reposting a fun experiment

I posted this a few months ago already, but it’s still fun, and I ran across it in my Lovecraft manuscript.

Hume transposed into Lovecraft’s world:

“When we think of Cthulhu, we only join three consistent ideas, octopus, dragon, and human, with which we were formerly acquainted.”

Lovecraft transposed into Hume’s world:

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded a picture of a golden mountain, I would not be entirely unfaithful to the spirit of the thing… but the general outline of the whole is what made it most shockingly frightful.”

Lovecraft is, in fact, a deeply anti-Humean author. No writer is less likely to view objects as bundles of qualities.