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The European Legacy: Toward New

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Hume on the Objects of Mathematics

Charles Echelbarger
Published online: 22 May 2013.

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Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 18:4, 432-443, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2013.791433

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 The European Legacy, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 4, 432–443, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.791433

Hume on the Objects of Mathematics

CHARLES ECHELBARGER

ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that Hume’s theory of Quantitative and Numerical Philosophical
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Relations can be interpreted in a way which allows mathematical knowledge to be about a body of objec-
tive and necessary truths, while preserving Hume’s nominalism and the basic principles of his theory of
ideas. Attempts are made to clear up a number of obscure points about Hume’s claims concerning the
abstract sciences of Arithmetic and Algebra by means of re-examining what he says and what he could
comfortably have said about relations of qualitative resemblance.

I have previously argued that syllogistic reasoning as a psychological phenomenon can

be plausibly modelled with the resources Hume makes available in his Treatise of
Human Nature.1 The model I constructed shows how validity and the type of objec-
tively necessary connection between premises and conclusions of valid syllogisms is
possible for real minds, if real minds are as Hume supposed them to be.
There is another issue regarding objectively necessary connections of ideas to
which this model directs attention. In general, Hume recognizes objectively necessary
connections in the context of what he calls Relations of Ideas, specifically those
relations he called Philosophical Relations. One issue for me, then, is how well the
model of syllogistic reasoning I have constructed squares with Hume’s doctrine of
Philosophical Relations of ideas. Resolving this issue will require attention to others as
well, specifically, ontological issues raised by his account of mathematical knowledge.
Since Hume rejected any ontological alternative that includes platonic universals,
we are safe in assuming that he did not construe objectively necessary connections as
relations of platonic universals. Hume’s ideas are neither platonic universals nor intel-
lectual apprehensions of platonic universals. Hume was an ontological nominalist,
maintaining that the only real beings are particulars, but he was an epistemological
realist about abstract ideas, maintaining that these ideas were representationally
universal, i.e., capable of representing many individual things in the same way and
equally. Unless he attributes the right sorts of intrinsic properties to ideas, Hume’s
theory of the Philosophical Relations of Ideas is unintelligible, and so is his claim that
we have some knowledge, which is “the assurance arising from the comparison of
ideas.”2 Mere comparison of some ideas, he says, yields “intuitive certainty,” and this

Department of Philosophy, SUNY at Oswego, Oswego, NY, 13126-3599, USA.

Email: charles.echelbarger@oswego.edu

Ó 2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 433

result obtains because the relations presented in the mere comparison of ideas
“depend entirely upon the ideas which we compare” (Treatise, 79). In other words,
ideas are objectively related in certain ways. A Philosophical Relation is “that particu-
lar circumstance in which even upon the arbitrary union of two ideas in the fancy,
we may think it proper to compare them” (Treatise, 13).
Of the seven Philosophical Relations he lists, he says that only four, which,
“depending solely upon ideas can be objects of knowledge and certainty.” These are
Resemblance, Contrariety, Degrees in Quality, and Proportions in Quantity and
Number. The first three of these, he says, “are discoverable at first sight and fall more
properly under the province of intuition than demonstration.” What Hume meant by
the last distinction is that no “enquiry or reasoning” is involved in the discovery of
those relations (Treatise, 70). However, Hume seems to have thought that reasoning is
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not always required in fixing the “proportions of quantity or number” (Treatise, 69). I will
come back to what Hume said about intuitive knowledge of quantitative and numeri-
cal relations. First, I will consider his treatment of knowledge of Resemblance and
Degrees of Quality in light of the general problem of necessary connections of ideas.
Two cases of intuitive certainty have special structural importance in Hume’s
theory of knowledge of Philosophical Relations. These cases concern (1) Resem-
blance, and (2) Degrees of Quality. One reason for their importance, I believe, is that
they provide a model for knowledge of quantitative or numerical relations. It is in
this model that Hume shows, on the most elementary scale, how to make his onto-
logical nominalism compatible with obtaining knowledge of some objectively neces-
sary facts. If successful, the elementary model, although directly about Resemblance
and Degrees of Quality, provides a standard on how to be an ontological nominalist
with regard to the object of mathematics, while correctly claiming knowledge of
some objectively necessary facts concerning quantity and number. In regard to the
objects of mathematics, Hume said:
Tis usual with mathematicians, to pretend that those ideas which are their objects, are
of so refined and spiritual a nature that they fall not under the conception of the fancy,
but must be comprehended by a purely intellectual view of which the superior faculties
of the soul are alone capable. (Treatise, 72)

