Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The present work argues that what Hume calls his 'Science of Man' is best understood as an attempt to found the sciences on a single faculty, the imagination. This necessarily involves a study of diverse subjects, and this calls for an admission of incompleteness and inelegance. ;In attempting to discover a foundation for the sciences, Hume assigned to the imagination unprecedented functions. Some of these functions, for example the role of the imagination in our reasoning about causes and effects, have received a great deal of attention from commentators. Others have been neglected. When, however, we turn to these other areas of Hume's thought, we can see how we cannot fully account for his conclusions about scepticism, politics, economics, religion, and the study of history, without considering his employment of certain fundamental principles of the imagination. Such principles, for example, that postulate the association of ideas and the association of impressions; that postulate that an idea can be converted into an impression; and which describe how we are to account for the effect of particular circumstances on our passions--circumstances such as opposition or uncertainty. ;I suggest that Hume wants to make his principles as universal as possible; and so explain all effects from the fewest possible causes. In this way, he imagines he is like a natural scientist; though his own aim is to 'found' the sciences by finding principles of human nature; and this involves studying what makes it possible for human beings to develop the sciences. ;The principles he arrives at, his most universal principles, are principles of the imagination. He finds them sufficient, I argue, to explain the most seemingly different dispositions of man. So instead of considering man as a creature best defined by his possession of rationality, Hume sees him as controlled by the interaction of the imagination and the passions. Apart from the very limited domain of the comparison of ideas, the conclusions and the determinations of 'reason' are to be explained through this interaction; in particular through the ways that ideas associate in the imagination so as thus to guide passions and beliefs