Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

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nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all
sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular.’ 87
It is skill in the involved business of separating adventitious from efficacious
circumstances, then, that makes a philosopher. ‘All general laws’, wrote Hume in ‘On
the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (first published in the Essays, Moral
and Political of 1742), ‘are attended with inconveniences, when applied to particular
cases; and it requires great penetration and experience, […] to discern what general
laws are, upon the whole, attended with fewest inconveniences.’ 88 This is why, as he
explained at the beginning of ‘Of Commerce’, it is the ability of philosophers ‘to
abstract general rules or principles’ that distinguishes them from ‘shallow thinkers’
for whom ‘Every judgment or conclusion […] is particular.’ 89 ‘Wise men’, Hume had
explained in the section of the Treatise on ‘general rules’, are more capable of
forming and applying such maxims than are ‘the vulgar’. 90 (A related concern
underlies the distinction Hume makes at the beginning of the Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding between the ‘easy and obvious’ moral philosophy based on
feeling, which is preferred by the ‘generality of mankind’, and the ‘accurate and
abstruse’ philosophy based on speculation, which is the province of the ‘profound
philosopher’.) 91 Hume, then, regarded the task of the working philosopher to be the
formulation of general rules, maxims or principles by which to explain natural, and in
his case particularly moral and political phenomena. I should like to close by
suggesting it is this practical ambition that underlies many of his moral, political, and
even literary essays.
A number of Hume’s essays begin with the consideration of an established
maxim or proverb. Thus ‘Of Taxes’ (first published in the 1752 Political Discourses)
87 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 81 n. 20.
88 Hume, Essays, p. 116.
89 Hume, Essays, pp. 253-55.
90 Hume, Treatise, p. 150 (1.3.13).
91 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 5-6.