The case of Resemblance or Degrees of Quality-relations serves as a model for

quantitative/numerical relations in the following way: if one denies that extra-mental
universals are the basis of a priori knowledge in mathematics, as Hume clearly does in
the above passage, one will not have an easily available option of appealing to such
universals as the basis of any sort of a priori knowledge. On the other hand, the
Ontological Realist’s case for extra-mental universals as the basis of knowledge of
simple qualitative resemblance is particularly powerful. If nominalism cannot be made
to work in this case, it is not likely to have much promise in others, such as quantita-
tive or numerical features. Indeed, it would seem that it is simply another instance of
knowledge of resemblance of ideas when one intuitively apprehends, for example,
that two quantities are equal. Without such elementary intuitions of quantity and
number, more complex ideas of proportion would appear to be impossible.
Concerning ideas of quality, one may (and Hume does) speak loosely of, say, an
idea ‘of red’ or an idea ‘of sweetness.’ If Hume is neither a Platonist nor a Meinon-
 434 CHARLES ECHELBARGER

gian, we must not take such phrases to refer to anything like mental acts standing in
some relation to RED simpliciter or SWEETNESS simpliciter. Nor would Hume allow,
in contrast to the early Brentano, that those phrases denote mental acts standing in
something like a relation (etwas relativiches, in Brentano’s words), where the object of
the mental act has only “intentional inexistence” or “subsistence in” the mental act.3
The notion of intentionality, somewhat as conceived in the classical scholastic
tradition of intellectual acts and their objects, is not completely absent in Hume’s
epistemology, but, I maintain, he did not make intentionality intrinsic to his percep-
tions. In ruling out a relational analysis of ideas and their contents, Hume also denied
that there are such really distinct objects or contents as RED simpliciter. As Hume
speaks of ideas of quality, the qualities (qualitative contents, if one prefers) are abso-
lutely determinate: specific shades of colour, types of flavour, and so on. We do not
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have names for all these determinate qualities, so, to serve philosophical purposes, we
may invent names like “red-37.”
To emphasize the previous point, a Humean idea of red-37 is not a mental act
standing in a relation or quasi-relation to red-37. Assuming ideas are mental acts of
some sort, they, like all mental acts, come and go. Once one idea ceases to be, it cannot
live again, but a person certainly can think of something being red-37 more than once,
thus having the ‘same’ idea on many occasions. To deal with this puzzle, I propose that
we distinguish, for Hume, between ideas as particular distinct existences and their, in
some sense repeatable, contents, but allow these contents no really distinct being ‘in’
those ideas. In other words, Humean ideational contents would not be things in their
own right. They would have no being apart from their ‘containing’ mental acts. Indeed,
they would not even have the status of merely subsisting nonexistent things as Meinong
once described non-existent intentional objects (Gegenstaende).4
The point to emphasize here is that, in Hume’s words, no real distinction can
be made between an idea and what I am calling its content. I will confront the issues
involved in Hume’s discussion of the “distinction of reason” he says is possible
between, say, figure and colour, in some of the paragraphs below (Treatise, 25).
Perhaps moves like these will help to block the likely criticism that to attribute
an idea/content distinction to Hume would mean that he allowed extra-mental
universals in his ontological inventory. At least, we may explain how he could have
employed this distinction by showing that his own notion of distinctions of reason
might, if properly employed, have provided him what he needed to distinguish
between ideas and their contents while remaining faithful to his nominalism.
Distinctions of reason between, say, the figure and the colour of a block of
marble, according to Hume, imply neither a difference nor a separation of the
qualities from the block nor from each other (Treatise, 25). Speaking of how we learn
to “distinguish the figure from the colour” in considering two differently shaped and
coloured pieces of marble, he says, “Comparing them with our former object, we
find two separate resemblances in what formerly seemed and really is perfectly
inseparable” (Treatise, 25). He goes on:
After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the
colour by a distinction of reason. That is, we consider the figure and the colour
together since they are in effect the same and undistinguishable, but still view them in
 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 435

different aspects according to the resemblances of which they are susceptible. When we
would consider only the figure of the globe of white marble we form in reality an idea
of both the figure and the color, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with the
globe of black marble.. .. By this means, we accompany our ideas with a kind of reflex-
ion, of which custom renders us, in great measure, insensible. A person who desires to
consider the figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its color desires an
impossibility, but his meaning is, that we should consider the color and the figure
together, but still keep our eye on the resemblance to the globe of black marble or that
to any other globe of whatever color or substance. (Treatise, 25)

In making distinctions of reason, we advert to present or remembered resemblances.

