Concluding Comments

Abstract

As we have seen, it is in Part iv of Book I of the Treatise that Hume first expounds his doctrine of the primacy of the vulgar consciousness. It is there also that this doctrine is shown to follow as a corollary from his other, more fundamental thesis, that feeling has primacy over reason. The ‘ natural beliefs ’ which are essential to the vulgar consciousness and determinant of it — belief in continuance of being and belief that the continuants are causally active — when formulated in abstract, and therefore in universal terms, are found to be in conflict with one another. They operate, Hume contends, in the manner in which the passions operate, as balancing factors in a complex mechanism — the mechanism through which Nature has provided for the needs of animal consciousness, and for the ‘ reasoning ’ processes required in the special, more complicated conditions of human existence.