In both the Treatise and the first Enquiry, Hume concludes his examination of the human understanding by reviewing and assessing a set of doubt-inducing discoveries that raise the question of what he calls “the veracity or deceitfulness” of our faculties (THN 1.3.13.19/153; THN 1.4.1.1/180; THN 1.4.2.1/187; EHU 12.3/ 149; EHU 12.13-14/153-54). We may call his doubt-inducing discoveries about human cognitive faculties his skeptical considerations and his two ordered examinations of them his skeptical recitals. In the final section of Treatise Book 1 (“Conclusion of this book”),

he vividly enacts a profound epistemological crisis that is provoked by five discoveries about human reason as the inferential faculty [3.3], and in its final sentence he declares himself, indirectly but unmistakably, a “sceptic.” The Appendix to the Treatise subsequently adds to that work’s skeptical considerations one more doubt-inducing discovery, derived from a newly discovered “contradiction” in his own account of personal identity. Yet his skepticism is limited in degree and governed by what we may call his Title Principle:

[Title Principle:] Where reason is lively and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate on us.