It is the direction towards the other that makes love and hate, along with their accompanying and similar afflictions, take a central place in an endeavor to transition from the theory of knowledge to ethical theory.

And although the self always precedes in Humean - and more broadly Enlightenment - logic, without its projection onto others, without this "empathy" which becomes the touchstone of all Hume's psychology and ethics (as well as that of Adam Smith shortly thereafter), all the distinctive warmth of life in society is drained from philosophy, turning it into the cold anatomy of a dead and false object, that of the isolated, no longer human, mind.