 is criticise them, indeed rather ridicule them for being overly dependent on the ffictions of the imagination. They get carried away by imaginative fantasies. They're almost like children or poets in being overly influenced by natural tendencies to invent imaginative ffictions. Here he's picking on substances, substantial forms, accidents and occult qualities. These are things which Hume's audience would also have generally thought to be ridiculous. He's writing for an audience of modern philosophers. He explains the ffictions as arising from the imagination in a very natural way. But what we ought to do as philosophers is be more critical about what the imagination naturally leads us to think. So our most judicious philosophers, and he's clearly referring to Locke here, Locke's chapter of our complex ideas of substances, consider that our ideas of bodies are nothing but collections formed by the mind of the ideas of the several distinct sensible qualities of which objects are composed. So Locke had said that our ideas of particular substances are made up of the collections of ideas that we have about their properties. So when we think of gold for example, we think of a combination of qualities including the colour, the texture, the weight and so on. Now Locke, actually entitling his chapter of our complex ideas of substances, he is himself attacking the Aristotelians, who had thought that we have a simple idea of substances. And Hume is essentially here agreeing with Locke, but he's giving an account of how that false idea of simple substances comes about. The smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought readily deceives the mind and makes us ascribe an identity to the changeable succession. So we've seen this from one for two. We see objects gradually changing, our imagination overlooks the changes, and because we naturally think of something as undergoing coherent gradual changes, we're seduced into thinking of it as a simple continuing thing. Now, okay, so we see an object over time changing in small ways, but generally appearing much the same, and we think of it as one and the same thing. That actually implies, Hume thinks, that it would have to be completely unchanging. To preserve identity, it must be literally the same over time. Now obviously, when we think more carefully, we realise that things are actually undergoing changes. So we have a kind of inconsistency in our thinking. We tend to think of the thing as identical over time and hence absolutely the same over time, but we realise that externally it's changing. So we reconcile that contradiction by imagining some substance underneath the sensible qualities which remains the same. So again, this is very much the sort of thing that he's been explaining in one for two. So notice that Hume's discussion in one for two, where he's talking about how we come to have the idea of body, is applicable both to the ancient philosophers and the modern philosophers. The ancients whom he's discussing now have one particular idea of substance. We'll see that in the next section of the modern philosophy, he criticises the modern philosophers such as Locke with their distinction between primary and secondary qualities. But both of them are subject to the kind of thing, the kind of illusions of the imagination that have been outlined in one for two. Okay, so the ancient philosophers are ascribing the identity of things to a single, simple substance underlying the objects qualities, a principle of union or cohesion amongst those qualities. But if the substance is simple, if the underlying substance is simple, how comes it that different instances of these material things have different qualities? For example, different colours, different shape, etc. Well, the Aristotelians have to invent something called substantial form, which they bring in to explain that. And then the qualities which are not essential to the object are ascribed as accidental qualities. So you get to the notion of accidents. And Hume wants to say that all of these notions are meaningless. People don't know what they're talking about. These philosophers suppose a substance supporting, which they do not understand, and an accident supported, of which they have as imperfect an idea. The whole system, therefore, is entirely incomprehensible. So he's extremely critical of the ancient philosophy. Now he goes on to attack the notions of faculty and occult quality. And here he is referring back implicitly to his discussion of causation. So people naturally imagine that they perceive a connection between constantly conjoined objects. When you see A followed by B again and again, you see an A, you naturally expect a B, you feel as it were a connection in the mind. Okay, that's all familiar from treatise 1314. When we look at the objects themselves, we find no such connection apparent in their qualities. Now the just inference to draw Hume says is that we have no idea of power or agency separate from the mind and belonging to causes. That's very similar to what he's been saying at the end of 1314. But what the ancient philosophers do is invent the words faculty and occult quality. They need only say that any phenomenon which puzzles them arises from a faculty or occult quality. So a well-known example of this is the ridicule that Mollier gives of the notion of occult qualities in Le Malade Imaginaire, one of his plays. And there a doctor is asked, why does opium make one sleep? So it's