Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Hume was a young Scotsman who wanted to study people the way scientists study stones and stars: by watching carefully. He asks simple, deep questions. Where do our ideas come from? Why do we think one thing must cause another? Why are we proud, or kind, or ashamed? His answers are calm and clear, and some of them are still argued about today, nearly three hundred years later.
Hume wrote the Treatise young, with a bold plan: to do for human nature what Newton had done for the physical world, building everything on experience and observation alone. Book One studies the understanding. Our ideas, he argues, all copy impressions from the senses, and ideas link by resemblance, closeness and cause. Even cause itself, examined, turns out to rest on habit: we see one thing follow another until we expect it.
Book Two turns to the passions: pride and humility, love and hatred, the will. Passions, for Hume, are not ruled by reason. Reason, in his famous phrase, is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Book Three reaches morals. We call actions good or bad, not because reason proves them so, but because a moral sense in us approves what helps and pleases.
The advertisement still speaks of trying the public taste with two volumes first, yet the text shelved here carries all three books, with the appendix Hume added. The book sold poorly at first. Hume later reworked its ideas into shorter, clearer books. Read today, the Treatise is the fullest sight of a great mind thinking for itself, section by section.
David Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 and 1740, when he was still in his twenties, aiming to make the study of human nature an experimental science. In three books, on the understanding, the passions and morals, he asks how ideas form, why we believe one thing must cause another, how pride and sympathy move us, and why we call some actions good or bad.
The contents lay out the whole design at a glance. Volume One holds Book One, Of the Understanding, in four parts: ideas and their association, space and time, knowledge and probability, and the sceptical and other systems of philosophy, through to personal identity. Volume Two holds Book Two, Of the Passions, and Book Three, Of Morals, with the appendix Hume added to the Treatise.
The advertisement still speaks in the language of a trial: the subjects of the understanding and passions, Hume says, make a complete chain of reasoning by themselves, and he took the natural division to try the taste of the public, promising morals, politics and criticism if he met with success. The text shelved here goes past that plan and carries all three books. His introduction gives the programme: all the sciences, even mathematics, natural philosophy and natural religion, return to the science of man, and are judged by men's powers and faculties.
Read it in his order. The scepticism about cause and belief in Book One is the ground on which the passions and morals of the later books stand, and the appendix, where Hume worries his own account of personal identity, honestly left standing, is part of the record.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 4705.
The first chapter
My design in the present work is sufficiently explained in the Introduction. The reader must only observe, that all the subjects I have there planned out to myself, are not treated of in these two volumes. The subjects of the Understanding and Passions make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves; and I was willing to take advantage of this natural division, in order to try the taste of the public. If I have the good fortune to meet with success, I shall proceed to the examination of Morals, Politics, and Criticism; which will compleat this Treatise of Human Nature. The approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labours; but am determined to regard its judgment, whatever it be, as my best instruction.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1739-40. Author died 1776. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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