that his pleasing picture of good will toward all men omits to record
his two hatreds; hatreds as whole-hearted and constant as one could
wish. One was for those he called “priests;” the other was reserved
for Englishmen. “O! how I long to see America and the East Indies
revolted, totally and finally--the revenue reduced to half--public
credit fully discredited by bankruptcy--the third of London in ruins,
and the rascally mob subdued! I think I am not too old to despair of
being witness to all these things.” This, to his friend Sir Gilbert
Elliot in 1768. It is curious to note that Hume lived just long enough
to have heard of the signing of the _Declaration of Independence_.
* * * * *
If, then, something of the nonchalance with which Hume throws off
comfortable tradition is due to his personal character, much may be
gathered respecting his motives for so treating common opinion from a
study of his philosophical ancestry. For Hume is the _fine fleur_ of a
growth flourishing in the England of the 17th and 18th centuries, which
in contrast to the Rationalism of the Continent, is usually called
Empiricism. We find anticipations of an empirical philosophy in Bacon
and Hobbes; but perhaps we should regard John Locke as the real founder
of the school. Rationalism, as we saw in connection with Descartes and
Spinoza, was inspired by the example of the mathematicians to hope
that all science might be, as their science seemed to be, deduced from
axioms called self-evident. These axioms appeared to be something
more than the mere summing up of experiences. Between the undependable
predictions of a weather prophet, who has frequently observed that a
“twinge of rheumatism means coming storm,” and the confidence of the
geometer that if two angles of a triangle measure 120° the other will
be found to measure 60°, there seemed to the rationalist not merely
a difference in degree of certainty, but a difference in kind of
evidence. The former knowledge, unsatisfactory as it was, could only
come after experience; the latter, beautiful in its precision, would
seem to be at the command of a thoughtful man before experience. Hence,
for the rationalist, experience fell to the level of a mere _suggestor_
of truth, an awakener of thought; reason alone could _demonstrate_ the
suggestion.
In complete contrast with such a view-point, the empiricist came
in the end to make experience the sole test of truth, even of such
truth as the mathematician possessed. If the issue is between taking
thought respecting all things with the rationalist, or everywhere
trusting to observation with the empiricist, it is clear the latter has
plausibility on his side. Who, closing his eyes and reasoning it out,
could learn that there were just eight planets, and not seven or nine?
If we must do one thing or the other exclusively, is it not easier to
imagine that the axioms of geometry embody the experience of the ages
and nothing more, than to suppose that equipped only with the pure
reason, _i.e._, with the principles of logic, one could discover the
one thinkable world to be that in which a person that is “I” should
exist with a sheet of paper this moment before him and a fly buzzing by
his ear?
So it seemed more and more as empiricism was developed at the hands of
Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Belief, we find Hume maintaining in the end,
is all of a kind; it is the inference from an actual impression (A) to
an expected impression (B), based on the remembered experience that A
has always in the past been followed by B. Since this past experience
is limited and since the remembrance of it may be defective, the belief
based on the two can never amount to certainty.
Such an attitude may well be called sceptical when contrasted with
the older rationalism, in that it denies the possibility of complete
certainty in any field of science, substituting as the ideal of
scientific evidence an ever-increasing balance of probability in favor
of the opinion we are constrained to accept. But though to think of
our body of accepted opinion after this manner is to induce an extreme
flexibility of the imagination, which must be prepared to conceive that
the firmest truth may be untrue and has only a more or less inadequate
array of facts behind which to defend itself, yet it does not follow
that nature is a fantastic dream, without order and coherence. Indeed,
_that_ experience which is to be our guide from now on, assures us of
just the contrary, and the new evidence that would be required to make
us admit that an event in exception to any well-founded law had really
occurred would have to be overwhelming.
* * * * *
Nowhere does Hume’s faith in the evidence upon which the best tested
uniformities of experience base their claim to acceptance as nature’s
laws, show itself more clearly than in his treatment of miracles.
To an analysis of the evidence for such miracles as history records
he devotes an entire section of his “Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding,” (1748):
“A miracle” he there writes, “is a violation of the laws of nature;
and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws,
the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as
entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why
is it more than probable that all men must die; that lead cannot, of
itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and
is extinguished by water; unless it be that these events are found
agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation
of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing
is ever esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of
nature.... There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every
miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.
