Notes on: Deleuze, G. (1991) [1958]  Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature. New York: Columbia University Press. Trans and Intro Constantine V Boundas Dave Harris [The first thing to note is the perverse habit of referring throughout to Hume's Treatises and not his Enquiries. This is perverse because Hume explcitly rejected the Treatises as juvenilia: 'not finding it successful [the Treatises]...he cast the whole anew [as the Enquiries] where negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression are, he hopes, corrected. Yet several writers ...direct all their batteries against that juvenile work,which the Author never acknowledged....A Practice ever contrary to all rules of candour and fair dealing and a strong instance of those polemical artifices, which a bigotted [sic] zeal  thinks itself authorized to employ' .] I also note Deleuze refers sometimes to Hume's Essays,which I have not yet read -- ie by Feb 2017] Deleuze, G Preface to the English language edition The new concepts created by Hume include: (1) belief as an essential component of knowledge, the conditions which legitimated it and a theory of probabilities.  This also implies that illusion is more important a problem than error.  (2) the association of ideas became a matter of culture and convention, rather than contract, and rather than a matter of the activity of the human mind.  The law, political economy and aesthetics all depend on correct associations of ideas [as in the sense of plausible analogies?].  (3) the idea that all relations are external to their terms [that is that they act on things and are not inherent in them?].  Some of these relations become habitual, and had it becomes a major factor in determining subjectivity: 'we are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying "I".  Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self' (x). Translators introduction: Deleuze, empiricism and the struggle for subjectivity. Empiricism in Hume demonstrates the logic of the AND, 'paratactic discourse' or minor stuttering.  These themes appear in other Deleuzian works like LofS, the assemblages in Kafka, and the BWO in ATP.  But it was with the book on Hume that we find an early reference.  This demonstrates the importance of the early work including work on Bergson and Leibniz, best understood as segments in 'Deleuze's nomadic image of thought' (1).  There are several writings on Hume in fact, although he appears as a significant silence in ATP.  The encounter lead to a preference for empiricism against transcendental thought, with its accompanying notion of difference and minoritarian discourse, as well as the paratactic series.  Hume led to a particular argument that the transcendental field tended to be chronically inhabited by subjective coordinates, both ecological and personological [argued particularly in Difference and Repetition against both Kant and Husserl.  The latter was accused of still relying on the evidence of consciousness, common and good sense, and then reinventing the empirical domain as modeled on a transcendental field still dominated by the subjective]. It is not only the 'new French philosophy' that is interested in empiricism.  Deleuze's approach has been referred to as transcendental empiricism, according to one collection (Denscombe), opting for empiricism against dialectic, empirical difference rather than conceptual.  Deleuze once saw it as offering a notion of pure difference which would be immediately blurred over by language, which raised questions about the relationship between speech and thought. The problem is to find a ground which is not subject to transcendental operations, but which permits 'rhizomatic synapses and diagrammatic displacements' (4).  In Deleuze, this would be turned in particular against the phenomenological gaze.  Deleuze cited Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson because all opposed the importance of the negative as an interior quality in its own right: hence the celebration of joy.  Deleuze saw the fold as important in explaining subjectivity, 'an ontology of intensive forces, extended forms' (5), none of which could be reduced to phenomena or thought. This is also where Bergson fits.  Natural perception is inadequate, for example in failing to grasp movement except in limited forms.  There is an' originary world' of universal variation, and consciousness is understood not as acting like a searchlight, but acting more like a way of blocking light to form opacity.  The object perceived in consciousness was one stripped of irrelevant characteristics.  Implicitly, consciousness had to be constituted rather than taken-for-granted, seen as something that blocks and reflects light.  Deleuze was to develop this in terms of the fold 'which bends and envelops the forces of the Outside'. Empiricism is not to be seen as some universal foundation for knowledge, but rather as a source for fertile questions and problems, especially the generation of serialities.  This is in contrast to the usual views of empiricism which say that experience is simply the origin and only source of validity of knowledge, 'an answer without a question' (6).  For Hume, scientific knowledge was not the primary: morality history and politics were more important.  Knowledge arose from the ability to associate ideas with a practical intent.  Experience itself is not a simple resource for knowledge, since separate perceptions have to be related together and supported by belief and anticipation.  Relations themselves are not derived from experience alone, but arise from 'the principles of human nature': they actually constitute experience rather than being derived from it.  As a result, they also constitute the human subject. Empiricism for Deleuze is based on 'the irreducible dualism that exists between things and relations, atoms and structure, perceptions and their courses, and also relations and their causes'.  Empiricism turns on external relations, that are not just derived from the nature of things.  Relations also cannot be understood as representations, ideas based on material objects.  Apparently, support is found in Hume who also had a dual strategy, noting different and disparate 'atoms' and at the same time a process of association, the construction of series or parataxis.  He was also interested in structures that affect atoms, including the mind.  However, the mind was seen as much more than just a frame to control the movement of material atoms, partly because the images it produces are not restricted.  Instead, a process of naturalization [seen here as the operation of the principles of human nature] of the mind, 'the result of the operation of associative principles upon it' constitute the human subject. This will lead to a critique of phenomenology, and to Bergson on the originary world.  There are two implied principles, difference and serialization of heterogeneous elements.  They are found in both Deleuze and Hume.  What is given is provided by a collection of separate and different ideas, so the mind cannot be reduced either to a fully constructive subject or to just a mirror of nature.  Impressions do not impinge on us by accident, but it requires a constituted Subject to organize them.  It follows that for Deleuze, Hume's empiricism does not refer to the senses but to the imagination.  His argument that ideas are derived from impressions is not a support for representationalism but 'a regulative principle' (8) [to guard against pointless speculation and excessive generalization] Both difference and repetition are involved in relations.  For example, the imagination of the subject, once transformed into a faculty, proceeds to relate and serialize.  This is how the given can be transcended [so have we left the principles of nature behind when we theorize --not if we use theory to discover the hidden powers of nature as below?].  Such repetition still implies difference, however.  Nor is speculation entirely free, since 'particular concrete and different circumstances' are required to direct interests through the mediation of passions.  Passions form 'concrete associations' and thus subjects inside of minds.  This notion of difference prevents dialectical closure into a mere negative.  This is an aspect of the 'strategy of the AND'.  Series are paratactic but held together by repetition and habit, and this explains why they sometimes converge and sometimes diverge, or even resonate.  There is no need for  'the dialectical labour of the concept' nor for the celebration of negation. Overall, we end with 'a critical but nontranscendental philosophy'.  All transcendental approaches have to reduce fields for methodological reasons, and then have to explain the emergence of subjects.  Human examines the constitution of subjects as something to be fulfilled, a task, the formation of rules and their criticism and rectification.  The result is habit, but this is not just a matter of repetition of experience, the repetition of similar cases.  Other kinds of repetition are also possible [in the imagination?], But imagination must be corrected by accurate judgement, a disciplined focus on important objects, relevant to understanding and to observation.  Moral activity is also important, reconciling different sympathies. The paradox is that this critical activity to regulate the imagination also leads the mind to 'the biggest of all fictions—Subject, World, and God' (9) and makes them seem foundational and incorrigible.  [Then there is a bit that contrasts Kant's attempt to separate ideas and concepts instead—possibly because concepts have some independent existence?]. Subjectivity still remains as a problem for neo structuralism [the term used instead of post structuralism].  Perhaps they never completely rejected the notion [argument on page 10 turning on the dangers of presenting a composite picture of neo structuralism].  The death of the subject might have been wished for, sometimes partly after rejection of the category of the Other, seen as inevitably negative and inherent in the construction of the Self.  This led to a serious critique of earlier notions of the subject in Descartes, Kant and Husserl. Deleuze has an important theory of subjectivity in his entire work, beginning with Hume and developing best in the work on Leibniz.  However, this suggests that we understand interiority not in the conventional terms but as a fold, '"the inside is the operation of the outside"' (11).  Deleuze 'gallantly attributed' this idea to Foucault, but it was his project as well.  However, there is a tension here in searching for any kind of interiority [having insisted that all relations are exterior], but this is inevitable.  It is important not to reduce Deleuze to some simple 'homocentric evolutionist conception' which would ignore his 'rhizomatic growth' and writing strategy [some quotes are selected from various places to show there's been no such conception, page 12].  There is instead an 'arc' starting with 'historico- philosophical interest in the structure - Subject and its actualization' (book on Hume), through a complete pulverization of subjectivity (the work on 1968, some of it with Guattari), to a retrieval of the subject as folded interiority (books on Foucault and Leibniz).  However this is still too facile and ignores rhizomatic relationships between the texts.  LofS, for example does not pulverize the subject, because it is 'too sober'; ATP replaces transcendental fields with singularities, events and intensities, traversed by various lines, offering a 'radical displacement of phenomenology' and the 'greening of the philosophy of difference', but there are still consistent links with the arguments about subjectivity in the book on Hume—the structure of the Subject as a matter of belief and anticipation, and also different routes to actualization.  The intense lines and series in L of S can also be seen as prefigured in notions of intensive time in the books on Hume, Nietzsche and Bergson. We should read Deleuze as he reads others, looking at the series he creates and how they converge, diverge or resonate.  It is not the case that each book is a single series, even those that refer to individual writers, since Deleuze's texts develop his own series as effects of reading Hume or whatever.  A theory of subjectivity might emerge in some of these series.  In the Hume series, the issue is how the mind becomes a subject, in the Bergson one it is how subjects emerge from pre personal singularities and events [in Creative Evolution?], in the Leibniz one it becomes a matter of developing a notion of individuality which is not just a deduction from a concept, nor something produced from the completely non conceptual [material].  In the Nietzsche- Foucault series it is a matter of uncovering a 'dynamic genesis' as a result of folding and internalization rather than simple interiority.  In Nietzsche - Klossowski, the issue becomes one of seeing the subject in the context of 'inclusive disjunctions and simultaneously affirmed incompossible worlds'(14).  These series are not located on a plane of consistency, although Deleuze does talk about possible unifying concepts like chaosmos and the 'cracked I', which are found in all the series and enable a 'disjunctive affirmation' of them.  These are already found in this book on Hume, such as the important theme of the anticipatory and inventive subject—anticipation, for example, becomes known as repetition or absolute memory, and inventiveness is described in 'synonyms'—'"assembling," "becoming on a line of flight," "becoming other," etc'. [these are always subjective?] This is the only way to discuss subjectivity, avoiding transcendental arguments that can only operate with 'subjective selfhood and personal otherness' (15).  The empiricist notion involves the mind as 'a theater without a stage', delirium, contingency, and understands how these isolated images become a system, how minds become subjects, how human nature develops: as the results of 'the combined effects upon it of the principles of human nature'.  These are principles of association, and of passion.  They develop a selective and corrective course, selecting among sensations, suggesting associations among them as a form of reflection.  The principles of association for Hume turned on contiguity, resemblance and causality which organize impressions into a system, bringing constancy to the mind and therefore naturalizing it in the form of habit and belief.  This also constructs a subject that is capable of anticipation.  Here, knowledge 'transcends the given'. However, the ethical subject produces difficulties because the elements of morality tend to exclude one another, forcing a choice among sympathies, or 'corrective integration', the invention of general rules.  Here, subjective partiality must be overcome, and non natural institutions invented.  Again we go beyond the given, by integration this time not generalization, something intensive [having intensity].  The whole scheme in Hume inspired Deleuze to consider extension and intensity as a basis for difference and repetition, 'the extension of contemplation and the intensity of practice' (16).  However, there is to be a complex 'braided' relation between the two, anticipated in this book on Hume with a discussion of time and its function in subjectivity.  Time is a structure of the mind but subjects synthesize time as a matter of succession, anticipation or duree.  The past is seen as a rule for future and as an influence on the present: time 'bends and folds the given and forms interiority'.  Complexity is also discovered in Hume when passions require the association of ideas, but the association of ideas takes place as a result of passion.  Understanding socializes passion, but passion works to give direction.  Passion is given the ultimate weight because it is so intense, although associations provide the content for passions.  Deleuze draws one implication—subjectivity is not just a matter of cognition, but requires to be understood in practice, as a matter of 'experimentation and struggle'. The same goes with the actualization of concrete subjects.  This can never be explained simply by different principles of association because concrete circumstances are involved and must be examined.  Hume sees the passions as providing individuation, affectivity which makes us want to identify with  the effects of our actions if we have chosen the means to produce these effects.  Subjectivity is deepened by such practice, so it requires a mind that can specify ends and suggests suitable relations to achieve them, a form of associationism. More general implications are that the subject is 'an always already "cracked subject"'(17).  This is inevitable once we allow that fiction plays a part in structuring the subject and constituting the individual.  For everything to work smoothly to constitute a subject, intense passions and extensive associations must conform to the principles of human nature and the principles of nature [if they are to be realistic and practical?].  We find this examined in Hume's  discussion of religion.  Deleuze does not think that Hume is refuting religion: passions and associations work consistently there as well.  The problem is that the world itself cannot be seen as the effect of some causal narrative beginning with God.  Deleuze has noticed something extra in this argument—that the world itself must always be a fiction, but one which is useful as the horizon of experience, something which gives us a principle of human nature.  In this way, this particular fiction itself becomes a principle of human nature, the world as not an object, but a constitutive fiction.[I the think I saw this as an excuse to halt scepticism and maybe guard his back] This is a further contradiction for the subject to overcome.  The world is a fiction and this is 'opposed to the principles which fix it and the operations which correct it' (18).  The normal process of extending the understanding finds itself in conflict with reflection [which would expose the fiction of the world].  Reflection cannot correct this fiction satisfactorily, so the mind must never be fully naturalized or placed under the control of the rational subject.  In Hume, there's a contradiction: God is not understood as first cause of nature, but he might be the cause of the principles of nature [including the source of the necessary fiction of the world?].  There might be some purpose to the world after all, and this would restore a role for human understanding as uncovering 'hidden powers of nature'(10.19) [supported with a quote from the chapter on philosophy]. Chapter one  The problem of knowledge and the problem of ethics [An ingenious attempt to find consistency amid the apparent paradoxes and dualities of Hume, including those between understanding and feeling,reason and morality.  As noted above, page references come, annoyingly, from the Treatises] A science of humanity for Hume entails 'the substitution of the psychology of the mind by a psychology of the mind's affections' (21) [we are going to understand subjectivity as the result of various affections organized according to certain principles which are ultimately principles of nature].  