A Treatise of Human Nature · Chapter
Section XVI: Of the Reason of Animals explained
Hume argues that animals possess reason and thought, and that their reasoning is based on the same principles as human reasoning, namely custom and experience.
What happens
Hume argues that animals possess reason and thought, and that their reasoning is based on the same principles as human reasoning, namely custom and experience. He uses this as a test for his own theory of belief, asserting that any valid system of the mind must apply equally to both humans and animals. He distinguishes between vulgar actions (like a dog avoiding fire) and extraordinary sagacity (like a bird building a nest), but maintains that both stem from the same causal inference grounded in custom. He concludes that reason is a kind of instinct, and that habit is a principle of nature.
Themes in this chapter
Custom and General Rules
Hume argues that both human and animal reasoning are based on custom and habit, and that this is the foundation of belief.
Skepticism About the External World
Hume notes that beasts never perceive any real connection among objects, and that their inferences are based on experience, not on any rational insight into necessary connections.
Characters to notice
- David Hume
Presents the argument that animals share in reason and thought, and uses this to confirm his system of belief based on custom.
Key passages
“Beasts certainly never perceive any real connection among objects. It is therefore by experience they infer one from another.”
Animals do not see any necessary link between things; they only infer one thing from another based on past experience.
Hume emphasizes that causal inference in animals is not based on rational insight but on custom.
“Nothing shows more the force of habit in reconciling us to any phenomenon, than this, that men are not astonished at the operations of their own reason, at the same time, that they admire the instinct of animals, and find a difficulty in explaining it, merely because it cannot be reduced to the very same principles.”
The power of habit is so strong that we take our own reasoning for granted, yet we marvel at animal instincts because we fail to see they are based on the same principles.
Hume points out the irony that humans overlook the habitual nature of their own reasoning while being puzzled by animal behavior.
“Reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations.”
Reason is actually a mysterious instinct that guides our thoughts and gives them certain qualities based on context, not a purely rational faculty.
Hume reduces reason to an instinctual process, aligning it with animal behavior.