G. J. Mattey's Notes on Hume's Treatise, Book 2, Part 3, Section 1

Notes on Hume’s Treatise

by G. J. Mattey

Book 2
Of the PASSIONS
PART 3
Of the will and direct passions.

Sect. 1. Of liberty and necessity.

The author has completed his treatment of the “indirect” passions. In Part III of Book II, he turns his attention to the “direct” passions. However, these passions, principally joy and sorrow, desire and aversion, hope and fear, are not discussed until Section 9. The first two sections, including the present one, are devoted to the question of the liberty of the will. Section 3 considers the influences of the passions upon the will. Sections 4 through 8 are concerned with the causes of the passions, including both custom and the imagination.

The question of the liberty or freedom of the will was widely discussed by the philosophers of the modern period. Here the views of Hobbes and Locke, which in important ways resemble those of the author, will be summarized.

Hobbes published, in 1654, Of Liberty and Necessity, A Treatise, wherein all controversy concerning Predestination, Election, Free-will, Grace, Merits, Reprobation, &c. is fully decided and cleared. At the outset, Hobbes makes a key distinction between two ways of understanding liberty or freedom. The first, which everyone acknowledges, is this: “he is free to do a thing, that may do it, if he have the Will to do it, and may forbear, if he have the Will to forbear” In Hobbes’s view, the question of necessity is whether one’s willing is itself due to his own will or something else in his own power. Liberty to will would be liberty (or freedom) from necessitation, but there is a question, “Whether such a Liberty be possible or not?” Hobbes himself states that what “necessitateth and determineth every action . . . is the Sum of all those things, which being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect would not be produced.” Given this definition, Hobbes maintains that “the Will itself, and each Propension of a man during his deliberation, is as much necessitated, and depends on a sufficient Cause, as anything else whatsoever.” He makes an analogy between the necessity of fire burning and one’s electing to do what one has a fancy to do. The person who so elects remains at liberty (in the first sense), “though it be not in his Will or Power to choose his Fancy, or choose his Election and Will,” in which case his action is not at liberty from necessitation.

Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, published initially in 1690, contained a chapter “Of Power,” with 47 sections. In subsequent editions, he removed Sections 28-38 and replaced them with a new set of Sections, 28-60, and numerous changes were made to the first 27 Sections. In both editions, he begins his discussion of liberty in Section 7 by stating, “Every one, I think, finds in himself a power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several actions in himself.” This “active” power, in turn, is understood as the ability to make a change (Section 2). So are all able to bring about changes in ourselves. In Section 7 of the first edition, we are told that the ideas of liberty and necessity “arise from the consideration of the extent of this power of the mind over the actions, no only of the mind, but the whole agent, the whole man.” A person’s freedom is “the power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind” (Section 8). An agent is not free, or is under necessity, “whenever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of the mind directing it” (Section 8). Just as the motion of tennis-ball is under necessity, so is someone falling from a bridge unable to stop his falling by a preference of his will. Locke notes that under his definition, liberty is a property of an agent, not the agent’s will. Then the question becomes, “whether a man be free?” (Section 21). As he notes, it is hard to imagine anything freer than a human agent: “in respect of actions with the reach of such a power [to speak or hold one’s peace, etc.], a man seems as free as it is possible for freedom to make him” (Section 21). However, “the inquisitive mind of man” does not rest content with this freedom, but rather asks a further question, “Whether a man be free to will”? One way of looking at this question is in terms of whether the preference of the mind is determined when it is exercised. Locke’s answer in the first edition is that in fact the preference is “always determined by the appearance of good, greater good” (Section 33, first edition). Nonetheless, the agent is free, because his power to bring about the action is not thereby diminished. In the later editions, Locke allows that what moves the mind when it exercises its power is satisfaction or uneasiness of his current state (Section 29). We desire happiness and we act to satisfy that desire. The new wrinkle in the later editions is an emphasis on our ability to evaluate rationally which actions would result in our greater happiness. When we do this, we may, at least in most cases, suspend an action that would satisfy an immediate desire, when we see that it is detrimental to our greater good. ”This is the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual beings.” (Section 53).

