A brief aside to talk with our friend David

I’ve just been reading a passage from David Hume’s A treatise of Human Nature*, about how we can come to some level of certainty in our investigations. It makes some good points (which I agree with and have thus far in my investigation, not disagreed with), and at other points falls catastrophically on its face. Let’s go!

[Edit: I have removed the first argument I made about this passage from Hume as I possibly have misunderstood a term he uses – demonstrable sciences – and applied to it meaning which he did not. I have thus replaced the older argument with what I feel to be a much stronger one. Thank you Dan for pointing out my error – I would hate to have continued on in it!]

We are permitted to substitute words for other words which would still manage to convey the initial concept accurately. “Concepts” afford us that luxury. We will apply such a substitution here, in order to make the argument more obvious to the reader:

Hume says these two things in the passage:

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