Hume and the Enlightenment

Hume and the Enlightenment Edited by Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle HUME AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT HUME AND THE ENLIGHT...

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Hume and the Enlightenment Edited by Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle

HUME AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

HUME AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

edited by Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2011

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2011 © Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle 2011 british library cataloguing in publication data Hume and the Enlightenment. 1. Hume, David, 1711–1776. 2. Enlightenment. I. Taylor, Craig. II. Buckle, Stephen. 192-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781848930841

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This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by MPG Books Group

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Contributors Abbreviations Introduction: Hume and his Intellectual Legacy – Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle 1 Hume and the Enlightenment – Stephen Buckle 2 Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume – Karen Green 3 Philosophy, Historiography and the Enlightenment: A Response to Green – Stephen Buckle 4 Hume’s Enlightenment Aesthetics and Philosophy of Mathematics – Dale Jacquette 5 Part 9 of Hume’s Dialogues and ‘The Accurate Philosophical Turn of Cleanthes’ – Stanley Tweyman 6 ‘Strange Lengths’: Hume and Satire in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion – Robert Phiddian 7 A Modern Malignant Demon? Hume’s Scepticism with regard to Reason (Partly) Vindicated – George Couvalis 8 Hume on Sympathy and Cruelty – Craig Taylor 9 Hume’s Natural History of Justice – Mark Collier 10 Hume and Rawls on the Stability of a Society’s System of Justice – Ian Hunt 11 Can Hume’s Impressions of Reflection Represent? – Anna Stoklosa 12 Mechanism and Thought Formation: Hume’s Emancipatory Scepticism – Anik Waldow Notes Works Cited Index

vii ix xiii 1 13 39 53 65 77 91 105 117 131 143 157 171 187 211 223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection developed out of a conference entitled Hume and the Enlightenment held by Flinders University in 2009, and many of the papers in this collection were presented there in earlier drafts. The original conference and this collection were made possible through the generous financial support of NEER, the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research, and a conference grant from the Faculty of Education, Humanities, Law and Theology at Flinders. We thank them for this support. Equally important was the support of the Flinders Humanities Research Centre. In particular, we would like to thank the then director of the Centre (and contributor to this collection) Robert Phiddian for getting behind this project; and the Centre’s staff, Rebecca Vaughan and Nena Bierbaum, for their excellent work in organizing the original conference. Finally, we would like to thank Melinda Graefe for editorial assistance. Melinda prepared the final papers for publication within a very short timeframe, and with an efficiency and professionalism that neither of us could have matched. Craig Taylor Stephen Buckle

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Stephen Buckle, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University Dr Buckle is an internationally respected Hume scholar. He is the author/editor of several books, including Hume’s Enlightenment Tract (Oxford University Press, 2001). Dr Buckle is also the editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings (2007). Dr Buckle was the keynote speaker of the conference out of which the present volume emerges. Mark Collier, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, USA Prof. Collier’s areas of research interest include the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of mind/cognitive science, and moral psychology and he has published a number of articles in these areas. George Couvalis, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Flinders University, Australia Dr Couvalis’s main field of research is the philosophy of science and he has published numerous articles and two books, Feyerabend’s Critique of Foundationalism (Avebury, 1989) and The Philosophy of Science, Science and Objectivity (Sage, 1997), in the area. Dr Couvalis has also published articles in aesthetics, social philosophy and Greek philosophy. Karen Green, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Monash University, Australia Prof. Green is a respected international scholar and is the author/editor of six books, most recently Virtue Ethics for Women 1250–1550 (Springer, 2011). Ian Hunt, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Flinders University, Australia Prof. Hunt is the author of Analytical and Dialectical Marxism (Ashgate, 1993) and several coedited books, including The New Industrial Relations in Australia (Federation Press, 1995). Prof. Hunt is also the author of many refereed articles – ix –

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Hume and the Enlightenment

on social philosophy, his primary area of research interest, including some recent articles on Rawls. Dale Jacquette, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bern, Switzerland Prof. Jacquette is an internationally renowned scholar and the author or editor of over thirty books including his David Hume’s Critique of Infinity. Prof. Jacquette is on the editorial board/advisory panel of numerous international journals and philosophy series. He has held numerous prestigious international fellowships and was the J. William Fulbright Distinguished Lecture Chair in Contemporary Philosophy of Language at the University of Venice, Italy, in 1996. Robert Phiddian, Associate Professor in English, Flinders University, Australia Prof. Phiddian is the author of Swift’s Parody (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and the editor (with Haydon Manning) of Comic Commentators - Contemporary Political Cartooning in Australia (Australian Public Intellectual Network, 2008). Prof. Phiddian is Chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and Director of the Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres. Anna Stoklosa, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada Ms Stoklosa’s research interests include early modern philosophy, especially Hume and Descartes. She is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the University of Toronto, Canada. Craig Taylor, Lecturer in Philosophy, Flinders University, Australia Dr Taylor is the author of Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis and numerous refereed articles on moral philosophy, his primary area of research interest. Dr Taylor was the convenor of the conference out of which this volume emerges. Stanley Tweyman, Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Master of Vanier College, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Prof. Tweyman is an internationally renowned scholar and the author or editor of over twenty five books. He is the founder and editor of Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, and the general editor of the Routledge Philosophy In Focus series. He has organized sessions at international scholarly conferences, and has spoken at two World Congresses in Philosophy, and at special commemorative international conferences on René Descartes, David Hume and George Berkeley.

Contributors

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Anik Waldow, Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney Dr Waldow is the author of David Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (2009). She mainly works in seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy and has a special interest in David Hume, emotions, the belief-generating function of sympathy, the problem of other minds, scepticism and personal identity. She has published articles in The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Hume Studies and History of Philosophy Quarterly.

ABBREVIATIONS

T

EHU

EPM

Dis Es D

H

L

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford, 2000), giving book number, part number, section number and paragraph number. For the Abstract (Abs), paragraph number is given. These are followed, after a slash (/), by the page number(s) in the older edition of L. A. SelbyBigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978). David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 1999), giving section number, part number, and paragraph number. These are followed, after a slash (/), by the page number(s) in the older edition of L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975). David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 1998), giving section number, part number and paragraph number. These are followed, after a slash (/), by the page number(s) in the older edition of L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975) where relevant. David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions, A Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 2007), giving part and paragraph number. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Press, 1985), giving page number. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge, 2007), giving part number, paragraph number and page number. For the letters, page number is given. David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 volumes (Liberty Press, 1983), giving volume number, chapter number, and page number. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T Greig, 2 volumes (Oxford, 1969), giving volume number and page number.

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INTRODUCTION: HUME AND HIS INTELLECTUAL LEGACY Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle

David Hume (1711–76) is commonly regarded as the greatest of the British philosophers, albeit more for being a destroyer than a builder. His philosophy rejects the enthronement of reason so characteristic of the western philosophical tradition, and replaces it with a naturalistic picture in which the human being is portrayed as a creature of imagination, passion and habit. The consequence is that we must accept some form of scepticism, such that we can be guided only by opinion, not by knowledge. This is not a form of philosophical quietism, however, since scepticism can establish standards of probability, and so have a critical edge. Thus Hume deployed his conclusions in a critique of religious arguments: most famously in his essay on miracles, but also in critical examinations of belief in divine design and, more generally, of divine causation of the world. His political writings are cautious, but undeniably modernist; and his economic writings helped pave the way for the achievements of his younger contemporary, Adam Smith. In fact, he and Smith are commonly linked, as two of the greatest contributors to that Scottish intellectual flowering after the Act of Union of 1707, now known as the Scottish Enlightenment. However, to place Hume in this way, as a contributor to Enlightenment in its Scottish form, is to raise a problem. This is the problem of the relationship between Hume’s philosophy (and, more generally, of the Scottish Enlightenment itself ) to what is commonly referred to as the Enlightenment, i.e. the increasingly radical French intellectual movement that grew up around the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, and which supplied much of the ideology of the French Revolution. Hume was no revolutionary, and so may seem to exist quite apart from this movement; on the other hand, his French diplomatic career in the 1760s put him into close contact with many of the radicals, and he moved comfortably in their social circles. Plainly, he did not regard them as the enemy. Part of the problem here is more apparent than real, since it depends on drawing the idea of Enlightenment too tightly around the French radicals. There were other Enlightenments beyond the French: Scottish, of course; but also English, –1–

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Dutch, German and Italian – just to mention the most notable. All of these are united by the freshness and boldness of their analyses of the societies of their day, but all followed different paths, reflecting the different national circumstances in which they developed. Thus, for example, although all involved some measure of religious criticism, the nature of this criticism varied considerably: at its most radical in France, because of the power of religious institutions, but least so in Germany, where much of the Enlightenment was a project of the clergy themselves. Similarly, although all involved some measure of political criticism, French radicalism reflected the particularities of the French situation (and in any case relied considerably on radical Protestant ideas imported from Holland); in England, radicalism was rare, because that country had been through its upheavals in the preceding century; and in Germany and Italy, those upheavals, when they came, were powerfully shaped by their projects of national unification. So, once a wider perspective is adopted, and the French Enlightenment seen to be linked to related but not identical movements in other countries, Hume’s relationship to the Enlightenment becomes considerably less problematic. The problem may not entirely disappear, however, since the common view of Hume’s philosophy as politically cautious but intellectually destructive still leaves it at odds with the picture of the Enlightenment as the period of bold and optimistic thinking that paved the way for our own ideals and institutions. This sets the two tasks for a collection on Hume and the Enlightenment. In the first place, it should attempt to place Hume’s writings, philosophical and historical, in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to determine the extent to which he does or does not fit into the prominent intellectual trends of the period. Secondly, because the Enlightenment is not only a bygone period of history, even of intellectual history, but a period recognized as in some way formative of our own day, it should also attempt some account of the ways in which Hume’s views still constitute live options for modern philosophy. This collection thus aims to throw light on these two issues. The first of these, Hume’s place in the intellectual trends of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, can be approached by considering two apparent instances of a lack of fit. The first of these is the less serious. It is that Hume is now best known for addressing a cluster of questions with little apparent relevance to the social and political issues central to the Enlightenment thinkers. Thus it is not at all obvious that there is any bearing on Enlightenment concerns, pro or con, in arguments to the effect that: we do not perceive causal connections, and so depend on regularities in experience to arrive at beliefs about what we have not observed; that our belief in an external world independent of our perceptions depends on complicated processes in the imagination; that we do not perceive a self, and so our belief in an enduring self is also dependent on processes in the imagination; and so on. This is Hume as he tends to be known

Introduction

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in the contemporary analytic philosophy curriculum, and, considered purely in terms of these issues, his philosophy has little if any bearing on Enlightenment themes. This lack of fit is, however, readily resolved by widening the focus. Once these themes are recognized as aspects of a naturalistic philosophy of the human being, their relationship to Enlightenment themes becomes clear. Thus his account of the limitations of our perceptual knowledge, and our consequent reliance on regularities in experience, is an application of the modern scientific accounts of perception and of inertial motion – in both cases treating the mind and experience as within the purview of natural science. Hume may still be seen to offer a philosophy different from his contemporaries, but this is an inevitable mark of originality; the relevant fact is that his naturalism situates him in a broad intellectual stream characteristic of the times. This first lack of fit is thus more apparent than real, since it depends on failing to see how Hume’s most famous arguments fit into his larger philosophy. The second lack of fit between Hume’s views and the wider intellectual world of his day is not so easily dealt with. It is that some specifically Humean themes seem positively hostile to Enlightenment themes. Moreover, the most significant of these seem to add up to a mutually-supporting triad of views with a decidedly anti-Enlightenment thrust. These are his reduction of reason to a servant of imagination and passion; the scepticism that follows from this reduction; and an apparent political conservatism that in turn flows from the scepticism. These all seem at odds with an Enlightened outlook: the first because the Enlightenment is also commonly known as the Age of Reason, and appeals to Reason as the only legitimate guide to human life are characteristic of the central Enlightenment figures; the second because a sceptical outlook seems inevitably to lead to a distrust of schemes for reform, and so encourages a conservative attitude (even if not actual affirmation of conservative doctrines); and the third simply because the Enlightenment was a period of reform, not of conservative adherence to established traditions. These are genuine issues requiring careful consideration, so they will be some of the main themes to be examined in the first part of this collection. What of the second aspect, Hume’s contribution to the legacy of the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment enjoys its special place in intellectual history because it is recognized to be, in important ways, formative of our own day. So in what ways, or to what degree, do Hume’s views still constitute live options for modern philosophy? The answer is complex. On the one hand, some central Humean doctrines enjoy considerable contemporary support, even to the point of constituting orthodoxies. The surprizing feature is that many of those views now enjoying such status are precisely those views supposed to have an anti-Enlightenment bearing. Thus it is that Hume’s dethroning of reason, and his elevation of imagination, passion and habit to take its place, are precisely the favoured doctrines of recent cognitive science. Similarly, the favoured model of

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human motivation, moral motivation included, is the belief-desire model associated with (if not identical to) Hume’s view. Associated with this model is the widely-accepted ‘internalist’ theory of reasons for action. Other Humean views, on the other hand, enjoy less support. His broadly utilitarian approach to questions of legal justice seems at odds with contemporary emphases on individual rights – although it is possible to say that, amongst practitioners (rather than academic theorists), his views are close to the norm. The same can probably be said of his political principles: his caution, and scepticism concerning abstract principles, recommends him more to the practical politician than to the political theorist. But this is enough to show that his ideas are far from dead. Even in his more conservative moments, Hume still speaks in terms of concepts that are recognizably modern and respected: opinion, consent, liberty and utility. To turn, then, to the individual papers in this collection. The first three take up the question of Hume’s place in the intellectual currents of his time. The first, by Stephen Buckle, defends Hume’s enlightenment credentials; the second, by Karen Green, questions them; and the third, by Buckle again, responds to Green. Buckle begins by acknowledging that there are a number of obstacles to holding Hume to be a thinker of the Enlightenment. One set of problems here stems from the very fact that Hume was a philosopher, moreover a philosopher who represents, as Buckle says, the high point of British Empiricism. It is a commonplace, at least in analytic philosophy, to think of philosophy as a-historical. On this view, either Hume is of enduring interest to us through the various philosophical problems he bequeathed to us, in which case his interest for us bears little relation to the period of the Enlightenment, or Hume is merely the last empiricist, the last representative of an exhausted philosophy notable perhaps mainly for the fact that he awakened Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’, thus spurring Kant on to develop some of the Enlightenment’s most significant doctrines. As if that is not enough, further obstacles emerge when we consider in more detail the content of Hume’s philosophy. Thus if we think of the Enlightenment as the ‘Age of Reason’, Hume’s Enlightenment credentials look even more shaky, for as Buckle points out Hume is perhaps most famous for cutting reason down to size; as he famously says ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’. However, as Buckle points out, this obstacle depends on the way in which we understand ‘reason’: on whether we construe it narrowly as philosophical rationalism or more broadly as the exercize of one’s own intellectual autonomy. The narrow interpretation, Buckle argues, presents us with insurmountable problems in making sense of the Enlightenment as an intellectual period. For example, it cannot account for the influence of empiricism on canonical French Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and d’Alembert. Much more plausible, Buckle suggests, is the idea that both rationalism and empiricism were both ‘distinctively modern forms of thinking, conscious of themselves as such – and

Introduction

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so anti-traditional’, both sharing a common belief in the achievements of the new natural science, and of its relevance to understanding human nature and to reforming society. In short, both movements shared a belief in the importance of individual human beings thinking for themselves including subjecting traditional answers and authorities to this process. Green agrees that the sentiment expressed in the last sentence is definitive of the Enlightenment, but she argues that it should be understood as positioned by Kant against the empiricism of Hume. As she notes, it was Kant who proclaimed the motto of enlightenment to be ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!’ Central to Green’s argument is the contrast between, on the one hand, the slavish role of reason advanced by Hume, and, on the other, Kant’s conception of reason; in particular, his argument that there is such a thing as pure practical reason, that there is an ‘a priori basis for an immutable measure of right and wrong’. But it is not, interestingly, via Kant that Green pursues this claim against Hume. Instead, she develops it via the eighteenth-century British historian and philosopher Catharine Macaulay. As Green argues, Macaulay shares Kant’s conviction that reason has the power to reveal immutable moral truths. Moreover, Macaulay thinks that those who grasp these truths will subscribe to republicanism. Thus Green’s point is that ‘philosophers who fail to make the connection between rational agency, enlightened reason and political reform may belong to the period of the Enlightenment, but they are, in a significant sense, not enlightened philosophers’. That Hume did not grasp these connections is evidenced, she argues, in his hostility toward republicanism and his political conservatism, including in his History of England. While Hume has little sympathy for the puritans in their conflict with James I, Macaulay, in contrast, sees both James I and Charles I as ‘regressive absolutists’. This is, says Green, a view we share with Macaulay, and that we do so illustrates that the Enlightenment legacy derives not from Hume the political conservative, the defender of traditional authority, but from such thinkers as Kant and Macaulay with their belief in the power of reason to demonstrate that democracy is rationally justifiable. Buckle responds by addressing three issues. First, he opposes Green’s determination to measure the Enlightenment entirely by reference to political ideas that ‘we now cherish’. He argues that it is Green’s supposition that this is his standpoint that underpins several of her objections, and, because it is not, concludes that her objections tend to miss their intended target. He adds that such a latter-day standpoint runs the risk of supposing greater conceptual continuities than in fact exist, a point he illustrates by reference to the evolution of the idea of rights. Second, he points out that, despite Kant’s significance as an Enlightenment figure, his rationalism cannot be taken as definitive: even his German contemporaries did not hold it so; and one of the most influential of recent defenders of liberal democratic society, Isaiah Berlin, inverts the roles of empiri-

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cism and rationalism by endorsing empiricism, and casting rationalism in the role of anti-Enlightenment villain. Buckle’s own conclusion is that empiricism and rationalism are both too general to imply any single political conclusion; thus neither can claim to provide the definitive Enlightened political outlook. Third, Buckle points out that there are problems in elevating Macaulay to the role Green accords her, since her own views seem an amalgam deriving from British philosophers of both rationalist and empiricist allegiances. And he adds that Green’s view that Enlightenment history boils down to political values misses the revolution in historiography brought about in the Enlightenment, not least in Hume’s History. He concludes by suggesting that Green’s view that our own political values are those of the radical Enlightenment is misleading, since our values are more plausibly seen, because of the twentieth-century’s ideological conflicts, as a retreat from radicalism to a more moderate position. The debate between Buckle and Green reflects, in large part, differing conceptions of the Enlightenment, and in particular whether certain political aspirations were essential to it. But the second way to approach Hume’s Enlightenment credentials is to consider his ongoing legacy; that is, to consider Hume’s part in fashioning the world the Enlightenment has helped create. Thus all the following articles in this collection deal in different ways with aspects of Hume’s intellectual legacy. Dale Jacquette’s particular interest in this regard is Hume’s application of his experimental method to mathematics and aesthetics, and specifically Hume’s claim that we can have no adequate idea of infinity or infinite divisibility, and its implications for the aesthetic idea of the sublime. As Jacquette points out, Hume’s denial that we have an idea of infinity or infinite divisibility follows directly from the fact that as finite cognitive agents we can have no impression of these things and hence no corresponding idea of them (as ideas are, according to Hume’s ‘copy principle’, merely faint copies of impressions of sensation or reflection). What follows from this (and from Hume’s scepticism about religion), as Jacquette then notes, is that Hume is precluded from the kind of infinitist and religious speculations on the sublime that were predominant in aesthetic theories of his day and that we later find in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. For Hume, our sense of the sublime reduces to a number of discrete psychological problems: specifically, those to do with why objects separated from us by great distance in space and time should have for us more positive aesthetic value – a standard example here being the sense of awe one has when looking from a mountain top over a high mountain range – when according to his theory distance has the effect of weakening the passions. As Jacquette goes on to explain, Hume’s solution to this problem is to argue that ‘aesthetic delight is produced by the mind’s overcoming the difficulties in assimilating the information presented by objects at great distances in space and time’. So, in both his discussion of infinity and the sublime, Jacquette argues,

Introduction

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we can see Hume’s uncompromising application of his philosophical method to such seemingly disparate subjects as mathematics and aesthetics. The two papers that follow deal specifically with an aspect of Hume’s thought that is perhaps most easily identified with the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment: his well known religious scepticism. Thus Stanley Tweyman and Robert Phiddian both consider Hume’s religious scepticism as it is manifest in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, although they do so from very different directions. The central aim of Tweyman’s paper is to show how Philo’s extreme Pyrrhonian scepticism has the effect of transforming Cleanthes ‘from a dogmatist to a mitigated sceptic’. This transition is revealed, so Tweyman argues, through the particular criticisms that Cleanthes advances against Demea’s Cosmological–Ontological Argument. Crucially, Tweyman suggests, those criticisms ‘are not designed to refute Demea’s a priori Argument, but rather to bring Demea to a ‘suspense’ of judgement regarding this Argument’. As Tweyman argues, for Hume such a state is the starting point for philosophic inquiry. Thus Hume’s method involves more than the experimental method emphasized in the Treatise and first Enquiry; what is required beyond this, as Cleanthes’ transformation shows, is that we overcome dogmatism, which can lead even those who follow the experimental method into error on account of their initial prejudices. Phiddian, by contrast, is not concerned primarily with the philosophical content of Philo’s sceptical arguments (or with Cleanthes’ possible conversion from dogmatist to philosophical sceptic) so much as, first, whether Hume through Philo deploys the literary mode of satire in addition to philosophical argument and, second, what that might tell us about the changing relationship between satire and philosophy at the time when the Dialogues were written. On the first point Phiddian’s answer is a qualified ‘yes’: he is at pains to point out that the Dialogues as a text merely has elements of satire or, more qualified still, of ‘satire manqué’, satire foiled, and that Hume is careful not to let the ‘passionate contempt’ of its target so central to satire crowd out reasoned argument. This takes us directly to Phiddian’s second point. He notes that, while the work of the second century Epicurean author Lucian could still (unlike now) be described as satirical philosophy, by the time of the Dialogues intellectual life had become much more divided into discrete disciplines with their own specific standards and commitments. Thus in the end Hume identifies too closely with a modern conception of philosophy as a medium of balanced, dispassionate and reasoned inquiry for him to surrender fully to his satirical impulses. Phiddian thus concludes that what satire there is in the Dialogues ‘is satire manqué at least in part because [the Dialogues’] philosophical purpose is pursued in too disciplined a manner to allow satire’s militant irony enough imaginative freedom to dominate the rhetorical thrust of the text’. George Couvalis also takes as his subject Hume’s scepticism, but here as directed at Cartesian Rationalism, including as advanced by Descartes himself.

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Couvalis suggests, following William Morris, that Hume’s argument in the section of the Treatise entitled ‘Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason’ is aimed at the Cartesian claim that one can be certain that one is right about some very simple mathematical or logical beliefs. Hume’s arguments there can be seen as of a piece with what many recent interpreters of Hume regard as his naturalism about human knowledge and human nature. However what such interpreters generally fail to consider, Couvalis argues, is how some recent research on the family of cognitive deficits called ‘acalculia’ supports Hume’s position. Couvalis points out that acalculics can have false beliefs about even very simple arithmetical propositions, all the while being convinced that their claims are obviously true. Those who suffer from such defects are not irrational; yet it does not follow from this, as Descartes seems to think, that their beliefs in the solutions to even the simplest mathematical problems is infallible. Couvalis’s paper, then, illustrates the robustness of Hume’s enquiries into human nature and knowledge, and their relevance to current psychological and neurological research. Hume’s naturalism is also of course central in his moral philosophy and the next three papers deal specifically with topics in these areas. Craig Taylor begins with the contention, from stalwart Humean Annette Baier, that for Hume cruelty is the worst vice. Taylor questions whether Hume really has an adequate account of what is morally terrible about cruelty, at least in its most extreme form. The problem, according to Taylor, stems from Hume’s account of sympathy, which is an account of a kind of mechanism through which the sentiments of another are communicated to us. Taylor’s point here is that in the case of extreme suffering, and particularly in the kind of suffering associated with modern forms of slavery, it is implausible to describe that suffering as simply a matter of feeling. What kind of sensation, Taylor asks, attends being bred like cattle? The Kantian has a ready answer as to why slavery is so terrible: it involves a failure to treat another human being as an end and not merely as a means. Taylor, however, finds this answer unconvincing. As he goes on to argue, it is not, as Kant would have it, a denial of the slave’s membership of the kingdom of ends that shows us the inhumanity of slavery; it is their suffering. Returning then to Hume, Taylor suggests that we can best account for the evil of slavery once we understand Humean naturalism as a kind of non-reductive naturalism: our sense of the evil of slavery is founded on certain natural reactions to such extreme suffering that involve a recognition of and concern for the sufferer. Taylor then concludes by arguing that some such non-reductive naturalistic account of our moral concepts provides the only plausible foundation for morality in a post-Enlightenment world, and that the dominance of this kind of broad naturalism in contemporary ethics points to Hume’s enduring influence in moral philosophy. Mark Collier’s paper indicates one way in which we might put Hume’s ethical naturalism to the test. As Collier points out, a central concern for Hume

Introduction

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was how to explain human beings’ capacity to cooperate on a large scale. While Hume recognized our capacity for strategic rationality, and hence our ability to recognize that cooperation is in our long term interest, he was also aware, as Collier notes, of our ‘strong psychological propensity to discount the future’. What is required for cooperation and social exchange is that we can trust that others will resist the short term advantage gained by defection in favour of the long term advantage gained from cooperation. So, as Collier goes on to suggest, that trust is secured for Hume by the fact that we develop a feeling of ‘repugnance towards injustice’. As Collier notes, even those without an interest in particular social exchanges will disapprove of defectors here because the disapproval of those who are affected will be communicated to others through the operation of the mechanism of sympathy. Further, this feeling of aversion will be reinforced, Hume thought, through education and public rhetoric. Collier concedes that Hume could not have determined whether his speculations concerning the basis of cooperation were correct, but, in a similar way to Couvalis, Collier argues that we are much better placed to test Hume’s account: recent research in experimental game theory and neuroeconomics is starting to produce results that bear out Hume’s account of how we are able to cooperate. As he puts it, ‘[r]esearchers have discovered that negative reward circuits in the brain become active…when participants make uncooperative moves in games involving social exchange’. Here again then, Hume’s speculations into human psychology appear to be borne out by relevant current research, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his sentimentalist account of ethics. Like Collier, Ian Hunt is concerned with Hume’s account of how it is we are able to cooperate to our mutual advantage despite the potential for conflict that Collier has outlined. However while Collier is concerned with Hume’s answer as to how we are able to work cooperatively in collective practice, Hunt is concerned with the conception of justice that is suggested by that answer. Thus for Hume our motive for upholding justice is artificial, which means that this motive is not implanted in our nature but acquired through experience. In this sense, Hunt notes, Hume’s views bear some similarity to the view of justice advanced by John Rawls. However, as he goes on to argue, while both hold justice to be in a sense artificial, what they mean by this is strikingly different and points to fundamentally different conceptions of justice. One way to characterize the difference here is by considering the importance both philosophers place on the idea that the rules enforced by society be stable. Thus, as Hunt notes, for Hume stable security of possession is simply necessary ‘for social cooperation upon which social benefits depend’. For Rawls, however, the question is not so much whether the rules deliver these benefits but whether ‘all members of a just society could freely and conscientiously decide that they will uphold its system of justice’. For Hume, Hunt suggests, justice amounts to a ‘compromise between the powerful and the

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weak that gives enough to each to reduce incentives for open conflict’, and in this sense Hume’s is a ‘non-normative account of justice as it is found in a society’. Rawls by contrast is concerned with the basis for the authority of a society’s rules and in this respect he represents a strand of Enlightenment thinking that can be traced not to Hume but to Kant. As Hunt concludes, while Hume ‘is happy enough for citizens simply to accept traditional views of legitimate authority… Kant…takes citizens to be mature as human beings only if they take ultimate responsibility for the laws under which they live’. Thus Hunt returns us to the debate between Buckle and Green as to how we should understand what it is to be a philosopher of the Enlightenment. Hume’s moral philosophy does not of course exist in isolation and is dependent in particular upon his account of the passions; on ‘impressions of reflection’, in Hume’s own terminology. But, as Anna Stoklosa points out, Hume’s account of the passions does not appear to be entirely consistent. Thus, while Hume claims in a variety of places that passions represent – that they are directed towards things, or in other words, that they are intentional – he also claims, at paragraph 2.3.3.5/415 of the Treatise, that ‘[a] passion is an original existence… and contains not any representative quality’. This seems to suggest that passions do not represent anything after all. Standard ways of accounting for this seeming contradiction in Hume include dismissing this paragraph as anomalous, or suggesting that, for Hume, it is not passions themselves that represent but only the ideas with which they are associated. Stoklosa, however, rejects both approaches as inadequate, albeit for differing reasons. She then proposes her own solution, arguing that Hume in the seemingly anomalous paragraph of the Treatise only rejects a specific kind of representation, that is, ‘representation understood as a copy’. Thus, as Stoklosa notes, Hume himself discusses ‘the representationality of words’: a form of representation that, unlike a copy, involves no kind of resemblance between word and object, indeed no kind of resemblance at all. While Stoklosa has focused on passions, or impressions of reflection, Anik Waldow, in the final paper in this collection, considers the role of Hume’s impressions in our formation of thoughts about the world. Taking up Thomas Reid’s idea that sensations (in Hume’s terminology, impressions) are signs of things that nature has taught us to interpret correctly, she suggests that impressions can be understood ‘as triggers of natural associative processes that enable us to relate our…ideas in a regular way to occurrences in our environment’. Waldow’s argument here challenges the view that in order to distinguish real as opposed to fantastical ideas in Hume’s system we must appeal to his ‘copy principle’. It is not, she suggests, so much the resemblance between impressions and ideas that enables us to distinguish real from fictitious ideas of the world, but the naturalness and regularity of the relevant processes of thought-formation in each case. While acknowledging the similarities between Hume and Reid, Waldow

Introduction

11

argues finally that there is an important difference in their views; specifically, while Reid remains committed to the idea that we can have knowledge of the metaphysical causes underlying sensations or impressions, Hume, the sceptic, holds that we cannot know that the ideas triggered by impressions accurately represent reality. Thus Hume in the end exhibits an ‘anti-metaphysical and antidogmatic spirit that Reid lacks’. Insofar as the spirit of the Enlightenment can be characterized by the rejection of metaphysical speculation and dogmatic belief in favour of what human beings can come to know by thinking for themselves, and through their own enquiries, one might say that, in this respect as in others, Hume’s Enlightenment credentials have been vindicated.

1 HUME AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT Stephen Buckle

David Hume was one of the outstanding thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in general surveys of the period, is uncontroversially recognized as such.1 Moreover, he enjoyed this status at the time: not only in England and his native Scotland, but also across the Channel in France, and so in what is typically regarded as the Enlightenment’s heartland. Thus, after his diplomatic posting to Paris in 1763 (and so after the success in France of his History of England), he quickly became a friend of major intellectual figures of the French scene, d’Alembert in particular, and something of a favourite exhibit in the Parisian salons: le bon David. In this light, he seems to be quintessentially a figure of the European Enlightenment. Nevertheless, to think of Hume as an Enlightenment figure is to run into obstacles. These obstacles come from both ends, so to speak: they derive both from common understandings of Hume’s philosophy, and from equally common conceptions of the Enlightenment. It will be helpful, then, to begin by surveying some of the more familiar of these obstacles.

Hume or Enlightenment? If we begin from the Humean side of the issue, three obstacles stand out. The first is very general, the fruit of a philosophical outlook: it is the conviction amongst philosophers that philosophy is fundamentally ahistorical, concerned with the eternally true. From this point of view, to situate a philosopher in particular circumstances is to accept that the philosophy is dead; and, if it is dead, it is not worthy of study. So, from this point of view, the fact that Hume lived in the period known as the Enlightenment is no doubt of considerable interest to historians; but in so far as Hume’s philosophy lives and breathes it belongs to no epoch. Hume, it will be said, bequeathed to us problems that we still struggle to resolve – problems concerning induction, causation, the nature of the self and so on – and what makes him a suitable subject of study is precisely that these problems are unresolved, not that they were thought up in any particular historical context. So, the conclusion must run, Hume is indeed a figure from the period now known as – 13 –

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the Enlightenment; but, from a philosophical point of view, this is a fact of no significance – no more than that he was a Scotsman who enjoyed his French claret. A second obstacle is not unrelated, in that it also assumes that Hume bequeathed to us certain problems that remain issues for us. The problem here arises from the fact that it is this cluster of discrete problems, rather than an overall philosophy, that is Hume’s legacy to us. If, for example, we open any typical introduction to Hume, we see chapters on an array of topics familiar to all philosophers: empiricism, causation, perception and the external world, personal identity, the foundation of morals, miracles and natural religion.2 Now if these topics sum up Hume’s relevance, then the Enlightenment bearings of his philosophy seem, at best, uncertain. The last three, on morals and religion, seem like typical Enlightenment topics – and, indeed, his conclusions concerning them can be regarded as typical Enlightenment conclusions. But the others seem more like obstacles to Enlightenment views than anything else: the Enlightenment is thought of as the Age of Reason, and as such seems opposed to empiricism; and Hume’s famously sceptical arguments about causation, belief in an external world, and personal identity all seem to speak the disengagement so characteristic of the sceptic – and so opposed to the Enlightenment’s ideal of the philosopher as social critic and reformer. Moreover, given that this latter list of topics represents Hume’s pure philosophy, it seems that his relationship to the Enlightenment is inversely related to the degree of purity of his philosophical principles. So, to invoke a familiar picture, he can be classed as an Enlightenment thinker when he is slumming it – dabbling in applied topics – but not when he is at his most genuinely philosophical. If these were not enough, a third obstacle can be found in the common view of the history of early modern philosophy, first developed by nineteenth-century Kantian historians of philosophy, but most sharply expressed by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy: that Hume was the last in the line of the British Empiricists – in fact, the empiricist who destroyed empiricism – and so represents a historical dead end.3 A less radical – if perhaps more patronizing – version of this view is that entrenched in the still-dominant Kantian paradigm of the history of modern philosophy: that Hume represents the high point of empiricism in the sense of forging the problems that Kant then resolved. On this version, his philosophical role was to awaken Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber’4 – but with that (unintended) achievement, his positive contribution to the history of philosophy came to an end. The baton passed to Kant, who went on to forge some of the Enlightenment’s most distinctive doctrines – and Hume simply fell away, back into philosophy’s, and society’s, past. Whatever is to be said for this view, it will be noted that it is quite at odds with the other two: unlike them, it supposes that Hume’s philosophy is dead rather than alive. But all three


15

seem to lead to the conclusion that Hume’s philosophy bears no significant relationship to the movement of ideas we think of as the Enlightenment. At least, that is so if, in Habermas’s words, the Enlightenment is not a mere historical curio, but an ongoing project of modern human society.5 This brings us to our second set of obstacles. Is the Enlightenment to be understood as the eighteenth-century flowering of intellectual culture, the so-called Age of Reason which reached its apogee in the France of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists? Or is it to be understood on the broader Habermasian model, as the inauguration of a new epoch in human intellectual history, the full realization of which is still in progress? If the latter, then Hume belongs unproblematically. It does not matter, from this point of view, whether he is cast as hero or villain in this movement of ideas – he undeniably belongs to it, as his central place in the contemporary philosophy curriculum is enough to show. If the former, then things are more complicated: Hume both belongs and does not. On the one hand, it is very hard to leave him out of the intellectual flowering of the eighteenth century: the only recourse here is the indefensible path of treating the Enlightenment as purely a French phenomenon. Plainly it was not, whatever the success of the Frenchmen in dramatizing their own significance, or, indeed, of historians of the French Revolution in conferring it on them after the fact. The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon; and, as Voltaire was himself well aware, its roots were as British as they were French.6 On the other hand, if the Enlightenment is understood as the Age of Reason, Hume presents a very uncertain figure, given his determination to cut reason down to size: his famous dictum, ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (T 2.3.3.4/414–15), makes a very poor application for membership of the Age of Reason. As a slogan, it makes a far better fit with the succeeding age, the Age of Romanticism, often classed by intellectual historians as the period of the Counter-Enlightenment.7 This difficulty in making Hume fit should not surprise, since it brings out an ambiguity built into the historians’ picture of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason: that it glues together both a historical and an intellectual component, as if simply co-extensive. The trouble of fitting Hume is enough to show that they are not. The period known, to later generations, as the Enlightenment can be thought of as an ‘age of reason’, but only if we understand that crucial term, ‘reason’, very broadly. If we conceive of the meaning of the term more narrowly, as implying a connection with the philosophical rationalism which the Romantics repudiated, then problems rapidly multiply. The trouble arises because the French Enlightenment, although heavily indebted to the rationalism of the Cartesians, was equally dependent on other canonical figures of a thoroughly anti-rationalist bent. The obvious marker of this is the widespread influence of radical materialist views. In Cartesian philosophy, the intellect is

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identified with the immortal soul, so the short route to materialist conclusions was to offer a reductive explanation of the intellect in terms of sensory – that is, bodily – processes. For these thinkers, then, the rational intellect is thereby effectively dissolved. This is the route taken by, for example, the most notorious of the materialists, La Mettrie, in his Man the Machine.8 It is plain that, from this angle, materialism and anti-rationalism are two sides of the same coin; so, in so far as the radical materialists are thought of as quintessential figures of the French Enlightenment – which of course they are – then the Age of Reason’s intellectual landscape is anti-rationalist no less than it is rationalist. This would be obvious were it not for the seriously complicating fact that these anti-rationalists appealed, no less than the rationalists, to the ideal of reason! Why did they do so?: Because that ideal was itself ambiguous. It meant not only a belief in the ruling power of reason, but also, more simply, the belief in thinking for oneself. This is indicated by the almost routine opposition, amongst most canonical Enlightenment figures, of ‘reason’ to tradition. It is fully evident in Kant’s conception of enlightenment as an individual intellectual odyssey, in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ He there declares the motto of enlightenment to be ‘Sapere aude!’ (dare to be wise): a slogan which he then glosses as ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’9 Kant is himself best thought of as a minimal rationalist – and of course there is no point in relying on your own understanding if it is nothing but a slave of passion – but it is revealing nonetheless that he does not tie the process of enlightenment to any rationalist thesis about reason’s status. The essay itself was published in the Berlin Monthly, a periodical addressed to the wider world of the republic of letters, so he clearly did not expect that its message was relevant only to those who had adopted his own philosophical position. So why is it that ‘reason’ was ambiguous in this way, signifying either philosophical rationalism, or intellectual autonomy, or even both? The answer is to be found in Descartes. His philosophy was both high rationalism and, in its famous method of doubt, the very model of anti-traditional intellectual autonomy. By his example, he inspired not only the Cartesians, who embraced his conclusions, but even their enemies, who adopted (or at least claimed to adopt) his methods, despite rejecting his conclusions. The focus, in modern philosophy departments, on the Meditations on First Philosophy somewhat dilutes this ideological edge to Descartes’s enterprise, since there he speaks mainly of rejecting the opinions he absorbed in childhood, before having attained his own age of reason. The wider social and political potential of the message is clearer in the earlier Discourse on Method, for there Descartes rejects the value of the education he received at the hands of the Jesuits, and also offers a concluding defence of having written in the vernacular in which the anti-traditional message is made explicit: ‘if I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than Latin, which is that of my teachers, it is because I hope that


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those who use only their unalloyed natural reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who swear only by the books of the ancients’.10 Thus, having already opened the Discourse with an affirmation of the value of everyone’s good sense,11 Descartes’s concluding remarks mean the work is bookended with appeals to the fundamental importance of the exercise of one’s own intellectual autonomy. Kant’s motto thus has deep French roots; and, given Descartes’s profound influence on the world of French philosophy and science, it is no surprise that French critics of the ancien regime should have appealed to his example even as they rejected his conclusions.

English and French Enlightenments If the French Enlightenment radicals did not follow Descartes to his dualist conclusions, from where did they find inspiration of a doctrinal kind? Here the answer may surprise: they found it in the British empirical tradition, above all in the works of Francis Bacon and John Locke. This fact can be gleaned from French sources which offer brief historical sketches of the rise of enlightened views: most notably, Voltaire’s youthful work, the Letters on England, and the later historical sketches for which it seemed to provide the template, including Condillac’s Introduction to his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), and d’Alembert’s Preface to the Encyclopédie (1751).12 The same two figures are even inspirations to Kant: the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) acknowledges the achievement of ‘the famous Locke’; and the second edition (1787) has, for a motto, an extract from Bacon’s Great Instauration.13 By the time Heinrich Heine penned his short history of German intellectual life, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, written for a French audience in 1835, Locke’s canonization was complete: Locke was the Frenchmen’s ‘master’, his Essay concerning Human Understanding their ‘gospel’.14 The surprising conclusion is, then, that, when the Enlightenment philosophers appealed to Reason, what they had in mind, of a doctrinal kind, was more often the British-originated empirical philosophy of Locke and his fellows than it was the French rationalism stemming from Descartes. Small wonder then that that appeal has so often been misunderstood! If we append to this insight another, one way of fitting Hume more firmly into the intellectual world of the Enlightenment presents itself. The second insight lies in considering Hume’s intellectual output. As is obvious to all, he not only wrote difficult philosophical works, but also polite essays and even a major history – but this has been seen by philosophers as something of an embarrassment, as evidence that Hume gave up philosophy, no doubt because of his self-confessed ‘love of literary fame’. The embarrassment is misguided, the fruit of almost complete misapprehension of Hume’s sense of his intellectual (and literary) vocation.

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The explanation for Hume’s corpus seems readily resolved: all we have to do is ask who amongst his predecessors produced such a corpus, such that Hume might be seen as emulating a great example? The answer is: Francis Bacon. This means that, quite apart from the well-known fact of Hume’s intellectual debts to Locke, his entire corpus can be illuminated by reference to the accepted originator of the empirical philosophical tradition on which the French Enlightenment most profoundly depended. Bringing Bacon into view also has another benefit, because it offers insight into both Hume’s sense of his philosophical project and of an under-appreciated intellectual debt. Bacon had recommended that the methods of natural philosophy could be applied to human life, and that society would be improved by the development of such a science of human nature. This thought gained firm roots in English intellectual life, its optimistic tale even being echoed by Isaac Newton in the ‘Queries’ appended to the second edition of his Opticks.15 But the person who first attempted to realize this ideal was a former secretary to Bacon, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes even described his early work, The Elements of Law, as ‘a treatise of human nature’.16 So, when a well-read eighteenth-century reader opened an anonymously-authored work of the same title, and saw in its Introduction praise of Bacon as the original source from which this new work flowed, our reader would have had no trouble seeing the work as aiming to contribute to the new spirit of enlightenment as embodied in the Baconian tradition. If our reader turned out to be Dr Johnson, he could then even have concluded that the work was not merely Baconian, but positively Hobbesian.17 This is not the place to argue a detailed case for Hume’s Hobbesian debts, nor should it be supposed that by proposing this view I am denying the more common view of him as having descended intellectually from Locke and Berkeley. I will say, though, that the debts to Berkeley are misunderstood, and more limited than usually supposed: in particular, while he saw Berkeley’s critique of Locke to be successful, it led him not to Idealism, as often supposed, but to a sceptical assaying of the powers of reason. As he put it, the arguments of Berkeley ‘though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical … [because] they admit of no answer and produce no conviction’ (EHU 12.15n/154–5). Hume is no Berkeleian. When this is recognized, there is no bar to seeing both Locke and himself as inheritors, in different but not unrelated ways, of Hobbes as well as Bacon. For present purposes, the important point is that this places Hume in an intellectual lineage with strongly marked materialist sympathies. Hobbes made no bones about his materialism. Locke, for his part, did much to make an indirect case for materialism by showing how the intellect could be ‘sensualized’: that is, explained by reference to recognized sensory and thus bodily processes – just as the French materialists did. His influence on materialism, on both sides of the Channel, is well known.18 I have argued elsewhere that Hume’s project can be understood to be a sceptical rewriting of Hobbes, and so describable as ‘sceptical


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materialism’. I will not repeat those arguments here.19 Suffice it to say that, thus interpreted, Hume’s well-known debts to Locke not only present no problem: they fall neatly into place. This is because, for all his sympathy and implicit support for materialism, Locke resists affirming the doctrine because it lies beyond our possibility of knowing: the human being, he held, is designed for practical life, not for uncovering ultimate mysteries.20 In this respect he and Hume are, I suggest, pretty much peas in a pod: both favour materialist styles of explanation, while refraining from claiming to know the truth of materialism. The difference between them is not simply reducible to, but nevertheless owes most to, their differences over religion. For Locke, the limits to our knowledge rule out extravagant doctrinal claims, but do not undermine the religious life itself; for Hume, in contrast, the limits to our knowledge suggest an interpretation of our beliefforming capacities that rule out the claims of all religious systems of thought, and the religious authorities built on them (if not of the most attenuated forms of theism).21 But in this difference, it is Hume who appears the more typically Enlightenment figure; and at this point it is worth remembering that he and the radical French philosophers found their personal encounters mutually engaging. The important philosophical-cum-sociological point to make here, though, is that the Baconian project of a science of human nature not only fits Hume into a recognizably Enlightenment tradition: it does so by fitting him into the best interpretation of the Enlightenment itself. Purely ‘historical period’ interpretations of the Enlightenment fail to explain what makes that period intellectually significant. To focus on just one example of that type of interpretation: to explain the Enlightenment as the consequence of the expansion of the book trade fails to explain what those books were about, or why anyone found them worth reading. (They weren’t all concerned with the improvement of agriculture!) But various intellectual interpretations also fail – including the popular idea that the period is tolerably described as the Age of Reason. The problem here, as already pointed out, is that this tends to identify the period with a triumph of rationalist philosophy, when it was the empiricism imported from across the Channel that was the more powerful influence. The broader Cartesian idea of reason as the cultivation of intellectual autonomy fares better, but even it lacks force until the typical fruits of the exercise of that autonomy are factored in. Those fruits were either modern rationalist or modern empiricist: in short, they were one kind or another of distinctively modern forms of thinking, conscious of themselves as such – and so self-consciously anti-traditional. If we ask what it was that these otherwise-opposed schools of thought had in common, the answer is simple: they had in common the belief that the methods and conclusions of natural science had been revolutionized, and that ancient beliefs had been compromised beyond rescue. The conclusion they drew from this was that a similar revolution was unavoidable in the understanding of human nature and society, and that

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such a revolution implied the suspending, at least, of traditionally-authoritative answers to these questions. In short, rationalist and empiricist alike believed in the necessity of constructing a new science of human nature, inspired by the example – methods and conclusions – of the new science of physical nature, and that even tradition-hallowed answers and authorities had to be subjected to this programme.22 So when, with this in mind, we open up a work entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and read on its title-page that it is ‘an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’, we know what the game is, and whose side the work is on. If we still feel lingering doubts, the Latin motto on the title-page should succeed in settling them, with its bold announcement: ‘Rare the happy times when we can think what we like, and say what we think’.23 The authorial anonymity might be taken as further evidence of bold ambitions.24 Hume’s Treatise thus announces itself as belonging to the heartland of what would come to be called ‘the Enlightenment project’; the moral for interpreters of his philosophy is, then, not so much to dispute the fact as to explain why it is so. To claim this may, however, seem more bold than wise. After all, Hume is routinely understood to be a conservative thinker – even, sometimes, a complacent and self-satisfied Tory. It is also claimed, by those inclined to equate the Enlightenment’s appeal to reason as necessarily an appeal to philosophical rationalism, that his empiricism is itself enough to prove him a conservative, and so to deny him the philosophical status of being classed as an Enlightenment thinker. These are familiar charges, and show no signs of dying out, so it will be appropriate if we turn now to consider some species of these claims.

The Enlightenment and Radicalism The Enlightenment is routinely regarded as a period of radical thought – the intellectual cradle of the French Revolution, and thus of the modern world – but it is almost equally routine to cast Hume as a conservative.25 So, if justified, these twin tendencies suffice to exclude Hume from the Enlightenment pantheon. In fact, however, neither of these claims can be sustained – at least, not without qualification. In this section I will consider the first of these two claims. Most obviously, if the Enlightenment period is under consideration, then of course there were conservative as well as radical thinkers. So the argument must be that it is the Enlightenment in a doctrinal sense that is essentially radical: which is to say, that the thinkers we now judge to deserve the title of ‘enlightened’ were all social radicals. The trouble with this claim should be obvious: it imposes a latter-day criterion to sort the ‘enlightened’ from the rest, and then proclaims, as if it has made a discovery, that the ‘enlightened’ fit the criterion! In short, there is more than a whiff of circularity here. It is only if we assume that the ideas that


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came to dominate the French Revolution were all along the yardstick for enlightened thought in the eighteenth century that the thesis can be maintained. That this is not a credible yardstick can be seen by reflecting on the transformative intellectual effects of social revolutions themselves, as revealed in the perceptive analysis of another revolution by a very sympathetic observer. Commenting on the development of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg observes that: The first period of the Russian Revolution … corresponds exactly in its general outlines to the course of development of both the Great English Revolution and the Great French Revolution. It is the typical course of every first general reckoning of the revolutionary forces begotten within the womb of bourgeois society. Its development moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party.26

In short, the dominance of the radicals is the effect of social revolution, not its cause. So to identify the Enlightenment with the radical minority whose ideas came to dominate the French Revolution is to airbrush history (just as the Mensheviks and others later came to be airbrushed from Russian history). That the Enlightenment – even in France – has been airbrushed in this way is readily shown. The two names most closely associated with the radicalism of the French Revolution were Voltaire and Rousseau. (‘C’est la faute à Voltaire, c’est la faute à Rousseau’ was a nineteenth-century French conservative ditty about the evils spawned by the Revolution.)27 Yet there was almost nothing on which Voltaire and Rousseau saw eye-to-eye. On the key issues of culture and politics, Voltaire was pro-civilization and pro-monarchy; Rousseau anti-civilization and antimonarchy. Fortunately, both agreed on the fundamental value of rule by law – but that was about it. Nor was it the case that their disagreements were those of dissenting allies in a common cause – rather they tended to the vitriolic. Voltaire makes it plain that he thinks Rousseau’s psyche to be shaped by ressentiment: thus he refers to him, in one article, as ‘an enemy of society, who is like the fox without a tail, who wants all his fellow foxes to cut their tails off ’, and in a letter to d’Alembert in 1762, after Rousseau’s works had been formally denounced by the Parlement of Paris and publicly burned, he remarks that ‘excess of pride and envy has ruined Jean-Jacques’.28 Rousseau, for his part, had declared his dislike and indeed hatred for Voltaire in a letter of 1760.29 To state the obvious: they did not get on, either personally or politically. The relevant point here is that it is very unconvincing to think that the Enlightenment thinkers were all of a piece, such that there was a recognizable Enlightened ‘line’. The problem will not go away by trying to separate the true enlightened ones from mere pretenders. If, for example, it is thought that the radical democrat Rousseau is truly enlightened, whereas Voltaire the sup-

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porter of progressive monarchies is not, there are too many uncomfortable facts to ignore. For example, Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1734 (in English translation, the Letters on England) has been described as ‘the first bomb to be launched against the ancien regime’.30 As such, it (and its author) could hardly be excluded from the ranks of the truly enlightened. Moreover, any suggestion that only democrats – or even only republicans – qualify as participants in the movement of Enlightenment also has to suffer the embarrassment of excluding two of the wider European movement’s most significant figures: Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. Although both jealously protected their royal powers from encroachment (and did not hesitate to pursue expansionist wars to promote their glory), they stood for civil and legal reform and cultural development, and so provided inspiration for the general cause. Catherine in particular saw herself as something of a Platonic philosopher-ruler, and composed her Bolshoy Nakaz (Great Instruction), a guide for legislative reform based heavily on the writings of Montesquieu and Beccaria, in that spirit.31 Although the tensions in that work – between its ideals of public and private utility and its unwillingness to countenance limitations on royal authority – led to its being sharply criticized by Diderot, it simply cannot be denied that this was a work, and she a monarch, deeply imbued with the Enlightenment’s spirit.32 Far better to admit the complexities and even contradictions in the progressive thinkers of the period than to prescribe latter-day criteria in order to leave figures like her outside the groundswell of Enlightened reform. Similar considerations must also apply to Rousseau. Routinely classed as a radical, and so a central figure of Enlightenment, he unified in his person so many conflicting elements that it is impossible to classify him properly without recourse to considerable qualification. The Social Contract, with its affirmation of direct democracy as the only legitimate polity, because the only possible form of the rule of law, rendered all monarchs as tyrants. It is no surprise that it was condemned and burned. But it is difficult to resist the thought that its attachment to the institutions of ancient Rome, however republican they may have been, is evidence also of a lingering nostalgia for a past golden age, and hence for a recalcitrant conservative streak in his outlook. Rousseau’s own total indifference to turning the Social Contract into any programme for political reform offers indirect support for this conclusion – it is sometimes difficult to avoid the conclusion that he thought his subsequent troubles stemmed from personal antipathies rather than political conclusions – but the main evidence comes from his other works. Thus the work which shot him to fame, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, with its argument that progress in the sciences had harmed society, is a classical conservative story of the decline of the west. The opening sentence of Emile – ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man’33 – caused shock


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at the time, since it was understood to be a sally against the doctrine of original sin, but its rejection of the present world for a distant past would again make it a very sound conservative motto. It is no surprise that the feminists found so much to criticize in that work. Even the second discourse, the Discourse on Inequality, with its famous attribution of social ills to private property, offers no alternative social blueprint, and so can equally be regarded as nostalgic for a lost past. Not for nothing did Voltaire say that Rousseau wanted us to go on all fours! I think it can be said that, were it not for Robespierre and Kant – the former having manipulated him, the latter having civilized him – he could easily have come to be classed as too full of contradictions to qualify as a radical or even progressive thinker. Cases like these could be multiplied. Edmund Burke, for example, is the canonical conservative thinker of the period, but his earlier work on beauty and the sublime was a cutting-edge treatment of the advanced ideas of the day. The intellectual world of the Enlightenment period was complex, and spawned conservative as well as radical thought; indeed, as these examples indicate, sometimes in the very same person. But these divergent strains all belong to Enlightened thought because all are undeniably (and self-consciously) modern – whether conservative or radical (or even moderate) in their tendency.

