Hume's Melancholy

The mythology of the “I”: David Hume turns inwards, only to find “some particular perception or other…I never can catch myself at any time without a perception” (300). You are melancholy, and your sorrow is held together not by followers, but by the blind distance that links all points to an indivisible whole. Yet the whole is vulnerable, and your “self” is forever at odds with the apparent density of the world. “The mind is a kind of theatre,” you say, “where several perceptions successively make their appearance.” Failing to find a common impression in this bundle of appearances, you are forced to concede that only an “unknown and mysterious” force would be equivalent to a “self” (302).

Your face is pressed to the window, your own face reflected in the darkness of night. The curtains are open, but the windows are shut. Muffled light seeps through the glass, your skin is cold but the frost has yet to settle. Condensation forms. “A ship, of which a considerable part has been changed by frequent reparations, is still considered as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing an identity to it” (305). You expose the palm of your hand: the flesh moves; the anonymous shiver of its being extends through your whole body. There is no continuity in this place, you say to yourself; the crumbling fragments of the wall are coming to the foreground of your perception.


Your shadow falls over time, marking the places and times that have been affected by your presence. How to account for these anonymous blocks of experience you’ve been accruing? You are alive—you fended off the void radiating in the spaces between sensations. Through your own work and effort, you managed to sculpt your life into a totality, the parts of which sufficiently resemble one another so at to give the impression that their agency is orientated toward a common goal: “Suppose we could see clearly into the breast of another, and observe that succession of perceptions…’tis evident that could more contribute to the bestowing a relation on this succession amidst all its variations” (308).


You are old and the different places in your memory float freely through the atmosphere. Of your actions on 11th of March 1719, you remember very little, only a generalised aura that permeated the year as a whole. What of the year today? From the air, it falls to the earth, receding deep into your body along the way. Soon, you will have visitors to your grave in the Calton Old Burial Ground, though your body will long be gone. Your melancholy is felt in far afield places. In 1997, a statue will be erected in your honour and people will have their photo taken alongside yourself as a Clashach sandstone still-life.