The Bundle Of Self

Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

At about 11 Hume entered the University of Edinburgh, a little younger than normal and after three years left without a degree, which was not unusual, as the education itself was what mattered at the time. He tried his hand in law and a merchant house but found both distasteful. During this time he suffered what he called ‘the disease of the learned.’ This has subsequently been attributed to his troubles with reconciling his philosophical thoughts.

One of which appears to be, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”

This was the basis of what became known as Hume’s bundle theory of self.

“I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”

At 23, with little money, he went to France to put his thoughts to pen in A Treatise of Human Nature. As he later described, “being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender”. He returned to London and got it published, albeit anonymously, probably as he recognised parts would be considered heresy.

“And were all my perceptions remov'd by death, and cou'd I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou'd be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity.”

Although published anonymously he forwarded manuscripts to others and it was widely recognised to be his work. Such that he was later prevented from gaining the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. The clergy weaponised the Treatise against him. And again when he showed interest for the chair of logic at the University of Glasgow.

Later in life he wrote in his autobiography that the book "fell dead-born from the press" and he went “to the press too early”, implying that he might have approached parts differently.

Indeed, even within two years of the first publication he added an appendix to affirm that he knew there was an inconsistency in his bundle theory.

“In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them…”

If our thoughts are each distinct (principle 1) and our mind never perceives the connection linking them (principle 2), why then do we feel like a single person?

“For my part,” he concluded, “I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.”

While Hume lived to witness much critique of his bundle of self concept, even today, all these years later, modern science has not yet reconciled the dilemma that Hume first posed. His troubled thoughts were well in advance of his times.