The mind is affected by the passions and the social [considered as a series of functions I thought in my notes].  Both imply each other and constitute therefore a proper unified object for scientific study: passions are required to supply motives and ends and ultimately characters, and these should be constant if they are to be social, but passions can only be satisfied in social arrangements.  Historically, there have been particular internal unities between political and social organizations and their ability to link with the passions.  What this means is that 'one must be a moralist, sociologist, or historian before being a psychologist, in order to be a psychologist' (22).  Understanding is required to show this relation between sociability and passion—and improve it. Human nature also includes understanding and the ability to associate ideas, although these are still affected by social conventions.  Although the understanding reflects interests, we can consider them as separate, distinct.  However, 'the understanding is only the process of the passions on their way to socialization'.  Sometimes the passions dominate understanding.  However, understanding understanding [sic --couldn't resist] will show us how the two areas of passion and sociability are linked in the most general sense. The human mind is not just an aspect of nature.  We should understand it instead as operating with ideas.  Ideas are given to us as experience, but the mind has to organize these ideas into a system.  This is done through the faculty of imagination, but ideas originally are seen as a collection or assemblage of things, a flux.  There is a notion of how the subject emerges here.  [I think there's also an argument that representations or images appear in the mind, with the same sort of connotation as found in Bergson—they are images of the real, with nothing added by the mind, so to speak].  When Hume says  the ideas are in the imagination, he means that ideas are identical to the activities of mind, that the imagination is not [initially] an agent in its own right.  'Nothing is done by the imagination; everything is done in the imagination' (23).  Ideas are reproduced in the form of mental impressions [of things or events].  The imagination can indulge in 'fancy', however, but this is not very useful because it does not provide constancy or uniformity, as in the examples of forming ideas of dragons or monsters.  The imagination also permits ideas to be connected by chance, and this is sometimes very useful [in enabling generalization], but the implication is that generalities like this are not inherent in ideas, but nor does the imagination supply the connection on its own: ideas have a particular 'role' which can be brought into operation if influenced by other principles. These principles consolidate imagination so that it becomes human nature.  Again constancy and uniformity are implied.  Ideas follow the principles of contiguity, resemblance, and causality when they are associated in the imagination.  In this way, associations like this transcend the imagination [that is exceed it rather than provide access to some transcendental realm?].  Association is 'a quality which unifies ideas', but 'not the quality of ideas themselves' (24) [that is it requires the imagination operating according to these principles].  Transcending the given also requires belief.  However, this is another example of what the mind does with the given, operating according to its principles.  Belief arises from constancy, a result of the interaction of all the principals of association, and this disciplines [and corrects] the imagination.  Again, links and unions are not found in ideas themselves.  Causality is particularly effective in belief because it makes objects appear solid, but the other principles also help to 'fix and naturalize the mind; they prepare belief and accompany it'.  We now have a notion of empiricism.  Nothing in the mind transcends [exists above] human nature because human nature provides principles that affect the way the mind works.  The principles of association are rules for the imagination, not produced by it.  Ideas are connected in the mind but not by the mind.  Imagination becomes human nature once it has been made constant and settled by the operation of the principles. Why does human nature not provide rules directly instead of working indirectly to regulate the imagination?  Why should the imagination go on to become human nature—it possesses no inherent reason to do so?  The answer seems to be that nature already qualifies [provides qualities of] the imagination adequately.  It is enough to produce effects without worrying about causes [especially first causes which might reintroduce god and other challenges to reason—let's press on and be positive].  This explains the more ambivalent discussion of first causes is in the Dialogues, though—it is OK to think of a first cause, but there is no need to actually pin it down, since understanding effects is adequate and all we can do using reason anyway. Ideas can actually become more general in several ways.  They might work through resemblance and thus represent all similar ideas ['general idea']. The mind can produce a more regular union, like when simple ideas are united in to a complex one [Deleuze refers to these terms as 'substance and mode' (25) —the simple ideas are somehow seen as particular cases of the more complex ones?].  In the third case an idea can 'introduce' another [suggest or imply?] [Deleuze calls this 'relation'].  The mind finds it easier to relate ideas as a result, which means it has become nature, or acquired 'a tendency'.  However, no new qualities emerge for ideas, 'no new ideas ever appear'[especially ideas of the relation itself?]. At least, they are related by the mind only fancifully, with [attributed?] quantity and quality.  [and there seems to be an additional tendency to reinforce relations with other relations].  General rules can be formed up like this, going beyond 'the determined field of legitimate knowledge'.  There is always a need for correction, 'corrective rules' [pretty much like hypothetico-deductivism?]. Generally, however, the mind is understood as passive, registering the effects of the principles of nature.  Causality is understood as a [passive]  'passion', or 'an impression of reflection' even a '"resemblance effect"'(26).  'Causality is felt', perceived by the mind, not a conclusion of the understanding.  We perceive that objects are constantly united, and it is the same with the ideas of those objects, and only after contemplation of them.  The idea of [practical or political? ] necessity might be one of those—in nature, we can talk only of necessity as the conjunction of things: this conjunction has to be contemplated.  But this sort of contemplation itself has to be activated by something.  We therefore have a paradox, that subjectivity is passive even though it is capable of transcending itself [that is moving beyond collections of impressions alone].  It is only when the mind has been affected by the principles that it can become a subject. It should be possible to examine the effects of nature on the mind scientifically, and this is all that psychology could do, to study affections.  We finds another ambiguity here, however.  At first, the mind is occupied by relatively simple ideas, such as the ideas of space and time.  We can understand these ideas as 'atoms'.  On the other hand, there's a whole range of practice in morality politics and history, and this can only be understood through 'associationism', and these must not be confused. To look at the first, the mind cannot just be a simple collection of these atoms because the atoms are also given an objective nature, something that can not be explained by the atoms alone [maybe, difficult argument here, page 27].  These debates persist in the human sciences to day, where atomism is criticized 'in the name of the concrete rights of ethology and sociology, or of the passional and social'[and Comte is cited here to say that a psychology of the intellect alone can never produce a proper study of human nature].  No one sees knowledge as consisting of consciousness alone: some writers want to introduce the body, others redefine psychic matter [some anticipation of Barad here?].  Hume takes the second route and this explains his struggles with materialism. Hume seems to suggest that the crucial fact about knowledge is its ability to go beyond: 'I affirm more than I know', and this is what makes me a subject.  I generalize and I have beliefs, based on relations.  This produces problems for general ideas, however [which contain contradictory parts, I think the argument is, a concrete part and an abstract one].  There is a similar problem trying to equate 'a real relation between objects and the objects to which we apply the relation'(28).  Hume actually begins with this problem, and puts his inquiries in the form of a basic challenge to those others who claim to have ideas in the first place.  He seems to be working here with the distinction between the [immediately] given which remains as it is, and the ways in which experience transcends that given, but in a way which is itself given, as human practice, arising from affections and reflections.  This shows the operation of passion and belief, which do not have to be further defined. 'Empirical subjectivity'(29) can be demonstrated as something constituted in the mind, as a consequence of the affects of principles.  It is thus not evidence for 'a pre existing subject'.  Only philosophy can understand these processes, not psychology [if it assumes a subject?].  The paradoxes of the subject above are to be explained by philosophical knowledge [like Bhaskar's argument for transcendental realism to solve the action/structure incompatibility in Sociology].  We have to understand the transcendental as a quality of the mind, so we need both to critically understand the mind but also see it as the ultimate 'necessary reference' for the transcendental.  We see this critical method in Hume as explaining ideas as originating in affections of the mind.  We have to see ideas as relating the character of the thing and impression produced by reflection [maybe].  [Actually, this seems to have a negative quality at first, dealing with the absence of an idea as the result of an affection of the mind, and this enables 'the negation of the idea of a thing' in its own right --more below].  A more positive argument is that the mind exerts a kind of activity when it produces 'the structures of transcendence'. This seems to go beyond Hume's basic argument that 'all ideas derive from a corresponding impression', and that ideas perfectly represent given impressions.  Hume is not addressing the issue about whether there is a necessary connection between the ideas and impressions, however, but is using critique against 'improper [speculative] applications'.  Reflection generally arises when the idea of one object produces a relation in the mind that helps form the idea of another one.  Its overall role is to produce the quality of subjectivity in the mind.  Once this is happened, we can move beyond ideas being tightly linked necessarily to corresponding impressions [the mind has emergent qualities].  This is where rationalism goes wrong with this emphasis on representations rather than relations, seeing ideas as representations within reason, and looking at the qualities of ideas such as for universality to try to understand what is constituted an experience, the existence of objects.  However, 'the mind is not reason; reason is an affection of the mind' (30) and can equally be understood as 'instinct, habit or nature'.  Reason can also be seen as 'a kind of feeling'.  The negative phase of the method above appears as trying out skepticism on the operations of reason, before moving to a more positive notion of reason as based on a feeling [of agreeability?]. So we have two senses of the notion of idea and impression.  One necessarily links impressions to ideas, and renders them homogeneous, but another insists on their separation, arising from the development of the faculties. [Another summary].  Impressions of sensation are the origin of the mind.  Impressions of reflection result from the emergent qualities of the mind and the operation of certain principles in it.  It would be wrong to overemphasize the notion that sensations alone provide data for the mind [which is what most people think empiricism is]. Its real role is to provide an origin for the mind, and break with the idea that things in themselves have to be represented, which runs into difficulties when ideas of resemblance are discussed.  The impressions of reflection are more important for Hume because they will eventually lead to the quality of subjectivity, they will stress association rather than atomism: the real problem addressed by Hume is 'the constitution of the subject' (31) and how it transcends [emerges] as the operation of principles rather than some simple material causality. We still have to show how these dualites are related.  The differences are important in defining the problem of the self.  The minds should not be seen immediately as a subject, indeed 'it is subjected', constituted and qualified by the principles.  The actual emergence of the self still needs to be explained, especially that notion of the self that equates the subject and mind.  'The self must be both a collection of ideas and a disposition, mind and subject', combining both an origin and emergent qualities [which is how I am understanding the term 'qualification' throughout], but never fully reconciling them.  In Hume's terms, we have distinct perceptions of distinct existences, but we never simply perceive real connections among these existences [the mind has to synthesize them]. There's another duality, turning on the difference between the affects of association and the effects of passion.  They produce systems of understanding on the one hand and systems of passion and ethics on the other.  How might they be related?  Hume fir suggests a simple correspondence or parallelism, so belief corresponds with sympathy, for example, and there is an analogy between the way in which belief associates ideas, and the way in which passions do.  Reason provide scientific generalities, and the passions also aim at constancy and regulation in practical and moral activity. Both serve to regulate speculation, and together they make up human nature.  Further, motives act a bit like causes.  It is not just a matter between reason as theory and morality and passions as practice, since both have combinations of theory and practice: indeed, theory and practice are always tightly connected in a general calculation of probabilities. However, none of this really gets beyond surface appearances. Analogies, for example, need to be further interrogated by philosophy to see which term is dominant.  Hume undertakes this sort of enquiry as a moralist, a political thinker, and an historian.  This is despite the sequence of discussion in his work.  We begin with the problem of reason, but gradually see that reason is itself a problem, that it operates within certain constraints [avoiding idiotic speculation, for example].  This implies that reason does not apply to everything.  It does not even determine practice: 'it is practically or technically insufficient' (33), although it clearly influences action.  We should not even see a simple opposition between reason and passion: passion does not focus on the relation between ideas and objects alone, but is instead an original part of human existence. Moral distinctions are also independent of reason, although they can be subject to critical understanding in their operation.  Reason here 'presupposes an antecedent ethics and an order of ends'.  It's role depends on the very difference of practice and morality.  These differences are found in the nature of practice and morality not just the circumstances in which they operate.  Excessive reason can look like madness and skepticism, something outside morality and practice.  A proper philosophy can never just be skepticism, partly because it would never be convincing as a complete explanation [if indeed it provided any actual explanations].  Skepticism in operation implies positivism [for the same reasons that Marcuse said existentialism lead to fascism?].  Reason can sometimes become excessive skepticism in reaction to the perceived positivism of the passions, but this will lead to a further 'positivism of the understanding'(34) in practice [as in speculation gets nowhere so we might as well just operationalize everything?]. So we can see clear differences between ethics and understanding.  As [emergent] affects, we get [properly social] moral affection on the one hand and [general] knowledge on the other.  Moral affections are as transcendental as the principles of association in understanding.  Empirical subjectivity is a combination of all of these principles, but the principles together lead to transcendent subjectivity with its characteristic: belief.  This process of transcendence lies at the heart of knowledge.  With understanding, we start with the subject and its activity, the way in which activity transcends the given, involving inferring causal relations.  But with ethics we cannot start with inference [I think this is what Hume proposes, when starting by looking at the qualities of admirable men], but work rather with the notion of relevant circumstances producing ethical behavior, seeing ethics not directly as an element of human nature [it rap[idly becomes universal for Hume though?].  In understanding, association is a necessary part of human nature [in functionalist notions especially?].  This even leads to the notion of two selves.  There are certainly two kinds of practice.  Understanding examines the workings of nature and uses extension.  It is possible for all objects to become linked in causal chains, not only logically, but by being linked as 'component parts of a certain probability' (35).  [Based on observation of conjunctions?].  This implies no qualities of the objects themselves.  And rigorous causality is only a particularly strong case of probability.  Nature consists of 'an extensive magnitude' and this means it is open to experiments and measurement.  We can build general rules once we have identified the relevant parts.  Nature does not make up a proper totality, but should be seen rather as a collection [all this before D thought of the term multiplicity?] : it requires an act of mind to suppose some unity, and this will not have a subsequent effect on interactions.  This provides no problem for the development of knowledge, which can be based on 'natural principles of understanding'.  But application of knowledge provides problems [because it might not be describing real connections?].  When we consider morality it is not so much a problem to identify the elements, but rather to reconcile them as mutually exclusive, as matters that are partial [in both senses].  