Quotes by Paul Hume

“Ultimately Russell himself admitted that he made his greatest efforts in the field of traditional philosophy – in epistemology, the search for the ultimate grounds of our knowledge about the world. How can we be certain that what we claim to know is true? Where lies the certainty in our experience of the world? Can even the most precise knowledge – such as mathematics – be said to rest on any sure logical foundation? These were the questions that Russell sought to answer during the periods of his most profound philosophical thinking. They have remained the perennial questions of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hume, and Kant, to Russell and Wittgenstein.””

“They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping.("The Phantom Model")””

“Hume failed to understand that paranormal phenomena do not violate or contradict nature; the supernatural is an extension of the natural world and conforms to universal laws.””

“Therefore, Hume argues, pleasure and pain are what motivate people and create passions. Passions are feelings that initiate actions, and reason should act as a “slave” to passion.””