A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion — David Hume — John Shaqi
A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume · en
involving that contradiction which it must involve if the antithesis
between reality and ideas in the mind is absolutely adhered to. Nay,
inasmuch as certain ideas of primary qualities, _e.g._ those of
solidity and of the receiving or communicating motion upon impulse,
are necessarily connected, it is supposed actually to exist (Book
IV. chap iii. sec. 14). It is only because, as a matter of fact, our
knowledge of the relation between secondary qualities and primary is
so limited that it cannot be carried further. That they are related
as effects and causes, it would seem, we know; and that the ‘causes
work steadily, and effects constantly flow from them,’ we know also;
but ‘their connexions and dependencies are not discoverable in our
ideas’ (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 29). That, if discoverable in our
ideas, just because there discovered, the connexion would not be a
real co-existence, Locke never expressly says. He does not so clearly
articulate the antithesis between relations of ideas and matters
of fact. If he had done so, he must also have excluded from real
existence those abstract ideas of body which constitute the scanty
knowledge of it that according to him we do possess (Book IV. chap.
iii. sec. 24). He is more disposed to sigh for discoveries that would
make physics capable of the same general certainty as mathematics,
than to purge the former of those mathematical propositions--really
true only because having no reference to reality--which to him formed
the only scientific element in them.
What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.