Just as one may thus, by a distinction of reason, distinguish between inseparable quali-
ties or between sensible qualities and things exemplifying them, so one may also, by a
distinction of reason, distinguish between ideas qua mental acts and their contents. If I
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am right about Hume on this issue, he maintained the following nominalistic thesis
with respect to qualities:
Mere shapes or mere colors, as opposed to things that exemplify them, can be
“something” only qua actual or potential contents of the mental acts of comparison
(“customary reflexions”), which support distinctions of reason.

It is the latter (imputed) thesis that motivates my attempt to describe the sort of onto-
logical status I believe may be ascribed to what I am calling the contents of Humean
ideas. I have not explained, to the extent one might wish, how such contents differ
from the merely intentional objects of classical mental act theory. Much more could
and will be said on this topic in another investigation of whether, and in what sense,
Humean ideas may have intentionality of a non-intrinsic kind.5
For Hume, ultimate resemblances are between concrete individual things. Even
though distinctions of reason can be made between ideas and their contents, the
resemblances we actually discover and use in our thinking are between such (vulgar
sense) things as blocks of marble, noises, pains, volitions or occurrent thoughts. An
idea of red-37 also resembles an idea of red-38 but not by having purely determinable
(“abstract” in the Lockean sense) redness in common. Obviously, two ideas of red-37
are similar, but the content red-37 is not some third thing that the two ideas both
“contain” and in virtue of which they are similar.6 As Ockham said of exactly similar
pairs, they are similar simply in virtue of themselves.7 Without our ‘consciousness’ of
resemblances of individual things or events, Hume seems to have said, we could not
begin to make any distinctions of reason. To suppose that the act of discovering
resemblances itself involves and requires comparison of mere aspects of things or
comparison of the sheer contents of mental acts is to put the cart before the horse,
for Hume. The simple qualities of impressions are nothing but the actual or potential
contents of acts of comparison and customary reflection. Their being consists entirely
in their being (rationally) distinguishable, if one may vary the familiar Berkeleian
formula.
The distinction between ideas as mental acts and their qualitatively simple
contents makes sense only in the context of the logically prior sort of comparison and
customary reflection with regard to the qualities of (complex) impressions (or the
directly perceived objects of vulgar consciousness which are called by such names as
‘table’ ‘water,’ etc.). When made with regard to ideas, the distinction between mental
 436 CHARLES ECHELBARGER

acts and simple qualitative contents, comparisons and customary reflections must also
be made but they are of another, logically secondary, order. An idea of red-37, inso-
far as it is an idea of a simple quality is thus a simple idea. But, since simple qualities
of impressions cannot be actually separated from those impressions, an idea that is,
strictly speaking, ‘of’ a simple quality must be an abstract idea and, so, formed by
means of a distinction of reason. If it is ideas which are the elements of thought,
properly so called, then the distinction between acts of thought and the simplest
possible contents of thought is something like a fiction based on another fiction. One
thinks of Hume’s obscure remarks on ‘ideas of ideas.’
To make a play on Quine’s well-known bon mot about Ockham’s razor, if
Hume’s nominalism was such as I conceive it to have been, it may not pluck out
every hair in Plato’s Beard, but it gives the world a very close shave. Whether this
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nominalistic strategy is successful is a matter I will not discuss in this essay. I only
want to convey a strategy that might have been essentially like Hume’s. What he
might have tried to use it for is what comes next.
Although, in the foregoing analysis, they have been cast among the ontologically
lowly, one may still rely upon the sorts of contents just introduced to explain how
Hume could ground the objectivity of Philosophical Relations of ideas. To this end,
consider Quantitative and Numerical Relations of ideas. I have tried to support a
point concerning Hume’s treatment of Qualitative Resemblance in order to apply it
to relations of Quantity and Number. According to my interpretation of distinctions
of reason, such distinctions can be made without (realistic) ontological consequences.
Given this point, it is sensible, even within Humean parameters, to speak of some
relations of ideas as fixed, and objective, even though ideas are fleeting, contingent,
and unrepeatable mental acts. If at least their contents are ways or manners in which
ideas are objectively similar or different, ideas themselves, in a solid sense, stand in
objective and necessary logical relations. Contents of ideas are adverbial on ideas
somewhat in the way that one’s manner of walking is adverbial on one’s walking.
But this does not in any way threaten the claim that ways of walking are objectively
similar or different. One must first discover the qualitative resemblance of certain
impressions before one can form the abstract ideas of, say, red-37 and red-38 and
then (somehow) form the abstract, general proposition that (anything) red-37
resembles (anything) red-38.8 In so doing, there need be no platonistic cognition of
purely determinable redness common to both contents or to both mental acts. Nor is
one who makes a distinction of reason between the qualitative contents of an idea of
red-37 and an idea of red-38 thinking of two really distinct things other than two
concrete complex qualified particulars, the complex impressions, of which the ideas
are copies.
The point of these moves is to provide a model. Quantitative and numerical
features of things may be treated in the same way that I suggest Hume treats sensory
qualities. They may be turned into contents of mental acts (ideas). It is an old, though
not universal, philosophical theme that numbers, unextended points, lines without
width, and planes of no thickness are not real things in themselves. Long before the
Modern period, many philosophers maintained that they are abstractions, merely
things “in the mind.”9
 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 437