We have to invent a system, justice, to do this, but this often takes the form of a limited schema not a whole system of morality, and the schema can often contradict each other and [as when private good contradicts public good].  We can only solve these problems by general agreement [hidden pressure towards social equilibrium?].  We are not moving towards transcendence here, but focusing on integration.  Reason moves from parts to other parts and then to wholes, but morality uses feeling to react to wholes.  Inevitably, the 'general rules have a different meaning'(36). Chapter two.  Cultural world and general rules [A kind of cross between functionalism and structuralism here.  Functional prerequisites provide the basic structure, but structure then emerges to produce specific forms.  This is nearly sociology! Or possibly nearly Levi-Strauss's structural anthroplogy  What makes it still philosophy in the bad sense is the irritating rhetorical questions and the pettifogging witty definitions, most of which I have translated into Portsmouthese] It is easy enough to understand moral conscience when connected to individuals and particular interests of our own, but we can also abandon our own point of view and talk about morality ['character'(37)] in general.  Sympathy is not enough to understand, because it does not extend and nor does it provide any quantitative dimensions [which will help us calculate moral consequences?].  It must also extend into the future.  Sympathy is understood as a combination of desire for the pleasure of others and by wishing to avoid them pain, and it is real.  We can extend it relying on contiguity, resemblance or causality again, which explains why we love those close to us.  This is to be understood as simultaneously limiting generosity—this is as far as natural generosity gets.  So nature provides us with a basic morality. It is also a partial sympathy, and we feel unhappy if we enlarge it or contract it too much.  It is this partiality that explains social life better than the notion of natural egoism, for example in explaining the generosity everyone extends to their kin.  This because we are always social, even before community as in Tönnies [sic, 38]: there are families friends and neighbors, and this focuses [determines for him] our sympathy.  It also reflects passion and particular interest, which are not focused on the ego alone.  However, such limited sympathy is as opposed to society as egoism is, and is no basis for participation in larger societies.  That's because sympathies are not similar or overlapping, but contradict [there is almost a suggestion that this is inevitable the more we allowed genuine otherness].  The problem of society does look different according to whether we contrast it with egoism or sympathy—egoism requires limitation, but sympathy requires a more 'positive totality' (39).  Fundamentally egoism leads only to a contractual notion of society, society only as a negative set of limitations, not 'the positive system of invented endeavours'. We do not find humans as egoistic individuals in nature, but only in families, so our understanding of human nature is already pluralistic and complex.  In families we find sexual instinct and sympathies between the kin, and this is a better model for social life and the individual.  However, families cannot just be added to one another.  Indeed they exclude others and are partial.  Parents of one family are strangers to other families.  This provides the tension that must be solved by integration, a way of transcending the contradictions of sympathy [not in the dialectical sense, of course].  The world has to intervene positively.  [This gives the emergent quality of morality]: morality becomes real when it can manage these contradictions and offer alternatives, as when 'property supersedes greed' (40), or when we extend the same sympathies to foreigners, 'without a variation in our esteem'[that is independently of our esteem].  Indeed, general morality implies 'this uniformity of esteem', but we don't get there just in imagination or thought, treating foreigners as honorary kin, for example.  Real sentiments and passions never arise from simply '"a known imaginary interest"'. Nature alone is not adequate to generate such a morality; the notion of the whole society as the basis of morality is an artificial idea, which cannot be derived from nature alone.  Nevertheless, all the elements of them are found in nature, but these cannot themselves produce morality.  The whole has to be invented, the only thing that can be given the tight limits imposed by nature.  Thus justice is an artificial set of rules, which must organize elements which include the principles of nature [but not just those].  This produces moral schema, connecting natural interests to the artificially and inevitably 'political category of the whole'(41).  A properly organized moral world will allow me to follow my interests, but also balance the interests of others: it can be understood both as a whole connecting parts, and as a means in relation to an end [ie functional].  Proper morality can only be political.  Once established, moral conscience determines psychological conscience and [wittily] is also a testament to the inventiveness of the individual consciousness. Once we grasp the notion of morality as both a whole and a means, we can understand it as a rule or norm, the 'general rule'.  Such rules will have forms and contents, customs and conversations, and notions of property and stability of possessions. One major outcome will be to substitute violence for conversation.  However, particular sympathies have to be overcome ['transcended'] in an effective way, without deleting sympathy altogether.  What we need is 'a stable and common point of view, firm and calm, and independent of the present situation'.  This will not be felt as strongly as personal sympathies, and requires an additional source to make it compelling, but it is practical at least.  It is the basic idea of a set of values against which we can contrast vice. One element of private life that supports this sort of notion is respect for the property of others, provided it is reciprocated.  This generates a general interest parallel to the general rule.  It is a classic institution to support a 'symbolic aggregate' (42).  In this way, the institution of property has a major political function and is 'the political phenomenon par excellence'.  We now have a connection between properties and institutions on the one hand and conversations and symbolic aggregates on the other [just like Habermas really], and thus the 'two chapters of a social science'.  This connection is important because we have to express concretely general notions of the common interest: so we find in 'the conversation of proprietors' an early demonstration of social reason. General rules extend and correct our sympathies, and are internalized as a personal sense of duty.  Once in operation, it is no longer necessary to emotionally sympathize with the other: the general rule allows exceptions [the example from Hume takes examples of legal exceptions or extenuating circumstances]. So far, Hume has developed a new notion of the relation between nature and culture.  Nature is still at work in providing the elements and also with its 'demands that they be made identical' (43) [if social life is to be seen as functional and natural].  The alternative would be the violent resolution of contradiction, and social institutions could never develop [especially property].  This was to be extended by Bentham [against natural law] by arguing that invention and artifice is required to satisfy human needs.  Artificial institutions at least help us to see the natural bases of interests [by contrast?].  Everything is based on the natural principles of sympathy and passion, but these have to be 'liberated from their natural limits'.  This liberation is actually also a kind of enlargement and extension of sympathy and passion, in the form of justice.  Such extensions correct and help us to reflect upon natural principles.  [And Hume evidently believes that once we reflect, we can see that the passions have to alter their direction toward the general].  So justice involves not a reflection on the appropriateness of interest, but more on how to extend that interest, overcome restraints and irregularities.  In this way, 'practical reason' emerges, as 'nothing but a determined moment of the affections of the mind' (44) [where determined means managed and directed calmly]. The surface dualities in Hume appear between affection and reason, nature and artifice, but, underneath, there is the whole of nature which will include [emergent] artifices and determinations.  This means a guaranteed natural obligation to justice once artificial schema have been devised.  The same goes with systems of esteem, which still have a natural input in the form of sympathy.  The ends of these various schema as well as their inputs are also understandable on the basis of nature—justice ultimately attempts to satisfy passions even though it constrains them.  The point is that human beings are inventive by nature—'even the artifice is nature; [and, inevitably] the stability of possession is a natural law' (44).  The formation of habit is natural even if actual habits are not.  We need culture and institutions to achieve natural ends.  In this sense, human history is part of human nature even though nature is also 'the residue of history'[these witty philosophical formulations get up my nose]: nature is a residue that is not explained by history, something common underneath specific institutions. We cannot therefore separate out things that belong to natural instincts, and things which belong to politics and education.  There is no nature without culture or vice versa.  This applies specifically to egoist theories claiming to be psychologies of human nature: apart from anything else, sympathy is equally natural.  If we just define egoism as the pursuit of [any and all] satisfaction, we only express an empty formalism.  Egoism explains some institutions as the means to satisfy drives, but there are other means as well.  Hume wants to break the hold of narrow egoism on political economy as well, bringing into account other motives that sometimes contradict narrow self interest.  Ultimately, he is arguing that [all] dispositions and the means to satisfy them are unified [also implying that they affect each other?]: it follows that we cannot just abstract supposedly pure economic or natural behavior from the whole range. Overall, we get a 'strong' notion of society (45).  It is not just based on some contract.  The point is not to see the law as the foundation of social life, but rather the institution.  Laws do limit action and are negative, but there are positive elements in the social as well.  The law itself presupposes some notion of utility.  Laws are not just there to protect pre-existing rights, for example, since the reason societies are formed in the first place is to impose some rights which did not exist before.  A proper conception of utility would focus on institutions not laws, since institutions provide us with positive models of action, positive means.  It is the reverse of the usual view that the social is only negative, based on some lack or need.  Conventions are creative and inventive, and exceed contracts.  They are cultural.  They develop without any promise of rewards [I think this is what is meant by the term promise page 46]. The conventions are based on utility [although this is also considerably extended, I recall, to include a need for 'social agreeability' which is not reduced to narrow self interest]. So society is made up of a set of conventions based on utility ultimately.  It is not a matter of contractual obligation.  The law is not the foundation of society, but rather institutions are.  The link between society and nature is not a matter of natural rights vs. law, but needs and their relation to institutions.  Utility is still the underlying 'fertile principle', but we have a new social psychology altogether.  Rules an out positive and functional [sic].  However, there is no simple reduction of social to natural, because humans are inventive and they invent institutional solutions.  This is a departure with those versions of functionalism which still based social life on a natural process, drives or needs.  Hume argues instead that drives are satisfied in institutions, sexuality in marriage, greed in property, but the drive is not the only explanation.  We have invented  'oblique and indirect' (47) to satisfy our drives, and also to constrain and channel them—a particular form of marriage for example [seems like classic Levi Strauss here!].  Hume recognizes that actual laws, for example are '"complicated and artificial"'[and arbitrary]. History shows the operation of difference in these particulars, despite a general drive.  So utility is an insufficient explanation for institutions: indeed, institutions constrain private utility while public utility has to operate in 'an entire institutional world'.  What is at work are 'reason and custom' (48) in determining particulars, or the imagination [that comes up with justifications], the fancy.  This is like Bergson arguing that different forms of association are so diverse because they are based on an equally vague association of ideas.  The underlying principles remain of aid because there are so many particular variables.  The imagination draws on so many different models, and so many circumstances [the latter explain why the imagination is not the total explanation either].  Imagination replaces instinct, and natural drives become 'reflective'[both based on reflection, and reflecting circumstances?].  We see that notions of justice, for example, operate with general rules which 'never indicate[s] particular persons'(49).  It cannot be too detailed if property in general is to be upheld, in rights as diverse as 'possession, occupation, prescription, accession, succession'.  This circumstance of a 'lack of adequation' of general rules [when it comes to particular cases] provides general rules with three dimensions: 'establishment, determination and correction' (50).  There's another problem in that general rules tend to lose their 'vividness' insofar as they are extended, and the consequences of breaking them can look extremely remote.  Principals need to be both enlivened and reinforced, not depending on the imagination alone, but by making them relate to the real situations.  This is what government does, making people realize that situations can change, but the nearest can become distant and vice versa. This is what political philosophy studies, how government adds vividness.  Those in government must operate with a very general notion of the good life, the most distant from their immediate interests.  Conversely, the governed must also come to see their ability to transgress law as extremely remote.  This is done through the development of loyalty.  Again contract theories are inadequate to grasp this, since mere promises to uphold contracts require loyalty and support.  This support is not contractual, but exists 'on another plane' (51).  It must also be combined with ways to make it adequate, to correct it in this sense.  Theories of sovereignty permit 'possession, accession, conquest, and succession', but they will also need to permit 'in rare and specific cases 'the rights to resist and even rebel' [as in functional conflict].  The main issue with the state is not representation but maintaining this belief, 'making the general interest and object of belief'.  If they transgress against this belief by putting their own interests first, resistance becomes legitimate 'in the name of a general rule'. There's another problem faced by social stability in the scarcity of goods.  This worsens in some circumstances when the state permits substantial accumulation of property.  Hume realized that such accumulations could develop dangerous inequalities.  We need a third set of rules to correct any imbalance, and this is where he explains political economy.  For Hume, commerce and industry distributes wealth and forbids useless accumulations.  [The political economy is found in the Essays].  Organized economic activity is clearly connected to property relations, but it also has a corrective tendency linked to the state, even though this is an 'accidental relation which comes from outside' (52) [almost a hidden hand theory here].  It is a way of restoring a certain equilibrium to old forms of accumulation, especially landed property.  Without any intervention, the landowners would be in immediate conflict with the peasants, with no way of meeting the need for accumulation of the first except by exploiting the second.  Commerce can provide a mediator, producing a number of lenders and borrowers, regulating the rate of interest, and introducing a third distinctive '"capitalist interest"'.  It produces a certain level of working capital [not immediately subordinated to the politics of feudalism], and the state can come to acquire some of this.  The immediate violence of feudalism is no longer required.  Instead, the state can provide manufacturers and commodities and this will appeal to labourers politically [there is a remarkable piece in Hume that seems to predict that superfluous labour can be extracted in this more amenable way, by seeing it as employed in the public service—a kind of early recognition of the power of economic growth as some apparently universal goal?].  The state adopts a definite method of regulation through political economy, avoiding the need for frequent arbitrary interventions: it pretends it is acting in the interests of the prosperity of subjects, and it is this that gives affirms its power. Again we need to know a definite differences with utilitarianism.  The economy is not natural, but just as artificial as forms of legislation.  Commerce and property our institutions.  Admittedly, Hume and the utilitarians had some hidden hand notion that all interests would coincide, although he did foresee some later difficulties.  Property, for example will always remain scarce and this will be a source of instability, but the quantity of money operates according to some mechanical process is on its own.  However, these mechanical processes also require 'qualitative motivation'(53), although Hume also allowed for some tendency to develop mechanical quantitative relations in commerce—less so in property. [diag on p.54] Chapter three.  The power of the imagination in ethics and knowledge [An irritating example of philosophical nitpicking, where confusions are deliberately fostered, so that your philosopher can appear as a wonderful hero who explains everything.  