Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

Serjeantson-12
regulae. Whilst Hume goes on in the following sentences to discuss the example of
natural philosophy, it is clear that he does not regard the formulation of such rules as
being restricted to that discipline. 40 The second point to emerge from this passage is
that, within the discipline of logic, Hume regarded rules as having the function of
directing the ‘judgment’ (‘a long system of rules and precepts to direct our judgment,
in philosophy’), a comment that recalls the sub-title of the Port-Royal Logique:
‘Containing, besides common rules (règles communes), several new observations for
developing the judgment’.
Hume, then, in a rather conventional manner, regarded his rules as pertaining
to the ‘judgment’. His account of judgment, however, was quite different from the
‘scholastic headpieces’ whose works he knew through Professor Drummond’s logic
lectures. The typical account school-philosophers gave of the intellect or
understanding (intellectus; cognitio) divided its activities into three distinct roles: the
so-called ‘acts of the mind’ (actus intellectus). 41 (Hume employs this scholastic term
in the Treatise.) 42 The three ‘acts of the mind’ consisted of ‘apprehension’
(apprehensio), judgment (judicium), and ratiocination (discursus). 43 The logics taught
in the Scottish universities in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries all
endorsed this division. 44 Indeed, seventeenth- and earlier eighteenth-century works on
logic were commonly organised according to this arrangement, with each act of the
40 Cf. Noxon, Hume’s Philosophical Development, p. 82-83 (a valuable discussion), who characterizes
this section as ‘some remarks in the Newtonian spirit upon the difficulty and importance of devising
experiments to exclude extraneous factors’, goes on to note the different concerns of Newton’s and
Hume’s rules--the one with the physical world, the other with human experience--but concludes that
they are nonetheless ‘quite compatible’.
41 Drummond taught this doctrine in his lectures: Echelbarger, ‘Hume and the logicians’, pp. 140, 144.
42 Hume, Treatise, p. 150 (1.3.13): ‘this act of the mind’.
43 The details of terminology varied, but the structure remained constant. This account is taken from
one of the most widely read school-philosophers in the period, Franco Burgersdijk. The actus
intellectus are found widely in early modern Aristotelian philosophy, although they are nowhere
distinguished in Aristotle’s Organon or De anima; see further E. J. Ashworth, ‘Editor’s introduction’,
in Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendivm (1618), ed. E. J. Ashworth (Bologna: Clueb, 1985),
pp. ix-lv, pp. xl-xli.
44 Emily Michael, 'Frances Hutcheson's Logicae compendium and the Glasgow school of logic', in
Logic and the Workings of the Mind, pp. 83-96, p. 88.