Experience Matters: Indifference and Determination in Hume's Treatise

Experience Matters: Indifference and Determination in Hume's TreatiseAuthor(s): CATHERINE KEMPSource: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2002), pp. 243-255Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670423 .

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Experience Matters: Indifference and

Determination in Hume's Treatise CATHERINE KEMP The University of Colorado ot Denver

There are in Hume's philosophy two very important forces: "the liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas" (1978, 10) and the principles that guide and limit this liberty by binding ideas in reg ular relations.1 Many traditional readings of Hume fasten on one or the other of these forces as a foundation for criticism of Hume's account of the mind and experience. According to some, Hume fails to provide proper limits to the activity of the imagination: knowledge and belief are a free-for-all, "to the perversion of all proper standards of thought and action" (Kemp Smith 1941, 378).2 Hume's venerable reputation as a philosophical skeptic is owed at least in part to this characterization of the imagination as 'libertine.' Other critics deplore what they per ceive to be a restriction of Hume's notion of experience to the past, which makes belief merely a summary of our prior experience without

any element of anticipation or any possibility of novelty or innovation.3 What Hume's critics miss in this transaction between libertinism and limitation, between the liberty of the imagination and its determination in experience,4 is the importance of an element Hume styles in the Treatise the mind's "native situation of indifference" (1978, 125). In this essay I begin a hunt for clues to the nature of this indifference and the role it plays in our experience, and in the end suggest that it renders

Hume's ideas as much?and in much the same way?anticipations of our future experience as they are records of our past experience. Although there are several phenomena described by Hume that involve

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2002.

Copyright ? 2002 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

243



244 CATHERINE KEMP

this element of the mind's indifference, I focus here on just one: its role in what

Hume calls our knowledge "from probabilities" (1978, 124). It is here, perhaps ironically, that the jointly anticipatory as well as compendious character of our

ideas is most readily observed. In this emphasis on the role of indifference I depart from the reading offered

by Annette Baier which dismisses Hume's assertion of 'native indifference' in

favor of a preference for and a tendency to proofs and perfection.5 Baier attrib utes to Hume "a presumption favoring generality, a native expectation that nature

will have her habits, and show them to us" (1991, 304 n. 3). In my view, it is

indifference, rather than a tendency to generality, which is "native" for Hume. It is also, I believe, what makes our application of the "experimental Method of

Reasoning"6 in the "science of human nature" (1978, xvii-viii) possible and effi cacious. The "empiricist" Hume of the tradition is narrowly confined within what are taken to be 'his own first premises,' most notoriously, the requirement that

all ideas have a foundation in impressions. The Treatise, however, is not the

empiricist reduction it is traditionally taken for; instead, Hume gives us an

account of what the mind does with its impressions,7 where much of the work takes place in the course of the activity of experience. The Hume I am pursuing here is an early figure, in advance of Kant's Copernican revolution, in the his

tory of efforts to account for the subjective constitution of objects in experience.8 The mind's indifference and its determination in experience suggest that Hume's

empiricism is altogether unlike that traditionally attributed to him.

I.

"The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our

'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory of the

facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded." (James 1890, 353)9

"The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are abstractions,

never realized in experience." (487)

In order to clear the way for this pursuit of the mind's indifference, we must make

some adjustments to our traditional understanding of Hume's exposition. Many of Hume's readers no longer accept the interpretation that mental life for Hume

is employed entirely about simples and their associations. Several recent com

mentators attribute to the Treatise a much more complex account of the mind

and its "perceptions."10 Phenomenology, in particular, has been especially hos

pitable to this kind of interpretation of Hume's work.11 The complication to this

story of the simples I recommend and rely on in this essay is a recognition that



Experience Matters 245

Hume's perceptions have two aspects. On the one hand, perceptions are acts of the mind which are more or less lively and in which the mind is related to its

objects. On the other, perceptions have contents that direct those acts to partic ular objects. Each of our perceptions is a particular kind of act: it is a seeing, a

touching, a wishing, or a smelling. Each act of this sort contains a content, which makes the act a seeing of a Buick rather than a seeing of a tree, a touching of a table rather than a touching of an ice cube, a wishing for a fortune rather than a

wishing for rain.12 Contents make acts perceptions of things in particular. Note that the distinction is phenomenological: we are talking about aspects

