A Treatise of Human Nature

Hume explains that he considers passions or emotions to be secondary or reflective impressions, while the primary or original impressions are feelings of pain or pleasure (327). He further divides original impressions into categories. His first pair of categories are calm (sense of beauty, admiration for art) and violent (hatred, pride, grief). Hume calls these violent impressions “passions.” He then splits passions into two further categories: direct and indirect. Direct passions are the ones responding immediately to pain or pleasure, including despair, desire, aversion, fear, hope, joy, and grief. The indirect passions also derive from our feelings of pleasure and pain, but they are shaped by other factors as well. Hume lists as examples of indirect passions love, generosity, pride, ambition, vanity, humility, pity, envy, and hatred (328).

Hume begins by looking at the passions of humility and pride. Since Hume admits we cannot describe the feeling of any passion, Hume focuses on two characteristics of the passions: cause and object. The cause is what triggers the passion, like making a work of art. Also, the cause itself is the quality (what about the cause that inspires pride) and the subject (which would be the person who feels pride). Human needs and impulses cause us to be the subject of humility and pride. However, causes come from origins more complex than just the human condition—Hume calls these origins “natural” (332-33).

There are three natural origins for pride, all of which come out of our ideas and their relations. These are the association of ideas (when one idea is related to another), the association of impressions (when one passion resembles another, like anger and envy), and mutual assistance (when we feel the same passion toward both one object and a related object). When it comes to pride, pride is caused when we have an impression of pleasure from something related to us, whether something we own, something we did, or something about ourselves. As for humility, it has a similar cause. It comes about when we have a negative impression from something related to ourselves. For example, owning a beautiful house will give us pride, but if something happens to make the house ugly or disfigured, we develop humility (340).

However, Hume admits there are five limitations. First, the relation of ideas must be close in order to be the cause of pride or humility. Second, “the agreeable or disagreeable object [must] be not only closely related, but also peculiar to ourselves, or at least common to us with a few persons” (343). Third and fourth, the cause has to be related to ourselves and to outside observers and be one that is important and long-standing. Finally, general rules and custom affect our passions, including pride and humility. In other words, social rules and the culture around us have an impact on what causes our emotions.

After listing the limitations, Hume brings up three causes of pride and humility. Hume begins with vice and virtue, which he calls “the most obvious causes of these passions” (346). Either because of human nature or from our cultural upbringing, we have impressions of pleasure from virtue and impressions of pain from vice. Similarly, beauty produces pleasure and deformity provokes pain. When we feel that something about us or closely related to us is deformed or beautiful, it causes humility or pride respectively. The last cause Hume discusses is external objects. Unlike vice and virtue or beauty and deformity, Hume argues external objects do not cause pride and humility on their own. Instead, they must have a relation of causation or contiguity to something about ourselves. For example, a person with aristocratic ancestry is most likely to feel pride in it if their family is still wealthy and has owned the same land for many generations (358-59).

Hume notes we also take pride in more abstract things, like wealth or political power, or humility from poverty even if we do not have past experience of these things. Hume argues people can receive pleasure or discomfort from anticipating what they will do with power or wealth “without any dread of punishment” (363), or what they would do without either power or money. Further, Hume suggests another reason we develop humility from poverty or pride from wealth and power is because we relate our own experience to our idea of another person. For example, a wealthy person might feel pleasure and pride from comparing their situation to that of a beggar (366).

Another abstract source of pride Hume addresses is love of fame. Hume sees this as based in sympathy—the human tendency to look to the opinions and feelings of the people in our lives (367). He argues that sympathy begins when we see signs of people’s reactions to us, such as their facial expressions, and develop an idea of that person and their feelings. The closer we are to that person, the stronger our idea of their opinions and emotions. If we become close enough to the other person, we end up adopting our idea of their opinions and taking what we believe to be their opinions as our own. We are also anxious about the reactions of people who have what Hume describes as authority (possessing some kind of special personal, social, or political status). Hume suggests it is from this type of relation that we form pride or humility from the opinions, or what we assume to be the opinions, of others.

These relationships are also shaped by the type of opinion and the type of person who is the subject of that opinion. For example, a soldier will probably not care much about people’s opinion of their eloquence (372). Hume concludes by briefly considering whether or not animals can feel humility and pride. Hume states that one can observe pride in the behavior of certain animals, like the singing of nightingales and the running of horses. Not only that, but Hume argues that since animals are capable of the association of impressions, it follows they would also be capable of humility and pride.