PREVIEW-Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?

0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsonmeier, eking out a meager existence in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin from the heart of Tex Mex country, Boston, Texas.

0:42 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan, doing a lot of sleeping in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:48 Mark: I just got the image of one of you then following up with me and saying, masturbating from Boston. Maybe next time when we do Kant,

0:59 Wes: I gotta think of some witty things before you start the podcast.

1:04 Seth: There would be much more appropriate things to say on the Hume podcast than like something like playing tennis or golf.

1:10 Mark: Our question for episode 17 is what can We Know? Featuring the mature and concise work by David Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. If you would like a link to that text, please go to our website, partiallyexaminedlight.com why? There are many wonderful things@partiallyexaminedlight.com like some discussion boards. We have a Facebook group. I'm doing a blog of my experience reading the Foundation.

1:33 Seth: Oh my God, are you.

1:36 Mark: You have not seen that. I started an entry in the discussion board of Facebook. So as I listen, I'm actually doing it as an audiobook because I don't think I could make myself sit there and read enough of it. I don't know if I can actually get through like 27 discs of it.

1:50 Wes: I'm still opposed to this whole Ayn Rand.

1:54 Mark: Well, I'm thinking if I do this, then we don't have to discuss it as a group.

1:57 Seth: You can just do the episode yourself and entertain callers.

2:00 Mark: No, it's in written form is what I'm saying. That's just the Fountainhead, though. I think if we actually did an Ayn Rand episode, we would do it on her philosophical work, not on this piece of philosophical in quotes literature. I don't know which of those words should be in quotes. Maybe both of them. Different layers of quotes. Anyway, here's some ground rules for our discussion of Hume. We do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. No gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers.

If we have a point to make, we'll just make it and not say, for instance, you would understand me if only you'd read Arthur Danto's the Transfiguration of My Middle Finger. We shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in cases where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining. So, Mr. Hume, anybody want to give an intro, a history, whatever?

2:54 Seth: We should say this, that in the tradition when Hume is taught, he's usually taught as part of a three pack. To get your British empiricists, you get Locke, Barclay and Hume as a three pack. We had opted not to read Locke and Barclay, at least not right now, and just go straight to Hume. So for anybody who's wondering whether they missed the Locke episode that you have not. But I think Hume does comment quite extensively on Locke and does rely on many of the things that Locke says, even though he puts it in the footnotes. So it's probably worth a bit of review, but I don't think you have to have read it in order to get the force of what he's trying to say.

3:30 Mark: And yeah, I should say so. We've got a lot of requests which you can also do on our website for future episode topics, many of them being modern people, Sartre, Heidegger, folks like that. And a lot of them it would be very hard for us to do, we felt, without having done some Kant on epistemology. In order to do that then you have to do a rationalist and an empiricist on epistemology. So that is what we are doing right now. For the next three episodes we're going to. This is our empiricist, right guys who think all knowledge comes from experience. And then we're going to do some more play doh. Some heavy duty rationalist epistemology. And then we'll do our Kant and then we'll. The floodgates will be open. Which doesn't mean we can. We don't have to go back to these folks. In fact, I should say, can I talk a little about Locke?

4:15 Wes: Sure.

4:16 Mark: So as part of the prep for this, I also looked at his essay concerning human understanding. I mostly skimmed it. It's very, very skimmable. And I was just struck with, after just looking at Hegel's, the logic that it's another one of those books that, and I'm going to blame Aristotle for this and I think this points out another like track of future episodes that we have to cover different topics in a row to get people prepared for this, but most of these big books, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's Phenomenology, Hegel's Logic, Sartre's Being Nothingness, I can't even say anything about being in time.

I have no freaking clue. Really seem to have this like systematic let's go through everything. First we must talk about substance and then we must talk about individuality and then we must talk about perception and you know, just this laundry list. You know, whatever order they think according to their theory, things have to go in. So these, these system builders and that's mostly what these very fat books have. And almost any given section of one of these I feel like is tediously slow, is like so picky because we're trying to give, you know, the, the very.