of mental phenomena rather than mental faculties (Husserl rather than Kant). The clues to this distinction in Hume's exposition are many and various;13 mine is the initial recognition of Hume's employment of the term idea in two senses in the Treatise: as content (which is "copied" from impressions) and as act.14 Idea as act also goes, in Hume's discussion, by the name "mere" or "simple" conception (1978,96-97,652 n. I).15 Hume tells us that in contrast to our impres sions, which have "force and vivacity" (2) or liveliness (1), mere ideas, ideas as

such, are "faint and languid" (9). The act-aspects of ideas are at least initially non-lively or mere conceptions. In mere conception the mind is directed by its content to a particular object (a table rather than an ice cube), but it does not con ceive that object in a lively act, which is to say that it does not believe in the exis tence of that object (94-96). Such faint and languid ideas can be transformed into more lively ideas or conceptions under all kinds of circumstances.16 Hume defines belief as a lively idea (96) or a lively manner of conception (653),17 so that in belief the mind is directed by the content of the act of conception to a par ticular object (a Buick rather than a tree) and believes in the existence of that

object. But there is nothing about a particular content or direction to a particu lar object that requires that it be contained either in a lively or in a non-lively act. To conceive something and to conceive that thing as existing are the same for Hume (66-67). The content of an act of perception has no necessary relation to the degree of liveliness that characterizes that act. Put differently, the quality of an act is essentially independent of its particular content. Impressions are lively because they are the "first appearance" of an object in the soul (1); ideas copied from these impressions are faint because the liveliness has faded away after the

object's first appearance.18 Why some ideas are lively and others are not is the

question that occupies Hume for the bulk of Book I of the Treatise (118-19).19 In the Abstract (1740) Hume asks, "What then is this belief! And how does it differ from the simple conception of any thing? Here is a new question unthought of by philosophers" (1978, 652). The first step in Hume's answer to this ques tion is this: mere conception as act is transformed into other manners of con

ceptions, including and especially the lively conception known as belief (96, 624-26). Note that in this transformation, the content remains the same: my "faint and languid" idea (as act) of a particular event I have forgotten (to which the mind is directed by the content) is transformed into a lively and believing idea (as act) when a friend tells me an anecdote that recalls the event to my



246 CATHERINE KEMP

memory (627-28, 85-86). The next step is to discover how mere conception is transformed into belief and what role it and the mind's indifference play in that transformation.

II.

Several kinds or manners of conception appear in Hume's account of our men

tal life. Some manners of conception vary by degrees of liveliness, where the variation is attributed to the vivacity of the related impression(s) (1978, 120, 143-44, 317). Others vary according to the strength and reliability of the rela tion serving as conduit for the vivacity of the conception (130, 146-47, 154), and still others according to the disposition or state of the mind itself when a par ticular impression is presented (99, 148^19). Conceptions enlivened by relations established by custom or habit are most reliable (110). But even these concep tions vary depending on the kind of custom or habit in question. Repeated lies

(86, 117), the repetition that comes with education (116-17, 140), and repeated imagination rather than repeated observation (140-^41, 222) all produce relations less reliable than the "constant and regular conjunction" of objects in our expe rience (87, 110), known also as custom. It is to custom in this sense that the man ner of conception called belief owes its liveliness. How does custom transform mere conception into belief?

Now as we call every thing CUSTOM, which proceeds from a past repetition,

without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth,

that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely

from that origin. (102, emphasis added)

The transformation is the effect on the mind of a "past repetition." Compare Hume's explication of the nature of experience:

We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of

objects; and also remember, that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity

and succession with regard to them. (87, emphasis added)

Mere conception is transformed into belief in experience (Hume 1975, 25-39,

56-59), in the series of perceptions which are these "instances" in a "past repe tition." How does a series of repeating instances effect this transformation?