And as a uniform experience amounts to proof, there is here a direct
and full _proof_, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of
any miracle; nor can such proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered
credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior.
“The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our
attention), ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle,
unless the testimony be of such kind that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’” And Hume
illustrates--“When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to
life, I immediately consider with myself whether it is more probable
that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact
which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle
against the other; and according to the superiority which I discover I
pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the
falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event
which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my
belief or opinion.”
As a specimen of the manner in which Hume would have one weigh the
probabilities for and against miracles, we may take the oft-cited
passage with which the discussions closes. “... Let us examine those
miracles related in scripture; and not to lose ourselves in too wide a
field, let us confine ourselves to such as we find in the _Pentateuch_,
which we shall examine, ... not as the word or testimony of God
himself, but as the production of a mere human writer and historian.
Here, then, we are first to consider a book presented to us by a
barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they are still
more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which
it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling
those fabulous accounts which every nation gives of its origin. Upon
reading this book, we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It gives
us an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely
different from the present; of our fall from that state; of the age
of man extended to nearly a thousand years; of the destruction of
the world by a deluge; of the arbitrary choice of one people as the
favorites of heaven, and that people the countrymen of the author;
of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing
imaginable: I desire any one to lay his hand upon his heart, and after
a serious consideration declare whether he thinks that the falsehood of
such a book, supported by such testimony, would be more extraordinary
and miraculous than all the miracles it relates; which is, however,
necessary to make it to be received, according to the measure of
probability above established.”
Higher critical ability and wider knowledge have since Hume’s day
been brought to bear upon the interpretation of such documents as the
books of the Old Testament, and it is not as an ethnologist that he
has any claim upon our attention. But the citation will serve to show
that the skepticism of the empirical method is not of a kind greatly
to disturb our confidence in the commonly accepted laws of nature. It
will further serve to establish one point respecting Hume’s theology,
a point which throughout all his hesitating utterances on this subject
he never abandons, that, namely, if aught in the world as we know it
points to a God, it is not the strange and exceptional, but the regular
and law-abiding aspects of nature. To him, a wonder-working God is a
superstition of the ages of ignorance and of the ignorant of all ages.
“Even at this day, and in Europe,” he writes in his “Natural History
of Religion,” “ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent
creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes,
of which he is wholly ignorant. He will not hold out his hand, and
bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of the joints in his
fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive
from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his
hand, with all other circumstances which render that member fit for
the use to which it is destined. To these he has been long accustomed,
and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell
you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one; the fall and
bruise of such another; the excessive drought of this season; the cold
and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate operations
of providence; and such events as with good reasoners are the chief
difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole
arguments for it.”
But, he adds on this occasion, “many theists, even the most zealous
and refined, have denied a _particular_ providence, and have asserted
that the Sovereign mind or first principle of all things, having fixed
general laws, by which nature is governed, gives free and uninterrupted
course to these laws, and disturbs not, at every turn, the settled
order of events by particular volitions. From the beautiful
connection, say they, and rigid observance of established rules, we
draw the chief argument for theism; and from the same principles are
enabled to answer the principal objections against it.”
It is in this “refined” variety that we shall expect to find Hume in
the end, if among theists at all. Meanwhile it will be interesting to
follow up this reference to a particular providence, belief in which
Hume associates so closely with the acceptance of miracles.
* * * * *
Section XI of Hume’s “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” is
entitled “Of a Providence and of a Future State.” A literary device
puts the argument in the mouth of a friend who has been invited by one
referred to in the first person to imagine himself making a speech
for Epicurus before an audience of enlightened Athenians. Accepting
the challenge the friend opens his apology as follows: “The religious
philosophers [O, ye Athenians], not satisfied with the tradition of
your forefathers and doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly
acquiesce) indulge a rash curiosity in trying how far they can
establish religion on the principles of reason; and they thereby
excite, instead of satisfying, the doubts which naturally arise from a
diligent and scrutinous enquiry. They paint in the most magnificent
colors the order, beauty and wise arrangement of the universe; and then
ask, if such a glorious display of intelligence could proceed from the
fortuitous concourse of atoms, or if chance could produce what the
greatest genius can never sufficiently admire. I shall not examine
the justness of this argument. I shall allow it to be as solid as my
antagonists and accusers can desire. It is sufficient if I can prove,
from this very reasoning, that the question is entirely speculative and
that when I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the
foundations of society, but advance principles which they themselves,
upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be
solid and satisfactory.
