Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

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Serjeantson-10 naturally carries us to a lively conception of the usual effect.’ 32 General rules are part of the accumulated experience that enable us to understand, and function in, the world. 33 If we are philosophers, however, we also use general rules to correct these first impressions, in accordance with ‘the more general and authentic operations of the understanding’. 34 Hume illustrates the way in which ‘our general rules’ are thus ‘in a manner set in opposition to each other’ with an example. He asks us to consider the case of a man hung from a high tower in an iron cage. This man, Hume asserts, ‘cannot forbear trembling’, even though ‘he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by the solidity of the iron which supports him’. 35 The general rule that great height presents a great danger is set against the general rule that iron provides a secure stay. The one kind of rule is supplied by the imagination, the other by the judgment. Hume does not draw the moral explicitly, but his account certainly implies that, tremble though he still might, a caged philosopher would tremble less than a less reflective prisoner. Hume ascribed a good deal of importance to his ‘general rules’; so much so, in fact, that in the Treatise he articulated a set of them to judge the relations between causes and effects. According to Hume’s account of causation, it is in principle ‘possible for all objects to become causes or effects to each other’. In order to determine ‘when they really are so’, Hume provides his set of eight general rules. These rules are intended to distinguish ‘accidental circumstances’ from ‘efficacious causes’. They include such stipulations as, ‘The cause and effect must be contiguous 32 Hume, Treatise, p. 150 (1.3.13). Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 279, notes the shared preoccupation in Hume and Malebranche with the capacity of the imagination to confuse constant conjunction with necessary connection. 33 On this point, see also David Owen, 'Philosophy and the good life: Hume's defence of probable reasoning', Dialogue, 35 (1996): 485-59, pp. 491-92. 34 On this point, see also Noxon, Hume’s Philosophical Development, p. 87; Martin, ‘Rational warrant’, p. 251; Owen, Hume’s Reason, p. 212. 35 Hume, Treatise, p. 148-49 (1.3.13).
Serjeantson-11 in space and time’; ‘The cause must be prior to the effect’; and ‘There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect’. 36 The inspiration for Hume’s ‘Rules by which to judge of causes and effects’ has sometimes been ascribed to the four Regulae philosophandi printed at the beginning of Book III of Isaac Newton’s Principiae mathematica philosophia naturalis (‘Mathematical principles of natural philosophy’) in the third edition of 1726. 37 Hume’s own account of their nature, however, suggests a different context. Having articulated the eight general rules, Hume pauses to make the following polemical comment: Here is all the LOGIC I think proper to employ in my reasoning; and perhaps even this was not very necessary, but might have been supply’d by the natural principles of our understanding. Our scholastic headpieces and logicians shew no such superiority above the mere vulgar in their reason and ability, as to give us any inclination to imitate them in delivering a long system of rules and precepts to direct our judgment, in philosophy. 38 Two principal points emerge for our purposes from this passage. 39 The first is that Hume regarded the articulation of rules in philosophy (as distinct from the general rules that he had suggested we all frame in daily life) as being an aspect of the discipline of logic (‘our scholastic headpieces and logicians’). This recognition casts doubt on the suggestion that Hume’s principal inspiration here came from Newton’s 36 Hume, Treatise, p. 173 (1.3.15), p. 149 (1.3.13). On Hume’s use of general rules in this context see further Owen, Hume’s Reason, p. 206. 37 Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica: The third edition (1726) with variant readings, ed. Alexandre Koyré and I. Bernard Cohen, with the assistance of Anne Whitman, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 550-55. The regulae only took their final form in this third edition. Maurizio Mamiani, ‘To twist the meaning: Newton’s Regulae philosophandi revisited’, in Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 3-14, provides a deeply problematic recent interpretation. Hume alludes to Newton’s third rule in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 27; see further Wright, Sceptical Realism of David Hume, p. 198. 38 Hume, Treatise, p. 175 (1.3.15). ‘Headpiece’ (OED, 2nd edn, 4b): ‘A man possessed of brains; a man of intellect.’ 39 Other aspects of the passage are brought out by Louis Loeb, 'Causal inference, associationism, and scepticism in Part III of Book I of Hume's Treatise', in Logic and the Workings of the Mind, pp. 283- 306, p. 290.
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