Mind you, I do miss subtleties sometimes. I thought 'reflection' meant both being mirrored in something and thinking about something, and got annoyed at the failure to distinguish them. But reflection has two implications in a more technical sense here -- simple mirroring and ' resonating', which seems to be a secondary kind of affect. That is both a principle of nature and the result of human thought {described as the imagination or the fancy rather than cognitive reflection} -- the latter works on the former]. With general rules, reflection [mirroring] and extension are connected, indeed 'identical'.  Passions are reflected [mirrored, or causing affects upon] but once they're in the imagination they can be extended and take on the form of a rule.  Extension and reflection vary in proportion, however: determining rules are more extensive than reflective, and the other way around for corrective rules.  Determining rules are 'extended beyond the circumstances from which they arise' (55), and this often involves misconstruing [implies ordinary thought here?] the accidental by seeing it as really a part of the general or essential—'the disadvantages of culture' [individual thought denied here though].  Corrective rules [especially those based on the rational, as we shall see] correct this extension of determining rules by dealing with the accidental and the exceptional [by considering common exceptions {and explaining them rationally?}].  Exceptions are natural and eventually, 'by means of habit and imagination' become objects of knowledge and experience through 'casuistic'[case - based] argument. So extension and reflection are identical on the one hand but different on the other [witty innit?]—the sorts of rules are different in practice, although they have the same origin.  In the first case, determining rules express a unity of cases, and this shows us the importance of the passions [including the will, as in the biblical sense of passion] and how they are reflected [mirrored] in the imagination.  Hume suggest that this is because there is some agreement between what is agreeable to the senses and to the fancy, so that images can provide satisfaction in a bodily sense.  However, once located in the imagination, passions can be liberated from actuality.  An entire 'artificial domain' (56) opens up, which is culture.  Passion can develop images without limit.  This transcends the partiality of the origin of images—the imagination itself becomes passionate [biblical] and rules are possible based on this. We can see this with three types of rules: (1) The rule of taste, where feelings turn into aesthetic judgments.  These do not need to be adequate to objects, nor to adapt to what is seen as the reality of objects [so there is no need for the sort of beliefs based on probabilities that produce knowledge].  Instead, there is a variability of '"liveliness and strength"'(57).  Tastes are not based on sentiments [of sympathy], so 'taste is a feeling of the imagination, not of the heart'.  It takes the form of a rule, based on liberating both passions and objects from actuality, but reinstating them in 'the mode of the possible'.  These possibilities can produce a certain fascination when added to judgments of value [the example involves speculating about the fate of a man nudged to be handsome in prison].  We also see it in the case of tragedy, the strange way in which the depiction of disagreeable passions can produce delight.  It is not just that the tragic form weakens and fictionalises, more that new feelings are added.  Again this involves passion not just cold imagination, and the effects on the spectator lead again to an extension of those passions, to a pleasure in the play of the imagination itself [very close here to Barthes on plaisir, and Bourdieu on the high aesthetic].  This extension is particular to art, which is neither a real object, nor just the mode of the actual passion.  It has its own sort of belief. (2) The rule of freedom.  Here, a sense of personal freedom arises from the affects of the will, 'a kind of passion', which can settle on unpredictable images [maybe, 58].  (3) The rule of interest and duty.  When considering actual examples say of the relations between master and servant, Hume notes that interest and duty are combined, that the interest of the master causes the duty of the servant [and he seems to have a notion of power rather like Weber's—the master can direct the action of another].  [So there is no separate impulse for power over another, but always a relation?] The same goes for the relations between husbands and wives.  It is not just enough for husbands to feel passionate towards their wives [as a source of marital obligation], because 'the husband can never be sure that the children are his own'.  This uncertainty is 'reflected in the imagination' and takes the form of the cultural constraint on women to remain chaste: this is so strongly established that even male debauches expect it in women. We know that generally passions produce affections in the mind and the imagination and this becomes a general rule [not directly but through a 'resonance' (59)].  We have to move away from simple affects here, which simply enter the imagination and help to fix it.  Now we have a more complex effect of reflection [not just mirroring but resonating].  The speculative aspects of mind are fixed by this reflection as 'affection resounds inside the mind', and the notion of human nature emerges.  This still implies that the mind is 'a fancy on another level', and fancy is required to fully develop after this resonating reflection.  The real exercise of the affections and their limits cannot be reflected, without imagination which liberates their forms.  The limit of this activity is also an object of the fantasy [in art?].  This is how  the accidental becomes essential and power detached from relations, from practical exercises.  In this sense, the imagination imagines power [god I am bored by this wit. I take it that imagination does not construct power out of nothing, but rather applies rules of association?]  The two general processes [two meanings of reflection] are combined in an 'absolute unity' producing general rules, so we can see that reflection and extension are one process.  But they're also two [sigh] and must be if we are to explain corrections.  We can reflect on the previous reflection, or 'the reflected interest'—'But why is it that, in both cases, the word reflection is used?'.  Apparently, it is to alert us to the fact that extensions are also already corrections that transcend partiality of natural passions., But this can transcend nature as well, particularly in the form of 'confusing essence and accident' (60), so a new form of correction is required.  This will involve the whole order of culture, which is not just illusory and fanciful but has a serious purpose [to help us reflect collectively on complex effects --  in the form of secondary reflections?].  Hume wants to contrast the human and the animal world here, because animals have no culture and so can register only simple effects of the principles of nature, in the form of instinct, which ties them to actuality—they have no fancy or reflection.  They also have no history.  But humans have culture and history, both of which involve the fancy again 'through the resonance of affections within the mind' [that is not just their simple impact on the mind].  So this looks paradoxical again—the most frivolous and the most serious are found in union. In addition, when the passions are mirrored in the mind, they encounter 'a fancy which is already settled, affected, and naturalized'.  This means that the fancy must be governed not just by the qualities of the passions themselves but by other principles of nature [the 'modes of association' --similarity, causality and the others?].  Only when this background is established [or determined] can passions produce 'constant and determined figures' in the imagination [that is actual applications or actualizations, instances?].  This helps judgement and understanding overcome any irregularities in the affections, as a natural remedy.  [This really looks like having it both ways when it comes to social determinism, and the whole assumption is that naturalized imaginations exists without any nasty social conflicts intervening] We see this in aesthetic rules, where passion has to reflect itself through existing principles of association to produce detailed 'rules of composition'[a strange quote from Hume here argues that composition can simply be understood as a chain of propositions and reasonings, although I thought he was saying that much of social life escapes reasoning—two types of reasoning, we are told below?].  We also know that social rules turning on property, occupation and the rest are also 'determined [ultimately] through the principles of association'.  All the notions of what is right depend on these notions of association, as Hume explains with some [arbitrary] examples: the sea does not belong to anybody because no one can take possession of it or develop a stable association with it, but regions of the sea can be seen as property—'"a union in the fancy"'.  So the imagination works to extend the rules through the principles of association, and this is how it constitutes rules [it is actually 'quasi constitutive' says Deleuze, 61]. However, the fancy has to invoke these principles, use them to develop the world of culture.  In this way, the serious and the frivolous are combined [because some of the associations are particularly frivolous, that is arbitrary or playful, perhaps most of them].  Logical argument here is mostly about plausibility, and is colored by the imagination.  We see this with arguments that appear in judicial trials or juridical discussion.  There's no way to decide them because everything will turn on the imaginative associations involved. It is not surprising that historians are similarly 'perplexed', just like philosophers are skeptical (62).  However, there is no alternative but to develop reflections [thinking] on individual cases and accidents in order to try and 'fill the gap' between the principles of understanding and the cultural domain.  It is true that culture is based on the illusion of the fancy, but these illusions are necessary and inevitable [so not just subjective again] .  Reasoning leads us astray here by not recognizing the necessary constraints of culture, but focusing only on the rational [maybe]: it is not surprising that people think they are free, subject only to reason.  But culture is still real, but also experimental.  It would be wrong to reduce its reality to what is accepted as real by the understanding, which would imply that things like general rules are real [in this material sense].  However, understanding can correct extensions of the principles of association, and even compose a theory of the exception [somewhere where rational calculation explains a difference with culture?] So the crucial thing is the relation between passions and the imagination, and this is Hume's originality.  There has to be an initially simple relation but one which will permit a more complex one to develop [emergence again].  The impact of the passions means that the mind alone is not sufficient [it is transcended].  The importance of the passions is also to ground human action, while permitting it to develop.  It is not the same relation between nature and the mind implied by the modes of association because the passions impart 'a direction and a sense' (63) [the modes of association are not directional but reciprocal].  This aligns relations with reality in the form of 'a univocal movement'[directed by one coherent voice].  This is also how the self emerges as an apparent first term: 'the impression of the self focuses the mind'.  {hence Deleuze's remark in the Intro: 'We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying a "IE"'  (x)][There's also an intriguing bit which I think means that the self becomes the center of action, that imposes a direction on a general relation, say between kin—we distinguish between action towards a brother and the brother's action towards us, although both are explicable in terms of a general relation between brothers].  This also explains why we act differently towards things that are near rather than distant. The tendency of the imagination is future oriented as a result of the action of the passions.  We see that association presupposes the passions [actually 'a mutual implication'] as ideas get associated because of a goal or intention.  Again this adds an element of reality [as future intentions become realized?].  However, this tendency driven by passion has limits.  It cannot produce genuinely general rules which cover cases which are 'very distant'.  Overall, tendencies mean that 'the possible becomes real', but it is also the case that 'the real is reflected' (64) [which I think means that our passions orient our action to a certain extent which constructs real options out of the merely possible, but there are other the elements of reality that require different cognitive operation, a more dispassionate reflection] A picture of subjectivity emerges overall.  The subject is not in dependent, but produced by a collection of ideas that together impart the quality of subjectivity, initially as an idea.  Principles of nature affect the imagination to produce 'a partial, actual subject'['partial' meaning having interests in this case].  Then this idea of subjectivity is taken over by the imagination which reflects the affections [including the impact of the principles of nature].  General rules also affect it [they emerge as we saw].  Ideas in the imagination cease to be just representational, tide to objects or qualities of the thing, but become more like 'a governing principle, a schema, a rule of construction'.  This permits the partiality of the subject to be transcended as subjectivity itself becomes more general like this.  We'll never grasp this notion of the self using [rational] understanding alone.  We have to take full account of culture and to see the development of subjectivity as offering a [necessary] 'moral and political solution'.  We now realize that affects alone will not explain subjectivity, since the fancy has a definite role and acts independently.  The self that results is  'the synthesis of the affection and its reflection'.  This fixes the imagination, and can be seen in a way as [an emergent] reflection of the affection. To understand practical reason, we need to see the importance of culture and morality which constitute a whole [even though we will also need to explain particulars, the determination of parts].  It develops as a whole because the imagination is schematic.  Its schemas combine [its principles of] reflection, excesses of reflection, and a constitutive ability [actually only quasi-constitutive].  Theoretical reason is concerned with the determination of the detail of nature, calculations about the parts.  It must somehow be unable to relate to practical reason, however, and develop schema that focus on the determination of parts rather than wholes.  It is not affected in the same way as moral reasoning.  It relies upon the non passionate nature of the principles of association.  It is therefore closer to [developing an image of] nature [rendered as 'reason is imagination that has become nature'(65)].  Even so, it operates with two sorts of reason [close to grammatical and empirical truth]: associations only between ideas, like 'resemblance, relations of quantity, degrees of quality, contrariety', and relations to objects which vary in a different way, according to factors such as 'relations of time and place, identity, causality'.  The first process proceeds by claiming certainties, through 'intuition and demonstration', the second one works with probabilities, 'experimental reason, understanding'.  These two processes do have a common root, however in the process of comparison.  The two outcomes, certainty on the one hand and belief on the other [belief can be the only basis for induction], are also related although distinct.  We see in the case of causality, for example whether it is grasped by understanding objects or by probability.  Hume argues that it is not just a quality produced by human nature noting a set of effects, because there is no 'ultimate reason' why this should happen.  Observing effects and experiencing them requires the gradual development of the habit, one that sets out to correct itself.  There is more than just natural probability.  Indeed, observing probabilities itself should be seen as a habit ['habit as a principle', 66].  Habit helps us presume the existence of effects.  Although it has its origin in a principle of human nature, it still needs to be formed gradually. In other words, there is 'the habit of contracting habits'[attributed to Bergson earlier].  The progress of reasoning ends in causality.  There is no direct connection with probability.  Experimental reason arises from habits: 'habit is the root of reason, and indeed to principle from which reason stems as an effect'. However, with [grammatical] relations between ideas, there is more of an immediate reasoning, requiring no gradual formation and therefore no intrusion into the operation of the principles of human nature.  Mathematics is seen in this way by Hume.  However, even here, the ideas do not associate as a result of their internal qualities, nor is mathematics just a matter of analyzing these already given relations.  Instead, 'relations are always external to their terms', although the operation of human reasoning can suggest that ideas act on their own [or possibly that grammatical operations are autonomous].  However since no observation of nature is required, the logic of physics 'or of existence' (67) requires something more like a schema as above. We have seen that habit is considered to be a principle of nature, and it follows that [learning from] experience must be as well.  They are different principles, however, even though habits presupposes experience.  Habits never develop into an explanation of habit itself —'a repetition will never by itself form a progression'.  Instead, we just experience repetition of similar cases.  This develops the philosophical notion of causality and understanding generally.  We still need to see how this inference works [the problem of induction].  Experience alone can never guarantee the persistence of causality, since an notion of causality makes continuous experience possible in the first place.  Just because reasoning works in one case, it does not mean that it is possible in general.  What is required is a faculty to draw conclusions from experience and therefore transcend it.  Repetition alone does not guarantee this, nor does mere succession [ of the same case] in time.  Habit lacks a grasp of quantity [including quantitative change]. Habit is a principle, but causality is an association of ideas, and it is this [puzzlingly referred to as {ultimately?}  'a natural relation'] that engenders belief [in the continuity of the material world] which in turn allows the impression of one object to be transferred to the idea of another.  In this way, habit engenders belief and therefore further possible understandings.  It presupposes the experience of observing conjunctions between objects, so that the imagination can produce the idea of an object.  