David Hume's Influences

1. Hume's Influences
In a 1737 letter, Hume wrote that readers of the Treatise would benefit by looking at writings by Nicolas Malebranche, George Berkeley, Pierre Bayle, and René Descartes:

I shall submit all my Performances to your Examination, & to make you enter into them more easily, I desire of you, if you have Leizure, to read once over le Recherche de la Verité of Pere Malebranche, the Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr Berkeley, some of the more metaphysical Articles of Baile's Dictionary; such as those of Zeno, & Spinoza. Des-Cartes Meditations wou'd also be useful, but I don't know if you will find it easily among your Acquaintances. These Books will make you easily comprehend the metaphysical Parts of my Reasoning. And as
French Catholic philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was a follower of Descartes and is most remembered for his Search After Truth (1674–1675). Two themes stand out in that work, both of which influenced Hume. First, Malebranche wrestled with how our minds receive perceptual images from external objects. For example, as I stand in front of a tree, I have a visual image of that tree. How does the tree itself cause that image in my mind? For Malebranche, the tree is physical in nature, yet my perceptual image is spiritual in nature, and, so, something like a miracle must take place to convert the one to the other. After rejecting various theories of perception, Malebranche concludes that God possesses mental/spiritual images of all external things, and that he implants these ideas in our minds at the appropriate time – when I stand before the tree, for example. In short, according to Malebranche, we see external objects by viewing their images as they reside in God. Hume did not adopt Malebranche's theological solution to this problem, but perhaps Hume learned from Malebranche that there is a great gulf between external objects and our perceptions of them, and that it is exceedingly difficult to explain the
For Hume, "direct passions" are so called because they arise immediately – without complex reflection on our part – whenever we see something good or bad. For example, if I consider an unpleasant thing, such as being burglarised, then I will feel the passion of aversion. The key direct passions are desire, aversion, joy, grief, hope, and fear. He suggests that sometimes these passions are sparked instinctively – as by, for example, my desire for food when I am hungry. Others, though, are not connected with instinct and are more the result of social conditioning. There is an interesting logic to the six direct passions, which Hume borrowed from a tradition that can be traced to ancient Greek Stoicism. We can diagram the relation between the six with this