Hume and Shaftesbury on the Self

Abstract

In this paper I wish to discuss Norman Kemp Smith's thesis that Book II of Hume's Treatise preceded Book I in date of composition1 because (and this is the only point I am going to discuss out of several which Kemp Smith makes) there is a different conception of the self propounded in the two Books. For, in Book II, according to Kemp Smith, Hume offers an early, constant, reliable, Hutchesonian sort of spared from the sceptical analyses employed in Book I. In other words, he presents a moral self dependable enough in terms of identity that we can properly impute moral responsibility to him ;2 whereas, in Book I, he presents, in opposition, a later, more sophisticated self, one that lends itself to a Newtonian analysis, dissolving its presence into a Heraclitean rate of change and reducing it to nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement (T. I, p. 252). This later according to Kemp Smith, is an epistemological one, as contrasted with the moral self presented in Book II.