The Objects of the Vulgar

Extract

In common with most, if not all, commentato?s on Hume's Treatise, Book 1, Part 4, §2, “Of scepticism with regard to the senses”, I consider his reasoning in places to be unsound and his claims to be inconsistent. In that section Hume is conce?ned with the question of how we come to believe in the existence of material objects having a continuous existence independently of ou? perceiving them. Since, in his more tough-minded moments, he takes it that the only perceptual data with which we can ever have acquaintance consists of fleeting impressions which are dependent on our having them, he f?nds himself led to the bleak and implausible conclusion that the existence of material objects is a fiction, and the belief something into which we are seduced by the imagination.