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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 577 absolutely requisite to the exciting our passions" (T 120). The implication would seem to be that belief constitutes an identifiable link in the causal chain between the presence of the object and the agent's exertion in its service. If belief is motivationally influential in exciting the passions, which in turn cause action, then to the extent that true belief satisfies criteria of reason, reason must be capable of motivational influence as well. However, one of the premises contained in this line of reasoning is subject to doubt: belief may be motivationally influential, but not even true belief is a species of reason for Hume. To see this, consider first Hume's detailed account of how facts become "the object of faith or opinion": When any affecting object is presented, it gives the alarm, and excites immediately a degree of its proper passion; ... This emotion passes by an easy transition to the imagination; and diffusing itself over our idea of the affecting object, makes us form that idea with greater force and vivacity, and consequently assent to it, according to the precedent system (T 120). The steps in the process are (1) the affecting object causes a passion; (2) this passion is transferred to the imagination; (3) in the imagination, the passion infuses our idea of the object; (4) this infusion imparts greater force and vivacity to the idea, "imitating," as Hume has said shortly before, "the effects of the impressions;" (T 119); (5) the greater intensity of this idea, and its approximation to an impression causes us to assent to it. "Belief," Hume tells us, "is nothing but a more vivid and intense conception of any idea" (T 119-20). The implications are four. First, belief is composed of an idea and a passion "diffused over" it. Second, the causal factor in belief is the passion that precedes the idea it infuses, not the idea itself. Third, since reason, as we already know, concerns only relations of ideas and matters of fact, reason is no more causally efficacious than are ideas as such. And finally, therefore, belief, qua passioninfused idea, is not a species of reason. This account of the influence of belief is borne out by Hume's earlier analysis of the nature of propositional belief in Sections 6 and 7. There Hume distinguishes between belief in those propositions proved by intuition or demonstration, and those concerning causation and matters of fact (T 95). We are determined to believe the former either immediately or by the interposition of other ideas. This chain of ideas, i.e. inference, depends solely on the union and association of ideas in imagination, not on reason (T 92). By contrast, whether we believe a proposition about matters of fact or its negation is determined by which of the two ideas is related to or associated with a present impression, thus increasing its force and vivacity (T 96; also T 86, 93). As Hume frequently reminds us, belief is a particular manner of forming an idea (T 95, 96, 97). A belief that has motivational influence, then, is an idea whose accompanying impression has sparked the passion that infuses © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
