A Treatise of Human Nature - Volume 3

passion. But it is not claimed that a judgment of this kind, whether true or false, is accompanied by virtue or vice. And as for the judgments that are caused by our judgments, The OCR reads "caused by our judgments," though the context of the argument suggests Hume likely intended "caused by our actions." they are even less capable of bestowing those moral qualities on the actions that cause them.

But to be more specific, and to show that those eternal, immutable fitnesses and unfitnesses of things cannot be defended by sound philosophy, we may weigh the following considerations.

If thought and understanding alone were capable of fixing the boundaries of right and wrong, the quality of being virtuous or vicious must either lie in certain relations of objects or be a matter of fact discovered by our reasoning. This conclusion is evident. Since the operations of human understanding divide into two kinds—the comparison of ideas and the inference of matters of fact—if virtue were discovered by the understanding, it would have to be an object of one of these operations, as there is no third operation of the understanding that can discover it. There has been an opinion very diligently spread by certain philosophers that morality is capable of demonstration; and though no one has