David Hume (1739), “Of personal identity”, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1 (“Of the Understanding”), Part 4, Section 6 (vol. I, London: John Noon, 1739; SBN 251–263). With the passage on personal identity in the Appendix to vol. III (London: Thomas Longman, 1740; T App. 10–21, SBN 633–636). Read in the Hume Texts Online critical text.
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: Book 1, Part 4, Section 6, “Of Personal Identity”, 1739, with the Appendix of 1740. Three things to add:
- Identifier. Neither printing has a DOI. The URL is the section’s page
on Hume Texts Online, whose text was read.
published:is the 1739 volume. Catalogue and auction records put its appearance at the end of January 1739; I found no day, so the date is the first of the month. - Two works in one entry. The Appendix belongs to a different volume and year. It is filed here, not separately, because App. 10–21 is addressed to this section and makes sense only with it. The rest of the Appendix (on belief, and two minor errors) was read and is not this entry’s subject.
- The edited text incorporates Hume’s ERRATA, the changes the Appendix instructs for volume 1, and his handwritten corrections in the British Library copy of volume 3, per the editors’ notes. Paragraph numbers (T 1.4.6.n, App. n) are the Norton numbering the site uses.
Key takeaways
- No impression, no idea, of a self. “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other … I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (1.4.6.3).
- The mind is a bundle. Mankind are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (1.4.6.4). The theatre image is withdrawn as soon as offered: “They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind”.
- Identity over change is a fiction of the imagination. A succession of related objects feels to the mind like one unchanging object, so we “feign” a soul, self or substance to cover the change (1.4.6.6). Ships, rebuilt churches, rivers, plants and animals get their identity the same way (1.4.6.8–14), and “the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one” (1.4.6.15).
- Resemblance and causation make the bundle seem one; memory discovers it. Memory creates resemblance among perceptions, and causation links them like the members of “a republic or commonwealth” (1.4.6.18–19). We extend our identity past what we remember, so memory “does not so much produce as discover personal identity” (1.4.6.20), against Locke.
- Hard cases have no answer. “All the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties” (1.4.6.21).
- The Appendix retracts the account of the connexion. “All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions”. He cannot renounce “that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences”, and pleads “the privilege of a sceptic” (App. 20–21).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, to fill out the record’s coverage of personal identity and selfhood. NOTE-386 is the reading, and it placed the work: Active. It is the classic statement of the view that there is no self over and above its perceptions, and it is quoted or assumed by most of the record’s works on the self. Read the Appendix with it: the Appendix is where Hume says what his own view could not explain, and that problem, what binds the bundle, is the one the record’s modern works keep answering.
No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Where it meets the record:
- Floridi (LIT-136, NOTE-130) takes the Appendix’s confession as the statement of his “problem of the chariot”, what binds the self’s information into a unity, and offers his three-membrane model as the constructive answer Hume lacked.
- Dennett’s narrative self (LIT-442, NOTE-364) ends on Hume’s failure to find a self by introspection, and answers it with a self that is an abstraction of interpretation, not a perception. Hume’s “fictitious” identity and Dennett’s “theorist’s fiction” are near relatives: both make the unity a product of a process that tells it, not a thing found. They differ on the teller. For Hume it is the imagination’s easy transition; for Dennett, the brain’s autobiographical story.
- Minsky (LIT-432, NOTE-348) treats the “Single-Self” as a convenient fiction over many partial self-models. That is Hume’s bundle with an architecture.
- Levin (LIT-439, NOTE-341) and Schwitzgebel (LIT-159, THEORY-043). Hume compares the soul to “a republic or commonwealth” whose members are replaced while it stays the same. The record’s bridge between a society of mind and a conscious nation runs the comparison the other way. The pairing is my observation; Hume uses the commonwealth for persistence through change, not for consciousness.
- Damasio (LIT-387) makes consciousness the identification of mind contents “as belonging to an organism”, supplied by homeostatic feeling. Read against App. 20–21, that is a candidate for the “real connexion” Hume could not find: one supplied by the body, not perceived among the perceptions. The reading is mine, not Damasio’s.
The personal-identity works filed beside it on 2026-10-02 continue the line. Locke’s chapter is the account of consciousness that Hume’s Appendix says “most philosophers” hold. Parfit’s “Personal Identity” ends by quoting Hume and closes on Hume’s other hope, that “more of what is bad depends upon false belief”. Galen Strawson’s minimal self and Zahavi and Gallagher’s phenomenological one, being filed in parallel by another agent, are modern answers to the question Hume’s introspection raised; they are not read here, so how each treats the bundle is left to those filings.