David Hume
David Hume enters philosophy not as a builder of systems but as their great dissolver. Where others sought certainty, foundations, or metaphysical reassurance, Hume applied a relentless empirical pressure that stripped philosophy back to what is actually given in experience. For the individual, this pressure is clarifying. For the crowd, it is destabilising, and therefore usually resisted.
Hume begins with a simple demand: trace every idea back to experience. Impressions arrive first — sensations, feelings, emotions. Ideas follow as their faint echoes. Anything that cannot be grounded in this sequence is suspect. For the individual, this demand sharpens attention and disciplines belief. For the crowd, it is inconvenient. Shared abstractions are easier to circulate than careful observation, and metaphysical language travels faster than lived scrutiny.
This tension becomes explicit in Hume’s analysis of causation. Philosophers before him assumed that cause and effect were bound by some necessary connection in the world itself. Hume asks where this necessity is ever perceived. When one event follows another, all that is observed is regular succession. The sense that one thing must produce another is not found in the objects, but in the mind.
“We never can observe any tie between cause and effect,” Hume writes. What we call causation is a psychological expectation formed through repetition. For the individual, this insight loosens false certainty and replaces it with alertness: one learns to distinguish what is seen from what is assumed. The crowd, by contrast, prefers necessity. Predictability stabilises collective behaviour, and habit hardens into asserted truth.
Habit, for Hume, is the engine of belief. Repetition generates expectation, and expectation feels like knowledge. The individual who recognises this gains a measure of freedom: beliefs can be examined, softened, or revised. The crowd moves in the opposite direction. Shared habits synchronise behaviour, and synchronised behaviour reinforces the illusion of certainty. What feels obvious becomes contagious.
Hume’s famous claim that “reason is, and ought only to be the servant of the passions” cuts in the same direction. Reason does not generate values or motives; it calculates means in service of desire. For the individual, this is sobering but empowering: one can observe the passions at work rather than pretending to be ruled by pure rationality. The crowd tends to reverse the story. Collective passions are rationalised after the fact, dressed up as principles, then broadcast as if they were conclusions rather than impulses.
Hume applies his scepticism most radically to the idea of the self. When he looks inward, he does not find a stable subject or enduring essence. He finds only a stream of perceptions: sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, each arising and passing away. “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception,” he writes, “and never can observe anything but the perception.”
For the individual, this dismantling of the substantial self can be liberating. Identity becomes something observed rather than defended. Continuity is recognised as a construction, maintained by memory and imagination. The crowd reacts differently. Without an inner anchor, it compensates by clinging to external identities: roles, labels, ideologies, and group narratives that promise solidity from the outside — and punish deviation to preserve the fiction.
Hume does not attempt to escape these conclusions by rebuilding metaphysics under a different name. He accepts the limits of certainty and refuses to pretend otherwise. Knowledge, beyond immediate experience, is always probabilistic. Even science rests on habits of expectation rather than demonstrable necessity. The individual who accepts this becomes more precise, not less: claims are held lightly, revised readily, and grounded carefully. The crowd, uncomfortable with uncertainty, converts probability into dogma and custom into law, then demands collective compliance.
Yet Hume is not a nihilist. He recognises that human life cannot be lived in permanent sceptical suspension. Habit, sentiment, and social feeling are not errors to be eliminated but conditions of functioning. Morality arises not from abstract reason but from shared human sentiments; we approve and disapprove before we justify. The difference lies in awareness. The individual knows this is how moral feeling operates, and therefore watches it. The crowd forgets, mistakes sentiment for objectivity, and enforces it as righteousness.
Within Individua, Hume functions as a permanent internal check. He prevents symbolic coherence from being mistaken for metaphysical necessity. He forces the system to remain grounded in lived experience rather than collective abstraction. Where the crowd seeks comfort in shared certainty, Hume teaches the individual to tolerate ambiguity without collapse.
Hume shows that clarity does not come from standing with the many, but from seeing through the assumptions the many actively circulate and reinforce.