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Full Idea
In order to form an idea of solidity, we must conceive two bodies pressing on each other without penetration. ..The ideas of secondary qualities are excluded, and the idea of motion depends on extension. This leaves us no just idea of solidity or matter.
Gist of Idea
We have no good concept of solidity or matter, because accounts of them are all circular
Source
David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature [1739], I.IV.4), quoted by Stephen Mumford - Dispositions 02.3
Book Ref
Mumford,Stephen: 'Dispositions' [OUP 1998], p.31
A Reaction
[compressed] For me these kind of strict empiricist arguments always recede when you accept the notion of an inference to be best explanation. We have some sort of notion of 'matter', but here the physicist seems to take over.
| 13470 | Mass is central to matter [Newton, by Hart,WD] |
| 15978 | I take 'matter' to be a body, excluding its extension in space and its shape [Locke] |
| 12718 | Secondary matter is active and complete; primary matter is passive and incomplete [Leibniz] |
| 19416 | Not all of matter is animated, any more than a pond full of living fish is animated [Leibniz] |
| 19422 | Every particle of matter contains organic bodies [Leibniz] |
| 19436 | Bare or primary matter is passive; it is clothed or secondary matter which contains action [Leibniz] |
| 7560 | Leibniz struggled to reconcile bodies with a reality of purely soul-like entities [Jolley on Leibniz] |
| 6731 | No one can explain how matter affects mind, so matter is redundant in philosophy [Berkeley] |
| 14301 | We have no good concept of solidity or matter, because accounts of them are all circular [Hume] |
| 16603 | In the 17th C matter became body, and was then studied by science [Pasnau] |