intellectual breakdown. Happily, human nature steps in to save him: "I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther." And later, when he gets "tir'd with amusement and company", his intellectual curiosity and scholarly ambition resurface and lead him back into philosophy. And since no human can resist reflecting on transcendent matters anyway, we might as well follow philosophy instead of superstition, for "[g]enerally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous." In the end, Hume remains hopeful that he can "contribute a little to the advancement of knowledge" by helping to reorient philosophy to the study of human nature—a project made possible by subjecting even his sceptical doubts to a healthy scepticism. Book 2: Of the Passions Part 1: Of pride and humility Sections 1–6 Hume begins by recalling Book 1's distinction between impressions of sensation ("original impressions", arising from physical causes outside the mind) and impressions of reflection ("secondary impressions", arising from other perceptions within the mind), examining only the latter. He divides these "reflective impressions"—"the passions, and other emotions resembling them"—into "the calm and the violent" (nearly imperceptible emotions of "beauty and deformity", and turbulent passions we experience more strongly) and into "direct and indirect" (depending on how complicated the causal story behind them is). Pride and humility are indirect passions, and Hume's account of the two is his leading presentation of the psychological mechanisms responsible for the indirect passions. Since we cannot put the feeling of a passion into words, Hume identifies passions via their characteristic causes and effects. The cause of a passion is what calls up the passion: e.g., pride can be caused by one's beautiful house. A cause can be subdivided into the subject itself (e.g., one's house) and the quality of the subject that "operates on the passions" (e.g., the beauty of one's house). The object of a passion is what the passion is ultimately directed at: pride and humility are both directed at oneself. Both object and cause have a foundation in human nature: according to Hume, the object of these passions is fixed by the basic constitution of human psychology (Hume uses the term