I'm now I'm going to describe the simple ideas and then we'll move up to the complex ideas and in talking about the simple ideas I'm going to list them all. So Locke has, has things like this. There are you know, 300 simple ideas and here they all are. I will describe. It's not quite that bad but it's like you know, on our perceptions of space and different. Oh there's, there's length within space, there's depth within space. Just the Hume that we picked doesn't do that. It really is a pretty concise book, gets to the point that's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

That's from the 1740s. Now in the 1730s he wrote this other book, Treatise on Human Nature which actually has much of that same long ass structure. So I feel like again I'm going to blame Aristotle that it's Aristotle, you know, go systematically through all these things that then was multiplied by the scholastics throughout the Middle Ages. So they just had volume upon volume of these, you know, here's our little Theory of Everything. And then a lot of philosophers after that just felt the need to sort of use that pattern partly to respond to these past theories.

So John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I mean I've got an abridged edition here that still, you know, is almost 500 pages long. And it's interesting that you know Hume, when he talks about Locke, he has a footnote about Locke here in the one that we read. To be ingenious, I must own it to be my opinion that Locke was betrayed into this question by the schoolmen who, making use of undefined terms, draw out their disputes to a tedious length without ever touching the point in question. A like ambiguity and circumlocution seem to run through that philosopher's reasonings on this as well as most other subjects.

So Locke was an empiricist. He's called the founder of British empiricism, but still seemed to be very much, you know, was well studied in philosophy in the Scholastics, as they call it. That is people through the Middle Ages from the Catholic Church who are ultimately using some form of Aristotle for their whole metaphysics. Right. The people that condemned Galileo and pretty much every other scientific advance that has ever come along.

7:24 Wes: Well, you know, Aristotle didn't write any books. Right. Those are just assembled notes from his lectures, like.

7:30 Mark: Sure, right. But who these people would be reading. Yeah, but I think who Locke and the Scholastics would be reading, I think

7:36 Wes: Aristotle is less to blame than the academics who took him up later.

7:40 Speaker: And.

7:40 Wes: Yeah, and arguably Aristotle is an empiricist as well.

7:44 Seth: Yep.

7:44 Wes: So I think the objection, ironically for Locke is, you know, Locke still holds onto the idea of substance, for instance, which is something that Hume rejects. Hume is a skeptic in a way that Locke just isn't. Which we'll find as we discuss this. I don't know. Should I give a few other biographical notes on here?

8:02 Seth: Sure.

8:02 Wes: I like the fact that he was friends with Rousseau but then had a

8:05 Mark: falling out with Rousseau.

8:06 Seth: Yeah.

8:06 Wes: Because Rousseau was really paranoid and began to think that Hume was involved in some international conspiracy against him or something like that. That's brilliant. And hung out in the French salons a lot. Who did he hang out with? Do you guys remember?

8:20 Mark: Well, it said he's friends with Adam Smith. Right.

8:22 Wes: Yeah. One other important thing, this Critique of Causality that we're going to discuss is still a hot topic in the philosophy of SC Science.

8:29 Mark: Right.

8:30 Wes: And he's also, of the trio of the three pack of empiricists, he's generally considered the best. Right. He's the one that contemporary philosophers are still excited by. He's had a huge influence in 20th century Philosophy of language and philosophy of science, the positivists and others. And also it's important to know he's just such a good writer.

8:50 Mark: Right, sure.

8:51 Seth: Yeah.

8:51 Wes: And the other thing to note is when we get to Kant, Kant, I mean, it's amazing how much of a Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is just a direct response to Hume and largely accepts Hume's argument. Kant's famous phrase in the Critique is that Hume quote unquote, awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers.

9:10 Seth: Hume also, when his other major philosophical work, which I guess was published Posthumously was Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which contains some really unbelievably strong and. And just damning critiques of the Intelligent Design theory and things like that.

9:30 Mark: He was definitely the argument from design, that is the world looks designed.

9:34 Seth: I'm sorry.

9:34 Speaker: Yes.

9:34 Mark: Therefore there must be a God who designed it, which is related to Intelligent Design theory.

9:39 Seth: Yes. I apologize. But yeah, he's just an interesting guy. Back in that day when there were interesting guys like that.

9:45 Mark: Oh, whoa.

9:45 Seth: Had interesting lives and did all kinds of crazy stuff and he wrote a history of England.

9:51 Mark: Yeah. I was surprised to read that he was more popular than his philosophy at the time.

9:54 Wes: Yeah.

9:55 Seth: And if I want to say, I seem to recall, I don't remember if this was about humor about Locke, but like one of them also lived until they were like in their 70s, which was very old and played tennis a lot and was like an advocate of being outside and physical activity at the time when you were sick they used to lock you up in a room and the shutters to ward off consumption, things like that.

