In the year 1735, the second son of a Scottish laird, having left the University of Edinburgh, disillusioned with his study of law but ambitious for success in literature and philosophy, was headed for La Flèche in France to complete his first book. He is the protagonist of this book, David Hume, who was later to become a highly acclaimed philosopher and historian, notorious during the eighteenth century and ever after for his controversial views. In his short autobiography ‘My Own Life’ written four months before his death and prefixed to the posthumous edition of his collected works, he describes how his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ‘fell dead-born from the press’ (E ‘My Own Life’ xxxiv). Nevertheless, and despite the author's own official disownment of the Treatise, which he considered a ‘juvenile work’ (EHU Author's Advertisement), few works can be said to rival its influence on modern European philosophy. There are many appropriate starting points in the Treatise to investigate not only the philosophical Hume but also the historical Hume. I will commence with one of the claims which the author of this ‘juvenile work’ himself boasts of his originality: ‘Thro’ this whole book, there are great pretensions to new discoveries in philosophy; but if any thing can intitle the author to so glorious a name as that of an inventor, ‘tis the use he makes of the principle of the association of ideas, which enters into most of his philosophy’ (A 35; 661–2).

It has been generally acknowledged that Hume prided himself upon his adoption, not his discovery, of the theory of the association of ideas in the Treatise. As Duncan Forbes points out, however, ‘Hume's early enthusiasm for a new system of the moral sciences based on the principles of association waned’ (1975b: 15). Certainly, in his last revision of the first Enquiry, Hume drastically shortened the section entitled ‘Of the Association of Ideas’: with the original eighteen paragraphs in the first edition reduced to just three (EHU 3.1–3[–18]; 23–4). Concerning Hume's confused and confusing definitions of imagination, Norman Kemp Smith also claims that ‘Hume's ascription of primacy to the imagination has no greater importance in the philosophy of the Treatise than that of being merely a corollary to his early doctrine of belief’ (1941: 462–4).