because it has a soporific virtue whose nature it is to stupify the senses. So you ask, why does opium make you sleep? Answer, it's got a sleep-inducing quality. Not explanatory. And this is the kind of thing that Hume here is ridiculing. Again, his audience would be very sympathetic to this. But among all the instances wherein the peripatetics have shown they were guided by the trivial propensity of the imagination. No one is more remarkable than their sympathies, antipathies and horrors of a vacuum. There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself. This inclination is true, is suppressed by a little reflection and only takes place in children, poets and the ancient philosophers. What excuse shall we find to justify our philosophers in so signal a weakness? So he gives an example of a child who hurts himself on a stone might hit the stone in anger. So the child is attributing intentions to the stone as though the stone has been naughty for hurting it. Now when we grow up we get past all that sort of thing. But he's saying essentially that the ancient philosophers when they talk about sympathies, antipathies, horrors of a vacuum they're doing exactly the same thing. And here he's referring to the basis of Aristotelian science. Aristotelian science attributes the tendency of stones to fall to a sort of desire, a striving to reach the centre of the universe. And Hume is saying actually this is just like the child who hits the stone. Now notice the important phrase there. They're guided by every trivial propensity of the imagination. He's attacking the ancient philosophers for being carried away by these illusions of the imagination. We'll see that this plays an important role in what's to come. Because he might seem to be inconsistent here. Remember think back to the discussion of induction. Hume asked whether induction is founded on reason. And he came to the conclusion that it isn't. That the foundation of induction is the imagination. It's the custom, our tendency after we've seen A followed by B repeatedly when we see an A to extrapolate and expect to be. And that's not dependent on reason. It's dependent on the imagination. So how is it fair of Hume to criticise the ancient philosophers for basing their philosophy on the principles of the imagination? He's doing exactly the same, isn't he? Well, there's a famous passage in which he addresses this. He distinguishes between two sorts of imaginative principles. Some of them respectable, some not. I'm going to read out this whole passage. It's a particularly notable one. And it's often been thought to give a sort of key to Hume's answer to scepticism. We'll see that in the treatise the answer doesn't quite work. But arguably it is retained in his later work and there perhaps does. In order to justify myself to explain how my philosophy is not subject to the objection that I've just given against the ancient philosophers, I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal, such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes, and the principles which are changeable, weak and irregular, such as those I have just now taken notice of, that is the principles that influence the ancient philosophers. The former, that's the ones that are permanent, irresistible and universal, are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin. The latter are neither unavoidable to mankind nor necessary, also much as useful in the conduct of life, but on the contrary are observed only to take place in weak minds and being opposite to the other principles of conduct and reasoning may easily be subverted by a due contrast and opposition. For this reason, the former are received by philosophy and the latter rejected. So he's saying that amongst the principles of the imagination that there are some that are respectable, that we couldn't live without, that are therefore universal, everybody has them, like induction. So that's okay, we as philosophers accept those and base our theorising on those. But there are other ones that are changeable, weak and irregular, the kind of thing that makes you assign purposes to a stone. Those sorts of principles are to be rejected. Now, there's an interesting footnote in, earlier in book 1 part 3 of the treatise, a footnote that Hume actually took the trouble to have inserted into the treatise while it was in press. So he had the footnote put on what's called a cancel sheet to replace the original page and he cut out some of the previous text in order to make room for him. So he obviously thought it was quite important. And this is essentially addressing exactly the same point. He's distinguishing between two different senses of the imagination. In one sense, the imagination is the faculty that controls the vivacity of our ideas, to which all the associative principles and so on belong, including custom. In the other sense, the imagination only concerns those whimsies and prejudices which are rejected under the appropriate character of being the offspring of the imagination. So when we criticise people for being carried away by the imagination, we mean it in this other sense, the sense in which imaginative principles are whimsies and prejudices. So distinguish between those two senses and Hume is quite happy to acknowledge that his philosophy is founded on the imagination in the former sense, the broader one, but he obviously is criticising the ancient philosophers for founding their philosophy on the whimsies and prejudices