Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

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in Locke’s Essay. And in contrast to Locke’s persistent sniping, Hume only makes
two explicit attacks on logic in the Treatise--although both, as we shall see, are highly
significant for understanding what he conceived the significance of that work to be. 16
Nonetheless, many of Hume’s most extravagant philosophical paradoxes take their
force from the rejection of earlier philosophical pieties. Moreover, when Hume tried
to stimulate interest in the Treatise with the Abstract of 1740, part of his attempt to
promote it consisted in describing Book I of the work as kind of logic. 17 Here Hume
explains that the ‘science of human nature’ (the subject of the Treatise) comprehends
‘logic’, the ‘sole end’ of which ‘is to explain the principles and Operations of our
reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas’; Hume goes on to state that in the
Treatise, he ‘has finished what regards logic’. 18
The logic of the Treatise, of course, is a very far cry indeed from the logic of
the schools. Hume himself signals this when he writes in the conclusion of Book I that
by publishing the work he had ‘expos’d himself to the enmity of all […] logicians’. 19
Among other striking departures from more conventional logical works, Hume
distinguishes between impressions and ideas (1.1.1); gives his own enumeration of the
qualities of relation between objects rather than appealing to the Aristotelian
categories (1.1.6); repudiates (as we shall see) the logical division of the ‘acts of the
intellect’; and argues that all reasoning is an effect of custom, and hence (remarkably)
that ‘reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls.’ 20 In
the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he also went on to denounce ‘all those
pretended syllogistical reasonings, which may be found in every other branch of
16 Although Hume, Treatise, p. 183 (1.4.1) may constitute a third attack.
17 This point is brought out clearly by Echelbarger, ‘Hume and the logicians’, pp. 142-43. R. W.
Connon and M. Pollard, 'On the authorship of "Hume's" Abstract', Philosophical Quarterly, 27 (1977):
60-66, furnish positive evidence for Hume’s authorship of the Abstract.
18 Hume, Abstract, in Treatise, p. 646.
19 Hume, Treatise, p. 265 (1.4.7).
20 Hume, Treatise, p. 149 (1.3.13), p. 115 (1.3.9), p. 183 (1.4.1); cf. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, p. 81 n. 20. Hume, Treatise, p. 179 (1.3.16).