Hume the Conservative? To turn now to the other side of our problem: that Hume is a conservative thinker (and so not an Enlightenment figure). Although it is plain that his specifically political thought is not radical, the case for casting him as a conservative is far from compelling. In the first place, rather too much is built into the thought that he exercised a significant influence on Burke, who opposed the French Revolution’s attempt at a rational reconstruction of the social order by appealing to the wisdom of tradition. There are certainly resemblances of outlook between the two men, but the question is how deep these go. It needs to be recognized, for example, that Hume’s attitude to the American situation, just prior to the Declaration of Independence, was a clear-eyed recognition that the British government was responsible for the problem, and that American independence was the only solution: ‘Let us, therefore, lay aside all anger; shake hands, and part friends. Or if we retain any anger, let it only be against ourselves for our past folly …’34 Given such opinions about Britain’s mistreatment of her subjects, it cannot easily be assumed that Hume would simply have shared Burke’s response to French troubles. Nevertheless, it is true that Hume shares Burke’s opposition to attempts at social reconstruction from the ground up, and also true that his reasons include an appeal to the force of tradition. He does say, for example, in ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ that ‘a wise magistrate … will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age’, and that he will seek to ‘preserve entire the chief pillars

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and supports of the constitution’ (Es 512–13). Plainly, these are not the words of a committed social radical. But it should be added that Hume makes these remarks in a somewhat surprising context, as we shall see, and that the magistrate’s reverence for the marks of age does not rule out social improvements for the public good. In fact, the improvements of which Hume approved extended to what, at the time, was thought to be a change to the constitution: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Attitudes to this event – the effective deposition of James II for the joint monarchy of William and Mary – was the faultline of politics in Hume’s day, dividing the Whigs, who supported it without qualification, from the Tories, who did not. Hume’s treatment of the question, in his essay ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, showed him, as he observed to a friend, to be ‘a Whig, although a very sceptical one’ (L I, 111). He meant that he did not accept the Whig’s self-serving account of the event, and that the dissolution of the Stuart line was a regrettable development – but (as he writes in ‘Of the Protestant Succession’) that the ‘uninterrupted harmony’ established between king and parliament, combined with the flourishing of ‘public liberty’, ‘internal peace and order’, and, more generally, material prosperity, shifted the balance firmly to the side of the Protestant settlement (Es 508). On this central issue of the day, then, Hume shows himself to be swayed by reasons which address not alleged antique rights and privileges, but the present and future flourishing of the society. I suggest that this gives us a better sense of Hume’s political orientation than we gain by imagining his response to the political landscape that grew up after the French Revolution. Such an exercise runs the constant risk of anachronism – not to mention sheer guesswork. But to get a more rounded sense of Hume’s outlook, we can begin with an instructive example. In his History of England, Hume’s judgement of Oliver Cromwell and his co-revolutionaries is at times very harsh. It is only natural to suppose that these judgements reveal a fundamentally conservative mentality. The fact is, however, that the judgements themselves are expressed in the terms traditionally applied to tyrants: Cromwell is cast, not as someone who misjudged the possible scope of social reform, but as someone ruled by unbridled ambition (H 5.57.428– 60; H 6.60.3–54; H 6.61.55–110).35 This charge is traceable all the way back to Plato’s Republic: its requirement that only lovers of wisdom are fit to rule is explicitly intended to deny rule to the ambitious, and precisely because they have unruly souls that have not been subordinated to reason’s rule.36 So, although Hume would have wanted to put calm passions rather than reason in the driver’s seat, the objection he makes to Cromwell could equally have come from a disappointed social reformer: that, like all tyrants, Cromwell sought power to satisfy his own personal ambition rather than to promote the good of the people. Of course, it could be objected that the judgement is in this case conservative because it is being brought against a social radical. But this is muddle. The


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objection either begs the question (by supposing that the criticism of a radical is necessarily conservative) or descends to that staple of everyday political life, the ad hominem (by supposing that any person who criticizes a radical view must be covertly conservative). The objection has to be addressed on its own terms, because the point it makes is sound: if a social radical is driven by tyrannical ambitions, then it is naïve to support him or her. Any social improvements won will not be secure in such hands: if, for such a person, political survival requires the later abandonment of such improvements, then abandoned they will be. In our own day, compiling a checklist of suspects is all too easy: most obviously, those fixed-term presidents who seek constitutional change as their final term approaches its expiry date. Tyrannical souls are always with us, and always pose a danger to political order: it is not conservatism to point the finger at individual cases, even when those cases are political radicals. The reasons for thinking Hume conservative are not exhausted by his views of Cromwell. It is also plain that he rejected ideas which later – after the French Revolution – became central planks of the radical left, such as the abolition of private property. But objections of this kind suffer from a lack of a sense of historical context. It was precisely the reformers of the eighteenth century who championed private property and its benefits, rather than the conservatives (for whom the important issue was the affirmation of ancient rights and privileges). They did so for several reasons. One of these was not dissimilar from those advanced today by champions of the free market: that security of property is necessary for investment in the future, and so a crucial plank in the development of prosperity. In circumstances where, for the poor, the prospect of famine was never far away, such arguments are completely misread if seen merely as precursors of arguments for investment-banker lifestyles. Moreover, if one asks, against whom was such property to be secured?, the answer is simple: against the dominant powers of the medieval and early modern worlds – the crown, nobility and church.37 This is why arguments for private property were so often seen to go hand-in-hand with arguments for political liberty.38 The moral is that there is nothing intrinsically conservative about the defence of private property; the key question is, on whose behalf are property rights sought? One need only think of the recurring campaigns for land reform in Latin America to see the force of this point. None of this makes Hume a social radical. He certainly did not suppose that a radical reconstruction of the social order according to rational principles was possible. But this does not make him a conservative, either, because it in no way implies that he was opposed to serious social reform. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. It is often forgotten, for example, that one of his essays, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, is a sketch of an ideal republic. (Strikingly, its proposals include social arrangements which Cromwell had also supported, and so offer indirect support for the integrity of Hume’s critique of Cromwell’s character.)39

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Of course, Hume did not seek actively to realize this political vision, but he makes his reason plain in the essay itself. He explains the essay as an intellectual exercise rather than a blueprint for social change, because systems of government are not like machines that can simply be replaced by new ones, nor can they be regarded simply as social experiments when the consequences of their failure can be severe. It is at this point that he refers to the authoritative force of tradition, referred to above – but it is plain that his point is that what the mass of the people respect is simply the system of rule to which they have become accustomed, not that they properly ought to respect only such a system. It is clear, then (as he writes in ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’), that his point is that it is the dangers posed by attempts to realize such ideals – which must include the threat posed by tyrannical natures – that require regarding their formulation as nothing more than, as we would say, an academic exercise (Es 512–14). Perhaps it is this very willingness to admit that the exercise is merely academic that is part of the problem: he rarely, if ever, gives the impression of being enraged by any social evil, and so makes for a sharp contrast with the likes of Voltaire. It is easy to conclude from such differences that he saw no cause for distress or regret in the social arrangements of his day. But this would be hasty. At the heart of the issue is Hume’s famous equanimity: but this equanimity was carefully cultivated, rather than simply a natural attitude – so its political implications depend on how it is to be explained. To deal with the matter fairly briefly: it is on Hume’s little autobiography that the image of his equanimity most fully depends, and this very late composition provides some striking contrasts with the facts of some aspects of his life and career. To mention just a few: the early letter which reveals an emotional youth who suffered from ‘the disease of the learned’; other letters which reveal a long youthful struggle over religious doubts; and the events surrounding Hume’s application for the Chair in Edinburgh, which saw him rush out a reply to an attack on the religious deviationism of the Treatise, and which subsequently left a bitterness which shows through the pages of the first Enquiry. Hume’s equanimity is thus, in part, his own literary creation.40 It was also a creation of another sort, too-readily missed in the modern world of professional philosophy. It was the self-conscious cultivation of the philosophical attitude: the attitude which seeks to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of eternity. In contrast to Plato, Hume did not think this meant rule by reason; nor, like the Stoics, did he think it could ever impose a severe self-discipline. But he cared about it all the same. His determination to avoid getting embroiled in controversy was one indication; his concern to be guided by expansive or enlightened views was another. In short, he cared about equanimity because he thought it part of what it was to be a philosopher, not merely a man. That this is an attitude quite distinct from that of the engaged social reformer goes without saying; but the important point


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here is that it is an attitude formed not by conservative values but by the philosophical sense that all human endeavours are flawed – that, as Kant put it, ‘from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’.41 To put it another way: those who preserve their equanimity by thinking that human folly and cruelty will always be with us are not thereby committed to approving of it. Quite the contrary, in fact. It is perhaps only conservatives who oppose utopian values; but it is not only conservatives who oppose utopian projects. Still, one might object, there is little in Hume to bespeak active concern for those who suffer most from human folly; and that, coming from a champion of sympathy for the pains of others, this is a striking fact. There is something to this objection, but it can readily mislead. Hume is certainly less keen than his sentimentalist predecessor, Francis Hutcheson, to affirm a general love of humanity as a whole, but there are several reasons for this. In the first place, his resistance to Hutcheson’s Christian Stoic Providentialism in favour of a sceptical and mechanical theory about the transfer of affections inevitably leads to a greater focus on matters of local rather than global reach. Feeling, like motion, exercises its greatest influence at close range. Moreover, sympathy feeds on resemblances, and so focuses on those most like oneself. Thus Hume’s examples of the operations of sympathy typically focus on relations within one’s social circle. Nevertheless, the limits he places on the scope of moral feeling are wide. Thus, for example, in summing up the character of Archbishop Laud after his execution by the Parliamentary faction, Hume remarks that ‘it is to be regretted, that a man of such spirit, who conducted his enterprises with so much warmth and industry, had not entertained more enlarged views, and embraced principles more favourable to the general happiness of society’ (H 5.57.458).42 This seems to suggest that Hume accepts the idea of human equality, but some of his remarks on this score are a surprise. In one passage in the History he observes, in discussing the career of the fourteenth-century ‘seditious preacher’, John Ball, that Ball inculcated on his audience the principles of the first origin of mankind from one common stock, their equal right to liberty and to all the goods of nature, the tyranny of artificial distinctions, and the abuses which had arisen from the degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers. These ideas, so agreeable to the populace, and so conformable to the ideas of primitive equality, which are engraven in the hearts of all men, were greedily received by the multitude (H 2.17.290)

The passage is striking because, although it acknowledges a basic kind of equality, it treats Ball’s project of social equality with scorn. It seems that Hume is determined to rule out the possibility of equality having any social or political effects; that, for all practical purposes, we should regard human beings as funda-

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mentally unequal. His expressed regard for the general happiness for society may indicate only a regard for the members of polite society. A second look at this passage, however, can bring out other important features. One of these is the religious package in which equality is wrapped: it goes without saying that Hume would have been unimpressed by that packaging, and would, moreover, have regarded the whole outlook to be typical of the utopian (and self-appointed) extremism that religious opinions tended to encourage: this passage occurs, after all, in a historical work which began with the English civil wars. A further, distinct, feature of this passage is its sense of the genuine advantages that flow from civilized society. To bring out this aspect, it is only necessary to observe that it is anti-Rousseauian in spirit. Natural equality counts for little because it is primitive; artificial distinctions count for much because they are civilizing, the fruit of social progress. That is, the inequality generated in human societies is because some have been elevated above their primitive condition, and so not to be decried because that elevation is not universal. Hume’s objection to Ball’s egalitarianism thus seems to be less a rejection of equality as we understand the term, and more an objection to a project which, in his eyes, implies levelling down. From this point of view, then, Hume’s objection to Ball is akin to Voltaire’s objection to Rousseau: the appeal to natural equality is to be resisted because it is a denial of the progress humanity has made in overcoming the dire necessities of its uncivilized origins – and therefore also implicitly a denial of the further progress that could be made by the enlightened direction of social evolution. In fact, if we suppose that, in the back of many, perhaps most, of the progressive minds of the period lay a broadly evolutionary picture of the steady development of human life from primitive and necessitous origins to the sophisticated social life of their day, their hostility to radical egalitarianism falls into place. The main source of this evolutionary picture, complete with a doctrine of social progress, was Lucretius’s poetic version of Epicurean materialism, De Rerum Natura.43 It lies in the background of the ‘state of nature’ theory that flourished in the seventeenth century and afterwards. It is discernible in Hobbes, but very obviously the backbone of Rousseau’s account in the second Discourse – including his critique of Hobbes! So, although later writers were to praise Rousseau for introducing history into political thought, the striking feature of his account, for all who knew their Lucretius, was his primitivist rejection of civilization – and therefore of modern progressive values. Voltaire criticized him accordingly; and Hume’s attack on Ball breathes a similar air. The surprising moral here is that, to the eighteenth-century mind, it need involve no contradiction to link social progress with inequality – at least, with inequality of wealth and social station. It was an established view that the advance of society did not proceed equally on all fronts, and so to mount a


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root-and-branch attack on inequality was to threaten to destroy the educated and cultured classes on whom future progress depended. To the modern eye, this looks like nothing but an excuse for protecting social privilege, but it needs to be remembered that we are dealing with an age in which the radical transformation of society, as distinct from steady social improvement, was scarcely credible, even to its more generous commentators. Even the political authority’s reaction to the Social Contract suggests they thought him as much a nutcase as a dangerous radical: if they were really convinced he was dangerous, he would never have survived to die a natural death. Dreams of direct democracy, while no doubt dangerous in the hands of the seriously committed, were nevertheless most plausibly regarded as flights of fancy by writers whose imaginations ran ahead of their powers of judgement. The best hope for social reform came from above, and the best guesses about the limits of such reform therefore recognized the necessity of working through established power. This is not to say that, even in defenders of social inequality like Hume, there existed no sense of an underlying equality. Thus although he pours scorn on any form of radical social equality, especially where it is animated by (as we would say) fundamentalist religious principles, he nevertheless affirms the value of goods like political liberty and general happiness. For example, he affirms the thoroughly aristocratic view that ‘the skin, pores, muscles and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners. The different stations of life influence the whole fabric, external and internal’. But his point in stressing these differences is, nevertheless, that these differences arise ‘necessarily, because uniformly, from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature’ (T 2.3.1.9/402). Moreover, he consistently argues, in proto-utilitarian terms, that social rules are grounded in their usefulness, not in their (real or supposed) antiquity. In fact, in sharp contrast to Rousseau’s idealization of antiquity, Hume shows himself on the side of the moderns in the contemporary dispute about the relative achievements of ancient and modern society, the ‘battle of the books’. Thus he argues for the greater size (and so economic success) of the modern world in his essay ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ (Es 377–464); and, especially in ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (Es 268–80), argues for the advantages of commerce, technology and (as we would say) consumer society as engines both of social happiness and of good government. These essays reflect an Enlightened concern for social improvement; they are not conservative views. The same can be said for his views of the American situation, as mentioned above. In short, any evidence that Hume is a conservative can be met with alternative evidence that he is not. If Hume’s outlook should still seem perplexing, perhaps use can be made of the explanatory typology employed by Tocqueville, writing the best part of half a century after the American and French Revolutions. In Democracy in America,

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Tocqueville explains American institutions and mores by contrasting democratic societies with aristocratic. The terms refer to societies which are characterized by material equality and the social flux (and insecurity of fortune) engendered by the commercial spirit, on the one hand, and by material inequality, social hierarchy, and fixity of social position and social roles, on the other.44 From this point of view, Hume’s outlook seems a mix of both aristocratic and democratic elements. Thus his blunt rejection of schemes for social equality while at the same time affirming the value of goods like political liberty, prosperity and general happiness. Moreover, this mix was not unusual. Aristocratic outlooks (and even, in some cases, origins) are common amongst even the most radical Enlightenment thinkers. It is simply not true that they were all egalitarian or democrat: their radicalism lay elsewhere, typically in the limitation of absolute power and the establishment of freedom from such power through the development of an effective system of law – which is why they placed such hopes in enlightened monarchs. Hume is much the same: his little autobiography makes it plain that he thought it no small thing to have served the Earl of Hertford well, while his writings make it plain where he thought social reform most necessary and worthwhile. The problem is not the presence of aristocratic elements per se, but the values and policies discernible in that semi-aristocratic philosophical outlook. Finally, allow me to suggest that the problem is more ours than his: we are so keen to see the Enlightenment as the foundation-stone of our modern era that we forget that the profound differences between their outlook and ours. In fact, our very determination to work out whether he was conservative or progressive is itself a symptom of this weakness, since these are terms with a far clearer purchase after the French Revolution than before it. Nevertheless, we can test Hume according to these categories, as long as we do not fill them out with inappropriately anachronistic content. When we do apply the test, it emerges that, despite – or maybe even because of – his aristocratic temper, Hume can be seen to stand for some surprisingly radical social and political views. His defence of freedom of opinion in his defence of philosophy against political authority in the first Enquiry deserves mention here (EHU 11/132–49; esp. 11.29/147); but the most striking, and most important, of these are his critiques of religion and morality. If we think of the Enlightenment as the origin of the modern ideal of the secular society, then Hume must be regarded as one of its heroes. Religion in his day was not merely a set of private beliefs, but of established social institutions which could exercise real power over human lives. Rousseau’s Emile was condemned and burned primarily because of its attack on revealed religion in its Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar.45 It was not for nothing that some of Hume’s works of religious criticism – the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and the essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ – were not published in his lifetime.46 To challenge religion was directly to challenge political


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authority – whether in the form of the power of the churches themselves, or in the form of undercutting the legitimacy of monarchs, for whom political legitimacy rested on religious claims. It was also indirectly to challenge public order in another way, since a significant amount of resistance to religious criticism reflected moral and political concerns. Many who found religious metaphysics unconvincing nevertheless held back from criticism because of the fear that to undermine religion would amount to the undermining of social order. Bringing out this aspect makes it clear that Hume’s critique of religiously-founded morals is the second part of his social critique: he argues that dispensing with religious beliefs need cause no alarm, since morality has a natural psychological foundation, and will actually be improved once the distorting effects of religious beliefs are removed. So, when placed in its context, Hume’s moral theory is revealed not to be mere ‘analysis’, but to be a plank in his social critique. The next section will focus on some central aspects of his moral thought, in order to bring out its progressivist aspects. It will also reveal an unexpected feature that will bring him closer to the popular image of an enlightened thinker: Hume’s theory provides the raw materials for a sentimentalist version of human rights.

Hume’s Moral Thought: Utility and Rights Hume’s moral theory picks out the useful and the agreeable as the fundamental principles of morals, and it is plain that he sees a link between the two. This makes utility a prominent element in his moral thought, and so has encouraged the view that he is a precursor of utilitarianism. From the viewpoint of his Enlightenment credentials, this is no problem, since it is plain that utilitarianism was a prominent Enlightenment doctrine, sharing in the anti-traditional outlook of the radical Enlightenment, and exercising influence accordingly. This might not always be recognized, because of the tendency of Anglophone moral philosophy to think of utilitarianism as a specifically British theory. But it was not. Some of Voltaire’s attacks on the absurdities and cruelties of the French justice system found theoretical support in the utilitarian philosophy of Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (published in 1765);47 and Marx’s dismissal of Bentham – that he ‘reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with wit and ingenuity’48 – shows that utilitarian patterns of thought were widespread amongst eighteenth-century radicals. This also serves to explain why Bentham was invited to advise Catherine the Great on issues of legal reform: it was not because she had a puzzling interest in an obscure English lawyer, but because he was recognized as a member of an influential progressive intellectual movement. In his later career, this influence was very plain in Britain, when he became the intellectual firgurehead of the group known as the ‘Philosophic Radicals’.49 As this term reveals, utilitarianism was a radically anti-traditional

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outlook, being thought of, in Britain, as the application of philosophy to society: that is, as the standpoint of Enlightenment. All this needs to be kept in mind, since it is so commonly assumed that the hallmark of the Enlightenment was the assertion of human rights. The implication is that, in so far as Hume is thought of as a godfather of utilitarianism, he is thereby an Enlightenment, not an anti-Enlightenment, figure. Utilitarianism, no less than rights theories, was a product of the progressivist parties – it was not an alternative doctrine propounded by conservatives.50 (It is worth noting that, for many of our contemporary utilitarians, this view remains alive: utilitarianism is often seen by them as progressivism in ethics.)51 Nevertheless, this conception of Hume, as the proto-utilitarian, is somewhat misconceived. In my view, he is better understood as advocating a form of rights theory, in the sense of recognizing side-constraints on acceptable social goals.52 This is obscured partly because of his own purposes, and partly because of the sentimentalist foundations of his theory; but, significantly, it is also the sentimentalist foundations which ultimately justify the claim. To see this, it is first necessary to remember that the close link he forges between the useful and the agreeable gives priority not to the useful, but to the agreeable. This is obscured by the prominent role he gives to utility in his argument. Benevolence, he says, owes a part of its approval to its utility, and justice owes the whole. But the emphasis here on utility is misunderstood if thought to be justifying a modern utilitarian calculus, such that individual rights are predictable casualties in specific circumstances. Rather the focus on utility is there in order to insist that there are few if any fixed moral rules, guaranteed forever, and regardless of context, by eternal Reason itself. Thus the argument for the utility of justice resides in the variability of rules of property, decorum, etc, in different social circumstances. So, if Hume were the kind of tediously mediocre intellectual from whom human society never seems to escape, he would then have proclaimed himself a relativist. Instead he discerns the operation of underlying principles, and, in the central chapter of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, entitled ‘Why Utility Pleases’, he awards the crown to moral sentiment. He argues there that it is because of our sympathetic regard for the pleasures thereby enjoyed that we care about general utility (EPM 5.15/218; 5.35/224). It is, in short, direct moral feeling, aided but not founded on rational calculations, that is the source of our approval. This fact does not of itself show utilitarian conclusions to be non-foundational in Hume’s scheme. After all, he does, in the same work, give a prominent role to the virtue of benevolence, and, for many utilitarians, it is benevolence that provides the ultimate justification for their outlook. Thus Jack Smart initially found utilitarianism compelling because he thought it to be the moral outlook which embodied the benevolent outlook.53 But on this question


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Hume’s account needs to be treated with a little care. In one sense, Hume does not found moral judgements on benevolence, in that he accords justice a distinct role: that is why, in the Treatise, he distinguishes between natural virtues (like benevolence) and artificial virtues (like justice); and it is also why benevolence and justice are given separate chapters in the second Enquiry. But from another perspective, benevolence could reasonably be said to be fundamental in Hume’s scheme: the sentiment which approves of a just act because of its tendency to serve the general utility could reasonably be described as general benevolence. Hume himself resists this temptation because he wants to explain benevolence in terms of immediate moral feeling, and he is acutely aware of a feature of justice that makes it opposed to such treatment. This is the feature that his moral sentimentalist predecessor, Francis Hutcheson, had termed, somewhat misleadingly, ‘external rights’. The term is misleading because it picks out a right of society against the individual, not a protection of the individual against the society. The underlying problem is this: if, as the sentimentalists hold, we approve of actions because of their tendency to promote happiness, then the application of justice seems at odds with this because it requires the punishing of wrongdoers, and so approves of actions the immediate tendency of which is to cause harm. How are such harms to be justified? Hutcheson’s answer, taken up by Hume, is that it is regard for the benefits deriving from the whole system that justifies the immediate harms imposed: wrongdoers have to be punished, not because we naturally find the infliction of harm pleasant, but because we have to protect the legal system which is the guarantor of the greater happiness. This is why justice is an artificial rather than a natural virtue: it is not warm-hearted, but cautious and jealous (EPM 3.3/183–4). It is also why Hume compares justice to a vaulted ceiling, in contrast to benevolence, which can be thought of as a wall. The point is that every brick is an addition to the wall – the natural virtues are additive, the goodness of each act a discrete good – whereas it is only the combined effects of the stones in the vaulted ceiling that makes it stay up: ‘nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts’ (EPM App 3.5/305). The moral is that we have to learn to tame our natural benevolent tendencies in order to judge justly, not in order to deny them, but to exercise them more effectively: ‘Here, therefore, reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those, which are useful and beneficial’(EPM App 1.3/286). This all makes good sense, no doubt. But it is also thoroughly utilitarian in spirit: harms to individuals are justified on the grounds of the greater good to the whole. But this is precisely the point at which rights-theorists find utilitarianism to fall short, since it offers no ultimate protection to the individual. Of course, Hume’s account, being rule-utilitarian rather than act-utilitarian, eases the problem by not allowing that justice can be compromised. This difference

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may, however, be thought merely cosmetic, since on this approach the nature of justice is settled by reference to what best serves the general good, and so allows a degree of malleability the rights-theorist will find disconcerting. So how does Hume’s theory find a bedrock role for individual rights? The answer is that, in his moral writings themselves, he does not. But in a different context he makes it plain that there are definite limits to the imposing of harms on individuals for the sake of a greater good. Significantly, these limits are imposed by our natural feelings themselves, so, in the end, Hume admits that overall outcomes can be trumped by individual capacity or willingness to resist them where the costs to the individual are too high. That is, Hume admits that harms to individuals, if sufficiently severe, deny the application of a felicific calculus, even at the level of a beneficent general system. Hume ultimately subordinates utility to the natural workings of moral feeling, and in this way makes the individual sovereign over any systemic demand. Hume does not merely admit to this point, he insists on it. But it has been overlooked because he makes it, not in any direct discussion of human morality, but in his treatment of theodicy. If this seems an unlikely location for drawing conclusions about moral theory, it only needs reminding that the subject matter of theodicy is the morality of the divinity. As such its arguments and conclusions are not remote from moral theory, but within its purview. Moreover, in this particular case the matter at issue is the same: the justifiability or otherwise of systematic theories of overall goodness when they fly in the face of natural moral standards. Hume makes it plain that the conflict must, in the end, be resolved in favour of the natural standards, and that these imply limits to the treatment of individuals for the sake of greater benefits. The system of theodicy Hume addresses is the Providentialist view influential in the Scotland of his day, especially amongst the Christian Stoics. The view is also sometimes called (to distinguish it from the Augustinian theodicy of free will) the Irenaean theodicy.54 Its central plank is that the evils we experience in ordinary life are justified by the overarching goodness of the whole creation. It thus shares with utilitarianism the idea that justification is a matter of the overall good brought about, not of the individual goods and evils that go to make up the whole. Hume firmly rejects this view, and does so in such a way that the parallel rejection of the utilitarians’ moral version must also be rejected. What he says is this: From this theory, some philosophers, and the ancient STOICS among the rest, derived a topic of consolation under all afflictions, while they taught their pupils, that those ills, under which they laboured, were, in reality, goods to the universe; and that to an enlarged view, which could comprehend the whole system of nature, every event became an object of joy and exultation. But though this topic be specious and sublime, it was soon found in practice weak and ineffectual … These enlarged views may, for a moment, please the imagination of a speculative man, who is placed in ease


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and security; but neither can they dwell with constancy on his mind, even though undisturbed by the emotions of pain or passion; much less can they maintain their ground, when attacked by such powerful antagonists. The affections take a narrower and more natural survey of their object; and by an œconomy, more suitable to the infirmity of human minds, regard alone the beings around us, and are actuated by such events as appear good or ill to the private system. The case is the same with moral as with physical ill … What though philosophical meditations establish a different opinion or conjecture; that everything is right with regard to the WHOLE, and that the qualities, which disturb society, are, in the main, as beneficial, and are as suitable to the primary intention of nature, as those which more directly promote its happiness or welfare? … [Moral] distinctions are founded in the natural sentiments of the human mind: And these sentiments are not to be controuled or altered by any philosophical theory or speculation whatsoever. (EHU 8.34–5/101–103)

The point should be clear enough: we are naturally geared to approve or disapprove of certain kinds of actions, and no theory can be accepted which requires us entirely to forego these natural judgements. Although Hume makes only passing mention to painful experiences in this passage, it is plain that it is with respect to such experiences that his point has particular bite. It is only local harms which an overarching theory of the goodness of the system needs to overrule, so it is the experience of extreme harm – of its irreducible evil – that is at the heart of Hume’s rejection of all such attempts at harmonizing theory. Harms, if sufficiently severe, cannot be harmonized. If, then, we think of human rights as side-constraints, as the insistence that there are non-negotiable limits on the treatment of human beings, the view Hume presents here does amount to a sentimentalist version of human rights theory. It even implies the inalienability of such rights.55 So, if to qualify as a member of the band of Enlightenment thinkers one must affirm a doctrine of human rights, then Hume does indeed qualify, despite the pervasive picture of him as a proto-utilitarian thinker. Of course, as I have argued, the view that the Enlightenment affirmed human rights rather than utilitarianism is a mistake, so it might seem that the conclusion is a merely Pyrrhic achievement. But if, in doing so, we have undermined not one interpretative error, but two of them, there is a certain satisfaction to be taken in the fact! There is also a more substantive point to make. It is all too easy to read contemporary ideas and distinctions back into the past, whenever we are confronted by similar terms or distinctions. The case of Hume’s moral theory illustrates the danger, by showing that Hume’s insistence on utility is not an insistence on modern utilitarianism. One reason for this, as I have suggested, is that Hume has particular targets in view, and it is necessary to keep them in mind when determining the bearing of his utterances. But there is also another reason for the difference in this case. It is often said that the thinkers of the Enlightenment

betrayed an overly optimistic assessment of the possibilities and probabilities of human society, once released from the burdens of medieval metaphysical systems. I think there is much to be said for this view, and it has relevance here. The modern argument that rights and utility are alternatives between which we must choose – a staple of introductory ethics courses – would have startled the Enlightenment progressives. They tended to see them as two sides of the same coin: they thought that it was precisely by the restructuring of the social order for the sake of human happiness that human rights would come to be preserved. Hume’s comments above give an idea of why that idea was held: for him, along with many of his intellectual fellow-travellers, it was precisely the metaphysical systems of religion and politics, hallowed by tradition, that obstructed the free operation of the natural values, with their irreducible regard for basic human goods; so it was the challenge to those systems, under the watchword of utility, that held out the hope for (as we would now put it) the recognition of human rights. It is a marker of our more chastened mentality, in the light of disastrous experiments in radical social overhaul – now known by the distinctly less favourable term, totalitarianism – that such optimistic harmonizing is, for us, untenable. There is more than one way in which our mentality is cut off from the intellectual world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Conclusion It should now be clear that any attempt to cast Hume as standing in simple opposition to the world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is quite unconvincing. It is unconvincing because Hume is not accurately classed as a conservative, nor is the Enlightenment understood if identified with the radical views which came to dominate in the French Revolution and its spin-off radical movements in the nineteenth century. The facts are more complex than that – on both sides of the fence. So it will be useful to conclude by stepping back and offering a thumbnail portrait of two main intellectual strands running through the Enlightenment period. This will result in a clearer perception of just where to locate Hume’s position. The Enlightenment can be understood to possess two quite distinct strands, one moderate and one radical. The radical strand grew out of the political radicalism spawned during the English Revolution of the 1640s. This strand, amongst which must be counted not only such radical groups as the Levellers but also the views expressed in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, effectively suffered defeat in England with the Protestant settlement of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Although Locke himself found no difficulty in accommodating himself to the new regime, it was a defeat for radicalism because the settlement put paid to any hopes for a thoroughgoing British republic. (One result was that mainstream Protestant sentiment drew back from the Two Treatise’s insurrectionary doctrines.) For


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those unwilling to adapt to the new regime, exile in Holland beckoned. There one could find like-minded opinion, especially amongst the Huguenot exiles from France, who had been forced to flee after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Amongst these two bands of exiles, radicalism in politics also encouraged radicalism in religion – whether in the form of Deism, Freemasonry, Spinozism or atheism. These groups developed their own publishing enterprises, and, especially as Diderot’s great project of the Encyclopédie ran into establishment opposition in Paris, became crucial to its continuation. The result was increasing radicalization of the circle around the Encyclopédie, until it became a byword for the radical wing of the French Enlightenment. In contrast, the moderate strand in Britain came to power in 1688, and cut its cloth accordingly. It took full advantage both of Newton’s scientific achievement (the Principia was published in 1687), and of his defence of religious orthodoxy. The institution of the Boyle Lectures, with its aim of showing the harmony between the new science and the old religion – of which the best-known is Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) – is evidence of this accommodation of the scientific revolution to a revised political order and religious orthodoxy. Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Letter on Toleration and its sequels (1689, 1690, 1692) effectively became the text-books of this new, moderate outlook: the ‘Newtonian Enlightenment’. Radical works which grew out of Locke’s writings, pushing his doctrines in directions he did not intend – such as John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) – were its first heresies, challenging the comfortable position of orthodox Protestant Christianity in the new outlook. But these were nuisances rather than threats: the English Enlightenment, having exported its radicals, remained moderate, flourishing in the peace and prosperity of the settlement, and successfully incorporating with Scotland into the United Kingdom (1707).56 Against this background, Hume falls into place. He wraps himself in the cloak of the moderate Newtonian Enlightenment, and, indeed, shares much of their scientific and political values. He presents himself as contributing to the tradition stemming from Bacon (carefully avoiding any mention of Hobbes), and increasingly affirms his indebtedness to Newton. But his critique of religion and morality has much in common with the radicals, and so leads to his being regarded as a fifth columnist. This is perhaps why the criticisms of his religious views are so sharp – as, for example, in the 1745 pamphlet opposing his appointment to the Edinburgh Chair (and to which Hume responded in A Letter from a Gentleman)57 – they amount to the denunciation of a pretended friend as in fact a dangerous enemy. It is thus Hume’s complex relationship to the two strands of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – its moderate English Newtonian, and its radical Dutch and French, wings – that explain not only why he is so often taken for a conservative, but also why he stubbornly refuses to fit the label.58

2 WILL THE REAL ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIAN PLEASE STAND UP? CATHARINE MACAULAY VERSUS DAVID HUME Karen Green

In his discussion of David Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding called Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, Stephen Buckle sets out to show that Hume is a philosopher of the Enlightenment. More precisely, Buckle claims that Hume is not a radical sceptic, but his employment of forms of ancient scepticism ‘reflects the characteristic Enlightenment strategy of appealing to ancient schools of thought opposed to Aristotle in order to attack scholastic philosophy and its religious truths’.1 This claim implies a negative and somewhat sceptical conception of the meaning of enlightenment. But is such an orientation sufficient to count as a ‘philosopher of the Enlightenment?’ In this paper I do two things. First, I question whether this form of sceptical orientation suffices for being considered an Enlightenment philosopher. The limits of such an orientation emerge, in particular, when one turns to the consequences of this orientation for Hume the political theorist and historian. Second, I argue that it is rather in the history and philosophy of Hume’s opponent, Catharine Macaulay that one finds a genuine Enlightenment philosophy. The first of these claims may rest on a quibble over the answer to the question, ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ But it is an important quibble. If, as I will argue, the Enlightenment consisted fundamentally in the establishment of the development of the idea that individuals have political rights, which underpins the growth, during the nineteenth century, of democratic forms of government, then Hume is not a philosopher of the Enlightenment. He should cede that place to another less famous eighteenth century historian, Catharine Macaulay. In fact, the strand of Enlightenment thinking which has these political consequences is consciously opposed to the sceptical conservatism that results from Hume’s conception of moral science. 2 For those who believe in ‘enlightened reason’ Hume is the enemy, and for good reason. This becomes clear once one turns to the unjustly neglected philosophical underpinning of republicanism as outlined by Macaulay. – 39 –

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The Case for Thinking Hume ‘a Philosopher of the Enlightenment’ Before turning to the reasons for questioning Hume’s credentials as an Enlightenment philosopher it is worth looking briefly at Buckle’s argument for taking him to be one. What we can agree with, in his argument, is that Hume is a philosopher who wants to extend experimental ‘Newtonian’ patterns of thought and inquiry from physical to moral subjects.3 This extension led Hume to view religious dogma sceptically, and to treat moral and political truths as discoverable by the same empirical methods as those which lead to reliable beliefs about the material world. Buckle takes the essence of the Enlightenment to consist in an ‘anti-religious, anti-traditional, self-consciously secularizing mentality’.4 Such a mentality is characterized by Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert and evinced also by Hume. But is this attitude actually definitive of the Enlightenment? It is surely not sufficient, in order to count as an Enlightenment philosopher, that one should be anti-dogmatic, anti-Aristotelian or sceptical. Michel Montaigne and René Descartes were, in the first instance deeply impressed by Pyrrhonian scepticism, and in the second instance, opposed to medieval Aristotelianism, but neither counts as an Enlightenment philosopher. Nor is it sufficient to be an Enlightenment thinker that one thinks that the methods of science can be applied to morals. That was a project already taken up by Thomas Hobbes. These attitudes are at most evidence of modernism, and it is incontrovertible that Hume is a modern, who like these precursors was engaged in shaking off old dogmas. But is this all that there is to the Enlightenment? At least part of what is distinctive about the Enlightenment is that it adds to the modernist critique of Scholastic dogmatism a constructive political aspect, which extols liberty and ultimately republicanism. In a rather different context, Ruth Perry, who wants to include Mary Astell among the Enlightenment thinkers, is forced to admit that if the central principles of the Enlightenment are ‘the rights of individuals within the state, religious toleration, and class levelling’ then she is not an Enlightenment figure.5 It is when measured against these political outcomes that Hume too falls short. It is, however, not my aim to deny that there is any sense in which Hume is a historian and philosopher of the Enlightenment. My aim is rather to urge that Catharine Macaulay has a greater claim to the mantle of Enlightenment historian, and that the neglect of her work results in a distorted understanding of the philosophical beliefs which resulted in contemporary political forms. At the very least, we should recognize that there are at two strands to the Enlightenment, a critical strand, to which Hume subscribes, and a constructive strand which positions itself against him. Indeed, it is at least arguable that the first phase of the Enlightenment was a continuation of the advent of modernity, which had begun in the mid-seventeenth century. While a second phase rejected the effeminacy of

Will The Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up?

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courtly sociability associated with the ‘moderns’ and turned to ideals of republican virtue, inspired by a return to ancient models.6 Hume, who extols the virtues of ‘delicacy of taste’ and argues that a cultivated taste ‘improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions’ (Es 6), subscribes to similar values to those found in Madeleine de Scudéry and other ‘moderns’ (Es 3–8).7 He enjoyed the great number of ‘sensible, knowing and polite company’ which he found in Paris, and ‘took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women’ (Es xl). He was an advocate of gallantry and courtly manners. But the second phase of the Enlightenment distrusted feminine sensibility, grounded its precepts on ‘enlightened reason’ and believed in human progress towards rational virtue.8

What is Enlightenment? It is Kant who offered the most famous answer to this question, and whose Enlightenment philosophy most explicitly positions itself against the empiricism and scepticism of Hume, while attempting at the same time to incorporate and transcend the critical aspects of Hume’s philosophy. For Kant enlightenment is making use of one’s own understanding. As he says, ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of the enlightenment’.9 Kant continues his essay by saying that it is difficult for an individual to achieve enlightenment, but ‘that a public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed this is almost inevitable, if only it is left its freedom’. Indeed he suggests that nothing is required for enlightenment but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’.10 Kant’s faith that the public use of reason will lead to enlightenment is grounded in his metaphysics of morals, which is explicitly and implacably opposed to the consequences that Hume draws from the application of empirical methods to moral thought. In his Treatise of Human Nature Hume asserts that, Those who affirm that virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measure of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: all these systems concur in the opinion, that morality, like truth, is discerned merely by ideas, and by their juxtaposition and comparison. In order therefore, to judge of these systems, we need only consider whether it be possible from reason alone, to distinguish betwixt moral good and evil, or whether there must concur some other principles to enable us to make that distinction. (T 3.1.1.5/457)

Since Hume avers that judging between good and evil provides a motivation for action, and since reason and the juxtaposition of ideas cannot, he claims, provide any such motivation, something else – that is human passions – must lie behind

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human moral judgement. Morals depend on sentiments and desires, and can in no way constitute an immutable measure of right and wrong. In opposition to this disturbing moral scepticism Kant argues that pure practical reason exists: Now the concept of freedom, insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason; and all other concepts (those of God and immortality), which as mere ideas remain without support in the latter, now attach themselves to this concept and with it and by means of it get stability and objective reality, that is, their possibility is proved by this: that freedom is real, for this idea reveals itself through the moral law.11

Hume wanted to place both speculative and practical reason on the same ground of empirical probability. As an empiricist he saw no evidence for metaphysical freedom, and accepted that freedom meant simply lack of constraint. Furthermore, from the point of view of politics as an a posteriori science, there can be no a priori value in freedom, nor can there be in any other political notion. Political liberty will stand or fall as experience shows it to be useful or inimical to the satisfaction of human desires. Kant objects. Practical reason can be shown to have pure a priori grounds. Without freedom there could be no moral law. But there is morality, so freedom exists, and provides the a priori basis for an immutable measure of right and wrong.12 Hume’s aim is to undermine philosophical pretensions to knowledge grounded in reason and the understanding in matters of fact and in matters of morals. Our tendency to form beliefs about matters of fact, like our tendency to feel love when we receive benefits, and hate when we receive injury, is ‘a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce, or prevent’ (EHU 5.8/46–7).13 Kant perhaps had this thought in mind, as well as other tendencies to treat humans naturalistically, when he argued in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that if the proper end of our nature were our preservation and happiness, then reason would have been a very defective instrument, and instinct would have been more reliable. He argues in opposition to this that reason, which is given to us as a practical faculty, which influences the will, must be intended to produce a will that is good in itself.14 Or, to put matters another way, since instinct can provide all the impulses necessary for survival, reason must be redundant if all that it aims at is happiness, but humans have reason, so its purpose must be to discover the truths of pure practical reason. It is somewhat ironic that Kant litters his political discourses with deprecating comments about women, for, in England, it is a woman whose views appear closest to his. Independently of Kant’s attempt to ground political liberty on


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the foundation of metaphysical freedom, and two years prior to the publication of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Catharine Graham Macaulay, published, in 1783, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, which is as opposed to Hume’s outlook as Kant is, and which, like Kant’s metaphysics of morals, attempts to defend a conception of freedom of the will which is adequate as a ground for the value of political liberty. According to Kant all members of the fair sex are too timid to dare to use their own understanding.15 And he asserts that by nature women and children are excluded from being citizens.16 Perhaps he based these conclusions on pure a priori principles, since had he bothered, he might have noticed the existence of Macaulay, who rather more generously assumed that the brutish sex shared the latent love of liberty that she possessed as a rational being. When she introduced the first volume of her History of England in 1763, she asserted; ‘From my early youth I have read with delight those histories which exhibit Liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and the Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being’.17 Her history of England is the story of the not yet completed growth of liberty in England, and her philosophy, like Kant’s, attempted to provide a metaphysical ground for political liberty.

Macaulay’s ‘Immutable Principles of Moral Truth’ Macaulay’s treatise is not explicitly directed towards Hume, but she begins it with the observation that sceptical opinions concerning the goodness and omnipotence of God have taken hold in ‘the weak and unstable minds of men’ and that these opinions militate ‘against every rational hope of any improvement in those higher parts of civilization which affect the rational interest of the species’.18 Her work is explicitly aimed to combat the opinions of Lord Bolingbroke and Dr King, whose voluntarism with regard to God, and libertarian principles with regard to humans, she sees as undermining all possibility for immutable morality, genuine human agency and the solution to the problem of evil. The thrust of Bolingbroke’s views were considered by contemporaries sufficiently similar to Hume’s for extracts of their works to have been collected together in a book called The Beauties of Hume and Bolingbroke published one year prior to Macaulay’s Treatise. So we can assume that Macaulay also has Hume implicitly in her sights, though she only refers to him in passing as a sceptic.19 King’s doctrine, as Macaulay represents it, is that the will is undetermined, and that things are ‘agreeable, because chosen; and not chosen, because agreeable’.20 So, while, as a libertarian, he disagrees with Hume on the will, he is similar to Hume in grounding value in subjective human responses. Nothing in things considered in themselves makes them good. Thus much of what Macaulay says against King also applies to Hume. Indeed, although she does not make Hume her explicit

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adversary, her belief that reason motivates is directly opposed to the claim, central to his rejection of immutable moral truth, that only the passions can move us. Equally, her insistence that things are chosen because we judge that they are good opposes his subjectivism. Like Kant, Macaulay argues that had God intended us to live only mortal lives of pleasure, it is incomprehensible why he would have given us reason. In such a case, ‘That high privilege, reason, which raises him to so painful a state of superiority above his fellow-animals might have been well spared for a more useful instinctive principle’.21 The point of our rationality must be to enable us to come to comprehend the immutable moral truths that guide God’s creation, to allow us to approach God in comprehending them, and to make us deserve the infinite happiness of the afterlife. Macaulay defends a conception of freedom of the will that she calls, somewhat confusingly, philosophical or moral necessity, and which is closest in character to what would now be deemed a version of rational moral agency, with this difference from some prevailing versions that her account of moral necessity accepts that reasons are, in some sense, causes. She explains her concept of freedom thus; Philosophical or moral necessity, is that necessity which arises from the irresistible force which the understanding has on volition, by its discriminations on the nature of those objects of choice which present themselves to the mind, as to its conceptions of good and evil; and of all those variety of distinctions which are comprised in the mischievous or the advantageous, the pleasurable or the painful, or in that irresistible force which often arises from habit, from the overgrown power of pampered and inordinate appetites, or from that energetic impulse which takes its rise from the strong emotions which attend the exalted passions.22

This moral necessity does not essentially limit our freedom as moral agents. Rather it is the same necessity that compels the all-powerful deity to choose the best, without this choice being any limitation on his power. In our case, however, since our reason is fallible, and rational motives are mixed with others based on habit and appetite, we do not necessarily choose the best. Her views are, as she maintains, similar to those of Samuel Clarke.23 Were we fully rational, and not subject to irrational passions and impulses, we would, like God, always choose the best. But our reason is limited and we are subject to many non-rational passions, and so the exercise of our freedom is a struggle. Macaulay argues that this is the only conception of freedom that is capable of solving the problem of evil, for we should recognize that, man is placed on this terrestrial globe, as in a nursery, or soil aptly fitted to give strength and vigour, and a more advanced maturity to his young and infirm reason; that he is placed on this terrestrial globe as in a school adapted to the advantages of a


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practical experience; and that he is surrounded with difficulties and hostile powers, for the purpose of enlarging his experience, and inducing a state of trial of that virtue which his reason and his experience enables him to acquire.24

Evil is necessary in order that we should be able to learn from experience how to distinguish genuine good from bad, and discover the nature of genuine virtue. Moreover, since Macaulay argues that if God is good there must be an afterlife, this evil is the necessary means for humans to achieve the blessedness that is the reward of virtue.

The Influence of Macaulay’s Ethics in her Historical Works Unlike Hume, who first developed his philosophical ideas, and then turned to history, Macaulay first completed her historical works, and only turned to writing philosophy relatively late in her career. Hence one cannot say that she based her historical works on her philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, one can find traces of the philosophy that she later articulated in her earlier historical writings, and it is reasonable to assume that she developed her philosophical writing in order to spell out more explicitly the philosophy that was implicit in them. In her Treatise on the immutability of moral truth Macaulay distinguishes three concepts of liberty. There is the rational agency that she calls moral necessity, which we have already discussed, second, there is the complete liberty of the will, claimed to exist by the libertarians, who argue that motives are chosen rather than compelling choice, and third there is the vulgar conception of liberty as freedom from constraint.25 Political liberty is not identical with any of these. Nevertheless, Macaulay represents historical battles for the liberties of subjects and the powers of the Commons in terms of a progress towards circumstances in which rational agency will be able to be achieved. She recognizes that political liberty will not necessarily lead to the growth of enlightened reason, but sees it as a prerequisite for this growth. Saying: How far these improvements [a degree of cosmopolitanism and lack of religious persecution] may, in their consequences, tend to the general enlightening the understandings of mankind towards a cultivation of their rational interest, remains yet in the secrets of futurity; for, surely, no real and universal melioration of the state of morals can reasonably be expected, whilst men are fettered with illiberal prejudices: but though these circumstances may, probably, lead to the attainment of that wisdom on which the excellence and happiness of man depends; yet they never can be considered as an attainment of the principle itself.26

Nevertheless, in her historical works she tends to represent the political struggle between the crown and the Commons as pitting despotic arbitrary rule against a population whose pursuit of their political liberties corresponds to a progress in enlightened reason. Thus she concludes her account of the conflict between

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James I and the Commons over their power to control taxation with the comment that; The short-sighted James was unable to account for the inconsistence he found between the theoretical and practical government of England; whilst the servility of the nobles confirmed him in the idea that he was in actual possession of a despotical power, the determined opposition of the Commons prevented him from bringing that idea to reality; a small degree of accuracy would have reconciled the seeming contradiction. Even in that early period it might have been discerned, that noble principles had taken deep root in the minds of the English people; that the progress of more enlightened reason would bring these to perfection; and the harvest of such fruit must infallibly produce an important change in the manner and constitution of the government.27

Thus, not only are there immutable moral truths, which individuals can come to discover through the exercise of their reason, but these truths have implications for the manner and constitution of the government. In particular, Macaulay believes that it is a truth clearly available to reason that the purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of the members of the community. She represents the best part of the parliament during the civil war as those who were republican and who wished ‘to reduce all men to that equitable state which is so remarkably pointed out by the law of nature ‘.28 As a result, she approves of the execution of Charles I and concludes the fourth volume of her history with the following comment. That the government is the ordinance of man; that, being the mere creature of human invention, it may be changed or altered according to the dictates of experience, and the better judgment of men; that it was instituted for the protection of the people, for the end of securing, not overthrowing the rights of nature; that it is a trust either formally admitted or supposed; and that the magistracy is consequently accountable; will meet with little contradiction in a country enlightened with the unobstructed ray of rational learning.29

Macaulay thus sees republicanism as rationally justifiable, in so far as it secures the protection of the people and the rights of nature, but she also makes it clear, in works such as her Letters on Education that a political system will not by itself lead a population to acquire the rational agency that she equates with liberty.30 For that a proper education is also necessary. Nevertheless, it appears that she assumes that individuals who have been sufficiently enlightened so as to grasp the immutable truth will subscribe to republicanism. In making these connections she shows herself to be both a philosopher and a historian of the Enlightenment. By contrast, philosophers who fail to make the connection between rational agency, enlightened reason and political reform may belong to the period of the Enlightenment, but they are, in a significant sense, not fully developed Enlightenment thinkers.31


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The Traces of Hume’s Moral Science in his Political and Historical Writings Unsurprisingly, Hume’s empirical method in the moral and political sciences results in no belief in political progress and no grand statements about the progress of enlightened reason. In his Essays, Moral, Political and Literary of 1742 he discusses the mixed constitution of Great Britain, and suggests that it suffers from instability, being inclined to slide either into pure republicanism or absolute monarchy. He comments, ‘though liberty be preferable to slavery, in almost every case; yet I should rather wish to see an absolute monarch than a republic in this island’ (Es 52). He shows no great preference for republican over monarchical governments, and anticipates Edmund Burke’s conservatism, suggesting that ‘[a]n established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its [sic] being established’ (Es 512). He says this in the introduction to his essay ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ in which he seems to amuse himself by speculating about what kind of Commonwealth would work best, were a republic to be instituted. While this text might be cited as proof that he was not anti-republican, it is so abstract and mathematical that it is difficult to take seriously, and could well be deemed satirical. Macaulay clearly included Hume’s history among her sources, for she refers to him when it suits her, but the overall story that she tells is of quite a different character, to that which he had developed. Whereas Macaulay represents James I as a bumbling monarch, corrupted by venal favourites and illegitimately interfering with England’s established liberties, Hume represented him more favourably. Hume has little time for the Puritans who he sees as fired by enthusiasm, and he represents James as quite sensibly keeping them in check. When he came to the throne the Puritans, ‘hoped that James, having received his education in Scotland, and having ever professed a strong attachment to the church established there, would at least abate the rigor of the laws enacted against’ them. But Hume comments, the king’s disposition had taken strongly a contrary biass. The more he knew the puritanical clergy, the less favour he bore to them. He had remarked in their Scottish brethren a violent turn towards republicanism, and a zealous attachment to civil liberty; principles nearly allied to that religious enthusiasm, with which they were actuated. He had found, that being mostly persons of low birth and mean education, the same lofty pretensions, which attended them in their familiar addresses to their Maker, of whom they believed themselves the peculiar favourites, induced them to use the utmost freedoms with their earthly sovereign (H 5.45.10–11).

Whereas Macaulay sees the progress towards republicanism as a step towards a government grounded in rational principles that will become clear to enlightened reason, Hume sees the Civil War agitators as ignorant enthusiasts. Demands

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for civil liberty are based in religious enthusiasm. Having no backing in observable evidence, religious enthusiasm is irrational and dangerous. In one of the few passages of his history in which he uses the term ‘enlightened’ it is clear that he has little sympathy with the republican or egalitarian tendencies that Macaulay believes will be achieved with the progress of reason. Cromwell, says Hume, had encouraged an arrogant spirit among the inferior officers and private men; and the camp, in many respects, carried more the appearance of civil liberty than of military obedience. The troops themselves were formed into a kind of republic; and the plans of imaginary republics, for the settlement of the state, were, every day, the topics of conversation among these armed legislators. Royalty it was agreed to abolish: Nobility must be set aside: Even all ranks of men be levelled; and an universal equality of property, as well as power, introduced among the citizens. The saints, they said, were the salt of the earth: An entire parity had place among the elect: And, by the same rule, that the apostles were exalted from the most ignoble professions, the meanest sentinel, if enlightened by the spirit, was entitled to equal regard with the greatest commander. In order to wean the soldiers from these licentious maxims, Cromwel had issued orders for discontinuing the meetings of the agitators; and he pretended to pay entire obedience to the parliament, whom, being now fully reduced to subjection, he purposed to make, for the future, the instruments of his authority. But the Levellers, for so that party in the army was called, having experienced the sweets of dominion, would not so easily be deprived of it. (H 5.59.513)

Hume never expresses sympathy with these ‘levelling’ maxims, which have been generalized in post-Enlightenment democracy to the extent that we think that even those not enlightened by the spirit are entitled to equal regard. In Hume’s history, the execution of the King is a tragedy, brought about by furious fanatics. He concludes his assessment of the period by observing, as the events which unfolded show, ‘that it is dangerous for princes … to assume more authority, than the laws have allowed them’. He continues however to opine that they provide ‘another instruction, no less natural, and no less useful, concerning the madness of the people, the furies of fanaticism, and the danger of mercenary armies’. (H 5.59.545–6) He represents the parliament as the most ‘severe and arbitrary government’ that had ever been known in the British Isles (H 5.59.528). And in discussing the execution of Bishop Laud he draws the conclusion that it shows ‘that popular assemblies, as, by their very number, they are, in a great measure, exempt from the restraint of shame, so when they also overleap the bounds of law, naturally break out into acts of the greatest tyranny and injustice’ (H 5.57.457). Whereas Macaulay had claimed that enlightened reason could not help but recognize that magistrates, gaining their power from the trust that the people have bestowed on them, may legitimately be removed by the people, Hume represents this as a dangerous doctrine, which is such that, even though it may be


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true that sometimes a prince is removed with justice, should never be promulgated to the ignorant. According to Hume; Government is instituted, in order to restrain the fury and injustice of the people; and being always founded on opinion, not on force, it is dangerous to weaken, by these speculations, the reverence, which the multitude owe to authority, and to instruct them beforehand, that the case can ever happen, when they may be freed from their duty of allegiance. (H 5.59.544)

He suggests that the doctrine that the people are the source of just power is ‘belied by all history and experience’ (H 5.59.533). The idea of the equality of mankind is a ‘fanatical notion’ (H 5.59.514). While the public trial and execution of the prince is deemed ‘[t]he height of all iniquity and fanatical extravagance’ (H 5.59.532). It is not surprising that under the circumstances in which he lived, Hume’s empirical method resulted in these conclusions. He was born, after all, into an age when most of the evidence available concerning good and bad government related to monarchies. If the only source of evidence as to morality and justice comes from experience, then it is difficult to see how we will discover political principles which require us to radically change our behaviour or sentiments. Any moral doctrine which limits itself to the observation of what has taken place in the past must be implicitly conservative, for there is nowhere for it to find evidence for the future success of the sorts of grand plans for the improvement of mankind which inspired thinkers such as Macaulay and Kant, and which fuelled the social change that we take to be the legacy of the Enlightenment. A short correspondence between Hume and Macaulay, took place in 1764 after a copy of the first volume of her history had been sent to him. This exchange was subsequently published in The European Magazine for 1783.32 In it Macaulay succinctly makes the point that Hume’s conventionalism implies an obligation to conservatism. Hume suggests that he and Macaulay do not differ as to the facts, but rather on the interpretation that they place on them and he continues, saying, ‘I look upon all kinds of subdivision of power, from the monarchy of France to the freest democracy of some Swiss cantons, to be equally legal, if established by custom and authority’.33 To this Macaulay responds: ‘Your position, that all governments established by custom and authority carry with them obligations to submission and allegiance, does, I am afraid, involve all reformers in unavoidable guilt, since opposition to established error must needs be opposition to authority’.34 It is difficult indeed to see how Hume can consistently reconcile his stated conventionalism with the fact that he also asserts, in this letter, that the cause of liberty is noble and virtuous. Hume should either accept that slavery is as noble as liberty, when established by custom, or acknowledge that unjust customs can easily become established. Those who agree with

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Macaulay, that custom is insufficient to secure justice, will also concur with the judgement expressed in the article which contains the Hume/Macaulay correspondence that ‘this celebrated Scotch historian, in the present correspondence, is manifestly inferior to the lady, at least in argument’.35

Conclusion: and One Last Irony There are no doubt different styles of enlightenment.36 But, if the enlightenment is that eighteenth century philosophical movement which had as its political consequences the American and French Revolutions and the ultimate establishment of democracy as the dominant political system, then it is Catharine Macaulay, not David Hume, who should be remembered as the quintessential historian and philosopher of the Enlightenment. It was she who was read by and corresponded with the American revolutionaries, and whose histories and tracts they saw as conducive to their aspirations.37 It is her belief that democracy is rationally justifiable which has become part of the dominant legacy of the Enlightenment, and her interpretation of the pattern of British history, according to which James and Charles I were regressive absolutists, who stood in the way of English liberty, is now standard. Ironically, Hume’s conservative history was rewritten during the nineteenth century, so as to conform to Macaulay’s interpretation of events. The Student’s Hume. A History of England from the earliest times to the revolution of 1688 based on the History of David Hume, incorporating the corrections and researches of recent historians published in 1874, is an extremely abridged version of Hume, which excises all his anti-republican vitriol, and contorts and ‘corrects’ him so that he conforms to democratic prejudices.38 Meanwhile, Macaulay’s historical and philosophical texts lapsed into obscurity, and our understanding of the Enlightenment in Great Britain has, as a consequence, been significantly diminished. There is an understandable desire to interpret history as a meaningful progress and to believe that Hume’s scientific and sceptical attitudes are those which lie at the origin of the democratic forms of political organization that we now cherish. But real history is rather more perverse and arbitrary than a simple tale in which there are cohesive advances on all fronts. Hume’s scientific and sceptical outlook may have been progressive in one sense, in that its development has led to many scientific advances. However, it provided him with no reason to believe in political progress. It was rather the faith in a good God, whose edicts are comprehensible, which gave Macaulay and many of her radical contemporaries their optimistic belief in the objectivity of moral truth, and the possibility of moral enlightenment, to be followed by political progress. The fundamental attitudes of the progressive political thinkers, whose political legacy has been an acceptance of the enlightenment values of ‘the rights of individuals within the state, reli-


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gious toleration, and class levelling’ were grounded in an enthusiasm that Hume thought, for good empirical reasons, was misguided. That enthusiasm is also clear in the writing of Catharine Macaulay’s younger contemporary, Laetitia Barbauld, who like Macaulay greeted the French Revolution as the dawning of a new age: Liberty, here with the lifted crosier in her hand, and the crucifix conspicuous on her breast; there led by philosophy, and crowned with the civic wreath, animates men to assert their long forgotten rights. With a policy, far more liberal and comprehensive than the boasted establishments of Greece and Rome, she diffuses her blessings to every class of men; and even extends a smile of hope and promise to the poor African, the victim of hard, impenetrable avarice. Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.39

To which Hume would surely have responded, as he did to the levellers, that the idea of the equality of mankind, since it is not grounded in experience, is a ‘fanatical notion’ (H 5.59.335).40

3 PHILOSOPHY, HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT: A RESPONSE TO GREEN Stephen Buckle

In ‘Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’, Karen Green takes exception to my account of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker. She argues that Hume is not an Enlightenment thinker, because he does not argue for the rights that underpin modern democracy; that this failure is inevitable, given his basic principles, because empiricism is an inadequate foundation for Enlightenment principles; and that it is Catharine Macaulay, and not Hume, who should be classed as the genuine historian of the Enlightenment. I will consider each of these three theses, and offer a concluding moral.