sense of the imagination. Okay, let's now move on to of the modern philosophy. That's a treatise 144. The modern philosophy, typified by Locke, claims to be based much more solidly than the ancient philosophy, not on whimsies and prejudices, but on the solid, permanent and consistent principles of the imagination. Now Hume's going to argue that actually it isn't nearly as solid as it might appear. So a key pillar of the modern philosophy is the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Secondary qualities are supposed to exist only in the mind. Primary qualities are attributed to objects themselves. Hume suggests that the only satisfactory argument for drawing that distinction is to do with variations, how things look differently in different contexts. So the argument is that if different impressions from the same sense arise from some object, suppose an object looks different in different lights, or looks different when we're suffering from some disease, or tastes differently depending on our situation. We clearly cannot attribute all of the qualities that we sense to the object. That would seem to be a contradiction. But on the other hand, our sensory impressions are of the same kind. To take an example that Locke gives, suppose one of my hands has been in cold water and one of them in hot water, and I put my hands into a bowl of warm water and it feels warm to one and cold to the other. It can't be both warm and... Sorry, it can't be both hot and cold. But on the other hand, my impression of hot and my impression of cold, those feelings are of the same kind. So if they can't both belong to the object, it seems that neither can. Again, if something looks different colours from different perspectives or in different lights, it can't have both colours because they contradict each other. But since both impressions are of the same kind, the natural conclusion seems to be that it doesn't have either of them. Now notice that this is an argument using a causal principle. From like effects, we presume like causes. That's quite important. We'll see that he refers back to it later. So that's the argument that he sees as providing the basis for the primary, secondary quality distinction. If you know Locke, I think you would rather doubt that that's the main argument that Locke is depending on. But at any rate, Hume following Barkley sees the argument as it were from illusion or from mistaken deceptions as an important reason for it. He follows on with a very Barkley objection. Remember, Barkley objected to Locke that you couldn't form an idea of a primary quality abstracted from the secondary quality. Because whenever we see a shape, we see a coloured shape, you can't actually form an idea according to Barkley and Hume of a shape that isn't coloured. Hume's argument is essentially a refinement of that. He's going to argue that if all the secondary qualities exist only in the mind, not in objects, you can't actually form an idea of a solid extended object independent of the mind. The problem is that to form an idea of an extended body, my idea of extension has to have some content. I have to have some idea of what it is that's extended. Now, I can get ideas of extension from sight or touch and ultimately from atomic ideas of colour, remember the minima from Book 1, Part 2, or simple solid ideas, which I get from touch. But the problem is colour is excluded from any real existence. In other words, the modern philosophers say that colour is a secondary quality, it's in the mind, not in objects. So that won't give you an idea of an external object. And our idea of solidity is parasitic on our idea of an object. The idea of solidity is that of two objects which cannot penetrate each other. So unless you've got something to provide content to the notion of an object, you cannot form the idea of one object which can't penetrate another one. You've got to have some independent content to that idea and you can't get it from the notion of solidity. Our modern philosophy, therefore, leaves us no just nor satisfactory idea of matter. So if you elaborate on this argument at some length and it's an interesting passage to read, I recommend that you do. The conclusion is that there is a direct and total opposition that tweaks our reason and our senses, or more properly, that tweaks those conclusions we form from cause and effect and those that persuade us of the continued and independent existence of body. So remember, he's had the causal argument that from which we conclude that secondary qualities don't exist outside the mind. And now he's followed that up with an argument that says without appeal to secondary qualities we cannot actually form any coherence idea of an extended body. So the conclusion of 144 of the treatise seems profoundly sceptical. CUM has shown, apparently, that there is a conflict between two pretty basic parts of our mental capacities. That is our causal reasoning without which we can't form any conclusions beyond memory and senses and our belief in an external world. OK, now let's move on to the final parts of book 1 of the treatise. The soul and the self, which are discussed in 145 and 146, and then I'll be finishing off with some words of our CUM's conclusion. So after 144, CUM says, right, we're going to leave behind the external world and turn to the internal world. We found all these contradictions in our thoughts about external objects from 142, all those problems about identity. And