Quiz: A Treatise of Human Nature

15 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. In “Of personal identity”, to what does Hume compare the mind, while warning that the comparison must not mislead us? A clock wound up by its maker A mirror that passively reflects the external objects set before it A theatre where perceptions make their appearance A blank tablet written on by experience
2. What does Hume hold about the reasoning of animals? They act from instinct alone and never learn from experience They are endowed with thought and reason, and infer by custom from experience They are machines without thought or feeling, as Descartes and his followers held They reason by demonstrative arguments, comparing ideas much as philosophers do
3. What relation does Hume discover, besides contiguity and succession, in our idea of cause and effect? Constant conjunction Identity of cause and effect A visible power in the cause Resemblance between cause and effect
4. Which section of the Treatise does Hume say, in the Appendix, has led him into a labyrinth? The section on personal identity The section on necessary connexion The section on the immateriality of the soul The section on the infinite divisibility of space
5. Why, according to Hume, does the evidence of ancient history not fade away over a long chain of transmission? Historical facts are known by demonstration rather than probability Each historian independently re-examines the original witnesses Tradition is guaranteed by the authority of the church The links are all of the same kind, copies by printers and copyists, so the mind runs along them easily
6. Where does Hume say the first rudiments of government arise? From quarrels between different societies, in war From disputes over property arising within one society From the natural authority of fathers over their families From an original contract agreed among all the people
7. Whose observation does Hume cite on how absence affects the passions? Michel de Montaigne, in his Essays Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées Bernard Mandeville, in the Fable The Duc de la Rochefoucault
8. Hume says we establish the rules of good-breeding for a purpose parallel to that of the laws of nature. What do the rules of good-breeding prevent? The opposition of men's pride Quarrels between the different ranks The opposition of self-interest over property The spread of irreligion in conversation
9. How does Hume picture the relations among pride, humility, love and hatred? As a circle, all derived from a single principle of self-love As a square, connected by their objects on two sides and by their sensations on the other two As a ladder, ranked from the noblest passion to the basest As two separate pairs with no connexion between them
10. Whose system does Hume say is “almost the same” as the popular doctrine of the immateriality of the soul? Hobbes’s Spinoza’s Locke’s Epicurus’s
11. In Hume’s example of reasoning from contrary experiments, how many of twenty ships that go to sea return? Fifteen All twenty Nineteen Ten
12. Which example does Hume use to show that the relations found in parricide carry no guilt by themselves? A river that undermines and at last carries away the hill it springs from A clock that runs down its own spring A sapling that grows from an oak and destroys the parent tree A wolf that kills its own cub
13. What did Aristides tell the Athenians about Themistocles's secret plan? That it should be put to the vote of the whole of Greece That it was just but impossible to carry out That it would ruin Athens's trade That nothing could be more advantageous, and nothing more unjust
14. What does Hume’s example of five notes played on a flute show? Time is the manner in which perceptions succeed each other, not a separate impression Hearing is the only sense that conveys the idea of time Time is infinitely divisible Music produces impressions of reflexion
15. What does Hume say a mind is, in Section II? A blank tablet on which experience writes A simple, indivisible thinking substance in which perceptions inhere An immaterial soul known by intuition A heap or collection of perceptions united by certain relations

0 of 15 answered