The philosophy of Hume
as contained in extracts from the first book and the first and second sections of the third part of the second book of the Treatise of human nature;
It is unfortunate that most students of philosophy, both in Germany and in Great Britain and America, should gain their knowledge of Hume's philosophy from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; for in this work, Hume sacrificed the thorough-going philosophical scepticism of the Treatise of Human Nature in order to carry out a system of religious scepticism which finds its culmination and best expression in the sections on " Miracles " and a " Particular Providence and a Future State.
When these sections are quietly omitted the Enquiry represents neither Hume's philosophy nor his theology, and yet the length and difficulty of the Treatise have made it necessary for college and university instructors to put editions of the Enquiry thus mutilated into the hands of their students.
To remedy this difficulty I have taken the following selections from the first book of the Treatise, in the hope that the main doctrines of this great work will be no less intelligible when much confusing detail is omitted. Selections from the sections of Book II. on Liberty and Necessity have been incorporated with the ex- tracts from Book I. because Hume's doctrine of the will is merely a special application of his doctrine of causation and cannot be understood apart from it.
Contents:
Bibliography i
Biographical Sketch 13
Sources of Hume's Sceptical Philosophy .... 21
Brief Exposition of Hume's Philosophy 25
The System in Outline 25
Causation 36
The Conception of Reality .42
The Belief in Reality 45
Confidence in Reason 46
Inference 47
The Treatise and the Enquiry, 49
Hume's Influence upon Subsequent Thought ... 55
Part I. — Of Ideas 61
Part II. — Of the Ideas of Space and Time and Existence. 78
Part HI. — Of Knowledge and Probability .... 86
Part IV.— Of the Sceptical Philosophy 143
Index, 175
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