now 144, we find this conflict between causal reasoning and belief in body. Now let's go on to the world of the mind, the intellectual world, and CUM says here we won't find any contradictions like that. As we'll see, that complacent view does not last. So I'm going to just sketch first of all what goes on in 145 of the immateriality of the soul. It's a section that is widely ignored actually in books on CUM, which I think is a great shame. It's actually quite a rich section and it's got some parts in it that are very important. What I'm going to do now is just give you a very quick guide through what is discussed. So at the beginning CUM attacks the notion of mental substance. Of course he's already attacked the notion of physical substance and the attack is in very much the same spirit. He appeals to the coffee principle to deny that there is any impression from which this idea can be derived and he condemns the notion of mental substance as meaningless. So the question as to whether our souls as it were consist of mental substance is shown to be a meaningless question. We don't even understand the terms in which it's posed. Again from 145.7.16 CUM embarks on a discussion of the location of perceptions and whether perceptions are extended. Here he says quite clearly that the only perceptions that have extension or location are those of sight or touch. Again you can see this is linking up with what he said about how we form our ideas of extension in the context of external body. It's a perceptions either of sight or touch. So other perceptions like smell for example has no physical location. When we experience a smell that is not physically located. Not spatially located. Now nevertheless suppose I smell a fig. I naturally attribute the smell and the taste when I taste it to the physical object itself. That's an illusion, it's a mistake. We naturally do it because we're so used to associating the physical fig with the taste and the smell. They come together so often that we naturally attribute the taste and smell as though they were spatially located. CUM actually refers forward to this passage from the discussion of causation. 1.3.14.25. You'll see that there's a note there, footnote 32. When he says that this illusion is similar to the illusion whereby we spread our minds on external objects when we attribute causation, causal powers to external objects. So that's a passage which backs up the interpretation of human causation as saying that we're making a mistake when we view causal powers as directly attributed to external objects or attributable. 1.4.5.17.28 is a discussion of spinosa. It can be a little bit difficult to interpret. It seems here that CUM is really having some fun at the expense of people who criticise spinosa. So spinosa is widely considered at the time to be an atheist. He has the hideous hypothesis that the entire world consists of one simple substance, God or nature. But clearly it's not a conventional idea of God, hence he is viewed with nearly as much repugnance as Hobbes. What CUM does is ingeniously turn the objections against spinosa against the idea of a simple soul. So theologians believe that we have a simple uncompounded soul, that the soul is essentially simple. And we have all these ideas, but those ideas are supposed to be modifications somehow of this simple soul. Spinoza believes that the world all consists of one simple substance and that the objects in the world are modifications of this one simple substance. So any objections to the latter apply also to the former. So it's quite an interesting discussion, not particularly essential I think for understanding Hume's philosophy. As I say he's more having fun at the expense of certain theologians, in fact the conventional orthodoxy at the time. The most important part of this section comes later and here he's defending materialism. So having defended spinosa he now goes on to defend Hobbes. You can see that this is a section not calculated to appeal to orthodox Christians. So here he considers the standard argument which many many philosophers had brought against Hobbes. Hobbes claimed that everything that exists is material, hence materialist. And the standard objection was that matter cannot possibly think. Since you can't have thinking matter that proves that there must be something more than the material world in particular we must have immaterial souls etc. Locke had used a somewhat similar argument to prove the existence of God. He said by cosmological reasoning there must be a first cause but the first cause can't be material because matter by itself could not cause thought. And the arguments based on the general view that there's so much difference between thought and matter in motion that there's no way the formal could arise from the latter. Well it seems quite a tempting argument and yet nothing in the world is more easy than to refute it. We need only to reflect on what has been proved at large that to consider the matter a priori anything may produce anything. And that we shall never discover a reason why any object may or may not be the cause of any other however great or however little the resemblance may be between them. So it's a direct appeal to Hume's analysis of causation. He said causation is a matter of constant conjunction. That's it. You don't need resemblance between cause and effect. And it's an empirical question what is constantly conjoined with what. In fact we find by experience that material