An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Answers

• Q04AUTOMATON

  Does conscious intention help cause bodily action?

  Undecided. we cannot perceive whether or how intention causes action. We feel the arm move when we will it, but the power by which will produces motion is unknown and inconceivable; we observe only constant conjunction.

  Summary disputed by reviewer: Hume accepts from experience that bodily motion follows the will; what he says we cannot perceive is the power or manner, not whether it does.

  This influence, we may observe, is a fact, which, like all other natural events, can be known only by experience, and can never be foreseen from any apparent energy or power in the cause, which connects it with the effect, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. The motion of our body follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means, by which this is effected; the energy, by which the will performs so extraordinary an operation; of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent enquiry. For _first_; is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension. But if by consciousness we perceived any power or energy in the will, we must know this power; we must know its connexion with the effect; we must know the secret union of soul and body, and the nature of both these substances; by which the one is able to operate, in so many instances, upon the other.

  Section VII, 'Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion', Part I · Project Gutenberg #9662 and davidhume.org confirm section titles; search excerpt quotes the 'unknown and inconceivable' passage. First published 1748 as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding.

• Q06AUTOMATON

  Can people be morally responsible for actions that follow necessarily from their bodily constitution and circumstances?

  Yes. necessity is compatible with, and needed for, responsibility. Actions are caused by character and motives like any natural event, and this necessity is what makes praise and blame possible; an uncaused act would reflect nothing about the person.

  The only proper object of hatred or vengeance is a person or creature, endowed with thought and consciousness; and when any criminal or injurious actions excite that passion, it is only by their relation to the person, or connexion with him. Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some _cause_ in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil. The actions themselves may be blameable; they may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion: But the person is not answerable for them; and as they proceeded from nothing in him that is durable and constant, and leave nothing of that nature behind them, it is impossible he can, upon their account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. According to the principle, therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a man is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of his birth, nor is his character anywise concerned in his actions, since they are not derived from it, and the wickedness of the one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the other.

  Section VIII, 'Of Liberty and Necessity' · Project Gutenberg #9662 and davidhume.org confirm the section; search excerpt quotes its opening on necessary force in matter.