A Treatise of Human Nature

Hume was interested in how we know anything at all, and he argued that all our knowledge ultimately comes from experience.

He was skeptical that pure reason could settle moral or political disagreements, and in his work A Treatise of Human Nature, he wrote the famous line that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.

Hume wasn't throwing reason away.

He was setting firm limits on what it could do.

But his deepest impressions were probably those which he derived from France.

It was there that he composed his Treatise of Human Nature, and during his whole life his relations with France and with French authors were very intimate.

The easy, pleasure-loving temper of that light-hearted people appears always to have possessed a singular fascination for his mind.

He eulogizes them repeatedly as models of what, quote, sensible, polite, and knowing, end quote, people ought to be.

Many suggestions of Smith's peculiar moral theories are scattered up and down the works of Hume.

With regard to Reid, it is only necessary to refer to his own express acknowledgement that it was Hume's sceptical conclusions which first of all startled him into independent inquiry.

I acknowledge, he says, that I never thought of calling in question the principles commonly received with regard to the human understanding until the Treatise of Human Nature was published in the year 1739.

The ingenious author of that treatise upon the principles of Locke, who was no sceptic, hath built a system of scepticism which leaves no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary.

But I understand that You're busy, you know, but these are important.

So what's considered kind of his magnum opus is his A Treatise of Human Nature.

By the way.

Yeah.

So A Treatise of Human Nature, which is it's a thick book.

It's dense and difficult at places.

It's probably my favorite thing that he wrote, though.

David Hume, the cool-eyed Scottish anatomist of human nature, gave the most famous answer on one side.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739.

It can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Reason does not command.