motion and thought are constantly conjoined which being all the circumstances that enter into the idea of cause and effect we may certainly conclude that motion may be and actually is a cause of thought and perception. Again a direct appeal to his analysis of causation in terms of constant conjunction. As the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect matter and motion may often be regarded as the causes of thought as far as we have any notion of that relation. In 145.31 he introduced as a dilemma and in the remainder of the paragraph he argues for the second horn of the dilemma. That is he very clearly says all objects which we find constantly conjoined are upon that account to be regarded as causes and effects. When he repeats that later he says are upon that account alone to be regarded as causes and effects. So you establish a constant conjunction that's enough. That gives you a causal relation. That suffices to ascribe causation between them. So these end paragraphs in 145 are I think very significant. They together with the discussions of liberty and necessity are where Hume actually applies the definitions of causation that he's given in 1314. And in both cases they're in aid of a similar sort of enterprise. What he's trying to do is vindicate the application of causal reasoning, causal scientific inductive reasoning to the mental world. And here what he's saying is there is no conflict between having causal relations between physical things and mental things. That's fine. It's just a matter of constant conjunction. In of liberty and necessity which we've seen before he's using the same analysis of causation to say that necessity applies much to the operations of the mind as it does to the operations of body. We can have a deterministic science of mind just like we can have a deterministic science of body. So 1314 of the treatise the famous discussion of the idea of necessary connection. This is where it has the payoff for Hume in supporting materialism, supporting determinism. Bringing empirical science the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects into the science of the mind. And that is the subtitle of the treatise an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects. So this is quite a key part of Hume's philosophy. But one final thing about 145 there's an interesting mistake at the end of it. The final paragraph starts off by emphasising Hume's main point. But then if you look at the last two sentences you'll see that he starts referring to the immortality of the soul. He hasn't said anything about the immortality of the soul. He's been talking about the immateriality of the soul and suddenly he seems to be referring to arguments which aren't there in the text. What's going on? Well we have the essay of the immortality of the soul which Hume nearly published in 1755 but then suppressed. And he'd ended up being published only after his death. He'd left it for posthumous publication. He was too dangerous. It's an excellent little essay. Lovely epitome of Hume's philosophy applied to the question of the immortality of the soul. Well in a letter to Henry Hume who later became Lord Keynes in 1737 Hume said, I am at present castrating my work that is cutting off its noble parts in order that it shouldn't give offence because he wanted to give the treatise to Joseph Butler Bishop Joseph Butler and others in the hope of getting, as it were, a good report. So he cut out various religious discussions probably of something, a predecessor of miracles which later turned up in the enquiry section 10 and it seems almost certain that Hume had at some point in the treatise in the manuscript his discussion of immortality or something like it was there. Okay let's now move on to the penultimate section of book one of the treatise, famous section of personal identity. First of all Hume wields the copy principle to deny that we have any idea of the self which is anything like the sort of standard notion. The self is supposed to have perfect identity and simplicity. Well when we look inside ourselves look at the impressions that we get we don't find any impression that corresponds to that kind of idea. So there's no way that we can have a legitimate idea of the self of that kind. When I look inside myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. So this drives us to Hume's famous bundle theory of the self or at least the bundle theory of our idea of the self. Now think back to what Hume said about the idea of substance. He criticised those who think we have some simple idea of substance the ancient philosophers for example. But at the same point he praised Locke for saying that we have a complex ideas of substances. That our ideas of substances as it were an amalgam of all the various qualities that we attribute to it. And he seems to be saying something similar here about the idea of the self. The legitimate idea of the self is not simple and uniform. It's the idea of a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. So that's the bundle theory for which Hume is very famous. So the rest of the section is devoted largely to explaining how it is that we are led to attribute an identity to the self. And he's going along very similar moves to those that we saw in 1, 4, 2 of skepticism with regard to the senses. Just as when we look at external objects and we find that they exhibit constancy and coherence we are seduced by that into thinking of them as persisting