I believe that Hume belongs in this tradition concerning the objects of

Mathematics and that he tried to improve upon it. In a passage already quoted above,
Hume says that no such thing as a “purely intellectual view,” of which only the
“superior faculties of the soul” are capable, is required for knowledge of mathematical
numbers or facts. He proposes in that passage to explain how mathematical objects
may instead be things which can be “comprehended by the fancy,” i.e. by the
imagination, and that they are copied from impressions just as are all other objects of
thought. I suggest that, in the Treatise, Hume tried to construct a parallel between
mathematical knowledge and knowledge of quality-based relations of ideas. Just as
there are ideas with objective qualitative contents, e.g., ideas “of” red-37, so there
are ideas that are “of ” quantitative units, and these constitute the objective basis for
quantitative relations of ideas.
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When Hume attacks the Cartesian claim that extension is infinitely divisible, he
says the fact that any determinate quantity of extension is a unit proves nothing
favoring the theory that extension is composed of infinitesimal parts. He says:
For by the same rule, these twenty men may be considered an unite.. .. The term of
unity is a merely fictitious denomination which the mind may apply to any quantity of
objects it collects together. Nor can such a unity any more exist alone than number
can, as being in reality a true number. But the unity which can exist alone and whose exis-
tence is necessary to that of all number is of another kind and must be perfectly indivisible and
incapable of being resolved into any lesser unity. (Treatise, 30–31, my emphasis)

These perfectly indivisible units are his minimal perceptions, perceptions at the limits
of consciousness in regard to their sensible magnitude. Even though the idea of a
(countable) unit may be applied in fictitious ways, it has a genuine empirical basis.
He also says,
One single object conveys the idea of unity, not that of identity. .. a multiplicity of
objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be supposed. The
mind always pronounces the one not to be the other and considers them as forming
two, three, or any other determinate number of objects. (Treatise, 200)

Combine these remarks with his statement that, in Algebra and Arithmetic,
We are possest of a precise standard by which we can judge of the equality and propor-
tions of numbers. .. When two numbers are so combined as that the one has always an
unite answering to every unite of the other we pronounce them equal. (Treatise, 71)

Reflection on these passages encourages me to suspect that Hume was trying to

develop something like what we would now call a restricted notion of a set and a
concept of the numerosity of a set as the basic elements in his philosophy of mathe-
matics. Accordingly, the equality of numbers would be analysed as the equinumerosity
of sets such that the objects comprising the memberships of sets are “comprehended
by the fancy.” Not only can one have an idea of a stone, one can have an idea of
two stones and this is not merely a case of having two ideas, each of which is an idea
of a stone. An idea of two stones would be equinumerous with an idea of two sticks.
The numerosity of a set would be a characteristic of sets of imaginable objects. Such
characteristics would be Hume’s nominalistic alternative to Platonic ideal numbers
and to the merely mental numbers of some conceptualists.
 438 CHARLES ECHELBARGER