The Enlightenment, Democratic Rights – and ‘Whig History’ The Enlightenment, says Green, ‘consisted fundamentally in the establishment of the development of the idea that individuals have political rights, which underpins the growth, during the nineteenth century, of democratic forms of government’. On this basis, she concludes, ‘Hume is not a philosopher of the Enlightenment’. There is no doubt that the inference is sound. If that is what the Enlightenment was, then Hume did not belong to it. But is this tight focus on political rights the most convincing approach to understanding the Enlightenment? It should already be clear, from ‘Hume and the Enlightenment’, that I think it is not: it ignores the more moderate strands of Enlightenment thought, giving priority to the radicalism of the late Enlightenment in France. Once the moderates are admitted into the picture, Hume fits comfortably inside the frame. Why, then, does she insist on such a narrow standard? I find it very difficult to resist the thought that she does so because of the intrusion of what has been called ‘Whig historiography’: history as the story of progress up to our own (necessarily) enlightened views, and so to be evaluated according to the standards we now take for granted. Past worlds will be regarded as good in so far as they can be seen to lead towards our own present views, and what will be important about them will be how, or the extent to which, they – 53 –

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lead towards us. From this point of view, to label some period ‘enlightened’ is to declare it a Good Thing, and as such a major step towards our own standardsetting outlook. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment thus must be, as its very name implies, the cradle of our present values. We are therefore fully entitled to identify what does, and what does not, belong to it simply by applying our contemporary values to the period’s salient figures and beliefs, and seeing who and what passes the test. This is what Green does. Her test for acceptance as a member of the Enlightenment is conformity with our own values. She shows this to be so by incidental remarks scattered through the text – remarks which are all the more revealing for being incidental. Thus she regrets that Hume shows no sympathy for the maxims of the seventeenth-century Levellers because they ‘have been generalized in post-Enlightenment democracy to the extent that we think that even those not enlightened by the spirit are entitled to equal regard’; that Hume’s empiricism gives him no room for taking seriously ‘the sorts of grand plans for the future of mankind which inspired thinkers such as Macaulay and Kant, and which fuelled the social change that we take to be the legacy of the Enlightenment’; and that Macaulay should be remembered as ‘the quintessential historian and philosopher of the Enlightenment’ because ‘her belief that democracy is rationally justifiable…has become part of the dominant legacy of the Enlightenment, and her interpretation of the pattern of British history…is now standard’. In all these passages, Green makes it plain that, for her, it is dominant present-day attitudes that determine who is, and who is not, to be cast as an Enlightenment figure: the standard is conformity with what ‘we now cherish’ (emphases added). In this light, it is very surprising that she should sum up with what appears at first sight to be an anti-Whiggish moral, by regretting ‘the understandable desire to interpret history as a meaningful progress…[towards] the democratic forms of political organization that we now cherish’ – since this is precisely what she herself does in the passages just quoted. But filling in the details of her remark explains what she has in mind: There is an understandable desire to interpret history as a meaningful progress and to believe that Hume’s scientific and sceptical attitudes are those which lie at the origin of the democratic forms of political organization that we now cherish. But real history is rather more perverse and arbitrary than a simple tale in which there are cohesive advances on all fronts. Hume’s scientific and sceptical outlook may have been progressive in one sense, in that its development has led to many scientific advances. However, it provided him with no reason to believe in political progress.

This makes it plain that Green supposes that it is not her account, but mine, that is guilty of simple Whiggishness. This is startling, since it is on her account, not mine, that one tests for Enlightenment status by looking for views ‘which lie at

Philosophy, Historiography and the Enlightenment

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the origin of the democratic forms of political organization that we now cherish’. And, since on my account the Enlightenment is best understood as the various attempts to apply to the social order the implications of the scientific revolution, and that these attempts were both empiricist and rationalist, moderate as well as radical, there is no basis for supposing my account to evince a ‘desire to interpret history as a meaningful progress’, nor that it commits me to ‘a simple tale in which there are cohesive advances on all fronts’. It seems that I have been found guilty of the implications of premises endorsed, not by me, but by her. The question whether Hume is to be classed as an Enlightenment thinker is not, on my account, equivalent to the view that Hume’s philosophy is a Good Thing.1 There are also characteristic dangers built into directly measuring past epochs by our own preferred standards. One is the tendency to overlook what was significant then, if it seems less so now; another is that continuities perceived may be more apparent than real; and a third is that we may exempt from consideration tensions inherent in the past, thereby artificially simplifying both that past and our relationship to it. I think all three of these are discernible in Green’s approach. In the first place, Hume is castigated for thinking of radical social levelling as the socially destructive fruit of fanatical religion. But a sensitive approach to this question would have to admit that in his day it simply was the case that radical egalitarianism was advocated by religious zealots. In the extreme case, they aimed at a theocratic utopia;2 and, even in the moderate case, at restitution of the Stuarts, if necessary by violent means. The former ambition explains much of Hume’s animus; but it is the latter that is crucial for understanding his History. In 1745, Scottish Highlanders, rallied by Bonnie Prince Charlie, overran Scotland and headed south, getting to within 125 miles of London before being turned back and ultimately defeated. This was the third and most serious of the Scottish uprisings in the cause of the exiled Stuart Pretenders. It was also, as things turned out, the last; but no-one had reason to think that at the time. So the opinions expressed in Hume’s History have to be assessed against that background. This means, among other things, that his attacks on the political turmoil brought about by religious extremism in the English Civil War are to be read in this light, not in the light of nineteenth-century questions concerning the extension of the franchise in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In mideighteenth-century Scotland, religious extremism raised urgent political issues; issues concerning the very survival of the peaceful and flourishing Hanoverian constitutional settlement. So, whether or not one agrees with his judgement on the matter, Hume’s attitude to radical religious politics in the Civil War is not evidence of conservatism, but of an acute awareness of the dangers of unfettered religious politics. (Observers of our own present problems in international politics might see reason to be sympathetic.)

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Secondly, adopting the standpoint of the present may encourage too swift an appropriation of apparent continuities, and fail to see underlying shifts. Green holds that ‘the Enlightenment consisted fundamentally in the establishment of the development of the idea that individuals have political rights’, thus setting us on the road to democracy. Again, the latter-day viewpoint stands out. But the crucial point here is why Green puts things in such a cautiously-hedged way (‘the establishment of the development’). I presume the answer is that she is very alert to the fact that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 is a declaration of the rights of ‘Man’ (‘L’Homme’). As such, it appears to exclude women – it certainly fails explicitly to include them – and so cannot be said to be a genuinely democratic document. The question, of course, is why this is so. Green’s talk of ‘development’ suggests her view to be that this was an inconsistent first application of an idea later applied consistently and thus universally.3 But there is another way of looking at this, which suggests a different answer. The French Declaration is in the republican tradition, and thinks of rights as powers to act on one’s own behalf: the realm of rights is the realm of the citizen’s legitimate powers. As such it presupposes independence: rights on this picture are the powers that citizens exercise on their own behalf. In other words, the French Declaration is a declaration of the rights of ‘Man and Citizen’ because it is an extension of the status and powers of the independent citizen to all men. As such, it is not the beginning of a new idea, but the extension of an old one. This extension does introduce tensions, the most obvious being the failure to include women despite the apparent universalism. But it also introduces a conceptual tension: by including all men, it breaks the link between rights and independence, and so between rights and powers. This break becomes all the more notable once women are included, and in our day, the extensive list of universal rights recognized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (and its spin-offs) means it has become a chasm. Rights no longer identify powers that one does or even should possess, because they often no longer refer to powers at all. Instead, the term ‘rights’ now means basic moral and legal principles; principles to which any individual or institution must conform in order to be judged just or legitimate.4 This conception, then read back into the past, gives rise to the apparent story of progress so beloved of modern historians of rights: the story that, until quite recently, only very few people possessed rights, and so only this few enjoyed full humanity – a travesty now overcome by the expansion of rights to encompass all.5 Stories such as these all fail, since they are built on the supposition that what is now meant by ‘rights’ is what has always been meant. But the term’s meaning has had to change in order for it to play the central role in moral and political discourse it now plays. The marker for this shift is to be found in the UN document’s inclusion of rights to benefits: welfare rights, such as rights to social security, education and


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a decent standard of living. If rights identify one’s own powers, then the benefits they confer must be brought about by one’s own efforts. This is why the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 says that one’s rights include the pursuit of happiness – something one must do oneself. Similarly, the French Declaration makes no mention of any rights to welfare, whether by individuals or the state. If rights are powers possessed by independent actors, then one’s health and welfare are one’s own responsibility: my rights mean that no-one can legitimately hinder me from looking after myself, but they do not mean that anyone else, individual or state, owes me anything. (Here we can see the roots of the powerful American resistance to President Obama’s health care program; and, more generally, to ‘big government’.) The UN Declaration, in contrast, in its desire to spell out the fundamental moral standing of the individual as a justification for protections delivered through government welfare programs and the like, turns rights into specifications of moral status rather than moral powers. In so doing it produced a powerful statement of a post-1945 international moral consensus. But it also produced a dramatic shift in the meaning of rights, and so also, albeit unintentionally, created the conditions for misreading the French Declaration, and, more generally, for misreading the place of rights in past political structures. No less significantly, it also produced an uneasily inconsistent conception of rights. Rights-talk now vacillates uncomfortably between two poles: between the idea that rights imply autonomy (individual powers), and the idea that they imply vulnerability (and so justify access to benefits). Our present situation is not, then, the happy completion of an eighteenth-century new idea, but the inheritance of a tension introduced into an old idea for the sake of new political goals, a tension which continues to infect our own political disputes. This inherited inconsistency is thus one illustration of the third danger mentioned above, that of exempting from consideration tensions inherent in the past, thereby artificially simplifying both that past and our relationship to it. There is also another that deserves consideration. Green holds not only that the Enlightenment means the beginnings of political rights and democracy, but also that this is a species of a larger genus: ‘the sorts of grand plans for the improvement of mankind which inspired thinkers such as Macaulay and Kant, and which fuelled the social change we take to be the legacy of the Enlightenment’. The problem here is how those ‘grand plans’ are to be delimited. This is because, on most accounts, the grand plans spawned by the radical Enlightenment include not only democratic schemes, but also the totalitarianisms that blighted the twentieth century. This is most obviously true of Communism, which saw itself as the attempt to complete the social revolution begun by the French (‘bourgeois’) Revolution, by extending rights beyond the political, or merely formal, sphere into the economic domain. But it is also true of the growth of nationalism, and even of its most

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virulent species, biological racism. Increasing literacy and the rise of newspapers, together with the transformation of communications brought about by railways and the telegraph, generated linguistically-based nationalisms hostile to existing, ethnically and culturally diverse, empires. Biological racism had its beginnings in the eighteenth-century recognition of the inadequacy of the Biblical account of human origins from a single Mesopotamian family, and developed into a new ‘science’ built on the rejection of the very idea of a single, shared humanity. The preferred alternative was the idea of different human groups evolving independently of each other, and so living in their environments ab initio (hence the modern term ‘aboriginal’). That this ‘science’ – known as the ‘polygenic theory’ – has been discredited, along the way producing poisonous political results, goes without saying; the point here is that it was a self-consciously modern outlook spawned by the attempt to escape traditional or conservative ideas. Nor, it should be added, are these sorts of ideas entirely dead, given the stubborn persistence of that related cluster of ideas known as Social Darwinism.6 These are all ideas that grew out of the same soil that produced the statements of political rights on which Green focuses. So, although they certainly are not part of her conception of the Enlightenment, the question that must be faced is, on what grounds are the one set of ideas to be separated from the other? If the answer is that some we now cherish, but others we do not, fair enough; but then it is plain that what is at issue is not the nature of some past intellectual epoch at all.

Empiricism and Rationalism Green also offers a specifically intellectual yardstick for separating Enlightenment ideas from other pretenders. This yardstick is philosophical rationalism, and in particular the views of Immanuel Kant. It was Kant, she observes, who offered the most answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ His answer emphasized the importance of using one’s own understanding; and, supported by his metaphysics of morals, argued that the key to such intellectual autonomy lies in the public use of reason. This answer, she holds, is at odds with Hume’s ‘moral scepticism’ based in the passions. She means that his standards are contingent, not a priori; the problem lies, then, directly in his empiricism. It is certainly true that Kant’s theory is at odds with Hume’s, but much less clear that the differences sort the Enlightenment theory from its opponents. Although Kant’s essay on the nature of enlightenment is the most famous of the period, its subject matter is enlightenment, rather than the Enlightenment. As such, it is something of a manifesto for Kant’s own viewpoint, and so hardly surprising that it develops characteristically Kantian themes. And, it should be noted, it was only one of several answers to the question published at much the same time (in the Berlin Monthly in 1784). The other answers, most notably that


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by Moses Mendelssohn, emphasized the connections between ‘enlightenment’ and other terms new to cultivated discussion, ‘culture’ and ‘education’. Mendelssohn’s theme can be summed up as the importance of cultivating intellectual and social progress. What neither he nor the other contributors do is insist that enlightenment depends on philosophical rationalism.7 In fact, some recent interpreters have argued for precisely the opposite conclusion. The best-known case is Isaiah Berlin. In his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, he argued that negative liberty – freedom from obstacles to action – is the foundation-stone of liberal democracy, whereas positive liberty – the freedom of self-mastery – is a poisoned chalice, opening the door to totalitarian systems. What is not always recognized about this account, however, is that Berlin fills out positive liberty in a decidedly rationalist way, by pinning it to the rationalists’ division of the human psyche into rational and non-rational components, in which the former must rule over the latter. The danger of positive liberty, on his account, is precisely because of this feature: it divides the self into master and mastered, and equates freedom with the condition of the mastering part – it treats the unfreedom of the mastered part as of no account. It thus provides a rationale for thinking of society along the same lines: society is free when the ruling class exercises mastery; that is, when it is able to exercise control over the rest.8 Berlin’s essay is a Cold War classic, being directed at twentieth-century totalitarianism, especially the Soviet system that rendered him a refugee. It is plain that he sees the immediate problem to lie in Rousseau, since in The Social Contract the essential move in setting up the political system – a system in which the individual retains no rights against the whole – is the abandonment of natural liberty for civil liberty; that is, of negative liberty for positive.9 In the background, however, is Plato’s division of the soul, and his attendant view that the rationality of the ideal society is a function of the rationality of its ruling class;10 it seems quite likely then that Berlin has in the back of his mind Karl Popper’s attack on Plato as a source of modern totalitarianism.11 Berlin is thus building on an established critique of rationalist philosophy as a source of modern totalitarianism. So, if some see empiricism as the enemy of enlightenment, others see it as its core. I suggest that both views are implausible: empiricism and rationalism are very broad philosophical commitments, capable of development in many contrasting directions. Of course, empiricist or rationalist tendencies will make a difference, by offering different assessments of the role of past experience. For the rationalist, past experience will be of little account; the task of reform will consist in the specification of the first principles governing human society. The empiricist reformer, in contrast, will seek to widen the experiential base of the population, and so will become, above all, an advocate of universal education. Thus it was the empiricist Locke who produced the first great tract on education; then, following him (and echoing many of his prescriptions), the eclectic

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Rousseau.12 Hume did not write an explicit tract on education, but it is plain that he cared about the education of the wider public: both the Essays and the History were designed for wide consumption; their sales figures show that he succeeded in his aim. In line with other Enlightenment figures, he saw reaching out to the public as a virtue of his work, to be contrasted with the insularity of the scholastic philosophy, in which learning, as he writes in ‘Of Essay-Writing’, ‘shut up in Colleges and Cells…went to Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery’ (Es 534–5).

History and the Enlightenment Green’s third objection is that Hume cuts a poor figure as an Enlightenment historian; and that it is Catharine Macaulay who deserves the palm because of the values and beliefs she brings to her historical writing. Green commends her for her radical Whig values, of course; but also for her belief in a divinely-backed set of ‘immutable principles of moral truth’; and for her beliefs in the necessity of learning from education and experience, and the legitimacy of deposing rulers who violate the trust placed in them. These commendations are somewhat surprising, since they are quite distinct from the constructivist rationalism of Kant that she otherwise treats as the essence of the Enlightened viewpoint: the former is best regarded as a species of the high rationalism of the Cambridge Platonists and their followers; the latter bears the hallmarks of the empiricist philosophy of John Locke. To take these in turn. First, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth’s A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published posthumously in 1731; it was thus well in time to exert an influence on Macaulay’s own work, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, which appeared in 1783. The similarities of the titles strongly suggest a similarity of outlook; and, as Green notes, Macaulay acknowledges a debt to Samuel Clarke, himself indebted to Cudworth and other rationalists of a Platonic stamp. But this makes Macaulay rather less like Kant than Green’s approach suggests. Both may have sought to ground political liberty on freedom of will, as Green observes, but for Kant morality is not immutable because it has to be made, and made anew by each of us. True, it must conform to the requirements of the categorical imperative, but that is a test that any moral rule, or maxim, must pass in order to satisfy reason’s demands – it is not itself a moral rule. Kant’s rationalism is thus considerably thinner than Macaulay’s Platonism, not least because of its accommodation to a moderate voluntarism.13 Secondly, Macaulay’s views on education and political authority show the influence of Locke. This is most plain in the quotation Green provides as a summary account of Macaulay’s political doctrines: that government is a ‘human invention’, and so can be changed ‘according to the dictates of experience’; that it is insti-


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tuted ‘for the end of securing, not overthrowing the rights of nature’; that it is ‘a trust either formally admitted or supposed’; and that ‘the magistracy is therefore accountable’. This is a cameo of Locke’s political principles.14 It is thus not obvious just how well Macaulay’s views all fit together; nor, if we are to take Kant’s principles as canonical, why her rather different position does not disqualify Green’s claim that she is the emblematic historian of the Enlightenment. But what is it that makes someone an ‘Enlightenment historian’? Green’s approach is to focus on moral and political doctrines; but perhaps it is closer to the mark to see the distinguishing features of the Enlightenment historian to lie elsewhere. This thought is rendered all the stronger by the fact that the eighteenth century did see a new breed of historian, and that this new breed were seen as carrying the torch for new values. So who were these historians? And what were their distinctive characteristics? The central figure was Montesquieu. His The Spirit of the Laws (1748) created a new kind of historical writing because it was seen to be philosophical history. Put in our terms, the idea is that his history was scientific, because it looked for explanations of events in terms of the efficient causes employed in natural science. To put it another way, it was the invention of history as we now understand the term. Montesquieu eschewed the mere accumulation of facts, and rejected the tendency to explain history by reference to the character of and exploits of great men, or by reference to the purposes of divine providence. It was Montesquieu’s example that lies behind the historical consciousness of the Scottish Enlightenment, manifested in the historical writings not only of Hume, but also of William Robertson and Adam Smith. It was also the inspiration for the greatest of the British historians, Edward Gibbon; and, although his first historical writings predate Montesquieu’s book, it also taught fundamental methodological lessons to Voltaire. What all these historians had in common is spelt out by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the following terms: In all we find the same basic assumptions: that history is universal [i.e. it applies to human beings as human beings]; that its course, though it may be affected in detail by human decisions, is fundamentally determined by the structure of society…that such axioms enable a science of history to be developed and the mechanics of progress to be identified; and, moreover, that this science itself supplies new evidence to the historian…And to all these writers the significant substance of history is the same. The improvement of wealth, the discovery of useful arts, the elaboration of industrial technique, and the creation and preservation of appropriate social institutions are of more interest to them than dynasties, wars…or theology.15

This is a conception of history that fits the general outlook I have defended: a history in which the fruits of modern science, in the shape of explanation by efficient causation, are applied to the world of human action and institutions; and a

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history that, by following these guidelines, is able to come up with prescriptions for the reform and improvement of human life and society. This is what Hume saw in Montesquieu. He tells us, in My Own Life, that it was when he became the librarian for the Faculty of Advocates that he ‘formed the plan of writing the History of England’; and that he was ‘sanguine in [his] expectations of the success of this work’ because he thought he was ‘the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices’ (Es xxxvi–xxxvii). But it was Montesquieu who had provided the inspiration: Hume had read his book when it first appeared, and corresponded with him, shortly afterwards arranging for several chapters to be translated and published in Edinburgh. According to Trevor-Roper, he told a friend that ‘the utter vacuity of English historiography…was suddenly brought home to him; and he set to work to fill it’.16 The account he offers of the hostility with which it was received is, then, meant to show the resistance to genuinely philosophical history from entrenched interests. He thus presents himself, and philosophical history, as at odds with the status quo. This perspective on his work came to be obscured by the steady growth of political divisions amongst the philosophical historians themselves. Although, as Trevor-Roper notes, ‘intellectually, all the ‘philosophical historians’ were reformers’, the differing political situations on each side of the Channel forced their histories down different paths: In Protestant countries reformers could be content to understand the world: reform could be achieved, piecemeal, through an intelligent application of the existing forces of society and an intelligent co-operation with their natural tendency…If only English kings and statesmen had shown a little more tact here, a little more imagination there – this was the burden of Hume’s History – there would have been no need of civil war in 1642 or revolution in 1688. But in Catholic countries the position was very different. There the philosophers felt obliged not merely to understand but to change the world…but a radical change of political direction could only be achieved by radical change of the organic social structure too: that is, by revolution.17

The unexpected success of the French Revolution then elevated the radical view as the only genuine Enlightenment view, and thereby recast the moderate reformers of the Protestant world as timid purveyors of traditional or conservative views. Hume fell firmly into this category, not least because his various provocations of the Whig zealots have been misread as conservative resistance. They are better read as the scorn of a philosophical historian, with a regard for genuine causes, for the purveyors of historical myths, such as the ancient liberties of the English. For Hume, as for Montesquieu, liberty was unplanned, the happy result of ‘structural deadlock’.18 It was not the consummation of some general plan, whether that plan was ancient, as supposed by the English Whigs, or modern, as proposed by the French Revolutionaries. More generally, for Hume, as for Montesquieu, and,


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until political exigencies intervened, as also for the French radicals, Enlightenment history was ‘philosophical history’ – the search for rational causes and their implications, and so, in this sense, for reason in history – it was not simply the imposition of radical political values on a historical narrative.

Concluding Remarks I have argued against Green’s conception of the Enlightenment in favour of a broader conception of an intellectual flowering in which the transformations in natural philosophy generated attempts to bring about a comparable reformation in civil thought; and that these various attempts were not all of a piece, but included a wide array of opposed views – views that are the ancestors of the ideas that even today divide us. In one respect, however, there may be space for a political moral – albeit not the one she imagines. The point is this: it is curious that the Enlightenment has become such a source of orientation for modern thinkers of a self-styled progressive mould. Why should progressivist thought be so preoccupied with a period two hundred years in the past? It is the mark of conservatism, not progressivism, to look back at a bygone ‘Golden Age’. Was the intervening period a bastion of reaction, merely an extended coda to the Congress of Vienna? Plainly it was not. Green herself refers to the growth of democratic ideas in the nineteenth century; and I have already referred to the rise of Communist and nationalist projects. So what explains this pronounced tendency to look back to the eighteenth century? The answer is, I think, an uncomfortable one for those who want to identify the Enlightenment with its radical wing, and as the source of the ideas that ‘we now cherish’. The problem is that much of the radical inheritance of the Enlightenment has been given up; and has been because it contributed so much, directly or indirectly, to the disasters of the twentieth century’s great wars. This is plainly visible if we focus on the period between the wars. It was the radicals of left and right, with their ‘grand plans’, who destroyed the democracy of the Weimar Republic. Similarly, in Britain, the radicalism of the left (e.g. the Cambridge spies) and the right (e.g. Mosley and his blackshirts) dominated, with liberal values attracting little enthusiasm amongst the political intellectuals. Artistic movements like Futurism had much the same thrust. The Spanish Civil War can be seen as the first ‘reality check’ to these grand ambitions – with Picasso’s Guernica the emblematic rejection of the sacrifice of ordinary lives for radical ideals – but of course worse was to come. The moral is that the political ideas ‘we now cherish’ are a retreat from those radical ideas; an attempt, post-1945, to return to the formative period of the modern west to find a more stable and peaceful inheritance amongst the wreckage of its radical dreams. The liberal democracy of our day is not the radical

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republicanism espoused by Macaulay: her appeal to ‘trust’ is a permanent threat of rebellion, not our day’s sense of consent as a conflict-avoiding mechanism. The difference is obscured by the appeal to rights in both outlooks. But the ‘rights of nature’ espoused by Macaulay and the French Declaration of 1789 are individual powers, not the basic forms of moral status of the UN Declaration of 1948. In between these dates lies the dramatic expansion of the franchise as the old feudal hierarchies gave way to modern industrialization – and also the growth of dreams of radical utopias supposedly made possible by those very same developments. It is the collapse of those radical visions in the ruins of war that underpins the ideas ‘we now cherish’; and it is the attempt to ground those ideas in a ‘myth of origins’ that has brought the Enlightenment to centre-stage – and to be remade in our own image.

4 HUME’S ENLIGHTENMENT AESTHETICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Dale Jacquette

Infinity and the Sublime David Hume cultivates an unusual set of overlapping interests in the philosophy of mathematics and aesthetics. Hume was an outspoken critic of the classical concept of infinity in the course of developing an empiricist philosophy of mathematics, and was also actively engaged in addressing a series of specific psychological questions concerning the aesthetics of the sublime. Hume seldom uses the word ‘sublime’ in his occasional writings on aesthetic topics, although he does so explicitly, for example, in his essay, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (Es 244). Yet he clearly intends the same concept which he singles out as having an empirical origin in impressions and ideas of ‘great distance’ in space and time. He demystifies the experience of the sublime in opposition to aesthetic theorists in and around his time who consider the concept of infinity to be essential to understanding its nature. A study of this particular application better helps us to understand Hume’s general philosophical methodology. What I shall say about these matters finally may appear obvious enough, yet there is something instructive in seeing the method illustrated so clearly and uncompromisingly in Hume’s attitude toward infinity in mathematics and in his aesthetic psychology of the sublime.1

Hume’s Experimental Method Hume exerted a profound influence on the later European Enlightenment. He did so primarily through the inherent appeal of his application of the ‘experimental method’ in the sciences to ‘moral philosophy’.2 Hume’s experimental method, adapted from Isaac Newton’s successful studies in the natural sciences, serves in effect as a purge against any concepts in philosophy whose origin cannot be plausibly traced to immediate sense impressions and resulting ideas, sometimes through a complex battery of cognitive – 65 –

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manipulations involving reason, memory, and imagination.3 From this empirical standpoint, Hume challenges the legitimacy of classical mathematical concepts of infinite divisibility and extension, and, surprisingly, though in much the same vein and on precisely the same methodological grounds, advances a more humanized finitist account of the aesthetics of the sublime. I propose, in what follows, to examine the general principles of Hume’s philosophy in both early and later periods as concerned throughout with the proper ideational credentials of all concepts legitimately belonging to science, mathematics, and the philosophy of art. Hume at his finest single-mindedly applies an empiricist criterion for the qualifications of philosophical concepts entering both into formal and natural sciences, as well as cultural studies of every kind. The intersection of Hume’s interests in the conceptual foundations of mathematics and the aesthetics of the sublime is later reflected in his direct influence on the aesthetic philosophy of his contemporary, Edmund Burke.4 The general pattern of a Humean philosophical investigation typically adopts something like the following sequence of steps: 1. An empirically unsupported concept is discovered in a philosophical context where it leads proper reasoning astray and gives rise to philosophical problems. 2. The concept is eliminated from philosophy as lacking adequate credentials. 3. The underlying truths that the rejected concepts were originally designated as supporting are then refitted with empirically approved counter- or alterconcepts, and the resulting theory is tested for explanatory adequacy and whatever other desiderata a theory of the type is expected to fulfill. 4. If the substituted empirically circumspect concept passes the test, then the original truths are translated into the new Humean conceptual framework and the concepts rejected on Humean grounds are replaced with rehabilitated Humean empirically approved concepts; if not, the original truths are denied and science and philosophy are advised that they must learn to live without them. I defend this elementary philosophical policy as central to all of Hume’s empiricism in the discussion to follow. That this is a cartoon of Hume’s ‘method’ is obvious at least on one level, but I want to urge that this is what Hume is about at least in the Treatise, and that the methodology as I have outlined it is the key to understanding both major flowerings of Hume’s work in philosophy.

Hume’s Enlightenment Aesthetics and Philosophy of Mathematics

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Experiential Origins of Ideas and the Problem of Infinity Hume imposes specific requirements on the legitimate origins of any of our ideas, anything with and about which we can actually think. He checks their credentials, their experience-originating pedigree, to establish or repudiate their legitimacy. Since we as finite cognitive agents can have no empirical encounter with infinity or infinite divisibility, Hume believes that we can have no impression and hence no adequate idea of infinity or the infinitely divisible. We accept these ideas as abstractions and we learn to use mathematical notations, in which symbols purport to represent the infinite, and, since Georg Cantor, but much after Hume’s time, transfinite higher orders of infinity.5 We may then begin to think that in the process we are saying something about infinity and that therefore infinity is something real, the real referent of our mathematical languages and algorithms. From a Humean perspective, in developing formal languages for expressing and calculating about infinite qualities we are only playing syntactically with symbols that do not represent and cannot be supported by or hence serve as the meaningful expression of any adequate ideas of infinity or infinite divisibility. The Humean bottom line on classical Euclidean geometry is that it is a castle built in the air, ein Luftschloß, whose axioms, definitions, and theorems do not correspond to ideas about the mathematics of space and of which we could not possibly have any adequate idea. Still, we might ask: Is not the beauty of mathematics the fact that it makes these wild assumptions, that there is a point between every two points, for example, among others, and that in the process it does mysteriously extend our knowledge beyond what we should have any right to know experientially, and yet it still works within the world of experience? These apparent facts about mathematical practice commend its practical use, but a good Humean should emphasize that the point of Hume’s inquiry is, somewhat like Socrates’ in his day, to look into the qualifications of putative ideas for which there seems superficially to be a vocabulary and formal symbolism available in the mathematical marketplace, but which in Hume’s case do not necessarily pass the empiricist entrance examination. Among such ideas most conspicuously are those of infinity and infinite divisibility as presupposed by classical mathematics and its applications, for example, in Newton’s physics and metaphysics.

Mathematics without Infinity If you studied geometry in school, and you did not rebel philosophically against the content of your lessons, then you were taught to believe that there were just as many Euclidean points in a millimetre as in a mile and indeed in of all of three-dimensional physical space. How else could we explain the usefulness of a

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mathematics that makes precisely these assumptions in successfully accomplishing complicated feats of engineering? The answer is that there are indeed other ways of explaining the pragmatic value of applied mathematics. This is especially true since all of elementary mathematics began and has subsequently built upon a foundation of practical information concerning the function of number and concepts of space in counting and measuring that were eventually codified into what purport to be true general abstract mathematical principles. Pure mathematics is supposed to be entirely a priori, so, like modern science generally, it seldom mentions its historical roots. It is also a refinement of the practical methods of mathematics that project an ideal onto our later experience of the world. We can use its language to describe the features of spatiotemporal phenomena with unlimited exactness and perform interesting calculations with numerical input involving exact and numerically and deductively reliable algorithms. Nor would Hume need to deny any of this. For his philosophical purposes it is nevertheless more important to reject the empirical conceptual foundations of classical infinitary mathematics as consisting of nothing but myths. We have no idea of infinity or infinite divisibility, Hume concludes, and we are not actually representing anything of which we have an adequate idea when we speak of infinity, using the word or its symbolic equivalents in mathematical languages. Hume, by my count, offers a total of six arguments against infinite divisibility in A Treatise of Human Nature alone, and another two refutations in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Thus, it is a topic that stays with Hume from the early to the later periods represented by the Treatise and the first Enquiry.6 And it is easy to see why. If an empiricist admits that infinity or infinite divisibility is real, to put the point bluntly, then a priori knowledge triumphs over empirical a posteriori knowledge. Classical infinitary mathematics is the ultimate battleground between, again to speak bluntly, rationalism and empiricism, the dialogue that has taken place in the Western tradition since the time of Plato and Aristotle. It has been played out in different forms in medieval times and in oppositions raised in the largely empiricist eighteenth century of the Enlightenment – and nowhere more nobly taken up than in the Scottish Enlightenment led by Hume – against the naïve rationalisms of the seventeenth century. The first, eponymous, empiricist, Sextus Empiricus, makes this explicit in the title of his most famous work, Against the Mathematicians (Adversos Mathematicos).7 To continue, blunt end forward once again, pure strict empiricism is right if and only if classical mathematics is wrong. This is recognized explicitly by Hume, and he responds to the challenge of defending his application of the method of experimental inquiry to moral subjects against classical mathematics’ supposed knowledge of extra-empirical matters in a number of ways. He denies the intelligibility of infinitary mathematics and he discusses at least in a programmatic way


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an overhauling of pure and applied mathematics to reflect the ideas of quantity we are actually capable of possessing. Here Hume points toward a strictly finitist theory of space and time composed of minima sensibilia or extensionless sensible indivisibles.8

Hume’s Inkspot Experiment We cannot survey all eight of Hume’s arguments against the infinite divisibility of extension in the present context, although this has been done in another place.9 Let us concentrate instead on the central anti-infinitist argument of the Treatise, which revolves around the so-called inkspot experiment. There Hume writes: Put a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; ’tis plain, that the moment before it vanish’d the image or impression was perfectly indivisible. ’Tis not for want of rays of light striking on our eyes, that the minute parts of distant bodies convey not any sensible impression; but because they are remov’d beyond that distance, at which their impressions were reduc’d to a minimum, and were incapable of any farther diminution. (T 1.2.1.4/27–28)

Hume’s complete line of reasoning in the inkspot experiment goes something like this: 1. Ideas are mental copies of impressions, and as such they are subject to the same limitations as the impressions from which they derive. 2. Impressions of extension are at most finitely divisible into minima sensibilia, as the inkspot experiment shows. 3. Ideas of extension are adequate representations of the most minute parts of extended things, so that extended things in reality cannot be more finely divided than their corresponding adequate ideas. 4. There is no idea of infinitely divisible extension, and extension in reality is not infinitely divisible; space is a finite and finitely divisible distribution of sensible extensionless indivisibles or minima sensibilia. Additionally, in the Treatise, Hume considers more classical and contemporary refutations of infinite divisibility, including Pierre Bayle’s trilemma against there being any adequate idea of extension or space in the Dictionary Historical and Philosophical, the argument from the addition of infinite parts, Malezieu’s argument from the unity of existents, an analogy from the finite divisibility of time, and a dilemma involving the concept of exact equalities in geometry.10 Some commentators have understood Hume’s animosity toward infinite divisibility as having been spent by the time he gets to the first Enquiry, or as supplanting the Treatise’s refutations by two arguments against infinity in the Enquiry.11 However, I think it is not so.

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In a famous remark in the ‘Advertisement’ to the second volume of the posthumous 1777 edition of his collected Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, Hume says of himself in the third person: ‘Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’ (EHU, Advertisement 83/2). Hume admits only that the Enquiries ‘cast … anew’ ‘[m]ost of the principles, and reasonings’ of the Treatise, ‘where some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected’ (EHU, Advertisement, 83/2). The statement leaves open whether Hume believes that the first Enquiry amends metaphysical errors about the problem of infinity in the Treatise. His prefatory remarks in the ‘Advertisement’ to the Essays might be understood to apply only to his earlier treatment of moral questions, or to metaphysical issues other than those concerning infinite divisibility in particular, which he does not mention by name. Hume moreover does not admit to having made any philosophical mistakes in the Treatise’s critique of infinity or any other topic, but recognizes only ‘some negligences’ in reasoning ‘and more in the expression’, which might naturally be understood as oversights rather than defects that the later writings might supplement rather than replace. In his later work, Hume also fully acknowledges the strong empiricist claim that ideas originate ultimately in immediate impressions of sensation or reflection, of which they are then the faint or faded images. The first Enquiry, Section 2, ‘Of the Origin of Ideas’, pointedly states: When we entertain…any suspicion, that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light, we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality. (EHU 2.9/22)

In place of classical applied mathematics, the Euclidean infinitary geometry of space, Hume proposes a strictly finitist account of space (and time) as consisting of sensible extensionless indivisibles. The project is directly opposed to Newton’s presuppositions in his ‘System of the World’ in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. There analogical geometrical reasoning in a Euclidean framework drive most of Newton’s inferences about terrestrial and extraterrestrial kinematics and the universal generalizations encoded in his basic laws of motion.12 Hume’s substitution of a strict finitism for Euclidean and other classical infinitary mathematics is intended specifically to avoid the three prongs of Bayle’s trilemma, according to which space can be neither infinitely divisible, a finitely divisible fabric of extended physical points, nor a finite divisible system of extensionless ideal mathematical (Euclidean) points.13 Hume’s account, if correct, also solves Aristotle’s so-called ‘contact’ problem in Book VI of the Physics,


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denying that something continuous can be composed of points that are either themselves continuous or touching.14 A curious historical puzzle with which we are immediately confronted is how Hume can proclaim himself a follower of Newton’s methodology adapting his hypothetical method of reasoning after its successes in natural philosophy to questions of moral philosophy. For, given his general philosophical objections to infinitary mathematics, Hume must be critical in particular of Newton’s appropriation of infinitary mathematics and of Newton’s own co-discovery with Leibniz of the principles of infinitary mathematical analysis or the infinitary differential and integral Calculus. One possible answer is that Hume may have considered everything that Newton said of value about the mechanics of motion as translatable with full practical value preserved into a more honestly empiricist, strictly finitist mathematics, in which space is treated not as a continuum, but as a physically rather than mathematically dense ensemble of extensionless sensible indivisibles. Classical infinitary mathematics is accidental to Newton’s physics in this respect, and even in fundamental conflict with Newton’s way of doing science, to which, as a methodology, perhaps one to be more properly applied, Hume remains faithful. To distinguish between the inspirational method espoused by a great thinker and its disappointing practice especially when limited only to certain matters of detail, possibly of greater importance to the critic than to the original author, would be nothing particularly new in the history of philosophy. Whatever is right in Newton we can get back after the Humean revolution, recovering a Newtonian mechanics in a finitist mathematics of space. The conclusions Newton reaches, Hume might say, are the results of an exemplary dedicated application of a largely proper empiricist methodology applied within the field of natural philosophy, leaving moral philosophy to benefit in parallel fashion from its enlightened epistemic principles with Hume among other notable proponents of the new learning at the forefront.

Empiricism and the Aesthetics of Great Distance Hume is very much the man of precise methodological demands and rather strict compliance with the same demands in his own philosophical practice. There is a style among philosophers with a methodological metaphilosophical agenda of making rules for others and then deliberately breaking them (think of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), or of making rules that outlaw certain of their theoretical competitors, and then saying they will continue to speak in the same convenient way themselves, but only as a heuristic device (as for most adherents of Darwin’s Origin of Species with respect to such teleological concepts as purpose in nature). Hume is none of these kinds of rule-breakers, and break his own rules he seldom

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if ever does. If there are exceptions to his own methodological restrictions in his philosophical pronouncements, Hume at least to his credit never seems to notice it or to make a virtue of transgression, and on the whole he maintains an admirable level of logical consistency in all his writings, even when he squirms almost viscerally about such complications and potential embarrassments for the empiricist program as the missing shade of blue (T 1.1.1.10–11/6). An interesting test case for Hume’s refutation of infinity and infinite divisibility in an unexpected context is his application of a strictly finitist interpretation of space and time extended to account for the aesthetic experience of the sublime. In marked contrast to Hume’s scrupulous avoidance of the word ‘sublime’ in much of his discussion, his later follower Edmund Burke has no difficulty whatsoever in speaking of the ‘origin’ or ‘original’ of our ideas of beauty and the sublime, as the two complementary categories of aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century philosophical world.15 The sublime is the sense of awe in the overpowering forces of nature, the vastness of the heavens or depths of the sea, which is a kind of aesthetic experience that in many seems entirely distinct from that of beauty, even if certain aesthetic objects manage simultaneously to be beautiful and sublime. Hume has relatively little to say about aesthetics and the philosophy of art in his writings. Burke later came to do what Hume had left undone in this particular area, just as Immanuel Kant was to do in a very different way with respect to the concepts of person as a unitary empirically identifiable subject of experience, material substance as a substratum underlying sensible properties, and the necessity of causal connection and casual law, all discredited by Hume’s sceptical inquiry into the perceptual origins of putatively corresponding ideas. The possibilities of Humean empirical reinterpretation of concepts rejected on Humean empirical grounds are substantial, and flexible assimilations of almost anything of value originally outside the Humean orbit are generally attainable in some pragmatically valuable form also under Humean constraints. To see exactly how Hume makes such assimilations is nevertheless highly instructive with respect to his own sense of methodological propriety. We are offered a unique opportunity to see this process at work in what he says, in other words, about the philosophical psychology of aesthetic experience of the sublime as a kind of awe in the face of great distances in space and time.

Hume’s Finitist Rehabilitation of the Sublime The original meaning of the sublime is often lost sight of today, when references to subliminal advertising and related artistic phenomena suggest subtlety and concealment or delicacy of structure that is the very opposite of what the sublime first denoted. The sublime is the elevated, lofty, deep or complex, and sometimes terrifying in nature and art, that which implies height and power.


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Examples of the sublime in philosophical-aesthetic commentary in Hume’s day include impressive mountaintop scenes of the Swiss and Italian Alps, river torrents and ocean storms, God’s creation of light and the division of night and day in Genesis 1.3, and John Milton’s poetic evocation of Satan in Paradise Lost.16 The interest in the aesthetics of the sublime in this period coincides with the translation first into French and later into English, and subsequent widespread discussion, of Longinus’ manual of rhetorical style, Peri Hypsos (On the Sublime), in which the silence of Ajax in Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey is featured as an example of lofty or elevated literary form. The concept of the sublime became popular enough for Alexander Pope to parody in his satire of Longinus’ treatise, Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728).17 As Samuel H. Monk has documented in The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England, the term ‘sublime’ derives from the 1674 French translation of Longinus by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, who adapted the Latin sublimi for Longinus’ Greek term hypsos. Bolieau’s L’Art Poétique and his treatise on Longinus excited and shaped British and Continental thinking about the sublime as an aesthetic category, different and in some ways opposite from, yet affording equal pleasure with and therefore complementing the aesthetic category of, the beautiful.18 Hume’s approach to the sublime more or less fits this pattern, though his metaphysics of strict finitism and sceptical religious outlook preclude him from the most high-flown speculations about the final significance of the sublime (as one later finds in Kant’s Critique of Judgement).19 Hume concentrates on three problems about the concept, concerning: (1) the aesthetic psychology of objects experienced at vast distances; (2) the comparatively greater admiration for objects separated from the perceiver in time than in space; and (3) the comparatively greater admiration for objects separated in past than future time (T 2.3.7.1–2.3.8.13/427–38). Hume assumes that the aesthetic phenomena presupposed by these problems are as he describes, offering a few examples without argument or analysis as though the point in each case was uncontroversial. The problems have a special poignancy in the development of his empiricist epistemology, because as Hume notes they are in a sense the very opposite of complementary phenomena involving the relations of perceiver and object separated by vast distances in space and time with respect to their effect on conception and passion as opposed to aesthetic admiration. Thus we have accounted for three phænomena, which seem pretty remarkable. Why distance weakens the conception and passion: Why distance in time has a greater effect than that in space: And why distance in past time has still a greater effect than that in future. We must now consider three phænomena, which seem to be, in a manner, the reverse of these: Why a very great distance encreases our esteem and admiration for an object: Why such a distance in time encreases it more than that in

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Hume and the Enlightenment space: And a distance in past time more than that in future. The curiousness of the subject will, I hope, excuse my dwelling on it for some time (T 2.3.8.1/432).

What is additionally at stake in the discussion for Hume’s philosophy, beyond its ‘curiousness’, is its apparent contradiction with his theory of conception and the passions. If the three aesthetic phenomena are really as he says, then, as the opposite of what is to be expected from an empiricist psychology of the passions, they indicate conflicting responses to the same objects. Hume has by no means simply contradicted himself, but he needs to reconcile the psychology of aesthetic experience with that of sensation, and in so doing expand upon his previous characterization of the subject matter of aesthetics and the psychology of conception and the passions. To resolve this apparent conflict in his philosophy of mind, Hume offers a Hutcheson-style application of Locke’s associationist psychology. The mind experiences the specific pleasures of greatness in contrast with that of the beautiful, according to Hume, by virtue of the effort it must make in assimilating the distances, offering satisfaction in overcoming the difficulties involved. Hume speaks of this as something that ‘enlarges the soul’ with a ‘sensible delight and pleasure’. The mind is active in the aesthetic process of sublime experience as Hume describes it, ‘reflecting on the interpos’d distance’, admiring the distance itself, and then by Lockean-Hutchesonian association transferring the passion and admiration excited by the contemplation of the distance to the distant object.20 The psychological problem of explaining the sublime is addressed in Hume’s discussion by the perceiver’s esteem and admiration ‘enlarging’ the soul. Hume declares that great distance in space or time adds positive aesthetic value to any object. He combines reflection or contemplation of great distance in the conceptual mode with its effect on the aesthetic experience of the sublime. Now when any very distant object is presented to the imagination, we naturally reflect on the interpos’d distance, and by that means, conceiving something great and magnificent, receive the usual satisfaction. (T 2.3.8.2/433)

The challenge for Hume is to explain from the resources of his theory of the passions why great distance in space or time should confer this kind of positive aesthetic value on objects so separated from the perceiver. The difficulty as observed is particularly acute for Hume, because his pronouncements about distance weakening the conception and passions seems to contradict the phenomena of the aesthetics of the sublime. Hume’s solution, as might be expected, is both ingenious and commonsensical, relying ultimately on Locke’s associationist psychology which Hutcheson had previously applied to aesthetic theory. The exact mechanism by which experience of greatness or the sublime produces pleasure is later explained by Hume’s observations of the mind’s pleasure in over-


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coming obstacles, the psychological effect of meeting with success after stirring its energies in the effort to prevail over cognitive challenge and adversity. In Book 2 of the Treatise, Hume delivers his most complete formulation of the associationist psychological explanation of the aesthetic pleasure resulting from experience of the sublime or greatness in distance, height and depth. He maintains: Since the imagination, therefore, in running from low to high, finds an opposition in its internal qualities and principles, and since the soul, when elevated with joy and courage, in a manner seeks opposition, and throws itself with alacrity into any scene of thought or action, where its courage meets with matter to nourish and employ it; it follows, that every thing, which invigorates and enlivens the soul, whether by touching the passions or imagination, naturally conveys to the fancy this inclination for ascent, and determines it to run against the natural stream of its thoughts and conceptions. This aspiring progress of the imagination suits the present disposition of the mind; and the difficulty, instead of extinguishing its vigour and alacrity, has the contrary effect, of sustaining and encreasing it. (T 2.3.8.9/435)

The second problem which Hume promises to resolve is dealt with in similar fashion, concerning the more enhanced aesthetic impression of distance in time than space. Hume again seems to overstate the sufficiency of distance to provoke sublime aesthetic experience. But tho’ every great distance produces an admiration for the distant object, a distance in time has a more considerable effect than that in space. Antient busts and inscriptions are more valu’d than Japan tables: And not to mention the Greeks and Romans, ’tis certain we regard with more veneration the old Chaldeans and Egyptians, than the modern Chinese and Persians, and bestow more fruitless pains to clear up the history and chronology of the former, than it wou’d cost us to make a voyage, and be certainly inform’d of the character, learning and government of the latter. (T 2.3.8.3/433)

Similarly, with respect to problem (3), concerning the asymmetry of aesthetic admiration and esteem for distant objects in or from past as opposed to future time, Hume argues: ’Tis not every removal in time, which has the effect of producing veneration and esteem. We are not apt to imagine our posterity will excel us, or equal our ancestors. This phænomenon is the more remarkable, because any distance in futurity weakens not our ideas so much as an equal removal in the past. Tho’ a removal in the past, when very great, encreases our passions beyond a like removal in the future, yet a small removal has a greater influence in diminishing them. (T 2.3.8.11/436–37)

The answer Hume offers in all three cases, to which the phenomena of all three problems in different ways testify, is that aesthetic delight is produced by the mind’s overcoming the difficulties involved in assimilating the information presented by objects at great distances in space and time. This is seen in Hume’s

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response to the third problem, of which he states: ‘The third phænomenon I have remark’d will be a full confirmation of this’ (T 2.3.8.11/436). Here he contends: In our common way of thinking we are plac’d in a kind of middle station betwixt the past and future; and as our imagination finds a kind of difficulty in running along the former, and a facility in following the course of the latter, the difficulty conveys the notion of ascent, and the facility of the contrary. Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us. Our fancy arrives not at the one without effort, but easily reaches the other: Which effort weakens the conception, where the distance is small; but enlarges and elevates the imagination, when attended with a suitable object. As on the other hand, the facility assists the fancy in a small removal, but takes off from its force when it contemplates any considerable distance. (T 2.3.8.12/437)

The difficulties are greater for conception or perception. The aesthetic pleasure potentially derivable is also proportionally greater for the experience of distant as opposed to near objects, for objects in time as opposed to space, and for objects in the past as opposed to the future. The difficulties first arouse the mind’s interest and attention, as Hume would have it, and then, as they are surmounted, produce the delight that arises naturally as in other human endeavors through pride of accomplishment in mastering an imposing cognitive challenge.

Hume’s Sublime Manqué Thus, Hume provides a substitute concept of the sublime that does not involve any reference to the suggestion of infinity as an ideal of aesthetic awe. Kant taught that such aesthetic experiences of the sublime lead us progressively to grasp the concept of God, an application to which Hume would evidently not be sympathetic. Hume ultimately goes even further than Burke, the latter of whom speaks of an artificial infinite, invoked by repetitions of things that seem to have no definite terminus, such as certain sidelong views of columns in an ancient Greek temple. Hume rejects altogether the concept of infinity, including Aristotle’s watered-down concept of potential infinity, as a consequence of his unflinchingly empiricist philosophy of mathematics. In this case, as in the geometry of space, Hume recovers a substitute non-infinitary concept of the sublime in explaining the psychology of merely great albeit astronomical distance in space and time.21

5 PART 9 OF HUME’S DIALOGUES AND ‘THE ACCURATE PHILOSOPHICAL TURN OF CLEANTHES’ Stanley Tweyman

In the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, particularly in the early Parts of this work, Hume, through Philo (and to some extent through Demea), urges against attempting to gain insight into the divine nature. For example, in Part 1, Philo tells Cleanthes: [W]hen we look beyond human affairs and the properties of the surrounding bodies: When we carry our speculations into the two eternities, before and after the present state of things; into the creation and formation of the universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operations of one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: We must be far removed from the smallest tendency to scepticism not to be apprehensive, that we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties… We are like foreigners in a strange country, to whom everything must seem suspicious, and who are in danger every moment of transgressing against the laws and customs of the people, with whom they live and converse. (D 1.10.11)

Philo cautions Cleanthes that wherever our arguments run wide of common life, that the most refined scepticism comes to be on a footing with them, and is able to oppose and counterbalance them. The mind must remain in suspense between them, and Philo concludes, ‘it is that very suspense and balance, which is the triumph of scepticism’ (D 1.11.12). Early in Part 2, Philo clinches his sceptical stand regarding knowledge of divine attributes by arguing (in traditional Hume fashion) Our ideas reach no further than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations; I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself. And it is a pleasure to me (and I hope to you too) that just reasoning and sound piety here concur in the same conclusion, and both of them establish the adorably mysterious and incomprehensible nature of the supreme being (D 2.4.19).

