Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

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philosophy. Secondly, for Berkeley, the ‘general rules’ formulated by philosophers
are a direct reflection of the regulation of nature effected by God (‘or the intelligence
which sustains and rules the ordinary course of things’). 71 In something more than a
simple play on words, human rules reflect divine rule. Hume may have accepted the
basic structure of Berkeley’s account of general rules, but he never accepted that they
were underwritten by the deity. 72 Finally and most characteristically, Berkeley does
not regard the natural philosophers’ ‘general rules’ as providing any knowledge about
relations of cause and effect. Instead, they are simply a reflection of our perception of
signs: ‘Those men who frame general rules from the phenomena, and afterwards
derive the phenomena from those rules, seem to consider signs rather than causes.’ 73
Here again we may see Hume’s account of general rules as a response to Berkeley.
Hume acknowledges that it is ‘only by signs’ that we become sensible of effects. 74
But he does not accept Berkeley’s doubts about our ability to discern their causes,
since that is precisely what his ‘Rules by which to judge of causes and effects’ are
intended to accomplish.
With this account behind us are now in a position to assess where Hume’s Treatise
stands in relation to previous accounts of ‘general rules’ in early modern philosophy.
The first and perhaps most important point to make is that in his hostility to long
systems of ‘rules and precepts to direct our judgment, in philosophy’, Hume is an
inheritor and in some senses the culmination of seventeenth-century tendencies
71 Berkeley, Principles, p. 125 (§62). For discussion, see Michael Ayers, 'Natures and laws from
Descartes to Hume', in The Philosophical Canon in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Essays in honour of
John W. Yolton, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 1996), pp. 83-108, pp. 101-04.
72 See Hume, Treatise, pp. 159-60 (1.3.14)
73 Berkeley, Principles, p. 142 (§108); see also p. 126 (§65): ‘the connexion of ideas does not imply the
relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified.’
74 Hume, Treatise, p. 151 (1.3.13).