A Treatise of Human Nature

Written in France before he was thirty, published anonymously, and disowned by its author at the end of his life.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1739(aged 28)
Original language: English

Overview

A Scot of twenty-three left Bristol for France in 1734, settled at La Flèche in Anjou near the college where Descartes had been schooled, lived on a small allowance and spent three years writing a science of human nature on the model Newton had used for matter. The first two books went on sale in London in January 1739, anonymously, from the bookseller John Noon; a thousand copies were printed. He was twenty-seven. In 1740 an anonymous pamphlet summarising those two went out, written by Hume himself to stir up notice; the third book followed from Longman that autumn. The method is to observe what people actually believe and why, instead of deducing what they ought to believe, and it takes apart more than it builds. Nobody has ever perceived one thing making another happen — only one thing following another, over and over, until habit supplies the connection and calls it necessity. Reason on its own moves no one to act; it serves the passions rather than commanding them. And no argument crosses from a description of how things are to a claim about what ought to be done. The few readers it found mostly noticed its irreligion. In 1745, while he stood for the chair of ethics and pneumatical philosophy at Edinburgh, a list of dangerous propositions drawn from the book went into circulation there; he answered in an anonymous pamphlet and lost the post, as he later lost Glasgow. He drafted a notice in 1775, printed only after his death in the collected edition of 1777, asking readers to judge him by his later works and let this one go. They did not.

Key concepts

What is Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas?

Impressions are Hume’s original, forceful perceptions; ideas are fainter copies of them in thought and memory. This distinction lets him test philosophical language: a legitimate idea must trace back to some impression. When no such impression can be found, the apparent concept—whether substance, necessary connection, or a rational self—lacks clear experiential content.

How does Hume distinguish relations of ideas from matters of fact?

Relations of ideas can be known by thinking alone, while matters of fact require experience. Geometry and arithmetic provide examples of the first kind; claims about what exists or what will happen belong to the second. Their denial is not contradictory, so no demonstration can establish them without relying on observation, memory, or experience.

What does Hume think causation actually gives us?

Causation gives the mind an expectation, not a sensed glimpse of necessary connection. Experience presents one event repeatedly following another, while custom carries the expectation from the first to the second. Hume therefore treats causal belief as a mental transition produced by repetition. It guides ordinary and scientific reasoning, but it does not reveal a power hidden inside objects.

Why does Hume distinguish natural from artificial virtues?

Natural virtues arise from human sentiments without requiring a convention, whereas artificial virtues depend on shared practices that serve a public purpose. Benevolence can operate without an institution; justice requires rules governing property, promises, and conduct. Calling justice artificial does not make it arbitrary: its rules acquire authority because social cooperation would fail without them.

What is Hume’s is-ought distinction?

Hume’s is-ought distinction forbids moving from descriptions of facts to moral obligations without an additional justificatory step. In the Treatise, he notices writers shifting from is and is not to ought and ought not without explaining the transition. The point challenges a certain kind of moral argument; it does not by itself supply a complete moral theory.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Mind Made from Experience

Can perception, memory, imagination, and habit explain how human beings form beliefs, selves, and moral judgments without appealing to innate ideas or a rational soul? The answer determines what reason can prove—and what sympathy and the passions must do instead.

Published in 1739, Hume set out to study human nature by examining perceptions rather than appealing to innate ideas or a separate rational soul. He divides perceptions into impressions and ideas, then explains their connections through memory, imagination, and association. Causal belief arises from repeated experience and habit, not demonstrative reason; the self likewise appears as a succession of perceptions rather than a single substance. In morality, sympathy and sentiment extend this account beyond private judgment.

imagination
perception
psychology
belief
epistemology
sympathy
human nature
identity
habit
morality
cognition
reason
metaphysics
judgment
association
experience
empiricism
memory
self
passions
emotions
virtue
reasoning
causation
justice

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 816
distinct concepts: 712
by passages held, corpus-wide: #80

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “belief” and “imagination”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
belief	imagination	40
imagination	passions	35
imagination	perception	27
belief	causation	24
causation	imagination	23
imagination	sympathy	19
moral psychology	sympathy	17
causation	perception	15
justice	moral psychology	15
passions	sympathy	15
belief	passions	8
causation	passions	8
justice	sympathy	7
moral psychology	passions	7
belief	perception	6
imagination	moral psychology	5
justice	passions	4
causation	moral psychology	2
imagination	justice	2
passions	perception	2
belief	sympathy	1
causation	sympathy	1
moral psychology	perception	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1739 A Treatise of Human Nature you are here EN
1741 Essays
Not one book but a collection under a single title, and the place on this shelf where Hume writes for the general reader — on politics, trade, taste and manners — rather than for philosophers.
EN
1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Shorter, sharper and re-argued: the first part of the Treatise remade for a general reader, and carrying two sections on religion that the earlier book had deliberately left out.
EN
1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
The moral theory of the Treatise's third book, rebuilt for the readers who were never going to open the original.
EN
1752 Hume's Political Discourses
Twelve essays on money, trade, taxes, public credit and population, published in 1752 and later folded into his collected essays — economics before there was a word for it.
EN
1757 The Natural History of Religion
Written for a volume that lost two of its essays to a threatened prosecution, this one asks where religion came from rather than whether any of it is true — the historical half of a question the Dialogues take up philosophically.
EN
1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
A conversation in three voices that its author kept by him for a quarter of a century, revising it three times and letting nobody print it while he lived.
EN

— or open another of their works