Put succinctly, mere conception is in itself indeterminate, and the series of instances determines it. Hume's description of the 'how' of belief as a manner

of conception depends significantly on the fact that in mere conception the mind




thinks about or entertains the idea (as content) of an object without believing in

the existence of the object, a feature of the mind Hume calls its "indifference"

(1978, 125). In indifference, "the imagination is free to conceive both sides of the question" (95), or, in the terms of the first Enquiry, "[t]he contrary of every

Matter of Fact is still possible" (1975, 25), that is, it is conceivable (1978, 135).20 In indifference the mind is "loose" (97, 110) and as likely to form one idea as

another, neither of which is in any way compelling.21 Somehow this indifference is overcome and this looseness "tightened" or bound into relations as a result of the series of instances in that "past repetition," which carries the mind over to one side of the "question" (above), and determines it to conceive and believe a

particular Matter of Fact as against its contrary or contraries. At this point it looks like those of Hume's critics who assert that his account

of experience is backward-looking and contains no anticipation or possibility of innovation have it right: the series of instances in a past repetition determine the

mind into certain relations, where those relations are reflections or summaries of our past experience only. Worse, it looks too like the critics of Hume's "lib ertine" imagination have a point as well: the effects of a past repetition can

arrange a relation between any impressions and ideas that will deliver enough liveliness even to poorly founded ideas to turn them into beliefs. Here the impor tance of the indifference of the mind in mere conception emerges. The content contained in an act of mere conception provides not only a record of our past experience but also a template for possibilities in our future experience. In its native situation of indifference, the mind retains the conception not only of what it has actually and previously experienced, but also what it conceives by way of

alternatives, so that the results of partial and even substantial determinations and transformations of mere conception?surmises and beliefs?remain available for subsequent determination in experience. What is determined, for Hume, remains re-determinable, as it were, where the condition for both the determi nation and the re-determination of our conceptions in experience rests in the mind's native situation of indifference. Under this description, Hume manages both a reliable restraint on the liberty of the imagination and the potential for correction or innovation of the relations that form this restraint.

III.

This picture of the mind's determination and re-determination in experience out lines two players: the mind's indifference and that series of instances which forms not only the "past repetition," but also our future experience. Indifference's part ner in this venture is experience itself, considered as a series of perceptions as instances. We have now to ascertain more precisely the relations between con

ception (or idea as act with content) and the instances or perceptions in both past



248 CATHERINE KEMP

and future experience (themselves acts with contents). It will emerge that these relations depend vitally on the recognition of a distinction between act and con tent for all of our perceptions, impressions as well as ideas, be the latter lively or faint, as in the case of mere conception.

We find indifference and the act of conception which contains it in several

places in the Treatise, but its relation to experience as a series of perceptions is most accessible in Hume's discussion of "probability" (I.iii. 11-12), a discussion which is more relevant to Hume's account of experience than is generally rec

ognized. His objective in these sections is to establish that experience determines the mind and its conceptions while at the same time our conceptions provide the

shape for that determination. In "Of the probability of chances" and "Of the prob ability of causes," Hume turns to an explanation "from the same principles [of] some other species of reasoning, which are deriv'd from the same origin" (124).

The contrast implied in the passage is between the forms of probable rea

soning to which he turns in these sections and reasoning "from proof (124), the discussion of which he has just concluded.22 There, Hume examined the effect on the mind of a "constant and regular conjunction" (87) of objects in our expe rience,23 in which, as the phrase implies, the series of instances of conjunction is uniform, that is, each of the instances resembles each of the others. Night is

invariably followed by sunrise; for each instance in which we perceive night, we

perceive day following upon it. In all of our experience, the instances in which we perceive night followed by day resemble all of the other perceptions of night, that is, there is no instance of a perception of night not conjoined with the fol

lowing day. Knowledge of this kind, which involves, for example, a present

impression of night and a belief in the near-future existence of day, is what Hume means by "proof." In proof, our belief rests on our experience,24 but in it we

encounter no exceptions to the conjunction, so that our expectation is very lively, in the example, that night will be followed by day. We conceive the conjunction of night and day, and we also conceive the contrary?their disjunction?in which

the one does not follow the other.25 However, the series of instances in our expe rience in which day has followed night creates a relation between the two objects such that the conception of their conjunction is a lively conception or a belief, while the conception of their disjunction is faint, which is to say, we merely con

ceive it. How does the series of instances in our experience come to enliven some con

ceptions and leave others faint and languid? We will do well to recall at this point that not only is each instance in the series a perception composed of act and con

tent, but that so also is the conception that is either lively or languid. In the case

of proof, each instance in our experience is an impression?a lively act of per

ception?whose content matches and thereby confirms the content of the

(thereby) lively act of conception. At the same time, the content of the impres sion fails to match, or disconfirms, the content of the act of mere conception of




the contrary (or contraries) of the lively conception. In the case of probability, the series is in some way diverse: either we have not had much experience of a

particular set of objects, that is, there have been very few instances, or there are some instances?impressions?whose contents confirm the content of one con

ception and some instances whose contents confirm a different conception and contradict the first. These two situations form two different sub-types of proba bility for Hume: the first involves no "contrariety" (1978, 131), or no experi ence of more than one sort of conjunction, and the second does involve

contrariety, in which we encounter perceptions that confirm one conception, and others that confirm different, contrary conception(s) (130-31). Finally, series of instances which tend to confirm one conception more frequently than another are classed by Hume under the heading of the "probability of causes," while those in which the series lends itself no more to one conception than any other(s) are headed "probability of chances."26