identical things. Even most strictly something can't be identical over time unless it's completely unchanging. Our imagination seduces us into making that mistake and now he's going to say that our idea of the self likewise arises from a similar cause. So he's going to explain our propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions and to suppose ourselves possessed of an invariable and uninterrupted existence. Think about when we attribute identity to plants and animals. Plants change over time but they change slowly. So we naturally mistake the gradual change for a continuing identity. Again, I don't think that Hume's discussion of identity, frankly, is his strongest philosophical card. He does, as I've mentioned before, tend to just assume that identity over time can only make sense if you have unchangeability. That seems to me at any rate to be something of a confusion between numerical identity and similarity. In his later works, Hume does not discuss the notion of identity, this kind of thing disappears. So I personally am inclined to think that his view about identity is not, as it were, part of his long-term settled view. Anyway, here he's going to say very similar things about personal identity to what he says about external objects. As I say, we see gradual change, a kind of constancy and coherence, and that naturally leads us to think that there's something identical there. We realise that that's absurd when we actually have noticed that it's changed, the thing has changed a lot over time. We look at a plant in one season and another season and, oh no, it's actually very different. So we fein some new and unintelligible principle that binds the things together, and when we do that kind of thing in the case of personal identity, that's how we run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance. So again, we've got that notion of substance. The notion of substance, Hume, is suggesting, at least when it's thought of something simple and continuing, arises from this kind of imaginative mistake. So to prove this hypothesis of how we come to ascribed personal identity, Hume sets out to show that the objects which are variable or interrupted and yet are supposed to continue the same are such only as consist of a succession of parts connected together by resemblance, contiguity or causation. In other words, by the associative principles of the mind. Remember, resemblance, contiguity, causation, Hume has identified way back in book one part one as the three principles of association of ideas. And he goes on to illustrate this. He talks about the circumstances in which we most naturally attribute identity to things when changes are gradual, when they are proportionately small, at least at a time, and when things serve to some common end or purpose. He gives an example. Suppose there's a church built somewhere, an old church, and it falls down or it's knocked down and then replaced by another church. Because they're serving the same purpose as providing a church for a particular town or village, we naturally talk of them as the same church, even though they clearly aren't. So when we attribute personal identity, it's just one more example of the same kind of thing. Obviously all this is saying that the attribution of personal identity that we make is standardly mistaken. If we think of personal identity as involving any more than that bundle, we're actually making a mistake. But to justify the claim that it is a mistake, Hume again emphasises, look inside yourself. You won't actually see any real connection between those perceptions. So our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas. Now, this might seem puzzling. You might think, well look, if there's a train of connected ideas, what is it that's being seduced into this illusion? Doesn't there have to be an identical person who is suffering, as it were, this seduction? In order to be confused into attributing identity, doesn't there have to be an eye that is being confused? And you can see that this sort of thing leads to real big questions about what's going on in Hume's account of personal identity. So a lot of secondary literature is attribute some of the problems that Hume has to that kind of thought. But what Hume seems to be doing is explaining the genesis of a particular mistaken idea of personal identity. And I think if you take it in that way, you don't have to read him as fundamentally confused here. So he talks about resemblance and causation and how they give rise to the idea. And he explains why memory is particularly key. Memory produces resemblance between our perceptions. When I remember something, the memory perception that arises in my mind, the idea of memory, is very resembling to the thing of which it's a memory. When we are concerned about our future, we think about the future, that brings up emotions which are causally connected with the future. So there are resembling and causal connections and both of these are largely mediated by the memory. So it's no surprise that Locke saw memory as the key to personal identity. But Hume is insistent that memory isn't the whole thing. It's not that memory makes personal identity. It partly does, but it also discovers personal identity. There is this connection, causal connection, associative connections, between our ideas and impressions and memory reveals that. Now Hume's theory of personal identity has given rise to very complex and protracted discussions in the