I argued fully in my book, Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,1 that Philo, in the first 8 Parts of the Dialogues, should be – 77 –

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regarded as an extreme sceptic, or Pyrrhonian – as one who attempts to bring Cleanthes to a point of indifference on the topic of knowledge of divine attributes. Philo reveals in Part 2 that he is arguing ‘with Cleanthes in his own way’ (D 2.11.22), that is to say, that he takes the identical evidentiary base as Cleanthes employs it – means to ends relations and a coherence of parts – and shows how alternative cosmologies can be derived from this base (Parts 6–8). In addition, in Parts 4 and 5, he shows how causal reasoning in the Design Argument leads to an infinite regress (Part 4), and that the conception of the divine mind emerging from the Design Argument can be reduced to absurdity (Part 5). In the first 8 Parts of the Dialogues, therefore, Cleanthes is represented as a (Humean) dogmatist – as one who (to quote the first Enquiry) is ‘affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles, to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments’ (EHU 12.24/161). Note, as well, Cleanthes’ words at the end of Part 1, which clearly locate him as representing the philosophical dogmatist: It is very natural, said Cleanthes, for men to embrace those principles, by which they find they can best defend their doctrines; nor need we have any recourse to priestcraft to account for so reasonable an expedient. And surely, nothing can afford a stronger presumption, that any set of principles are true, and ought to be embraced, than to observe, that they tend to the confirmation of true religion, and serve to confound the cavils of atheists, libertines, and freethinkers of all denominations. (D 1.20.16)

The role played by Philo’s Pyrrhonian arguments is to rid Cleanthes of his dogmatism (one-sidedness), and to make him begin philosophic inquiry without prejudice. Beginning philosophic inquiry without the one-sidedness of the dogmatist is, for Hume, the true starting-point of philosophy. The opening paragraph of Section 5, Part 1 of the first Enquiry makes this point: The passion for philosophy, like that for religion, seems liable to this inconvenience, that, though it aims at the correction of our manners, and extirpation of our vices, it may only serve, by imprudent management, to foster a predominant inclination, and push the mind, with more determined resolution, towards that side, which already draws too much, by the biass and propensity of the natural temper. It is certain, that, while we aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage, and endeavour to confine our pleasures altogether within our own minds, we may, at last, render our philosophy like that of EPICTETUS, and other STOICS, only a more refined system of selfishness…There is, however, one species of philosophy which seems little liable to this inconvenience, and that because it strikes in with no disorderly passion of the human mind, nor can mingle itself with any natural affection or propensity; and that is the ACADEMIC or SCEPTICAL philosophy. The ACADEMICS always talk of doubt and suspense of judgment, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all

Part 9 of Hume’s Dialogues and ‘the Accurate Philosophical Turn of Cleanthes’

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speculations which lie not within the limits of common life and practice. Nothing, therefore, can be more contrary than such a philosophy to the supine indolence of the mind, its rash arrogance, its lofty pretensions, and its superstitious credulity. Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be, carried to too high a degree. (EHU 5.1/40–1)

Now, that Philo believes his Pyrrhonian attack on Cleanthes’ Design Argument has succeeded is made evident by what Philo says in the final paragraph in Part 8: All religious systems, it is confessed, are subject to great and insuperable difficulties. Each disputant triumphs in his turn; while he carries on an offensive war, and exposes the absurdities, barbarities, and pernicious tenets of his antagonist. But all of them, on the whole, prepare a complete triumph for the sceptic, who tells them, that no system ought ever to be embraced with regard to such subjects: For this plain reason, that no absurdity ought ever to be assented to with regard to any subject. A total suspense of judgement is here our only reasonable resource. (D 8.12.62)

In addition to revealing to Cleanthes the effectiveness of the Pyrrhonian critique in the first 8 Parts of the Dialogues, Hume must also show that Cleanthes has learned from this technique, and is now prepared to consider counterbalancing arguments when an argument is put forward by an opponent who is a dogmatist. In other words, Cleanthes must reveal his adoption of mitigated scepticism. How to accomplish this within the discussion of the Dialogues? I suggest that Cleanthes reveals his transition from dogmatism to mitigated scepticism by offering arguments against Demea’s a priori Cosmological–Ontological argument in Part 9, which cannot be considered as decisive against Demea, but only as counter-balancing, in the same manner in which Philo’s Pyrrhonian arguments against Cleanthes’ Design Argument serve to counterbalance Cleanthes’ Argument. I hasten to add that, in the case of two of the arguments Cleanthes offers against Demea’s Argument in Part 9, Cleanthes could, in fact, have offered decisive criticisms, based on matters which Hume had established elsewhere. That he does not do so does, I believe, supports my thesis that the arguments presented by Cleanthes in Part 9 of the Dialogues against Demea have a strategic value within the philosophical and dramatic components of this work, and must be appreciated in this respect. At the appropriate points in this paper, I will show a) that, with regard to some of the criticisms Cleanthes puts forth in Part 9, Hume had more to offer than is actually presented here, and b) that, once the additional material is taken into consideration, the criticisms offered would cease to be counterbalancing, and would, in fact, be decisive.

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Demea’s Cosmological–Ontological Proof The argument, replied Demea, which I would insist on, is the common one. Whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence; it being absolutely impossible for any thing to produce itself, or be the cause of its own existence. In mounting up, therefore, from effects to causes, we must either go on in tracing an infinite succession, without any ultimate cause at all, or must at last have recourse to some ultimate cause, that is necessarily existent: Now that the first supposition is absurd may be thus proved. In the infinite chain or succession of causes and effects, each single effect is determined to exist by the power and efficacy of that cause, which immediately preceded; but the whole eternal chain or succession, taken together, is not determined or caused by any thing: And yet it is evident that it requires a cause or reason, as much as any particular object, which begins to exist in time. The question is still reasonable, why this particular succession of causes existed from eternity, and not any other succession, or no succession at all. If there be no necessarily existent being, any supposition, which can be formed, is equally possible; nor is there any more absurdity in nothing’s having existed from eternity, than there is in that succession of causes, which constitutes the universe. What was it then, which determined something to exist rather than nothing, and bestowed being on a particular possibility, exclusive of the rest? Exernal causes, there are supposed to be none. Chance is a word without a meaning. Was it nothing? But that can never produce anything. We must, therefore, have recourse to a necessarily existent being, who carries the REASON of his existence in himself; and who cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction. There is consequently such a being, that is, there is a Deity. (D 9.3.64)

Demea’s argument appears to have a prima facie plausibility. Consider the structure of the proof. Any object that currently exists is related causally to a chain or succession of objects which extends back to infinity. Demea argues that, although particular members in the chain or succession can be accounted for by reference to earlier members in the chain, nevertheless, two questions remain unanswered. One question is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, and the other question is, ‘why does this particular succession of causes exist rather than some other, or no succession at all?’ Demea contends that these are legitimate causal questions, which can only be answered by making a modal leap. Since no contingent being can account for the eternal (backward) chain of causes and effects (any such contingent being would be a member of the succession and, therefore, part of the problem), and since we cannot explain the chain through either Chance (chance for Hume means no cause, and Demea regards this as meaningless, and, therefore, unintelligible) or Nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit – nothing comes from nothing), Demea concludes that we can explain the infinite or eternal succession only by having recourse to ‘a necessarily existent being, who carries the REASON of his existence in himself; and who cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction’. According to Demea, therefore, the eternally contingent must be grounded in the eternally necessary.


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When Cleanthes undertakes his critique of Demea’s argument, he begins with the well-known Humean criticism of this argument, and says of this criticism: ‘I propose this argument as entirely decisive, and am willing to rest the whole controversy upon it’ (D 9.5.64). The criticism is the one which concerns the Humean point that nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. This criticism, in full, reads as follows: I shall begin with observing, that there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable. (D 9.5.64)

Cleanthes’ point centres around the Humean view that, since the premises in a sound deductive argument offer conclusive support for the conclusion, the only type of statement that can be demonstrated is one which is necessarily true, that is, where the relata are inseparable from each other. Mathematics, of course, offers the paradigm for the type of demonstrative proof which Hume has in mind. Hume has a test for determining whether the relata in a statement are connected necessarily or contingently: the first relatum is affirmed in thought, while the second is denied. If the first cannot be thought once the second has been denied (as is the case with, for example, 2+2=3+1), then the relata are necessarily connected, and are inseparable from each other; on the other hand, if the first can be thought once the second has been denied (as is the case with, for example, ‘strawberries’ and ‘red’), then the relata are contingently connected, and are separable from each other. Now, Cleanthes’ point is that since he finds ‘God exists’ functions in the way ‘all strawberries are red’ functions, in that the test of inseparability does not succeed in either case (if I think of strawberries and deny they are red, I can still think of strawberries; similarly, if I think of God and deny that He exists, I can still think of God), a demonstrative proof of God’s existence is (logically) impossible. But Demea will hardly find this a decisive criticism regarding a demonstrative proof of God’s existence, since he claims to be unable to think of God’s nature, if God’s existence is denied. For Demea, as we have seen, God ‘carries the REASON of his existence in himself, and … cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction’. Cleanthes’ criticism, as stated, therefore, appears to be no stronger than Demea’s position, and is, at most, counterbalancing. Demea and Cleanthes appear to be offering competing introspective accounts – Demea claiming that he cannot think the non-existence of God, and Cleanthes claiming that he can think the non-existence of God. Since Cleanthes’ second and third criticisms of Demea’s argument also centre on the conceivability/incon-

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ceivability thesis regarding the claim of God’s necessary existence, they need not be discussed here: they, too, can be shown to be counterbalancing arguments to Demea’s claim that the non-existence of God is inconceivable. Nowhere in Part 9 of the Dialogues does Hume offer a proof for the conceivability of every existential proposition, including the proposition that God exists. Demea maintains that God’s necessary existence can be appreciated by realizing that ‘God cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction’. Cleanthes, on the other hand, tells us ‘[w]hatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent’. Elsewhere, however, Hume does have an argument to support his (and Cleanthes’) position on the topic of the non-deducibility of existential propositions. His argument is presented in the Treatise of Human Nature, and in the first Enquiry, in the context of his discussion of existence and belief. Hume’s main point regarding existence and belief is that neither makes any addition to the thought or idea of an object: ‘When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither increases nor diminishes’ (T 1.3.7.2/94–5). According to Hume, if the difference between believing that something exists and not believing that that thing exists is not due to the introduction of a further idea of belief or existence, then the difference must be in the manner in which ideas that are believed are conceived – ideas that are believed are conceived more forcefully, are more vivacious, than those that are not believed. Hume offers the additional consideration in the Appendix to the Treatise regarding belief, namely, that since ‘[t] he mind has the command over all its ideas, and can separate, unite, mix, and vary them, as it pleases; so that if belief consisted merely in a new idea, annex’d to the conception, it wou’d be in a man’s power to believe what he pleas’d. We may, therefore, conclude, that belief consists merely in a certain feeling of sentiment; in something, that depends not on the will, but must arise from certain determinate causes and principles, of which we are not masters’ (T. app. 2/624). Applying this account of belief and existence to Hume’s critique of so-called deductive proofs of existential propositions, including the proposition that God exists necessarily, we get the following. To establish the deducibility or demonstrability of a proposition, it must be the case that the relata are inseparable from each other; that is, if we affirm the first in thought and deny the second, we lose the thought of the first – hence, the relata are conceptually inseparable from each other, and the proposition connecting them is necessary. The general point that arises here, therefore, is that deducibility requires propositions that contain two relata, the second of which is inseparably connected to the first. But existential propositions, according to Hume’s analysis of belief and existence, contain only one concept – the thought of the subject – with no additional idea or concept for the existential component. It follows from this that no existential


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proposition can be established deductively (or intuitively, if it is a self-evident truth), inasmuch as the denial of an existential proposition is always conceivable. In Cleanthes’ last criticism, he argues: In such a chain too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts. (D 9.9.65–66)

Cleanthes is arguing that the ‘world’ or ‘whole’ which is formed by the succession of causes and effects is not a thing in the way that the individual members of the chain are things. The ‘world’ is a concept or ‘arbitrary act of the mind’ and, as such, needs only to be explained through concept formation. Now, rather than providing a decisive criticism of Demea’s argument, Cleanthes has shown Demea a competing interpretation of the succession of causes and effects, but he has not provided a means of deciding between his position and Demea’s position. That is, Demea has argued that the modality of the chain is identical to the modality of the members of the chain, and, therefore, a causal account of each member of the chain through contingent predecessors in the chain can never account for why the chain exists. Causal accounts within the chain assume the existence of the chain, and provide causal accounts for individual members. Cleanthes argues that the question of a cause for the chain is not well-formed, given that all that exists are individual members of the chain, and these are adequately explained through the contingent causes which precede them. However, beyond asserting his position and providing an illustration (‘Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I would think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty’) which may or may not be accurate, Cleanthes offers no means of deciding whether Demea’s position, or his position, is the correct one. I showed earlier that Cleanthes’ first criticism of Demea’s a priori argument in Part 9, and his subsequent two criticisms, are stated in a manner that enable Hume to reveal the change in Cleanthes from a dogmatist to a mitigated sceptic. And, as I showed above, Cleanthes employs a similar strategy in his last criticism of Demea’s a priori argument. I now turn to Cleanthes’ penultimate criticism of Demea’s argument. The criticism reads as follows: Add to this, that in tracing an eternal succession of objects, it seems absurd to enquire for a general cause or first author. How can anything that exists from eternity, have

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Hume and the Enlightenment a cause; since that relation implies a priority in time, and a beginning of existence? (D 9.8.65)

Although Demea fails to use modal language, other than the reference to God as a ‘necessarily existent Being’, the general thrust of his position is that the succession of causes and effects, despite being eternal, at least in the sense of not having had a beginning, is also contingent (the modality of the chain as a whole, according to Demea, is identical to the modality of the members of the chain). And it is this contingency which leads Demea to ask, why anything at all exists, and why this succession exists and not some other. The criticism in paragraph 8 makes it clear that, if the causal succession exists from eternity, then following Hume’s analysis of causality, wherein causes must be temporally prior to their effects, it follows that the succession itself does not, better cannot, have a general cause or first author. At one time, in earlier work, I argued that Cleanthes’ criticism is basically ineffective. I argued that, in this criticism, Cleanthes is utilizing elements of Hume’s account of causation, namely, that causes must exist prior to their effects, and that an effect is a new existent. However (my argument proceeded), to bring this analysis to bear on the a priori proof, as Cleanthes has done, is questionbegging. For if Demea is correct that the chain of causes and effects, and the matter out of which this chain is formed, are contingent, then the fact that the chain is eternal may not remove the need to provide a causal account as to why it (and no other possible chain, or no chain at all) exists. If matter is contingent, then the chain may require a causal explanation, regardless of how far back in time it reaches. It is logically possible for there to exist two eternal beings, with one being necessary and the cause or ground of the other. It can be argued that it is a concern with modality, and not with how long something has existed, which reveals whether a cause is required. Cleanthes’ (Humean-type) criticism would be acceptable, only if we were assured that the eternity of matter precludes its having a cause, and (as I once thought) Cleanthes offers no argument to support this. With this interpretation of Cleanthes’ criticism we once again appreciate Cleanthes’ change from dogmatist to mitigated sceptic. I now hold, and will attempt to establish here, that Cleanthes does have an argument that establishes that the eternity of matter precludes its having a cause, even if the chain and its members are contingent. The proof I will offer here, following Cleanthes’ argument in paragraph 8 of Part 9 of the Dialogues, is epistemological rather than metaphysical, that is, Cleanthes efforts in Part 9 all concern what can, and cannot, be proved, and, therefore, what can, and cannot, be known to exist. As everyone knows, Hume is adamant that we never understand the powers of objects through which they act as causes of certain effects. Hume is equally


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adamant that designating an object as a cause, and another as effect, requires seeing objects of those types constantly conjoined. How does constant conjunction assist us in understanding causes and effects? In one respect, constant conjunction assists us by generating the habit or determination of the mind, so that we naturally associate the cause with the effect (this, in the language of the Treatise, is causality as a ‘natural relation’). In so far as causality is viewed as a ‘philosophical relation’ (once again, utilizing the language of the Treatise), the importance of constant conjunction is this: even though we lack any insight into causal power, the constant conjunction between objects convinces us of the causal relevancy of one object to another. The powers of the first object, although unknown, appear to be directed to the production of, or a change in, the second object. Applying this analysis of the importance of constant conjunction to ascriptions of causality to our discussion, we can understand the full weight of Cleanthes’ criticism in the eighth paragraph of Part 9. The most useful way of developing what I have to say here is to revisit Demea’s argument at the point at which he seeks to answer the questions: why is there something rather than nothing; and why does this particular succession of causes exist from all eternity rather than some other, or no succession at all? As we have seen, Demea offers four possible explanations: (1) We cannot have recourse to a contingent cause outside the chain, since all contingent beings belong in the chain; (2) he eliminates chance, or the absence of a cause, for this (he claims) is meaningless; and (3) following some medieval thinkers, he urges that we cannot say the world was determined and caused by nothing, if nothing is treated as an (Aristotelian) material cause – ex nihilo nihil fit. Demea, of course, opts for the fourth option, namely, that the only reasonable explanation as to why there is something rather than nothing, and why there is what there is and not something other, is that a necessary being exists who is the cause of the world as we know it. In other words, according to Demea, eliminating the first three options leaves us with the fourth. But this is where Demea errs, given Cleanthes’ criticism in paragraph 8 of Part 9. Given the Cleanthean/Humean account of causality, establishing a necessarily existent being as the cause of the eternal chain of causes and effects would require the observation of constant conjunction between this being and the causal chain – this is required in order to establish the causal relevancy of the existence of the one to the production and existence of the other. Since this requirement cannot be satisfied, Cleanthes is arguing that we cannot establish that a necessarily existent being is the cause of the eternal chain of causes and effects, even if the chain and its members are contingent, and even if we have eliminated the other three putative causes. We can develop Cleanthes’ criticism even further. Assume for the moment that we already know (i.e. independently of Demea’s argument) that a necessary being exists, and that the eternal chain of causes is contingent. Following

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Cleanthes’ criticism in paragraph 8, which focuses on the role of constant conjunction, it would still be impossible for us, using Demea’s premises, to show that one is causally relevant or responsible for the other. Each would exist in a manner which appears to be incompatible with its having been caused. What exists in what we call the world might someday cease to exist, and in this respect, we might be tempted to say that what exists, exists contingently. But even if this is true, Cleanthes’ point is that the eternity of the world, at least in terms of its not having had a beginning, prevents us from proving that it was caused to exist. Accordingly, it may be the case that the eternal causal chain of which Demea speaks is both contingent and uncaused, or at least from an epistemological point of view, must be so regarded. At this stage, I would like to return to Demea’s catalogue of putative causes for the chain of causes and effects which make up the world. While agreeing with Demea that external contingent causes are eliminated as the cause of the chain for the reason Demea offers, namely, the chain is made up of the totality of contingent beings, so no one contingent member stands or exists outside the chain, and while also agreeing with Demea that creation ex nihilo, in which nothing is regarded as a material cause in the Aristotelian sense of material cause, is also eliminated as the causal account of the existence of the causal chain, nevertheless, I think we must revisit Demea’s second putative cause of the world, namely, chance. Demea eliminates chance on the ground that chance is a word without meaning. Now, presumably, he holds this position regarding chance, because he thinks that an uncaused (or chance) event is unintelligible. Although this is Demea’s position regarding an uncaused event, it is not Hume’s position. Hume devotes the entire section of Book 1, Part 3, Section 3 (78–82) of A Treatise of Human Nature to establishing that there is no absurdity or contradiction in conceiving a new existent, without presupposing that it must have been caused to exist. In fact, he argues that the causal maxim is neither intuitively nor demonstrably certain. Accordingly, its denial (that something does/may exist and has not been caused to exist) will always be intelligible (regardless of whether this claim is true or false). Taking chance in Demea’s sense of being a causeless event, and adding Hume’s contribution that causeless events are perfectly intelligible to us, it is clear that for Hume, Demea’s reason for dismissing chance as accounting for the causal chain must be rejected. In fact, it appears that of the four putative explanations provided by Demea for the existence of the chain of causes and effects, chance provides the most satisfactory account of the origin of the world: the eternity of the causal chain precludes our knowing of its having a cause (whether or not it was caused to exist), and, therefore, we must conclude that the world, even if it is contingent, exists without a cause. And this, according to Hume, is perfectly intelligible to us.


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And, finally, we are now able to address the two questions that Demea regards as legitimating the search for the cause of the world, when the world is viewed as an eternal succession of causes and effects. Given the eternity of the world (Demea’s position), we will always lack the requisite observations of constant conjunction to enable us to establish the relevance of a cause for the existence of the world, and, therefore, it will never be possible to understand what is being sought when Demea asks, why is there something rather than nothing? and why is there what there is and not something else? Demea’s argument that the causal chain is eternal eliminates the relevance of a cause for the existence of the world. Accordingly, the two questions raised by Demea are not well-formed, and are, therefore, meaningless.

Conclusion If my argument in this paper is correct, then Part 9 of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, or more particularly, Cleanthes’ criticisms of Demea’s a priori argument, are driven and guided by Hume’s desire to reveal to Philo, and to the reader, that Philo’s Pyrrhonian objections in Parts 2 through 8 have turned Cleanthes from a dogmatist to a mitigated sceptic. With this change in Cleanthes’ philosophical stance, there is, according to Hume, a reasonable expectation of truth in inquiry in the remaining Parts of the Dialogues, to the extent that this is available to us. However, what my interpretation also reveals is that Cleanthes’ criticisms in Part 9 are not designed to refute Demea’s a priori Argument, but rather to bring Demea to a ‘suspense’ of judgement regarding this Argument. Demea begins the Dialogues as a mystic, holding that God is adorably mysterious: he urges that God is incomprehensible, although He can be the object of adoration and worship. But, in Part 9, it is Demea who argues for God’s necessary existence (a dramatic and unexpected shift!). My question, then, is this: can we conclude that Demea has been sufficiently affected by Philo’s Pyrrhonian criticisms in Parts 2, and Parts 4–8, and by Cleanthes’ criticisms of the a priori argument in Part 9, so that he, too, has now been brought to the point of indifference, and is able to proceed as a mitigated sceptic throughout the remainder of the Dialogues? I believe that Demea has not achieved a state of indifference and a willingness to follow the argument rather than personal prejudices. This is most dramatically revealed at the end of Part 11, when Pamphilus informs us: ‘Thus Philo continued to the last his spirit of opposition, and his censure of established opinions. But I could observe, that Demea did not at all relish the latter part of the discourse; and he took occasion soon after, on some pretense or other, to leave the company’ (D 11.21.88). Demea must leave the discussion before Part 12, because he continues to lack the indifference required to proceed without prejudice in philosophic inquiry. Philo and Cleanthes, on the other

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hand, both now having adopted the position of mitigated scepticism, can in Part 12 investigate, to the extent that human senses and reason allow, what can be learned about God through the study of nature. Is there any indication in the earlier Parts of the book that we can eventually expect a shift in Cleanthes’ position? I believe that this question can be answered affirmatively. In the introduction to the Dialogues, Pamphilus remarks that Hermippus had offered a brief character sketch of the three main speakers. In the case of Cleanthes, he speaks of ‘the accurate philosophical turn of Cleanthes’ (D PH 6/5). Now, in one sense, this characterization can be taken to mean the same as we intend when we speak of someone with a ‘philosophical bent’, that is, someone with a natural talent for philosophy. But I suggest that, in the context of the shift in Cleanthes from dogmatist to mitigated sceptic, ‘the accurate philosophical turn of Cleanthes’ can be regarded as a harbinger of the transition we will see in Cleanthes as the dialogue progresses. Describing his philosophical turn as ‘accurate’ conveys to the reader that the transition has been entirely successful. Enlightenment thinkers generally are critical of their medieval predecessors, in large measure, because the latter never sought to develop a proper method for pursuing their inquiries. Hume is no exception to this. For example, in the Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes: For to me it seems evident, that the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations. (T Intro. 8/5)

Or again, in the last paragraph of the Introduction to the Treatise, Hume writes: We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compar’d, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension. (T Intro. 10/6)

What my study in this paper reveals is that there is more to Hume’s method than the Experimental Method, which he emphasizes in the Treatise of Human Nature and the first Enquiry. It is Hume’s position that a commitment to the Experimental Method simpliciter can still lead to errors, if the investigator is a dogmatist, for such individuals generate arguments to support their prejudice, rather than beginning the inquiry, as Cleanthes finally does in Part 9, from a position of indifference. As we have seen, Pyrrhonian doubt, for Hume, is, when used correctly,2 a pedagogic tool, which enables the inquirer to begin with an


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open mind, and who, therefore, follows the argument, rather than forcing the argument to support the prejudice. Descartes uses hyperbolic doubt in the first meditation to rid the mind of all sensory prejudice, and to enable the inquirer to begin from the standpoint of indifference. Hume uses Pyrrhonian doubt to turn the dogmatist into a mitigated sceptic – again to begin from a state of indifference. The contrast between Descartes and Hume on the use of extreme scepticism is this: Descartes employs hyperbolic doubt prior to the introduction of specific arguments (in the first Enquiry, Hume refers to this as extreme antecedent scepticism), whereas Hume chooses to generate his sceptical arguments after the dogmatist has presented an argument driven by a particular prejudice (in the first Enquiry, Hume refers to this as extreme consequent scepticism). The Enlightenment, therefore, at least as exemplified by Descartes and Hume, emphasizes that, regardless of the method the individual philosopher employs in the search after truth,3 we must give prior attention to the inquirer’s state of mind, ensuring that the investigation is not being influenced and guided by prejudice of any sort. The proper starting point for philosophic inquiry is indifference, or as Hume puts it at the end of Part 8 of the Dialogues, ‘a suspense of judgement’.

6 ‘STRANGE LENGTHS’: HUME AND SATIRE IN THE DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION Robert Phiddian Your spirit of controversy, joined to your abhorrence of vulgar superstition, carries you strange lengths, when engaged in argument; and there is nothing so sacred and venerable, even in your own eyes, which you spare on that occasion. (DNR 116)

At the dramatic climax of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, moments after Demea has asked Philo accusingly ‘[a]re you secretly, then, a more dangerous enemy than Cleanthes himself ?’ (D 11.18.87) and left the room, Cleanthes makes the more precise critique of Philo’s rhetorical method above. The lengths to which Philo’s unsparing abhorrence of superstition and spirit of controversy drive him are indeed strange if detached philosophical moderation is the sole goal of the discourse. Cleanthes is accusing him, in effect, of being unphilosophical in his argumentation, indulging a ‘spirit of controversy’ and ‘abhorrence of superstition’ that betray unphilosophical passions. The contention of this essay is that Philo often argues satirically rather than philosophically, and that this has a bearing that needs careful articulation on Hume’s own rhetorical practice. Without regard to constraints (the ‘sacred and venerable’), Philo has railed exorbitantly at superstition, and ridiculed more than debated his target. Whether you think on the balance of probabilities that the judgement of the Dialogues falls on his or Cleanthes’ side, Philo as satirist here carries too much Hume to be merely a butt, a hapless Socratic interlocutor. If he is even partly the bearer of Hume’s convictions and attitudes, then his response to Cleanthes’ accusation is duplicitous, in the manner of a Swiftian narrator: I must confess … that I am less cautious on the subject of natural religion than on any other; both because I know that I can never, on that head, corrupt the principles of any man of common sense, and because no one, I am confident, in whose eyes I appear a man of common sense, will ever mistake my intentions. (D 12.2.89)

He protests too much. He is either a fool or a knave, for his intentions are far from clear, and his position on theism remains disputed by scholars centuries later. – 91 –

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Hume was not himself so incautious about natural religion. He never published the Dialogues in his lifetime, though they existed in manuscript form for the last quarter century of his life, and yet went to considerable lengths to ensure that it be published shortly after his death.1 He was clearly both proud of this text and fearful of how some readers might react to it. It is possible that he at a profound level actually did believe that discussion of natural religion would not, ultimately, corrupt anyone, but rather free them from superstition. However, he clearly knew that, in practical controversial reality, he was dealing with explosive stuff. It is easier to see Philo here as a satirical provocateur than as an innocent proponent of simply sincere views. As it relates to Hume himself, it is more plausible to see this as a ruse to provide plausible deniability against the predictable attacks from the Calvinist establishment than as a sincere expression of intellectual quietism. This is not as furtive as Jonathan Swift’s care always to publish anonymously and, in particular, to ensure that the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels should be dropped off at the publisher’s clandestinely, days after Swift himself had left London for Dublin. But it is the same sort of thing. An attempt to survey all of Hume’s work for evidence of satire would be too large a project for a single essay, so I will concentrate instead on this spot where the author’s mixed pride and unease suggests a particular controversial intensity. The Dialogues provides a likely spot for prospecting. It is worth prospecting in some detail because it is probable that discovery of satire in this text would at least require us to modify our sense of its philosophical status. Satires present themselves as militant proclamations or uncovering of the truth, but they remain very much on the rhetorical rather than rational side of the old Socratic division between rhetoric and philosophy. Satire is an art of persuasion that deploys caricature and ridicule rather than balanced analysis to carry an audience, and it is at least possible that to discover the extent to which the Dialogues is satirical is to mark the extent to which it is unphilosophical. While satire can appear in philosophy and, as we shall see, this was not uncommon in the Enlightenment, it generates tensions for philosophical enterprise, especially one in the fraught and contested area of the nature of god and religion.

I David Hume is often described as an ironist but seldom as a satirist. If you had to choose one of these descriptions for him, clearly the judgement of posterity on this matter is reasonable. Even if one accepts David Raynor’s ascription of ‘The History of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, Commonly called Peg, only lawful Sister of John Bull, Esq’. (1761) to Hume rather than Adam Ferguson, and his charitable definition of the undoubtedly Humean ‘A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, Esq.; late Lord Provost

‘Strange Lengths’

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of Edinburgh’ (1748) as a satire rather than a common-or-garden controversial pamphlet,2 this adds up to two prose satires on current affairs, over a long career. It is not much to show for the idea that Hume consciously sought the status of a satirist. However, one can be both an ironist and a satirist – it is, indeed, difficult to be a satirist without being an ironist, as Northrop Frye’s classic apercu suggests: ‘The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony’.3 So two important provisos suggest that we should not leap from the paucity of formal satires to the conclusion that satire has no role to play in our understanding of Hume. The first is a matter of literary theory: very few texts can be simply designated as satires by genre. Indeed, satire is scarcely a formal genre at all, but is a widespread mode that emerges in texts that employ generic forms of bewildering variety, from realist novels to political cartoons. Where we call a work satirical, we are really saying that it is discernibly marked by satirical purpose, not that it has any essential formal qualities. The only systematic exception to this generalization is verse satire in the manner of Horace, Juvenal, and Pope, which is a form as well as a mode of cultural critique. Menippean satire is a raucous family of texts largely in prose, with overlapping similarities (always including Lucian and Swift, but exceedingly blurry at the edges) rather than a neat group. As a term, it can only be made to have explanatory power at the cost of tendentious rules and exclusions, and even at the heart of what has been called Menippean satire,4 it is better to call Gulliver’s Travels a satire because it is marked persistently by satirical purpose, not because it shares any essential formal properties with a family of prose satires. There are also many works governed predominantly by other purposes and rules that, nevertheless, have satirical dimensions. Dickens’s Bleak House, for example, is an often satirical realist novel, but there would be little sense in describing it as a satire, tout court. In a writer as attentive to rhetorical form and the discourses of others as Hume, it is not unlikely that ‘the satirical’ could emerge from time to time in his work, which is always argumentative as well as expository, and shares an anti-metaphysical thrust with many satires. There is, at least, no a priori reason why satire might not appear in a philosophical text. The second proviso is literary historical, and has two elements. The first of these is that the eighteenth century, especially the early eighteenth century in Britain, is a great age of satire, and it is a mode that touched much serious literary effort in the era.5 In this context, it would not be at all surprising for someone with the literary ambitions Hume expressed in his disingenuous but not dishonest description of ‘my love of literary fame’ as ‘my ruling passion’ not to wax satirical from time to time.6 Satire was a characteristic element of much of the broadly humanistic writing encompassed by the term ‘literary’ at the time and, as Peter Dendle demonstrates in his analysis of the Dialogues’ relation to Paradise Lost, much is to be learnt by reading Hume in a context that extends beyond

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what we would now recognize as specialist philosophy.7 Enlightenment thinkers did not recognize the elaborate set of disciplinary boundaries between literature, theology, and philosophy that characterize twenty-first century scholarship. This brings us to a second element that requires more fine-grained literary history. A reason why an ambitious writer might eschew satire in the formally minded eighteenth century might be that the rules of the genre he or she has chosen to write in preclude it. Even Alexander Pope managed to write pastorals that lack satirical bite, and the same might be true of serious philosophy. By the twentieth century, that certainly would be the case – the polemical reductiveness and caricature of satire would be scandalous in analytic philosophy, which (so far as I can tell) prides itself on the rigorous pursuit of balance and objectivity. However, it is increasingly clear that early modern philosophers such as Hobbes and his opponents through Shaftesbury and beyond viewed the philosophical persona and attacks on it as a legitimate element of philosophical debate. This attention to Enlightenment polemical context is endorsed broadly in Hume studies by Stephen Buckle, with an attendant turn away from distilled propositional content towards discursive contexts.8 The thing that really moves us onto satirical territory is attention to combat about the legitimating personae of philosophical debate, a phenomenon noted for an earlier period by Conal Condren in a soon to be published paper on Hobbes and the Lucianic tradition: [I]n antiquity and the early modern period, philosophic activity was first taken as requiring the cultivation and presentation of a distinct persona, defined by intellectual virtues and habits of mind necessary for the ends of the enterprise. … [T]he upshot of the attempt to recover the contentious centrality of the persona to philosophy has been to highlight the presence of the satiric, the witty and the humorous as integral to dispute. For, if philosophers promoted their doctrines in part through their legitimating personae, then either persona or doctrine was fair game for critique: an unfitting persona, a matrix of the wrong intellectual credentials and proclivities, might be invoked to explain doctrinal error as much as propositional blunder.9

In classic Aristotelian rhetorical terms, this requires attention to ethos as well as logos, not controversial in itself as an idea. What it seems to have resulted in during the early modern period in the Anglophone context is a conflation of philosophical and satiric discourses that was strong up to the 1720s. My contention is that it is still significantly present, if in changing ways, through the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in the work of Hume on religion. While Hume is closer than are these late seventeenth century figures to modern, disciplined philosophy that eschews wit and ‘playing the man’ to focus exclusively on propositional content, he is only closer. This essay is an exploration into the extent that Hume is a liminal figure between early and fully modern ideas of philosophy. Especially in his writings on religion, he verges quite often on the satirical, but it is at least arguable that he is too disciplined a philosopher


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to give himself over comprehensively to the reductive caricature of satire. In his anti-metaphysical bent and his extensive theoretical argument that humans are driven far more by sentiments and ruling passions than by reason or idealism, he is not obviously opposed to the comic materialism that marks the ‘satiric frame of mind’.10 The terms of possibility that Hume might be extensively satirical in some elements of his work are reasonably clear. Whether and how this hypothesis stands up to investigation will require close reading that in this instance will focus on the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. We’ll need a tolerable definition of the satirical before we go much further, and this is not a straightforward matter of opening a literary glossary and transcribing. The last time critics were confident that they could define satire was in the late 1960s and, for reasons that cannot be essayed here without their taking over the paper, that no longer provides a very satisfactory formulation. As I have already intimated, the most recent scholarly synthesis of literary satire, by Charles Knight, is reduced to talking primarily about ‘a satirical frame of mind’, which is admirably expansive but not much definitional help. Beyond restrictively formal satire, we can say that the satirical occurs where exaggerated and often humorous commentary or intervention is made on a matter of some public interest, with a view to expressing and exciting emotional and/or intellectual revision. This expression of more or less forceful critique lies both in the author’s purpose and in the audience’s ascription and (through ‘reading’) experience of exaggerated, judgemental, and often humorous purpose.11 This shifts the focus from the shape of the text to its performative (i.e. rhetorical and emotional) function. Once we have moved onto that intersubjective rather than objective territory, we can propose a core meaning for satire as ‘a humorous attack intended to provoke revisionary thought or emotion’. Even this is a core rather than an essential meaning – for example, a significant minority of satires, of which Orwell’s 1984 is the most prominent example, are not obviously funny. Nor does it solve the overlapping border disputes with, to name only a few, comedy, parody, and irony. But it is the best I can do after a couple of decades worrying at the issues, and is presented as a working definition.

II The contemporary reputation of the second century Greek author, Lucian, can help focus attention on the extent to which satire and philosophy were not kept separate in Hume’s time. Ian Ross reminds us that in 1766 the Abbé Morellet described Lucian as Hume’s favourite author, so the intertextual link is strongly made.12 Lucian’s dialogues are now categorized, where they are noted at all, as satires and only satires. In the early modern period, they were viewed as satirical philosophy, as if there were no paradox in the collocation. And, indeed, from

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More and Erasmus, through Swift, Johnson, and Voltaire, Lucian seems to have provided a mode of (often paradoxical) thought as much as a mode of attack. It was a mode of satirico-philosophical discourse particularly attuned to the discussion of religious and doctrinal matters. As Condren argues: In its Lucianic form the seriousness of satire was significantly directed to the absurdity of intellectual error and charlatanry, failings that could be detected from logical discourse, metaphysics, moral and political theory, to religious belief, so stretching in a virtually unbroken continuum from putatively bogus philosophy to the promotion of superstition and idolatry.13

Merely on contextual grounds, one would not be surprised to find a Lucianic thread in Hume’s writings that deal with doctrines fundamentally held. The most prominent immediate Lucianic model for Hume would have been Swift, an author he described in his essay ‘Of Civil Liberty’ as the author of ‘the first polite prose we have’ in English (Es 91). Sadly for the delightful frisson generated by a Scotsman complimenting an Irishman on being the only other correct writer of English prose, this is not such a resounding or remarkable assessment as it might seem. Swift as a prose model seems to have been a Scottish Enlightenment truism, endorsed also by Adam Smith, something that was in the Edinburgh air rather than a distinctly Humean perception.14 Moreover, as Ross points out, Hume had some less glowing things to say about Swift in letters.15 He nevertheless manages to make a convincing argument that Swift’s Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708–11) provides a relevant Lucianic context for the Dialogues, even though he has to concede that ‘[w]e have no specific evidence that I know about concerning his encounter with the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, though we do know that he read Gulliver’s Travels’.16 Adam Potkay has ably argued that the Medieval Volumes of The History of England provide the supplement to Gulliver that Hume once proposed for himself, in a letter to Gilbert Eliot of Minto: ‘I have frequently had it in my Intentions to write a Supplement to Gulliver, containing the Ridicule of priests’.17 Gulliverian elements are also apparent in passages from the Natural History of Religion such as this one: Upon the whole, the greatest and most observable differences between a traditional, mythological religion, and a systematical, scholastic one, are two: The former is often more reasonable, as consisting only of a multitude of stories, which, however groundless, imply no express absurdity and demonstrative contradiction; and sits also so easy and light on men’s minds, that, though it may be as universally received, it happily makes no such deep impression on the affections and understanding. (Dis 75–76)

The harsh conflation of thought here, and the abrupt reversal of the received wisdom that scholarly theology must be better – more deliberate and rational – than the popular alternative, takes us into the world of the King of Brobding-


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nag’s brutal interpretations of Gulliver’s accounts of European civilization. The king rounds on Gulliver with this sort of thing: It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one Perfection is required towards the Procurement of any one Station among you; much less that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue, that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning, Soldiers for their Conduct or Valour, Judges for their Integrity, Senators for the Love of their Country, or Counsellors for their Wisdom.18

There is no philosophical patience in Hume as in Swift, just a strong desire to jolt the reader from foolishness; sophistication, both writers suggest, only protects idiocy by making it more obscure. Swift goes further, perhaps, but he always does. For both of them, the asperity comes from the suddenly sceptical outside perspective, and the syntax of both is sharp enough to cut flesh. Nevertheless, Gulliver’s primarily socio-political satire is not the appropriate context for Hume’s calculated attack on speculative religion in the Dialogues, as Ross recognizes by turning to the Argument, which is explicitly about deist attacks on Anglican orthodoxy. It is not, however, the most obvious Swiftian model. The broad probability that Hume knew and modelled his work on A Tale of a Tub (1697–1704) is of a similar order to that of his knowing the Argument and, on a few grounds circumstantially stronger. A Tale is a more apposite intertext for the Dialogues than the Argument both because it is on broadly the same scale as the Dialogues, and a more famous work of Swift’s through the eighteenth century; the fascination with topical and anthologisable satirical essays such as the Argument and the Modest Proposal (1729) is something of a back-formation from the pedagogical practices of mid-twentieth century literary studies. Both texts were conveniently available to Hume through the collected editions of Swift’s works by Faulkner and Hawkesworth that began to appear late in Swift’s life and were reprinted regularly thereafter. A Tale takes pride of place in these editions at the head of volume one, and it was in its twenty-fifth edition by 1755;19 interestingly, there were three Scottish editions (1750 Edinburgh, 1752 Edinburgh, and 1753 Glasgow) in the period of the main drafting of the Dialogues, which argues a spike of interest in the text at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment. Though I am not aware of any direct mention of A Tale by Hume, it is a text someone of his interests in his context would very probably have known. It is certainly a proximate example of the Lucianic mode of serio ludere, to play seriously.

III The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion starts in a holiday mood of release from the ‘[a]ccurate and regular argument … such as is now expected of philosophical enquirers’ (D 1.3). Pamphilus’ prologue, addressed to Hermippus, is in a personated rather than authorial voice, which implicates readers immediately in

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the assessment of the formal authority of the voice. He claims classical authority for the choice of dialogue, but this has disparate implications which cannot be simply resolved one way or the other. In the Platonic and Ciceronian traditions, dialogue tends to present controlled ambiguity, whereas in the parallel Lucianic tradition, the ambiguity tends to take flight. While Plato is obviously a very distant precursor, Cicero’s De natura deorum is often and appropriately cited as a model for Hume’s text. It is a dialogue that presents a range of philosophical positions on the nature of the gods and, at least in the truncated form that has survived into the modern period, it does not reach a conclusion. It is a serious but philosophically open text that clearly rejects Epicureanism, but less certainly chooses between Stoic and Academic views of the deities. At least in the form it survives in, it relates and critiques theologies, without arguing for the supremacy of any one of them. The Dialogues clearly walks both sides of an intertextual divide between Cicero and Lucian, but my investigation will take the Lucianic path with the Swift of A Tale. While not formally a dialogue, A Tale’s narrator is so much a creature of warring parodied discourses that the text is thoroughly dialogical, both in its structure – where cultural and religious sections interrupt each other almost consistently – and in its rhetorical texture – see, for example, my20 analysis of a single passage as ascribable to multiple authorial constructions, both of different versions of Swift and of his many targets. Once we start to doubt the voice of the text before us, as Lucian and Swift teach us, as is often the case in Humean irony, the framing of the Dialogues becomes interestingly complicated. Through ‘departing from the direct style of composition’ he claims ‘a freer air to his performance’ (D 1.3), but is he claiming enabling mental space or merely taking liberties? The justification he provides is neither obviously absurd nor compelling: There are some subjects, however, to which dialogue-writing is peculiarly adapted, and where it is still preferable to the direct and simple method of composition. Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious, that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important, that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate the triteness of the subject; where the vivacity of conversation may enforce the precept; and where the variety of lights, presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant. (D 2–3.4)

This only really works as an apology for philosophical licence if you can assume a stable body of doctrine that it is the writer’s duty to pass on to weaker minds who need a lot of dulce to help the utile go down. ‘Inculcation’ is clearly a weasel word for Hume. He knows his Calvinist readers will pass by it approvingly, ignoring the way it is mined with irony for, to a mature scepticism, that which is merely asserted and inculcated is neither demonstrated nor validly taught. Novelty and vivacity are also things the narrator of A Tale flagrantly claims in an extraordi-


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nary spirit of both conscious and unconscious charlatanry. Consider this passage defending credulity: [A]nd so the Question is only this; Whether Things that have Place in the Imagination, may not as properly be said to Exist, as those that are seated in the Memory; which may be justly held in the Affirmative, and very much to the Advantage of the former, since This is acknowledged to be the Womb of Things, and the other allowed to be no more than the Grave. Again, if we take this Definition of Happiness, and examine it with Reference to the Senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fade and insipid do all Objects accost us that are not convey’d in the Vehicle of Delusion? How shrunk is every Thing, as it appears in the Glass of Nature? So, that if it were not for the Assistance of Artificial Mediums, false Lights, refracted Angles, Varnish, and Tinsel; there would be a mighty Level in the Felicity and Enjoyments of Mortal Men.21

When the narrator of an apparently philosophical text presents as an enthusiastic advocate of delusion over chaste clarity, of artifice over nature, and of fantasy over memory, it is clear that we are in the company of satire’s ‘militant irony’. It seems to me, however, that the tone of the Tale’s persona is quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from Pamphilus’. The searching and often humorous rigour of Philo’s following arguments recast this pious assertion that true doctrine is indomitably obvious as satirical irony. The text develops in such a way as to hollow out the authority of the frame narrator in a manner closer to Swift’s than to Cicero’s. While it does not make any sense to conclude that Hume is simply attacking the dialogue form by undermining it in Swift’s wholesale parodic manner, it does become very possible that he is presenting that dialogue as a provocation to the plodding habits of ‘accurate and regular…methodical and didactic’ argument. This is more a satirical strategy than a narrowly philosophical one, and is apparent quite often in Philo’s manner; for example here: You might cry out sceptic and railer, as much as you pleased: But having found, in so many other subjects, much more familiar, the imperfections and even contradictions of human reason, I never should expect any success from its feeble conjectures, in a subject, so sublime, and so remote from the sphere of our observation. When two species of objects have always been observed to be conjoined together, I can infer, by custom, the existence of one whenever I see the existence of the other: And this I call an argument from experience. But how this argument can have place, where the objects, as in the present case, are single, individual, without parallel, or specific resemblance, may be difficult to explain. And will any man tell me with a serious countenance, that an orderly universe must arise from some thought and art, like the human; because we have experience of it? To ascertain this reasoning, it were requisite, that we had experience of the origin of worlds; and it is not sufficient surely, that we have seen ships and cities arise from human art and contrivance (D 2.24.26)

The narrator (the often-invisible Pamphilus) comments here on Philo’s ‘vehement manner, somewhat between jest and earnest, as it appeared to me’ (D

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2.25.26), so Philo’s raillery is formally contained within the plausible deniability. While Hume identified himself with Philo by contrast to Gilbert Elliot’s Cleanthes in a letter dated 10 March 1751 where he also asserts that Cleanthes is the text’s hero (D 120), he has an ambiguous relationship to Philo’s railing, almost hysterical tone here. As a ‘railer’ he is explicitly identified with satirical expression,22 but he also bears a large element of Hume’s critique of theist ideas. He is a suspiciously enthusiastic condemner of religious enthusiasm. The ‘surely’ in the last, unfinished sentence is a giveaway, a sure sign that passion and impatience have overcome placid argumentation. Highly unorthodox ideas are put into play without clear truth markings, as a satirical provocation to revisionary thought rather than as straight philosophical argument. It is not as wild as A Tale, but there is a family resemblance. The single, most clearly satirical passage occurs when Philo plays fast and loose with the argument for design at the end of Part 5: In a word, Cleanthes, a man, who follows your hypothesis, is able, perhaps, to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology, by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: It is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force, which it received from him… (D 5.12.45)

This is derision aimed at an apprentice god, a servile god, a doddering and since defunct god – it is aimed at theism or atheism, depending on how you resolve the irony, but either way it carries its ‘argument’ by ridicule more than by propositional content. Moreover, even if you conclude that Philo is the butt of the joke rather than Cleanthes, there is no room in this calculus for orthodox revealed Christianity. It has been edged out of the picture by railling that makes us choose between an inscrutable designer god or no god at all. Philo hammers home his point to Demea with violent rhetoric: You justly give signs of horror, Demea, at these strange suppositions: But these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are Cleanthes’ suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think, that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all. (D 5.12.45)

A modern atheist is likely to simply enjoy this, but it is playing very fast and loose with theism by the standards of the 1750s, and Cleanthes’ calming (if shouted)


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response restores decorum. Whether it addresses the philosophical content of the critique is another matter: These suppositions I absolutely disown, cried Cleanthes: They strike me, however, with no horror; especially when proposed in that rambling way, in which they drop from you. On the contrary, they give me pleasure, when I see, that, by the utmost indulgence of your imagination, you never get rid of the hypothesis of design in the universe; but are obliged, at every turn, to have recourse to it. To this concession I adhere steadily; and this I regard as a sufficient foundation for religion. (D 5.12.45)

This rejects Philo’s persona, and that would probably have been enough in the Enlightenment context for the bulk of the audience to withdraw from the extremity of the argument. It is, however, playing the man rather than the philosophical ball, as Hume perhaps knows. Even posthumously, one doubts that Hume could present Philo’s attack on Cleanthes’ argument for design in print in his own voice, if he had wanted to. That we will never know is more like a satirical aporia than a philosophical one. Moreover, plausible deniability is very much a satirical trope, used triumphantly by Pope in his ‘Epistle to Augustus’ (1737) where the flatterer of George II (George Augustus – no one could miss the point) is constrained to see the poem’s elaborate comparison between the pedestrian monarch and Horace’s Augustus Caesar as a positive (i.e. equal) one, or be forced to deny that the current monarch deserves the ‘compliments’. An orthodox Christian cannot let himself think that the proof of design might be faulty, or that there might be any space between assent to design and ‘true religion’, presumably Calvinist Protestantism. Satire asks readers to fill in the gaps and consequences of the arguments, and can feyly pretend that there are no gaps to fill. ‘How could you imagine that I might have suggested anything so heterodox?’ is a game Hume clearly enjoyed playing.

IV In the end, however, satire alone is not a sufficient descriptor for what Hume is doing, in a way that it is sufficient for Swift. In this, Hume is like some other mid-century intellectuals, and here the idea that satire is modal, an emergent rhetorical feature of texts rather than a brute formal fact, becomes crucial to an understanding of what is happening. As intellectual life became more disciplined (ie more divided into intellectual disciplines) with the gradual establishment of what we have come to call the Enlightenment and Modernity, so some writers started to miss ‘pure’ satire in interesting ways. Gibbon’s commitment to history contains (but does not destroy) his satirical impulse; Sterne’s and Fielding’s commitments to psychological verisimilitude contain (but do not destroy) their satirical impulses; Johnson’s commitment to critical accuracy is similar; and the same can be said for the call of philosophy on Hume. The classic exposition of

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what is happening lies in a description of Johnson’s Rasselas by his second-greatest biographer, Walter Jackson Bate: What happens, therefore, is that ridicule, anger, satiric protest, are always in the process of turning into something else. It is the process that is important. We have here what amounts to another genre or form of writing, the essence of which is not satire at all but which begins with satiric elements and an extremely alert satiric intelligence (indeed, an imagination that often seems most fertile and concrete when stung by exasperation). But then the writer – still fully aware of the satiric potentialities, still taking them into account – suddenly starts to walk backward and then move toward something else. Much of Johnson’s greater writing on human nature and human life falls into a distinctive literary type, eminently characteristic of him, that we might call ‘satire manqué’ or ‘satire foiled’. It involves a kind of double action in which a strong satiric blow is about to strike home unerringly when another arm at once reaches out and deflects or rather lifts it.23

The argument here is modulated to the work of a contemporary to whom Hume is more often contrasted than compared, but it works, mutatis mutandis for the emergently satirical moments in Hume’s sardonic description of the bases for religious faith. Bate’s stress on exasperation is especially apposite for Hume: while he was justly proud of the equanimity he eventually achieved on most topics, the spur of original exasperation is apparent in many of his writings, especially those on religion. So something that could easily be described as satire manqué happens when Cleanthes hoses down Demea concerning Philo’s ridicule: Believe me, Demea; your friend Philo, from the beginning, has been amusing himself at both our expense; and it must be confessed, that the injudicious reasoning of our vulgar theology has given him but too just a handle of ridicule. The total infirmity of human reason, the absolute incomprehensibility of the divine nature, the great and universal misery, and still greater wickedness of man; these are strange topics surely to be so fondly cherished by orthodox divines and doctors. In ages of stupidity and ignorance, indeed, these principles may safely be espoused; and perhaps, no views of things are more proper to promote superstition, than such as encourage the blind amazement, the diffidence, and melancholy of mankind. (D 11.19.87)

The spirit of satire is invoked and deflected, which is quite different from not being there in the first place. A contrast with Swift, and an image of a spider common to both writers, is again instructive. Swift’s spider in the Battle of the Books (a text always printed with A Tale, from 1704 to today, and an only semi-independent province of its attack on Modern books) is a figure of solipsistic Modernity, criticized harshly by the Ancient-reading Bee, gatherer of ‘Sweetness and Light’. The Bee attacks the Spider because ‘he Spins and Spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any Obligation or Assistance from without’, and proclaims:


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Erect your Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but Dirt, spun out of your own Entrails (the Guts of Modern Brains), the Edifice will conclude at last in a Cobweb: The Duration of which, like that of other Spiders Webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a Corner.24

This has a visceral vehemence especially characteristic of Swift’s satire, but the confrontational physicality is common to the mode, and it clearly carries its argument by passionate contempt rather than reasoning. If, as it is reasonable to surmise, Hume knew this particular version of the classic spider and bee topos, his use of it in Part 7 is markedly more eirenic: The Brahmins assert, that the world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again, and resolving it into his own essence. Here is a species of cosmogony, which appears to us ridiculous; because a spider is a little contemptible animal, whose operations we are never likely to take for a model of the whole universe. But still here is a new species of analogy, even in our globe. And were there a planet, wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible), this inference would there appear as natural and irrefragable as that which in our planet ascribes the origin of all things to design and intelligence, as explained by Cleanthes. Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from the brain, it will be difficult for him to give a satisfactory reason. (D 7.17.56)

Even in the voice of Philo, Hume is careful to frame the world-spinning spider as an analogy, and to distance it into the exotic learned tradition of the Brahmins. And even this level of imaginative license is bedded down with Cleanthes’ following appeal to temperate common sense: I must confess, Philo, replied Cleanthes, that, of all men living, the task which you have undertaken, of raising doubts and objections, suits you best, and seems, in a manner, natural and unavoidable to you. So great is your fertility of invention, that I am not ashamed to acknowledge myself unable, on a sudden, to solve regularly such out-of-the-way difficulties as you incessantly start upon me: Though I clearly see, in general, their fallacy and error. And I question not, but you are yourself, at present, in the same case, and have not the solution so ready as the objection; while you must be sensible, that common sense and reason is entirely against you, and that such whimsies, as you have delivered, may puzzle, but never can convince us. (D 7.18.56–57)

Instead of maintaining the volume of the ridicule, the prose takes us behind the image, to see how it works, in a way too balanced to be called satirical. In the end, a philosophical commitment to dispassionate analysis asserts itself, and satire is meaningfully missed. This is the sensible chap’s response to the doubt-raising excesses of satire, held in suspension, certainly, by the dialogue form’s refusal to entirely back Philo as the fount of wisdom. It can, I think, be construed as a consciously philosophical recognition of and turning away from the seductions of fertile invention and satirical force.

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Consequently, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion can be placed into a literary context that relates to but does not quite fit within the satirical mode so influential in Enlightenment thought and literature. In particular, it belongs between the vehemence of the thoroughly satirical Voltaire’s Candide and the pietist wisdom of Johnson’s Rasselas (both 1759, during the secret life and periodic revision of the Dialogues). These are all ‘meaning of life’ texts of the mid-century, each verging on different bits of intellectual territory. It seems to me that the Dialogues can be seen in a tradition of ironic and satirical philosophizing that goes back through More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly to Classical sources like Cicero and Lucian. It is a sort of, often profound, intellectual play, well recognized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but less visible to us because of modern philosophy’s commitment to propositional content over rhetorical strategy. The Dialogues belongs in a group of texts between satire and philosophy, and just where you put it on that spectrum depends to a considerable extent on how you tend to resolve its ironies. It is satire manqué at least in part because its philosophical purpose is pursued in too disciplined a manner to allow satire’s militant irony enough imaginative freedom to dominate the rhetorical thrust of the text. There is definitely a satirical thread in the text, especially in the vehement and witty way Philo attacks arguments, but the turn from passion to propositional content marks it as too philosophically serious (in a modern sense) to be fully satirical.

7 A MODERN MALIGNANT DEMON? HUME’S SCEPTICISM WITH REGARD TO REASON (PARTLY) VINDICATED George Couvalis

Introduction The Enlightenment consists of many strands. One strand is the claim to have discovered indubitable foundations for our knowledge in reason or in experience. This strand, like many other strands, has its origins in pre-enlightenment thought. It loomed large because of the vicious conflict between the reformation and the counter-reformation. The conflict made the search for foundations which would resolve debates once and for all especially urgent. Another strand is the sceptical strand, which criticizes any attempt to claim to have discovered indubitable foundations for our knowledge. It also loomed large in the conflict between the reformation and counter-reformation.1 A third strand is the scientific revolution, which made it seem to some as if all features of the world were to become scientifically explicable. Hume is sympathetic to the first strand. He often talks as if he thinks claims to knowledge should have indubitable foundations, and he searches for them in experience. However, he also sees that claims to indubitable knowledge have proved baseless and dangerous. He is strongly attracted to the sceptical strand because he grasps that searches for secure foundations have failed to produce indubitable results. He is also attracted to it because he understands that those who claim to have discovered secure foundations for religious beliefs have fostered fanaticism and helped produce disasters. Nevertheless, Hume also is struck by the fact that the scientific revolution seems to have produced dazzling successes. He understands that if anything remotely resembles a foundation for knowledge, it is the method of science. As I understand him, Hume is an enlightenment philosopher who aims to produce a scientific account of human nature and human reasoning, while being highly critical of claims to have indubitable foundations for knowledge. – 105 –

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Hume’s Aims in ‘Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason’ In a classic essay, William Morris has argued that Hume’s ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ is intended as a critique of some form of ‘intellectualist rationalism’.2 The rationalism Hume wants to criticize seeks to produce an indubitable foundation of knowledge in reason. Despite some interesting criticisms of Morris’s argument, it remains plausible to say that Morris identified the target of that section of the Treatise correctly.3 Recent interpreters of Hume’s Treatise differ greatly on many points. Nevertheless, most agree that one of his intentions is to present a naturalistic account of human knowledge and human nature and to work out its implications. Barry Stroud started this trend in Hume interpretation in recent times.4 He argued that Hume’s theory sees every aspect of life as scientifically explicable. It places man squarely within the scientifically intelligible world of nature, and thus conflicts with the traditional conception of a detached rational subject. That conception was added to something like the theory of ideas in philosophers as diverse as Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz and Locke. But Hume is not content simply to put forward a theory that conflicts with it, although he does think his own theory is borne out by the facts. Some of his most original contributions to philosophy are made in his attempt actually to discredit the traditional rationalistic conception on its own terms. He does not just advance a positive theory that plays down the role of reason; he tries to show independently that reason does not, and in fact cannot, have the kind of role in human life that had traditionally been supposed.5

Don Garrett and others have recently gone beyond Stroud by arguing that Hume is in part trying to produce a scientific psychology.6 For his part, Stephen Buckle has argued that Hume’s naturalism and scepticism are two sides of the same coin.7 For the purposes of this paper, I will accept without argument that in ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ Hume intends in part both to present a naturalistic account of human knowledge and to criticize a form of intellectualist rationalism. Interpreters who understand the Treatise naturalistically intend not merely to make a contribution to intellectual history but to show that when Hume’s views are correctly understood their relevance to current debates in the philosophy of mind and epistemology becomes clear. Much recent philosophical work in these areas relies on current psychological and neurophysiological research. Yet such interpreters do not discuss the extent to which such research bears out Hume’s account. For instance, discussions of ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ have proceeded without reference to recent psychological research on numerical reasoning and calculation. I will show that recent psychological research has an important bearing on some of the claims of Hume and his critics. I will only discuss the argument Hume puts at the very beginning of that section

A Modern Malignant Demon?