10:15 Mark: I, I didn't read that in my Hume biographical stuff. And maybe that was Locke, but it

10:20 Seth: might have been Locke.

10:21 Wes: He died of cancer, intestinal cancer or something like that. But he was playing cheerful to the end of his. It might have been locked while he was dying. He organized the publication of the religious treatise that appeared after he died.

10:36 Seth: It's definitely something that was unique to the. I'd say more typical of the English. You wouldn't get that kind of stuff out of the Continentals, which.

10:45 Mark: The anti religious stuff.

10:47 Seth: No, no, no, no, the. Like we need to organize sports to improve the.

10:53 Wes: Oh, right. If you're Continental, you just spill.

10:56 Seth: That's exactly right.

10:57 Wes: Drink and hang out at cafes.

10:59 Seth: Yes.

10:59 Wes: One other biographical note that I thought was interesting was that first of all, I liked his mother's name was Catherine Falconer Home, which I just. I love that name. And she was a single mother. His father died or left, I think died when he was 2. And she called David uncommonly wake minded, which. Where wake minded is the word for precocious. I just love that phrase. But after he went to. I think he went to college and studied philosophy for a while. He sort of had a crisis of, oh, this is really impractical and I should try and do something more worldly.

And he took a job as a clerk for a sugar importer and that didn't work out very well. And so he went back to school and I thought it was interesting in light of our own experience with philosophy. And I Think it motivates of a lot of his skepticism and his anti skepticism ironically, or is anti system building on the one side and then is being against extreme radical skepticism on the other. So there's that sort of pragmatic streak.

11:58 Mark: Well, I thought I saw something in the biographical stuff as well about even within academia that he just like couldn't bear the classes that were not philosophy.

12:07 Wes: Interesting.

12:08 Mark: Tolerably. I don't know.

12:10 Wes: Also, he never got an academic post. He never became a professor because of the controversial nature of his writing.

12:17 Mark: So we should jump for that. And that's sort of why, you know, Hume, he's not like the most. I was going to say he's the most extreme of these empiricists. But Berkeley is like extreme to the point of silliness in a different way, to the point of saying that the material world just doesn't exist and everything is ideas. And so he's. But definitely Hume is an advance beyond Locke. There's an orderly advance there in terms of breaking away from the scholastics. And you can see, as far as religion goes, why you would run into problems. Because the whole point of empiricism is that we can only know things that we get from experience.

We don't experience religious matters, therefore we can't know anything about religious matters. Bam, done. But yet Locke doesn't think that. Locke, like when I was looking through Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he supports the. I mean, he has an argument against the ontological argument for the existence of God, which is the one that Descartes uses in the Meditations, but he believes leaves the cosmological argument, which is that, oh, everything has a cause. There must be a first cause. That's God. Like, he buys that just fine. And the reason Hume does not have that available to him is exactly a matter of his analysis of causality, which is, I guess, our main topic today.

13:28 Seth: Okay, should we just give at least

13:29 Mark: his version of empiricism in the first place?

13:32 Seth: Well, I'm looking back over my notes and I'm wondering whether we need to even start from the beginning, you know, the different species of philosophy talking about moral philosophy and.

13:41 Mark: No, not that.

13:42 Seth: Yeah, I think we can. Even though there's some really nice poetic parts there, the feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions and reduce the profound philosopher to mere plebeian. He's got more like that. Okay, origin of ideas. So he uses some slightly more technical, or I should say more precise language than Locke does, but basically what he says is, look, there's a difference between perceptions, which would be something that you are experiencing right now in the present, and your memory of a perception that you had in the past, or your anticipation of a perception you might have in the future in your imagination. He says, right, right.

14:25 Mark: You're already. This is funny.

14:26 Seth: No, no, no, no, no. He starts off using the word perception before he does the definition.

14:31 Mark: But I think perceptions, right. Are all the kind of intake. Right?

14:34 Seth: Geez, you guys, man, just hang on just one second. So he says, look, memory and imagination can mimic, but you cannot reach the force and vivacity of the present experience. So his criteria, this is important, is that force or vivacity of your experience basically tells you that you're experiencing something in the present or you're not. And so he says this is true for all perceptions. And he puts in here love, anger, pain, color, all of those things. So he says, okay, let me be more precise. He says there's basically two different classes of perceptions of the mind that are divided by virtue of their degrees of force or vivacity. One is thoughts or ideas, which would be memory or imagination. And the other is what he calls lively impressions, which are present experiences where you see, hear, smell, feel, have emotional. You know, that sort of thing.

