INTRODUCTION: HUME AND HIS

INTELLECTUAL LEGACY

Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle

David Hume (1711–76) is commonly regarded as the greatest of the British

philosophers, albeit more for being a destroyer than a builder. His philosophy
rejects the enthronement of reason so characteristic of the western philosophical
tradition, and replaces it with a naturalistic picture in which the human being
is portrayed as a creature of imagination, passion and habit. The consequence is
that we must accept some form of scepticism, such that we can be guided only by

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opinion, not by knowledge. This is not a form of philosophical quietism, how-
ever, since scepticism can establish standards of probability, and so have a critical
edge. Thus Hume deployed his conclusions in a critique of religious arguments:
most famously in his essay on miracles, but also in critical examinations of belief
in divine design and, more generally, of divine causation of the world. His politi-
cal writings are cautious, but undeniably modernist; and his economic writings
helped pave the way for the achievements of his younger contemporary, Adam
Smith. In fact, he and Smith are commonly linked, as two of the greatest con-
tributors to that Scottish intellectual flowering after the Act of Union of 1707,
now known as the Scottish Enlightenment.
However, to place Hume in this way, as a contributor to Enlightenment in
its Scottish form, is to raise a problem. This is the problem of the relationship
between Hume’s philosophy (and, more generally, of the Scottish Enlightenment
itself ) to what is commonly referred to as the Enlightenment, i.e. the increas-
ingly radical French intellectual movement that grew up around the Encyclopédie
of Diderot and d’Alembert, and which supplied much of the ideology of the
French Revolution. Hume was no revolutionary, and so may seem to exist quite
apart from this movement; on the other hand, his French diplomatic career in
the 1760s put him into close contact with many of the radicals, and he moved
comfortably in their social circles. Plainly, he did not regard them as the enemy.
Part of the problem here is more apparent than real, since it depends on draw-
ing the idea of Enlightenment too tightly around the French radicals. There were
other Enlightenments beyond the French: Scottish, of course; but also English,

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2 Hume and the Enlightenment

Dutch, German and Italian – just to mention the most notable. All of these are
united by the freshness and boldness of their analyses of the societies of their day,
but all followed different paths, reflecting the different national circumstances
in which they developed. Thus, for example, although all involved some meas-
ure of religious criticism, the nature of this criticism varied considerably: at its
most radical in France, because of the power of religious institutions, but least
so in Germany, where much of the Enlightenment was a project of the clergy
themselves. Similarly, although all involved some measure of political criticism,
French radicalism reflected the particularities of the French situation (and in any
case relied considerably on radical Protestant ideas imported from Holland); in
England, radicalism was rare, because that country had been through its upheav-
als in the preceding century; and in Germany and Italy, those upheavals, when
they came, were powerfully shaped by their projects of national unification.
So, once a wider perspective is adopted, and the French Enlightenment seen
to be linked to related but not identical movements in other countries, Hume’s
relationship to the Enlightenment becomes considerably less problematic. The
problem may not entirely disappear, however, since the common view of Hume’s
philosophy as politically cautious but intellectually destructive still leaves it at

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odds with the picture of the Enlightenment as the period of bold and optimistic
thinking that paved the way for our own ideals and institutions.
This sets the two tasks for a collection on Hume and the Enlightenment. In
the first place, it should attempt to place Hume’s writings, philosophical and his-
torical, in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to determine
the extent to which he does or does not fit into the prominent intellectual trends
of the period. Secondly, because the Enlightenment is not only a bygone period
of history, even of intellectual history, but a period recognized as in some way
formative of our own day, it should also attempt some account of the ways in
which Hume’s views still constitute live options for modern philosophy. This
collection thus aims to throw light on these two issues.
The first of these, Hume’s place in the intellectual trends of the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, can be approached by considering two apparent
instances of a lack of fit. The first of these is the less serious. It is that Hume is
now best known for addressing a cluster of questions with little apparent rel-
evance to the social and political issues central to the Enlightenment thinkers.
Thus it is not at all obvious that there is any bearing on Enlightenment concerns,
pro or con, in arguments to the effect that: we do not perceive causal connec-
tions, and so depend on regularities in experience to arrive at beliefs about what
we have not observed; that our belief in an external world independent of our
perceptions depends on complicated processes in the imagination; that we do
not perceive a self, and so our belief in an enduring self is also dependent on
processes in the imagination; and so on. This is Hume as he tends to be known
 Introduction 3