At last, repetition permits progress or even a whole new cognitive production, since it is no longer firmly attached to the objects that we have experienced.  We are able to transfer the past into the future, to carry the thoughts of one object onto another, and this becomes 'an anticipation or a tendency'(68).  If experience gives us a notion of the conjunction of similar objects, [an awareness of the role of ?] habit is required to make this mental inference. There is still a difference between this operation in knowledge, and the generalizations found in the moral world, although both produce general rules which are extensive and corrective.  The difference lies in the relation to nature: morality is suppose to reflect the principles of nature in imagination, but knowledge focuses on a more particular principle, with its own [more artificial?] legitimacy.  [a truly appalling chiasm ensues: 'We have seen that the formation of the principle was the principle of the formation'[the last formation refers to the formation of a whole system of reasoning and rules to guide it?].  Ultimately, belief is sustained not only with present impressions which provide vividness, but with more connections with belief and causality.  [If habit and experience agree, causality becomes an important principle to guide action, or 'fix the imagination' in this terminology]. However, sometimes, experience and habit do not present a unified understanding.  [Discrepancies can lead to further thinking? See correctiveness below]. Habits can 'feign or invoke a false experience', an illusion or imaginative fiction.  Here, habit does not correct the imagination but actually amplifies it, to such an extent that it can defy future correction.  Hume calls the existence of such beliefs 'non philosophical probability'[and national stereotypes are the example].  More adequate laws require constant correction to become a philosophical probability [meaning corrected by philosophical principles? Philosophy must be seen as a universal 'human nature too?].  There is a particular danger of the intrusion of uncorrected passions, given that causality requires the operation of the fancy.  Corrections of the extension of knowledge to these non philosophical areas [assuming that that is in the interests of people?] can assist the correction of the more philosophical rules [maybe, 70]. Another source of false beliefs lies in language which produces 'fictitious causalities'.  Spoken repetition accompanies observed repetition, and transposing observation into language can make them particularly vivid [Hume says that written reports of matters such as enchantment and apparitions are often more persuasive from experience and observation].  Words get believed.  This gives a power to 'education eloquence and poetry'.  All these can generate false beliefs.  Critique of language is necessary.  Language consolidates accidental characteristics and conjunctions.  It is affected by the disposition of the person speaking [some are more open to correction than others?].  This is the downside of the extension of knowledge, with art as its upside.  Correction should take both a quantitative and qualitative form. Strictly speaking, the beliefs in knowledge are also a falsification of raw experience, a fictitious repetition.  We have to judge all these examples using 'a second kind of rules', an a 'ulterior reflection' (71).  [Criteria here seem to include a conformity between habits and experience, as well as calculating probabilities: the first is a kind of empirical correction?].  So legitimate reason is not directly derived from habit, but only 'obliquely'.  We have to use past experience to adequately establish the object of belief [to help us reject false habits?].  There is a particular quality of experience that is important, the focus on 'partes extra partes'[when I looked this up it means the existence of things adjacent to quite independent things.  Presumably we test the adequacy of objects of belief by seeing if they agree in some way with the objects completely independent of them, not logically entailed for example.  The term implies external relations between the parts not internal ones.  The quote from Hume also suggest that we treat each case and each experiment with the same weight, so that we can use the largest number of them, if they produce contradictory results to suggest adequate belief.  I wasn't happy with this argument when I encountered it in Hume, for obvious reasons—it assumes that independent scientists are all working independently on different but related problems instead of on coherent programmes; that these can all be summed; that belief is underpinned by a kind of vote -- among scientists?].  In this way, the understanding is used to grasp and sum the parts, and this is an necessary correction to the acts of the imagination which generates ideas, both false and adequate in the first place [so we are very close to Popper on the conjecture and refutation, although, of course, his argument is on refutation not quantitative agreement]. This is a kind of correction of rules by other rules.  But all the rules arise from habit, not from solid philosophical grounds.  Habit thus has different consequences, enabling extension in the imagination but correction in judgment.  However, at least habits can be tested for adequacy to experience.  We should confine our beliefs only to repeated cases that have been tested like this.  This applies particularly to corrective rules.  The tests should enable us to distinguish causes from affects, and thus to criticize illegitimate beliefs. Chapter four.  God and the world Religion can be seen as combining all the kinds of a rule: 'extensive and corrective rules of passions, and extensive and corrective rules of knowledge' (73).  Different forms of religion stress either passion or knowledge, so polytheism originates in the diversity of the passions and a irreducibility, while theism originates in the quest for unity in nature, a unity provided by resemblance and causality.  In both cases, religion generates a system of extensive rules.  Religion is not natural, not an instinct, for Hume, butts has a history.  Original polytheism offered a heaven entirely in the imagination, and shows a good example of confusing the accidental with the essential, especially in the 'strange encounters which we make in the sensible world', or in exceptional and fantastic circumstances' (74) which are seen as indicating divine essence.  Ruling deities display 'barbarity and caprice' as a result.  Idolatry also shows this tendency to take the extraordinary as the essence, in the form of mysticism or fanaticism: these extremes arise because morality is 'joyless', and even vice looks more fun [and is often the content of male bragging, says Hume]. Theism also has extensive rules, but this time I aimed at knowledge.  Religion is still a fiction, something constructed for the purposes of belief ['a simulacrum'].  Repetition and tradition are important.  Testimony is required as well as immediate miracles, and this gives an impression of knowledge.  Or analogies are used, say between the workings of machines and the world.  The accidental stands for the general here too, if we see human technical activity as somehow privileged as a clue to how god works.  Causality is also deployed in an attempt to explain God by his effect, and nature.  Sometimes nature is seen as fully determined by god, including disorder and evil, but it's also possible to offer a less close tie, and here, 'unknown effects' (75) must be invoked to explain the details of nature adequately.  This is really and misuse of causality for Hume, since it breaks the notion of proper causality that joins unconnected things, at least at the level of 'species'. The only proper objects, and the only proper repetitions are found in the world.  Any cosmologies [that add any external reasons] must be fanciful.  In this way, the theory of causality insist that only experience as a reference is legitimate. How can the rules of religion be corrected?  Miracles can be tested by reference to the world of knowledge, and experience here, of testimony, helps us calculate the probabilities.  There's also the possibility of contrary evidence, which cannot be included within general experience, incorporated into systems produced by understanding.  Suicide might be one of these if we see it as a major rejection of duties towards god or society.  Hume argues that it is not inherently more impious than any other act, however, but just another 'object of nature' (76): killing yourself is not cursing god, but can be a simple way of avoiding misery. The problem with religion is that any correction seemingly escalates into a total critique: miracles are either magic or nothing.  Correcting extensions of cultural rules can be positive and create the whole of culture, but religion is an exception, and words actually 'consecrate an object', instead of just being a useful term, a sense that can change.  This is the point at which philosophy reaches 'completion here in a practical battle against superstition'.  Once we start seeing the positive role of corrective rules, religion comes under critique, and remains only as something frivolous.  Religion reflects the passions, but not in a serious way, only in 'mere fancy'.  It follows principals of association resemblance and causality entirely within the fancy. Hume can see some function for religion nevertheless.  Faith does have this power of leading us to think of ourselves as a miracle, as something which can even run '"contrary to custom and experience"' (77).  This could be ironic, but there is a proper argument in the Dialogues, that religion does address what causes the principles of nature: god ceases to be anything positive but remains as the cause.  He might be responsible for what the 'original agreement between the principles of human nature and nature itself', a personification of the 'pre established harmony' that Hume cites.  In this way, he can think of 'something in general', as opposed to the specifics provided by a knowledge or experience, which will always be partial.  At this originary level, reason is found alongside 'instinct, generation, vegetation', each of which has an accounts of the origin of the world.  One implication is that there is something that pre exists all the normal oppositions in nature, something 'beyond good and evil'.  We get to this by considering the rival discourses of the origin of the world, which are all partial and involve dubious analogies: we have to transcend these perspectives [transcendental realism again].  It is similar to the notion of an elan vital says Deleuze, since there must be purpose, for Hume, although he is more skeptical about the notion of the design produced by infinite intelligence [I think he is remembering Bergson again here, where the elan vitale produces a series of specifics, intelligence and instinct, vegetable and animal.  If this is so for Hume, it would explain the remark that follows, that we can transcendental deduce an orderly system '"from the belly as well as from the brain"', that is from bodies and instinct rather than from human intelligence alone?]. Is this still confined just to the fancy?  Hume critiques fictitious causality if the repeating objects are not grounded in experience, or if we have to start with particular objects like the world itself, which does not repeat and is not really an object.  There is another case as well, based on the notion of the continuous existence of objects based on 'the coherence of certain impressions'(78): continuous existence is required to connect up appearances in order to reason causally.  Sometimes this is useful in generalizing from the appearance of only one object in experience, although strictly speaking 'the inference is fictitious'.  The object is given 'more coherence and regularity' and is actually found in perception [the grounds for classic objection to empiricism, of course].  In effect, we are suggesting that our perception of an object causes it to exist, and this contradicts the notion that there must be two separate entities in any causal conjunction.  Strictly speaking, this sort of attribution of continuous distinct existence is a fiction, 'not offered to any possible experience'(79) [seems a bit too strict if continuous existence is seen as a hypothesis to be tested by future experience?]. We clearly believe in continuous and distinct existence, but this is really a type of extension, like the formation of rules, generated by the imagination working on contiguity resemblance and causality.  It is a kind of extra coherence based on the success for coherence produced by a general rule.  It is a way of connecting the suppose regularity of rules in the imagination with actual identities of objects.  However, unlike general rules, the 'fiction of continuity' is not open to correction.  [strangely, there's a bit that said that the fiction of continuity 'should not be corrected'—because that would make science impossible?  Or language for that matter?]. There are different origins as well.  Extensive rules of knowledge appear in the form of laws and involve going beyond the principles that originally constituted experience.  These are rules subsequently affect understanding, while still appearing as 'general, elaborate experience'.  However, the possibility of continuous and distinct existence is not offered as an object of experience, and nor is it denounced as a false experience.  It is taken instead as 'the characteristic of the World in general' (80).  It is not an object itself, but rather 'the horizon which every object presupposes'.  This can also be a characteristic of religious belief, although religious belief is itself a composite, rules and beliefs in the existence of bodies, which does treat the world as a specific object and invokes the senses and the understanding. To the extent that we must believe in the existence of bodies, fiction must become a principle of human nature.  This is because a multiplicity of ideas has to be turned into a system of knowledge [in order to permit the specific activities of human nature?].  However, these ideas strode not just be seen as linked [grammatically] in the mind, but seen as something separate, something that does not depend on the senses, but 'truly objects'.  This is not just a matter of adding vividness, or relying on belief.  A system of ideas has to be developed that will extend the interruptions of mere appearance by constructing a fictional continued being which will fill in the interruptions and thus preserve '"a perfect and entire identity to our perceptions"'[all this is arguing backwards from what we know to be the case].  This completes 'the identity between system and world', even if the world itself is actually a fiction: such a fiction is therefore necessary [circularity here surely?].  This makes the fiction of continuity of objects a principle, not just one of those fictions in the imagination [again there is an implication that the fiction of continuity emerges from these earlier fictions].  By developing this step, the imagination actually constitutes and creates a world. Continuity is therefore 'an excessive effect of causality, resemblance, and contiguity', which are extended, really illegitimately, into a constitutive principle.  The principle is established in a number of steps or moments.  First we have to assume that something has an identity if it is invariable and continuous over time.  Second, there has to be a particular type of resemblance produced by similar considerations of the supposedly identical object in the form of an 'easy transition'.  Continuous existence therefore has to be suggested as a fiction in order to overcome any contradiction between discontinuous impressions [why should this contradiction need to be overcome?].  Hume argues that this fiction is both satisfactory and false, but overcoming contradictions between impressions seems to be crucial, so that we can reconcile both continuous and discontinuous ones.  This usage has become a principle, so this sort of opposition is right at the centre of the imagination.  Imagination contradicts reason, as we see if we reflect that there is no solid reason to presuppose a continuity, when perception suggests the opposite. The contradiction runs throughout, 'between extension and reflection, imagination and reason, the senses and the understanding'(81.  It is the principles of the imagination and the principles of reason that are in contradiction: it is not just that they do different things as before.  The contradiction cannot be overcome by one extending or correcting the other.  In particular, reason can not eliminate the fiction of continuity, even though it might oppose it.  Some new relation between the two needs to be established, one not found in ordinary consciousness but in philosophy.  This philosophy 'affirms distinct and independent existences'(82)).  So objects are distinct from perceptions, continuous and uninterrupted rather than variable.  We can retain reason and allow for the role of imagination.  This is not a full reconciliation, but requires us to accept alternate approaches.  It is difficult to fight off some of the fictional forms of causality as a result.  Neither reason nor the imagination is dominant, but both exist in the mind.  As a result 'this system is a delirium' (83), where reflection can carry on endlessly, but it cannot correct the principle of fictitious continuity. No philosophical system can escape such delirium, the role of the imagination, at least as long as it believes in the existence of continuous bodies as a principle [there is perhaps a suggestion that this principle is required for the other principles of contiguity causality and similarity to work].  Mind must permit this fiction or fancy: the 'insane is still natural'(83).  All philosophy has to operate with this fiction of an independent existence, although in different forms, such as substances, various occult objects.  Even new rigorous empiricist philosophy has not escaped.  The two processes of imaginative fiction and reason are even 'mutually implicated, since belief in the existence of bodies essentially encompasses causality' [thought so].  There is no alternative but to choose between the overall system, with its contradiction, or nothing, between '" a false reason and none at all"'.  This is still a state of madness.  We will never be able to pick out solid principles in the mind from the irregular operations of fancy, we can never simply choose the understanding of over the imagination, since the understanding alone will never deliver knowledge without the assumption of continuity.  It would involve a pathological form of understanding to let it challenge all forms of certainty [which is Hume's objection to skepticism?] So the mind can display three states:  'indifference' and fancy [understanding and imagination], but also madness, based on an insoluble contradiction between the principles, and thus delirium, 'the system of fictional reconciliations between principles and fiction' (84).  