15:32 Mark: Right. It's interesting that he doesn't say just like, sense impressions, because he's leaving it open. Like, what sense exactly is it that gets at our sense that you're afraid of something? Like, he doesn't.

15:43 Seth: Right, Exactly.

15:44 Mark: Doesn't commit himself to analyzing that as. Oh, I get that through, you know, the touch of the own heat of my body or the sound, you know, any of that crap, which Locke definitely does. Like, he's all. It's the senses, you know, talking about sense data and things like that. Hume doesn't seem to use that language.

15:58 Seth: No, I mean, for him.

15:59 Wes: Well, sense data are one kind of impression. And then there's hate and love and desire and will and all that.

16:06 Seth: Yeah. Like, you could have the experience of fear, like have somebody threaten your life and have the experience of fear. And that counts as a lively impression in the same way that, like, seeing something does. It's a present experience that's delivered, quote, unquote, through the senses.

16:20 Speaker: Right.

16:21 Mark: And finding that you believe something is the same kind of thing. Right. Like, I see there's a book in front of me, I have an impression of the book, and then I also have an impression of my thought. Maybe I'm jumping ahead here, that I believe that there's a book there.

16:33 Seth: Yeah. You are jumping ahead.

16:35 Mark: Okay. Things get complex very quickly.

16:39 Seth: Well, one of the things I really like about this is I like this force and vivacity. This is the same move that Descartes makes. To throw back to a previous podcast. You know when he says that the way you distinguish between dreaming and reality is sort of the force and the impressions and it's something that I still believe myself. I like that quite a bit. It's just he builds a pretty big edifice on top of. On top of that.

17:03 Mark: I don't know, it seems when it's put that way, if it's really just. That's the only way we know whether we're having an actual experience now or just thinking of something is that it's more lively. Like he gives examples that make sense. Like when you get hurt, you experience that pain a lot more intensely than you do the memory of that pain. It's qualitatively different. You can tell the difference. You can tell that you're not experiencing the pain now. But it doesn't follow from that that every single idea will be less lively than every single impression.

There are plenty of impressions that I have that I'm only vaguely aware of certain things. You know, I'm getting some impression of the air around me right now, but unless I'm paying attention to it, I. It just barely even registers at all. If, but yet that compared with my memory of some trauma I underwent, you know, in a nightmare or something, force and liveliness doesn't capture the difference between those.

17:49 Seth: No, I agree, but what he's saying is that the idea or the memory or your imagination of any particular thing will always be less forceful and vivacious than your actual lively impression of that thing. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a difference between the force and vivacity of various impressions and thoughts and ideas.

18:09 Mark: I think, also interesting. Locke specifically, I think says that the ideas are copies or echoes of the lively impressions. But can Hume really say that? He can't say that. Hume can say there's copies, but Locke can actually say, you know, we have these moment to moment impressions that then cause the ideas in our heads. Right. Whereas Hume doesn't want to bring cause in there. Right, right.

18:34 Wes: The impressions don't cause the ideas. Well, I don't know. I don't know.

18:39 Mark: Well, this is going to be the theme that we're finding running through this is that Hume wants to give a description of experience. That's all. Just like we're sitting back watching a parade of Images and I mean that's just an analogy. They're not all visual. But any then theory we have about what's going on behind those images or what's causing the images or anything like that, that's of our experience and something that in some strong sense we can't really know anything about. Whereas for Locke, he really still thinks, even though he's an empiricist, that we are perceiving objects in the world, that we don't know much about the objects in the world, but surely those objects in the world are causing our impressions. He definitely goes so far as that.

19:16 Wes: Right. For Hume, object is already an abstract. Since an object is composed of many impressions, should we go over the critique of cause of?

19:25 Seth: We have to do a little bit more to get there, I think. So you've raised sort of one clear criticism, right, which is that your sort of present experience isn't mediated into a thought. He can't have you having a thought or an idea about a lively impression. Thoughts and ideas are things that take place after the fact or independent of the experience, that the experience is somehow visceral and direct. So that's one thing we have to consider. And then of course the second thing is that in his notion and this empiricist notion is that what experiences provide you are what we might call the kind of lively impressions that can be resolved or that create simple ideas.