in the contemporary analytic philosophy curriculum, and, considered purely

in terms of these issues, his philosophy has little if any bearing on Enlighten-
ment themes. This lack of fit is, however, readily resolved by widening the focus.
Once these themes are recognized as aspects of a naturalistic philosophy of the
human being, their relationship to Enlightenment themes becomes clear. Thus
his account of the limitations of our perceptual knowledge, and our consequent
reliance on regularities in experience, is an application of the modern scientific
accounts of perception and of inertial motion – in both cases treating the mind
and experience as within the purview of natural science. Hume may still be seen
to offer a philosophy different from his contemporaries, but this is an inevita-
ble mark of originality; the relevant fact is that his naturalism situates him in a
broad intellectual stream characteristic of the times. This first lack of fit is thus
more apparent than real, since it depends on failing to see how Hume’s most
famous arguments fit into his larger philosophy.
The second lack of fit between Hume’s views and the wider intellectual world
of his day is not so easily dealt with. It is that some specifically Humean themes
seem positively hostile to Enlightenment themes. Moreover, the most significant
of these seem to add up to a mutually-supporting triad of views with a decid-

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edly anti-Enlightenment thrust. These are his reduction of reason to a servant of
imagination and passion; the scepticism that follows from this reduction; and an
apparent political conservatism that in turn flows from the scepticism. These all
seem at odds with an Enlightened outlook: the first because the Enlightenment
is also commonly known as the Age of Reason, and appeals to Reason as the only
legitimate guide to human life are characteristic of the central Enlightenment
figures; the second because a sceptical outlook seems inevitably to lead to a dis-
trust of schemes for reform, and so encourages a conservative attitude (even if not
actual affirmation of conservative doctrines); and the third simply because the
Enlightenment was a period of reform, not of conservative adherence to estab-
lished traditions. These are genuine issues requiring careful consideration, so they
will be some of the main themes to be examined in the first part of this collection.
What of the second aspect, Hume’s contribution to the legacy of the Enlight-
enment? The Enlightenment enjoys its special place in intellectual history
because it is recognized to be, in important ways, formative of our own day. So
in what ways, or to what degree, do Hume’s views still constitute live options
for modern philosophy? The answer is complex. On the one hand, some cen-
tral Humean doctrines enjoy considerable contemporary support, even to the
point of constituting orthodoxies. The surprizing feature is that many of those
views now enjoying such status are precisely those views supposed to have an
anti-Enlightenment bearing. Thus it is that Hume’s dethroning of reason, and
his elevation of imagination, passion and habit to take its place, are precisely the
favoured doctrines of recent cognitive science. Similarly, the favoured model of
4 Hume and the Enlightenment

human motivation, moral motivation included, is the belief-desire model associ-

ated with (if not identical to) Hume’s view. Associated with this model is the
widely-accepted ‘internalist’ theory of reasons for action. Other Humean views,
on the other hand, enjoy less support. His broadly utilitarian approach to ques-
tions of legal justice seems at odds with contemporary emphases on individual
rights – although it is possible to say that, amongst practitioners (rather than
academic theorists), his views are close to the norm. The same can probably be
said of his political principles: his caution, and scepticism concerning abstract
principles, recommends him more to the practical politician than to the politi-
cal theorist. But this is enough to show that his ideas are far from dead. Even in
his more conservative moments, Hume still speaks in terms of concepts that are
recognizably modern and respected: opinion, consent, liberty and utility.
To turn, then, to the individual papers in this collection. The first three take
up the question of Hume’s place in the intellectual currents of his time. The first,
by Stephen Buckle, defends Hume’s enlightenment credentials; the second, by
Karen Green, questions them; and the third, by Buckle again, responds to Green.
Buckle begins by acknowledging that there are a number of obstacles to holding
Hume to be a thinker of the Enlightenment. One set of problems here stems from

