A Treatise of Human Nature

In the history of Western philosophy, David Hume is most famous as a proponent of empiricism: knowledge gained through direct experience, experimentation, and observation. Empiricism is often conceived as opposed to rationalism, which is knowledge reached just through abstract logic and reasoning. Likewise, Hume rejects rationalism, arguing against the philosopher René Descartes’s view that all humans are born with some innate knowledge and that knowledge learned through logical deduction is superior to knowledge gained through the five senses. Not only that, but Hume argues that experience and observation are not just superior to abstract reasoning, but that experience and observation are the actual basis for how humans learn and develop intellectual and moral ideas. Hume summarizes his argument this way: “Wherever ideas are adequate representations of objects, the relations, contradictions and agreements of the ideas are all applicable to the objects; and this we may in general observe to be the foundation of all human knowledge” (78). In other words, all of our knowledge comes from how we rework, expand upon, or combine the impressions we gain through sensation and observation into more complex ideas.