Experience of a series of perceptions whose contents confirm or disconfirm a particular act of conception modify the degree of liveliness that attends that act

(653-54). Note that it is the relation of resemblance or lack of it between con tents in the series and the content of a particular conception that modulates the

vivacity of the act and transforms it from mere conception to belief, or reduces it from belief to surmise.27

The joint effect of the mind's indifference in mere conception and the effi

cacy of perceptions arriving in experience appears in this somewhat difficult claim from the section on the "probability of chances": "A perfect and total indif ference is essential to chance, and one total indifference can never in itself be either superior or inferior to another" (125). In mere conception the mind is indif ferent to its confirmation or disconfirmation in experience. In a probability of

chances, none of the "sides" (137-38) prevails. In a probability of causes, for either "side" to prevail, it must exceed the other "side" in the number of instances in which it appears. That is, lively perceptions with the confirming content must outnumber or be outnumbered by lively perceptions with contents that do not match that of the conception (136). A disconfirmation under one conception is a confirmation under another (135). The liveliness (or faintness) of a particular conception, then, depends upon the way in which perceptions show up our expe rience. In order for experience to affect the mind, or in order for the series of per ceptions as instances to influence a particular act of conception, that conception must be determinable by those instances, that is, its content must be available to be confirmed or disconfirmed in the succession of perceptions and its act must be available for modulation in its degree of liveliness. The modulation of con

ception from faint to lively (or vice-versa) is possible only because the concep tion itself is an expression of the mind's native situation of indifference, in which it is free to be determined or re-determined under the onslaught of perceptions

making up our experience.



250 CATHERINE KEMP

IV.

A brief examination of one of the two sub-types of probability, the one in which we do encounter contrariety in our experience, will round out our inquiry into the importance of this indifference.

Hume is famous (or infamous) for his claim that we are brought by habit and not by "reasoning" to expect that the future will resemble the past (1975, 34, 42-43, 58; 1978,103-5). In the Treatise this effect is characterized as an "habit ual principle" for which we28 have experienced "many millions" of confirming instances, so that upon only a single instance of the conjunction of two objects

we can reliably and with propriety expect the two to be conjoined in the future. That is, our lively conception in which we expect that where the one object is, the other will follow, is properly lively, where the liveliness is derived "indi

rectly" or "obliquely" by means of the habitual principle. Hume characterizes the operation of this habitual principle as a "perfect habit" (1978, 135), the per fection of which we can see in those situations where we are right, and we end

up with "proof (above): we do not encounter any contrary instances, or instances of disjunction, which do not match the content of our conception of the initial

conjunction. But in other cases, we do encounter such contrariety: in some

instances things are just as we expect them to be, under the operation of our

habitual principle, but in others the contents of the impressions we receive do not match?they disconfirm?the content of our conception of the initial con

junction (131). Hume offers the following example of the operation of our habitual principle:

Suppose ... I have found by long observation [in many instances], that of

twenty ships, which go to sea, only nineteen return. Suppose I see at present

twenty ships that leave the port: I transfer my past experience to the future, and

represent to myself nineteen of these ships as returning in safety, and one as

perishing. (134)

If we encounter no instances in which fewer than nineteen ships return, we have

knowledge based on "proof and the "perfect habit" remains intact. But

when considering past experiments we find them of a contrary nature, this

determination, tho' full and perfect in itself, presents us with no steady object, but offers us a number of disagreeing images in a certain order and proportion.

The first impulse, therefore, is here broke into pieces, and diffuses itself over

all those images, of which each partakes an equal share of that force and vivac

ity, that is deriv'd from the impulse. (134).