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the very fact that Hume was a philosopher, moreover a philosopher who repre-
sents, as Buckle says, the high point of British Empiricism. It is a commonplace, at
least in analytic philosophy, to think of philosophy as a-historical. On this view,
either Hume is of enduring interest to us through the various philosophical prob-
lems he bequeathed to us, in which case his interest for us bears little relation to
the period of the Enlightenment, or Hume is merely the last empiricist, the last
representative of an exhausted philosophy notable perhaps mainly for the fact
that he awakened Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’, thus spurring Kant on to
develop some of the Enlightenment’s most significant doctrines.
As if that is not enough, further obstacles emerge when we consider in more
detail the content of Hume’s philosophy. Thus if we think of the Enlightenment
as the ‘Age of Reason’, Hume’s Enlightenment credentials look even more shaky,
for as Buckle points out Hume is perhaps most famous for cutting reason down
to size; as he famously says ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the pas-
sions’. However, as Buckle points out, this obstacle depends on the way in which
we understand ‘reason’: on whether we construe it narrowly as philosophical
rationalism or more broadly as the exercize of one’s own intellectual autonomy.
The narrow interpretation, Buckle argues, presents us with insurmountable
problems in making sense of the Enlightenment as an intellectual period. For
example, it cannot account for the influence of empiricism on canonical French
Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and d’Alembert. Much more plausible,
Buckle suggests, is the idea that both rationalism and empiricism were both
‘distinctively modern forms of thinking, conscious of themselves as such – and
 Introduction 5

so anti-traditional’, both sharing a common belief in the achievements of the

new natural science, and of its relevance to understanding human nature and to
reforming society. In short, both movements shared a belief in the importance
of individual human beings thinking for themselves including subjecting tradi-
tional answers and authorities to this process.
Green agrees that the sentiment expressed in the last sentence is definitive of
the Enlightenment, but she argues that it should be understood as positioned by
Kant against the empiricism of Hume. As she notes, it was Kant who proclaimed
the motto of enlightenment to be ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of
your own understanding!’ Central to Green’s argument is the contrast between,
on the one hand, the slavish role of reason advanced by Hume, and, on the other,
Kant’s conception of reason; in particular, his argument that there is such a thing
as pure practical reason, that there is an ‘a priori basis for an immutable measure
of right and wrong’. But it is not, interestingly, via Kant that Green pursues this
claim against Hume. Instead, she develops it via the eighteenth-century Brit-
ish historian and philosopher Catharine Macaulay. As Green argues, Macaulay
shares Kant’s conviction that reason has the power to reveal immutable moral
truths. Moreover, Macaulay thinks that those who grasp these truths will sub-

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scribe to republicanism. Thus Green’s point is that ‘philosophers who fail to make
the connection between rational agency, enlightened reason and political reform
may belong to the period of the Enlightenment, but they are, in a significant
sense, not enlightened philosophers’. That Hume did not grasp these connections
is evidenced, she argues, in his hostility toward republicanism and his political
conservatism, including in his History of England. While Hume has little sym-
pathy for the puritans in their conflict with James I, Macaulay, in contrast, sees
both James I and Charles I as ‘regressive absolutists’. This is, says Green, a view we
share with Macaulay, and that we do so illustrates that the Enlightenment legacy
derives not from Hume the political conservative, the defender of traditional
authority, but from such thinkers as Kant and Macaulay with their belief in the
power of reason to demonstrate that democracy is rationally justifiable.
Buckle responds by addressing three issues. First, he opposes Green’s deter-
mination to measure the Enlightenment entirely by reference to political ideas
that ‘we now cherish’. He argues that it is Green’s supposition that this is his
standpoint that underpins several of her objections, and, because it is not, con-
cludes that her objections tend to miss their intended target. He adds that such a
latter-day standpoint runs the risk of supposing greater conceptual continuities
than in fact exist, a point he illustrates by reference to the evolution of the idea
of rights. Second, he points out that, despite Kant’s significance as an Enlight-
enment figure, his rationalism cannot be taken as definitive: even his German
contemporaries did not hold it so; and one of the most influential of recent
defenders of liberal democratic society, Isaiah Berlin, inverts the roles of empiri-
6 Hume and the Enlightenment

cism and rationalism by endorsing empiricism, and casting rationalism in the

role of anti-Enlightenment villain. Buckle’s own conclusion is that empiricism
and rationalism are both too general to imply any single political conclusion;
thus neither can claim to provide the definitive Enlightened political outlook.
Third, Buckle points out that there are problems in elevating Macaulay to the
role Green accords her, since her own views seem an amalgam deriving from
British philosophers of both rationalist and empiricist allegiances. And he adds
that Green’s view that Enlightenment history boils down to political values
misses the revolution in historiography brought about in the Enlightenment,
not least in Hume’s History. He concludes by suggesting that Green’s view that
our own political values are those of the radical Enlightenment is misleading,
since our values are more plausibly seen, because of the twentieth-century’s ideo-
logical conflicts, as a retreat from radicalism to a more moderate position.
The debate between Buckle and Green reflects, in large part, differing con-
ceptions of the Enlightenment, and in particular whether certain political
aspirations were essential to it. But the second way to approach Hume’s Enlight-
enment credentials is to consider his ongoing legacy; that is, to consider Hume’s
part in fashioning the world the Enlightenment has helped create. Thus all the

