Note 711 — Chapter V

Part of this view is well expressed in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, book iii. part ii. ‘This, however, hinders not but that philosophers may, if they please, extend their reasoning to the supposed state of nature; provided they allow it to be a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never could have, any reality.’ … ‘The same liberty may be permitted to moral, which is allowed to natural philosophers; and ’tis very usual with the latter to consider any motion as compounded and consisting of two parts separate from each other, though, at the same time, they acknowledge it to be in itself uncompounded and inseparable.’ Philosophical Works, vol. ii. p. 263.