And that what consciousness does or what you do in your mind is that you take all these simple ideas that you get from experience and you combine them in various ways to come up with compound or more complex ideas that are really various combinations and forms of basic, simple, lively impressions and experiences. And that's why Locke goes to all the pains of trying to enumerate what all these simple experiences are, is that he's going to have to use that as the foundation and say that, well, anything that you can think is somehow reducible to all these basic simple impressions of color, sound, space, whatever those happen to be.

20:44 Wes: So give an example of a complex.

20:47 Seth: So I think in the text his example is something about a golden mountain. So he says in your imagination you can imagine a golden mountain, but really what you're doing is just combining the ideas, gold that you've had an experience of, and mountain that you've had an experience of. And you're creating this thing in your imagination called a golden mountain, which of course doesn't exist anywhere. So that's meant to answer the question of how can you have an idea of something that you haven't actually experienced, it's that you have these combinations of ideas that were based on experience.

Another argument that's given in favor of this is that if you have a deficiency in one of your sense capabilities, like if you're blind, if you were born blind, you would never know what color was. That you can't come to the idea of color without having experience of color. You can't come to the idea of sound without having the experience of sound and so forth. If you've never tasted vindaloo, you might be able to combine a bunch of ideas of other tastes if you had all the requisite taste put together. But the reality is that you need to have the experience.

21:51 Mark: Now, I'm trying to determine, looking back here, because he goes by this pretty quick, if these initial impressions have to be simple, because it seems a lot of the examples that he gives, like when he talks about how we combine things, like a mountain itself is not simple. Like, that's a lot of. You don't just perceive there's the mountain. There's a lot of background that goes into recognizing that something is a mountain, separating it from the surrounding landscape, that, you know, it has a back. It seems there's a bunch of impressions packed together that go into mountain.

22:17 Wes: Yeah. I think the mountain is already an object, is already conceptual, and goes beyond mere impressions. And if you think about the role of causality in our very conception of objects, I think they're not mere fleeting impressions in the way that we've talked about. So even to perceive a mountain, for instance, your eyes might scan different parts of the mountain, have different impressions, and would have to sequence those over time and use ideas or memories of previous impressions and collect all that together.

22:50 Mark: Yep.

22:51 Wes: So there you get a complex object which is composed of impressions, but it's necessarily an idea.

22:57 Speaker: I think.

22:58 Seth: Yeah.

23:00 Mark: Yeah. I think we might just be getting in a little more detail than this particular text. Go in. And I can't say whether Treatise of Human Nature goes into this level of detail. I know that Locke's essay really tries to deal with all this stuff very specifically, and that's why he gets so basic. Like, already. I'm wondering, from what you were saying, Wes, how language plays into this, when we both say mountain, we presumably refer to the same thing. We presumably know what we're talking about because we have impressions that go with that. But it's not clear that we're going to have the same impressions that go with that.

I have a different mountain in mind than you do, or different parts. Or maybe I've never even climbed a mountain. And you have. So there's going to be a bunch of different impressions, but yet we can all use that word with facility and make true statements about it that we can recognize as true or not true.

23:44 Wes: Yeah. Between us. Well, mountain is already. And he talks about this later on, it's already conceptual. And as a concept, it doesn't exactly refer to any particular impression. Right. It's like a variable. Remember when he talks about, what is it, a dog or something? And he says, you know, it's not like dog or horse refers to some Platonic ideal, the essence of horse, but rather when we use that word, we'll think of some particular image of a horse, for instance, and then we'll recognize that that could vary in certain ways. We might change the color, we might change this or that. So in a way, anytime you have a word, a piece of language for something that's conceptual, it's not referring directly to any particular impression or collection of impressions, which is fine.

24:36 Seth: I think that this is probably one of those places where, you know, you could go into an inquiry into what constitutes a simple. This is reminding me of that painful, painful, painful discussion about atomic facts and Wittgenstein. But I think one way we can give him an out here is to say that, I mean, obviously nobody experiences the world as a simple. You experience the world already as a compound and complex set of impressions. Right? I mean, there's color, there's shape, there's movement, there's light. It's just over time, in your experiences, you are able to start to distinguish particular things and find some are similar to each other, some are not similar to each other, etc.