The numerosity of sets, like the contents of ideas of quality as I have interpreted
them on Hume’s behalf, are utterly dependent, adverbial on certain mental acts, i.e.,
those acts (ideas) which are ‘of sets of objects.’ Indeed, the idea of a set would be of
a determinately numerous set in much the same sense that an idea of quality is of a
determinate sensible quality. Sets, however, would be relegated to an even lower
ontological status than qualitative contents because they are what Hume calls “merely
fictitious” units, which “cannot exist alone” and are not “true numbers” (Treatise,
30). Sets are mere fictions created by the mind in “collecting] together” any quantity
of objects (Treatise, 23). Only the unity of minimum sensibles can exist alone because
they are “perfectly indivisible” and “incapable of being resolved into a lesser unity”
(Treatise, 30–31). If we want to call them numbers (or sets), they should be called “of
another kind,” being “necessary to the existence of all number” (Treatise, 31). The
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generality of many mathematical facts involving, for example, the natural numbers,
would then stem from the formation of abstract ideas of sets of various numerosities
and would involve abstraction of ideas of tuples of such sets as operated upon (addi-
tion, subtraction, etc.), and then compared with the numerosity of other sets. One is
then able to think that, for example, any set formed by adding any two-membered
set to any other two-membered set is equinumerous with any four-membered set.
‘Complete assurance‘ of this fact would arise from the perfect support of any imagin-
able examples satisfying the abstract ideas making up the general fact. Ultimately, it is
the unit-for-unit correspondence standard which furnishes the objective basis for the
complete assurance.
It should be stressed that Hume was mainly concerned to explain “common”
intuitive knowledge of the most elementary mathematical facts. He seems to have
believed, with Descartes and Locke, that if one knows elementary mathematical facts,
general deductive logic is all one needs to obtain knowledge of more complex
mathematical facts. Not every mathematical fact can be known intuitively as the
elementary ones can. Some mathematical facts are so complex that even the greatest
geniuses in mathematics must exercise their intellectual abilities to the utmost in order
to establish them.
Up to a point, then, Hume’s view of the nature of mathematical objects and
mathematical truth seems to be a primitive precursor of Logicism, but it is also mixed
up with a variety of psychologistic claims. On the one hand, he treats the numerosity
of sets as if it were an objective property of sets but then, in other contexts, insists
that the objects constituting sets be “distinct” and “independent.” Thus, in one way,
he seems to have anticipated something like Frege’s and Russell’s definition of
Cardinal Number as the class of all classes that are similar to a given class. We may
also be reminded of Russell’s notion of a Class-concept,10 one of Russell’s early,
short-lived attempts to avoid the paradox which now bears his name. Hume even
seems to have hit upon a close relative of Frege’s and Russell’s technical notion of
Similarity as unit-for-unit correspondence. But, then, Hume ties this notion in with
what will “strike the eye” as resembling and with “what is comprehended in an
instant,” and with whether we keep our ideas “steady and precise” (Treatise, 70). One
may well suspect that these psychologistic qualifications threaten his attempt to
account for the absoluteness of knowledge of proportions of quantity and number.
He claims that we “discover” the precise standard by which we can judge of the
 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 439

proportions of numbers and that we may make this discovery by direct comparisons
of (imaginable) objects. If so, then perhaps, in principle, use of the standard could
correct for errors due to confusion or inattention, provided we retrace and review
our mathematical operations with care. This suggestion will raise hope in some
students of Hume that Hume’s psychologistic qualifiers are just incidental details.
However, these qualifiers may be essential to Hume’s approach. As I have
concluded, Hume’s ideas of sets must be absolutely determinate in the same way that
his ideas of qualities are absolutely determinate. When he insists that intuitive knowl-
edge of quantitative relations requires that we keep our ideas steady and precise and
that they be comprehended in an instant, it may seem that we are limited to intuitive
knowledge of relations of very short numbers or very simple figures. He says that we
commonly have no “adequate” idea of numbers as short as a thousand.11 It is not
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clear how this admission affects the point for which I have made a case: that, for
Hume, our ideas of numbers must be absolutely determinate.
It is clear that Hume demands that all intuitively evident mathematical ideas be
“adequate.” So Hume is evidently placing very sharp limits on the role of intuition in
mathematical knowledge. However, so does Peano’s approach to the foundations of
Arithmetic. All of standard Arithmetic can rest on the narrow basis of Peano’s five
postulates, according to recent Logicism. Hume could argue that suspicions of
psychologism on his part regarding the foundations of mathematical knowledge are
misplaced, because all that he is trying to do is to identify something psychologically
real that will serve as the natural basis of mathematical knowledge, whereas Peano’s
postulates cannot be assumed, without experiment, to correspond to anything psycho-
logically real. Hume could argue that we need not have any doubt as to the value of
Peano’s postulates as, what he (Hume) would call, artificial devices for reconstructing
mathematical knowledge to be justified in seeking those specific features of psycho-
logical reality that explain how real and objective certainty in mathematics is possible
for minds like ours. I take Hume to be primarily interested in questions concerning
our naturally acquired ideas. Are there naturally acquired ideas of ‘Number’? of
‘Zero’? of ‘Successor’? Do we naturally acquire ideas of any numbers? Perhaps
Mathematics is entirely artificial, merely a convention-governed game played with
invented utterances and inscriptions. I believe that Hume favours the position that
Nature plays an indispensable, though limited, role in the generation of this sort of
knowledge. One need not and, I believe, Hume does not, downplay the importance
of artificial methods of mathematical proof nor the results established by those
methods (which far exceed the scope of intuition) in order to investigate and observe
mathematical intuition “on the hoof. ” Indeed, on page 180 of the Treatise, he praises
(the artificial methods and devices of) the demonstrative sciences, saying, “In all
demonstrative sciences, the rules are certain and infallible,” and on page 31, “A
demonstration, if just, admits of no opposite difficulty. And, if not just, ’tis a mere
sophism and consequently can never be a difficulty. ’Tis either irresistible, or has no
manner of force.”
His cautions in the Treatise about the fallibility of Reason in applying the rules
of demonstration (180–87) are not intended to show that we can have no knowledge
by means of demonstration in mathematics, only that we must not blame the tool if
we use it poorly. As he says on page 71, “There remain, therefore, Algebra and
 440 CHARLES ECHELBARGER

