Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

Serjeantson-24
of human understanding the venerable distinction between natural and moral
philosophy. This refusal is implicit in the Treatise in the example of the man in the
iron cage; it is made explicit in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding when
Hume states that natural and moral arguments are ‘of the same nature, and derived
from the same principles.’ 76
‘The chief business of philosophers’
Hume never lost his conviction that philosophers were distinguished from the ‘vulgar’
by their ability to subsume the circumstantial multiplicity of experience within
effective general rules. 77 He did restrain his desire to provide a formal account of this
procedure, however, as can be seen when we turn to consider the role of rules and
circumstance in the two Enquiries. Hume advertised the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (1748), as containing ‘most of the principles, and reasonings’ of the
Treatise. The part of this Enquiry that corresponds most closely to the account of
‘general rules’ in the Treatise (1.3.13) is a footnote in section five attacking the
conventional distinction made between ‘reason’ and ‘experience’. Here Hume
explains that all the sciences--whether natural, moral, or political--‘will be found to
terminate, at last, in some general principle or conclusion, for which we can assign no
reason but observation and experience’, and he goes on to equate these principles with
‘general and just maxims’. 78
76 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 69.
77 Here I am in agreement with Hearn, ‘General rules in Hume’s Treatise’, p. 406, who notes that ‘a
natural tendency requiring correction by general rules […] can be said to represent one of the basic
ingredients in Hume’s account of human nature and experience.’ It follows that I dissent from the
conclusion of Noxon, Hume’s Philosophical Development, p. 192, that the later Hume decided that ‘the
student of nature has more to learn from history than from the experimental method’; Hume did not
regard the two as contradictory.
78 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 1, 37-38 n. 8.