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of the Treatise. Hume goes on to put a widely discussed argument which relies on claims about multiplying probabilities which I will not discuss. Rationalists and their sympathizers have often assumed that the properly rational part of the mind is a single general purpose faculty (‘reason’ or ‘the intellect’, or in one of Jerry Fodor’s modern variants of rationalism, ‘the language module’). This faculty was often thought to at least be capable of grasping that simple logical or mathematical statements or inferences are self-evidently true or correct. For instance, Descartes thinks the cogito is self-evident, and in the ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’ talks as if mathematical statements or simple inferences, which we perceive with our rational intuition, are self-evident. He also thinks that complicated inferences or inferences to more complicated statements can be made into ‘deductions’ which are almost certain. Modern rationalist sympathizers, such as Lawrence Bonjour, are inclined to be a little more cautious.8 However, I have pointed out elsewhere that even Karl Popper excepts parts of mathematics and logic from his radical fallibilism.9 Rationalists hold very different views concerning proof, inference and knowledge.10 Hume seems to have wisely made his target any variety of rationalism which seeks certainty via reason rather than a specific variant of rationalism. He apparently deliberately does not mention a specific author in the section of the Treatise we are discussing. Nevertheless, by considering what variety of rationalism was uppermost in Hume’s mind, we will better understand some features of Hume’s argument. Hume tells us that he wrote much of the Treatise in La Flèche. The local Jesuit college was a centre of Cartesianism. We know Hume discussed some of his ideas with Jesuits in La Flèche and it is likely that Hume read many Cartesian texts there.11 In a letter to Michael Ramsay written in 1737 Hume lists the materials Ramsay should read to understand the Treatise. The first item on the list is a central work by the Cartesian Malebranche. Descartes’s Meditations is mentioned as is an article in Bayle’s Dictionary on Spinoza.12 (Locke is not mentioned at all, which renders David Owen’s claim that Locke is an important target of Hume’s Treatise suspect).13 In the passage of the Enquiry which seems to roughly correspond to ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ Hume refers to the method of ‘DES CARTES and others’, which recommends a universal doubt ‘not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties; of whose veracity, say they, we must assure ourselves, by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle, which cannot possibly be fallacious or deceitful’ (EHU 12.3/149–50). It is very plausible that Hume has Cartesian rationalism primarily in mind in that section of the Treatise.

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Cartesian Rationalism Cartesian rationalists start philosophical epistemology by trying to deal with scepticism. It is not part of scepticism to deny that any of the statements we believe are true. More importantly, it is not part of scepticism to deny that we can use infallible or highly reliable methods to tell whether a statement is true. Sceptics merely philosophically doubt that we can use such methods. Some modern philosophers hold (roughly) that we know a statement if we use an infallible or highly reliable procedure for ratifying it.14 On this first account of knowledge, sceptics are primarily interested not in whether we know any statements but in whether we know that we know them. Other philosophers hold (roughly) that we know a statement only if we use an infallible or highly reliable procedure for ratifying it and use a highly reliable or infallible procedure to tell when we are being reliable. On this second, more traditional account of knowledge, sceptics are interested in whether we know any statements. Cartesians assume that the second account of knowledge is correct, but Cartesian epistemology provides an answer to sceptics that does not assume that the second account is correct. Descartes understands philosophical scepticism very well. To deal with it, he argues in his ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’ that ‘conception of a clear and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason’ is self-evident, certain and indubitable. He calls such a conception an ‘intuition’ (‘intuitus’).15 I take it this means that when we understand that a statement is true in intuition: 1) we grasp that it is the sort of statement which requires no justification outside of itself; 2) we are certain that the statement is true; and 3) we grasp that the statement is indubitable in the sense that ‘there can be no room for doubt’ that it is true.16 In terms of the first account of knowledge, we can say that when we understand that a statement is true in an intuition, we know that we know it. Descartes holds that there are other statements which we know by deductive inference of which we are ‘certain’ but we do not know through a single intuition. We can be certain of these statements when we move to them ‘through a continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought’ which consists of a series of intuitions that blend with one another. Descartes’s example of such an uninterrupted movement is intuiting that 2+2=4, then intuiting that 3+1=4 and finally intuiting that 2+2=3+1 necessarily follows from the other two propositions.17 Descartes admits that ‘deduction in a sense gets its certainty from memory’,18 but he does not seem to think that this poses a serious problem. He is ambivalent about how much of a problem it poses. At one point he says that ‘the deduction of or pure inference of one thing from another can never be performed wrongly by an intellect which is in the least degree rational, though we may fail to make the inference if we do not see it’. Yet in discussing arithmetic and geometry, he declares that ‘[w]here these sciences are concerned it scarcely seems humanly


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possible to err, except through inadvertence’,19 which implies that inadvertent error is possible. At any rate, speaking from the point of view of a practiced reasoner, he says he has learnt to pass through intuitions so fast ‘that memory is left with practically no role to play, and I seem to intuit the whole thing at once’.20 Practice can greatly expand the range of statements of which we can be certain. Descartes tells us in the Rules that ‘arithmetic and geometry prove to be much more certain than other disciplines: they alone are concerned with an object so pure and simple that they make no assumptions that experience can render uncertain’.21 He also takes parts of arithmetic and geometry to be immediately self-evident, certain and indubitable. By contrast, in the Meditations, he allows that even our immediate grasp of simple arithmetical statements might be mistaken. It might be possible for a malignant demon to deceive us even about simple mathematical statements. Perhaps we can only grasp the cogito in an intuition. In the case of the cogito he thinks it is not possible for us to be deceived.

Hume’s Critique Hume seems to criticize the Meditations in ‘Of personal identity’ and other parts of the Treatise. ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ is directed at the kind of view Descartes puts in the Rules. Hume begins ‘Of scepticism with regard to reason’ with the statement that ‘[i]n all demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible; but when we apply them, our fallible and uncertain faculties are very apt to depart from them, and fall into error’ (T 1.4.1.1/180). By this he presumably means that the ‘rules’ are necessarily true and that using them correctly always yields truths. He cannot mean the rules are psychologically or epistemologically certain, for he later argues that we can never be certain that our logical powers are working correctly. His subsequent discussion (he mentions expert mathematicians and accountants) suggests that by ‘rules’ he means both axioms and the elementary arithmetical statements to which other arithmetical statements can be reduced. These are the two kinds of statements Descartes argues can be grasped in a single intuition. To make sure of our judgement on matters of demonstration, Hume says we need to form a new judgement about the use of our faculty in that instance ‘and must enlarge our view to comprehend a kind of history of all instances, wherein our understanding has deceiv’d us, compar’d with those, wherein its testimony was just and true’ (T 1.4.1.1/180). Hume has in mind here a history of the use of our faculty of reason in general, not the use of the faculty of reason of one individual, for he later points out that even the greatest mathematician in the world makes mistakes and has to rely on others to ratify his/her proofs. As far as I know, no Hume commentator has compiled such a history, even in a potted

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form. I will compile a fragment of such a ‘history’ in the form of a psychology of our reasoning about number. In a strikingly naturalistic comment, Hume now declares that we must consider our reason, meaning presumably our reasoning faculty in operation, ‘as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect; but such-a-one as by the irruption of other causes, and by the inconstancy of our mental powers, may frequently be prevented’(T 1.4.1.1/180). Imlay suggests that ‘[w]hat Hume probably has in mind here are things like failure to pay attention and lapses of memory’.22 However, Hume’s statement is very general. ‘The irruption of other causes’ and ‘the inconstancy of our mental powers’ could include genetic defects or brain damage. Hume concludes that ‘[b]y this means all knowledge degenerates into probability’ (T 1.4.1.1/180). It is generally agreed that he means that all our knowledge is dependent on inductive inferences. In stating his point, Hume assumes that the second account of knowledge is correct. Putting his point in terms of the first account of knowledge, he might say ‘this argument shows that we cannot know that we know anything without using inductive inferences’. If Hume is correct, Cartesian rationalists cannot deal with scepticism, even scepticism about arithmetic or geometry, for they hold that inductive inferences do not even yield certainty, let alone indubitability. Hume’s argument relies on the thesis that there is only a causal and contingent connection between using our faculties, however carefully, and our conviction that we have arrived at the truth. Cartesians might well deny that the connection is contingent. He produces two pieces of empirical evidence for the claim that the connection is only contingent. First, highly expert algebraists and mathematicians do not assume that they are right in their proofs of any proposition, however simple. They run over them many times and rely on the judgement of their friends and the learned world. To the argument Hume states (T 1.4.1.2/180) that even the greatest mathematician in the world does not place entire confidence in his proofs, a Cartesian rationalist might reply that intuitions are transparently infallible, and that we might infallibly reduce all arithmetical reasoning to chains of intuitions so that we can be certain of the final statement in the chain. Hume criticizes this Cartesian argument by arguing that, second, even merchants using skilled and experienced accountants need to use the artificial structure of an accounting system to ‘produce a probability beyond what is deriv’d from the skill and experience of the accomptant’ (T 1.4.1.3/181). He considers the Cartesian response that any series of additions can be reduced to the simplest addition, so that we really do have genuine knowledge and not merely a probability of knowledge. (In the terms Descartes uses, the Cartesian response is that we have certainty.) He argues that the Cartesian response is inadequate because knowledge (in terms of the first account of knowledge, knowing that we know) and probability


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(inductive inference) are of radically different kinds, and probability cannot give us certainty. But this reply merely presupposes his initial argument, which is that our reason is a standard causal mechanism, and that as a consequence it can always fail, so that we can only have an inductive argument that it is likely that it has succeeded. Perhaps, the Cartesian rationalist might say, reason is not a standard causal mechanism of this kind. Perhaps it works in such a way that the only kind of breakdown possible would lead to complete irrationality. Either we have reason or we do not. Any rational being will accept simple logical and mathematical truths and reject simple logical and mathematical falsehoods. In any case, Mikael Karlsson argues that contrary to Hume, ‘[a]s a matter of fact and experience, it may well be possible to describe a range of cases where adding numbers, at least, never fails’.23 He mentions cases such as adding 1 and 1 or 2 and 2. Thus, Karlsson says, following Hume’s lead and compiling a history of our past performance, it seems that inductively there are cases in which we never fail. (Karlsson does not seem to grasp that to argue this way might be to concede everything to Hume that he needs – for it is to appeal to induction and so to admit that a matter of inductive probability is in question in dealing with a sceptic about our logical knowledge. But let us leave this problem aside in this paper.)24

A Modern Malignant Demon: Acalculia To back up Hume’s central idea against the rationalistically minded and Karlsson, let us go into recent research on acalculia or dyscalculia. These terms are used loosely and inconsistently in the literature. I will try to use them more precisely. Acalculia is a family of disorders in which someone’s arithmetical judgement or reasoning is extremely poor or totally lacking due to brain damage. Dyscalculia is the inherited version of the same thing. (Note that some researchers use dyscalculia where I would use acalculia.) Studies of patients with varieties of acalculia show an extraordinary range of problems. Patients cannot do simple additions or judge whether they are correct. One patient answers complex multiplication questions correctly but does not answer some simple addition problems. Another understands commutativity and some quite complex algebra, but fails to add 3 and 2 correctly. Acalculia and dyscalculia are not one disorder though they are sometimes lumped together and called Gerstmann’s syndrome or acalculia. As we will see, this is a misnomer, for Gerstmann’s syndrome proper is only one type of acalculia, and in any case there is some doubt that it is a unified syndrome. The research indicates that a number of functionally (and probably spatially) distinct processes are involved in everyday arithmetic. There is the ability called subitizing, which is either innate or acquired extremely early in development.

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This allows us to judge how many things we are looking at. Up to four things, we can do this without counting them one by one. We can also do simple arithmetic through a process involving subitizing. (Some extremely ingenious experiments have been conducted to show that tiny infants can subitize.) Beyond four things, we can get an approximate grasp of numbers of things by subitizing. We can apparently also do approximate arithmetic in this way for much larger numbers. Subitizing might be thought to be a process in which the reasoning faculty produces something like a Cartesian intuition. (In the brain, this process seems to happen when the results of parallel processing suddenly come together, but we don’t need to worry about the details here.) However, subitizing relies on analog not digital processing, so that it gives us only approximate results when we are working with anything but very small numbers of things. Perhaps the worst form of acalculia, Gerstmann’s syndrome proper, is a disorder in which we lose the ability to subitize. Gerstmann’s syndrome typically results from damage to specific points in the left parietal lobe of the brain. The loss of arithmetical ability often goes together with the loss of a number of other skills, largely skills which have to do with spatial perception. However, spoken verbal skills are retained and may be of a high order. Ordinary reasoning skills seem to be quite undamaged, even skills which have to do with what logicians claim are the principles involved in the concept of number, such as understanding one to one correspondence, transitivity, etc. Some extreme cases of developmental or congenital Gerstmann’s syndrome in children ranging from 8½ to 12 years old are so extreme, that researchers say that even the simplest additions were beyond their scope. Interestingly, the researchers report that the children seem nevertheless to understand the concept of number, though what this means is rather unclear.25 Extreme cases of Gerstmann’s syndrome seem to show that Karlsson is wrong. Gerstmann’s syndrome in general shows that otherwise rational people can fail in their judgements about very simple arithmetical propositions. They also show that there is not one faculty of reason which is involved in logic and arithmetic. Thus, they cause trouble for the rationalistically minded. To bear out the case that there is not one unified faculty of reason, consider that at least one patient is known who has remarkable arithmetical skills, but does not answer correctly extremely simple logical problems involving transitivity and other notions. (This is the case of Monsieur Van described by Butterworth.)26 Our arithmetical skills are not a unified whole. We apparently learn to do more complicated arithmetic through counting on our fingers, and by learning tables of simple additions and multiplications which are stored in verbal memory. Once this store is in place, it seems that we usually rely on it to answer quite simple arithmetic problems. It is possible for patients to lose this verbal memory


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store or to have it scrambled. It is also possible for patients to retain this verbal memory store while losing the ability to understand what it means. Consider first the patient JG. JG is a close to classic case of acquired Gerstmann’s syndrome. Her verbal skills are in the normal range. Tests on her general reasoning skills show her to be quite a good reasoner. Let us turn to her arithmetical skills. She can produce the right answer to a range of multiplication problems. She is fairly bad at addition, very bad at subtraction and appalling at division. In many cases, she doesn’t answer wrongly but says she can’t remember. When asked a question like ‘if 13+9=22, what is 9+13=?’ she does not answer unless forced. If forced, she gets the answer wrong. She shows no grasp of arithmetical commutativity or other simple arithmetical principles. She says in various cases that she cannot remember the meaning of the calculation. She does not answer arithmetical questions using pencil and paper, her fingers or any other means the experimenters suggest. The paper on her is aptly titled ‘Arithmetic facts without meaning’. JG relies on verbal memory to produce answers. She doesn’t understand the meaning of arithmetical facts that she knows because she does not understand even very simple arithmetic.27 JG shows us that we can lose a grasp of arithmetic. The fact that she exists rebuts Karlsson’s claim if the claim is taken to be a claim about understanding what we are doing. She can produce the right answer to simple arithmetical problems, but only by rote. Were parts of her verbal memory damaged, which is surely possible, she would not even answer the simplest arithmetical question correctly. If the rationalist view is that someone with an intact intellect should be able to make simple arithmetical judgements infallibly, JG refutes the rationalist view. She also shows that rationalist faculty psychology is mistaken, for she has good verbal reasoning capabilities but her arithmetical reasoning is very poor or not existent. Consider now the patient DA. DA’s memory of tables has been badly damaged, but for some time he seems to have been unaware that it had been damaged. His general conceptual knowledge of arithmetic is very good. He knows about commutativity, etc. and about some reasonably sophisticated principles in algebra. He provides a sophisticated statement of the nature of number to researchers. DA can subitize, etc. However, he gets half of a set of one digit addition problems wrong. DA could have got correct results by counting on his fingers, but apparently does not recognize that he needs to do so. Instead, he relies on his scrambled memory. Thus, his answer to 2+3=? is ‘6’. His answer to 3+2=? is ‘is also 6, of course’.28 The best explanation I can think of for DA’s behaviour is that the answers to arithmetical questions come to him as obvious – the kind of thing Descartes thinks is characteristic of an intuition. He could have used counting to arrive at the result, but he does not. The Cartesian picture assumes that if you rely on memory, you can tell that you are doing it. DA seems to be unaware that he is relying on a sophisticated strategy which might well

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fail. The researchers who studied DA seem to have been surprised that he always relied on what they describe as a sophisticated ‘guessing’ strategy rather than a ‘safe’ one. But this is hardly surprising. Research shows that adults generally rely on things like a memory of tables, even for some quite simple problems. Think of your own case. Are you aware of the strategy you use to answer simple arithmetical problems? Typically, you are not. The answer just seems to come to you as obvious. At least JG knows that she is quite unreliable on arithmetical matters. The case of DA shows up serious problems for the rationalist view. We can go badly wrong in simple arithmetical judgements even when we think we are intuiting the obvious. It is not transparent to us when we are intuiting the obvious and when we are not. The case of patient NAU, who is the well known ‘approximate man’, is worse than that of DA. At first, he was totally unable to do precise arithmetic and had lost many of his language skills. (He suffered from mild aphasia in both the production and comprehension of words and severe aphasia when trying to write or read words. He was considerably better with number words.) Even his subitizing was confined to approximation. Thus, he thought 3 was the correct answer to 2+2=? The astonished researchers who studied him noted that when circling an approximately correct answer to an arithmetical question involving addition, ‘he often thought that the result he circled was actually the correct result of the addition!’29 NAU gradually developed a strategy in which he used his fingers to very slowly solve addition problems which were presented visually. However, he continued to produce only approximately correct answers to orally presented problems. NAU is someone who has only very rudimentary language skills. Yet he is rational enough to be able to do approximate arithmetic, sometimes with quite large numbers. Further, over time he developed a (fallible) strategy for doing precise arithmetic to deal with his problem. (The researchers put this point by saying that his procedural rationality in arithmetic seems to have been undamaged.) He seems to be a partly rational person who gets numerical calculation and reasoning problems approximately right. However, he is certainly not transparently infallible though at times he seems to think that he is. When he learnt to do arithmetical problems by counting, he began to rely on a procedure which is terribly fallible even on rationalist criteria because it depends on memory.

Conclusion Let us return to Hume. What Hume had inferred from knowledge of what accountants do and knowledge of the practices of mathematicians is borne out in a striking way by empirical research on acalculia. Human beings, even rational human beings, are not infallible even on the simplest problems. Karlsson is wrong. Indeed, the patients described above might well conclude that they are being per-


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secuted by a modern version of Descartes’s malignant demon. Further, rational human beings are certainly not transparently infallible. Without a knowledge of her past performance and reliance on others, or knowledge of the causal workings of her mind, an individual cannot be sure that she does not suffer from some severe disorder. We need to rely on induction. This not only vindicates Hume’s scepticism with regard to reason, it also provides evidence for his naturalistic understanding of our reason. In this way, it vindicates the sceptical and naturalistic strands of the enlightenment while undermining rationalist foundationalism.

Afterword I should note, however, that I have not dealt with Descartes adequately. Descartes’s weak position is that some mathematical judgements are infallible. Descartes’s strong position is that only the cogito is infallible. I have only partially vindicated Hume’s scepticism with regard to reason. However, I suspect that a stronger naturalistic attack on Descartes can be produced. The case of Monsieur Van I mentioned above suggests that our logical skills can fail badly while our mathematical skills remain intact. In addition, there are cases in the psychiatric literature which might completely vindicate Hume’s argument. There is a syndrome called Cotard’s syndrome in which patients will sometimes deny that they exist while apparently retaining their logical skills in a bizarre encapsulated manner. For instance, in a well known study of one of these patients, Madame B., the doctor reports that she said to him ‘I can’t be sick because I don’t exist’, which is surely impeccable reasoning. But Cotard’s syndrome will have to be the subject of another paper. I thank Stephen Buckle for his perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. He is not to blame for the faults that remain. They are due to my obstinacy.

8 HUME ON SYMPATHY AND CRUELTY Craig Taylor I shall focus on the question of the humaneness or cruelty of the whole morality, and this is a Humean focus. The Kantian may not care so much about our findings here, since she, if she is true to the master, regards masturbation and suicide as the very worst thing a person can do, whereas it was cruelty that Hume regarded as the worst vice.1

Those sympathetic to Kant’s moral theory will no doubt hold Baier here as massively unfair to him. More particularly – and once they have recovered their composure – one question they may ask is whether Hume really provides us with an account of what is wrong, indeed morally terrible, about cruelty. There is no doubt given his frequent references to cruelty, especially in his History of England, that Hume was most appalled by it. However what is more doubtful is whether we can find in his moral theory an adequate account of the offence to another that occurs in the case of cruelty, or at least in the case of extreme cruelty. Here the Kantian may press that what Hume lacks is something like Kant’s ‘formula of humanity’. While that is a possibility I will consider, what I will argue in the end is that what Hume really lacks is simply an adequate account of the significance of those immediate and unreflective or natural ways in which human beings are moved to respond to the suffering of another. Our understanding of what is so terrible about cruelty I will argue is in the end founded in part on the natural, including especially sympathetic, ways in which we respond to the victims of cruelty. While the position I defend here is clearly not Hume’s it nevertheless owes a good deal to Hume’s naturalism.

Sympathy As Baier notes Hume’s is a sympathy based morality. But that is of course misleading for anyone who has not examined Hume’s account of sympathy. For Hume, sympathy is a kind of mechanism through which the sentiments of another are communicated to us. As Hume says: When any affection is infus’d by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of – 117 –

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Hume and the Enlightenment it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection. (T 2.1.11.3/317)

Sympathy for Hume then seems to be closer to what we might call empathy. Sympathy is not itself a concern for another’s suffering; it is the process by which we come to feel that emotion, or a copy of it.2 Moreover the operation of sympathy is entirely automatic and the result of natural processes or laws as can be seen from the analogies Hume uses to describe this phenomenon. As Hume says our minds reflect each others’ emotions like light is reflected in a mirror (T 2.2.5.21/365) and emotions pass from one person to another as the motion of one wound string passes to other strings equally wound (T 3.3.1.7/575–6). Sympathy is itself not a moral attribute at all, though it is important to moral appraisal. The role of sympathy for Hume is in part to determine what human qualities are classified as virtues and which as vices; which actions are virtuous and which vicious. An action, or sentiment, or character is virtuous or vicious; why? because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind … To have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration. (T 3.1.2.3/471)

Thus cruelty is disagreeable and a vice since the cruel person is the cause of torment of his victim, a torment that through the operation of sympathy is transmitted in some part to us. We can see how sympathy works here if we consider Hume’s account of pity, which he calls ‘a concern for … the misery of others’:3 (T 2.2.7.1, 369) ’Twill be easy to explain the passion of pity, from the precedent reasoning concerning sympathy … All human creatures are related to us by resemblance. Their persons, therefore … strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original one … If this be true in general, it must be more so of affliction and sorrow. These have always a stronger and more lasting influence than any pleasure or enjoyment. (T 2.2.7.2/369)

As I have argued elsewhere,4 in his account of sympathy Hume seems to conflate our concern for our own suffering with our concern for the suffering of another. If Hume is suggesting that through sympathy I feel a similar emotion of affliction or sorrow to another who is suffering then it would seem to be my emotion (a copy of the original) rather than the affliction or sorrow of the sufferer that moves me. One point here is that it is not at all clear that our own (copy of another’s) suffering and the (original) suffering of another will move or affect us in the same way. If it is my suffering that moves me then why should I not simply attempt to break the sympathetic connection between myself and the person

Hume on Sympathy and Cruelty

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who is suffering by, say, turning away? More troubling still, while Hume states that ‘[t]here is always a mixture of love or tenderness with pity, and of hatred or anger with malice’ (T 2.2.9.1/381), in Hume’s system it would seem that pity should lead to hatred not love. For according to Hume the causes of the passions of love and hatred produce separable feelings of pleasure and uneasiness respectively (T 2.2.1.6/331). Thus as Hume concedes, as pity is an uneasiness, and malice a joy, arising from the misery of others, pity shou’d naturally, as in all other cases, produce hatred; and malice, love. (T 2.2.9.1/381)

Hume’s solution to this problem involves what seems to me an ad hoc, and not entirely successful addition to his theory. Hume has argued that the succession of impressions in the mind are related by resemblance so that ‘our temper, when elevated with joy, naturally throws itself into love, generosity, pity, courage, pride, and the other resembling affections’ (T 2.1.4.3/283). Hume now suggests that an ‘impression may be related to another, not only when their sensations are resembling…but also when their impulses or directions are similar and correspondent’ (T 2.2.9.2/381). Thus, Hume argues, pity is related to ‘[b]enevolence or the appetite, which attends love’ and is ‘a desire of the happiness of the person belov’d, and an aversion to his misery’ (T 2.2.9.3/382) since both pity and benevolence involve the desire for another’s happiness and aversion to his misery; that is to say, their direction is in this way similar.5 Indeed Hume says at one point that pity and benevolence are the same desires (T 2.2.9.3/382). But this cannot be right, and rather spoils the point about resemblance. Benevolence as Hume understands it is not the same thing as pity since in the case of benevolence we are not moved by the suffering of another but by a general desire for another’s happiness or aversion to his misery. One could be moved by benevolence towards someone regardless of whether they are suffering or not, and that is obviously not possible in the case of pity. It is not at all clear Hume provides an adequate account of pity as we might naturally understand it. But, to consider a different point, a feature at least of extreme suffering, suffering to the point of affliction, is that it can render a person incapable of understanding the nature or extent of that very suffering. One wonders given all that Hume says whether he has really grasped the nature of extreme suffering or affliction. Consider the following passage from the personal narrative of the nineteenth century African American Frederick Douglass in which he describes the condition of being a slave through an examination of the songs he and his fellow slaves used to sing. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then all together beyond my feeble comprehension…they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls

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Hume and the Enlightenment boiling over with the bitterest anguish…To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanising character of slavery.6

Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave from which the above passage comes is really in part the story of his growing awareness of the suffering, his own suffering as it was, associated with slavery.7 What he is saying is that such suffering was not simply that associated with hunger, cold, and such physical privations, that beyond this it involved – what he at first struggled to express – what people suffer when their families are broken apart, when they are treated as no more than property, when they are bred like farm animals. To suffer, to be afflicted, in the way that Douglass and his fellow slaves were involves being unable to comprehend what has been done to one. The slave’s suffering or affliction is not simply a matter of feeling; to have some sense of, say, their physical deprivation or fears is not yet to have a sense of the hurt or evil of slavery. One might say that beyond this we feel the inhumanity of it, but that is not something that is sympathetically communicated to us in proximity to or by contemplating the suffering slave. For, if Douglass is right, the slaves themselves do not feel that. So if our feeling constitutes our condemnation here, where does this feeling come from? It might be agued that Hume was aware of something like the situation I have just described given what he further says about pity. We have also instances, wherein an indifference and insensibility under misfortune encreases our concern for the misfortunate … ’Tis an aggravation of a murder, that it was committed upon persons asleep and in perfect security … As we ourselves are here acquainted with the wretched situation of the person, it gives us a lively idea and sensation of sorrow, which is the passion that generally attends it; and this idea becomes still more lively, and the sensation more violent by contrast with that security and indifference, which we observe in the person himself. (T 2.2.7.6/371)

But what sensation of sorrow generally attends being bred like cattle? It is easy enough to imagine, for example, the embarrassment or shame that generally accompanies being laughed at, and the contrast between our sense of that and the blissful ignorance of someone laughed at behind their back may be so striking as to make our sympathetic embarrassment or shame more acute. Similarly, we can accept Hume’s point that we blush when people behave foolishly even when ‘they show no sense of shame, nor seem in the least conscious of their folly’ (T 2.2.7.5/371). But the whole point of Douglass’s narrative is that his readers do not have (but may acquire by attending to what he has to tell them) an adequate idea of what it is to suffer in the extreme and specific way that slaves suffer under the institution of slavery as that was constituted in the American South.


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Justice If we want to characterize the inhumanity of slavery a natural thought will be that slaves suffer a profound injustice. We might say that the injustice of it explains why this particular piece of extreme human cruelty is so morally terrible. That is certainly part of what Douglass wants to say. In which case we might argue that while slavery certainly involves suffering what makes it particularly vicious is that it offends against the virtue of justice. Justice for Hume though is an artificial virtue. Such virtue too produces pleasure and approbation, but only as the result of human artifice; the cause of our pleasure or approbation is not some natural human attribute. Human artifice in the form of society’s laws and conventions are a solution to the problems particular human beings encounter in trying to live safely in the secure enjoyment of those external goods upon which human life depends. So justice, being a human artifice designed for this end, looks most unlikely to provide us with the sense of injustice that is at issue in the example I have described from Douglass. I cannot put the point better than Hume himself; Our property is nothing but those goods, whose constant possession is establish’d by the laws of society; that is, by the laws of justice. Those, therefore, who make use of the words property, or right, or obligation, before they have explain’d the origin of justice … are guilty of a very gross fallacy … (T 3.2.2.11/491)

But making use of the words ‘property’ and ‘right’ – including both limiting and extending their compass – is just what Douglass is doing, and in a context that requires us to disregard what law and convention dictates with respect to them. If there were no other way to explain the origin of justice there may be perhaps no other way to respond to Douglass’s story but with a kind of limited pity; pity in response to physical hardship and deprivation.

Respect for Persons What one needs perhaps to characterize what is so morally terrible about extreme cruelty is not anything about what it feels like to be a slave but what slavery denies to the slave, specifically that slavery involves the denial of the slave’s humanity. Human beings are not property, which is not to say that law or convention cannot make them so, but to say that to treat a person as a slave, or to enslave them, is to fail to acknowledge something that they are by their very nature – which leads us to Kant. Kant, of course, attempted to explicate all moral requirements in terms of his Categorical Imperative, the ‘Humanity’ formulation of which gives some substance to the notion we should never treat another human being merely as a means but also as an end.8 Our humanity is both positively an end we must

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pursue in virtue of our nature as rational agents and negatively an end we must respect in the case of other people as rational agents. Kant’s conception of human beings as rational agents imposes limits on the way in which we should treat ourselves (hence Baier’s point about masturbation and suicide) and each other. Regardless of the conventions or laws that create slaves and regardless even of how slaves themselves feel about that, slavery is, as Kant would have it, against the moral law in virtue of the fact that slaves are rational agents and worthy of that respect that is due any being that is as Kant says an end-in-itself, that has as he thinks a kind of absolute value.9 The slave-owner I suggested denies the slave’s humanity, and so it may seem that Kant but not Hume is able to account for the particular evil of slavery. But of course it is not for Kant most fundamentally human beings that we must treat as an end in themselves but their humanity, by which Kant means those properties that give us moral worth and which includes most obviously a certain capacity for practical reason, a capacity to choose and pursue our own particular ends. But we might wonder whether the evil of slavery can be adequately characterized by appeal to this conception of humanity. To explain, we could say that the slave-owners of the American South failed to treat their slaves as ends-in-themselves and only as a means to their own ends, so that they failed to respect the humanity of their slaves. But that hardly seems to capture the force of Douglas’s appeal to his readers. Part of the point of that appeal is that the slave-owners and other whites who form Douglass’s immediate readers may not deny that slaves are rational beings in the sense Kant outlines. And in the face of that it won’t be enough to point out, as a Kantian may urge, that their position was rationally indefensible. For there were powerful reasons connected to the whole economy of the South that might lead Douglass’s readers to simply live with that. The way Douglass does appeal to his readers involves getting them to recognize something they (or the majority of them) cannot live with, which is an understanding of the extreme cruelty inflicted upon slaves, an understanding that itself depends on an understanding of the way they suffer. Douglass accepts that slavery involves a denial of the slave’s humanity, however he explains the humanity that is here denied in terms of the way they suffer rather than trying to explain the moral significance of their suffering by appeal to the humanity that is thereby denied. Consider what Douglass actually says, and just a few lines after the passage I last quoted: If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, – and if he is not thus impressed it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate heart’.10


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Douglass’s argument in the above passage is a fairly straightforward appeal to human sentiment. Of course Douglass recognizes that not everyone will be impressed by his argument that slavery is evil or soul-killing; that is, he recognizes that some people have no flesh in their obdurate hearts. In other words, those who lack the requisite human reactions, tendencies or sentiments may remain unmoved. Douglass presents our understanding of the evil of slavery as a kind of achievement, one that involves the exercise and further development of certain emotional capacities. Our understanding of the suffering of slaves and hence the evil of slavery is then presented as contingent upon the exercise and development of those very capacities. I began by suggesting that Hume cannot account for our moral judgements about extreme cruelty, for our judgements about what is so morally terrible about it. I then looked to Kant to see if one could account for such judgements via the idea of respect for persons and more specifically via his humanity formulation of the Categorical Imperative. However as I went on from there to argue, what the ‘formula of humanity’ shows is not that human beings are owed a kind of unconditional respect but rather that it is the humanity that most (but interestingly not all)11 human beings possess that is owed that respect. And now there is a question, as I noted above, as to whether the denial of humanity in that sense can capture what is so morally terrible about extreme cruelty. Specifically, I suggested that this gets the order of explanation the wrong way around; that it is the cruelty that explains the inhumanity rather than the inhumanity explaining the cruelty. Further, and given what Douglass says, I have suggested that one may come to understand the nature of the slave’s suffering and hence the cruelty involved here through certain natural human reactions to such suffering. But to further explicate this account of the evil of cruelty I need to go back to Hume and more specifically, to quote Peter Strawson, to pit ‘Hume the naturalist against Hume the skeptic’.12 This will then lead us on to the debate between modern Humeans and Kantians.

Two Kinds of Naturalism In his Woodbridge Lectures, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Peter Strawson argues as follows: I first invoked the notion, and the name, [naturalism] in connection with Hume and Hume’s way with skepticism (including his own). His point… is that arguments, reasonings, either for or against the skeptical position are, in practice, equally inefficacious and idle; since our natural disposition to belief, on the points challenged by the skeptic, is absolutely compelling and inescapable … Where Nature thus determines us, we have an original non-rational commitment which sets the bounds within which, or the stage upon which … the question of rationality or irrationality, justification or lack of justification, of this or that particular judgment or belief can come up.13

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Of course what Strawson is describing, as he notes, is Hume the naturalist against Hume the sceptic about the existence of the external world. And there is an important difference, as Strawson also points out, if we move from this kind of scepticism to scepticism about morality, or more specifically scepticism about the justification for our moral judgements. Here another face of naturalism comes into view: [W]e could theoretically, and sometimes can, and even sometimes must, practically, view human behavior, or stretches of human behavior, in a different light, which I characterized as ‘objective’ or ‘detached’ or (here comes the other face) ‘naturalistic’; a light which involves the partial or complete bracketing out or suspension of reactive feelings or moral attitudes or judgments. To see human beings and human actions in this light is to see them simply as objects and events in nature, natural objects and natural events, to be described, analyzed, and causally explained in terms in which moral evaluation has no place; in terms, roughly speaking, of an observational and theoretical vocabulary recognized by the natural and social sciences, including psychology.14

Strawson calls the above-mentioned face of naturalism ‘reductive naturalism’ and sees it as presenting a challenge to what he calls in contrast a non-reductive naturalism that does not attempt to counter [the conclusions of reductive naturalism] with argument, as some have done, alleging some non-natural, metaphysical foundation to validate our general disposition to moral response and moral judgement. (Cf. theories of noumenal freedom in Kant or of a special faculty of intuition of non-natural qualities in the ethical intuitionists of a recent generation.) The non-reductive naturalist simply urges, once again, the point that it is not open to us, it is not in our nature, to make a total surrender of those personal and moral reactive attitudes, those judgements of moral commendation or condemnation, which the reductive naturalist declares to be irrational as altogether lacking rational justification.15

The point of repeating these general observations concerning what Strawson views as two faces of naturalism is just to help motivate the thought that a solution to the problem of accounting for our sense of the particular evil of extreme cruelty to another human being may involve accepting the non-reductively naturalistic but still (it seems to me) Humean point that it is in our nature to be repelled in specific kinds of ways by the infliction of extreme cruelty on other human beings at the same time as being moved in other, I will call them (noting the contrast with Hume) sympathetic, ways by the victims of such cruelty. Douglass’s narrative read in this light is about the human capacity to express what he suffers, the particular cruelties of slavery, as well as an appeal to the capacity in others to be moved by such expressions in ways that give substance to our conception of such suffering and cruelty. And let me stress here that the human capacity of response that I am concerned with here is distinct from that of animals; the responses that give substance to what it is to suffer as a human being are


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distinct from those responses that give us a sense of animal suffering. I can see no reason to refrain from calling such responses natural, just so long as that is not taken to mean that human actions are natural events in the reductive sense that Strawson indicates, events that are to be explained in terms of the vocabulary of the natural and the social sciences. If we ask, though, what the point is of describing these responses as natural one answer now is that this enables a contrast between a conception of human beings as being part of nature, a conception common to both reductive and non-reductive naturalism, and a conception of human beings in which human agency and in particular moral agency is to be given a certain metaphysical foundation or explanation. Given how broadly I have, following Strawson, defined non-reductive naturalism there may not seem to be much that it rules out. Arguably almost all contemporary approaches to the foundation of morality are naturalistic in some sense. But that itself points I think to Hume’s enduring influence; even modern day Kantians acknowledge, implicitly at least, Hume’s influence in this sense. Consider modern day Kantian Christine Korsgaard’s discussion of the internalism requirement, the requirement that practical reasons be capable of motivating us: The internalism requirement is correct, but there is probably no moral theory that it excludes … The force of the internalism requirement is psychological, what it does is not refute ethical theories, but to make a psychological demand on them.16

And as she goes on to say about fellow Kantian Thomas Nagel: Nagel … argues that investigations into practical reason will yield discoveries about our motivational capacities. In Nagel’s eyes the internalism requirement … can teach us about human motivational capacities, it can teach us psychology.17

How much of a concession to Hume Korsgaard is in fact making here depends of course on how we or rather she conceives of the psychological, or for that matter of human nature. A particular problem for Kantians here concerns their treatment of the will. Concerning the nature of the will Hume is quite clear, as he says, by the will, I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind. (T 2.3.1.2/399)

Hume’s account of the will is of a piece with his general account of human nature or psychology; the will is just another kind of impression. Things are not so simple for Korsgaard and other Kantians. The Kantian idea of the freedom of the will and moral responsibility depends at the very least on viewing human beings from two different standpoints. First, as subject to natural laws in which case we are conceived as part of the phenomenal or we might say empirical world, second as being free to choose or determine our own lives and actions, as having

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the capacity to act in ways that are not viewed as determined by natural laws, in which case we must conceive ourselves as part of the noumenal world, a world that lies outside or beyond the phenomena. Consider what Korsgaard says here: As thinkers and choosers we must regard ourselves as active beings even though we cannot experience ourselves as active beings, and so we place ourselves among the noumena, necessarily when we think and act. According to this interpretation, the laws of the phenomenal world are laws that describe and explain our behaviour. But the laws of the noumenal world are laws which are addressed to us as active beings … We view ourselves as phenomena when we take on the theoretical task of describing and explaining our behaviour; we view ourselves as noumena when our practical task is one of deciding what to do.18

I cannot go into the complex issues raised by the phenomena/noumena distinction in Kant here, but two remarks about Korsgaard’s account of responsibility seem apposite. First, Korsgaard, acknowledging the affinity of her account of responsibility with the one that Strawson himself develops in his Freedom and Resentment,19 is happy to say that ‘[i]n everyday personal interaction, we cannot get on without the concept of responsibility’.20 Thus, one might concede that Korsgaard has gone some way to acknowledging Strawson’s point that ‘it is not in our nature to make a total surrender of those personal and moral reactive attitudes, those judgements of moral commendation or condemnation, which the reductive naturalist declares to be irrational as altogether lacking rational justification’. But second, a question remains as to whether Korsgaard’s account of psychology is in the end really adequate for accounting for moral judgement. So for example one might ask whether we should practically view ourselves as noumena when deciding what to do. A natural thought here is that in deciding how to act we should consider whether given our past behaviour we are really capable of acting in the way we are contemplating. To expand on the above point, a question that needs to be asked is whether the supposed laws of the noumenal world are addressed to us as particular human beings. Apposite here is the specific21 debate between Bernard Williams and John McDowell over Williams’s internal reasons thesis.22 Williams argues in true Humean fashion that all practical reasons – including of course moral reasons – are internal reasons, by which he means roughly that if an agent has a reason to φ (that is, to act in some particular way) there must be some element of what Williams calls that agent’s subjective motivation set that would be satisfied by φ-ing. By contrast, Williams suggests, to claim that there are external reasons for action is to claim that an agent has reasons for action that do not display this kind of relativity to their particular motivational set. McDowell then responds to Williams, in a manner somewhat more sympathetic with Kant, by defending a particular conception of external reasons. Specifically, McDowell argues contrary to Williams that as agents we have reason to do in a given situation just what a ‘correct deliberator’ would do, where his proposed candidate for a correct


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deliberator is, following Aristotle, the man of practical wisdom or the phronimos. Thus we can say according to McDowell that an agent may have a reason to φ even if there is no motive in their subjective motivational set that would be satisfied by φ-ing; that the agent has an external reason to φ, that there are external reasons for action. In other words, we have reason to act as the phronimos would act regardless of what our current motivations happen to be. Now Williams’s response to McDowell – which as I say is apposite to my concern with Korsgaard – is as follows. Williams notes that according to McDowell’s externalist interpretation of an agent’s reasons for action, a statement of the form ‘A has a reason to φ’, does not make a statement distinctively about A at all … On the externalist account … statements of [this type] do not relate actions to persons, but types of action to types of circumstances, and they are most revealingly expressed in the form ‘in circumstances X, there is a reason to φ’.23

Williams’s argument is targeted against McDowell, and of course McDowell’s particular account of external reasons is not explained in terms of formal rules – as indicated by Kantian moral theories – but in terms of what the phronimos, understood as an ideal type, would do. So as Williams goes on to argue, ‘if I know that I fall short of temperance and am unreliable with respect even to some kinds of self-control, I shall have good reason not to do some things that the temperate person could properly and safely do’.24 But Williams’s point here applies equally to Kantians like Korsgaard – as I will now explain. Korsgaard in her own response to Williams on internal reasons argues that moral reasons will be addressed to each of us in particular just in case there is such a thing as pure practical reason. As she says, ‘what seems to follow from the internalism requirement is this: if we can be motivated by considerations stemming from pure practical reason, then that capacity belongs to the subjective motivational set of every rational being’.25 But even leaving aside the question of how practical reason itself here is supposed to provide us with new motivations regardless of the current contents of our subjective motivation set, is it really correct to say that the moral law, for instance, is addressed to us as the particular active beings we happen to be? One might think that insofar as the task of deciding what to do is a practical task at all it needs to be addressed to us personally in the specific sense of our phenomenal selves with our particular abilities, limitations and incapacities. To ‘view ourselves as noumena when our practical task is one of deciding what to do’, is to ignore the relevance of our particular psychology in our practical deliberations.26 This is not, let me stress, to excuse, say, some limitation in a person’s motivational capacities, but simply to point out that the conclusion of a piece of practical deliberation is supposed to be an action and that for this reason an agent’s capacity (or not) to actually carry out that action must be relevant to such deliberation.

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Morality after the Enlightenment Looked at another way, the contrast between moral naturalism and non-naturalism that I have highlighted is perhaps more radical than some modern moral theorists have really acknowledged. Here it may be argued that this distinction really points to a fundamental difference between the way in which at the beginning of the enlightenment it was possible to think about the foundations for morality or value generally and the way it is possible to think about such foundations now in the world the enlightenment helped bring about. To get a sense of that difference consider what David Wiggins has to say about how the questions of life’s meaning is for us importantly different than it was for Mozart writing two years before the death of Voltaire. The passage Wiggins quotes from Mozart is as follows: We live in this world to compel ourselves industriously to enlighten one another by means of reasoning and to apply ourselves always to carrying forward the sciences and the arts.27

As Wiggins says: What we envy here is the specificity, and the certainty of purpose. But, even as we feel envy, it is likely that we want to rejoice in our freedom to disbelieve in that which provided the contingent foundation of that specificity and certainty … The foundation of what we envy was the now (I think) almost unattainable conviction that there exists a God whose purpose ordains certain specific duties for all men, and appoints particular men to particular roles or vocations.28

Of course it may be argued that this difference is not so great, since a core notion of God is still accessible to us as it was to Mozart. But, as Wiggins goes on to suggest, the conception of God still championed by modern theologians tends towards an a priori conception of God and while, as Wiggins also says, those living in the eighteenth century may have had such a conception they, ‘would have hastened to amplify with a more hazardous a posteriori conception’. Wiggins’s point is then that it is that a posteriori conception that provides the kind of certainty to the specific duties for particular men that Mozart speaks of and hence the kind of meaning it was possible for a life to have then but perhaps impossible for it to have now. Even if we retain a belief in God the kind of certainty of specific and particular purpose that the more substantial a prosteriori conception of God provided men of the eighteenth century is lost to us.29 Wiggins’s discussion above is framed in terms of the meaning of life and his point is in part that the question of life’s meaning is a problem for us, a problem we might say for us of finding meaning in life, in a way that it was not for men of the eighteenth century. But the loss of the certain foundation to life’s meaning that Wiggins speaks of is also the loss of the same certain foundation of morality. And the point I want to make here is that we feel that loss most keenly perhaps


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in the face of the worst human beings can inflict upon each other – which brings me back to my central concern, cruelty. What we may want to say in the face of cruelty is that each human being is owed a kind of unconditional respect, yet what we may also find it difficult to deny is that such respect is itself a condition of how human beings, through a certain ultimately contingent development and articulation of those natural ways in which we relate to each other, have come to view what it is to be human. From one point of view this account of the basis for our most deeply held moral convictions may seem inadequate. Hence a reductive but optimistic naturalist might persevere with attempts to explain certain moral requirements as unconditional by appeal to certain natural facts. So, for example, such a naturalist might, perhaps drawing on recent developments in evolutionary theory or neuroscience, continue with some kind of a posteriori enquiry into the foundations of, say, the human good or justice. Or, following modern day Kantians such as Korsgaard, we might continue to inquire into what the nature of practical reason can tell us about human psychology or human nature in the hope ultimately that our deepest moral convictions may be founded on the existence of something like pure practical reason. So far however both approaches offer us only, it seems to me, rather vague promissory notes. As against such promissory notes there is, when we read something like Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his life as an American slave, the evidence if not exactly of our senses at least of our responses. Following the non-reductive strand of Hume’s naturalism, then, we might simply accept that given the way we have come through our natural responses to each other to understand what it is to be human, showing cruelty to another human being is the worst thing that a person can do. And we can say this knowing that it could have been, and sometimes has been, otherwise – and be grateful for, rather than despairing of, that.

9 HUME’S NATURAL HISTORY OF JUSTICE Mark Collier

The Puzzle of Cooperation Nature appears to have exercised, according to Hume, particular ‘cruelty’ towards human beings (T 3.2.2.2/484). When one surveys the rest of the animal kingdom, one finds a harmonious balance between what creatures want and what they are able to do. Lions have voracious appetites, but they have the power to satisfy them; sheep have simple desires, but these are easily fulfilled. It is in man alone that we discover, as Hume puts it, an ‘unnatural conjunction of infirmity, and of necessity’ (T 3.2.2.2/485). Upon further reflection, however, we can see that nature has provided us with a remedy for this unfortunate predicament: social cooperation (T 3.2.2.3/485). ’Tis by society alone he is able to supply his defects, and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures…By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability encreases: And by mutual succour we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents. (T 3.2.2.3/485)

Social cooperation allows us to compensate for our feeble frames. We are not the fastest, strongest, or sturdiest creatures, but we make up for these shortcomings by joining forces with one another to an extent unmatched in the rest of the animal kingdom. This raises an important question: What is it about human beings that allows us to cooperate on such a vast scale? Hume recognizes that the origin of human cooperation is a puzzle. Given the circumstances in which our primitive ancestors must have found themselves, one would expect interpersonal conflict to have been widespread. Resources in this ancestral environment were scarce, after all, and could not satisfy the desires of everyone. The agents who pursued these goods, moreover, would have been driven by unbridled appropriative impulses. This avidity…of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society. There scarce is any one, who is not actuated by it; and there is no one, who has not reason to fear – 131 –

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Hume and the Enlightenment from it, when it acts without any restraint, and gives way to its first and most natural movements. (T 3.2.2.12/491–2)

When creatures with unrestrained appetites compete for limited resources, it seems likely that they would inevitably come to blows. Thus, it is prima facie difficult to understand how our ancestors cooperated with one another in these circumstances.

Property Conventions Hume maintains that one cannot simply appeal to generosity or benevolence in order to solve this puzzle. He does not deny that we are capable of acting unselfishly; the problem is that human kindness is narrowly tailored (T 3.2.2.5/487). We care about the pain and suffering of our friends and relatives, in other words, but we are also largely indifferent to the plight of those outside our close circle (T 3.2.2.6/487). It is easy to understand why we refrain from the possessions of our loved ones, then, but it is hard to see why we do so with regard to strangers, whose welfare is of little concern to us. The key to solving this puzzle, according to Hume, lies with our capacity for strategic rationality. Our ancestors began to cooperate with strangers, he proposes, because they recognized that doing so would promote their mutual interests. Men being naturally selfish, or endow’d only with a confin’d generosity, they are not easily induc’d to perform any action for the interest of strangers, except with a view to some reciprocal advantage, which they had no hope of obtaining but by such a performance. (T 3.2.5.8/519)

Hume maintains that the benefits of social cooperation are easy to discern. Our ancestors had ‘repeated experience’ with the ‘inconveniences’ of an uninhibited pursuit of scarce resources (T 3.2.2.10/490). These costs stood in stark contrast, moreover, with the benefits of cooperation displayed within the family (T 3.2.2.4/486). It would have required only minimal intelligence to recognize, therefore, the advantages of mutual restraint from the possessions of others. The benefits of this strategy, as Hume puts it, are ‘palpable and evident, even to the most rude and uncultivated of human race’ (T 3.2.7.1/534). It is not enough to believe, of course, that there is reciprocal advantage in abstaining from the possessions of others. There is no use in adopting such a strategy unless others are willing to do the same. Thus, one must also believe that others believe that they stand to benefit from a policy of mutual restraint.1 This convention…is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another

Hume’s Natural History of Justice

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in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express’d, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behavior. (T 3.2.2.10/490)

Our ancestors began to act on their acknowledged interests, on this account, because they expected that others would do so as well. Property conventions were gradually established, according to Hume, as these mutual expectations gave rise to regular patterns of behaviour. Humean conventions involve situations where ‘the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other’ (T 3.2.2.10/490). Let us call individuals ‘strategically rational agents’ if they have the capacity to understand that the outcomes of their decisions often depend on the choices of others. We can say that agents enter into conventions for the stable possession of property if and only if: (A) Each agent believes that the other is strategically rational. (B) Each agent believes that mutual abstinence from the possessions of others would promote their individual interests. (C) Each agent believes that others believe that this policy would promote their individual interests. (D) The beliefs in (A)–(C) produce a suitable regularity in their behaviour. This analysis makes it clear that property conventions require a fair amount of cognitive sophistication. Agents must not only make complex calculations about their own interests, but they must also entertain higher-order beliefs about the beliefs of others. The only question that remains, according to Hume, is how our ancestors established particular rules for delineating possessions. How could strategically rational agents select among alternative methods of conferring ownership? It is at this point that Hume appeals to the considerations of psychological salience. Resources would have been assigned according to the rule of present possession, for example, since custom and habit naturally lead us to value goods with which we are acquainted more highly than those enjoyed by others.2 What has long lain under our eye, and has often been employ’d to our advantage, that we are always the most unwilling to part with; but can easily live without possessions, which we never have enjoy’d, and are not accustom’d to. ’Tis evident, therefore, that men wou’d easily acquiesce in this expedient, that every one continue to enjoy what he is at present posses’d of; and this is the reason, why they wou’d so naturally agree in preferring it. (T 3.2.3.4/503–04; italics original)

There are other possible rules, of course, for demarcating property. But the rule of present possession is the one that ‘engages the attention most’ (T 3.2.3.6/505). Thus, strategic rationality is what enables us to establish general rules for the sta-

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ble possession of property, but it is the faculty of imagination which allows us to coordinate upon particular rules for determining exclusive use of these goods.3

Social Exchange and Self-Control Conventions for the stable possession of property are useful, but what if we find ourselves with a surplus of goods? In order to reap the full benefits of economic cooperation, according to Hume, we must settle upon conventions for social exchange. Different parts of the earth produce different commodities; and not only so, but different men both are by nature fitted for different employments, and attain to greater perfection in any one, when they confine themselves to it alone. All this requires a mutual exchange and commerce (T 3.2.4.1/514; cf. T 3.2.2.3/485)

It would have occurred to our ancestors by ‘plain utility and interest’, as he puts it, that they would mutually benefit from the transfer of surplus goods and services (T 3.2.4.2/515). Thus, we can say that agents enter into social exchange conventions if and only if: (A) Each agent believes that the other is strategically rational. (B) Each agent believes that social exchange would promote their individual interests. (C) Each agent believes that others believe that social exchange would promote their individual interests. (D) The beliefs in (A)–(C) produce a suitable regularity in their behaviour. Social exchange conventions would have gradually evolved, then, as strategically rational agents came to acknowledge the reciprocal advantages of trade and commerce. Hume recognizes that such conventions are difficult to explain, however, in the context of large-scale commercial societies. The problem is that the transfer of possessions in economies of any significant size will involve temporally deferred exchanges. Suppose that I promise to reimburse you next week for your goods or services today. You would not agree to the exchange unless you were assured that I will keep my word when the appropriate time comes. If we are complete strangers to each other, however, you would have no reason to believe this. Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. ’Tis profitable for us both, that I shou’d labour with you to-day, and that you shou’d aid me to-morrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my account, in expectation of a return, I know I shou’d be disappointed, and that I shou’d in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone: You treat me in the same manner.


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The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security (T 3.2.5.8/520–21).