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following articles in this collection deal in different ways with aspects of Hume’s
intellectual legacy.
Dale Jacquette’s particular interest in this regard is Hume’s application of his
experimental method to mathematics and aesthetics, and specifically Hume’s
claim that we can have no adequate idea of infinity or infinite divisibility, and its
implications for the aesthetic idea of the sublime. As Jacquette points out, Hume’s
denial that we have an idea of infinity or infinite divisibility follows directly from
the fact that as finite cognitive agents we can have no impression of these things
and hence no corresponding idea of them (as ideas are, according to Hume’s ‘copy
principle’, merely faint copies of impressions of sensation or reflection). What fol-
lows from this (and from Hume’s scepticism about religion), as Jacquette then
notes, is that Hume is precluded from the kind of infinitist and religious specula-
tions on the sublime that were predominant in aesthetic theories of his day and
that we later find in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. For Hume, our sense of the sub-
lime reduces to a number of discrete psychological problems: specifically, those
to do with why objects separated from us by great distance in space and time
should have for us more positive aesthetic value – a standard example here being
the sense of awe one has when looking from a mountain top over a high mountain
range – when according to his theory distance has the effect of weakening the
passions. As Jacquette goes on to explain, Hume’s solution to this problem is to
argue that ‘aesthetic delight is produced by the mind’s overcoming the difficulties
in assimilating the information presented by objects at great distances in space
and time’. So, in both his discussion of infinity and the sublime, Jacquette argues,
 Introduction 7

we can see Hume’s uncompromising application of his philosophical method to

such seemingly disparate subjects as mathematics and aesthetics.
The two papers that follow deal specifically with an aspect of Hume’s thought
that is perhaps most easily identified with the intellectual currents of the Enlight-
enment: his well known religious scepticism. Thus Stanley Tweyman and Robert
Phiddian both consider Hume’s religious scepticism as it is manifest in his Dia-
logues concerning Natural Religion, although they do so from very different
directions. The central aim of Tweyman’s paper is to show how Philo’s extreme
Pyrrhonian scepticism has the effect of transforming Cleanthes ‘from a dog-
matist to a mitigated sceptic’. This transition is revealed, so Tweyman argues,
through the particular criticisms that Cleanthes advances against Demea’s
Cosmological–Ontological Argument. Crucially, Tweyman suggests, those
criticisms ‘are not designed to refute Demea’s a priori Argument, but rather to
bring Demea to a ‘suspense’ of judgement regarding this Argument’. As Twey-
man argues, for Hume such a state is the starting point for philosophic inquiry.
Thus Hume’s method involves more than the experimental method emphasized
in the Treatise and first Enquiry; what is required beyond this, as Cleanthes’ trans-
formation shows, is that we overcome dogmatism, which can lead even those who

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follow the experimental method into error on account of their initial prejudices.
Phiddian, by contrast, is not concerned primarily with the philosophical content
of Philo’s sceptical arguments (or with Cleanthes’ possible conversion from dog-
matist to philosophical sceptic) so much as, first, whether Hume through Philo
deploys the literary mode of satire in addition to philosophical argument and,
second, what that might tell us about the changing relationship between satire
and philosophy at the time when the Dialogues were written. On the first point
Phiddian’s answer is a qualified ‘yes’: he is at pains to point out that the Dialogues
as a text merely has elements of satire or, more qualified still, of ‘satire manqué’,
satire foiled, and that Hume is careful not to let the ‘passionate contempt’ of its
target so central to satire crowd out reasoned argument. This takes us directly to
Phiddian’s second point. He notes that, while the work of the second century Epi-
curean author Lucian could still (unlike now) be described as satirical philosophy,
by the time of the Dialogues intellectual life had become much more divided into
discrete disciplines with their own specific standards and commitments. Thus in
the end Hume identifies too closely with a modern conception of philosophy as
a medium of balanced, dispassionate and reasoned inquiry for him to surrender
fully to his satirical impulses. Phiddian thus concludes that what satire there is
in the Dialogues ‘is satire manqué at least in part because [the Dialogues’] philo-
sophical purpose is pursued in too disciplined a manner to allow satire’s militant
irony enough imaginative freedom to dominate the rhetorical thrust of the text’.
George Couvalis also takes as his subject Hume’s scepticism, but here as
directed at Cartesian Rationalism, including as advanced by Descartes himself.
8 Hume and the Enlightenment

