"Gilding or Staining" the World with "Sentiments" and "Phantasms"

Hume Studies Volume XIX, Number 2, November 1993, pp. 253-272 "Gilding or Staining" the World with "Sentiments" and "Phantasms" BARRY STROUD Hume's "science of human nature" is meant to explain, in theory, how human beings come to have all the ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that we know they have. All such mental items are to find their source, one way or another, in experience. But given Hume's conception of perception and feeling, and his understanding of the relation between perception or feeling and the rest of our mental life, there is an important class of thoughts which present a special problem for him. The question is whether Hume's theory can really explain how we get those thoughts and whether, if the kind of explanation he offers does not succeed as it stands, it could ever be improved on while remaining faithful to the general structure of his conception of the mind and its relation to the world. Many who philosophize today in the spirit of Hume while rejecting what they see as unacceptable but dispensable details of his way of thinking would appear to hold that it can. I think no satisfactory explanation along the right lines has yet been given, or even suggested. The thoughts I am concerned with are primarily thoughts of something or other's being so. I do not mean only beliefs or judgments that something or other is so; there is also the contemplation or entertaining of something as being so, whether it is actually believed or judged to be so or not. For example, looking at the billiard table, I come to believe that the white ball's hitting the red ball will cause the red ball to move in a certain direction. I also think that ifthe white ball causes the red ball to move in that direction, the red ball will Barry Stroud is at the Department of Philosophy, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA. 254 Barry Stroud go into the corner pocket. In this second, conditional, thought, I think of the white ball's causing the red ball to move, but I do not then express the belief that it will, which I have in the first thought. This is one example of the kind of thought I have in mind. It involves what is for Hume the problematic idea of one thing's causing another. Another example, from a seemingly very different area, is the thought of an action's being evil, or vicious, or blameworthy. I might observe someone doing something and immediately come to think that it is bad or vicious. Or I might think, purely hypothetically, that if any person were to commit a sufficiently vicious or evil act, he should be executed—or perhaps, more humanely , that he should not, even if what he did is vicious or blameworthy. These thoughts involve what is for Hume the problematic idea of vice, or moral evil, or blameworthiness. A third example involves the idea of beauty. I can find a particular object beautiful when looking at it, or, with no particular object in mind, I might seek something beautiful. And I might think that if I had something beautiful, I would be fortunate or happy. There seems to me no doubt that we all have thoughts like this. What binds these apparently different examples together is that the ideas involved in each case are special or problematic for Hume in the same way. "Take any action allow'd to be vicious," he says, "Wilful murder, for instance." Examine it in all its lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.1 The idea of vice or viciousness does not denote anything in the "object" to which it is applied. What you think to be true of the "object" simply isn't there. The "object" is also said to be the wrong place to look...