“You then, who are my accusers, have acknowledged that their chief
or sole argument for a divine existence is derived from the order of
nature.... From the order of the work you infer that there must have
been project and forethought in the workman.” Now, “if the cause be
known only by the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities
beyond what are precisely requisite to produce the effect.... No one,
merely from the sight of one of Zeuxis’s pictures, could know that he
was also a statuary or architect....
“Allowing, therefore, the gods to be authors of the existence or
order of the universe, it follows that they posses that precise
degree of power, intelligence and benevolence which appears in
their workmanship.... The supposition of farther attributes is mere
hypothesis; much more the supposition that in distant regions of space
or periods of time there has been or will be a more magnificent display
of these attributes and a scheme of administration more suitable to
such imaginary virtues.... Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be
suited to the present appearances of nature, and presume not to alter
these appearances by arbitrary suppositions in order to suit them to
attributes which you so fondly ascribe to your deities.”
And the pleader proceeds to show that it is as useless to practice as
unsupported by reason, to supplement the order of things we know by
another for which there is no evidence.
“Are there any marks of a distributive justice in the world?” he puts
it to his hearers. “If you answer in the affirmative, I conclude that
since justice here exerts itself, it is satisfied. If you reply in the
negative, I conclude that you have then no reason to ascribe justice in
our sense of it to the gods. If you hold a medium between affirmation
and negation by saying that the justice of the gods at present exerts
itself in part, but not in its full extent, I answer that you have no
reason to give it any particular extent, but only as far as you see it
_at present_ exert itself.”
* * * * *
We had rather anticipated that we should find Hume among those “zealous
and refined theists” who point to the “beautiful connection” and
“single plan” of nature as to the ultimate evidence of an intelligence
back of it. But now that we have gathered together his important
denials, we begin to feel that Hume’s “zeal” for theism must be of the
most restrained order, that the “refinement” of his proof must approach
attenuation.
And so in the end, it proves. Not but that there are emphatic enough
avowals of conviction: “The whole frame of nature bespeaks an
intelligent author;” we find it written, “and no rational enquirer
can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard
to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.” But this
firmness of assertion is not an enduring mood. Elsewhere we find at
least one “rational enquirer” suspending his belief, not for a moment,
but indefinitely. The essay which opens with the passage just quoted
concludes with these words: “The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an
inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear
the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.
But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible
contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely
be upheld did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of
superstition to another, set them-a-quarrelling; while we ourselves,
during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the
calm, though obscure regions of philosophy.”
To explain this flickering mood, one is abandoned to one’s own insight
into the nature of the man and into the conditions of his problem. In
the first connection, we make it out that Hume’s genial bearing before
men cloaked, in a seemly well-bred fashion, a deep seriousness of
character, just as the light tone of certain of Plato’s dialogues is
chosen as a fit medium for the setting forth of lofty ideas in polite
company. At sixteen, before he had acquired this _pudeur_ of high
sounding discourse, we find him writing to his friend Michael Ramsay
with the shameless solemnity of a Roman sage: “The perfectly wise man
that outbraves fortune is much greater than the husbandman who slips by
her, and indeed that pastoral and saturnian happiness I have in a great
measure come at just now--” and more of the like! We may safely take
it that the sage of sixteen had not died in the man of sixty, for all
that the latter preferred to talk with his worldly friends of “_soupe
à la reine_ and beef and cabbage (a charming dish).” Well, then, in
common with most natures possessed of a like “high seriousness,” Hume
would have preferred to see the world in a religious light, would
instinctively have looked in it too for high purpose. And this high
purpose, he seemed to see it out of the corner of his eye as one does
the first star in the twilight. But when he sought it with full, clear
vision--it was gone.
The reason for this phenomenon may, perhaps, lie in the nature of the
problem as Hume habitually thought of it. It was, there could be no
doubt of it, the order and uniformity of nature that was to reveal
to us an intelligent cause. But in daily life, as in the highest
philosophy, we recognize two kinds of order and uniformity in our
experience. It is an established rule that a stone will fall to the
earth, that all stones will fall in the same way, that a single law
describes a behavior common to this stone’s falling and to the planets’
swinging in their orbits, a law we imagine to hold for every particle
of matter in the universe in its reaction toward every other, and which
we call the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation is about as high
an expression of a uniformity holding throughout nature as we have as
yet come upon. Such laws as those of physics and chemistry are among
the best attested results of experience, and we may stare at them
quite boldly without fear of putting them out of countenance; but then,
too, we may examine them as intently as we will without finding in them
the revelation of an intelligence that framed them. For merely as such
laws they make no reference to a purpose to which the mechanism they
govern is adapted.