We can trust that our friends and family will keep up their end of the bargain, according to Hume, since they are naturally concerned about our welfare; but such confidence is much harder to come by when we are dealing with strangers who are largely indifferent to our plight. Conventions for social exchange cannot be established unless strategically rational agents are assured that their partners will reciprocate. But how can they trust one another to do so? Hume proposes that strategically rational agents would recognize that it is in their long-term interests to cooperate in social exchanges. They would understand that anyone who breaks their word, as he puts it, ‘must never expect to be trusted any more’ (T 3.2.5.10/522). Hence I learn to do a service to another, without bearing him any real kindness; because I foresee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same kind, and in order to maintain the same correspondence of good offices with me or with others. And accordingly, after I have serv’d him, and he is in possession of the advantage arising from my action, he is induc’d to perform his part, as foreseeing the consequences of his refusal. (T 3.2.5.9/521)

The crucial point is that agents stake their reputations on these exchanges, and thus failure to reciprocate would deprive them of the benefits of future commerce. Even though unilateral defection is a dominant strategy in a one-shot farmer’s dilemma, in other words, this is not the case when it comes to an iterated sequence of games. Conventions for social exchange are established, therefore, because agents expect one another to act on their long-term interests. Hume recognizes that appeal to our considered interests, however, is not sufficient to explain temporally delayed sequential exchanges. The problem is that human beings have a strong psychological propensity to discount the future. [E]very thing, that is contiguous to us…commonly operates with more force than any object, that lies in a more distant and obscure light. Tho’ we may be fully convinc’d, that the latter object excels the former, we are not able to regulate our actions by this judgment; but yield to the sollicitations of our passions, which always plead in favour of whatever is near and contiguous. This is the reason why men so often act in contradiction to their known interest; and in particular why they prefer any trivial advantage, that is present, to the maintenance of order in society, which so much depends upon the observance of justice. (T 3.2.7.2–3/535)

Prudence counsels us, in other words, to reciprocate in social exchanges; but it seems that our tendency to prefer small-rewards now over large-rewards later would render us incapable of taking such advice.4

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We seem to have fallen right back into the jaws of the farmer’s dilemma. There would be no reason to cooperate in these circumstances because this propensity toward temporal discounting would become common knowledge, and as a result, strategically rational agents would expect each other to defect for the sake of short-term gains. You have the same propension, that I have, in favour of what is contiguous above what is remote. You are, therefore, naturally carry’d to commit acts of injustice as well as I. Your example both pushes me forward in this way by imitation, and also affords me a new reason for any breach of equity, by showing me, that I shou’d be the cully of my integrity, if I alone shou’d impose on myself a severe restraint amidst the licentiousness of others. (T 3.2.7.3/535)

It appears that our analysis of social exchange conventions was incomplete. Agents must not only believe that their partners recognize the advantages of social exchange; they must also believe that their partners are self-controlled enough to act on their acknowledged interests. If human beings are incapable of delayed gratification, however, this condition could never be satisfied. Strategically rational agents would not enter into delayed exchanges with shortsighted and impulsive partners. Hume recognizes that social exchange conventions could never have been established in large-scale societies if our tendency to discount the future was left unchecked.5 In order to complete his natural history of justice, therefore, he must explain how our ancestors managed to overcome this obstacle. Hume rejects any naïve solution which suggests that agents can conquer their impulsivity through strenuous effort and a ‘repeated resolution’ to be strong-willed (T 3.2.7.5/536). The remedy must, he maintains, be significantly harsher. Indeed, the only way for shortsighted agents to acquire self-control is to submit themselves to the authority of civil government. Men are not able to radically cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote. They cannot change their natures. All they can do is change their situation, and render the observance of justice the immediate interest of some particular persons, and its violation their more remote. These persons, then, are not only induc’d to observe those rules in their own conduct, but also to constrain others to a like regularity, and enforce the dictates of equity thro’ the whole society. (T 3.2.7.6/537)

Government sanctions, in contemporary terms, serve as a ‘commitment device’.6 Like alcoholics who voluntarily check themselves into a clinic, we become aware of our propensity to discount the future, and thus commit ourselves to a coercive rule of law. Governments are not established, on this account, to shelter us from others; rather, they serve to protect us from ourselves.7


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This institutional solution, however, cannot be the entire answer. For one thing, it is hard to understand why strategically rational agents would expect civil magistrates to act in a self-controlled manner. It seems the only way that they could avoid acting impulsively, after all, would be to submit to a higher coercive authority, and so on ad infinitum. Hume attempts to block this infinite regress by stipulating that the execution of justice lies in the immediate interests of the magistrates (T 3.2.7.6/537). One might wonder about the plausibility of this claim. There is a more fundamental worry, in any case, about the appeal to government as a commitment device. The problem is that the magistrates would presumably enforce social exchange conventions through punitive sanctions. But such threats would be ineffective deterrents for shortsighted and impulsive agents. If it is really the case that we discount the future, we would overlook any risk of future punishment.

Chastity and Justice We can find clues to a more promising solution in Hume’s account of chastity norms. Hume’s natural history of chastity begins with a number of prima facie plausible assumptions (T 3.2.12.3/570–71): (i.) Men and women have a common interest in raising children to maturity. (ii.) Human infants require lengthy and costly parental care. (iii.) Men prefer not to contribute to these costs unless the child is biologically related to them. (iv.) Men cannot, given the facts of human anatomy, be certain of paternity. Men face an assurance problem, then, when it comes to raising children. They are unwilling to contribute to child care unless they are assured of paternity. But how can they be confident this is the case? How can they trust, in other words, that they have not been cuckolded? It is obvious that vows of fidelity cannot solve this problem. The question is whether a particular agent is trustworthy. Thus, one cannot simply take them on their word. (In the language of game theory, this is ‘cheap talk’.) Hume also considers, and quickly rejects, the suggestion that institutional sanctions could provide the requisite security. The problem is that ‘legal proof ’, as he puts it, would be ‘difficult to meet with in this subject’ (T 3.2.12.4/571). This is not true in the court of public opinion, however, where the standards for indictment are notoriously low. What restraint, therefore, shall we impose on women, in order to counter-ballance so strong a temptation as they have to infidelity? There seems to be no restraint possible, but in the punishment of bad fame or reputation; a punishment, which has a mighty influence on the human mind, and at the same time is inflicted by the world upon

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Hume and the Enlightenment surmizes, and conjectures, and proofs, that wou’d never be receiv’d in any court of judicature. (T 3.2.12.4/571)

Women have an interest in maintaining their reputation in society. But a name can be lost upon the slightest presumption of impropriety. They will carefully avoid any situations, then, that might provoke indignation from others. Men can rest assured that their mates, in turn, will avoid any temptation of infidelity: the risks would simply be too great. This proposal does not, according to Hume, go far enough. Women have a propensity, like everyone else, to discount the future; as a result, they will naturally overlook the damage that might be done to their reputations. All human creatures, especially the female sex, are apt to over-look remote motives in favour of any present temptation: The temptation is here the strongest imaginable: Its approaches are insensible and seducing: And a woman easily finds, or flatters herself she shall find, certain means of securing her reputation, and preventing all the pernicious consequences of her pleasures. (T 3.2.12.5/572-573)

It is not sufficient for men to believe that infidelity goes against the long-term interests of their mates. Even if women acknowledge their interests in fidelity, after all, they might be unable to resist the allure of the present moment. Thus, we find ourselves back where we started. Men will not contribute to the costs of child care unless they believe that their mates are self-controlled enough to act on their acknowledged interests. If our propensity toward temporal discounting is common knowledge, however, this necessary condition would never be satisfied. Hume maintains that this assurance problem could not be solved unless men believe that their partners are disposed to feel repugnance at the very thought of infidelity. ’Tis necessary, therefore, that, beside the infamy attending such licenses, there shou’d be some preceding backwardness or dread, which may prevent their first approaches, and may give the female sex a repugnance to all expressions, and postures, and liberties, that have an immediate relation to that enjoyment. (T 3.2.12.5/572)

It is not enough for women to believe, in other words, that they would feel ashamed if their infidelity is revealed. These concerns about the future will be discounted and thus cannot override the enticement of immediate pleasures. These negative affects must occur at the moment of deliberation.8 Agents act impulsively because they overestimate the value of present goods. The only way this propensity could be corrected, then, is if these rewards were rendered less attractive. And this is precisely what is accomplished by the feelings of backwardness and dread: they serve as contrary hedonic impulses. Hume recognizes that he must account for these emotional aversions. It is prima facie implausible to maintain that women would feel repugnance, after


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all, at the ‘approaches of a pleasure, to which nature has inspir’d so strong a propensity’ (T 3.2.12.6/572). He maintains that this aversion can be explained, however, in terms of a mixture of sympathy and socialization. Those who have an interest at stake will naturally disapprove of female infidelity; but even those who lack such concerns will morally condemn any signs of immodesty because they are ‘apt to be affected with sympathy for the general interests of society’ (T 3.2.12.7/572). These chastity norms are subsequently reinforced by educators who teach women, from an early age, to look upon any impudence with a wary eye. Public censure and private education work together to insure, then, that women become disinclined toward an otherwise natural impulse. Hume’s natural history of chastity points to an alternative account of how our ancestors managed to establish conventions for delayed social exchanges. The challenge is to explain why strategically rational agents would trust their shortsighted partners to reciprocate once they have received the benefits of the exchange. The solution is that agents would not participate in these sequential exchanges unless they had reason to believe that their partners are disposed to feel repugnance at the very idea of cheating. Mutual trust is made possible, in other words, by our ‘abhorrence of injustice’ (T 3.2.2.25/500). It is the fact that you are affectively repulsed by the thought of cheating which assures me that you are not only prudent enough to recognize the advantages of reciprocal exchange, but you are also self-controlled enough to act on your acknowledged interests. Hume recognizes that he is obligated to account for this antipathy toward injustice. How could impulsive agents become disinclined toward cheating, especially when unilateral defection offers such a large short-term payoff ? Hume’s answer proceeds along the same lines as his discussion of chastity norms. Those with interests in a particular exchange will naturally disapprove of defectors, and even those without anything at stake will ‘partake of their uneasiness by sympathy’ (T 3.2.2.24/499).9 This aversion to injustice is subsequently reinforced, as with chastity norms, by private education and public rhetoric (T 3.2.2.25–26/500–01). This interpretation throws new light on Hume’s remarks about the sensible knave. Sensible knaves acknowledge that society could not exist without rules of justice, but they think it best to opportunistically violate them. That honesty is the best policy, may be a good general rule; but is liable to many exceptions: And he, it may, perhaps, be thought, conducts himself with most wisdom, who observes the general rule, and takes advantage of all the exceptions. (EPM 9.22/282–3)

Hume argues that we need not worry excessively, however, about these deviant characters. Sympathy and socialization will insure that most of us acquire an ‘antipathy to treachery and roguery’ (EPM 9.23/283). What about those who

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fail to develop these aversions? Hume concedes that such knaves exist, but he denies that they would be sensible enough to avoid detection. [W]hile they purpose to cheat with moderation and secrecy, a tempting incident occurs, nature is frail, and they give into the snare; whence they can never extricate themselves, without a total loss of reputation, and the forfeiture of all future trust and confidence with mankind. (EPM 9.24/283)

Knaves are those who lack feelings of repugnance towards cheating. But these emotions are required, as we have seen, for human beings to achieve self-control. Those who lack an antipathy to injustice, then, will inevitably succumb to the temptation to cheat, even when it is unsafe to do so.

Collective Action It is unfortunate that Hume did not pursue this sentimentalist approach to justice, since it would have enabled him to solve another important puzzle about human cooperation. Even if strategically rational agents were self-controlled, Hume recognizes, there would be many circumstances in which they could not join forces. His meadow example illustrates one such situation. Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because ’tis easy for them to know each other’s mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is, the abandoning of the whole project. But ’tis very difficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons shou’d agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and wou’d lay the whole burden on others. (T 3.2.7.8/538–9)

The draining of the meadow is a collective action problem.10 The difficulty is that each person would reap the benefits of the project, whether or not they help out with its costs. Agents would recognize that they could free-ride upon the efforts of others, therefore, and nobody would make any contributions. Let us define a collective action convention in the following terms. Individuals enter into collective action conventions if and only if: (A) Each agent believes that the other is strategically rational. (B) Each agent believes that contributing to public goods would promote their individual interests. (C) Each agent believes that others believe that contributing to public goods would promote their individual interests. (D) The beliefs in (A)–(C) produce a suitable regularity in their behaviour. The problem is that it is difficult to see how these conditions could ever be satisfied. Individuals would not believe that it was in their interests to contribute to


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public goods, nor would they expect others to arrive at this conclusion. In short, it appears that collective action would be impossible for strategically rational agents. The worry in this case is not that agents are too impulsive to act on their interests; rather, contributing to public goods was never in their interests in the first place. This problem does not arise when group size is small, according to Hume, because agents can monitor each other’s behaviour. It is much harder to keep track of free-riders, however, in the context of large-scale societies. How could our ancestors have established collective action conventions in these circumstances? Hume once again invokes governmental sanctions. The meadow never gets drained because agents prefer to let others do all the work. But if institutions were established that detect and punish free-riders, agents would be compelled to contribute to public works. Thus bridges are built; harbours open’d; ramparts rais’d; canals form’d; fleets equip’d; and armies disciplin’d; every where, by the care of government, which, tho’ compos’d of men subject to all human infirmities, becomes, by one of the finest and most subtile inventions imaginable, a composition, that is, in some measure, exempted from all these infirmities. (T 3.2.7.8/538–9)

The threat of punishment would create an incentive for agents to do their part. Governments would make it their interest, as it were, to contribute their fair share. Hume’s institutional solution once again fails, however, to provide a sufficient remedy. The central difficulty is that the invention of government is itself a collective action problem.11 Strategically rational agents would prefer that others contribute the resources required to create agencies for monitoring and enforcing participation in public works; they would prefer to reap the benefits of regulation, in other words, without incurring any of its start-up costs.12 This would not be the case for individuals, however, who have acquired feelings of repugnance to injustice. Even though such agents lack economic incentives to participate in collective action, these affections would insure that they have psychological interests in contributing their fair share. As with social exchange conventions, then, emotional aversions allow us to overcome dilemmas that prudential reasoning alone could not.

Conclusion: The Current Status of Hume’s Enlightenment Project The natural history of man was a central concern of the Scottish Enlightenment.13 But Hume anticipates that these accounts might be brushed aside as nothing but ‘chimerical speculation’ (T 3.2.12.6/572). Such proposals refer to events, after all, beyond our written records. Can they be substantiated? Or are they entirely conjectural? Hume was not in a position, of course, to evaluate his account. But it is no longer necessary to remain agnostic about its status.

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Researchers in experimental game theory and neuroeconomics have developed a novel paradigm that allows us to put it to the test. This experimental approach is admittedly in its early stages, but the results are coming in, and they are consistent with Hume’s solution to the puzzle of cooperation. Researchers have discovered that negative reward circuits in the brain become active, for example, when participants make uncooperative moves in games involving social exchange.14 It appears that this circuitry enables participants to cooperate in these games, moreover, by inhibiting their impulsive desires for immediate gratification.15 Further studies have revealed that ‘negative emotions’ also serve as the affective mechanisms which ensure that participants contribute their fair share in public goods games.16 There is a growing consensus in cognitive science that emotions play an important role in economic behaviour. The causal etiology of these affections, however, remains an open question. It is unclear to what extent, for example, they are innate or learned. Hume’s hypothesis is that our aversions to injustice result from our automatic tendency to resonate with the affections of those around us. There is some preliminary support for this proposal. Recent studies have shown that areas of the brain associated with vicariously sharing the emotions of others, for example, become active when participants make uncooperative moves in iterated prisoner’s dilemmas.17 This hypothesis, of course, requires further testing. But the crucial point is that it could provide an important research program for those interested in the puzzle of why human beings cooperate with one another to the unique extent that we do. Previous commentators have correctly emphasized the role of game-theoretic notions in Hume’s theory of justice.18 Prudential considerations clearly play a pivotal role in this account. But Hume recognizes that they cannot fully explain how creatures such as ourselves – with our propensities to discount the future and free-ride on the efforts of others – could have established justice conventions in large-scale societies of strangers. This leads him to present an innovative and plausible account of the psychological prerequisites of conventions: human beings manage to cooperate with one another because we are strategically rational creatures with a heart.

10 HUME AND RAWLS ON THE STABILITY OF A SOCIETY’S SYSTEM OF JUSTICE Ian Hunt

Introduction This chapter deals with differences between Hume and Rawls in their accounts of the requirement of stability in a society’s system of justice in order to draw out fundamental differences in the way that their ideas of justice reflect enlightenment concerns. Although Rawls’s position in Political Liberalism seems to converge with Hume’s view that justice is an artificial virtue, the key to understanding differences in their accounts of the requirement of stability for a system of justice is that their reasons for viewing justice as artificial fundamentally differ. To modern ears, to call a thing ‘artificial’ suggests that it is ‘contrived’ or not real. Hume means not this but only that our motive for justice is to uphold and play our part in property institutions, which are a human artifice, or social construction. For Hume (T 3.2.2.5/487), justice is artificial because we approve not of naturally implanted motives for individual action but of acquired motives shown in taking part in a collective practice, or institution, that society has developed over time to maintain conditions necessary for citizens to cooperate for mutual advantage, despite the potential for conflict in their competing claims to advantages that may be distributed among members of society in equal or unequal shares. This collective practice must be stable, because members of society could not otherwise be assured of mutual advantage through a peaceful settlement of competing claims to the fruits of their cooperation. Hume’s account of justice and the requirement that it be stable is thus part of an attempt to explain how justice contributes to a peaceful and prosperous society. It is part of an enlightenment project to show that norms of justice should be followed because they are empirically shown to be necessary for the peace and prosperity wanted by the overwhelming majority of any society rather than because this is what religious or traditional authority commands. – 143 –

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For Rawls, a system of justice is artificial in the sense that it should implement what he terms a ‘free standing’ political conception of justice, formed through an overlapping consensus among differing reasonable comprehensive moral viewpoints, rather than implement any particular comprehensive moral view. Such an agreed conception of justice may legitimately be enforced in a society in which citizens are taken politically to be free and equal persons. It is constructed from differing reasonable comprehensive moral viewpoints but is rationally grounded by being in wide reflective equilibrium with the reflective reasonable normative commitments of citizens. Rawls requires stability for this agreed political conception of justice, not simply because a system of justice must be practically feasible, but because citizens must be able to support a system of justice from their own convictions if the constraints of justice are to be self imposed. Stability is a precondition of adherence to constructed principles of justice for the right reasons, which enable social cooperation to be regarded as fully free. It reflects Rawls’s1 normative commitment to a free democratic society, in which free and equal citizens reasonably agree to essential social arrangements on the basis of views and values they have themselves reasonably chosen, though they may differ in important respects. Rawls thus builds on another enlightenment tradition that puts responsibility for social arrangements squarely on human beings themselves.2

Rawls on the ‘Artificial’ Virtue of Justice In Political Liberalism, Rawls3 proposes a ‘political conception of justice as a free standing view’. His reason for this is that he seeks a conception of justice that might be freely accepted within a society as the basis of an ongoing social order based on a shared notion of what is just and unjust. In societies with a plurality of reasonable comprehensive moral conceptions, it will not be possible to have a shared and free commitment within society to a notion of what is just and unjust based on any one comprehensive moral conception. And, without a freely accepted shared conception of what is just and unjust, free cooperation for mutual advantage will not be possible. Social order will be possible but will not be free, because some members of society will be forced to cooperate on terms they cannot accept as just. Rawls does not propose a conception of justice that members of society might accept as their best option for living peacefully within their society, given its existing plurality of moral viewpoints and balance of power. Instead, he4 seeks a conception of justice that will be an acceptable basis for free social cooperation over generations, stretching indefinitely far back into the past and forward into the future. The existing balance of forces, or the peculiar requirements of exist-

Hume and Rawls on the Stability of a Society’s System of Justice

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ing reasonable moral views in society, cannot therefore be assumed to shape the basic structure under Rawls’s conception of justice.5 Instead, ‘fundamental ideas’, which Rawls6 claims are implicit in the public culture of a democratic society, shape his political conception of justice. These are ideas of society as a fair system of cooperation over generations, the person as a free and equal political subject, the basic structure of society, and the idea of public justification of principles of justice for a political society, which is based on a ‘wide reflective equilibrium’ around principles supported by an ‘overlapping consensus’ among many different reasonable comprehensive moral doctrines that people choose to follow as a matter of conscience. The ground of a specification of the principles of justice that citizens see as publicly justified despite their differing moral views is a criterion of fair rules of basic structure institutions that is identified by the device of the ‘original position’. This criterion is that no occupants of social positions defined by the basic structure of society be coercively required to sacrifice their interest in access to primary goods (liberties, opportunities, income and wealth and the social bases of self-respect) in favour of the interest of occupants of other social positions.7 If we take a ‘sacrifice’ of one’s interests as getting less than one would in a just society, this reduces to the condition that occupants of social positions not be coercively required to accept less access to primary goods than they would have under rules that most advantage the least advantaged in favour of the access of occupants of other positions. Rawls’s principles of justice then spell out how this criterion applies to various institutions within the basic structure. Just institutions must bestow a system of basic liberties on all citizens equally, ensuring that they can all roughly equally take advantage of their political liberty; they must secure fair equality of opportunity for all citizens to occupy positions of advantage and responsibility; the system of distribution of income and wealth must leave the least advantaged citizens better off than they could be under any other in principle feasible distribution in human societies; and basic structure institutions must secure the social bases of self-respect for all citizens. Political justice is thus ‘artificial’ for Rawls in the sense that principles of justice are free standing with respect to any partially or fully comprehensive morality. They nevertheless are to be taken as objectively true inasmuch as they correctly guide fair, free social cooperation between free and equal political subjects, who share an understanding of right and wrong despite their different moral viewpoints. The principles of political justice are thus true principles of practical rather than theoretical reason when applied to the essential features of a democratic society. The ‘artifice’ involved in political justice is therefore the political construction of the rules of fair social cooperation.

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For Rawls,8 the political conception of justice consists of rules that citizens rationally choose to impose upon themselves. It is the realization of normative requirements of free and fair social cooperation, as opposed to forced social cooperation in any of its forms, among citizens who freely adopt their comprehensive moral viewpoints. All citizens must be prepared to adopt shared rules of fair cooperation, and abide by them, provided others do so also. And all citizens must be free to pursue their own ends through cooperation, in accordance with moral viewpoints that they have freely adopted. For Rawls, free adoption of comprehensive moral viewpoints presupposes that citizens can adopt a conception of the good to pursue, which is free from the intolerance of other citizens with different moral viewpoints. This is not simply a matter of individual freedom of conscience, since under that citizens could adopt moral views that are intolerant of different views. Freedom to adopt and pursue a conception of the good would then involve freedom to suppress others in pursuit of their views, and thus would be in conflict with the collective freedom of conscience implicit in free cooperation. Free adoption of comprehensive moral viewpoints thus presupposes what Rawls9 calls ‘reasonable’ pluralism. Freedom of conscience, consistent with reasonable pluralism, also presupposes that citizens are not internally bound by their initial views but are capable of reflecting upon and revising their conception of the good. Lacking these capacities citizens would be subject to the power of the state, public opinion or parental pressure in adopting their conception of the good. Since both the liberalisms of Mill and of Kant affirm freedom of conscience in this sense, their views of the good will meet the requirements of Rawls’s political conception of justice. Similarly, any other moral viewpoint that tolerates freedom to adopt different viewpoints will tolerate the liberalisms of Mill and Kant. Rawls10 calls such views ‘reasonable’. A society that adopts Rawls’s political conception of justice therefore has citizens who show the ‘maturity’ of daring to use their own judgement, which Kant11 thought the motto of ‘enlightenment’. Under Rawls’s12 political conception of the person, citizens are free in that they take themselves as ‘selfauthenticating sources of valid claims’. Free and equal, they are not presumed to defer to the authority of others or inherited institutions in making claims on the belief or action of others. They adopt a political conception of justice only on the basis of an overlapping consensus among their reasonable comprehensive moral viewpoints. Rawls’s just society thus takes up Rousseau’s13 notion of ‘a form of association…under which each individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before’. Its conception of justice is stable ‘for the right reasons’ because citizens adopt it as a matter of their own judgement, given their conscientiously adopted moral viewpoints.


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Hume on the ‘Artificial’ Virtue of Justice Hume, as Blackburn14 interprets him, begins instead with an expressivist account of moral judgement. On this account, Hume considers that moral judgements of natural virtue or vice express sentiments of pleasure (admiration) or pain (disgust) at the outcome of what people do in acting from their motives, from a point of view in touch with common humanity, as opposed to a personal point of view (EPM 9.6/273). This account suffers from some ambiguity. Is it the presumed motives, or the consequences of acting from them, that inspire reactions of pleasure or pain from a point of view in touch with common humanity? And how do we take into account what Hume says about what he calls ‘artificial’ virtues? Hume (T 3.2.1.2/477) says quite firmly that either praise or blame apply only to motives of action, adding that ‘the external performance has no merit’. Hume thinks that these motives cannot include in the first instance the desire to do one’s duty, because some type of action is one’s duty only if it is what virtuously motivated people do. Parental care for children could not be a duty if it were not the outcome of the natural parent affections, of which we approve. Hume seems to suggest that we do not morally react to the harm that children suffer but only to the absence of parental affection in cases of parental neglect. In the case of justice, Hume claims to find no natural motive behind it. He therefore has no direct account of why we morally praise it for the virtuous motives that lie behind it. Hume claims that we are initially moved to follow rules of justice from prudence. Hume (T 3.2.2.3/485) agrees with Hobbes that, in the absence of security of possession: In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society.15

Justice, for Hume (T 3.2.2.16/495), is the regulation of selfishness and natural but selective generosity required for a settlement of competing claims on scarce goods that yields secure possession of shares of social advantages for every one. Conventions of property for this regulation can arise because people gain on an ongoing basis from conditional cooperation around security of possessions: ‘the whole system of actions, concurr’d in by the whole society, is infinitely advantageous to the whole, and to every part’ (T 3.2.2.22/498). Hume (T 3.2.2.10/490) assumes that these conventions are established in much the same way as two men may tacitly agree to share in rowing a boat. However, Hume (T 3.2.2.12/492) does not spell out why something like this happens in the case of adherence to the rules of justice in society, although

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he assumes that we will readily enough acquire habits of justice. After all, what is to prevent the advantage that some individuals might take should they adopt the policy of accepting the protection of rules of justice provided by those who stick to them, while flouting those rules whenever that would be to their personal advantage? What would then prevent a slide into conflict when no one is willing to abide by the rules of justice because they have no confidence that others will accept a similar restraint? Hume has a potential answer to this problem implicit in his emphasis on what citizens can expect for the future. As subsequent analysis has shown,16 repeated encounters in small face-to-face societies can convert partial conflict situations, in which non-cooperative actions might seem best, into a situation where cooperation is in the self-interest of all. Repeated encounters bring with them the response that others make to earlier encounters, so that a person who is tempted by self-interest to break the rules of justice must consider the cost of some retaliatory response from others in the future. Adherence to justice can therefore, in certain conditions, arise in the way that two rowers see their interests best served by cooperating in rowing a boat. Although Hume does not explicitly spell out the conditions in which this can occur, he does cover the required conditions. Hume (T 3.2.2.24/499) is aware that large societies do not reliably impose spontaneous sanctions on people who try to take a share of the advantages without taking on a share of the burdens involved. To avoid the possibility that individuals who do not play their part will bring about a general disregard of the rights of others, society needs to reinforce prudential reasons for cooperation based on spontaneous sanctions against wrongdoing with a collective, politically organized practice of justice. Hume notes a difficulty in the way of a collective practice of justice. Motives to act justly as an individual need not have the good consequences that produce satisfaction in us upon our ‘general survey’ (T 3.2.2.24/499) of them. According to Hume (T 3.2.2.24–26/498–501), we might well feel uneasy about any act of justice in isolation, such as ‘restoring a great fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot’ (T 3.2.2.22/497), because its consequences seem ‘pernicious’ (T 3.2.2.24/499). A further difficulty is whether a collective practice of justice will suppress selfinterested motives for injustice. Hume (T 3.2.2.24/500) thinks that writers such as Hobbes are wrong to think that political sanctions could work if members of society were purely selfish. These sanctions will only work with people who have some commitment to the interests of others to counterbalance their more selfish motives. Hume thinks that people happily do have some, though limited, natural ‘sympathy’ for the interests of others. This, coupled with the natural concern of


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parents for the interests of their children, will enable a collective practice of justice to be effective, which will in turn lead to moral approval of justice. Awareness of the immense advantages of the general practice of justice leads us, through ‘sympathy’ with the interests of others in this practice or institution, to be ‘uneasy’ about even our own temptations to act in our own immediate interest. Since ‘everything, which gives uneasiness in human actions…is call’d vice’ (T 3.2.2.24/499), this thus leads us to morally condemn such motives (T 3.2.2.24/499–500). Once children are to be born into a social world where justice is established, Hume (T 3.2.2.26/500–501) thinks that natural parental concern will lead parents to cultivate a sense of justice in their children, which will counter their temptations to act contrary to the requirements of justice. Finally, the institution of justice, which is ‘artificial’ or collectively created, has the required consequences of prompting general approval, through sympathy with the interests of others, despite our spontaneous disapproval of individual acts of justice taken in isolation. Hume contrasts the increase of human happiness brought about by cumulative individual acts of benevolence with that derived from following rules of justice: The happiness and prosperity of mankind, arising from the social virtue of benevolence…may be compared to a wall, built by many hands; which still rises by each stone, that is heaped upon it…The same happiness, raised by the social virtue of justice…may be compared to the building of a vault, where each individual stone would, of itself, fall to the ground; nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts. (EPM App. 3.5/305)

With this model of justice as a social construction, Hume (T 3.2.2.22/497–8; T 3.2.6.6–11/530–4) is able to say that the dependence of the ‘whole fabric’ of any artificial virtue on ‘the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts’ requires a strict adherence to the rules of justice, because the removal of even one stone from the ‘vault’ threatens to bring the whole edifice down. This requirement of strict adherence for the advantages of justice produces the moral approval that counters any spontaneous disapproval of individual acts of justice with ‘pernicious’ consequences. Our survey of just actions thus prompts moral approval of the motives behind them only when we see them as contributing to the collective artificial practice or institution of justice (T 3.2.6.11/533–4). A society where people share motives for individual benevolence will be benevolent to the extent of that sharing. But only an institution in which members of society cooperate together in addition to sharing practices, however widely, can achieve justice. We now have an answer to the question of whether presumed motives or consequences produce the reactions of uneasiness or satisfaction, which are the basis of moral condemnation and approval. For Hume, the uneasiness or satis-

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faction that prompts moral appraisal is produced by patterns of consequences rather than by the consequences of single actions. When we judge an action virtuous we must therefore be judging the presumed motive behind it, since this causes a pattern of actions with good consequences. In the case of the natural virtues, such as generosity, or vices such as needless anger, the motive leads to patterns of good or bad consequences in individual actions. In the case of artificial virtues, the motive judged virtuous is not a motive for individual action as such. In isolation, just individual actions do not sustain patterns of consequences that lead to either uneasiness or satisfaction overall. Just actions lead to patterns of good consequences that ground moral approval only when they fall under an institution of justice. We produce patterns of good consequences only when we intend to act with others to uphold rules of justice, if others are either willing, or can be coerced by collective enforcement of justice, to do likewise: ‘’tis only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is advantageous’ (T 3.3.1.12/579). The artificial virtues are therefore motives to act collectively, or to take part in collective action, rather than to take independent just action. Hume (T 3.2.1.7/479) earlier obscures this point somewhat by claiming that ‘no action can be virtuous…unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality’ (italics original). These claims may be consistent, however, if we distinguish the motive of upholding the institution of justice from the motive of doing what one ought morally to do. The institution of justice has the benefits that lead to general approval of taking part in it only in certain conditions, which Hume (T 3.2.2.16/494) describes as ‘the concurrence of certain qualities of the human mind with the situation of external objects’, and which Rawls,17 following Hume, terms ‘the circumstance of justice’. Hume concludes from this that any notion of justice must be based in part on experience. That we have a duty of justice cannot be derived from the necessary conditions for having reasons for action. Any necessary principles of morality relating to justice can affirm only conditional duties. Nevertheless, what makes justice an ‘artificial’ virtue is not that the duty of justice has point only in certain conditions. Courage to rescue someone is a natural virtue, though it makes sense only in conditions of danger. The distinction relies rather on that between motives for individual and collective action. Justice for Hume, as it is for Rawls, is thus a shared understanding of right and wrong that is not derived from individual moral viewpoints. However, its practical function for Hume as opposed to Rawls is not to establish the basis for free cooperation that is fair according to a standard upon which different moral viewpoints may converge under conditions affirming the political conception of a person as free and equal. It is rather to foster a general practice of respect for


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possessions, or the institution of property, which is morally approved because of the good for living together in society that security of possession achieves.18 Hume assumes a general agreement on what is good and is not much concerned with the way in which security of possession is achieved, so long as it brings with it the benefits of social cooperation. The institution of property will take account of the existing balance of forces and existing tendencies to form property conventions from reciprocal interactions between individuals. We do not ask whether the rules of property are fair but only whether they foster conduct that we call ‘just’ to express approval of the overall advantages of civilization that it makes possible. The baseline against which the advantages of society are judged is what a fictional ‘state of nature’ would be like, which Hume (T 3.2.2.2/485) thinks would be as bad as Hobbes paints it. The alternative to a state of nature is society, in which human powers are conjoined to make possible levels of production and security unattainable by individual means. Happiness is thus possible in society but not in a state of nature. This recommends society in the form it has evolved through conventions established on the basis of pre-existing balances of threat advantage. Hume does not consider the possibility that there might be different terms and ways in which human powers are conjoined and, thus, simply does not consider what might be the best social alternative to the baseline of a hypothetical state of nature. This is not to say that Hume thinks that coercion based on threat advantage is all we need to establish rules of secure possession of any kind, given his belief in our natural capacity for sympathy, which at least suffices for our rejection of purely egoistic rules of possession.

Why the Stability of Justice is Important to Rawls and Hume Stability is important to a system of justice for Hume because he regards a system of justice as a modus vivendi between competing interests, established on the basis of relative threat advantage. This modus vivendi is necessary for stable security of possession, which in turn is necessary for social cooperation, upon which social benefits depend. Hume does not require any form of equal treatment for claims. Claims will be decided on the basis of a compromise between the powerful and the weak that gives enough to each to reduce incentives for open conflict. Even if social cooperation involves many relations of coercion arising from threat advantages, it still brings overall benefits to all, even the least advantaged, at least when compared with what would be their situation in its absence. In Hume’s case, without stability in a society’s system of justice, there would be no sense of justice, since there would then be no assurance as to security of possessions. Without assured security of possessions, a collective practice of justice, and the advantages of civilization it brings, cannot be had. And without the

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advantages of collective commitment to security of possessions for all citizens, we will not morally approve of just conduct, or be able to sustain or cultivate a sense of justice, as we might if justice were a natural virtue (T 3.3.1.18/584). All that would remain of our sense of justice would be the general sentiment of ‘sympathy’, which Hume (T 3.3.1.9/577) takes to be the basis of the moral point of view, especially in the case of artificial virtues, as motives to do what is good for others in society. Hume (T 2.1.11.5/318;T 3.3.1.7/576) construes sympathy as a natural capacity to enter into the minds of others, which is deficient in autistic human beings, coupled with a capacity, which is deficient in sociopaths, for our ideas of the passions of others to become, through their immediate presence and resemblance to our own, as ‘lively’ and as moving as our own passions. In the absence of the institution of justice, sympathy cannot take the form of an abstract concern with the good of others on an equal footing, but will be a concrete concern for the good of particular others in particular circumstances (T 3.3.1.14/580–81). Rawls demands a stable system of justice for quite different reasons. He19 is concerned with stability ‘for the right reasons’. Since Rawls is concerned with justice as the framework of free social cooperation, a modus vivendi around a system of justice among people with different general moral standpoints and different interests will not suffice. Instead, the ideal is that all members of a just society could freely and conscientiously decide that they will uphold its system of justice, if not as an immediate consequence of their moral views, then at least because taking such a system as just would fit best with their intuitions and moral views, in what Rawls terms ‘wide reflective equilibrium’. The ideal of free social cooperation as the basis of a liberal democratic political society is what leads Rawls to his view of Political Liberalism, once he saw that even tolerant comprehensive liberal conceptions, such as those of Mill or Kant, would have to forced on people with different moral conceptions as the basis of their society’s system of justice, and would thus constitute a ‘fact of oppression’ within such societies. That everyone has good reasons from their own moral standpoints to comply with the requirements of justice is the first basis of stability for the right reasons. The second basis of stability for the right reasons is that social positions in a just society will shape the interests and sense of justice of those who occupy them so that they will want to return to those just arrangements if they are disturbed by war, natural disaster, or other emergencies. For Rawls, the sense of justice is a fundamental concern, separate from a concern for the good of our selves or others, for the way we balance the claims of people arising in the course of free cooperation. It should be stable through changes in threat advantages and the balance of force of opinion between different moral viewpoints. It can be conceived as the basis of arrangements for shares


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of the burdens and benefits of free social cooperation from indefinitely far back into the past and indefinitely far forward to the future. It is thus fundamentally different from Hume’s sense of justice. The sense of justice for Hume is the sense of what is due to others arising from a concern with not only our own interests but also, through sympathy, with the interests of others, which satisfy everyone’s interests as much as is possible, given existing threat advantages. Hume thus provides an essentially non-normative account of justice as found in society. With this account, he takes himself to have shown on the basis of empirical evidence that society’s arrangements for protection of property contribute to its prosperity and happiness. This enables him to sidestep the question of what authority our social norms have over our conduct. We need not invoke some higher authority, such as the will of God, tradition or the light of reason, to govern our inclinations. Citizens will be persuaded by their capacities for judgement and understanding (T 3.2.2.9/489) to continue their support for justice because they want the best chance of pursuing their happiness, given their circumstances, and believe on the basis of empirical evidence that strict adherence to the rules of justice, as they have emerged over time, is necessary for a stable, prosperous society in which they will have that chance (EPM App. 3.9/307).20

Two Strands of the Enlightenment Project The convergence between Hume and Rawls on the artificiality of justice, coupled with their divergence on the importance of its stability and of the sense of justice, highlights two different strands of the enlightenment project. Hume represents one strand because he thinks that our sound customs reflect common experience with the requirements of living in society and should be accepted on that basis, for their advantages, rather than on the basis of some authority that is not grounded in the experience or judgement of individual human beings (Es 467). Hume (Es 475) is not much concerned with the issue of by what authority society may impose rules of justice on citizens who do not voluntarily enter into it, as they might enter an association. Hume (Es 480) takes political obedience to be one of the artificial virtues and, like them, to be practised because it is necessary for the advantages of society. Hume (Es 480–1) thinks it absurd to try to found political obedience on a conditional contract, since the obligations of contract are also artificial virtues. We carry out contractual obligations because this practice is the basis of some of the immense advantages of society. Neither political obedience nor contractual obligation ultimately grounds the other but have a common ground in the necessities of social cooperation for mutual advantage (Es 481). Hume (Es 486) does not take seriously the normative issue of the conditions under which we ought to obey the state. Hume argues that legitimate authority

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can only be treated as a matter of possession of power to rule. This must ultimately derive from voluntary acquiescence, since no one could otherwise acquire the power to force others to submit (Es 468–9) but, once established, maintains itself. It is at best pointless and, at worst, dangerous to suggest that citizens are obliged to obey a ruler only if they receive justice and protection in return (Es 469–70). In Kant’s21 terms, Hume only subscribes to the hypothetical imperative that, if one wants the advantages of society, then one ought to obey the state underpinning the stability of the conditions, including the received rules of justice, that are necessary for those advantages. Whether the state ought regardless to support the conditions under which the political concept of the person as free and equal can be realized under the rules of justice within a society is of no consequence for Hume. The other strand of the enlightenment project is concerned with the political concept of persons as free and equal members of society. It is concerned with the issue of by what authority our values command our actions, rejecting any external imposition that would compromise the political standing of citizens as free and equal. For Kant,22 it is concerned with the dignity that citizens acquire when they make their own decisions about what they are to believe and what laws they ought to follow. Kant is not concerned that people who hold positions thereby have duties to make decisions and express views conforming with their positions. However, when people assume the responsibilities of citizens, they take on a ‘public’ rather than ‘private’ voice,23 where they must make up their own minds on pain of abandoning their claim to be free and equal: ‘The touchstone of whatever can be decided as law for a people lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law on itself ’.24 For Kant, the legislative authority of the state rests on its laws expression of the collective will of the people. Hume (Es 477–8), representing the enlightenment project of seeking empirical grounds for a prosperous and happy society, is happy enough for citizens simply to accept traditional views of legitimate authority. Kant,25 representing the enlightenment project of defining the conditions under which citizens are politically respected as free and equal, takes citizens to be mature as human beings only if they take ultimate responsibility for the laws under which they live. On Rawls’s Kantian view, political authority is possible only if the state is constituted so that citizens have the rights and duties presupposed by their being taken as free and equal. From an impartial, reasonable point of view citizens ‘in effect try to fashion a certain social world; they regard the social world as not given by history, but, at least in part, as up to them’.26 Citizens do not simply make a rational choice to obey the state as necessary means to the advantages of society but accept a form of government that is subject to reasonable constraints,27 given their political acknowledgement of citizens as free and equal.


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The sense of justice of citizens is not, as it is for Hume, a solemn way to bestow the highest honour and approval on arrangements necessary for mutual benefit in social cooperation, but a form of respect for the claims of citizens, taken as free and equal, for fair shares of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation. The stability of justice for Rawls reflects that acknowledgement: to be stable in Rawls’s28 sense, a system of justice must be capable of generating over generations a reasoned informed overlapping consensus among reasonable comprehensive moral viewpoints that suffices to disarm motives for injustice. These two strands of the enlightenment project, as represented in the views of Hume and Rawls on the stability of society’s system of justice, invoke two ways of guiding our conduct. Hume takes for granted our wants. To improve human affairs we must have a better understanding of what these wants are and of how we can go about fulfilling them. Hume thinks that social institutions are the key to ensuring that the immense advantages of civilization seen against what we can suppose our human condition would be in its absence. A moral science based in experience is needed to guide our conduct toward more effective social institutions, especially in those rare moments when it is safe to improve upon them. Rawls, on the other hand, looks for a social ideal where our conduct is guided by justice. This ideal is not found by asking what changes could we make to the societies we inherit from the past. Instead it asks the question of what rules we would reasonably choose for an ongoing system over generations that would embody the ideal of free social cooperation between citizens taken politically as free and equal. Rawls seeks a guide for improved human affairs that does not take our wants and values as historically given but asks what people would decide if they had the maturity to take their own rational and reasonable judgement as their final authority.

11 CAN HUME’S IMPRESSIONS OF REFLECTION REPRESENT? Anna Stoklosa

David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment The impact of the numerous intellectual advancements that took place during the Scottish Enlightenment continues to be quite considerable, as the ideas of the period’s great thinkers – David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and others – continue to be discussed today. One of the key disciplines of the Scottish Enlightenment was moral philosophy and it is in this field that Hume made some of his most original contributions. Hume’s moral philosophy is contained primarily in the third book of A Treatise on Human Nature, which was later recast as An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. An adequate understanding of Hume’s moral philosophy, however, is predicated on an adequate understanding of Hume’s views on the passions, as many claims made in Book 2 of the Treatise are foundations for the claims he subsequently develops in Book 3.1 An examination of Hume’s views on the passions – or, more specifically, what he classifies as the indirect passions – reveals an elegant account that is marred by seemingly anomalous claims made in paragraph 2.3.3.5 of the Treatise. Although Hume’s extensive discussion of the passions both prior to and after 2.3.3.5 makes it clear that passions are intentional or directed, in 2.3.3.5, he seems to deny that passions represent anything. These views are generally taken by scholars to contradict each other. Two approaches to resolving the tension have therefore been offered: Annette Baier’s argument to dismiss 2.3.3.5 as anomalous and Rachel Cohon and David Owen’s argument to shift the passions’ representation onto the ideas associated with the passions. I will argue, however, that neither of these approaches is adequate, and, moreover, that both rest on a mistaken interpretation of the claims of 2.3.3.5. I discuss an alternative interpretation of 2.3.3.5 and consider several challenges that can be raised against it. I close by suggesting what Hume’s indirect passions do represent. – 157 –

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Hume’s Metaphysics Hume defines everything that enters the mind as perceptions, which are exhaustively divided into impressions and ideas (T 1.4.2.7/190). Impressions temporally precede ideas, and include all of the sensations, passions or emotions that may appear in the soul; ideas are the faint images of impressions (T 1.1.1.1/1–2; T 3.1.1.1/455–6). Hume grounds the difference between impressions and ideas in the degree of force and liveliness with which these perceptions strike upon the mind.2 Hume is quite clear on this point – it can be found restated multiple times in the Treatise,3 as well as in the Abstract and the Enquiry. In the Treatise, for example, Hume notes that impressions are ‘those perceptions, which enter [the mind] with the most force and violence’ while ideas are their faint images (T 1.1.1.1/1–2). In the Abstract it is succinctly noted that impressions are those of our perceptions which are strong and lively, while ideas are those perceptions which are weak and faint (T Abs. 5/647). In the Enquiry, Hume similarly notes that our impressions are those of our perceptions which are more lively, whereas our ideas are those perceptions which are less lively (EHU 2.3/18). In short, it is vivacity that constitutes the ‘official distinction’ – to borrow Owen’s phrasing – between Hume’s impressions and ideas.4 It seems, however, that Hume holds not merely that vivacity is the official difference between impressions and ideas, but that vivacity constitutes the only difference between them.5 This becomes evident on a closer reading of many instances in which Hume expounds on the difference between impressions and ideas. He says, for example, that our ideas and impressions greatly resemble one another in every particular except vivacity – in all other respects, the one seems to be a reflection of the other (T 1.1.1.3/2–3). Moreover, since ‘[t] he component parts of ideas and impressions are precisely alike’, he points out that the different degrees of their force and vivacity can be the only particulars that distinguish them (T 2.1.11.7/318–19; emphasis added). The two kinds of perceptions, he states elsewhere, differ only in the degrees of force and vivacity with which they strike upon the soul (T 1.3.7.5/96; T 2.1.11.7/318–19) and strength and vivacity are the only differences between them (T 1.1.7.5/19). And, according to him, an idea, although fainter than an impression, is the same in all other respects (T 1.3.1.7/72–3). Hume’s metaphysics of the mind, however, is far more complex than a division of perceptions into impressions and ideas on the grounds of their vivacity; he also divides perceptions into simple and complex, on the grounds of differences in their internal structures. Simple perceptions are those that cannot be further separated, while complex perceptions are those that can be separated into further parts (T 1.1.1.2/2). Mapping Hume’s division of our perceptions

Can Hume’s Impressions of Reflection Represent?

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into simple and complex, onto his division into ideas and impressions, then, generates a four-way taxonomy of perceptions: simple impressions, simple ideas, complex impressions and complex ideas. What are the relationships between these four types of perceptions? Let us consider, first, the relationships between simple perceptions. This relationship is described by the copy thesis, which holds that ‘all of our simple ideas … are derived from simple impressions which are correspondent to them and which they exactly represent’ (T 1.1.1.7/4). The phrasing of the copy thesis suggests that impressions causally precede ideas, and this, in fact, is Hume’s view, as he states in the following paragraph that simple impressions always precede simple ideas, and their causal ordering is never inverted (T 1.1.1.7/4; T 1.1.1.8/4–5). The copy thesis, however, does not merely convey Hume’s views regarding the causal relationship between simple perceptions; it also informs about their content relationship. In other words, in addition to claiming that simple impressions causally precede simple ideas, the copy thesis also points out that the content of our simple ideas is derived from our simple impressions. Hume repeatedly endorses the content claim in the Treatise. He says, for example, that ‘[o]ur ideas are copy’d from our impressions, and represent them in all their parts’ (T 1.3.7.5/96).6 Moreover, the impression of red and the idea of red are different only in degree – not in nature (T 1.1.1.5/3–4). Finally, he notes that whenever we vary an idea of a particular object, the only changes that can take place are an exacerbation or attenuation of that idea’s vivacity – were we to make other changes to the idea, that idea would represent a different impression (T 1.3.7.5/96). Thus, the content of our simple ideas is not merely derived – it is copied from our impressions. Just as simple ideas are caused by simple impressions, so, too, complex ideas are caused by complex impressions (T 1.3.14.4/157).7 Surprisingly enough, Hume does not devote much space to discussing the causal relationship between complex ideas and complex impressions. Nevertheless, coupling the instances where he does claim that there is a causal relationship between complex ideas and complex impressions, with his unwavering commitment to the claim that impressions cause ideas8 strongly suggests that he does, indeed, hold this view. What of the content relationship between the complex perceptions? Here, we have a shift away from the copy relationship that obtains between their simple counterparts. To borrow Hume’s example, we may have seen Paris (and thus formed a complex impression of it). As it is impossible, however, that our idea of Paris will perfectly replicate all of its structures, streets, etc, in veridical proportions, Hume concludes that although our complex impressions and ideas greatly resemble one another they are not copies of each other (T 1.1.1.5/3–4). That is, whereas the content of simple ideas copies the content of simple impressions, the content of complex ideas ‘merely’ resembles the content of their correspond-

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ent impressions. Both simple and complex perceptions, however, obey the same causal order: impressions precede ideas. Hume’s taxonomy of perceptions is not yet complete, however, as there is yet another way of taxonomising our perceptions. In addition to dividing our ideas and impressions into simple and complex, Hume further sub-divides our impressions into impressions of sensation, and impressions of reflection (T 1.1.2.1/7–8).9 The distinction between the two types of impressions – viz. impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection – is drawn in terms of their causal history. With regard to impressions of sensations, Hume thinks that we can only make a negative causal claim about their causes – that is, we can know only that impressions of sensation are not caused by any antecedent perception (T 1.1.2.1/7–8). Whether they are caused by the constitution of the body, created by the mind or by God, caused by the animal spirits, or by the application of objects to the external organs, we do not and cannot know, according to Hume (T 1.3.5.2/84; T 2.1.1.1/275).10 On the other hand, the causes of the impressions of reflection are knowable. An impression of reflection is a result of the following causal sequence: an impression of sensation causes an idea of sensation, which in turn causes an impression of reflection (T 1.1.2.1/7–8; T 2.1.1.1–2/275–6). To borrow Hume’s own example, suppose that an impression of sensation (e.g. of heat or cold, or thirst or hunger, or some pleasure or pain), strikes our senses. The mind copies this impression of sensation into an idea of sensation. This idea of sensation then causes a new impression – of, say, desire or aversion, or of hope or fear. This new impression is the impression of reflection, which, according to Hume, can be subsequently copied by memory or by imagination, and thus produce further ideas (T 1.1.2.1/7–8).11

Hume’s Passions Where do the passions fit in on this complicated picture? Recall that, at the most general level, Humean perceptions are divided into impressions and ideas, and they are further divided into simple and complex perceptions. On this taxonomical picture, Hume categorizes passions as impressions; some passions are simple impressions, whereas others are complex impressions. The passions of pride and humility, for example, are simple impressions, which cannot be further broken down into their constituents (T 2.1.2.1/277; T 2.2.3.1/347), while the passions of anger and benevolence – formed from a mixture of simple passions – are complex impressions (T 2.2.6.3/367). In addition to classifying passions as impressions, recall that Hume further sub-divides impressions into impressions of sensation and impressions of


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reflection. At the beginning of Book 2 of the Treatise – Of the passions – Hume sets aside the subject of impressions of sensation, because their subject would lead him too far astray from the topic under current consideration – namely, the passions (T 2.1.1.1/ 275). This implicitly suggests that passions are impressions of reflection rather than impressions of sensation. We need not, however, rely solely on this implicit suggestion, as Hume also makes explicit his view that the passions are impressions of reflection, pointing out that ‘the impressions of reflection, viz. passions, desires and emotions … arise mostly from ideas’ (T 1.1.2.1/7–8) and that ‘impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions’ (T 1.1.6.1/15–16). The taxonomy does not terminate at the point of classifying passions as impressions of reflection, however. One further, original division12 of the passions is introduced here: into those that are direct and those that are indirect. Direct passions are those that arise immediately from pleasure and pain, and include: desire, aversion, grief, joy, hope, fear, despair and security. Indirect passions arise from pleasure and pain, in conjunction with other qualities.13 Indirect passions include: pride, humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, generosity and their dependents (T 2.1.1.4/ 276–7).14 Given this very extensive metaphysical taxonomy, it seems rather odd to encounter Hume’s claim at the beginning of Treatise Book 2 – Of the passions – that passions, such as pride, humility, love and hatred, cannot be defined (T 2.1.2.1/277; T 2.3.3.5/ 415).15 But while we cannot define passions, Hume holds that it is possible to describe them – by ‘enumerating the circumstances which attend them’ (T 2.1.2.1/277). Among those ‘circumstances’ we may include Hume’s account of the object of the passions. In case of the passions of pride and humility, the passion’s object is the idea of the self (T 2.1.2.2/277).16 The self here is understood as ‘that person of whose thoughts, actions and sensations we are intimately conscious’ (T 2.2.1.2/329–30). It is to the passion’s object – viz. the idea of the self – that we direct our attention or focus when we feel the passion of pride or humility (T 2.1.2.2/277). If our idea of our selves is advantageous, we feel pride – if it is not advantageous, we feel humility (T 2.1.2.2/ 277). The object and the cause of the Humean passion are not identical, however (T 2.1.2.3/ 277–8). What can cause the passions? According to Hume, the causes of our passions are varied and multitude. Taking pride as an example, this passion may be caused by: the qualities of our minds, such as imagination, judgement, memory or disposition; the properties of our bodies, including their beauty, strength, agility, dexterity; or the properties of our possessions, including our country, family, children, riches, horses, etc (T 2.1.2.5/278–9; T 2.2.8.4/273– 4). While the causes of the passion of pride are multitude and varied, all of these

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causes have to bear some relation to the self (T 2.1.2.5/278–9; T 2.1.2.6/279; T 2.1.6.3/291). Knowing that the object of the passion of pride is the idea of the self and that the cause of the passion of pride has to bear a close relation to that self, however, does not yet constitute a full account of indirect passions. What is missing is an account of how these elements come together. This is described by the double relation of impressions and ideas. To generate this double relation, according to Hume, we need to couple two properties of the causes of passions to two properties of the passions themselves. The two properties of the causes of the passions are that the causes of the passions are closely related to our selves, and that the causes of the passions produce a pain or pleasure (independent of the pleasure or pain that is produced by the passions themselves) (T 2.2.5.5/359; T 2.1.5.2/285). The two properties of the passions themselves are that the passions’ object (in case of pride and humility) is the idea of the self (T 2.1.5.3/285–6) and that the passion produces a sensation of pleasure (in case of pride) or pain (in case of humility) (T 2.1.5.4/286; T 2.1.5.5/286–7). To borrow Hume’s example, suppose that I am proud of my beautiful house. The cause of the passion (idea A, my house) causes the passion of pride. The cause (idea A, my house) is closely related to the object of the passion (idea B, myself ). The cause (idea A, my house) separately causes a sensation (impression A, pleasure). This sensation (impression A, pleasure) is related to the sensation of the passion (impression B, pleasure). It is from this double relation of ideas and impressions that ‘the passion is derived’ (T 2.1.5.5/286–7). The final important property of the Humean passions is that they are of or for or about someone or something. According to Hume, one may be proud of, for example, her beautiful possessions, her excellent memory, or strong body (T 2.1.9.1303–04; T 2.1.2.5/278–9; T 2.2.8.4/373–4); she may love her family (T 2.2.1.4/330), or be humbled by what is ugly in her (T 2.1.8.5/300–01). In other words, Humean passions are intentional or directed.