secondary literature. Perhaps the main reason for this is that in the appendix to the treatise, so this is published just 21 months later. It's published together with book 3 of the treatise. Hume says, oh dear, my account of personal identity won't work. Upon a more strict review and concerning personal identity, I find myself involved in such a labyrinth that I must confess I neither know how to correct my former opinions nor how to render them consistent. Now it would be nice if Hume at this point had taken the trouble to spell out exactly what the problem is. But he doesn't do that. Or at least the spelling out that he gives is extremely confusing. So it's become something of an industry amongst Hume scholars to speculate on what is going on. You get probably as many different accounts of this as there are commentators. In short, there are two principles which I cannot render consistent, nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, is that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. No contradiction between those two. So why is he saying that he has such a difficulty in rendering them consistent? Well, I don't propose to go into that, but be aware if you read Hume on personal identity, a lot of the intricacies of those discussions are driven by trying to make sense of what Hume says here and fitting it in with what is actually in the section of personal identity. So to finish off, let's look very briefly at another very complex section, Treaties 147, conclusion of this book. What makes this very hard to understand is that it's very dynamic. Hume seems to go through a sequence of thoughts and a sequence of emotional changes with those thoughts. Going from despair to optimism to complacency, most of our mental processes have been shown to be dependent on the imagination. But the imagination seems rather inconstant, something that we don't want to rely on. In fact, Treaties 144 has found a manifest contradiction between two aspects of our imaginative thought, one of them to do with causal reasoning and one of them to do with our belief in the continued existence of matter. We've got that contradiction from the section of the modern philosophy. We've also got confusion about the notion of causation as revealed at 1314. So Hume is referring back quite explicitly, usually with footnotes to these various sections. That leads us into a dangerous dilemma. If we ascent to every trivial suggestion of the fancy, the imagination, if we follow all the different imaginative principles, we'll be led into contradiction. Moreover, it will also give us ridiculous views like those of the ancient philosophers. So we don't want to follow all the different principles of the imagination. How are we going to choose which to follow? Well, the natural thing to do is to say, let's just adhere to the general and more established principles of the imagination, the ones that in that famous passage at the beginning of 144, he had used to distinguish his reliance on the imagination from that of the ancient philosophers. The ancient philosophers allow themselves to be pulled around by all these trivial suggestions of the imagination, whereas Hume himself only relies on the general and more established, the causal reasoning, or at least that's what it seems at that point. The trouble is if you think back to 141 of skepticism with regard to reason, Hume has said that the only thing that stops us degenerating into total skepticism about everything is unfortunately a trivial suggestion of the imagination or a trivial propensity of the imagination, namely that when we go through a complex argument we lose track of it. That's pretty trivial, or it looks that way. So Hume's left at the end of one of the treaties with a real problem. It seemed like we had a way of resolving it, of going for the general and more established principles of the imagination, going with causal reasoning, with induction and so forth, and putting aside the things that lead towards the fictions of the ancient philosophers. But 141 casts very serious doubt on that. And it seems, in 147, it's a complex matter that many different interpreters have many different views on this section. There's no, this isn't the place to discuss that at length. But it seems that Hume's answer to skepticism in the treaties comes down to the same sorts of thing that he was saying at the end of 142, when he said that carelessness and inattention provide the only remedy. Again, a famous passage. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and I marry with my friends. And afterwards these speculations appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find it in my heart to enter them any farther. It looks in the treaties as though Hume thinks there is no satisfactory philosophical answer to all these skeptical problems. We just have to leave them behind us when we go out of the study, dine, play a game of backgammon, and so forth. I think Hume gets much closer to a satisfactory answer in the inquiry. If you look at section 12 of the inquiry particularly, that is Hume's mature discussion of skepticism and there he comes to a much more satisfactory view. He's left behind the problems about identity. He no longer has that argument about skepticism with regard to reason. And as a result he is able to rely on causation and induction, the general and more established principles of the imagination without running into inconsistency or total skepticism. Okay, thank you.