Etc. And that's how you kind of get down to, you know, there's some informal set of simples. So, for example, we might use the term rock as a simple to describe, but we would have had experiences of thousands and thousands of rocks before we finally. And we would understand when we say it, that we're not referring to any particular rock that has any particular set of characteristics per se, just that there is a simple called a rock that works for us. Because that's. The other thing is that Hume is ultimately going to be pragmatic about this because he's trying to describe the way people actually function in the world and not hypothesize about the way they should.

So it works for people to have an idea of a rock, and the rock is pretty basic, and we can think about a wall that's made of a bunch of rocks. Put together. Or you can think about throwing a rock at somebody, or you can think about all these different things, but a rock is a rock. And so practically speaking, we call that a simple. For example, I'm not saying that that's what he.

26:15 Wes: I don't think it's a simple.

26:16 Mark: Actually, I think I follow Seth here, that I don't think he's committed to saying that we perceive things as simple. I'm flipping through just in case I was not clear about this before. Hume has a longer book, A Treatise of Human Nature, that was written about 10 years before the Inquiry concerning human Understanding. The inquiry concern Human understanding is a reworking of the first third of the Treatise of Human Nature, and it's quite a bit shorter even than that first. And the Treatise on Human Nature does address more point by point Locke's essay Consuming Human Understanding, but still does not get into simple ideas versus complex ideas in the way that Locke does.

26:51 Seth: Well, I'm not trying to make an argument in favor of rocks being simples per se. I think what I'm saying is that the philosopher can spend time resolving complex experience down into simples and say ultimately it all comes from experience. Even if you have to parse it out, it's still a function of experience that you have space, color, whatever it is. Common people aren't going to go to that level of detail and they don't need to. Right. Human understanding works at a certain level without the need. It's founded on these simple ideas. And that's how you can have a memory of something in the past and break out.

Like when you remember something, if you think about, let's say, for example, the first time you met your wife or something like that, you're going to remember certain aspects of the experience, but you're not going to remember everything that was happening to you at the time. The entire complex of the color and the sound and the temperature and all that kind of stuff. And I think he's saying is that over time, as human beings begin to see regularities and things, as they grow older and they begin experience, they just use those conceptions. They use those impressions that they get to form ideas, and then they can have memories of those experiences and break it out, or they can imagine things in the future and then philosophers can spend time deciding about what those basic fundamental principles are.

But everything comes from experience in one way, shape or form.

28:09 Wes: Yeah, but I think it's important just to Every impression is a simple that leads to a simple idea. And the rest of it is complexes, ideas, can be complexes of simple ideas. And the reason why that is important is that association, which we'll talk about in a moment, including especially causality, is implicated in anything that we think of as an experience of an object or something that we would call a full scale experience. Impressions and simple ideas are like the fleeting little bits and pieces that have to be assembled into what we would call experience.

28:46 Mark: I do have a quote here. This is actually from the Treatise of Human Nature, which I will not quote anymore. But I knew he went in a little more depth here near the beginning of it. He remarks that ideas and impressions always appear to correspond, respond to each other, and then says upon a more accurate survey, I find that I have been carried away too far by the first appearance. That I must make use of the distinction of perceptions into simple and complex to limit this general decision that all our ideas and impressions are resembling. I observed that many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them.

That many of our complex impressions never exactly copied in ideas. I can imagine to myself such a city as the new Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold and walls are rubies, Though I never saw any such. I have seen Paris, but. But shall I affirm that I can form such an idea of that city as will perfectly resemble all its streets and houses in their real and just proportions. So what he gets out of this

29:34 Wes: is this just what we're reading now is meant to be a correction of. No, he disavowed the treatise. Right. Just not to say that we should take that fully seriously. But this is meant to be the mature. Some things are different.

29:46 Mark: Right, Right. No, he did. It's not just shortening. He's like. He listened to criticism and he refined it and tried to put it in the best possible way. Still, you know, it's interesting. It was only now in going back to read this this time that I sort of got the distinction between the two books. I don't know if I just didn't pay attention to that, but like I read plenty of the Treatise in various classes at the time. Like people still read that. They don't just throw that away and read the inquiry.

30:09 Wes: No, no, no, I'm not saying.

30:10 Mark: And I think part of it is because he gets more into these distinctions, which maybe he decided later just don't matter that much.

30:18 Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode preview. I know it stops just when things

30:22 Wes: were getting really good.

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