I’m making notes for my Substack and I came across this passage from Hume, quoted by Barry Stroud in his 1977 book on the philosopher:

“If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history, they plainly receive the same ideas […] tho’ his testimony has not the same influence on them. The latter has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He enters deeper into the concerns of the persons […] He even goes so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person. While the former, who gives no credit to the testimony of the author, has a more faint and languid conception of all these particulars …”

Stroud takes issue with what Hume is saying here, because we all know it’s just as easy to get engrossed in a fiction, to see all the details clearly in our minds and feel for the characters, as it is when we’re reading something we believe to be true.

But I think Hume might be on to something here. I think the reason fiction can often seem so vivid to me and make me care so much is because I do believe it to be true, at least in the moment as I’m reading it. In Hume’s terms: though I’m reading a “romance” I’m reading it “as a true history.” When my impressions are “faint and languid” it’s usually because I’m not very interested in the book, and so I can’t “get into it” and make the imaginative leap into believing it, and this happens at least as frequently with non-fiction as it does with fiction. With non-fiction I might know that technically what I’m being told is true, but because it’s been told so distantly and abstractly I don’t believe it happened quite this way and so effectively I don’t believe the account that I’m reading.

In short, I’m very taken with Hume’s notion that to believe something means to have a strong impression of it in the mind, even if (as Stroud points out) Hume himself seems to have been very dissatisfied with this part of his own theory.

(I’ll write more about Hume and belief on my Substack, which is now up and running if you’d like to subscribe.)