Hume asks: "[W]hat is the manner how we extract a single judgment from a con

trariety of past events" (134)? That is, how does the "brokenness" of the perfect




habit recover sufficiently to permit us to form a lively conception concerning the most likely outcome? Hume's answer is difficult, but ultimately revealing: the mind in effect reassembles its complex conception by surveying all our past instances or perceptions, breaking up the instances according to resemblance

(rather than conjunction), and then piling all the resembling contents together in their own piles (134-35). In the case of the example of the ships setting sail, all the returning ships from all the instances go into one pile, and all the perishing ships go into another. The resulting act of conception has a complex content which determines the mind, upon the present impression of twenty ships sailing, to form a lively conception of a certain proportion of ships returning versus ships perishing.

The content of the act of conception by which we represent to ourselves this

proportion is of course a summary or record of our past experience. But it is also an anticipation of an adjusted proportion: the complex conception provides a

template for all of the possible confirmations and disconfirmations of our expec tations in our future experience. The operation of the "habitual principle," con fronted with contrariety, ensures the reconsideration of the content of the act of

conception and a correlative adjustment of its vivacity. The "past repetition" of

perceptions as instances simultaneously determines the mind and renders it, as

template, susceptible to re-determination in experience. Here the independence, which I asserted above, of the quality of the act from its content is provisionally overcome: the quality of the act is determined (and re-determined) by its partic ular complex content. In Hume's account of this form of probability we observe the mind's continuing determination and determinability in experience, which, I suggest, is what Hume means by the mind's native situation of indifference.

V.

What is not immediately obvious in the transaction between liberty and deter mination in our experience is the role played by the contents of acts of concep tion and the indifference with which they are held in mere conception. The

conceivability of alternatives and its corollary in the availability of conception to determination and re-determination means that in Hume's description of men tal life a particular act of conception with its content is always both reliable and amendable in our experience. In our reasonings from probability, the content of an act of conception gives a shape to the vicissitudes of confirmation and dis confirmation in our experience. At the same time, those vicissitudes modify and

re-modify conception and its content. The content of conception is a record of our previous experience as much as it is an anticipation of our future experience, both ordinary and extraordinary.

Thus in this context indifference is really itself a facilitation of a continuous



252 CATHERINE KEMP

deference by the mind to its experience. It is on these terms, I believe, that Hume sees the possibility of progress in the science of nature and of innovation in the science of human nature. This amenability of the relations that bind and restrict the liberty of the imagination is the foothold in Hume's epistemology of the

"experimental Method of Reasoning." Applied, as Hume would have it, both to natural philosophy and to "moral subjects," this method makes it possible for us to get closer to (if not arrive at) the "hidden springs and principles" (1978,132) of both natural and moral phenomena by means of sustained reflection on a series of "experiments."29

Notes 1. "[N]othing wou'd be more unaccountable than the operations of [the imagination], were it

not guided by some universal principles, which render it... uniform with itself in all times

and places. Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone wou'd join them .. .

without some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea nat

urally introduces another. This uniting principle [is not] an inseparable connexion ... nor

yet are we to conclude, that without it the mind cannot join two ideas; for nothing is more

free than that faculty: but we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly pre vails. ..(1978, 10)

2. This is the entire passage: But when Hume professes to have shown that this power [of impressions to enliven ideas] extends to a similar enlivening of free ideas, his evidence proves insufficient. Indeed, in pro

fessing to establish this thesis, he is carried very much further than the requirements of his

argument make it at all desirable that he should go. Instead of accounting for belief, he

accounts rather for the excessive influence of education and propaganda, for the undue influ

ence of whatever happens to have a certain constancy in the individual's environment, and

for the over-beliefs that spring up and spread so rankly in the field of religion. If any and

every impression has, as he declares, an infective power, it is not surprising that belief should

know no proper bounds, and, favoured as it is by man's essentially social make-up, should

so spread in epidemic forms, to the perversion of all proper standards of thought and action.

(Kemp Smith 1941, 378) Note that Kemp Smith's argument here tends much more to establish the undesirability of this

aspect of Hume's theory of belief, than any deficit of evidence for its claims.

3. Pragmatism, thus, presents itself as an extension of historical empiricism, but with this fun

damental difference, that it does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but upon consequent

phenomena; not upon the precedents but upon the possibilities of action.... An empiricism which is content with repeating facts already past has no place for possibility and for lib

erty. It cannot find room for general conceptions or ideas, at least no more than to consider

them as summaries or records. But when we take the point of view of pragmatism we see

that general ideas ... are the bases for organizing future observations and experiences....

