A Treatise of Human Nature · Chapter
Section IV: Of the Love of Relations explained
Hume explores how relations and acquaintance produce love and kindness, arguing that the force and liveliness of conception is the common principle.
What happens
Hume explores how relations and acquaintance produce love and kindness, arguing that the force and liveliness of conception is the common principle. He discusses the effects of resemblance, contiguity, and causation, and examines phenomena such as the weakening of ties upon a mother's second marriage, explaining it through the ease of the imagination's double motion.
Themes in this chapter
Association of Ideas
Hume applies the principles of association (resemblance, contiguity, causation) to explain the love of relations and acquaintance.
Passions and the Self
The self is central to the generation of love and pride, as the idea of ourselves conveys vivacity to related objects.
Sympathy and Social Influence
Sympathy with similar characters and the agreeable nature of lively ideas of passions are key to understanding social affections.
Characters to notice
- David Hume
Author and narrator, presenting the philosophical analysis.
Key passages
“Whoever is united to us by any connection is always sure of a share of our love, proportioned to the connection, without enquiring into his other qualities.”
Anyone connected to us, regardless of their other traits, receives a degree of our affection that matches the strength of that connection.
Hume asserts that relations alone, without regard to merit, generate love.
“The mind finds a satisfaction and ease in the view of objects, to which it is accustomed, and naturally prefers them to others, which, though, perhaps, in themselves more valuable, are less known to it.”
The mind takes pleasure in familiar objects and prefers them over more valuable but unfamiliar ones.
This explains why acquaintance and habit produce affection.
“The double motion is a kind of a double tie, and binds the objects together in the closest and most intimate manner.”
When the imagination can move easily back and forth between two objects, the connection between them is strengthened.
Hume uses this to explain why a mother's second marriage weakens the bond with her children more than a father's.