Arithmetic as the only sciences in which we can carry on a chain of reasoning to any
degree of intricacy and yet preserve a perfect exactness and certainty.”
If this be Psychologism, perhaps Hume would not be disturbed by the charge. I
suspect, however, that he would deny the accusations of subjectivism and relativism
that usually follow accusations of Psychologism. He never doubts the objectivity or
universality of mathematical truth. He could argue that his psychological investiga-
tions into mathematical understanding are for the purpose of explaining the mind’s
capacity for obtaining certainty concerning mathematical truth. It is, of course, the
contemporary reader’s obligation to decide whether he or she believes Hume’s variety
of psychologism is as harmless as Hume might contend. In particular, it will be
important to consider whether there are unacceptably psychologistic implications in
Hume’s philosophy of Mathematics in the following well-known passage,
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Since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they
must necessarily appear in every particular what they are and be what they appear.
Everything that enters the mind, being in reality a perception, ’tis impossible that any-
thing should to feeling appear different. This were to suppose that, even where we are
most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken. (Treatise, 190)

I think the most important phrase in this passage is “actions and sensations of the
mind.” In this context, we are most concerned with ideas and I doubt whether Hume
would classify an idea, especially an abstract idea of quantity or number, as a sensation,
though he does say that, even here, in Mathematics they are of objects whose nature is
comprehensible by the fancy. Indeed, if Hume so readily acknowledges that most of
our ideas of number are inadequate (most of them being greater than of a thousand), it
would seem that his principle identifying the appearance of perceptions with the reality
of perceptions simply does not work for most of our ideas of number.
We could take this argument to be a good proof that Hume’s principle identify-
ing the appearances of perceptions with the realities of perceptions is simply
worthless. Let us be sure that we have not overlooked some potentially useful
alternatives to this drastic conclusion.
Consider again the possibility I suggested earlier that Hume is in the same tradi-
tion as Locke with regard to mathematical ideas and mathematical knowledge. The
very way that Hume uses the term “consciousness” with regard to the “actions and
sensations of the mind” is strongly reminiscent of Locke’s terminology and approach
(Treatise, 190). Locke said that the objects of mathematics are combinations or
variations of the same simple idea and these are “ideas of so many distinct units added
together” (Locke, II.XII). These are, he says, “voluntary collections” and are “put
together by the mind” and have no “foundations in Nature” (III.IX.7). These
remarks are very similar in tone to Hume’s assertions about ideas of number being
“fictitious unities.” Recall that Hume distinguishes between the true unity of minimal
perceptions and the fictitious unity, which is a mere “denomination” the mind may
“apply to any quantity of objects it collects together.” We may fairly say that, for
Hume, one of the “actions of the mind” is the formation of ideas of number
(Treatise, 61). A multiplicity of objects is always “pronounced” by the mind to be a
multiplicity, and this multiplicity is always “considered as forming two, three, or any
other determinate number of objects” (Treatise, 200).
 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 441