This means that the ultimate resource for the mind is 'nature or practice', with practice meaning moral and cognitive.  The mind must be 'referred to'[explained by?] nature. The opposite relation is seen in 'good sense'.  But to get to good sense we must acknowledge madness and solitude.  The only way in which the affections of the mind can be processed in the form of ideas involves 'a decisive contradiction'.  The best the mind can do is to produce 'the entire domain of general rules and beliefs', as some sort of 'middle and temperate region'.  Here contradictions are not resolved, but they are regulated by at least those corrections that are possible.  We also find [cognitive?] practices can regulate.  In this way, general rules and belief are necessary for both science and life [note that the original Deleuze puts all this in a very different way – I hope I have reduced it without distortion]. [It also occurs to me that the  self or subject must be one of these necessary fictions, as Boundas suggests. When we reason we know it is historical, social, variable, incoherent etc, but to deal with it, we have to extend it a continuous and stable status. Hence the impossibility of abolishing it in structuralism etc as Giddens has said. And in Deleuze? So we have to live with it as a contradiction and/or find delirious ways to proceed?] Chapter five.  Empiricism and subjectivity [Connects up the ideas of the empirical world as a series of parts with no inherent internal relation with the role of the subject—to provide those relations, sometimes just reflecting the principles of nature, but sometimes adding to them.  This is governed by the passions, the general form of which is utility]. Subjects move and develop themselves, showing a 'mediation and transcendence' (85) [I called it emergence].  At the same time, the subject is also reflected upon, leading to the characteristics of human nature: 'inference and invention, belief and artifice'.  These assume a knowing subject.  The subject acts upon particular conditions though, such as [natural] sympathy. Inference allows us to argue for the existence of something that is not given, that can be believed—that Rome existed, or that bread is nourishing.  Such argument and affirmation is central to us judging ourselves a subject.  But are arguments like this true?  What gives them their 'right'?  Hume initially insists that this is unknown, that we do not know the relation between what we sense, the qualities that result, and the powers of nature.  [We have to believe]. We also make moral aesthetic and social judgments when we reflect and are reflected upon. A process of extraction from affects and a transformation into the notion of a pure function is involved, and this helps us move from immediate partiality.  This is an example of artifice or invention.  It is the second power of subjectivity.  Invention and belief involves the creation of general rules or norms.  This has to be explained since neither are given in nature.  We can change the focus and ask about the subject and its relations to what is given—the subject is given [because it is a bundle of affects?] but so is that which transcends the  given, but in another way.  The given features synthesis and system.  Empiricism must take account of this.  Philosophy is always try to find some starting point for analysis in order to criticize consciousness and explain the totality of experience.  It takes a transcendental turn when it starts with something that is methodologically certain to explain the given, and then asks how subjects can also give something.  This requires 'a constructivist logic which finds its model in mathematics'(87) [that is, the subject, as some outside agent, reasons logically with the terms that are given?].  Empirical critique is different because it sees the given as immanent, where determinable hypotheses act in a rule governed way, and the model here is physics: the given is understood in such a way that it can constitute subjects, and the subject in turn has to constitute itself.  This is where empiricism is distinguished from transcendental and psychological arguments. The given for Hume is 'the flux of the sensible', a collection of impressions and images or perceptions.  It forms a totality so that being equals appearance.  It also shows movement and change [in a particular way—'without identity or law'].  We understand the imagination and the mind initially as something that collects perceptions and impressions, with some basic succession between them.  Empiricism here means not just that ideas are derived from impressions: these impressions and perceptions are themselves seen as 'distinct and independent' in principle.  'This is the principle of difference'.  Experience involves succession or other movements between the separable ideas, and this is the key to it.  There is no additional view about the role of either subjects or objective reality involved: 'it is not the affection of an implicated subject, nor the modification or mode of a substance' (88).  Nothing further is required to explain the existence of different and separable impressions.  If we want to use terms like substance, we must see it as not something in general, beneath perceptions, but something that can be applied to each individual perception. Hence 'The mind is identical to ideas in the mind' [it requires no additional powers or affects].  The mind does not even require a [pre existing] subject whose mind it is.  The subject emerges only from what is given [and from the activities of the mind, not the other way around].  Nor is there anything that we might call nature in general: perceptions are the only objects.  There are no primary qualities [and this somehow has implications for the idea of sufficient reason, criticized by Hume, perhaps because it implies that some objects have the ability to bring into being other objects, some primary quality?].  There can be no critique of substance or nature in themselves.  Ideas do not represent objects, but impressions, and these are innate.  There may well be real nature and real bodies, but we can only deal with the appearance of objects to our senses, and never know their real nature.  This is a necessary skepticism.  The relation between thoughts and nature will only arise anyway in the context of the subject questioning their own judgements, in the context of organizing them legitimately.  So the real problem then becomes explaining the powers which provide appearances and their connection with the principles which determine their constitution of the subject ['transcendent principles' to be precise (89)].  How does this harmony between the powers of nature and the subject arise?  As a result of this shift of emphasis, the given is neither a representation of nature nor a modification of the subject.  It does register on the senses and so 'it presupposes organs and even a brain', but we cannot go from this point is to argue that there must be some [bodily?] organization that produces the subject, or at least has the same principles—the physiological explanation of subjectivity.  Hume actually says such an explanation might be probable, even possible, but it could not be used to describe the principles of the physiological model itself.  There would still be a problem of explaining why the products of this organism took on the characteristics of human nature and the subject, especially its 'spontaneity'.  At best, physiology might explain a collection of impressions, but the given and the mind would still require explanation: they  'cannot call upon anything other than themselves' to do this. However, collections of impressions are arbitrary, and none of them seem essential to consistency.  If we take one away, we do not produce a contradiction.  We return to the notion of the divisibility of perceptions and ideas of them.  It is the smallest possible perception or idea that must be a constant for the mind, while more general perceptions or ideas can appear or disappear.  So the basis of an idea is something that is indivisible, at least as far as ideas go [real particles of sand might be subdivided infinitely, but the idea of a particle of sand would remain the same].  The smallest possible ideas are what forms mind and its notion of the given.  The same sort of argument can be found when discussing space or extension: in reality, space can be infinitely divided, but a kind of residual minimal idea of it remains as the fundamental constituent. The imagination combines in an infinite way minimum notions: '"unity," "indivisible point," "impression of atoms or corpuscles" "terminating idea"' (90).  No other idea or thing in general can exist below this minimum.  This is the basis for the objectivity of the mind.  There may well be things that are smaller than the smallest bodies that we detect, but there can be nothing smaller than the impressions we have of the bodies or the ideas that we form of them [so subatomic physics needs a special language or a mathematical notation?].  So the smallest impression is derived from our senses, unlike those found in science or mathematics. A 'sensible point or atom' must be visible and tangible.  It has no extension, since extension is not just a property of an atom.  Instead, we derive concepts from a succession of atoms, like notes played in succession on a flute which provide us with a sense of time for Hume.  Space similarly is the idea of sensible points in a particular arrangement or order. Thus space [and time] is a quality arising from the given: 'space and time are in the mind' (91).  Additionally, space requires a particular set of impressions based on particular senses, sight and touch, while time is a quality of any set of perceptions as long as there is a succession [and there always is in our mind].  We have a notion therefore of atoms and structures, elements and their distribution, parts which make up the whole through notions of space and time.  This is 'an objective and spontaneous mode', requiring no particular reflection or construction.  Subsequent notions of distance, contiguity, length, breath and thickness are similarly spontaneous. A subject can add to this spontaneous mode.  It therefore becomes a faculty, organizing collections into systems.  The mind synthesizes, invents and believes as we have seen.  Several problems follow: (1) As the mind becomes a subject, its simpler points of view—in relation to itself, to its senses and to time-- become reorganized.  Thus simple succession is now seen instead as 'duration, custom, habit and anticipation' (92).  Anticipation can be seen as a kind of habit, 'the thrust of the past and the elan towards the future' [see Schutz on the 'because of' and 'in order to motives'], combined in 'the same fundamental dynamism'.  Deleuze says this is close to Bergson on duree or memory.  Habit produces the subject because the subject can synthesize time, the present and the past in order to anticipate the future.  We see this in the importance of belief and invention [of morality] —subjects reflect upon themselves, overcome their partiality, set up institutions in order to achieve agreement.  This also implies the utilitarian notion, that we expect to conserve what it is we possess.  When this does not happen, we can find contradiction in matters such as the logic of property [standing for any institution], and we can then explain the further complexities of property, forms such as occupation or succession.  In a way then, they are all driven by anticipation and its frustrations, an inherent dynamism on the part of the subject.  The same might be said for the role of custom which can lead us to adjust our anticipations, and accept frustrations.  Developing institutions like property illustrates a concrete synthesis of time, and further creative and inventive implications. Belief similarly begins as a vivid idea connected to the present impression, a feeling, something felt rather than conceived.  There is a causal relation connecting an idea to an impression, and if we grasp it, we can see that it is also produced by a synthesis of time.  In the simplest case, causal relations are solidified by custom, an object is connected to its '"usual attendant"' (94).  Only through custom can we connect means to ends, the basis of all action.  The past yields a rule for future again.  The simple notion of time as succession in the mind has become a synthesis. Memory is also required.  Ideas of memory are a component in this synthesis as well as sense impression and ideas of imagination.  A memory is a retrieved impression 'that is still vivid'.  But memory alone does not synthesize time, because it reproduces structures of the given rather than actively transcending them.  Habit is the transcendental process which thus belongs particularly to the subject, and it operates on memories.  It does not actually require memory at all, but operates with the notion of the past which is not necessarily even actually given. Some syntheses appear to be spontaneous, as we take the past and the present as it is presented to us, and anticipations are no longer a problem either.  Normal agents experience all this is unproblematic, but philosophers must satisfy their curiosity and ask for an actual foundation.  The solution is to see past and present as matters that are only constituted within time, the operation of certain principles, and that these also provide syntheses.  What happens is first that experience shows us a multiplicity and a repetition of similar cases, spanning the past.  Habit provides another principle which means we want to move from one object to a second which follows it, implying 'time as a perpetual present to which we can, and must, adapt'(96).  In its operations, understanding and imagination, the mind itself forms up notions of past or future compared to the present.  A belief is a particularly vivid form of this operation. (2) The organism is no longer seen as simply something that collects perceptions.  It has to develop a 'a dual spontaneity', one spontaneously settling on particular relations, as 'the animal spirits' connect up contiguous ideas, and this has to be a physical spontaneity as opposed to the relations and associations already in the mind.  In this way, the body can also be seen as a subject.  There is also a 'a spontaneity of disposition' (97).  We know that impressions can be either of those of the sensation or those of reflection, with the latter being particularly important for constituting the subject.  But reflection can never produce new and original ideas unless in special circumstances.  Sensations are related to the body and its procedures which produce impressions, and the case of spontaneity above, with the animal spirits, seems to suggest a role for the body informing impressions for reflection.  Hume discusses this best with looking at the passions which produce dispositions, as when hunger produces a disposition to eat.  However, there are other passions like pride or love where there is no specific bodily dispositions.  In these cases, passions have to be assisted in their production, connected to other causes.  For example, an external object may produce passions and [possessing such an object] may produce a bodily disposition.  Alternatively, the passions may produce a disposition which 'spontaneously incites' an idea, one which corresponds to an object.  (98) (3) What principles constitute a subject in the mind, transform the mind into a subject?  We know that these are supposed to be the principles of human nature, especially 'principles of association and principles of the passions', and we can take utility to be the general form of the second.  Subjects pursue goals or intentions in the name of utility, choosing the best means and establishing relations among ideas [instrumentally?  Possibly in experience as well?].  This is what transforms a collection of perceptions into a system. These principles are not found in ideas themselves, but in the subject.  [To develop this to its extreme] the causes that operate on ideas 'determine a subject which alone establishes relations'[determine must mean help to produce, or produce the characteristics of, rather than strictly cause? Implies some 'will to consciousness'?].  Truth is connected to subjectivity, as long as it is not a [grammatical] tautology, if relations are external to ideas, and this explains the whole problem of the subject [why it develops and what it does].  The relations between ideas when collected produce a subject, and this is a common argument in all empiricism [it explains the idea that subjects are, variously, pluralistic and real].  Hume actually also suggests that some kinds of relation depend entirely on the ideas which are being compared, such as 'resemblance, contrariety, degrees of quality, and propositions of quantity and number' (99).  Others can vary without being fundamentally changed, like 'identity, temporal and spatial relations, causality'.  But these are still external to ideas for Hume, since they are only applications of the mind, so that equality, say  is not a property in figures themselves, '"but arise[s] merely from the comparison, which the mind makes betwixt them"'.  Ideas might be different in terms of whether they are collective or individual, say, or in the modes in which they appear, but they are all external to the ideas. Thus spatial and temporal relations like contiguity, or anteriority help us relates a variable object with a structure or a totality where it is located.  These notions have been already provided by the mind, but it is also the case that contiguity and anteriority are relations.  There must be some external influence at work to make them relations [not impressions alone of course].  If we consider identity, it implies a fictional relation [argued above, using the term continuous existence].  Causality is a transcendent relation [moving beyond the cases that are actually given].  These are puzzling relations, because they select from ideas which can also be understood as individual [maybe, 100]: thus resemblance only compares certain qualities, proportions consider only quantities, notions of degrees of quality compare only intensities.  However, these properties are not internal, since the objects concerned are still only a collection until a relation is applied to them: they do have particular properties, such as their indivisibility, but this alone does not provide them with the ability to be added or subtracted, or evaluated. What is happening here is that a particular relation is being attributed because particular circumstances suggest that it is proper to do so.  There is a normative element, a judgment, connected to subjectivity or will.  What happens is that circumstances suggest associations. The principles at work in nature --  contiguity, resemblance and causality -- are now considered to be the origin of relations in the mind.  Contiguity specifically addresses the senses, causality time, and resemblance imagination.  