T 2.3.3.5 and the Directedness of the Passions Given the directedness of the Humean passions, what, then, are we to make of Hume’s claims in the following paragraph? A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification. When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. ’Tis impossible, therefore, that this passion can be oppos’d by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists


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in the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent. (T 2.3.3.5/415; emphases added)

The key claim in this paragraph appears to be that passions do not represent anything.17 Indeed, 2.3.3.5 has been interpreted as making precisely this claim, and consequently, is taken to be in tension with Hume’s view that the passions are intentional, or directed. Kenny, for example, notes that Hume ‘denies very explicitly the intentionality of the passions in [2.3.3.5]’,18 and Penelhum points out that 2.3.3.5’s denial of the intentionality of the passions is a wildly implausible one.19 In a similar vein, Annette Baier writes that, given Hume’s clear recognition of the directedness of the passions throughout Book 2 of the Treatise, the claims of 2.3.3.5 are unrepresentative of Hume’s views on the passions.20 In a joint paper, Rachel Cohon and David Owen similarly argue that 2.3.3.5’s contents are in conflict with the directedness of the passions.21 In his response to Cohon and Owen’s article, Sayre-McCord reiterates their point that Hume denies passions’ representationality in 2.3.3.5, and agrees that this causes a problem for Hume, as that claim flies in the face of the intentionality of the passions.22

Solutions to the Problem? 1. Annette Baier’s Approach Given the perception of the tension between the contents of 2.3.3.5 and the directedness of the passions, one resolution to this problem, put forth by Baier, has been simply to label 2.3.3.5 ‘anomalous’ and dismiss its contents.23 According to Baier, Hume clearly endorses passions’ directedness, up until his claims in 2.3.3.5. What, she asks, happened in 2.3.3.5? ‘Is this passage a temporary aberration, an atypical and counter-productive blind swipe at his rationalist opponents? Was [Hume] so ‘possest with the passion’ of antirationalist zeal, ‘so carry’d away by the Heat of Youth & Invention’ that he misrepresented his own views, the views he had been spelling out with such appreciative detail in the preceding parts of Book Two?’24 Whatever the explanation, Baier thinks that Hume seems to have repented the claims of 2.3.3.5, since we do not find them repeated in either of the two Enquiries, or in the Dissertation on the Passions. She concludes, therefore, that Hume himself came to see the defects of his claims in 2.3.3.5, and we are thus justified in regarding 2.3.3.5 as an anomaly.25 While, admittedly, 2.3.3.5 does contain claims that may not seem to be prima facie consistent with the directedness of the passions, its dismissal as ‘anomalous’ is unwarranted for two reasons. First, dismissing the paragraph as anomalous does nothing to shed light on its contents. To be fair to Baier, she does think that no light can be shed on its contents. I think, however, that she gives up

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on explaining the claims of 2.3.3.5 too quickly, as, seemingly, think Cohon and Owen who argue that it is possible to reconcile the claims of 2.3.3.5 with Hume’s views on directedness of the passions.26 Second, it is not clear why one would expect a recapitulation of the claims of 2.3.3.5 in either of the Enquiries or in the Dissertation on the Passions. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is a recasting of Book 1 of the Treatise – Of the Understanding. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals is a recasting of Book 3 of the Treatise – Of Morals. One should not expect to find a recapitulation of 2.3.3.5 in either work, as 2.3.3.5 is contained in Book 2 of the Treatise. If the claims of Treatise Book 2 were to be found in Hume’s other writings, the most plausible place for this could only be the Dissertation on the Passions – which does draw on Book 2 of the Treatise (Of the Passions). However, the Dissertation is only about one-sixth as long as Book 2: they are approximately 10,500 words and 61,400 words long, respectively. Beauchamp estimates that between the shortening of the Dissertation, and the contents of the Dissertation that did not originate from the Treatise, only approximately 12% of Book 2 made its way into the Dissertation.27 Much of Treatise’s richness was therefore lost28 and consequently, it is unreasonable to expect to find a recapitulation of 2.3.3.5 even in the Dissertation – the work whose contents most closely resemble those of Treatise Book 2.

2. Rachel Cohon and David Owen’s Approach Cohon and Owen do agree with Baier that the contents of 2.3.3.5 appear to be in tension with the passions’ directedness. However, rather than dismissing 2.3.3.5 as anomalous, as Baier does, Cohon and Owen attempt to reconcile its claims with the directedness of the passions. In order to do so, first they turn to establishing what Hume means by representation. To this end, they rely on the contents of the Copy Thesis, from which they derive the following account of representation. If perception B, is to represent another perception A: 1. perception B must be caused by perception A, and 2. perception B must resemble, perhaps even be a copy of, perception A.29 Thus, for example, if an impression is to represent another perception (idea, say), the impression must be caused by the idea, and the impressions must copy or resemble the idea. Thus, Cohon and Owen think that Hume says in 2.3.3.5 that passions fail to represent because the passions fail the second condition for representationality.30 The directedness of the passions, however, still needs to be accounted for. Cohon and Owen do not think, however, that a passion’s failure to represent


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need constitute a problem for its directedness. The thrust of their solution for reconciling 2.3.3.5’s claims with Hume’s views on the directedness of the passions consists in shifting the representation away from the passions themselves. They note that although for Hume, a passion ‘doesn’t itself represent another; [the passion] is associated with ideas…and Hume has no problem with ideas representing’.31 Thus, Cohon and Owen suggest that we can account for the directedness of the passions by adverting to the representationality of the ideas that are associated with the passions.32 There is, however, a problem with this argument. Cohon and Owen advocate accounting for the directedness of the passion by relying on the representation of the ideas associated with the passion. However, as Sayre-McCord notes, and I agree, if this strategy were successful, this would only show how the ideas that are associated with the passions are directed; it would not show how it is that the passions themselves are directed.33 Thus, Cohon and Owen’s strategy brings us no closer to reconciling the directedness of the passions with the contents of 2.3.3.5.

Motivation for an Alternative Approach A shift in approach is therefore called for. The direction in which this shift ought to occur becomes apparent once we examine the motivation underlying Baier’s and Cohon and Owen’s approaches. Their respective arguments are predicated on the view that Hume denies passions’ representationality in 2.3.3.5. I think, however, that this view is incorrect – it is not the case that Hume denies representationality of the passions in 2.3.3.5. Before turning to the argument, however, let us briefly pause to discharge a preliminary challenge – why should we think that Hume does not deny the passions’ representationality in 2.3.3.5? I think that there are two reasons for this. Hume’s claims about directedness of the passions are the first reason – showing that passions are representational would obviate a tension that obtains between Hume’s claims in 2.3.3.5 and the rest of the Humean corpus. Both Baier’s and Cohon and Owen’s approaches rest on the view that this tension ought to be resolved, and in this, I think, they are right. The second reason for holding that Hume does not deny representationality of the passions in 2.3.3.5 is linked to Hume’s view about the difference between impressions and ideas. Recall that Hume holds that vivacity is the only distinction between impressions and ideas. If ideas represent, then so too should impressions (and therefore so should the passions, which are a species of impressions for Hume). Ideas clearly do represent for Hume. He points out, for example, that ‘[i]deas always represent their objects or impressions’ (T 1.3.14.6/157–8) notes that every simple idea represents a simple impression (T 1.1.1.6/4), and, more generally, that our ideas represent our impressions (T 1.1.1.12/7). He goes even

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as far as to claim that every idea is nothing but a representation of an impression (T 1.3.14.6/157–8). Since Humean ideas clearly do represent, and, according to Hume, vivacity is the only distinction between ideas and impressions, Humean passions, therefore, should also represent.

Re-reading T 2.3.3.5 But how to reconcile this with Hume’s purported denials of passions representation in 2.3.3.5? Let us closely re-read Hume’s claims in 2.3.3.5. Two claims are made about representation in this paragraph. First, Hume says that ‘a passion… contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification’ and second, ‘’[t]is impossible, therefore, that this passion can be…contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent’ (T 2.3.3.5/415; emphases added). Scholars read Hume here to be saying here that passions are non-representational tout court. But notice that in each instance, the non-representationality claims are made in reference to a particular notion of representation – namely, representation understood as a copy. That is, what Hume seems to be rejecting in 2.3.3.5 is the claim that passions represent by being copies of anything. This does not, however, entail a rejection of passions’ representation tout court. And if 2.3.3.5’s claims deny to the passions only one particular form of representationality (rather than representationality tout court), then 2.3.3.5’s claims are consistent with Hume’s views on directedness of the passions. This approach – while offering a resolution of the tension between Hume’s claims in 2.3.3.5 and his views on directedness of the passions – is not immune to challenges, however. Three challenges appear to be especially pressing. First, Hume repeatedly links copy-ness34 and representation in his work. The question that arises, therefore, is whether he has a metaphysical space for an account of representation that does not rely on copy-ness or resemblance. Second, Hume also claims in 2.3.3.5 that passion is an ‘original existence’ – if this is the case, how can a passion be representational? Finally, one may also object here that it is the entire double relation of impressions and ideas – rather than any one of its elements – that carries the passions’ representational burden for Hume. As such, it seems plausible to interpret Hume’s claims in 2.3.3.5 as denying representationality only to impressions of reflection without thereby undermining the directedness of the Humean passions. Let us consider each of these in turn. Consider, first, the question of whether there is a metaphysical space for a non-copy or non-resemblance account of representation in the Humean metaphysics. Admittedly, there are plenty of reasons to hold that Hume understands representation to involve a copying or resemblance relationship. Hume explicitly links copy-ness and representation when pointing out that ‘since all ideas


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are deriv’d from impressions, and are nothing but copies and representations of them, whatever is true of the one must be acknowledg’d concerning the other’ (T 1.1.7.5/19; emphasis added) and that ‘[a]n idea is a weaker impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its copy or representative’ (T 1.1.7.5/19; emphasis added). Hume also – although somewhat more tenuously – links copy-ness and representation in the Copy Thesis, which holds that ‘all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent’ (T 1.1.1.7/4; emphasis removed). ‘Correspondence’ need not equate ‘copy’ or ‘resemblance’ but it seems plausible to interpret Hume’s ‘correspondence’ to mean just that, as the Copy Thesis immediately follows a claim that simple ideas resemble simple impressions and that we may therefore affirm that simple ideas and simple impressions exactly correspond (T 1.1.1.6/4). Copy-ness (or resemblance) and representation thus appear to be intimately linked for Hume. Nevertheless, one must be cautious not to read these claims as stronger than they actually are. These claims clearly do link copy-ness (or resemblance) and representation. They do not, however, deny non-resemblance representation. There is, moreover, plenty of textual evidence supporting the view that Hume permits representation in cases where the representing and the represented bear no resemblance to each other at all. This view is most clearly conveyed in Hume’s discussion of the representationality of words. He points out, for example, that words represent objects and facts (T 1.3.9.12/ 112–13). Eloquence of words, similarly, may represent objects in strong and lively colours (Dis 6.16). This view is reiterated, nearly verbatim, in the Treatise, where Hume claims that eloquence permits objects to be ‘represented in their strongest and most lively colours’ (T 2.3.6.7/426–7). It is also with words, Hume says, that Homer represents Achilles’ heroism and Ulysses’ prudence (Es 228). Words, then, which do not resemble anything, clearly can represent for Hume. Entities other than words – which likewise do not resemble anything – are also said to represent by Hume. Our actions, for example, represent. In religion, a habit or a grimace can represent the mysteries of the faith (T 3.2.4.2/515– 16); in law, the giving of stone and earth represents delivery of a property (T 3.2.4.2/515–16). The deeds of an ambitious stepmother may be represented in tragedies as bloody and dreadful (Es 140) and our virtuous sentiments may be represented in tragedies as divine (Es 247). Objects may also represent, as money implies a kind of representation of beautiful objects (T 2.2.5.6/359–60), and riches represent the goods of life (T 2.2.5.6/359–60).35 None of these representations resemble their representata, yet Hume quite clearly thinks that they do

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represent. Passion’s failure to resemble or copy anything thus likewise does not preclude their representationality. The second problem for interpreting 2.3.3.5 as consistent with representationality of the passions, however, arises from Hume’s other claim in 2.3.3.5 – one asserting that the passions are original existences. If passions are original existences, however, how can they possibly represent anything?36 I do not think that the originalness of the passions needs to preclude their representationality. This is because Hume uses the term ‘original’ in a number of ways. Hume uses ‘original’ for example, to mean a cause (T 1.1.3.2/9; EHU 2.1, 17), to indicate an inexplicable property of human nature (T 1.1.4.6/12–13), to mean something new (T 1.3.6.3/87–8; T 1.3.14.4/157), to mean ‘not preceded by any other perception’ (T 2.1.1.1/275). He also uses ‘original’ to indicate a foundational property from which others are derived (T 2.1.3.3/280), to mean ‘unique’ (T 2.1.3.5/281–2), and to point out that something is a natural property (Dis 3.6). It therefore does not seem necessary to interpret ‘original’ as somehow precluding representation. Moreover, Hume also notes that ‘these qualities, which we must consider as original, are such as are most inseparable from the soul’ (T 2.1.3.3/280; emphasis added). Thus, passion’s originality – far from precluding representation – may simply be underscoring the passions’ intimate connection to the self. There is yet one other challenge that could be raised here – namely that Hume does indeed deny representationality in 2.3.3.5 – but only to impressions of reflection. It is the entire experience of the passions – the double relation of impressions and ideas – rather than any element in particular that carries the passions’ representational load, and thus, the claims in 2.3.3.5 are consistent with Hume’s views on directedness of the passions. The problem with this approach, however, is that it is not consistent with Hume’s claims. In addition to laying out the complex structure of the double relation of impressions and ideas, Hume goes to some lengths to specify what the different components of the double relation of impressions and ideas represent. Recall, Hume holds that the passion is placed between two ideas, where ‘[t]he first idea…represents the cause, the second, the object of the passion’ (T 2.1.2.4/278; emphasis original). The idea of the cause (idea A of the double relation of impressions and ideas) represents the beautiful house; the idea of the object of the passion (idea B of the double relation of impressions and ideas), represents the self. The move that it is the entire double relation (rather than any of its particular elements) that carries the passions’ representational load (thus accounting for the passions’ directionality) is thus not a viable one.


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What do Hume’s Passions Represent? The question that arises here, however, is just what it is that Hume’s passions – impressions of reflection – do represent? This is not entirely clear, as Hume himself does not discuss this. However, I can offer here a tentative suggestion of what I think Hume would hold is the passions’ representata. To this end, let us first establish what the passions do not represent. Hume’s passion is placed between two ideas – the first of which represents the cause of the passion, and the second of which represents the object of the passion (T 2.1.2.4/278). Passion, then, cannot represent the cause, as an idea (associated with the passion) already represents it. Nor can the passion represent the object, as an idea (associated with the passion) already represents this, as well. Passion, then, would have to represent something else. Recall that the cause of the passion is not simply the idea of a beautiful house. It is, rather the idea of my beautiful house. It is this relatedness or relation to the self, I think, that the Humean passions are intended to represent. There is no prima facie reason why Humean passions could not represent relations.37 Moreover, representing relations cannot require resemblance, as relations do not resemble anything. This interpretation is thus consistent with Hume’s denial in 2.3.3.5 that passions represent by resembling anything. Finally, tasking passions with representing this relation nicely fills out a gap in the Humean account of the representata of the double relation, by providing a representation of what the remaining constituents of the double relation do not represent.

Conclusion To briefly conclude then, while Hume clearly holds that passions are directed, the claims of Treatise 2.3.3.5 seem to contradict this view. While Hume’s account of representation is not clear – Hume himself does not define or explain what he means by representation38 – the approaches offered thus far appear to rest on a misinterpretation of the claims of 2.3.3.5. For Baier, this results in the dismissal of 2.3.3.5’s contents, while for Cohon and Owen, this motivates them to shift the passions’ representationality onto ideas associated with the passions. Close reading of 2.3.3.5, however, shows that Hume denies to passions only a particular type of representationality – namely, representationality by copyness or resemblance – rather than representationality full-stop. Hume’s indirect passions, therefore, can and do represent, and the tension between 2.3.3.5 and Hume’s views on the directedness of the passions does not actually obtain.39

12 MECHANISM AND THOUGHT FORMATION: HUME’S EMANCIPATORY SCEPTICISM Anik Waldow

Introduction Hume frequently denies that we can know the causes of our impressions; however, he urges us to clarify the value of our ideas by tracing them to the impressions from which they derive. The question that arises here is why valuable ideas should be based on impressions at all. If impressions cannot be known correctly to mirror the properties of the objects1 that act as their causes, it seems that we have no good reason to trust impression-derived ideas more than any other ideas; for all we can tell, they may or may not tell us something about the way the world is. Furthermore, if ideas are required to resemble our impressions, as Hume’s copy principle seems to suggest, the world of which we conceive by entertaining legitimately formed ideas will resemble the world of our sensations, although, as Reid has famously claimed, it is highly implausible to depict the world in this manner: In all this debate about the existence of a material world, it hath been taken for granted on both sides, that this same material world, if such there be, must be the express image of our sensations: that we can have no conception of any material thing which is not like some sensation in our mind; and particularly, that the sensations of touch are images of extension, hardness, figure and motion. Every argument brought against the existence of a material world, either by the bishop of Cloyne or by the author of the Treatise of Human Nature, supposeth this.2

This essay develops a new reading of Hume’s theory of perception by defending it against Reid’s criticism. It argues that Humean impressions are best understood, not as images that represent their causes through resemblance relations, as Reid suggests, but as triggers of natural associative processes that enable us to relate our impression-triggered ideas in a regular way to occurrences in our environment. Impressions thereby put us in a position to form expectations that can – 171 –

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be refuted or confirmed and help us to adjust our actions to the requirements of our surroundings. The merit of this interpretation is that it allows us to understand that Hume’s scepticism possesses a function rather different from the one emphasized by commentators with a strong focus on Hume’s epistemology: it has an empancipatory function that strengthens the position of individuals when they form judgements about themselves, the world and others. Hume makes room for this interpretation, as we will see, by stressing that we are entitled to trust our mechanically produced ideas despite the fact that we cannot know that these ideas mirror matters of fact correctly; this general trust is possible for the very reason that our natural idea-forming mechanisms are indispensible and useful in our daily interactions with the world and other persons.3 By giving his sceptical arguments this pragmatic twist Hume, it will be argued, directs our attention towards the world that ordinary limited creatures can access, investigate and understand; he thus shows us that there is no need to look for privileged epistemic agents who claim that they are in a position to penetrate into the realm of metaphysical truths, plainly for the reason that on Hume’s account no one, regardless of how learned they are, can reach beyond the realm of the experienceable. In Part 1, I will take a closer look at Reid’s theory of perception and consider in which respect Reid avoids the difficulty he attributes to Hume. Part 2 will reveal that Reid’s criticism fails to hit its target, because in Hume’s context it makes little sense to understand the correspondence between ideas and impressions as the feature that allows us to distinguish between ideas that can tell us something about the world and those that cannot. Part 3 will specify further differences between Reid’s and Hume’s projects to show that Hume’s scepticism encourages an anti-dogmatic stance. Part 4 will finally argue that ideas that are the products of natural impression-processing mechanisms enable us to form regular and useful patterns of thought in response to our interaction with the world.

1 Sensory Inputs as Signs According to Reid, perception is a threefold process consisting of sensation, conception and belief in the very object that causes our perceptions. Reid writes that ‘sensation, taken by itself, implies neither the conception nor belief of any external object’, while ‘perception implies an immediate conception and belief of something external – something different both from the mind that perceives and from the act of perception’.4 Furthermore, he explains that it is complete nonsense to require sensations to resemble the objects of which we conceive in processes of perception. Sensations, as he puts it, are signs, and signs do not resemble the things they signify: ‘As in artificial signs there is often neither similitude between the sign and the thing signified, nor any connection that arises

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from the nature of the things; so it is also in natural signs. The word gold has no similitude to the substance signified by it’.5 What is the difference between artificial and natural signs? Reid tells us that we learn to interpret the first by ‘the effect of habit and custom’,6 while our understanding of the second is an effect of the original constitution of our minds: ‘Nature hath established a real connection between these signs, and the thoughts and dispositions of the mind which are signified by them; and Nature has also taught us the interpretation of the signs; so that, previous to experience, the signs suggest the thing signified, and create the belief of them’.7 It here seems that nature ensures that we cannot interpret natural signs incorrectly: it provides us with the code needed to form the conception of the very thing that the natural sign signifies. Given that sensations are natural signs, it follows that we cannot err if we base our perceptual judgement on them. S. A. Grave distinguishes between two doctrines of natural signs within Reid’s account of sign reading: one that understands sensations as the signs of non-sensory perceptions and another that takes them to signify the properties of external objects.8 We can do justice to both accounts if we follow Reid’s claim that sensation-triggered conceptions deal with ‘external existences’; we can then treat sensations as signs of the very things we conceive of and believe in when being affected by them. In other words, sensations signify their causes that, according to Reid, form the intentional object of our sensation-triggered conceptions. One benefit of importing the notion of signs into one’s theory of perception is that one thereby enables the mind to form beliefs in and conceptions of things unperceived. For instance, if smoke is treated as a sign, the presence of smoke motivates the conclusion that something is burning, although the fire itself may be unperceived. Note that even those opposing an excessive use of signs, such as the ancient empiricists and sceptics, were generally quite permissive towards signs referring the observer to the temporarily absent. Thus, ancient empiricists are said to appreciate signs used for ‘the discovery of things which are not manifest temporarily’.9 And the sceptics apparently knew, as Sextus claims, that ‘recollective signs are found convincing by everyday life: seeing smoke someone diagnoses fire: having observed a scar, he says that a wound was inflicted’.10 However, the indicative sign, that is, the sign that cannot be ‘observed evidently together with the thing it signifies’ was less charitably seen. It was deemed a ‘fiction of the Dogmatists’11 who plainly assumed without proof that the indicative sign signifies ‘from its proper nature and constitution (as bodily movements are signs of the soul)’.12 The way Reid talks about sensations suggests that he understands them as indicative rather than recollective signs, which can in principle be observed in connection with the things they signify (smoke can in principle be observed in

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connection with fire). Reid does not only claim that ‘nature has established a real connection between the signs and the things signified’; he also concedes that there are cases in which our sensations provide us only with an obscure notion of the things they signify: Of the secondary qualities, our senses give us only a relative and obscure notion. They inform us only that there are qualities that affect us in a certain manner – that is, produce in us a certain sensation; but as to what they are in themselves, our senses leave us in the dark.13

What follows from this is that even Reid, who is typically interpreted as a direct realist, admits that it is not possible for us to reach out to things independently of our ability to sense them.14 If our sensations are poor, as in the case of secondary qualities, we are led to an insufficiently clear conception of the very property that causes our sensations, a circumstance that must be taken to indicate that it is not possible for us to compare our sensation-triggered conceptions with the causes of our sensations. If this were possible one could replace the obscure conception related to our sensations by the more appropriate one that results from the direct grasp of the property in question.15 So all in all one can say that even the Reidian mind is unable to observe the sign together with the thing signified, because it is unable to observe sensations together with their causes, which, if possible, would mark sensations as recollective signs rather than indicative ones. The only things that appear to go along with each other are sensations and sensation-triggered conceptions and beliefs, but not sensations and their causes. It is clear that once sensations are admitted as indicative signs, one is able to avoid the problem that troubles many empiricist accounts and is caused by the requirement that meaningful concepts be based on sensory inputs: if this requirement is taken seriously, it leads to an unacceptable impoverishment of our conceptual resources. As we know, Hume has often been identified with this position, because according to his copy principle every idea has to resemble one preceding impression: ‘all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent’ (T 1.1.1.7/4). Although this is right, it is important to bear in mind that the copy principle exempts complex ideas: I observe, that many of our complex ideas never had impressions, that corresponded to them, and that many of our complex impressions never are exactly copy’d in ideas… I perceive, therefore, that tho’ there is in general a great resemblance betwixt our complex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they are exact copies of each other. (T 1.1.1.4–5/3–4)

This suggests that, according to Hume, it is possible to have meaningful thoughts of things and events that we have never experienced in the way we think of them;


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we can do so if we combine ideas stemming from particular impression samples into one complex idea, for instance, when we think of the city of Rome on the basis of ideas derived from a radio report about the city and combine these with ideas deriving from impressions we had when we were looking at pictures of the Colosseum. So, contrary to what has often been suggested, it does not seem appropriate to accuse Hume’s copy principle of having given way to an irreversible impoverishment of concepts. It needs to be mentioned at this point that in principle complex ideas such as the idea of the city of Rome are creations as much as ideas of unicorns are creations of ideas that copy the impressions of horses and horns. Since this is so, one could wonder how it is possible to determine the epistemic status of complex ideas: the idea of the city of Rome, of which we heard in radio reports and read in magazines, could be as fictitious as the idea of a unicorn. The temptation here of course consists in once again retreating to the copy principle by requiring that epistemically privileged complex ideas, such as the idea of the city of Rome that we take to exist, be grounded in corresponding complex impressions, that is, in one particular sample of experience. It is easy to see, however, that if one performs this move and cites the copy principle as the ultimate criterion that allows us to distinguish between thoughts about fictitious and real things one is straightforwardly led back to the objection that it is utterly unconvincing to restrict our ideas of things we take to exist to those of which we have direct experience. What all this shows is that without providing an answer to the question of how Hume is able to discriminate between ideas about things that we take to exist and those we take to represent fictions, one is forced to admit that Reid’s criticism of the Humean copy principle has a point: it allows us to appreciate that we are generally opposed to the idea that the only existing things are those we can directly experience. Dale Jacquette makes precisely this point against Hume and Berkeley and in support of Reid who allows for belief in the unperceivable by treating sensations as signs: ‘If sensations are not the same as primary qualities for Reid, then empiricism is not, as in Berkeley and Hume, a matter of limiting what we can know to the immediate contents of experience but of interpreting the natural signs in sensation, much as we must interpret artificial signs in conventional language’.16 Jacquette is certainly right in claiming that Reid’s use of the notion of sign provides him with some sort of flexibility regarding the concepts we take to represent real things. However, it needs to be noted that the sole reason for which Reid claims that it is possible to interpret our sensations correctly, and thus to form correct beliefs about principally unperceivable things, is that he takes it that nature has established a bond between signifier and signified and has taught us how to decipher the causes of our sensations correctly.17 But of course

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it remains an open question whether nature can legitimately be characterized in this manner and this clearly jeopardizes Reid’s theory of signs. What is more, Reid’s reference to nature and its role within sign reading processes sits uncomfortably with the general agenda of those we usually identify as empiricists. As we have seen, one reason for emphasizing the role of experience is that it blocks speculations about underlying metaphysical causes as well as dogmatic claims about the ways in which knowledge about these causes can be acquired. By interpreting sensations as indicative signs, Reid refers us to precisely this dogmatic tradition.18 We will have occasion to return to this point below. For the moment let us have a look at Reid’s interpretation of Hume’s theory of perception and examine whether his criticism is just. This will serve us as a starting point for advancing the claim that Hume’s theory of perception leaves room for as great a variety of concepts that can potentially tell us something about the world as Reid’s theory does, without, however, re-introducing dogmatic elements through the back door.

2 Humean Impressions Reid’s theory of signs rests on one core assumption: that is, the assumption that sensations resemble neither their causes nor the conceptions they occasion. And Hume, he claims, ignored precisely this by conceiving of ideas as the copies of impressions. Before deciding whether Reid is right in criticizing Hume, a few clarifications concerning the two philosophers’ vocabulary are in order. While Hume speaks of impressions and ideas, Reid uses the terms sensation and conception. As we have seen, sensations are understood as signs which do not in the least resemble the things they signify, that is, the external object that is taken to cause our sensations;19 whereas conceptions are defined as that part of perceptual processes that is concerned with ‘something external – something different both from the mind that perceives and from the act of perception’.20 In Reid’s context sensations thus amount to triggers of conceptions that lead us to an understanding of and belief in external things that must be taken to be the causes of our sensations. Hume approaches things from a different angle. He does not tell us when precisely it is that perceptions gain conceptual content.21 In what follows I will therefore focus on the causal relations between sensations and conceptions, on the one hand, and impressions and ideas, on the other, without addressing questions concerning the conceptual and non-conceptual components of perceptual processes. Hume states that we can conceive of an external object by forming ideas that we derive from our impressions: [W]hen we first form our reasoning concerning the object, ’tis beyond doubt, that the same reasoning must extend to the impression [of an object]: And that because the


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quality of the object, upon which the argument is founded, must at least be conceiv’d by the mind; and cou’d not be conceiv’d, unless it were common to an impression; since we have no idea but what is deriv’d from that origin. (T 1.4.5.20/242)

It is important to note that Hume is careful to emphasize that it remains unclear whether or not our ideas of external objects correctly represent the objects themselves.22 For he tells us that our ideas of objects allow us to infer solely to the properties of our impressions and that this is as far as we can go: I say then, that since we may suppose, but never can conceive a specific difference betwixt an object and impression; any conclusion we form concerning the connexion and repugnance of impressions, will not be known certainly to be applicable to objects…As an object is suppos’d to be different from an impression, we cannot be sure, that the circumstance, upon which we found our reasoning, is common to both, supposing we form the reasoning upon the impression. ’Tis still possible, that the object may differ from it in that particular. (T 1.4.5.20/241)

It here becomes clear that Hume merely admits of a resemblance relation holding between impressions and impression-derived ideas; he neither claims that impressions resemble their causes nor that ideas display the properties of these causes. If we relate this to Reid’s criticism of Hume, it looks as if it is justified only if Reid were to attack the relation between impressions and ideas. If he reached for Humean impressions and their relation to objects, he would plainly miss his target: Hume explicitly states that we do not know whether or not impressions resemble their causes. At first sight it seems that Reid indeed targets the Humean relation between impressions and ideas; after all he attacks the view that the ‘material world, if such there be, must be the express image of our sensations’23 (emphasis added). So he attacks the claim that the material world, if it exists, represents itself as an image produced by our sensations; and this is another way of saying, in Humean terminology, that ideas of external existences resemble our impressions of them. To understand this criticism correctly, however, we need to bear in mind that Reid establishes a connection between sensation-triggered conceptions (or ideas) and external objects: he tells us that in cases in which primary qualities affect us in sensation we form veridical conceptions of them, that is, we think of primary qualities the way they exist in the object without requiring them to resemble the sensations that these qualities caused in the first place. Reid’s criticism of Hume thus seems to be based on the thought that Hume should have realized that conceptions (or ideas) can tell us something about the world: they can do so if not required to resemble our sensory inputs and if treated in their own right. Note that Reid here clearly distracts us from the problem raised by Hume. That is the problem that impressions (or sensations) do not allow us to determine

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their causes and that therefore impression-derived ideas (or sensation-triggered conceptions) cannot be known adequately to inform us about the properties of these causes. The issue of resemblance merely dramatizes this point, because it emphasizes that not even those ideas resembling our impressions can be known correctly to display their causes. Reid plainly ignores this difficulty and establishes without further discussion that sensations naturally trigger conceptions that give us a correct account of our sensations’ causes.24

3 Beyond the Experienceable What this fleeting comparison already shows is that Reid’s criticism of Hume somewhat misses the point that Hume tries to establish: namely, that we have no reason to think that the conceptions we form on the basis of our sensations mirror real things. Since Hume furthermore states that we cannot take it for granted that impressions resemble their causes, it here looks as if nothing prevents us from treating Humean impressions in a Reidian fashion, that is, as triggers of thoughts that we often treat as representations of real things. By emphasizing this Reidian aspect of Humean impressions, we create awareness of the fact that an idea that exactly copies one singular previous impression sample does not possess any considerable advantages over an idea that does not: it may or may not display the properties of the object that causes us to have the alleged idea. If we leave the sceptical implications of this interpretation aside for one moment, this rather negative conclusion can be rephrased: since it remains an open question whether impression-derived ideas appropriately mirror the things which cause us to have impressions, ideas that do not mirror a preceding impression sample gain in value. It becomes conceivable that they provide us with hints that are as valuable as those provided by ideas that copy the exact contents of individual impression samples when it comes to questions concerning what exists and causes us to experience the world in the way we do.25 More generally put, one can say that with our acceptance of the impossibility of knowing whether impressions correctly represent their causes it becomes possible to adopt a relaxed stance towards the copy principle.26 One thereby gains the chance to consider elements other than mere idea-impression correspondence to determine which ideas are most likely to tell us something about the world. I will suggest below that the nature of idea-forming processes needs to be taken into account in order to determine for the value of ideas. Before turning to this topic, I want to point out that an account of how it is possible to discriminate between fictitious ideas and ideas we take to represent real things will remove the last appeal of Reid’s criticism of Hume. As mentioned before, this appeal relates to the fact that Reid’s criticism – although mistaken in its details – points us to an important problem, namely the problem that an overemphasis on the copy prin-


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ciple leads to an impoverished concept of reality. This problem becomes pressing once we start reflecting on the status of complex ideas, because it seems that the need to discriminate between fictitious and non-fictitious complex ideas leads us straightforwardly to the point where we have to make use of the copy principle. If it can now be shown that the discrimination of complex ideas is possible without referring to the copy principle, the last reason for which one could think that Reid’s analysis of Hume’s theory of perception is useful will be removed. To do justice to Reid, it is perhaps necessary to stress that his project is rather different from Hume’s. This becomes particularly clear if we consider to what extent both thinkers remain committed to the realm of underlying metaphysical causes. As pointed out before, Reid treats sensations as indicative signs that provide us with everything needed for the formation of a veridical conception of our sensations’ causes. By presenting us with this account he clearly suggests that it is possible to penetrate into the realm of the in principle unperceivable of which we can have knowledge on the basis of the deliverances of the senses. The reason why Reid is led to this conclusion is that he believes that nature teaches us how to infer from the perceivable phenomena to their imperceptible causes. Certainly, Reid emphasizes that we naturally possess the ability to develop knowledge of the unperceivable. Thus he distances himself from the idea that we need a certain theory to perform the move from the observable to the in principal unobservable – an idea that ancient empiricists and sceptics identified as one of dogmatic metaphysics. However, at the same time it can hardly be denied that Reid is committed to the idea that knowledge of metaphysical causes is possible; and this shows that he remains caught up in the framework of speculative dogmatism.27 Hume, as has been pointed out, can be read as offering a quasi-Reidian story about impressions that trigger conceptions of things that we take to exist in the world. These conceptions, as I will explain in further detail below, are the product of natural associative mechanisms that lead us from our impressions to our (often complex) ideas of how the world is. On this interpretation it looks as if Hume, as much as Reid, holds that the formation of concepts that we take to deal with real things happens naturally. So it seems that both perceptual stories resemble one another not only with respect to the triggering-function of Reidian sensations and Humean impressions, but also as it regards the naturalness with which processes of thought formation are conceived to take place. Despite these similarities, however, a crucial difference between both thinkers remains: Hume is clear that we cannot know whether our impression-triggered ideas adequately represent reality; he thus exhibits the sceptical, anti-metaphysical and anti-dogmatic spirit that Reid lacks. It is important to note at this point that despite Hume’s scepticism, his analysis of how the human mind impacts on us such that we come to accept that the concept of reality that we naturally form in response to our experiences, and

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in response to those associations involved in the formation of thoughts about matters of fact, provides the only concept of reality that allows us to make sense of ourselves as persons embedded in reality. After all, Hume clearly confronts us with the fact that the search for underlying causes is a vain enterprise and that we therefore have to deal with that concept of reality that naturally emerges out of our interactions with the world. In emphasizing this he moves from what some have called sceptical despair on to a positive account of how our cognitive and non-cognitive abilities allow us to organize our lives successfully in that it is conducive to our own well-being and that of other persons.28 With this positive outlook in place, Hume frees us of the burden of reaching for knowledge of things that remain concealed for the very reason that the human mind is not made for understanding them. He thus allows us to let go of our obsession with a world that is not ours, which is the world of underlying metaphysical causes that only dogmatists claim to know.

4 Idea-Processing Mechanisms In this section we will examine what distinguishes the processes that lead to ideas we usually take to tell us something about the world and those which we interpret as fictions. This will enable us to see that the human mind is not lost within the world of impressions and ideas, that is, ideas that cannot be known appropriately to mirror matters of fact, but that we are equipped with enough to interact with the world successfully. Hume’s remark on ‘a kind of pre-established harmony’ (EHU 5.21/54) can be read in precisely this vein. Although he here admits that nature ‘is wholly unknown to us’ he expresses most positively that the principle of custom, and more precisely the habit of forming certain ideas in reaction to certain events in nature, act upon us such that ‘the subsistence of our species, and the regulation of our conduct, in every circumstance and occurrence of human life’ (EHU 5.21/54–5) can be ensured. When Hume talks about how we manage to discriminate between fictitious and non-fictitious ideas he refers us to our feeling. Those ideas we take to represent something real, he writes, ‘take faster hold…than ideas of an enchanted castle’ and ‘have a much greater influence of every kind, either to give pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow’ (EHU 5.12/50). The reason for this is that ‘a conception [is] more intense and steady than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, and that this manner of conception arises from a customary conjunction of the object with something present to the memory or senses’ (EHU 5.13/50). Of course, our feeling of steadiness or liveliness can be deceptive.29 Even Hume admits that sometimes ideas resulting from the imagination can become so lively that we start believing in them, for instance, ‘when we tremble at the brink of a precipice…the imagination produces a species of belief ’, ‘though we know our-


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selves in perfect security, and have it in our choice, whether we will advance a step farther’ (Hume 2007, 5).30 It thus seems recommended to consider the source of one’s idea, namely, whether it has its roots in an actual or memorized impression that relates the idea of falling ‘through a customary conjunction’ to the actual impression of standing at the brink of a precipice, rather than its mere liveliness in order to rule out that it is the product of delusion-enhancing imagination.31 We will now see that this is precisely the way one ought to proceed because mere reference to the fact that the imagination is involved in the creation of one’s ideas is insufficient for disqualifying ideas as fictitious. At the beginning of the Treatise section Of the connexion or association of ideas (T 1.1.4/10–13) Hume investigates principles that enable the mind to form constancy and stability in its thoughts. He writes: As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing wou’d be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone wou’d join them; and ’tis impossible the same simple ideas shou’d fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonly do) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another. (T 1.1.4.1/10)

Note that, according to this passage, the imagination is not described as the source of fictitious ideas but rather as the very faculty by which we can form complex thoughts (about things that we may believe to exist) that are stable enough to be repeated. Repetition is possible because the imagination follows the ‘gentle force’ of nature which points out to every idea ‘those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united into a complex one’ (T 1.1.4.1/11; emphasis added). Thus, it is the imagination and its susceptibility to natural associative relations that helps us to bundle simple ideas together into complex ones. It thereby assists us in forming complex thoughts by procedures which defy change and relativity.32 It here turns out that Hume’s ambiguous understanding of the role of the imagination – at times, he presents the imagination as the creative motor of our fictitious ideas, as in the case of winged horses, at others, he presents it rather neutrally, namely, as the very faculty that helps the mind to achieve stability in its thoughts – renders useless the reference to the faculty of the imagination if one wishes to determine whether or not one’s ideas are fictitious.33 Saul Traiger makes precisely this point when emphasizing that ‘[f ]ictions are not products of the imagination, when imagination is construed narrowly as a faculty which merely generates, by concatenation, complex ideas for which there may be no resembling antecedent complex impressions’.34 But although this is right, it is clear that there is a difference between the way the mind comes to form complex ideas that we take to represent real things and those we take to be fantastic

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creations. Hume points out that ‘the mixture and composition’ of fictitious ideas ‘belongs alone to the mind and the will’ (EHU 2.5/19); and as we have seen, he takes it that ideas qualifying as stable concepts are glued together by the natural bond of ‘some associating quality’ (T 1.1.4.1/11). One can conclude from this that it is the naturalness of the process underlying the formation of ideas that matters for their discrimination: if an idea is formed by a willingly performed act of the imagination, it qualifies as fictitious; if it is the product of a natural associative process that has its roots in an actual or memorized (inner or outer) impression, it qualifies as non-fictitious.35 As mentioned before, Hume, differing from Reid, refrains from claims to the truth of our ideas of matters of fact: these ideas, although grounded in experience in the sense that the process of their formation took off from certain impressions and involved certain natural associations, may or may not represent correctly what has caused us to have them. One could here wonder what sense it makes to qualify ideas resulting from natural associative processes as non-fictitious if it remains an open question whether or not these ideas truly represent things existent in the world. If they do not, they are as fictitious as ideas of unicorns. The answer to this question is that ideas resulting from natural associative processes relate to experience in a way that idea creations that are willingly formed do not. Take for instance the association of cause and effect. This association is taken to reflect the way we perceive events in our surroundings: if we are confronted with an impression of a certain event A, we immediately associate the idea of event B, because events of both kinds have been perceived constantly to occur together: ‘Whenever any object is presented to the memory or senses, it immediately, by the force of custom, carries the imagination to conceive that object, which is usually conjoined to it’ (EHU 5.11/48). Our natural associative processes thus relate our ideas in regular patterns to the perception of our environment. The associative relation of cause and effect and contiguity are somewhat special because they motivate ideas of things in an order that we once experienced to be so, while associations working upon the relation of resemblance sometimes lead us to form ideas of things that may never have occurred in the combination in which we think of them: an impression of my actual dog can trigger an idea of another dog, despite the fact that I have never perceived both dogs together; whereas the impression of a piazza can trigger the idea of its neighbouring street by the association of contiguity only if I once perceived them to neighbour one another. And although this is so, it can be maintained that relations of resemblance still put us in a position to link our thoughts in a reliable and regular way to certain sets of sensory stimuli. If pictures of the Colosseum in Rome trigger associations of resemblance, they lead us to form the idea of the city of Rome as long as these associations keep holding. Since we manage to relate our ideas about the world in this reliable and stable way to our experiences of this world,


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we can think of the world in stable patterns, form expectations and adjust our behaviour in accordance with our observations.36 Of course, what has been said so far about the trigger function of impressions also holds for ideas: ideas can trigger other ideas. I can think of fire and associate it with an accident, without entertaining the belief that an accident is about to happen. Or I can think of a friend who died years ago when thinking of a person who resembles her. So again one could ask what it is that distinguishes ideas that tell us something about the world from those that do not? Although ideas can indeed take over the role of impressions by triggering further ideas, it needs to be noted that the question is not so much that of determining which ideas inform us about the actual existence of the things of which we conceive when entertaining these ideas; the question rather is how we are able to distinguish ideas that relate to the way in which we experience the world from those that do not. If we think of smoke in connection with the idea of an accident, we presumably do so because we have had experiences in which both phenomena occurred together. And if the idea of my dead friend is triggered by ideas about a person who resembles her, the idea of my friend will most likely trigger further ideas, such as the idea of her death. So although ideas can be caused by other ideas, it is still possible to distinguish those which relate to our experiences with the world from those that are pure fictions. We can do so if it turns out that the associations by which our thoughts are formed have their roots in the arrangement and order of previous impressions and thus count as indirectly impression-triggered.37 One problem still seems to remain. As has been pointed out, Hume calls the vulgar belief in body a ‘fallacy’ (T 1.4.2.44/210), although this belief is the product of natural associative processes.38 This suggests that reference to associations and their triggering impressions is insufficient for distinguishing acceptable ideas from unacceptable ideas. A closer look at Hume’s discussion of the vulgar belief in body, however, reveals that he does not reject the belief in body per se (T 1.4.2.1–2/187–8). He rejects the view that perceptions are continued external existences; and he does so on the grounds of the observation that ‘[w]hen we press one eye with a finger, we immediately perceive all the objects to become double, and one half of them to be remov’d from their common and natural position’ (T 1.4.2.45/210). He thus objects to the vulgar belief in body on the basis of a newly acquired impression, that is, the impression that size and shape of perceived bodies change if we manipulate our eyeballs. It is clear that with the emergence of such an impression the natural association leading to the vulgar belief in body cannot take off, because the impressions that usually trigger the alleged association are lacking.39 In a certain sense this tells us that we are entitled to trust our associative tendencies for the time that they naturally unfold: if complications emerge, complications such as the emergence of unusual impressions, they are blocked and make room for new idea- and belief-forming procedures.

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Conclusion By regarding Hume’s account of perception through the lens of Reid’s theory of signs we have gained a perspective that has allowed us to shift our focus away from the problem that, strictly speaking, the Humean mind cannot know whether its impressions correctly represent their causes. And we have seen that it makes sense to think of Humean impressions as triggers of natural thought-processing mechanisms that regularly relate certain kinds of sensory inputs to certain kinds of ideas about the world. On this interpretation it is the regularity and stability of our conceptions in relation to certain sets of sensory inputs that accounts for the value of our ideas; it is neither the correspondence between ideas and impressions, nor the fact that impressions must be taken to represent objects that purportedly cause them. Impressions thus understood are, as Annette Baier puts it, ‘touchstones of reality’.40 If considered from this perspective, it no longer seems pressing to explain how the world existing independently of our perceptual and cognitive grasp can be reached. One can plainly accept that we are naturally predisposed to experience the world in a certain way and that it is this experience that leads us to form stable and reliable ideas about how the world is organized. The important point here is that we can do so without being pushed towards speculations about in principal unperceivable metaphysical causes and claims to absolute truth. Hume’s account of idea formation thus resists the Reidian move towards dogmatism: it dispenses with speculations about that which cannot be reached by ordinary human minds and yet allows us to exploit our experience-based conceptual repertoire when dealing with the world and one another. In so doing Hume empowers individuals to hold on to the views to which their natural cognitive instruments have led them, even in situations in which these views may be incompatible with the official doctrines of authorities. According to Hume’s sceptical principles it holds that no one, not even the most learned, can reach beyond the limits of the human mind; they too have to accept that insight into what it is that provides us with the types of experiences and conceptual resources that we have is impossible. They therefore have to rely on their natural idea- and belief-forming mechanisms as much as anyone else. If we overrate the copy principle and treat it in isolation from Hume’s theory of association and the triggering function of impressions, we can easily overlook this important aspect of Hume’s scepticism. One may perhaps argue that Hume, a thinker who very much emphasizes the shortcomings of reason, does not fit neatly with the Enlightenment tradition, because this tradition has often been taken to empower epistemic agents by stressing the relevance of their reasoned rationality. Although it is true that Hume is sceptical about the special status of reason as a purely rational instrument, it is also true that his examination of human nature leads him to emphasize


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that all individuals have the same cognitive powers – powers that perhaps fail to provide them with insight into absolute truths but that clearly allow them to organize their lives in a fruitful and satisfactory way. He thus confines everyone alike to the world that our natural idea- and belief-forming mechanisms render accessible and transparent to us; and he denies that for any human creature it is possible to reach beyond this. In so doing he clearly provides us with a taste of the Enlightenment spirit because he tells us that everyone, regardless of class or education, is in a position to draw on her own cognitive resources when interacting with the world. If we pay attention to this, it finally becomes clear that Hume is interesting as a thinker of the Enlightenment not despite his scepticism that denies reason a special status, but precisely because of it: after all it is thanks to his sceptical arguments that individuals are pushed to accept that the cognitive mechanisms that nature has given to them are not all that bad – and more importantly, that no one can claim to surpass them in their thinking about and engaging with the world without becoming guilty of metaphysical speculation.

NOTES

1 Buckle, ‘Hume and the Enlightenment’ 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

See, for example, D. Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006); K. Sloan (ed.), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum Press, 2003). This list is taken from S. Blackburn, How to Read Hume (London: Granta, 2008). Blackburn’s little book is, however, at least in part, an exception to the general point, since he also includes a chapter on ‘The Science of Man’, and there and in other places attempts to situate Hume in relation to contemporaries typically regarded as Enlightenment figures. B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 634. I. Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, ed. G. Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 10. J. Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’; in S. Benhabib and M. P. d’Entrèves (ed.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997). F.-M. A. Voltaire, Letters on England (1734), trans. L. Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980). Most notably by Isaiah Berlin. See, for example, I. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1965), ed. H. Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1999), ch. 2. J. O. de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings (1747), ed. A. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I discuss this connection more fully in S. Buckle, ‘Hume’s Sceptical Materialism’, Philosophy, 82 (2007), pp. 568–72. I. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’’, in I. Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 54. R. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. I. Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 62. Ibid., p. 5. E. Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), ed. H Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); J. le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (1751), trans. R. N. Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. Aix, Bii. ‘The idealist side of Cartesian philosophy was never able to succeed in France … The French philosophers chose John Locke as their master … The Essay on Human Understanding became their gospel; they swore by it … He made the human mind into a calculating device, and the whole human being became an English machine … John Bull is a born – 187 –

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes to pages 17–22 materialist …’ H. Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, ed. T. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 45–8. ‘And if natural philosophy in all its parts, by pursuing this method, shall at length be perfected, the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged’. Query 31, Opticks (2nd edn, 1718); in I. Newton, Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 140. T. Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 109, 274n. I owe this point to P. Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, Irreligion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 62. ‘If he is anything, he is a Hobbist’; Johnson to Boswell, in J. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; S. Johnson and J. Boswell, To the Hebrides, ed. R. Black (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007), p. 286. See, in particular, J. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), and Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See S. Buckle, ‘Hume in the Enlightenment Tradition’, in E. S. Radcliffe (ed.), A Companion to Hume (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 21–37, and ‘Hume’s Sceptical Materialism’. J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1.1.5–6. For a detailed defence of this view, see S. Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 403–7. This is a free translation; the quotation is from the Histories of Tacitus (T p. 1/ix). See, for example, R. Zaretsky and J. T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 64. See, for example, D. W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Dissenting views are not unknown, however. See, for example, J. B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, intro. B. D. Wolfe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 30. Quoted in I. Davidson, Voltaire in Exile (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 306. F.-M. A. Voltaire, ‘Homme’, from Questions on the Encyclopaedia, in F.-M. A. Voltaire, Political Writings, ed. D. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 70; Letter to d’Alembert, June, 1762 (Letter 7193), quoted in Davidson, Voltaire in Exile, p. 180. Davidson, Voltaire in Exile, pp. 180–1. G. Lanson, quoted by D. Williams in Voltaire, Political Writings, p. ix. S. Dixon, Catherine the Great (London: Profile Books, 2009), ch.7. ‘I see in Her Imperial Majesty’s Instruction a plan for an excellent code, but not a word on the means of ensuring its stability. I see in it the name of the despot abdicated, but the thing itself preserved, and despotism called monarchy … But the Empress has a great soul, insight, enlightenment, a very extensive genius; justice, goodness, patience and

Notes to pages 22–32

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

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resolution…There is nothing which cannot be completed with time and so rare a collection of such excellent qualities’. D. Diderot, Observations sur le Nakaz, in D. Diderot, Political Writings, ed. J. H. Mason and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 164. J.-J. Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762), trans. A. Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 37. D. Hume, Letter to William Strahan, 26 October 1775; in D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, ed. S. Buckle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 214. For discussion, see A. Baier, ‘Hume’s Treatment of Oliver Cromwell’, in A. Baier, Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 58–80. Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), Book IV. The classical example is Locke, whose defence of private property is plainly intended as a limitation on the power of monarchs to tax without any recourse to the consent of the governed. (He is the spiritual godfather of the Boston Tea Party, with its famous slogan, ‘no taxation without representation’.) J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 2, p. 25ff. See, for example, Diderot’s comment that ‘without liberty, there is no property; without property, no agriculture; without agriculture, no strength, greatness, prosperity, wealth’. Diderot, Observations sur le Nakaz, p. 164. See Baier, ‘Hume’s Treatment of Oliver Cromwell’, pp. 60–1. This point is developed in the editorial introduction to Hume, An Enquiry, ed. S. Buckle, pp. xi–xxi. ‘Nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of ’; I. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose; in Kant, Political Writings, p. 46. Surprisingly, he excludes animals from moral consideration, despite the ease with which many humans sympathize with animal suffering. The explanation is that they are collateral damage, since, in ruling out moral affections for the non-human, Hume’s aim is to deny moral obligations to gods or angels. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. M. F. Smith (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5, pp. 925–1457. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 536. Rousseau, Emile, pp. 266–313. It is surely a strange state of affairs for an allegedly conservative thinker to be unable to publish some of his works because of the dangers of doing so! C. Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, ed. R. Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); F.-M. A. Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, ed. S. Harvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For background, see Davidson, Voltaire in Exile, pp. 144–55. K. Marx, Capital, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), vol. 1, p. 758n. See E. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1928). Thus Susan Neiman’s recent attempt to paint Hume as a conservative because empiricism (and, one must presume, its moral progeny, utilitarianism) is intrinsically conservative is doomed to fail. Neiman argues that Hume’s appeal to custom, and his insistence on

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51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

Notes to pages 32–40 an ‘is-ought’ gap, render conservatism unavoidable. (S. Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (London: The Bodley Head, 2009), ch. 5, esp. pp. 142–6, 158.) But this is to misunderstand Hume on both the role of custom and in the ‘is-ought’ passage. First, his affirmation of custom is the identification of a non-rational mechanism in human mental functioning – not an attempt to preclude social change, desire for which is not (and on his view cannot be) limited to rational processes. Secondly, the meaning of the ‘is-ought’ passage is not to reduce ideals to (present) facts, and so to rule out dreams of what might be but yet not is, but to insist that only on the sentimentalist view can morality be explained as practical – that only for the rationalist is there a gap. In other words, it implies that, in order to be consistent, practical social reformers need to be theoretical moral sentimentalists. It does not ban active social reform as somehow wrong-headed. For a more complete account of the meaning of the ‘is-ought’ passage, see S. Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 270–84. Peter Singer is one such case; but for an explicit presentation of the view, see J. Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 3rd edn (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 1999), pp. 96–8 (‘The Revolution in Ethics’). The account of rights in terms of side-constraints derives from R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 28–9. J. J. C. Smart, ‘An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics’; in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 67–8. See J. Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966), part 3. This is despite the fact that, because of the sentimentalist foundation, the imperatives to which they give rise must be regarded as hypothetical rather than categorical. But the relevant point is that this difference will make little or no practical difference if such hypothetical imperatives are backed by a sufficiently determinate theory of human nature, and hence of the predictable (and so legitimately enforceable) limits on our treatment of each other. In this and the preceding paragraph, I am heavily indebted to M. C. Jacobs, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, 2nd rev. edn (Lafayette, LA: Cornerstone Books, 2006), chs 1–3. Hume, A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, in An Enquiry, ed. S. Buckle, pp. 147–62. The significance of the Letter for understanding the Treatise’s implicit religious critique is emphasized in Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise. For helpful comments on the earlier version of this paper, I would like to thank Karen Green, Anik Waldow and (especially) Craig Taylor.

2 Green, ‘Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’ 1. 2.

3.

Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, p. 1. Mossner, who points out that Hume was not genuinely a Tory, for he was above party affiliation, nevertheless concludes that ‘Hume as a skeptic chary of planned progress is a Conservative in the large, non-party … sense’. E. C. Mossner, ‘Was Hume a Tory Historian? Facts and Reconsiderations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2:2 (1941), pp. 235–6. Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, p. 46; T 2.2.10.9/392–3.

Notes to pages 40–6 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Ibid., p. 44. R. Perry, ‘Mary Astell and Enlightenment’, in S. Knott and B. Taylor (eds) Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 366. See J. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997). Rousseau, for instance, sets himself against the degenerate taste of Voltaire, and flees from Hume’s proffered aid once he gets to know the man. But the case of Rousseau is complex for part of his success is to absorb the language of sensibility into his manly republicanism. See K. Green, ‘Madeleine de Scudéry on love and the emergence of the ‘private sphere’, History of Political Thought, 30:2 (2009). For a discussion of Scudéry’s importance in the establishment of the value of sensibility and tender passions see J. Broad and K. Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 180–98, J. DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), M. Maître, ‘Sapho, reine de Tendre: Entre monarchie absolue et royauté littéraire’, in Madeleine de Scudéry: Une femme de lettres au XVII siècle, ed. D. Denis and A.-E. Spica (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2002). For further evidence of Hume’s commitment to Enlightenment gallantry, in the context of Wollstonecraft’s critique of it, see B. Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’, in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender and Enlightenment. I. Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. A. Wood, trans. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 139. Ibid. p. 139–47. Here it is clear that his target is Hume’s philosophy. Discussed in Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, p. 175. Kant, Practical Philosophy, pp. 50–2. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 295. C. Macaulay, History of England, From the accession of James 1 to the elevation of the House of Hanover, 3rd edn, 5 vols. (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1769–72), vol. 1, p. v. C. Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (London: A. Hamilton, 1783), p. iii. D. Hume and Lord Bolingbroke, The Beauties of Hume and Bolingbroke (London: G. Kearsly, 1782), Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, p. 110. Ibid. p. 170. Ibid. pp. 98–101. Ibid. pp. 171–2. Ibid. pp. ix–x. Ibid. p. 234. Ibid. pp. 170–2. Ibid. pp. 11–12. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 1, p. 264. Ibid. vol. 4, p. 153. Ibid. vol. 4, pp. 403–4. C. Macaulay, Letters on Education. With observations on religious and metaphysical subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790).