Couvalis suggests, following William Morris, that Hume’s argument in the sec-
tion of the Treatise entitled ‘Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason’ is aimed at
the Cartesian claim that one can be certain that one is right about some very
simple mathematical or logical beliefs. Hume’s arguments there can be seen as
of a piece with what many recent interpreters of Hume regard as his naturalism
about human knowledge and human nature. However what such interpreters
generally fail to consider, Couvalis argues, is how some recent research on the
family of cognitive deficits called ‘acalculia’ supports Hume’s position. Couvalis
points out that acalculics can have false beliefs about even very simple arithmeti-
cal propositions, all the while being convinced that their claims are obviously
true. Those who suffer from such defects are not irrational; yet it does not follow
from this, as Descartes seems to think, that their beliefs in the solutions to even
the simplest mathematical problems is infallible. Couvalis’s paper, then, illus-
trates the robustness of Hume’s enquiries into human nature and knowledge,
and their relevance to current psychological and neurological research.
Hume’s naturalism is also of course central in his moral philosophy and the
next three papers deal specifically with topics in these areas. Craig Taylor begins
with the contention, from stalwart Humean Annette Baier, that for Hume cru-

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elty is the worst vice. Taylor questions whether Hume really has an adequate
account of what is morally terrible about cruelty, at least in its most extreme
form. The problem, according to Taylor, stems from Hume’s account of sympa-
thy, which is an account of a kind of mechanism through which the sentiments of
another are communicated to us. Taylor’s point here is that in the case of extreme
suffering, and particularly in the kind of suffering associated with modern forms
of slavery, it is implausible to describe that suffering as simply a matter of feeling.
What kind of sensation, Taylor asks, attends being bred like cattle? The Kantian
has a ready answer as to why slavery is so terrible: it involves a failure to treat
another human being as an end and not merely as a means. Taylor, however, finds
this answer unconvincing. As he goes on to argue, it is not, as Kant would have
it, a denial of the slave’s membership of the kingdom of ends that shows us the
inhumanity of slavery; it is their suffering. Returning then to Hume, Taylor sug-
gests that we can best account for the evil of slavery once we understand Humean
naturalism as a kind of non-reductive naturalism: our sense of the evil of slavery
is founded on certain natural reactions to such extreme suffering that involve a
recognition of and concern for the sufferer. Taylor then concludes by arguing
that some such non-reductive naturalistic account of our moral concepts pro-
vides the only plausible foundation for morality in a post-Enlightenment world,
and that the dominance of this kind of broad naturalism in contemporary ethics
points to Hume’s enduring influence in moral philosophy.
Mark Collier’s paper indicates one way in which we might put Hume’s ethi-
cal naturalism to the test. As Collier points out, a central concern for Hume
 Introduction 9

was how to explain human beings’ capacity to cooperate on a large scale. While
Hume recognized our capacity for strategic rationality, and hence our ability to
recognize that cooperation is in our long term interest, he was also aware, as Col-
lier notes, of our ‘strong psychological propensity to discount the future’. What
is required for cooperation and social exchange is that we can trust that others
will resist the short term advantage gained by defection in favour of the long
term advantage gained from cooperation. So, as Collier goes on to suggest, that
trust is secured for Hume by the fact that we develop a feeling of ‘repugnance
towards injustice’. As Collier notes, even those without an interest in particu-
lar social exchanges will disapprove of defectors here because the disapproval of
those who are affected will be communicated to others through the operation of
the mechanism of sympathy. Further, this feeling of aversion will be reinforced,
Hume thought, through education and public rhetoric. Collier concedes that
Hume could not have determined whether his speculations concerning the basis
of cooperation were correct, but, in a similar way to Couvalis, Collier argues that
we are much better placed to test Hume’s account: recent research in experimen-
tal game theory and neuroeconomics is starting to produce results that bear out
Hume’s account of how we are able to cooperate. As he puts it, ‘[r]esearchers