Together, they suggest connections between ideas, appearing as a natural quality of the mind, really, an external quality of nature.  Collections are operated on, 'designated to each one of us'(101) by human nature, but this is only possible when the mind becomes a subject, something to which ideas are designated: conversely, a subject is something that has complex ideas.  The whole thing is presented in language: in speech, the subject designates to reality ideas which have been designated to it. Ideas themselves cannot account for the relations are established among them, since these come from the principles of human nature 'or the principles of [social?] association'.  Complex ideas of relation are prompted by particular circumstances, but particular circumstances themselves might be being produced arbitrarily by the imagination.  What is happening is that some complex ideas do not require particular prompting, but are 'immediate or direct', requiring no additional idea.  These include relations between adjacent colors or two contiguous objects.  This will not explain relations that cover longer distances, such as those between nonadjacent colors [where others intervene].  Hume wants to distinguish between these immediate relations as natural, reserving the term philosophical relation to the less obvious ones.  Nature normally presents itself as 'easygoing and immediate', while mediations exhaust these qualities. For these mediated relations, the qualities of the ideas being connected can appear to be too general, involving too great a choice, and here the whole associationist approach might be limited by being unable to explain particular, concrete contents in relations.  Bergson, for example, argues that if you go back far enough, you can always find a common element to any two images, but we lose the ability to explain why one specific image evokes the other, given an infinite number of resemblances.  Hume had to agree that association of ideas is best for explaining habits of thought, common notions of good sense, general ideas about general needs shared by everybody, but it was no good for understanding particular minds and how they work.  We need casuistry to explain why a particular connection between ideas seems appropriate, even in cases where the general connection is arbitrary.  Circumstances again are going to provide 'sufficient reason' (103). Something has to provide a particular affectivity.  Hume tended to focus on the more general operations, but he admits that circumstances can produce specific affects.  A set of circumstances individuates passions, interests and needs [and thus subjects as well].  The passions are particularly important here in particularizing the principles of association.  Particular cases enter the imagination and make associations more likely to be used, to spring to mind next time.  So the principles of association provide the form of the subject, and principles of the passion provide singular content.  This is how subjects are individuated.  We should not see these processes as in opposition—for example, the passions are also universal and constant [their combination is specific and particular? We need the haecceity here?].  It still remains to be seen how exactly they lead to individuation.  A clue lies in the necessary practicality which lies at the heart of subjectivity, a tendency to link motive and action, means and end.  There can be no other theoretical basis for subjectivity, another 'fundamental claim of empiricism' (104).  Really, this follows from saying that the subject is constituted within the given [rather similar to Bergson's idea that practical reasoning is so dominant because we had to learn how to solve material problems?] Chapter six.  Principles of human nature. [Includes suggestions about how philosophy might be criticized, entirely internally. Then a recap, and a consideration of the role of philosophy to amplify nature, perhaps emerge form it again -- as in causality which requires more than just an experience of conjunction of objects] So, atomism relates to ideas as long as relations are external to them.  Associationism suggests that relations are external to ideas and 'depend on other causes' (105).  This means that many objections to Hume are misplaced. All great philosophers have been criticized incorrectly.  Objections often criticize theories without looking at the nature of the problem which provides the theory with the foundation and structure.  Hume has been criticized for itemizing the given.  Sometimes this view is traced to his personal views or tastes: 'what a philosopher says is offered as if it were what he does or is what he wants', in a 'fictitious psychology'.  Such criticisms are really important in understanding a philosophical theory.  It does just that there must be a foundation for a theory, but it should look at philosophical foundations, especially the question that has been developed, or elaborated 'to the very end' (106), covering all the implications.  It should spell out what things would be if the question were 'good and rigorous', when they reveal their essence or nature after being subordinated to a particular question.  The question can be criticized as impossible or incorrectly raised, and alternative possibilities from other questions might be demonstrated.  However everything starts with the critique of the question, and 'there is no critique of solutions, there are only critiques of problems'.  Thus we can criticize Descartes some notion of doubt on the grounds that it relates back to a problem which the cogito responds to, and examine the conditions of the problem.  However, in general, 'most of the objections raised against the great philosophers are empty'.  It is not enough to say that things are not like that.  Rather it is an issue of knowing whether the question which presents these things in a particular light is good or rigorous, that the question does not 'force the nature of things enough' (107) [produce testable results?], or that another way of raising the question would be better.  There are always psychological and sociological factors involved, but these 'are relevant only to the question', and might explain motivation for asking it, but not whether it is a good one. [So Marx and even Foucault need not apply? [Really evasive this, in my view. So it doesn't matter if the actual empirical predictions or 'facts' are wrong? This can only work IF the philosophy in question has no 'facts' and is entirely definitional, tautologous, like maths OR if 'facts' are always internal to theories with no possibility of intersubjective agreement beyond them, or anything like a 'basic statement'. Deleuze himself cites 'facts' though. as something self-evident, requiring no further argument, a tactical limitation of philosophical critique. Maybe it is just an acknowledgement that questions always have presuppositions? We can see the tautological form emerging below with the definition of experience as having only perceptions not relations -- so relations must be external etc]. Hume explains the question of the subject as asking how it is 'constituted inside the given' [good sociological question then].  We have to explore this by suggesting that relations are external to ideas [ie that there is a given outside of our idea of it]: both atomism and associationism are implications of the question.  It would still be possible to subject this to philosophical critique, but that is not the task here.  Instead it is to show how empiricism is defined as a result of a precise problem and its conditions.  Other definitions of empiricism are not Hume's, as when Kant sees empiricism as a matter of deriving knowledge only from experience, without asking why this point of view might be developed and how it relates to the original question.  In its broadest claim, this definition would cover any philosopher.  It is not a satisfactory definition: knowledge is not the most important thing for empiricism except as a means to practical activity.  Knowledge 'does not have this univocal and constitutive aspect that we [normally] give it'(108). Instead, experience has two aspects, neither of which are constitutive.  If we see experience as a collection of perceptions, relations must be something additional [entirely definitional!].  We have to discuss instead the principles of association, which become the principles of human nature, and it is these, working on experience, which constitutes a subject which can transcend experience.  If we define experience to mean the conjunction of past objects, we still have problems with principles that do not come from experience themselves—something produces a conjunction between experience and observations, and, as we saw, this will be habit as a principle of nature.  Hume is not interested in any other origin for these relations, but focuses instead on their effects.  Thus 'empiricism is not geneticism: as much as any other philosophy, it is opposed to psychologism'. It would be more precise to see empiricism as a theory which says knowledge is derived from the given, but even here, there are two stages in which the given appears: as a collection of ideas and experience, but also as a subject which can transcend experience and suggest relations which do not depend on it.  So the two stages [the immediate and the emergent] work as a dualism.  The question then becomes when does the emergent side actually emerge, including how does the subject get constituted inside the given.  Proper empiricism must operate with some form of this duality, which can appear in a number of diverse forms.  By contrast, any nonempiricist theory assumes that in some way, 'relations are derived from the nature of things'(109) [or subjects?].  The two sides of the duality do 'accord, for the accord is a fact' [ie a taken for granted], requiring a metaphysics.  This turns on the problem of purposiveness.  Collections of ideas turn into systems, rules of nature into representations, natural phenomena into mental representations and so on.  Kant saw this as a basis for critique of Hume: there must be rules which control the operation of the imagination, if the imagination is to be active, and names given constantly.  This was something a priori for Kant, some synthetic unity.  Kant was right to focus on the imagination as an issue.  Indeed 'empiricism is a philosophy of the imagination and not a philosophy of the senses' (110): for the subject to be constituted, the imagination must become a faculty.  This can only emerge as a result of some principles which synthesize representations, but Kant argues that Hume just assumed, by asking that particular question about the origin of the subject, that this relation was a matter of agreement between human nature and nature.  There has to be some accord otherwise knowledge could not emerge: relations between representations and things would appear to be always accidental.  But for Kant, the relation was considered the other way around, so that the given agreed with the subject, and nature with the nature of reasonable beings, so that nature could only become a set of phenomena, requiring some a priori synthesis, within nature itself: 'things presuppose a synthesis whose source is the same as the source of [human notions of] relations' (111).  Critical philosophy is not empiricism for Kant.  'Transcendence is an empirical fact [and it is that that] makes transcendence immanent to something' [produces an object?].  Imagination features a priori syntheses, and it is those that produce, and are contained within the 'synthetic unity of apperception'. For Hume, 'nothing within thought surpasses the imagination, nothing is transcendental', because our nature produces synthetic principles in the form of experience: the objects of the experience do not matter [and indeed can be fanciful?].  What stops these syntheses being simply accidental and contingent is purposiveness, 'the [willed?] agreement of the subject with the given', its powers, and thus with nature (112).  There are several different expressions of it reflecting particular steps or dimensions of the developing subject.  Establishing such links in practice assumes purposiveness, which will involve both the principles of association and the principles of passion, as a unity.  As these resonate increasingly loudly, so the subject develops.  [And resonance is a metaphor used by Hume himself, where passions act as string instruments do]. The subject is affected by principles and is subsequently activated.  Thus the terms passive and active do not really apply as total descriptions: the subject is both once it has emerged.  As the principles deepen their effect, activity grows.  Subjectivity is a process, with diverse moments: using Bergson's terminology, it begins as an imprint and progressively turns into a machine.  We should start with pure impression, however.  Principles produce impressions of reflection [in this mirroring sense?].  But reflection can proceed or process: some are selected as particularly important.  This cannot be explained in terms of a passive reflection model.  The mind must possess faculties which do not depend just on nature as the provider of impressions: it must have a nature of its own, one that constitutes subjects.  Selected impressions are then chosen for [active] reflection, selection leads to constitution of the subject.  Passions [actually the principle of passions] bring about the first selection, using 'impressions of pleasure and pain'(113).  Principals of association, however, choose selected impressions to make them into a composite.  This determines reflection in a way which does 'not contain any virtualities' (114) [Deleuze argues that the impressions of sensation do develop virtualites—some notion that sensations belong to some possible whole?  Reflection works with specifics? So Deleuze would not agree with Hume here? Unless the argument is that special philosophical procedures are needed to grasp the virtual,not just good sense?]. In general, the principles of [human] nature 'designate' impressions of sensation, and these then lead to 'an impression of reflection'.  These principles are both natural and 'inevitably few in number'.  We should simply take the list as 'a fact', with no need to explore or investigate further.  The principles of association are the old favorites contiguity, resemblance and causality, and these have three effects 'general ideas, substances, and natural relations' which are understood as impressions of reflection.  Passions are still involved, but here they mean 'calm passion', appearing as 'a tendency, custom, freedom, or disposition'.  General ideas look like this, when resemblance means we can group together more specific ideas.  This general term, sometimes when connected with a particular [vivid?] usage, can lead to 'a habit, a strength, and the power to evoke any other particular ideas of the same group'.  It produces an impression of reflection [showing it has been reflected from nature?].  When it comes to substances, contiguity and causality are more important in grouping certain ideas, and we can discover new members of this group as we explore.  Natural relations draw from each of the principles and 'produce an easy transition from one to another'. In practice, [understanding 'the action of the principles'], is more difficult, because principles can have other effects, including some not examined yet.  These take the form of 'abstract ideas, philosophical modes and relations'.  Abstract ideas can be seen as similar to general ones [although they seem more specific, based on two actual resemblances and 'are distinctly apprehended'].  Philosophical modes and relations are more difficult.  We should see them as connected to natural relations like the modes of substances.  It looks as if they are moving beyond a selective role for the principles of association, driven by something other than these principles: 'affectivity [the quality of yielding affects?] and circumstance' (115).  It is those elements that justify reflections of impressions that would otherwise look nonnatural or arbitrary.  The modes of philosophical analysis are also distributed more widely than those which tend to be contiguous or causally related in nature: the ideas of philosophy are not just based on those two.  Examples include concepts [practices?] of the dance [affectivity and circumstance] and of beauty [something generated by additional philosophical processes?]. Causality is still special.  It is based on the principles of experience and habit, but it is not only a simple relation: it includes inference.  It is the only relation that does this, which makes it unique among the natural relations.  The inference is what amplifies its connection with natural order, but it is still produced by natural relations.  However, it also requires philosophical relations, which point out the 'constant conjunction within experience', and which produces a further experience of conjoined objects that might not have been conjoined by the imagination alone.  This implies a separate function for philosophical relations in addition to natural ones [so philosophy is like an emergence of normal thought?].  Philosophical thought therefore exists on a different level from experience which selects and habituates, because it develops comparisons rather than just associations.  However, habit can also create an 'equivalent experience...  fictional repetitions that render it independent of reality'. The passions also have this constitutive role as well as just designating impressions of sensations. The system of pleasures and pains also can [initially] appear as a natural impulse or instinct, but this works at its clearest with 'properly physiological needs, as for example, hunger, thirst and sexual desire'(116)—these are direct passions.  There are also indirect ones, which still have the same roots: an idea that excites it, an impression, distinct pleasures and pains.  But the reflection can take different directions, toward pleasure and pain, good and evil on the one hand, but also toward an actual object produced by passions themselves.  Passions can engender an apparently primitive instinct, but can also inspire a different kind of organization, attaching emotions to ideas.  The second one is the indirect passion.  Where 'good and ill are [immediate and] certain' we have joy and sadness,  where the outcome is [still immediate but] less certain we have hope and fear, when 'they [passions] are [less immediate but] merely entertained' (117) we get desire and aversion.  If outcomes depend on us, we have 'the will'.  Of the indirect passions, 'pride and humility' are fundamental, both relating to an idea of the self, and 'love and hate', produced when we consider the idea of another person. These last ones are indirect because they relate to an object linked to the idea.  Pride, for example might be linked to our possessions or our personal appearance, while the same objects have no impact if there is no connection with our selves.  Indirect passions therefore relate both to good and evil, but to other qualities as well, to related ideas, to particular objects of passion.  