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31. In the seventeenth century Madeleine Scudéry held similar views concerning the rational grounds of morality to Catharine Macaulay’s Stoic-inspired notions. She however saw no incompatibility between monarchy and the full exercise by individuals of rational moral agency, so one has no temptation to think of her as a precursor of the enlightenment. See Broad and Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought. 32. Anon., ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Catharine Macaulay Graham’, European Magazine, 4 (1783). Hume’s letter is also in R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (eds), New Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 80–2. 33. Anon., ‘Account of the Life’, p. 331. 34. Ibid. p. 331. 35. Ibid. p. 332. 36. E. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 37. C. H. Hay, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution’, Historian, 65:2 (1994), K. Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 38. D. Hume, The Student’s Hume. A History of England from the Earliest Times to the Revolution of 1688 based on the History of David Hume, Incorporating the Corrections and Researches of Recent Historians (London: John Murray, 1874). 39. A. L. Barbauld, Address to the Opposers of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: J. Johnson, 1790), pp. 32–3. 40. One is reminded of another more recent conservative empiricist, who argued that empirical evidence clearly establishes the intellectual inferiority of women, D. Stove, ‘The Subjection of John Stuart Mill’, in Philosophy, 68 (1993).

3 Buckle, ‘Philosophy, Historiography and the Enlightenment: A Response to Green’ 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

For this reason I take it that the question Green raises concerning who had the better of the exchange of letters between Macaulay and Hume to be beside the point. One central argument against monarchy was Puritan, appealing directly to the Biblical rejection of kingship in 1 Samuel 8, and may have been influenced by Jewish sources. See Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). One problem internal to this view is whether universality has indeed been achieved: if rights are universal, why is there an age limit imposed on their possession and exercise? Rights are now sometimes described as ‘valid claims against others’, and so as ‘claimrights’ for short. But this is misleading, since the ‘claims’ in question do not require actual claiming. The term ‘claim-right’ is thus a kind of hybrid, preserving the historic sense of rights as powers, while thinning out the idea of a claim until it is indistinguishable from the traditional idea of an obligation. The idea of claim-rights is old wine in new bottles. See, e.g., L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). It should be added that Darwin’s own theory in On the Origin of Species did not support polygenism or any racial hierarchy. See, for example, B. R. Brown, Until Darwin: Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). For the contributions by Mendelssohn, Kant and others, see J. Schmidt, What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 47–83.

Notes to pages 59–68 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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I. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), trans. M. Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), book 1, ch. 8. Plato, Republic, 427e–429a, pp. 669–70. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume One: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945). J. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), ed. J. W. Yolton and J. S. Yolton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Rousseau, Emile. This is a large topic, and one which quickly leads into high medieval disputes between the Thomist Dominicans and the Ockhamist Franciscans. Perhaps the best introduction to the moral issues, see J. B. Schneewind, Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. Ch. 9, 11 and 12. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. P. Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), esp. Ch. 2–4, 9 and 19. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, in H. Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 8. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, p. 6. Ibid. p. 11. Ibid. p. 16; see also Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), ed. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Book 11, Ch. 4.

4 Jacquette, ‘Hume’s Enlightenment Aesthetics and Philosophy of Mathematics’ 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

Hume does not explicitly draw connections between infinity and the sublime, but it is my thesis that his rejection of any adequate idea of infinity and infinite divisibility obligates him to offer a strictly finitist aesthetics of the sublime. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hume’s complete subtitle is: ‘BEING AN ATTEMPT TO INTRODUCE THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD OF REASONING INTO MORAL SUBJECTS’. By moral subjects or moral philosophy the eighteenth century meant not only ethics but what is designated today as philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology. Ibid., especially 1.1.3.1–4/8–10 (Of the ideas of the memory and imagination); also T 1.1.1.1–4/1–3 (Of the origin of our ideas). E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; 1759), ed. and intro. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1958). See G. Cantor, Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts, mit erläauternden Anmerkungen sowie mit Ergängzungen aus dem Briefwechsel CantorDedekind, ed. Ernst Zermelo (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1966). I consider Hume’s later arguments against infinite divisibility in D. Jacquette, ‘Infinite Divisibility in Hume’s First Enquiry’, Hume Studies, 20, 1994, pp. 219–40. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians (Adversus Mathematicos), also sometimes referred to as Against the Physicists and Adversus Dogmaticos, trans. R.G. Bury in Sextus Empiricus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1936).

194 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Notes to pages 69–70 T 1.2.3.4–6/34 inter alia. See Jacquette, ‘Hume on the Infinite Divisibility of Extension and Exact Geometrical Values’, in E. Mazza and E. Rochetti, Filosofia e Scienza nell’etá Moderna (eds), New Essays on David Hume (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2007), pp. 81–100. D. Jacquette, David Hume’s Critique of Infinity (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2001). See also D. Jacquette, ‘Hume on Infinite Divisibility and the Negative Idea of a Vacuum’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10 (2002), pp. 413–35; D. Jacquette, ‘Hume on Infinite Divisibility and Sensible Extensionless Indivisibles’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996), pp. 61–78; D. Jacquette, ‘Kant’s Second Antinomy and Hume’s Theory of Extensionless Indivisibles’, Kant-Studien, 84 (1993), pp. 38–50. P. Bayle, ‘Zeno of Elea’, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle (1734– 1738), 2nd edn P. Des Maizeaux (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984), p. 614. T 1.2.2.2–3/30. Hume’s note attributes the argument simply to: ‘Mons. Malezieu’ (T 1.2.2.3/30 n.7); D. L. M. Baxter, ‘Hume on Infinite Divisibility’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 5 (1988), pp. 133–40; P. Cummins, ‘Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, and Reid on Extension, Composites, and Simples’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 7 (1990), pp. 299–314; J. Franklin, ‘Achievements and Fallacies in Hume’s Account of Infinite Divisibility’, Hume Studies, 20 (1994), pp. 85–101; D. Raynor, ‘‘Minima Sensibilia’ in Berkeley and Hume’, Dialogue (1980), pp. 196–200. See Jacquette, David Hume’s Critique of Infinity, pp. 131– 80. See Jacquette, David Hume’s Critique of Infinity, pp. 223–59. I. Newton, The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series: with its application to the geometry of curve-lines; by the inventor Sir Isaac Newton, Kt. Late President of the Royal Society; translated from the author’s latin original not yet made publick, to which is subjoin’d, a perpetual comment upon the whole work, consisting of annotations, illustrations, and supplements, in order to make this treatise a compleat institution for the use of learners, ed. and trans. J. Colson (London: J. Nourse, 1736); I. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 2nd edn (1713), Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, trans. A. Motte (1729), rev. and ed. F. Cajori (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1969). See N. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964), pp. 284–90, 325–38; A. Flew, ‘Infinite Divisibility in Hume’s Treatise’, in D. W. Livingston and J. T. King (eds), Hume: A Re-Evaluation (New York: Fordham University Press), pp. 257–69; R. Fogelin, ‘Hume and Berkeley on the Proofs of Infinite Divisibility’, Philosophical Review, 97 (1988), pp. 47–69. Bayle’s trilemma is not entirely original, but recapitulates a medieval argument. See J. M. M. H. Thijssen, ‘David Hume and John Keill and the Structure of Continua’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), pp. 271–86. Thijssen writes on p. 285: ‘Although Hume may have used Bayle as a source his discussion of the three possible views regarding continuity (i.e., divisibility in infinitum, composition out of mathematical points, and composition out of physical points) reflects a much older scholastic heritage. The same is true for almost all of the arguments that Hume (and Bayle) employ in their discussion of continuity’. In his letter to Alan Ramsey, Hume also recommends Bayle’s entries on ‘Zeno’ and ‘Spinoza’ as background reading for understanding the Treatise. Thijssen, p. 285, refers to Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert, pp. 159–61, as documenting the medieval origins of the trilemma in the continuum debate. Hume indicates his awareness of the trilemma’s ancestry, when he writes in considering the argument in the Treatise, p. 40: ‘It has often been maintain’d in the schools’ (T 1.2.4.3/40). Fogelin and Mijuskovic suggest that besides The Port Royal Logic an additional source for the infinity arguments may have been I.


14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

195

Barrow, The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning Explained and Demonstrated: Being Mathematical Lectures Read in the Public Schools at the University of Cambridge, trans. J. Kirkby (London: Stephen Austin, 1734), p. 76, to which Hume refers at T 1.2.4.21/46, n.11. Aristotle, Physics 231a29–b6, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. and rev. trans. J. Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 391. E. Burke, Enquiry, pp. 73–6; 139–43; especially Part Four, Section XI, ‘The Artificial Infinite’. S. H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1935), pp. 10–83. Ibid. Monk’s bibliography contains references to translations of Longinus in French and English editions. A recent translation of Longinus is published by G. M. A. Grube, Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime) (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991). N. Bolieau-Despréaux, L’Art Poétique and Traité du Sublime ou du Merveilleux dans le Discours Traduit du Grec de Longin, in the Oeuvres completes de Boileau (Paris: Garnier freres, 1870–1873). I. Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), especially pp. 99–203. See also I. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), trans. J. T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960). See F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Value in Two Treatises, 2nd edn, vol. I, Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (London: John Darby, 1726). Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, pp. 394–401. Hume discusses the association of ideas at T 1.1.4.1–7/10–11. See D. Jacquette, ‘Hume’s Aesthetic Psychology of Distance, Greatness and the Sublime’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 3 (1995), pp. 89–112; reprinted in D. Jacquette, David Hume’s Critique of Infinity, Afterword, pp. 307–33.

5 Tweyman, ‘Part Nine of Hume’s Dialogues and “The Accurate Philosophical Turn of Cleanthes”’ 1. 2.

3.

S. Tweyman, Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986). There are abuses of Pyrrhonian doubt which Hume discusses in Section 12 of the first Enquiry (EHU 12.1–34/149–65). However, this discussion is beyond the scope of this paper. In the ‘Author’s Replies to the Second Set of Objections’, Descartes discusses his method in the Meditations on First Philosophy, which he refers to as the method of ‘analysis’ (in R. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 2, p. 110.

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6 Phiddian, ‘“Strange Lengths”: Hume and Satire in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

J. C. A. Gaskin, in his introduction to his Oxford edition of the text, uncontroversially ascribes the first substantial draft to ‘by early 1751’ (xviii). See D. Hume, Principal Writings on Religion, including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). D. R. Raynor (ed), Sister Peg: a Pamphlet hitherto unknown by David Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 223. See H. D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). The ‘Rise of the Novel’ might be held to contradict this, but actually illustrates the point about cultural status. The emergent novel was not satirical in Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson but it was then a popular rather than literary form. The slightly later introduction of satire into the new genre by Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Laurence Sterne is a sign of its rising literary status. ‘My own Life’, Es xxxi–xli. P. Dendle, ‘Hume’s Dialogues and Paradise Lost’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60:2 (1999), pp. 257–76. Buckle, ‘Hume in the Enlightenment Tradition’, pp. 21–37. C. Condren, ‘Lucianic Humour and the History of Philosophy: The Case of Hobbes and his Critics’, Australasian Humour Studies Network, February 2009 Colloquium on ‘The Perils and Pleasures of Humour’, Women’s College, University of Sydney, 2009. C. A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–10. I use ‘reading’ and, a little later ‘text’ in the broad sense of consuming rhetorically formed material. The satirical can exist visually, musically and, presumably, in other ways, so the sense of reading and text should not be confined to verbal media for the purposes of this attempt at definition. Constant use of all relevant verbs and nouns would be distractingly unwieldy. I. S. Ross, ‘Hume’s Language of Scepticism’, Hume Studies, 21:2 (1995), p. 240. Condren, ‘Lucianic Humour’. See A. Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 187. Ross, ‘Hume’s Language of Scepticism’, pp. 248–9. Ibid. p. 243. 18 February 1751, quoted in Potkay, A., ‘Hume’s ‘Supplement to Gulliver’: The Medieval Volumes of The History of England’, in Eighteenth-Century Life, 25 (2001), p. 32. J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. C. Rawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 121. J. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. lxvi. R. Phiddian., Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Swift, A Tale, p. 172. See D. Nokes, Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth Century Satire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) for an account of how raillery was a common eighteenth-century word for satire.


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23. W. J. Bate, Samuel Johnson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), pp. 493–4. 24. Swift, A Tale, pp. 234–5.

7 Couvalis, ‘A Modern Malignant Demon? Hume’s Scepticism with Regard to Reason (Partly) Vindicated’ 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

For the history of these strands, see R. Popkin, A History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Feyerabend has argued that naïve empiricism is a close relative of Protestant foundationalism, which holds that truth about the divine is only to be found in Scripture. On his account, Protestant foundationalism is logically vacuous as it is impossible to identify or understand scripture without appeal to non-scriptural evidence. He says that, like Protestant foundationalism, naïve empiricism is vacuous but had great rhetorical power in the hands of brilliant scientists. Nevertheless, he also argues that less intelligent scientists were taken in by the rhetoric. On balance his view is that naïve empiricism retarded the development of science (P. Feyerabend, ‘Classical Empiricism’, in R. Butts and J. Davis (eds) The Methodological Heritage of Newton, (Blackwell: Oxford, 1970)). I discuss Feyerabend’s critique of empiricist foundationalism in detail in G. Couvalis, Feyerabend’s Critique of Foundationalism (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989). W. Morris, ‘Hume’s Scepticism About Reason’, Hume Studies, 15:1 (April 1989), 39–60. See, for instance, Meeker’s partial defence of Morris in K. Meeker, ‘Hume’s Iterative Probability Argument: A Pernicious ‘Reductio’’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38:2 (April 2000), pp. 221–38. It should be noted, however, that the classic naturalistic interpretation of Hume is that of Norman Kemp Smith (N. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of Its Origins and Central Doctrines, (London: Macmillan, 1941)). B. Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 13–14. D. Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). S. Buckle, ‘Hume’s Sceptical Materialism’, Philosophy 82 (2007), pp. 553–78. L. Bonjour, In Defence of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). G. Couvalis, ‘Is Induction Epistemologically Prior to Deduction?’, Ratio, 18 (2004), pp. 28–44. Stephen Gaukroger has pointed out, for example, that Leibniz and Descartes have very different views about the nature and value of demonstration and proof (S. Gaukroger, Cartesian Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 88ff.). E. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Ibid, pp. 626–7. D. Owen, Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A. Goldman, Epistemology and Cogniton (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, p. 14. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 15. Ibid. p. 15. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 25.

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21. Ibid. p. 12. 22. R. Imlay, ‘Hume’s Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason: A Study in Contrasting Themes’, in S. Tweyman (ed), David Hume, Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 279. 23. M. Karlsson, ‘Epistemic Leaks and Epistemic Meltdowns: A Response to William Morris on Scepticism with Regard to Reason’, Hume Studies, 16 (1990), p. 124. 24. In Couvalis, ‘Is Induction Epistemologically Prior to Deduction?’ I adapt some of Hume’s arguments to argue that we must presuppose the reliability of induction to rebut scepticism about our deductive knowledge. However, my target there is primarily Karl Popper’s deductivism. 25. M. Kinsbourne and E. Warrington, ‘The Developmental Gerstmann’s Syndrome’, Archives of Neurology, 8 (1963), p. 49. 26. B. Butterworth, ‘Mathematics and the Brain’, Opening Address to the Mathematical Association (3 April 2002), at http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/pdf/MALECTURE. PDF [accessed 31 December 2010]. 27. M. Delazer and Th. Benke, ‘Arithmetic Facts without Meaning’, in Cortex, 33 (1997), pp. 697–710. 28. M. Hittmair-Delazer, U. Sailer and Th. Benke, ‘Impaired Arithmetic Facts but Intact Conceptual Knowledge – A Single Case Study of Dyscalculia’, Cortex, 31 (1995), pp. 139–47. 29. S. Dehaene and L. Cohen, ‘Two Mental Calculation Systems: A Case Study of Severe Acalculia with Preserved Approximation’, Neuropsychologia, 29 (1991), p. 1051.

8 Taylor, ‘Hume on Sympathy and Cruelty’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

A. C. Baier, ‘Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant’, Ethics, 103:3 (1993), p. 436. For a good account of Hume on sympathy, to which I am indebted, see P. S. Ardal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). From this definition of pity it seems clear that by pity Hume means something like what we mean by sympathy. See C. Taylor, Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Hume, one might think, comes close to admitting the ad hoc nature of this solution later in the section when he is forced to deal with further complications this solution brings in its wake. Hume has argued that ‘pity or a sympathy with pain produces love’, but then, as Hume goes on to ask, ‘why does [this rule] not prevail throughout, and why does sympathy in uneasiness ever produce any passion beside good-will and kindness?’ At which point Hume immediately asks (in part to himself ?): ‘Is it becoming a philosopher to alter his method of reasoning, and run from one principle to its contrary, according to the particular phænomenon, which he wou’d explain?’ (T 2.2.9.11/385). F. Douglass, The Narrative of a Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York, NY: Penguin, 1986), pp. 57–8. Hume was of course opposed to slavery, which he regarded as a cruel and oppressive custom. Indeed he discusses the slavery practiced in the ‘AMERICAN colonies, and among some EUROPEAN nations’, and suggests that such examples ‘would never surely create a desire of rendering it more universal. The little humanity, commonly observed in persons, accustomed, from their infancy, to exercise so great authority over their fellow-


8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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creatures, and to trample upon human nature, were sufficient alone to disgust us with that unbounded dominion’ (Es 383–4). But, first, Hume seems to be here concerned more with oppression under the unrestrained authority of tyrants rather than slavery as Douglass attempts to characterize it. And, second, Hume’s focus is on the fact that such authority undermines the humanity of the perpetrator; he does not contemplate, as Douglass invites us to, what slavery or the slave-owner does to the slave. I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. and ed. M. Gregor, intro. C. M. Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This is not to say that Kant openly advocated for the abolition of slavery. Douglass, Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 58. So those with severe and permanent mental disability would seem to lack the requisite rationality that is essential to our moral worth for Kant. P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 39. Ibid. pp. 38–9. Ibid. pp. 39–40. Ibid. pp. 40–1. C. Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, in C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 329. Ibid. pp. 329–30. Korsgaard, C., ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and responsibility in personal relations’, in C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 204. P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974). Korsgaard, ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends’, p. 197. I refer here to the ‘specific debate’ between Williams and McDowell because Korsgaard has also taken issue, but for different reasons, with Williams’s internal reasons thesis in her ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’. I briefly address Korsgaard’s response to Williams in what follows. See here B. Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in B. Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. McDowell, ‘Might there be external reasons?’, in J. E. J. Altham and R. Harrison (eds), Mind, World and Ethics: Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and B. Williams, ‘Replies’, in Altham and Harrison (eds), Mind, World and Ethics. Korsgaard also takes issue with Williams’s internal reasons thesis in her ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’. Williams ‘Replies’, pp. 189–90. Ibid. p. 190. Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, p. 328. While my focus here has been to highlight the relevance of our particular abilities, limitations and incapacities in our deliberations, the point is not restricted to what may be termed mere psychological incapacity, incapacity to act in accordance with some ideal moral standard. For it may be that our moral decisions will themselves express what is morally possible or impossible for us in a given circumstance; that apart from mere psychological incapacity there are genuine moral incapacities, incapacities that are an expression of our particular moral character, our particular moral psychology. For discussion of such moral incapacity see B. Williams, ‘Moral incapacity’, Proceedings of the

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Aristotelian Society, 92 (1993), pp. 59–70 and similarly, but much earlier, Peter Winch’s discussion of moral modality in P. Winch, ‘The Universalizabilty of Moral Judgements’, in P. Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 27. Letter from W. A. Mozart to Padre Martini, 4 December 1776, quoted in D. Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, in Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 89. 28. Ibid. p. 89. 29. One might think that Wiggins’s point here about Mozart is slightly overdone. Mozart was, after all, a freemason, a member of the religiously based yet modernizing institution of the day. The relative prominence of rational moral principles as opposed to special revelation within masonry, moreover, is in evidence in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Still, Wiggins undoubtedly has a point. We can get a sense of the difference in world views here from the author’s note in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (London: Dent & Sons, 1952): I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, he replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t. Here we see just the kind of contrast Wiggins has in mind. Thus the old certainty of the shepherd contrasts sharply with Thomas’s attitude to the world, one that is at once reverent but also uncertain in the kind of way that the enlightenment made possible. I thank Steve Buckle for this example.

9 Collier, ‘Hume’s Natural History of Justice’ 1. 2.

3.

4.

Cf. D. K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 56. Hume’s observation on this point was prescient; cognitive psychologists have provided abundant empirical evidence for this ‘endowment effect’ (R. Thaler, ‘Towards a positive theory of consumer choice’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1:1 (March 1980), pp. 43–7. Cf. R. Sugden, ‘Spontaneous Order’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3:4 (Fall, 1989), p. 95. Considerations of psychological salience are also at work, according to Hume, in our selection of particular rules for the accession of property; we regard the fruit that grows in our garden, and the offspring of our cattle, as belonging to us because they are ‘connected together in the imagination’ with our present possessions (T 3.2.3.10/509). So too for the inheritance of property: our possessions pass to our descendants because there is an ‘association of ideas’ between parents and their children (T 3.2.3.11/511). This propensity to prefer the contiguous over the remote has been confirmed in a variety of experimental studies (G. Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 3). Indeed, researchers have demonstrated that this impulsive tendency is strongly correlated with unilateral defection in iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas (A. C. Harris and G. J. Madden, ‘Delay Discounting and Performance on the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game’, Psychological Record, 52 (2002), pp. 429–40; R. Yi, M. W. Johnson, and W. K. Bickel, ‘Relationship between cooperation in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game and the discounting of hypothetical outcomes’, Learning and Behavior, 33 (2005), pp. 324–36.

Notes to pages 136–44 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Those who live in small-scale or primitive societies, Hume proposes, would be vulnerable to this propensity. But it would be ‘less conspicuous’ in societies where there is so little initial temptation to dispossess others of their goods (T 3.2.8.1/539). The tendency to overrate the worth of contiguous goods does not represent a serious problem, in other words, when they have so little value in the first place. But this is not the case when it comes to ‘large societies, where there are so many possessions on the one hand, and so many wants, real or imaginary, on the other’ (T 3.2.8.6/544). The temptation to defect for the sake of short-term gains, it seems, increases along with the wealth of nations. T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1960). J. Harrison, Hume’s Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 172. Cf. R. Frank, Passion within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), p. 82. Our impulsiveness might blind us with regard to our own actions, as Hume puts it, but it does not prevent the injustices of others from appearing in their true colours (T 3.2.8.7/545). They feel the same way, of course, about our own tendency to cheat. The associative principles of sympathy will lead us, therefore, to affectively mirror their feelings of disapproval. We ‘naturally sympathize with others’, as Hume puts it, ‘in the sentiments they entertain of us’ (T 3.2.2.24/499; cf. T 2.1.11.2/316). M. Olson, Jr, The Logic of Collective Action: public goods and the theory of groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 33n; R. Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 40–1. R. Hardin, ‘From Power to Order, From Hobbes to Hume’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 1:1 (1993), p. 71. Taylor, M., Anarchy and Cooperation (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), p. 22. P. Wood, ‘The natural history of man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science, 28 (1990), pp. 89–123. J. K. Rilling, D. A. Gutman, T. R. Zeh, G. Pagnoni, G. S. Berns and C. D. Kilts, ‘A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation’, Neuron, 35:2 (2002), p. 399. Rilling, ‘A Neural Basis’, p. 403; cf. K. McCabe, D. Houser, L. Ryan, V. Smith and T. Trouard, ‘A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98:20 (2001), pp. 11832–35. E. Fehr and S. Gächter, ‘Altruistic punishment in humans’, Nature, 415 (2002), p. 139. C. Lamm and T. Singer, ‘The role of anterior insular cortex in social emotions’, in Brain Structure and Function, 214:5–6 (2010), p. 582. Lewis, Convention; D. Gauthier, ‘David Hume: Contractarian’, Philosophical Review, 88 (1979), pp. 3–38; J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); R. Hardin, David Hume: Moral & Political Theorist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

10 Hunt, ‘Hume and Rawls on the Stability of a Society’s System of Justice’ 1. 2.

J. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. E. Kelly (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 34–5. Rawls ( J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 225) shares this view with Kant and initially claims Kant’s moral philosophy as an antecedent of the choice of principles in the original position.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Notes to pages 144–55 However, Rawls ( J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, exp. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 99–100) subsequently moves from a form of (non-metaphysical) Kantian constructivism to his political constructivism, and emphasizes that the kind of political autonomy at the basis of his view is not Kant’s view that autonomy is the exercise of practical reason in accordance with inherent principles. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 10. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 15. Rawls (ibid. pp. 54–5) therefore rejects the idea that what is just in society could be set by a historical process. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 13–14. This is explained in I. Hunt, ‘Why Justice Matters’, Philosophical Papers, 38:2 ( July 2009), pp. 170–1. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 136–7; Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 190. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 61–5. Ibid. pp. 48–60. Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 17. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 32–3. Rousseau, The Social Contract, p. 60. S. Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 201–5. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 186. J. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 88–90; M. Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1976) J. Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 109–10. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory, pp. 90–1. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 392. See also Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property, pp. 261–2. Buckle (pp. 259–60) is wrong to conclude that the artificiality of justice or other virtues, such as chastity, makes them peculiarly conditional, so that ‘there is no reason for the conscientious pursuit of such virtues’. Because the removal of even one stone from the ‘vault’ of any artificial virtue threatens to bring the whole edifice down (EPM App. 3.5/305), strict adherence to rules of justice or chastity is required. With natural virtues, breaches of duty have less consequence, since they bring down only one part of the natural moral edifice. Kant, Practical Philosophy, pp. 67–9. Ibid. pp. 18–20. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 20. Ibid. p. 22. Rawls, J., Justice as Fairness, p. 118. Ibid. pp. 81–2. Ibid. p. 185.


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11 Stoklosa, ‘Can Hume’s Impressions of Reflection Represent?’ 1.

L. Turco, ‘Moral sense and the foundations of morals’, in A. Broadie (ed), The Cambridge Companion to The Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. Hume concedes that in some cases (e.g. madness or fever) this distinction may blur. Such cases, however, are quite limited according to Hume (T 1.1.1.2/2). 3. In Books 1 and 2 of the Treatise Hume makes this point at: 1.1.1.1/1–2; 1.1.1.3/2–3; 1.1.3.1/8–9; 1.1.7.5/19; 1.3.7.5/96; 1.3.10.3/119–20; 2.1.11.3/317; 2.1.11.7/318–19; and 2.2.5.4/358–9. 4. D. Owen, Hume’s Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also W. Waxman, Hume’s Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and D. Garrett, ‘Hume’s Naturalistic Theory of Representation’, Synthese, 152 (2006), pp. 301–19. 5. I am here in agreement with Stroud and Alanen who also read Hume in this way. See L. Alanen, ‘The Powers and Mechanisms of the Passions’ in S. Traiger (ed), The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 179–98; B. Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 6. It is unclear whether Hume means for this statement to apply to complex or simple perceptions. His claim that ideas are copied from impressions suggests that it is applicable to the simple perceptions (as I will discuss shortly, copy relationship does not obtain between complex perceptions, only simple ones). On the other hand, simple perceptions, by Hume’s definition, ‘admit of no distinction nor separation’ (T 1.1.1.2/2), thus the ‘parts’ claim tells against this reading. Perhaps then he means this claim to apply to complex impressions, as those perceptions do have parts? However, complex perceptions stand to each other in a relation of resemblance (not copy), as is discussed subsequently. The claim may, perhaps, be an instance of uncharacteristic carelessness on Hume’s part. 7. Another way to generate complex ideas, according to Hume, is by uniting simple ideas via the principles of association (T 1.1.4.1/10–11). While this seems like a violation of Hume’s precept that all ideas come from impressions, this is not actually the case because simple ideas (from which these complex ideas are formed) are themselves caused by simple impressions. (Hume also makes this point, albeit in a slightly modified language, in his discussion of the copy thesis in Hume, EHU 2.5, 19 and EHU 2.7, 20). 8. Instances of his claim that impressions cause ideas can be found at: T 1.1.1.7/4; T 1.1.1.8/4–5; T 1.1.2.1/7–8; T 1.3.8.8/101–2; T 1.3.14.6/157–8. 9. Hume also further sub-divides ideas into ideas of memory and ideas of imagination. For spatial constraints, however, I will set those aside. 10. This limitation is due to Hume’s empirical approach. In the Introduction to the Treatise, Hume cautions the reader not to go beyond experience. As Owen argues, this carries an explanatory cost because in limiting what is knowable to what can be experienced, we limit our ability to know the explanatory principles that lie beyond experience (Owen, Hume’s Reason). Broughton argues along similar lines ( J. Broughton, ‘What does the Scientist of Man Observe?’, Hume Studies, 18:2 (November 1992), pp. 155–68). 11. Notice that Hume uses the term ‘copy’ to describe the relationship between the impression of sensation and the idea of sensation; he does not describe the relationship between the idea of sensation and impression of reflection as a copy relationship. The non-copyness of our impressions of reflection will come to bear on the issue of the passions’ ability to represent, discussed shortly. 12. Jane McIntyre points out that neither this terminology nor any equivalent classification (of passions into direct and indirect) occurs in either earlier or contemporary works on

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

Notes to pages 161–4 the passions ( J. L. McIntyre, ‘Hume’s Passions: Direct and Indirect’, Hume Studies 26:1 (April 2000), pp. 77–86). Fieser makes a similar observation ( J. Fieser, ‘Hume’s Classification of the Passions and its Precursors’, Hume Studies, 18:1 (1992), pp. 1–17). Hume does not indicate at this point what the ‘other qualities’ are. This will become apparent shortly. In the following remarks, I will focus primarily on the indirect passion of pride – just as Hume himself does in the Treatise. Admittedly, what may underlie this claim is Hume’s awareness of some of the difficulties around adequately defining concepts (see especially his discussion on defining belief in T 1.3.7.7). Kemp Smith calls Hume’s use of ‘object’ in his discussion of the passions, ‘unconventional’ pointing out that we should have expected Hume to say the self is the ‘subject’ of the passion of pride rather than its ‘object’ (N. Kemp Smith, The philosophy of David Hume (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983)). C.f. Ardal, who argues pace Kemp Smith that it is more natural to talk of a person we love as ‘the object of our love’ rather than ‘the subject of our love’ (P. S. Ardal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); see also P. S. Ardal, Passions, Promises and Punishment (Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press, 1998)). Hume also denies here that passions refer to anything. It’s not clear whether Hume’s concept of reference is the same as his concept of representation, however, the two sometimes are conflated in the literature (see, e.g., A. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); T. Penelhum, ‘Hume’s Moral Psychology’, in D. F. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)). As far as I know, only Sayre-McCord has suggested that Hume may mean different things by reference and representation in T 2.3.3.5, although unfortunately he does not develop this point (G. Sayre-McCord, ‘Hume’s Representation Argument Against Rationalism’, Manuscrito, 20 (1997), pp. 77–94). I think that Sayre-McCord is right, but will not expand on the issue due to spatial limitations. A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and the Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 17. Penelhum, T., ‘Hume’s Moral Psychology’. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments. Cohon and Owen, ‘Hume on Representation, Reason and Motivation’. Sayre-McCord, ‘Hume’s Representation Argument Against Rationalism’. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments. Ibid. p. 163. Ibid. I discuss the Cohon-Owen argument below. D. Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions, ed. T. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See Beauchamp’s excellent introduction to his edition of the Dissertation, which includes a paragraph by paragraph comparison of the contents of the Dissertation and Treatise Book 2. J. Immerwahr, ‘Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (1994), pp. 225–40. The stipulation that the relationship here has to be either a copy or a resemblance one is necessary, as only simple ideas are copies of simple impressions; complex ideas – as was noted – ‘merely’ resemble complex impressions. Cohon and Owen, ‘Hume on Representation, Reason and Motivation’.


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31. Ibid. Recall that Hume holds that a passion is placed between two ideas, where the first idea represents the cause of the passion, and the second idea represents the self who experiences the passion (T 2.1.2.4). 32. Garrett suggests something similar (Garrett, ‘Hume’s Naturalistic Theory of Representation’). 33. Sayre-McCord, ‘Hume’s Representation Argument Against Rationalism’. 34. As previously noted, in order to capture the representationality of both simple and complex perceptions, ‘copy’ needs to be understood here to mean ‘copy or resemblance’. 35. Admittedly, it is not clear whether Hume is using the term ‘represent’ in the same way in all of these examples. Arguably, at least some of these usages of ‘represent’ may be intended to mean ‘portray’. An adequate treatment of this issue would require a longer discussion of Hume’s concept of portrayal and is thus beyond the remit of this paper. The point, however, is that although the usual understanding of Hume’s notion of representation involves a resemblance relationship between the representing and the represented, Hume also uses the term ‘represent’ where the representing and the represented bear no resemblance to each other at all. 36. Cohon and Owen, for example, hold that passions’ being original existence is problematic for their representationality (Cohon and Owen, ‘Hume on Representation, Reason and Motivation’; see also Alanen, ‘Reflection and Ideas in Hume’s Account of the Passions’). 37. The argument that passions represent a relation of some type is not entirely without philosophical precedent. Such precedent can be derived from Simmons’s argument that Cartesian sensations represent the relation of harm or benefit in which another entity stands to a mind-body union (A. Simmons, ‘Are Cartesian Sensations Representational?’, Noûs, 33 (1999), pp. 347–69.). As Cartesian passions are a species of sensations, the representationality of relations should extend to passions, as well. 38. In addition to Cohon and Owen’s account of Humean representation discussed here, I am aware only of the account defended by Don Garrett. His account of Hume’s representation grounds Humean representation in entities’ (whether mental or non mental) specific functional or causal roles. While Garrett’s account is very interesting, he would not think it applies to the passions, as he interprets 2.3.3.5 to deny representationality of the passions (Garrett, ‘Hume’s Naturalistic Theory of Representation’). 39. This paper was originally presented at the Hume and the Enlightenment Conference, in Adelaide in 2009. A very preliminary version of some of the ideas contained here was also presented at the Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference, in Sydney in 2008. I would like to thank the organizers of both conferences for inviting me, and the audiences for their very helpful suggestions and feedback. Thanks are also due to Graeme Hunter and David Raynor at the University of Ottawa, for feedback on earlier drafts.

12 Waldow, ‘Mechanism and Thought Formation: Hume’s Emancipatory Scepticism’ 1.

2.

I use the term object in the third of the senses suggested by Grene, namely in the sense of ‘objects as non-mental’ objects, to which Hume ‘sometimes, though not always, explicitly referred to as “external objects”’ (M. Grene, ‘The Objects of Hume’s Treatise’, Hume Studies, 20:2 (1994), p. 165). In what follows I will keep to this usage and will indicate if ‘object’ is used in a different sense. T. Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. W. Hamilton, 2 vols (Edinburgh/Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994a), vol. 1, p. 127.

206 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes to pages 172–6 Throughout the Treatise, and as early as on page three of Book 1, Hume refers to things we find in the real world, such as oranges, pineapples and the city of Paris (T 1.1.1.4– 1.1.1.9/3–5). In assuming that the real world, and not merely the universe of perceptions of which one is immediately aware, is the background against which Hume develops his theory of perception, I follow commentators such as J. Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, E. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Baier, A Progress of Sentiments and Baier, Death and Character, Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract and P. Kail, Projection and Realism in Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). T. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. W. Hamilton, 2 vols (Edinburgh/Bristol: Thoemmes Press. 1994b), vol. 1, p. 312. Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, p. 121. Ibid. p. 121. Ibid. p. 195. Grave, S. A., The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 175–6. Galen, Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (1821–1833), trans. R. Walzer and M. Frede, intro. M. Frede (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1985), p. 9. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. J. Annas and J. Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 93. Ibid. p. 93. Ibid. pp. 92–3. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 313. ‘I touch the table gently with my hand and I feel it to be smooth, hard and cold. These are qualities of the table perceived through touch; but I perceive them by means of sensation which indicates them’ (Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 311). N. Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) takes up a similar line of argument; see R. Nichols, Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) for a criticism of Wolterstorff. D. Jacquette, ‘Thomas Reid on Natural Signs, Natural Principles, and the Existence of the External World’, Review of Metaphysics, 57 (2003), p. 295. Daniels argues that Reid’s reference to nature as a guarantee for the veracity of our cognitive faculties owes its plausibility to a Cartesian-like argument (N. Daniels, Thomas Reid Inquiry: The Geometry of the Visibles and the Case for Realism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 117–18. I here disagree with Nichols who claims that Reid’s theory of perception does without metaphysical speculations and is therefore better in line with the empiricist project than Locke’s, Berkeley’s and Hume’s theories (Nichols, Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception, pp. 277–85). I discuss the anti-dogmatic implications of empiricism in A. Waldow, ‘Empiricism and its Roots in the Ancient Medical Tradition’, in C. Wolfe and O. Gal (eds), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (Springer: New York, 2010), pp. 287–308. This also holds for primary qualities: Reid emphasizes that the way something feels, that is, the phenomenological properties we experience when sensing certain kinds of objects, are not attributed to the object, but what causes the sensation. These causes are captured in the conceptions that are constitutive of processes of perceptions, rather than in our sensations. See Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 311.


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20. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 312. 21. Some commentators think all Humean perceptions are conceptually structured, either because they take it that impressions have conceptual content and stand model for the conceptual content of their copy ideas or because they assume that processes of perception require the presence of impressions and ideas while ideas are understood to be what renders perception conceptual. Others again sympathize with the view that strictly speaking only abstract ideas qualify as concepts, because only those ideas are said to have a general representative function. 22. Some commentators take this to indicate that it is impossible for the Humean mind to conceive of external objects at all; see for instance K. Winkler, ‘The New Hume’, Philosophical Review, 100:4 (1991), pp. 541–79. I have argued elsewhere that only the very property by which we can distinguish objects from perceptions remains incomprehensible, because the Humean mind lacks a positive, impression-derived idea of this property. This is so because impression-derived ideas contain per definitionem merely properties of impressions, and hence of perceptions. What follows from this is that the mind is able to conceive of external objects in the guise of perceptions, however, without having a precise understanding of what distinguishes external objects from perceptions, which is a less restrictive claim than the denial of the conception of an external object per se. For a more detailed version of this argument see A. Waldow, David Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (London: Continuum Books, 2009). 23. Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, p. 127. 24. This is another way of expressing Hume’s criticism of Reid as formulated in Hume’s letter to Hugh Blair, who had sent him Reid’s manuscript of the Inquiry into the Human Mind. Hume here objects that Reid’s theory itself rests on the theory of innate ideas; see P. B. Wood, ‘David Hume on Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind. On the Principles of Common Sense: A New Letter to Hugh Blair from July 1762’, Mind, 95 (1986), pp. 411–16 and J. Wright, ‘Hume vs. Reid on Ideas: The New Hume Letter’, Mind, 96 (1987), pp. 392–9. 25. Note that passages in which Hume uses the copy principle are usually intended to determine the inappropriateness of our concepts; and they do so not so much by showing that some of our existent ideas fail to copy from preceding impressions, but by revealing that the ideas to which we thought our concepts related actually do not exist. In Of personal identity (T 1.4.6/251–63) Hume for instance writes that ‘it must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any impression … consequently there is no such idea’ (T 1.4.6.2/251, emphasis added). And he concludes from this that it is vain to reason with metaphysicians who believe in the self as something ‘simple and continu’d’ (T 1.4.6.3/252) and thus operate with an empty concept of self. What follows form this is that the copy principle is a means to determine the value of our concepts rather than a means to assess whether or not our ideas correspond to something real. This cannot be done because it is a standing question whether or not impressions, and hence impression-derived ideas, resemble their causes. 26. Baier points out that ‘we get the most charitable interpretation of Hume’s reason for beginning the Treatise as he did if we play down the so-called ‘copy principle’’ (Baier, Death and Character, p. 138); and she adds that ‘this thesis … does not gain force as the work advances, which more or less drops out in Book 3 … That suggests it never was [Hume’s] main quarry’ (Baier Death and Character, pp. 145–6). Landy defends the opposite claim, that is, that with the advancement of his writings the copy principle

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27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Notes to pages 178–83 becomes more and more important to Hume (D. Landy, ‘Hume’s Impressions and Ideas’, Hume Studies, 32:1 (2006), pp. 119–39). For Reid the mere circumstance ‘that, by the constitution of our nature, we are under the necessity of assenting’ (Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, p. 130; emphasis added) is sufficient for establishing true belief. See for instance Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, pp. 1–17. Landy notes that ‘in the mind that is diseased or mad ideas can obtain a degree of force and vivacity equal to that of impressions’ (Landy, ‘Hume’s Impressions and Ideas’, p. 121) and draws the conclusion that impressions are best understood, not in terms of their liveliness but their ability to function as originals from which copy ideas derive. Although I agree that the liveliness of impressions is a rather bad criterion in order to understand what distinguishes them from ideas, it seems to me that it is not the circumstance that they issue copy ideas but rather that they function as triggers of stable idea-forming processes that marks them out as perceptions of a certain sort. A similar example can be found in the Treatise. Here Hume describes ‘a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho’ he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling’ (T 1.3.13.10/148–9). In T 1.3.9.4/108 Hume refers us to the ‘settled order, arising from custom and the relation of cause and effect’ beside an idea’s force and liveliness as the criterion that marks ideas we take to be about something real. See Landy ‘Hume’s Impressions and Ideas’, M. Frasca-Spada, ‘Hume on Sense Impressions and Objects’, in M. Heidelberger and F. Stadler (eds), Philosophy of Science: New Trends and Perspectives (Vienna Institute Yearbook, Dodrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 13–24 and D. Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) for a rejection of liveliness as the distinguishing feature of impressions. For an overview of the problems Hume’s account of liveliness faces see J. Broughton, ‘Impressions and Ideas’, in S. Traigger, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Admittedly, the function of Humean associations is not limited to the concatenation of ideas: associations are also at work when the mind links simple ideas diachronically, that is, when it passes from one simple idea to another (for instance when the association in question is resemblance). Hume admits to three senses of the term in a footnote in his discussion on belief: ‘When I oppose the imagination to the memory, I mean the faculty, by which we form our fainter ideas. When I oppose it to reason, I mean the same faculty, excluding only our demonstrative and probable reasonings. When I oppose it to neither, ’tis indifferent whether it be taken in the larger or limited sense’ (T 1.3.9.19n/117–18). Traiger, ‘Impressions, Ideas, and Fictions’, p. 384–5. This distinction is consistent with what Hume has to say about the difference between the principles of the imagination ‘that are permanent, irresistible, and universal’ and ‘the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular’ (T 1.4.4.1/225). Cf. Hume on ‘pre-established harmony’ (EHU 5.21/54) and the system of thought that is related to impressions such that ‘we are pleas’d to call a reality’ (T 1.3.9.3/108). Cf. T 1.4.4.1/225. O’Shea puts it as follows: ‘If we follow our objectifying imagination along to a belief in persisting bodies, we operate upon a principle that embraces falsehood and contradic-


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tion, and leads readily to speculative flights of the fancy’ ( J. O’Shea, ‘Hume’s Reflective Return to the Vulgar’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 4:2 (1996), p. 309). 39. This goes against the view that natural belief is irresistible. It is irresistible only if we relax the ‘bent of mind’ (T 1.4.7.9/269) and return from a reflective state of mind to our everyday activities. For a characterization of natural belief as irreplaceable see J. C. A., Gaskin, ‘God, Hume and Natural Belief ’, Philosophy, 49 (1974), pp. 286–7. 40. Baier, Death and Character, p. 144.

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INDEX

acalculia, 8, 111–14 aesthetics, 6–7, 65–6, 71–6 beauty, 23, 72–4, 161 sublime, 6, 23, 65–6, 72–6 Age of Reason, 3–4, 14–16, 19 see also Enlightenment American Declaration of Independence, 23, 57, 128, 129 a posteriori, 42, 68, 128–9 a priori, 5, 7, 42–3, 58, 68, 79, 81, 83–4, 87, 93, 128 Aristotelianism, 40, 85–6, 94 Aristotle, 39, 68, 70, 76, 127 Physics, 70 associations, associative processes, 10, 171, 180, 182–3 Astell, Mary, 40 Bacon, Francis, 17–19, 37 The Great Instauration, 17 Baier, Annette, 8, 117, 122, 157, 163–5, 169, 184 Ball, John, 27–8 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 51 Bayle, Pierre, 69–70, 107 Historical and Critical Dictionary, 69, 107 Beccaria, Cesare, 22, 31 On Crimes and Punishments, 31 belief, 2, 8, 11, 19, 77, 82, 123, 172–6, 180, 183–5 belief-desire theory of motivation, 4 benevolence, 32–3, 119, 132, 149, 160 Bentham, Jeremy, 31 Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne, 18, 106, 175 Berlin, Isaiah, 5, 59

Berlin Monthly, 16, 58 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 73 L’Art Poétique, 73 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 43 Bonnie Prince Charlie [Prince Charles Edward Stuart], 55 Brahmins, 103 Burke, Edmund, 23, 47, 66, 72, 76 Calvinism, 92, 98, 101 Calvinist Protestantism, 101 Cantor, Georg, 67 Cartesian, 7–8, 15–16, 19, 107–8, 110–13 see also Descartes Catherine the Great, 22, 31 Bolshoy Nakaz, 22 causation, cause and effect, 1, 13–14, 61, 84 causal chain, 85–7 constant conjunction, 85–7 chance, 80, 85–6, 181 Charles I, 5, 46, 50 Christianity, 37, 100 see also Religion, revealed Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 98–9, 104 De Natura Deorum, 98 Civil War, English, 28, 46–7, 55, 62 Clarke, Samuel, 37, 44, 60 A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, 37 communism, 57 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 17 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 17 Cognition, 65, 67, 75–6, 180, 184–5 Cohon, Rachael, 157, 163–5, 169 concepts, conceptions see also ideas, 44, 65–6, 68, 72, 173–9, 182, 184

– 223 –

224


convention, 121–2, 132–7, 139–42, 147, 151 cooperation, 9, 131–2, 134, 140, 142–8, 150–3, 155 copy principle, 6, 10, 159, 162, 164, 166–9, 171, 174–6, 178–9, 184 see also resemblance Cosmological–Ontological argument see God, existence of Cromwell, Oliver, 24–5, 48 Cruelty, 8, 27, 117–18, 121–4, 129, 131 Cudworth, Ralph, 60 A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 60 custom, 49–50, 77, 99, 133, 153, 173, 180–2 see also habit

Encyclopédie, 1, 17, 37 see also Diderot and d’Alembert Enlightenment Dutch, 2, 37 English, 1, 17, 37 French, 1, 2, 4, 13, 15–19, 37 German, 2 Italian, 2 moderate, 6, 23, 36–7, 53, 55 radical, 1, 6, 31, 36–7, 53, 55, 57, 63 Scottish, 1, 61, 68, 96–7, 141, 157 Epictetus, 78 epistemology, 73, 106, 108, 172 Erasmus, Desiderius, 96, 104 The Praise of Folly, 104 Euclidean geometry, 67 ex nihilo nihil fit, 80, 85

d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 1, 4, 13, 17, 21, 40 Darwin, Charles, 58, 71 Origin of Species, 71 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 56 democracy, 5, 22, 29, 48–50, 53–4, 56–7, 59, 63 Descartes, René, 7–8, 16–17, 40, 89, 106–10, 113, 115 Discourse on Method, 16 Meditations on First Philosophy, 16 Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 107–8 design argument see God, existence of Dickens, Charles, 93 Bleak House, 93 Diderot, Denis, 1, 22, 37, 40 Douglass, Frederick, 119–24, 129 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 120 dogmatism, 7, 11, 40, 78–9, 172, 176, 179, 184

fancy (fantastic) see imagination Ferguson, Adam, 92 Frederick the Great, 22 freedom, 4, 24–5, 27, 29, 30, 40–51, 59–60, 62, 124–5, 128, 145–6 free-rider problem, 141 Frye, Northrop, 93

Edict of Nantes, 37 education, 9, 16, 46–7, 56, 59–60, 139 egalitarianism, 28, 55 Elliot, Gilbert, 100 empiricism, 4–6, 14, 19–20, 41, 53–5, 58–60, 65–8, 70–6, 173–6, 179 empirical standpoint, 66

Gibbon, Edward, 61, 101 Glorious Revolution, 24, 36 God, 42–5, 40, 50, 76, 92, 98, 100, 128, 153, 160 attributes of, 81, 87 existence of, 81–4, 87 cosmological-ontological argument, 7, 79–81, 83, 85, 87 design argument, 78–9 Habermas, Jürgen, 15 habit, 1, 3, 44, 85, 94, 133, 148, 167, 173, 180 see also custom Heine, Heinrich, 17 On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 17 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 28, 37, 40, 94, 147–8, 151 The Elements of Law, 18 Homer, 167 The Odyssey, 73

Index Hume, David as ironist, 92–3 A Dissertation on the Passions, 163–4 A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, 37 A Treatise of Human Nature, 7–8, 10, 20, 26, 33, 41, 66, 68–70, 75, 82, 85–6, 88, 106–7, 109, 157–9, 161, 163–4, 167, 169, 171, 181 An Abstract of a Work Lately Published, Entituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, 158 An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 7, 26, 30, 39, 68–70, 78, 82, 88–9, 107, 158, 164 An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 32–3, 157, 164, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 7, 30, 77–9, 82, 84, 87–9, 91–3, 95–8, 104 Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 70 Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 47 The History of England, 5, 13, 24, 50, 96, 117 The Natural History of Religion, 96 Hutcheson, Francis, 27, 33, 74 ideas, 6, 10–11, 41–2, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 75, 77, 157–63, 165–9, 171–2, 174–84 fictitious, 10, 178–82 triggered by sensations, 11, 171, 173–4, 176–9, 182–4 vivacity or liveliness, 82, 152, 158 see also concepts images, 70, 158, 171 imagination, 1–3, 34, 66, 74–6, 99, 134, 160–1, 180–2 impressions, 158–9 of reflection (see also passions), 6, 10, 70, 19, 160–2, 164–9 of sensation, 6, 11, 65, 69–70, 160–1, 171–2, 174–84 inkspot experiment, 69 internalism, 125, 127 intuition, 107–10, 112–13, 124, 152 James I [ James VI of Scotland], 5, 24, 46–7 justice, 4, 9–10, 31–4, 49–50, 121, 129, 135–7, 139–42, 143–55

225

as modus vivendi, 151–2 see also virtue, artificial Johnson, Samuel, 18, 96, 101–2, 104 Rasselas, 102, 104 Kant, Immanuel, 4–6, 8, 10, 14, 16–17, 23, 27, 41–4, 49, 54, 57–8, 60–1, 72–3, 76, 117, 121–3, 125–7, 129, 146, 152, 154 Critique of Judgement, 6, 73 Critique of Pure Reason, 17 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 42–3 Korsgaard, Christine, 125–7, 129 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 16 Man the Machine, 16 Leibniz, Gottfried, 71, 106 liberalism, 143–4, 146, 152 liberty see freedom Locke, John, 17–19, 36–7, 59–61, 74, 106–7 Essay concerning Human Understanding, 17, 37 Two Treatises of Government, 36 Longinus, Cassius, 73 On the Sublime, 73 Lucian, 93–8, 104 see also satire Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus], 28 De Rerum Natura, 28 Luxemburg, Rosa, 21 Macaulay, Catharine Graham, 5–6, 39–51, 53–4, 57, 60–1, 64 A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, 43, 45, 60 History of England, 43 Letters on Education, 46 McDowell, John, 126–7 materialism, 16, 18–19, 28, 95 mathematics, 81, 107 empiricist, 6–7, 65–9, 71, 76 classical, 67–71 infinite divisibility, 6, 66–70, 72 infinity, 6, 65, 67–70, 72, 76, 80 artificial, 76 potential, 76 memory, 66, 99, 108–10, 112–14, 160–1, 180, 182 Mendelssohn, Moses, 59

226


metaphysics, 31, 41–3, 58, 67, 73, 96, 158, 166, 179 methodology, 65–6, 71 experimental method, 6–7, 20, 65, 88 Mill, John Stuart, 146, 152 Milton, John, 73 Paradise Lost, 73, 93 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 40 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 22, 61–2 The Spirit of the Laws, 61 moral philosophy, 8, 10, 31, 65, 71, 157 More, Thomas, 104 Utopia, 104 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 128 Nagel, Thomas, 125 naturalism, 3, 8, 106, 117, 123, 128–9 non-reductive, 8, 124–5 reductive, 124–5 neuroeconomics, 9, 142 Newton, Isaac, 18, 37, 65, 67, 70–1 Opticks, 18 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 70 Newtonian, 37, 40, 71 Orwell, George, 95 1984, 95 Owen, David, 107, 157–8, 163–5, 169 passions, 4, 6, 10, 15, 24, 41, 44, 58, 74–5, 91, 95, 119, 135, 152, 157–8, 160 double relation of impressions and ideas, 168 direct, 161 indirect, 157, 161–2 intentionality of, 157, 162–6, 168–9 personal identity, 14, 109 pity, 118–21, 161 see also sympathy Plato, 24, 26, 59, 68, 98 The Republic, 24 Platonism, 22, 60, 98 Pope, Alexander, 73, 93–4, 101 ‘Epistle to Augustus’, 101 Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, 73

primary qualities, 175, 177 prisoner’s dilemma, 142 probability, 1, 42, 110–11 property, 23, 25, 32, 48, 121, 132–4, 143, 147, 151, 153 psychology, 9, 65, 72–6, 106, 110, 113, 124–7, 129 associationist, 74–5 Puritans, Puritanism, 5, 47 Ramsay, Michael, 107 rationalism, 4–6, 15–17, 20, 58–60, 68, 106–7 Cartesian, 7, 107–9 naïve, 68 rationality, 44, 59, 114, 123, 184 strategic, 9, 132–3 Rawls, John, 9–10, 143–6, 150–5 Political Liberalism, 143–4 reflective equilibrium, 144–5, 152 reason, faculty of, 109, 112 religion, 30–1, 36–7, 55, 167 natural, 6–7, 14, 19, 30, 91–2, 94–7, 101–2 revealed, 30 true, 78, 101 Reid, Thomas, 10–11, 157, 171–9, 182, 184 representation see intentionality republicanism, 5, 22, 39–41, 46–8, 56, 64 resemblance, 10, 27, 118–19, 152, 166–7, 169, 171, 177–8, 182 ressentiment, 21 rhetoric, 9, 91–5, 98, 100–1, 104, 139 rights, 4–5, 24–5, 31–6, 39–40, 46, 50–1, 53, 56–9, 61, 64, 148, 154 inalienable, 35 Robertson, William, 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 21–3, 28–30, 59–60, 146 Discourse on Inequality, 23 Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 22 Emile, 22, 30 The Social Contract, 22, 29 Russell, Bertrand, 14 History of Western Philosophy, 14

Index satire, 7, 92–103 Lucianic, 96–8 Menippean, 93 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 41 self-control, 127, 134–40 sentiment, 8–9, 27, 29, 31–3, 35–6, 42, 49, 82, 95, 117–8, 123, 140, 147, 152, 167 scepticism, 1, 3–4, 6–8, 14, 18, 39–42, 58, 77, 89, 98, 105–10, 115, 172, 179, 184–5 mitigated, 79, 88–9 Pyrrhonian, 7, 40, 78–9, 87–9 scholasticism, 39–40, 60, 96 sensations, 10–11, 119, 158, 161, 171–9 see also Impressions of sensation see also Signs sensible knave, 139 sentimentalist ethics, sentimentalism, 9, 27, 31–5, 140 Sextus Empiricus, 68, 173 Against the Mathematicians, 68 signs, 10, 172–6, 179, 184 Smith, Adam, 1, 61, 96, 157 Spinoza, Benedict de, 107 state of nature, 28, 151 stoics, stoicism, 26, 34, 78 Strawson, Peter, 123–6 Freedom and Resentment, 126 Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, 123 Stroud, Barry, 106 suffering, 8, 117–25, 132

227

Swift, Jonathan, 91–3, 96–9, 101–3 A Modest Proposal, 97 A Tale of a Tub, 97 Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 96 Gulliver’s Travels, 92–3, 96 The Battle of the Books, 102 sympathy, 8–9, 27, 32, 117–20, 124, 139, 148–9, 151–3 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 29–30 Democracy in America, 29 Toland, John, 37 Christianity not Mysterious, 37 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 56 utilitarianism, 31–5 utility, 4, 22, 31–6, 134 virtue, 41, 45, 118 artificial, 9, 33, 121, 143–5, 147–50, 152–3 chastity, 137–40 natural, 32–3, 150, 152, Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 4, 15, 17, 21–3, 26, 28, 31, 40, 61, 96, 104, 128 Candide, 104 Letters on England, 17, 22 Whig history, 53–8 Wiggins, David, 128 Williams, Bernard, 126–7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 71 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 71

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