Preface

Summary

There is scarcely any subject broached by David Hume in the course of his philosophical writings that is not touched in some way by the faculty he calls ‘the imagination’ and the principles that he takes to govern it. The imagination makes its appearance early in the Treatise, when Hume is expounding his theory of ideas, and remains his constant companion to the last, where, in a final act of recognition, he acknowledges that all his anatomical labours might be for naught should the ‘hideous’ details he has uncovered not be smoothed over and made ‘engaging to the eye and the imagination’. It falls to the painter – that master of representation, trader in images and purveyor of effect – to ‘set [objects] more at a distance’ by shifting the focus of the philosophical eye from the ‘minute views of things’ to one of general outlines and surfaces across which eye and imagination might move more easily (T 3.3.6.6/SBN 621). In the reflections that make up his Appendix, moreover, recognition turns to capitulation: here, Hume admits defeat in rendering intelligible the mysteries of ‘self’ and ‘substance’, ideas in which the intrigues of the imagination are so deeply implicated that even Hume's considerable genius (or so he claims) cannot root them out. He pleads the ‘privilege of a sceptic’ in the face of a ‘difficulty … too hard for [his] understanding’ (T. App.21/SBN 636). One is reminded here of Hume's memorable battle earlier with the demon of ‘total scepticism’ at the end of Book 1, with the philosopher, in the famous image, on his weather-beaten vessel heading into the immense depths of philosophy with only the strangest and most unexpected of bedfellows for company: the imagination, the bottom upon which Hume's line (to borrow from John Locke's earlier nautical metaphor) sounds. The imagination provides Hume with the fundamental principle upon which philosophy and common life rest (the ‘quality’, ‘seemingly so trivial’, through which the ‘mind enlivens some ideas beyond others’ [T 1.4.7.3/SBN 265]), and offers the sole hope of escaping his apparently crippling doubts (we are saved from total scepticism only by a ‘singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy’ [1.4.7.7/SBN 268]).