I submit that it is this sort of pronouncing and considering action of the mind to
which Hume would apply his rule identifying the appearance and reality of ideas of
number. Because the action of the mind is fully presented to consciousness, so is the
“number” this action directly constructs. It seems that this mental action of pronoun-
cing and considering is that of constructing sets of definite numerosity. It almost
certainly involves mentally counting objects. To consider two objects as a pair-set
involves counting each one exactly once and involves pronouncing each object to be
non-identical with the other. It is not important if the objects in the multiplicity are
not “true units,” indivisible objects comprehensible by the fancy, that is, what Hume
maintained were the “true atoms of extension.”
A multiplicity can be constructed as a pair-set even if the objects comprising the
multiplicity are divisible, even separable, by the imagination. Precise mathematical
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operations are possible with sets because of the numerosity they are fictitiously
pronounced to have, not because of the number of indivisible objects (“true units”)
forming the ultimate parts of each counted object in the multiplicity. For this very
reason, there can be no difference between the number an idea seems to be “of” and
the number an idea is really “of.” If it seems to the comprehension of the fancy that
an idea is “of” a pair-set, that will be because it has been constituted as a pair-set by
the fancy itself. Far from falling into a psychologism that destroys the objectively
necessary truth of mathematical propositions, Hume is attempting to explain how it is
that psychological realities themselves make objectively necessary truth in mathematics
possible.
To pursue the interpretation a little further, Hume could explain that an idea of
a set need not be “adequate” in order to be determinately numerous. He could say
that an idea of a (non-true, fictitious) number is determinately numerous if and only
if its numerosity is either adequately conceived by direct intuition or its numerosity
can be constructed in a series of finite steps, with each step being intuitively evident.
If very short numbers are thus constructed, comparisons between them may
instantaneously reveal them to be equal or unequal and which is greater or smaller.
Thus, in turn, Hume could say, one may form the abstract idea of “any number,”
having perhaps already constructed other ideas at lower levels of abstraction. One
would then have the sort of idea suitable for being the sort of variable essential to
Algebraic thinking. It is an important question whether such an invention has any
basis in psychologically natural operations. Artificial, conventional notations had to
have been invented and it is highly implausible that no one did any algebraic or other
mathematical thinking until such notations were invented. I think Hume’s position
on this topic, as with Arithmetic and Logic, is that there are indeed such naturally
occurring operations even though Art and Education immensely supplement them.
One of the reasons why it is important to distinguish what is due to Nature and
what is due to Art, according to Hume, may be seen by considering some of the
things he says about ideas of Geometrical figures. Like Locke and Berkeley, Hume
took part in the great eighteenth-century debate over the infinite divisibility of
Extension. The fact that mathematicians establish many solid results about the proper-
ties of figures, which relies on the principle of divisibility without limit, does not
show that there is anything both mathematically ideal and psychologically real (ideas
of infinitesimals) underlying the use of the principle.
 442 CHARLES ECHELBARGER

Descartes and other rationalists constantly used examples from Geometry to

show that the rational faculties of the mind were entirely different in kind from the
senses or the imagination. Hume, I believe, maintained that the use of such
Geometrical examples of knowledge begged the question, since it conceives the
objects of Geometry in such a way as to assume that, in Hume’s words, the capacity
of the mind is infinite insofar as it has knowledge of any of these objects. The lines
constituting the figures that are the objects of our ideas are, according to Descartes,
really composed of infinitely many units. In Hume’s judgement, Descartes took a rule
for the construction of figures, a rule due to human artifice, to support his view of
the real nature of human reason. Paradoxically, Hume argued against Descartes and
others that as these rationalists maintained, the intelligibility of extension and its
divisibility logically required that we have ideas of the limits of division, that is, of
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that which cannot be further divided.

However, Hume said, whatever cannot be divided must be something compre-
hensible by the fancy or else the very possibility of mathematical thinking would be
destroyed. If we must say that the true units of extension are themselves unextended
and unimaginable, Hume says, we are driven directly to a hopeless confrontation with
the ancient, still unresolved in his time, paradoxes of Zeno concerning the real parts of
extension or matter. Hume was certainly familiar with these paradoxes, and especially
with their skeptical implications, from his reading of the works of Pierre Bayle.
I think Hume maintained that the only way to avoid destroying the foundations
of Geometry and Arithmetic altogether is to interpret the notion of unextended parts
of extension to mean “parts of extension not further divisible by an act of imagina-
tion,” and “extended” to mean “divisible by an act of imagination.”
Far from being a danger to the Sciences of Reason, Hume conceived his
psychologistic and naturalistic approach to explaining their foundation in human
nature to be the surest means to setting them on a solid foundation. After all, that is
just what he tells us the aim of the science of human nature is in the preface to the
Treatise of Human Nature.

