ABSTRACT
Davis Hume sums up his difficulties by saying that there are two principles, neither of which he can give up, but which together make it impossible to account for the unity of consciousness. In a republic, he explains, the individual citizens are united by various political, legal, and customary relationships, and their descendants, succeeding to these relationships with or without modifying them, continue the existence of that same republic. On the topic of substance Hume is brief and positive. Hume probably thought that he could afford to be brief in his rejections of the idea of substance in view of what Locke and Berkeley had said of it. Hume clearly does not accept Berkeley’s account of spiritual substance, though he does not consider Berkeley’s views by name, or even seem to have Berkeley principally in mind. Hume’s main objection to the theologians is that the notions of substance and inhesion are unintelligible.