But there is quite another type of uniformity which we are ever
discovering and appealing to, if not in the whole of nature, at least
in many of its parts. Hume calls it “unity of plan,” and he points
to the general adaptation of the organs of the body to the end of
preserving the life of that body. And where we find such adaptation of
various means to a single end, we ascribe life and even intelligence to
the organic whole. Nature, from this point of view, is full of life and
intelligence. Or, rather, should we not say it is full of _lives and
intelligences_? Here indeed, is the difficulty; can we treat the whole
cosmos as one great organism? Can we find one supreme end that all the
obvious minor ends subserve, as they in turn are served by diverse
means? Or, as another similar possibility, can we establish an analogy
between the cosmos and a machine of human invention, an implement of
the arts,--a watch, say, to follow Paley’s argument? Here, too, we
must find a purpose, for a machine is not merely a mechanism--it is a
mechanism with a function.
Many excellent minds have expended themselves on this problem, whose
difficulty is supreme, and I think we shall not be far wrong in
asserting that it is at moments when the issue presents itself in this
way to Hume’s mind that “doubt,” as he says, “uncertainty, suspense of
judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny.” There
seems something beyond Hume’s usual imperturbability in the words
with which one of his dialogues concludes: “Believe me, Cleanthes,
the most natural sentiment which a well-disposed mind will feel on
this occasion, is a longing desire and expectation that Heaven would
be pleased to dissipate, at least alleviate, this profound ignorance,
by affording some more particular revelation to mankind, and making
discoveries of the nature, attributes and operations of the divine
object of our faith.”[3] But perhaps this is only a phrase, for nowhere
else do the lips of Hume shape the words “revelation” and “faith” but
that the lines of mockery are seen to form around them.
* * * * *
In this state of mind respecting theology, it is inevitable that Hume
should struggle in quite a pagan spirit with the problem of human
wisdom. Our experience of life being what it is, how may man most
successfully attain to happiness, and what relation has the line
of conduct which prudence would recommend to that which has been
traditionally regarded as virtuous?
But first, _has_ there been any one principle of conduct that defines
it as virtuous; or are there as many notions of virtue as there are
communities with more or less independent traditions? It is a problem
of ethics upon which every inquirer from Socrates down has spent his
best thought.
There is a little dialogue of Hume’s that suggests the nature of the
problem and hints at a solution in a way altogether charming. “My
friend, Palamedes,” the narrator begins, “who is as great a rambler in
his thoughts as in his person, ... surprised me lately with an account
of a nation with whom he told me he had passed a considerable part of
his life, and whom he found, in the main, a people extremely civilized
and intelligent.
“‘There is a country,’ said he, ‘in the world called Fourli, no matter
for its longitude and latitude, whose inhabitants have ways of thinking
in many things, particularly in morals, diametrically opposite to
ours....
“‘As it was my fortune to come among this people on a very
advantageous footing, I was immediately introduced to the best company;
and being desired by Alcheic to live with him, I readily accepted his
invitation, as I found him universally esteemed for his personal merit,
and indeed regarded by every one in Fourli as a perfect character.’”
And we are thereupon regaled with a display of Alcheic’s virtues. We
accompany him first in a serenade that he offers, not indeed to his
lady-love, but to a certain youth, and we learn in this connection,
that Alcheic, himself, who had been very handsome in his youth, had
been courted by many lovers, but had bestowed his favors chiefly on
the sage Elcouf, to whom he was supposed to owe, in great measure,
the astonishing progress he had made in philosophy and wisdom. “It
gave me great surprise,” the traveller adds, “that Alcheic’s wife (who
by-the-by, happened also to be his sister) was no wise scandalized at
this species of infidelity.”
Later it appears that Alcheic was a murderer and a parricide; and when
asked what was his motive for this action, he replies coolly that he
“was not then so much at ease in his circumstances as he is at present,
and that he had acted in that particular at the advice of all his
friends.”