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have discovered that negative reward circuits in the brain become active…when
participants make uncooperative moves in games involving social exchange’.
Here again then, Hume’s speculations into human psychology appear to be
borne out by relevant current research, demonstrating the continuing relevance
of his sentimentalist account of ethics.
Like Collier, Ian Hunt is concerned with Hume’s account of how it is we are
able to cooperate to our mutual advantage despite the potential for conflict that
Collier has outlined. However while Collier is concerned with Hume’s answer as
to how we are able to work cooperatively in collective practice, Hunt is concerned
with the conception of justice that is suggested by that answer. Thus for Hume
our motive for upholding justice is artificial, which means that this motive is not
implanted in our nature but acquired through experience. In this sense, Hunt
notes, Hume’s views bear some similarity to the view of justice advanced by John
Rawls. However, as he goes on to argue, while both hold justice to be in a sense
artificial, what they mean by this is strikingly different and points to fundamen-
tally different conceptions of justice. One way to characterize the difference here
is by considering the importance both philosophers place on the idea that the
rules enforced by society be stable. Thus, as Hunt notes, for Hume stable secu-
rity of possession is simply necessary ‘for social cooperation upon which social
benefits depend’. For Rawls, however, the question is not so much whether the
rules deliver these benefits but whether ‘all members of a just society could freely
and conscientiously decide that they will uphold its system of justice’. For Hume,
Hunt suggests, justice amounts to a ‘compromise between the powerful and the
10 Hume and the Enlightenment

weak that gives enough to each to reduce incentives for open conflict’, and in this
sense Hume’s is a ‘non-normative account of justice as it is found in a society’.
Rawls by contrast is concerned with the basis for the authority of a society’s rules
and in this respect he represents a strand of Enlightenment thinking that can
be traced not to Hume but to Kant. As Hunt concludes, while Hume ‘is happy
enough for citizens simply to accept traditional views of legitimate authority…
Kant…takes citizens to be mature as human beings only if they take ultimate
responsibility for the laws under which they live’. Thus Hunt returns us to the
debate between Buckle and Green as to how we should understand what it is to
be a philosopher of the Enlightenment.
Hume’s moral philosophy does not of course exist in isolation and is depend-
ent in particular upon his account of the passions; on ‘impressions of reflection’,
in Hume’s own terminology. But, as Anna Stoklosa points out, Hume’s account
of the passions does not appear to be entirely consistent. Thus, while Hume
claims in a variety of places that passions represent – that they are directed
towards things, or in other words, that they are intentional – he also claims, at
paragraph 2.3.3.5/415 of the Treatise, that ‘[a] passion is an original existence…
and contains not any representative quality’. This seems to suggest that passions

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do not represent anything after all. Standard ways of accounting for this seeming
contradiction in Hume include dismissing this paragraph as anomalous, or sug-
gesting that, for Hume, it is not passions themselves that represent but only the
ideas with which they are associated. Stoklosa, however, rejects both approaches
as inadequate, albeit for differing reasons. She then proposes her own solution,
arguing that Hume in the seemingly anomalous paragraph of the Treatise only
rejects a specific kind of representation, that is, ‘representation understood as a
copy’. Thus, as Stoklosa notes, Hume himself discusses ‘the representationality of
words’: a form of representation that, unlike a copy, involves no kind of resem-
blance between word and object, indeed no kind of resemblance at all.
While Stoklosa has focused on passions, or impressions of reflection, Anik
Waldow, in the final paper in this collection, considers the role of Hume’s impres-
sions in our formation of thoughts about the world. Taking up Thomas Reid’s
idea that sensations (in Hume’s terminology, impressions) are signs of things
that nature has taught us to interpret correctly, she suggests that impressions
can be understood ‘as triggers of natural associative processes that enable us to
relate our…ideas in a regular way to occurrences in our environment’. Waldow’s
argument here challenges the view that in order to distinguish real as opposed
to fantastical ideas in Hume’s system we must appeal to his ‘copy principle’. It is
not, she suggests, so much the resemblance between impressions and ideas that
enables us to distinguish real from fictitious ideas of the world, but the natu-
ralness and regularity of the relevant processes of thought-formation in each
case. While acknowledging the similarities between Hume and Reid, Waldow
 Introduction 11

argues finally that there is an important difference in their views; specifically,

while Reid remains committed to the idea that we can have knowledge of the
metaphysical causes underlying sensations or impressions, Hume, the sceptic,
holds that we cannot know that the ideas triggered by impressions accurately
represent reality. Thus Hume in the end exhibits an ‘anti-metaphysical and anti-
dogmatic spirit that Reid lacks’. Insofar as the spirit of the Enlightenment can be
characterized by the rejection of metaphysical speculation and dogmatic belief
in favour of what human beings can come to know by thinking for themselves,
and through their own enquiries, one might say that, in this respect as in others,
Hume’s Enlightenment credentials have been vindicated.

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