[F]or empiricism, in a world already constructed and determined, reason or general thought has no other meaning than that of summing up particular cases. .. . (Dewey 1984, 12-13,

emphasis added)

Dewey is speaking of the British empiricists of the modern period: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

4. Wilbanks 1968, 172.

5. Baier 1991, 83-86, 304 n. 3.

6. Part of the subtitle to the Treatise: "Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method

of Reasoning into Moral Subjects." 7. For a recent and especially compelling example, see Frasca-Spada (1998):

We have seen that the idea of space has something in common with the notion of belief: they are both 'manners' in which perceptions appear or are conceived. Both seem to be peculiar




hybrids: they certainly cannot be ideas without correspondence with impressions, they do

not seem to derive from any distinct impression of the senses, they do not exactly derive

from passions or impressions of reflections either. This is why I have suggested that they may be regarded as traces, among mental contents, of mental operations and activities. (194,

emphasis added) 8. This observation is neither new nor newly entertained:

Why does Hume's Treatise ... represent such a great historical event? What happened there? .... [I]n Hume the entire soul, with its "impressions" and "ideas," the forces belonging to

it. .. its laws of association . . . engendered the whole world, the world itself ... Now at

last it was possible and necessary to become aware of the fact... that the life of conscious ness is a life of accomplishment: the accomplishment, right or wrong, of ontic meaning, even

sensibly intuited meaning, and all the more of scientific meaning. (Husserl 1970b, 88-90) See also notes 10 and 11, below.

9. See James's discussion of "associationist-psychology" (277 ff). See also accounts of James's

criticism of Hume in Siegfried (1990, 86 ff.), "Humean sense data epistemology," and Edie (1987,

69-70), "atomistic-associationist theory" and "phenomenalism." 10. See, for example, Frasca-Spada (1998):

I suggest that simple impressions are instantaneous perceptions, or, as it were, emotional

rather than visual units_In other words, a simple impression is defined through its imme

diacy. ... [T]he simplicity of this simple impression lies in its coming before the perceiver has learned how to complicate it. (181-82)

See her treatment of phenomenalism and realism in Hume (13-14, 46-48) and of Hume inter

pretation generally (4-6). Also see Livingston (1984, 44-59). Consider, particularly, this passage: A simple perception is not a phenomenal atom, something stripped of virtually all qualities, such as a minimum visible, and out of which the rich, complex world of experience is con

structed. A simple perception may be as rich as one likes and, indeed, may have an infinite number of parts or aspects uncoverable by distinctions of reason; it is just that none of these

parts are separable from each other. (53) For a somewhat daring reading of Hume's perceptions, see Baier (1991): "Persons and their

works are primary.... It will be flesh and blood persons, not hats, shoes, or stones (T[reatise]. 202), that are our paradigm perception-objects" (33).

Hume tells on the first page of the Treatise that all "the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS" (1978, 1).

11. See Husserl (1970a v.2, 402 ff.). See generally Mall (1973), Murphy (1980), Reinach (1976), and Salmon (1983).

12. Acts and contents are related as aspects or moments of a perception, in the way, analogously, color and shape are related as aspects of extension. See Reinach (1976, 173). See also Husserl's dis cussion of the "reciprocal foundedness" of certain parts of a whole and his definition of "moments"

(as against "pieces") (1970a, Vol. 2: 466-68). See also the discussion of "mutual and one-sided sep arability" in Smith (1994, 63-64). For recognition of this distinction in Hume, see Livingston (1984, 57-58).

13. See Donald Livingston's distinction between act and "intentional and propositional content"

emerging out of Hume's "narrative" treatment of perceptions (1984, 57-58). See Yolton (1984, 192-95) and Frasca-Spada (1998, 69, 151). See also Broadie (1986-87, 165), for antecedents avail able to Hume in Scottish philosophy.

14. See Kemp (2000a). Note that this recognition of the act-content distinction in Hume is derived entirely from the way that Hume uses the term idea in the Treatise. Note also that impres sions, like ideas, are acts with contents: in impressions the acts are always lively and are the liveli est of all acts. The contents of impressions are what make their "first appearance" in the soul and are "copied" when ideas "represent" impressions (Hume 1978, 1-2, 8).