1. The direct passions are those that arise immediately from pain or pleasure, without requiring an additional relation of ideas of the cause of the passion and the object to which it is directed. Direct passions “arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure.” The chief direct passions are desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear.

2. While pain and pleasure give rise immediately to the passions, they also give rise to the will, which is not a passion. The author describes the will as being at least as worthy of remark as the direct passions. He states that he will inquire into the will because “the full understanding of its nature and properties, is necessary to the explanation of“ the passions. He defines will in this way: “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” As with the passions discussed in the preceding two Parts of Book II, the will is not capable of definition, yet is known well enough by observation. So the author proposes to bypass all the philosophers’s definitions, which he thinks lead to nothing but confusion, and to proceed straightaway to the consideration of the question of the will’s liberty or necessity, a question that occurs naturally in the treatment of the will and which has been the subject of long dispute.

3. The author begins his treatment by noting that the actions of material objects are considered by all to be necessitated. “Every object is determin’d by an absolute fate to a certain degree and direction of its motion, and can no more depart from that precise line, in which it moves, than it can convert itself into an angel, or spirit, or any superior substance.” The necessitation or determination of material objects serves as a paradigm for all cases of necessitation. Whatever actions take place in a relevantly similar way “must be acknowledg’d to be necessary.” In order to tell whether the actions of the mind fall under this category, we must examine what exactly are the relevant characteristics of the behavior of material objects that leads us to call it necessary or determined: “on what the idea of a necessity in [their] operations is founded, and why we conclude one body or action to be the infallible cause of another.”

4. In Book I, Part III, Section 14, paragraph 15, it is argued that no observation of a single instance of cause and effect can give rise to the idea of a necessary connection between them. The idea of a relation of cause and effect can only be due to the observation of a constant union between them. Necessity is a component of the idea of cause and effect, so the idea of it must as well be based on constant union. In fact, necessity itself is only “a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant, and infer the existence of one from that of the other.” Thus constant union and inference are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a judgment of necessity. The specific judgment of the necessity of human actions might be argued for on the basis of constant union alone, since this is what produces the inference. However, the author will separate the two and “first prove from experience, that our actions have a constant union with our motives, tempers, and circumstances,” before considering “the inferences we draw from it.”

5. It is easy to show from experience “that our actions have a constant union with our motives, tempers, and circumstances.” This union holds across variation in gender, age, government, living-conditions and education. Just as in the operations of nature, like causes produces like effects, so with human action. [The principle that like causes produce like effects is laid down in Book I, Part III, Section 15, paragraph 5.]

6. An example is the uniform way in which males behave and the differing uniform way in which females behave. The former are characterized by “force and maturity,” while the latter exhibit “delicacy and softness.” This is similar to the way fruit trees in different regions uniformly produce fruit of different characters.

7. Another example is the uniform results of aging on the body and the mind. The mature adult can lift a larger weight than can an infant, and he can reason in a much more sophisticated way.

8. In fact, we understand the constant union in human behavior even better than that in the natural world. We cannot explain the ultimate reason that two flat pieces of marble adhere to each other, but we can understand why humans invariably associate with one another in society. Young people in primitive conditions naturally engage in sexual intercourse, and just as certainly as babies are physically produced from the union, so is the parents’ care of the child. Later in life, there are physical circumstances that make the separation of the offspring from the parent inconvenient, and just as certainly, the offspring will seek to avoid these inconveniences “by a close union and confederacy.”

9. Yet another example is a comparison of the physical and mental circumstances of people in different “stations of life.” Just as the day-laborer will have a certain robustness of body and crudeness of sentiments, a “a man of quality” will have other ones, which are quite different “The different stations of life influence the whole fabric, external and internal, and these different stations arise uniformly, from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature.” Because man cannot live without society, governments are necessary, and from these flow a multitude of distinct activities, such as “industry, traffic, manufactures, law-suits, ware, leagues, alliances, voyages, travels, cities, fleets, ports.” Yet with each of these categories, there is great uniformity of human behavior.

