MIND AND SOUL impression of the self, and no idea of the self; there are simply bundles of impressions and ideas Hume showed that the inner subject was illusory, but he did not expose the underlying error which led the empiricists to espouse the myth of the self The real way out of the impasse is to reject the thesis that the mind knows nothing but its own ideas, and to accept that a thinker is not a solitary inner perceiver, but an embodied person living in a public world Hume was right that he had no self other than himself; but he was himself not a bundle of impressions, but a portly human being in the midst of eighteenth-century society It might be thought that a bundle of impressions was so diVerent from any kind of active agent that it would be idle to discuss whether or not it enjoyed free will However, Hume goes on to address the topic of liberty and necessity, quite oblivious to his oYcial philosophy of mind (This is his custom when pursuing a diYcult philosophical agenda—an agreeable inconsistency for which we may be grateful.) His general thesis is that human decisions and actions are necessitated by causal laws no less than the operations of lifeless natural agents, and are equally predictable: Were a man, whom I know to be honest and opulent, and with whom I live in intimate friendship, to come into my house, where I am surrounded with my servants, I rest assured that he is not to stab me before he leaves it in order to rob me of my silver standish A man who at noon leaves his purse full of gold on the pavement at Charing Cross may as well expect that it will Xy away like a feather as that he will Wnd it untouched an hour after (E, 91) Whatever we do, Hume maintains, is necessitated by causal links between motive, circumstance, and action Class, among other things, is a great determinant of character and behaviour: ‘The skin, pores, muscles and nerves of a day-labourer are diVerent from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners.’ Hume’s insistence on determinism leads him to some implausible conclusions: that a group of labourers should go on strike is for him as unthinkable as that an unsupported heavy body will not fall Although he believes that human actions are determined, Hume is willing to accept that we enjoy a certain liberty Like some of his successors, he was a ‘compatibilist’, someone who maintains that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other if rightly understood Our natural 239