15. See Kemp (2000b, 45-51). 16. See note 27 below.



254 CATHERINE KEMP

17. See also Hume (1978, 96, 626), "this peculiarity of conception." 18. Hume notes that memory-impressions, which are not quite the first appearance in the soul of

particular things, are in a kind of half-way house of liveliness, somewhere between impressions of sense and mere ideas (1978, 8-9).

19. In the section of the Treatise entitled "Of the influence of belief' (I.iii.10), Hume tells us that

"[i]mpressions always actuate the soul, and that in the highest degree; but 'tis not every idea which as the same effect" (1978, 188). A full understanding of our ideas, however, is vital to insight into

the impressions that do most importantly "actuate" the soul: "as the impressions of reflexion, viz.

passions, desires, and emotions, which principally deserve our attention, arise mostly from our ideas, 'twill be necessary to ... give a particular account of ideas, before we proceed to impressions" (8).

20. Our past experience is not always uniform. Sometimes one effect follows from a cause, sometimes another: In which case we always believe, that that will exist which is most

common.... But I also conceive the other effect, and conceive it as possible, and as connected with

the cause. (Hume 1978, 655, see also 111) At this juncture it is important to note that the status of this element in Hume's account is not

genetic. Hume is describing an aspect of mental acts, not positing some anterior mental state of

absolute neutrality, in advance of the arrival of experience and its onslaught of perceptions. 21. For nearly every one of the several senses the Oxford English Dictionary lists for indiffer

ence there is at least one reference to the impartiality or neutrality of judges. From 1533: "He is ...

farre fro such indifference & equitie, as ought and must be in the judges." Partridge gives us for

indifference a negative form of differ, which has its origin in the Latin "differre, to carry (ferre) from

one side or another, to disperse . . . and, as se differre, to carry oneself from one side or another, hence to be different" (1983, 156, 309).

The English word "case" has its origin in the Latin forms for "a falling, e.g. of dice," from

"cadere, to fall," where the Latin casus means "fall, accident, happening" (69, 81). "Chance" has

its origins in the same series of Latin forms.

I suggest that it is the series of cases or instances, which Hume will call "chances" or "causes," which "carries" the mind "from one side or another." In Hume's account of the transformation of

indifferent or mere conception into belief, indifference is overcome by the emergence of an incli

nation to one "side" or the other. The indifferent conception is rendered "different," which is to say, determined.

This (perhaps somewhat fanciful) hunt after English word origins seems to me to suggest that it

is possible to develop a reading of Hume's account of knowledge and belief on the model of the

common law, in which a legal rule emerges out of a series of similar cases and through the judges' "indifference" retains both its determination and subsequent determinability in relation to future

cases that come to fall under the rule. See Kemp (2002). 22. See Hume (1978,1.iii.4-10). 23. This is the relation of cause and effect (Hume 1978, 89-90). 24. As opposed to being derived from an inspection or "comparison" of our ideas, which for

Hume is knowledge proper, as distinguished from belief (1975, 25-26; 1978, 69-70, 124). 25. See note 20 (above). 26. Hume's favorite example in these sections is of a six-sided die of which four sides are marked

with one figure and the two remaining sides are marked with another figure (1978, 127-30). We

bring several different acts of conception to our experience of the throw of such a die, each of which

contains a particular conjunction of the throw with either one of the four similar sides turning up or

one of the two similar sides turning up. Our expectation, expressed by a complex conception of the

entire state of affairs about throwing a die is stronger in the case of the figure on four sides than in

that on two sides. An instance of a particular throw is a complex impression whose content matches

the content of one or the other of the two conjunctions appearing in our complex conception. An

impression of a throw yielding the figure on two sides has a content that matches the content of the

complex conception favoring the figure on two sides and fails to match, or disconfirms, the content

of the complex conception favoring the figure on four sides. See also Hume (1975, 56-59).




27. In other types of cases, the transformation (to a more or less lively conception) comes about

through a relation among acts. See Hume (1978, 2 [sleep, fevers, madness], 123 ["extraordinary fer

ment of the blood and spirits"], 317 [sympathy], 630 [poetry and madness]). 28. Those who have reached "maturity" (Hume 1978, 131). 29. See for example Hume's discussion of our judgments about motives and the moral quality of

actions (1978, 477-79). On approaches to "hidden springs and principles" see Yolton (2000,

112-32).

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Experience Matters: Indifference and Determination in Hume's Treatise