10. A final example is that of our reaction to travelers who give us reports that we cannot believe. If someone claimed that in the far north, it was cold in the summer and warm in the winter, we would be incredulous. The same would hold of a report about the behavior of people, such as is described in Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’ Leviathan. [The Republic describes a certain kind of ideal city, ruled by philosophers, while Leviathan describes a “state of nature,” in which everyone is at war with everyone else. The author dismisses the latter as “a mere fiction” in Book III, Chapter II, Section 2, paragraph 15.] In summary, some uniformities hold universally among humans, while others are specific to “different nations and particular persons.” We learn of these uniform characters through “the observation of an uniformity in the actions, that flow from them; and this uniformity forms the very essence of necessity.”

11. In the author’s view, the only way of avoiding the conclusion that human actions are necessary is to deny that they are uniform. “As long as actions have a constant union and connexion with the situation and temper of the agent, however we may in words refuse to acknowledge the necessity, we really allow the thing.” But there is considerable evidence that human behavior is not, in fact, uniform, but is rather the very opposite. Human actions are the most capricious than any others, and human desires are most inconstant. Humans are also most likely to depart from the use of reason, or even to behave contrary to their own temperaments. We change our course from moment to moment and in fact in a single stroke will undo everything we have accomplished through hard work. “Necessity is regular and certain. Human conduct is irregular and uncertain. The one, therefore, proceeds not from the other.”

12. The author’s response appeals to the conclusions he drew in Book I, Part III, Section 12, “Of the Probability of Causes.” There, the author noted that in many cases our experience does not reveal perfectly uniform behavior [yielding what he had called in Book I, Part III, Section 11 a “proof”] and thus does not pass with perfect confidence from the idea of a cause to that of an effect. We are reduced instead to probable reasoning, which is an “inferior degree of evidence.” In probable reasoning, contrary instances are taken into account and balanced against one another, “and, deducting the inferior from the superior, proceeds with that degree of assurance or evidence, which remains.” In fact, even when the two sides are equally balanced, we suppose the balance to be the result of contrary causes that are concealed, rather than from no cause at all. Chance, or indifference, is thus not taken to lie in things, but rather in our judgment, which is based on imperfect knowledge of things. The author continues with the claim that there is perfect uniformity in the case of some actions by some humans of some characters, but where it is not, we should recognize that the case is the same with bodies, “nor can we conclude any thing from the one irregularity, which will not follow equally from the other.”

13. The distinctions the author has been making reveal the inconsistency in our judgments about people. It is commonly thought that the insane have no liberty, yet the inconstancy of their behavior would indicate that they have more liberty than anyone else. To think that they are unfree is the result of the use of “confus’d ideas and undefin’d terms,” commonly made us of in reasoning and especially prominent in reasoning about human action.

14. This completes the first part of the author’s task, to show that there is a constant union between people’s motives and their actions which is just as strong as that found in material nature. The second part is to show the influence of this union on our understanding, such that we infer the action from the motive. “If this shall appear, there is no known circumstance, that enters into the connexion and production of the actions of matter, that is not to be found in all the operations of the mind; and consequently we cannot, without a manifest absurdity, attribute necessity to the one, and refuse it to the other.”

15. The author notes that even those who would deny the necessity of human action in favor of a “fantastical system of liberty” agree that there is force to “moral evidence,” or evidence about human the course of human behavior. We suppose that this evidence is a “reasonable foundation” for both speculation and practical action. The first example given by the author is that of the evidence for our beliefs about historical events, such as the lives of the Roman emperors. There is the concurrence of evidence from many historians who were on the scene at the time. Such historians would not lie about these events because they know that if they were, they would be subject to derision if found out by their contemporaries. So we conclude that the facts were as they were reported. A number of other examples of such reasoning are given.