NOTES

This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the 23rd conference of the Hume
Society in Park City, Utah, USA, in July of 1995. Thanks are due to Wade Robison and
Tom Lennon for perceptive comments on the earlier version.
1. Charles Echelbarger, “Hume on Deduction” Philosophy Research Archives 13 (1988): 351 – 365.
2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Peter. H. Nidditch and L. A. Selby-Bigge
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 79; hereinafter, Treatise.
3. An English translation of chapter 1, book. 2, vol. 1 of Brentano’s Psychologie Vom Empiris-
chen Standpunkt may be found in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. and
trans. Roderick Chisholm (Glencoe, IL: Ridgeview, 1960).
4. See Alexius Meinong on the “Theory of Objects,” in Chisholm, Realism and the
Background of Phenomenology.
5. I have addressed this issue to some extent in “Hume on Deduction.”
6. In fact, Hume seems to have said precisely this on page 20 of the Treatise, where he says
“to form an idea of an object and to form an idea simply is the same thing. The reference
 Hume on the Objects of Mathematics 443

of an idea to an object being an extraneous denomination of which in itself it bears no

mark or character.”
7. Ockham says, “It does not follow that if Socrates and Plato agree more than Socrates and
the Donkey, there is some one thing with respect to which they agree more. But it is
sufficient they agree more of and by themselves.” See Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of
the Summa Logicae, trans. Michael Loux (Notre Dame, MD: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1974).
8. On universally quantified propositions, as Hume might have conceived them, see my,
“Hume on Deduction.”
9. To take a highly relevant modern example, Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing (1706), ed. Alexander C. Fraser (Mineola: Dover, 1959) said the objects of math-
ematics were “simple modes,” i.e. variations or combinations of the same simple idea
without the mixture of any other, as a dozen or a score, which are nothing but the Ideas
of so many distinct unites added together” (II.xii.5). Moreover, Locke said modes are
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“combinations not looked upon to be characteristical Marks of any real Beings that have
a steady existence, but scattered and independent Ideas put together by the Mind” (II.
xxii.1, 2). It is because modes are “voluntary collections” of ideas having “no particular
foundation in Nature” that there is a coincidence between the real essence of a mode and
its nominal essence. Locke says, “a figure including a space between three lines, is the real
as well as nominal essence of a Triangle, it being not only the abstract idea to which the
general Name is annexed but the very Essentia, or Being of the thing itself: that founda-
tion from which all its properties flow” (III.iii.18). Locke’s and Hume’s views of the
nature of mathematical objects seem to be much like that of Ockham. In Summa Logicae,
Ockham maintained that ‘quantity’ is not predicable per se of any term signifying things
outside the mind. Rather, it is only predicable of quantitative terms. But quantitative
terms, Ockham says, only signify individual substances and their qualities through connot-
ing divisions into parts (“intentio philosophi fuit assignare differentiam nominum et predicabilium
intentionum quae no predicatur nisi de aliquo habente diversas partes, vel de rebus diversis et distinc-
tis coniunctim sumptis”). Ockham classified all terms as written, spoken, or mental, assigning
to mental terms the duty of signifying things by their nature rather than by convention.
See William Ockham, Expositio Aurea (1496), ed. Marcus de Benevento, facsimile reprint
(Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg, 1964).
10. Bertrand Russell, “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types” (1908),
reprinted in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: Macmillan, 1964).
11. I suspect that Hume thought of the psychology of non-elementary demonstrative mathe-
matical reasoning as a matter of mentally constructing numbers by means of various
heuristic procedures, depending on the sort of problem requiring solution. These
psychological processes may or may not resemble the tidy stepwise sequences exhibited in
mathematics textbooks. The heuristic would be a rule for the construction of a proof-
sequence. This suspicion of mine is based on what Hume says about the way that our
abstract ideas enable us to call to mind ideas of individuals falling under them. At Treatise
pages 22–23, he alludes to the fact that we form “customs” which are “analogous” to
those involved in forming abstract ideas when we deal in quick and abbreviated fashion
with large bodies of information or when we handle large numbers. We seldom or never
form adequate ideas of large bodies of information or large numbers. In the case of some
proof-heuristics, one may approach solutions to complex mathematical problems by
breaking the problem up into parts, doing one part at a time, according to a certain order,
until the solution is obtained. One thinks of the PEMDAS heuristic in elementary
algebra, and the humorous associated memory devices often suggested to students as an
aid to remembering the acronym. Perhaps there are natural mental strategies analogous to
this artificial one.