Hume on Personal Identity: Memory and Natural Relations

In 1739, David Hume revolutionized the notion of personal identity in his work “A Treatise of Human Nature.” He articulated some aspects of personal identity that we cannot easily comprehend. By personal identity, we only express the perceptions stored in memory, but we cannot accurately describe the source of those perceptions. Hume described this narrow account as an error theory. He made it clear that memory plays an important role in connecting perceptions in the emergence of personal identity, but ultimately, memory cannot maintain this connection and serves as nothing more than an auxiliary principle. Here, Hume distinguished himself from the 17th-century empiricist John Locke by presenting a theory in which he argued that, in addition to memory, three natural relations also operate through our mental processes and make our personal identity intelligible over time. Through this paper, we analyze how Hume positioned memory in this explanation of personal identity and how acceptable this view is in contrast to Locke’s explanation of personal identity as based solely on memory. This paper also examines why Hume grounded personal identity on natural relations in addition to memory.