Others require connection with principles of association, especially contiguity and causality.  The direct passions can be connected themselves with more indirect ones. We have a useful duality again, and a method for studying the passions [certainly a lot better than modern stuff on the emotions].  The passions are not primary, nor should they be seen as just attached to other factors like the imagination or natural competition between men.  They have their own processes, two distinct parts that can combine into a composite, a physics. Is there one simple movement of human nature which explains both processes of understanding and passions?  If so, it emerges from combination as above, so empiricism 'is a kind of "physicalism"'(119) [interesting implications for the later concept of the haecceity?], where the physical is contrasted to the geometric, or the transcendental or psychological.  When we understand subjectivity, as we have to, we resort to principles which agree with what is given [which are found in nature].  These indirectly produce human experience, although there is no 1 to 1 correspondence [but a reflection] between objects and experience.  In this sense, human nature reflects a 'transformed mind' (119) [as an emergent whole].  As a whole it is indivisible, although it can be fragmented by considering the separate principles that produce it.  In other words, the subject is activated mind, but only because the mind is initially passive in relation to the principles that produce it. The point about fragmentation means that the subject itself can be seen as 'decomposed into as many imprints as there are imprints left in the mind by the principles', decomposed into impressions of reflection [meaning reflection produced by principles, as in mirroring].  However, once constituted, 'the subject itself is indivisible, nonfragmentable, active, and global' (120).  In order to reconcile these two possibilities, the principles of nature are themselves to be seen as ordered, each  'finally and absolutely subordinated to the others' [in [articular circumstances?].  The principles are not equal in value.  Thus the passions direct and give sense to the activities of the subject, while the associations provide 'projects, goals, intentions, occasions, an entire practical life and affectivity'.  However, in some circumstances the passions become primary, but this is only because impressions of sensation have already been chosen according to practical necessity and general needs.  [Puzzlingly, Deleuze argues that this shows 'the principles of the passions are absolutely primary'.  Maybe the argument is that the passions can take over because they are already socialized, so there is no need to attempt to relate to social life independently?].  The relation between association and passion can be seen as the same as the association between the possible and the real [but only if we accept that the real 'precedes the possible', that is takes priority in practical life?].  Associations provide the subject with a possible structure, but the passions are required 'to give it being and existence'. This comes over in Hume as belief displaying a [functional] need for sympathy [social agreeability], and causality for property.  However, when Hume offers a critique of relations what he means is that we should not take common representations as a criterion for the relations [although he seems to do exactly that especially with property, and this is the ideological element that just sees property as natural?  Not necessarily only private property though?].  Relation should be seen instead as leading to an activity, something grounded not in adequate representation but in practice.  There is no argument that subjects are naturally knowing subjects.  They make associations for utilitarian reasons.  All that mental associations do is clarify 'a set of possible means for a practical subject' (121).  Their real goals are provided by morality, passions, political and economic order.  This sort of [social] purposiveness can be seen as a secondary form of a primary version which ensures the agreement between human nature and nature. Conclusion.  Purposiveness So principals of association lead to natural relations among ideas, 'an entire network similar to a system of channels' (123).  We do not rely on accidents to connect ideas, since they are connected on the basis of a principle, so that 'ideas naturally follow one another'.  This develops a reason in the imagination, and constancy in the fancy.  However, morality would requires something different to suggest a definite direction among the otherwise reciprocal relations.  Relations themselves cannot determine priorities, since they are always external to the terms.  Human action, however requires both an origin and an end, with ends also setting limits to what we need to know.  Morality is like action, with a direction between ideas, and never a simple reciprocity.  Causality also contains a notion of irreversibility, but this is a privileged relation, and it still depends on some initial interest which makes us find the causes and distinguish them from the effects. The principle of the passions provides the ends of activity, something that fixes the mind in the sense of 'nailing it down', providing it with 'centres of fixation' (124).  We can register pleasures and pains, but we also have to decide that pleasure is good, and we can really go no further than this, say by asking why is pleasure experienced as good.  This becomes a principle for action, linking action and relations, in the form of connections between means and ends.  However this is not just a simple relation but a 'nexus', including a series of means, and an effect that will interest us.  Causality is still involved[as  acomponent?] since means can be seen as causes and ends as effects [so we have to be able to predict action and its effects on the basis of the judgment of causes and effects]. However, the means are not just causes, because they aim not just at any effect but at a good one, and at something achievable.  Means and ends relate to each other on the basis of utility, and causality only helps achieve desired effects. Subjective tendencies to achieve and pursue a good end arise from 'principles of affectivity, impressions of reflection, and the passions'(125).  Good ends are positively promoted as well as just achieved, producing character traits.  However, these character traits are not always useful in all circumstances [Hume's example says that in the Punic wars, caution was appropriate sometimes and enterprise in other circumstances: the best actor is able to '"suit his temper to any circumstances"'].  The same goes when we evaluate historical acts, selecting what is useful, not only things, but 'passions, feelings, and characters' (126): it is a judgment about the utility of characters not things that characterizes moral judgment.  Reason helps us untangle circumstances, but the overall judgment or feeling, sentiment, is also needed once we make a choice in favor of the useful. Morality speaks where reason remain silent.  Reason is too cool and disengaged to be an adequate motive to action, although it does select means to achieve happiness.  Taste [a set of preferences] is more important in constituting happiness and becoming a motive to action. These combined principles turn our mind into a subject, and the fancy into human nature [assuming that tastes are generalized and made social?].  The mind is able to act like a subject in the sense of developing relations in the name of overall ends.  Again we see that the subject emerges from the given.  To be precise, this emergence ends in, is 'grounded in', the fancy (127) [the speculative aspect of imagination, as ever].  Once the mind has become a subject, it prefers some ideas rather than others, it is activated as a response to particularly vivid impressions which will lead to 'certain laws of communication, distribution, and allotment'.  Vividness is communicated to ideas and to other ideas that are related [this might imply that vividness is something located in the given, but...] Vividness is not produced by principles, but 'is the property and the fact of fancy—its irreducible and immediate datum, to the extent that it is the origin of the mind'[still leaves it open as to whether it is found only as an operation of fancy?]. With knowledge, the activity of the mind as a subject is able 'always to move from the known to the unknown', and this is what transcendence means here.  The mind is schematic, with general rules, and this is aimed at increased extension.  Knowledge is only a relation between parts 'such that we can determine one part by reference to another'.  There is no other kind of intensive knowledge, hence the objections to general cosmology or theology.  What the schema of knowledge delivers is relations which settle 'matters of fact and relations among ideas', moving towards unknown circumstances or to unknown relations.  Here, Hume distinguishes between proof and certainty.  Proof relates to probability and involves schema that involve causes, like arguments found in physics.  Relations between ideas are more like mathematics, where unknown relations are inferred from properties that are known [if we know the first two angles of a triangle, we can infer the third one].  Here, it is not causes but general ideas that are involved.  General ideas serve as 'the rule of the production of the ideas that we need' (128).  Thus in maths, we can produce a certain idea by deploying another idea as a rule of construction [Hume's example here is how we can construct the idea of a very large number by invoking multiplication, say, even though we can not form an adequate idea of it directly].  Causality operates by developing belief based on relating a known object to another which is unknown. This form of extension is also 'excessive'[having no limit in principle?].  The limit arises because some impressions are particularly vivid, and this is not derived from rules or principles, but from the fancy.  It is similar to the argument that there is a whole set of possibles which come into being [must do for rationalists, apparently].  Vividness helps us select between the relations, and not all relations communicate it.  However, relations also have to be 'firm, constant, and invariable' as well as vivid, and to operate according to causality, as we saw, if they are to be legitimate. Impressions can also produce relations which are 'fabricated' and 'feigned', taking the form of 'mirages' or something entirely 'solicited by fancy'. 'Passions and dispositions of the moment' can reinforce these.  So the subject is under pressure from something else, 'a self, which is always a slave to its origin'.  Luckily, as we know, excessive rules can be corrected by other rules, so causes eventually must conform to experience, and general ideas must conform to notions of space and how it is defined for us.  Nevertheless, 'an entire polemic between the subject and the fancy is thus carried out inside the self...  inside the subject itself' (129) [so having promised some clarity by distinguishing the subject from the social self, Deleuze then says they are the same anyway!].  Another way of putting this is to see a polemic going on 'between the principles of human nature and the vividness of the imagination...  between principles and fictions'.  We have already shown how some fictions can be corrected by knowledge, although there is a fiction at the very heart of the notion of the world in general. Turning to the passions, we fix the mind by giving it ends, and activate it by producing motives and dispositions to act, particular interests, once there is a means to achieve those ends.  They produce a '"natural constitution"'for the mind.  They appear as affects [attached to and directed to] '"a proper limited object"'.  However circumstances and other relations also affect action.  An additional difference between knowledge and the passions can be found here, since 'in the case of the passions, at least by right, all relations and all circumstances are already given'[very strange example from Hume about Nero killing his mother, where the motive of revenge overcame all the other relations and circumstances].  Again anticipated reactions become part of the constitution of the mind as well, implying that our preferences and inclinations produce general views about objects, not just particular attachments or immediate pleasures.  These mean that the passions as well as knowledge become 'an ineluctable datum [inevitable fact] of the fancy'(130).  What the imagination does is to turn particular attachments between affects and objects into general views about those objects.  This generalization arises from the ability of the principles of the passions to 'resonate, extend themselves, and succeed in being reflected'.  Thus reaction is productive, and what results in reflection is invention. General interest is one of those inventions, where resonance in the imagination, and the communication brought about by passions, go beyond partiality.  They also become 'the natural constitution of the mind as a feeling for humanity or as culture', a reaction to the totality of circumstances, the production of a general rule for action, so we can pronounce things as 'good or bad in general'.  So we can judge Nero as bad, whatever his particular circumstances.  This moral schema can be seen as a 'grounded' activity of the mind [that is not entirely fanciful].  However the moral schema are intensive rather than extensive, involving not moving from known to unknown relations or circumstances, but reacting to known circumstances and relations, enabling us to feel '"a new sentiment of blame or approbation"' (131). We can see a circle as an object of knowledge and define it as a relation of parts.  As an object of aesthetic feeling, however the circle stands for a whole.  The mind can react according to its own constitution.  Knowledge is 'in the last analysis grounded in the imagination', because the rules of understanding are.  The same goes for the rules of the passions, which are equally grounded in the imagination.  For both, 'the fancy finds itself at the foundation of a world', of culture and 'of distinct and continuous existence'.  Both schema have corrective rules, but in knowledge, this is devoted to countering excess in the form of fictional relations.  However, the idea of the world and continuous existence must itself be based on a fiction that cannot be corrected, as we saw.  Excessive moral rules also produce 'a wholly fictitious world', but the principles of the passions still apply.  A fictitious world here integrates all passions that exclude each other based on particular interests, establishing a general interest  [the fiction of a functional society governed by shared belief?] The fictitious world also justifies passions [makes them adequate to their principles], explains all the effects as attributable to a common cause [maybe—as a kind of false equality between the passions on the grounds that at least they are all passions?], and makes the effects of the principle equal to the principles [which might mean that all passionate interventions can be justified on the basis that the passions are important to the whole constitution of the mind? OR that actual passions have effects consistent with the principle of passions?].  Overall, 'a harmony is established between fiction and the principles of the passions' (132). Thus the imagination has an important role in establishing a relation between the principles of human nature.  Reason suggest that we require belief to guarantee causality and distinct existence, although these beliefs might contradict reason.  Human nature allows us not to have to choose, because such a choice is not fundamental to human nature.  All is well because knowledge and other associations are always 'for the sake of the passions'.  There is an emergent subject, with a necessary '"intentional purposiveness"' [which turns us away from abstract philosophical contradictions, as in positivism] We can never use associationism alone to explain the psychology of knowledge: instead, associationism is a theory that explains 'practice, action, morality and law' The subject is both the 'product of principles, and a mind that transcends itself'.  The subject involves both the principles of nature and a fancy which grounds them.  The subject is more than just the mind, which is only a collection of impressions and ideas: impressions provide vividness, and ideas reproduce impressions [reflection in this sense of mirroring].  This appears in the two fundamental characteristics 'resonance and vividness', and the subject emerges when it's possible to mobilize vividness to make it communicate between ideas, especially when these ideas resonate together to produce something new.  Both belief and invention are 'modes of transcendence', although both are related to 'the original characteristics of the mind'.  Both modes are modifications of the mind, but are also 'caused by the principles...  principles of association and principles of passion'. The point is not to ask what the principles are, but rather what they do: 'They are not entities; they are functions' (133) [in the sociological sense too].  The importance thing is their effects, how they constitute a subject from the given, one that can invent and believe, as principles of human nature.  Beliefs [are transcendental in that they] anticipate.  Vividness also helps anticipation, overcoming memory and senses [by bending them to a purpose?].  Anticipation means there must already be relations between ideas, however, so that we already know that things are conjoined in the given, but this also implies the operation of particular principles in experience, or in resemblance and contiguity.  There must also be habit [which produces the belief that the future will be the same as the present].  The given on its own would never produce adequate ideas of the relations between its parts, even with similarities—the imagination can always conceive other qualities perfectly intelligibly [even if they are stupid]. Subjects also have to conserve themselves, reacting to the given, either by instinct or invention.  This implies a holism, a connection between the parts.  The given by itself would never construct such a whole.  We have to supply it with a nature, through belief and invention.  Again, these wholes are not just derived from the given, but have to be 'purely functional'.  These functions must agree with the powers that supposedly create the given, although we don't know what these powers are.  However purposiveness involves an agreement between intentions and [what is taken to be] nature.  This agreement can never be established but can only appear as 'the weakest and emptiest of thoughts'.  Philosophy is better employed trying to theorize what it is we're doing, 'not as a theory of what there is'.  Human action has its principles, but being can only be grasped as something which has a synthetic relation with those principles.  back to Deleuze page