16. The author now summarizes his findings and places them in the context of his overall system, as described in Book I, Part III, Section 14. All that we observe is events, and we can discover no necessary connection between things. All we find is when we discover regularities, mind is determined to pass from one object to another, which is the foundation of our causal reasoning. Thus, if we find uniformity which determines the mind to produce belief, we have necessity, however much we might dislike calling it that. The motions of bodies are uniform and result in beliefs about their causal connections. “As there is the same constancy, and the same influence in what we call moral evidence, I ask no more. What remains can only be a dispute of words.”

17. Should one have any lingering doubt about the perfect analogy between reasoning about the behavior of material objects and of people, they might be dispelled by this final consideration. That is, our reasoning often forms a seamless chain that contains both evidence about the behavior of bodies and about the behavior of people. Suppose there is a prisoner awaiting execution. He has no external means of escape. His only hope lies in either penetrating the walls of the prison or convincing the warden to let him go. He might reason that he would have a better chance scratching his way through stone and steel than by trying to influence his jailer. He also foresees a mixed chain of events leading to his demise, first the refusal of the guards to let him escape, then the physical actions of the executioner. Both the actions of the guards and those of the ax are equally certain to him. “Here is a connected chain of natural causes and voluntary actions; but the mind feels no difference betwixt them in passing from one link to another, nor is less certain of the future event than if it were connected with the present impressions of the memory and senses cemented together by what we are pleas’d to call physical necessity.” The constancy of the union is in both cases the same, “whether the united objects be motives, volitions, and actions; or figure and motion. We may change the names of things; but their nature and their operation on the understanding never change.”

18. The author believes that his conclusions can be evaded only by changing the meanings of the terms he has used, i.e., ‘cause,’ ‘effect,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘chance.’ According to the author’s own definitions, removal of necessity in favor of liberty requires removal of cause and effect, and removal of cause and effect results in nothing more than chance. So liberty would reduce to chance, which no one would want to allow, as the very notion of chance is thought by most either to be contradictory in itself or in conflict with experience. In that case, there would be no liberty either. On the other hand, if anyone wishes to contest the definitions, the author cannot argue with him until those definitions are made known to him.

Section 8 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, entitled “Of Liberty and Necessity,” re-works the material found in the present section of the Treatise. Hume argues in Part 1 that the debate over human liberty and necessity is a mere verbal dispute. All are agreed about the necessity of events in the material world, but this is to be understood solely in terms of constant conjunction and the resultant customary inference. If it could be shown that human actions are also subject to constant conjunction and customary inference, then they would be placed on the same basis as natural events and declared to be necessary as well. And in fact, there is a discoverable constant conjunction in human action, which everyone acknowledges. This conjunction is the source of our inferences about people’s future behavior. However, people think that they find in natural events a necessary connection that is lacking in human actions. Hume has argued that there is no such connection to be found, so there is no difference between natural and human actions on this score. Another source of the denial of necessity in human action is a feeling that we have that we could do something other than what we in fact do. Yet despite this feeling, our actions remain predictable, and hence necessary, in Hume’s weakened sense of that notion. We can, on the other hand, preserve a notion of liberty despite the regularity of human behavior, by considering it hypothetically as the power to do what one wills. In Part 2, Hume discusses the implications of his account of liberty and necessity. He cites the regularity of human behavior as the basis for blame and punishment as well as for the assignation of moral qualities in general. Any action is judged to have moral import only insofar as it indicates the internal character of the agent, which character, in turn, is nothing more than what is durable and constant in the person. Hume then considers the consequences of the necessity of human action for religion and poses the dilemma that either God is responsible for our bad actions, or they are not in fact bad after all. He rejects the latter possibility on the grounds of the existence of real human misery. As for the former, he declares that the ways of God are mysterious and beyond the reach of human reason—best left alone by philosophy.