Excerpt from Treatise of Morals: And Selections From the Treatise of the Passions
Hume's main philosophical interest was, as he tells us himself, in morals and politics. "I cannot forbear." he says in the last section of the fourth part of Book I., "having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations which actuate and govern me." The discussion of logical and metaphysical principles in the first book is intended as an introduction to the moral and political subjects of the second and third. Yet the connection between Books II. and III. and Book I. is not strict. Hume's morals do not depend on his metaphysics; rather the purpose of his metaphysical discussions is to show that reason is impotent both in science and in conduct, and therefore has no bearing at all on moral inquiries. The second part of the Treatise makes it clearer than ever that Hume's scepticism is a criticism of reason and not of life. The self whose existence he explained away in Book I. is taken for granted in Books II. and III.; and in his account of the will Hume insists emphatically on the reality of moral causation. For the first part of the Treatise has established the independence and self-sufficingness of the passions and of man's moral nature, and defended them against all dictation of reason. In these books therefore Hume leaves his scepticism behind him. He is no longer a revolutionary. His moral theory follows in its main outlines the sentimentalist school of the eighteenth century. In morals and politics he is "on the side of the angels," and plays his part in making objections to the doctrines of Mandeville and Hobbes, who are the two Mephistopheles of the eighteenth century in morals and politics, as Hume himself was to be in metaphysics.
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