Part 8

I have felt that our illustrations of modern thought would be incomplete, were I not to include in the series an example of an attempt to work out the duty and destiny of man without waiting for an insight into the mystery of God. It is the more advisable that we examine one such character, that this way of thinking is neither newly invented, nor yet grown out of fashion.

We recall that Lucretius, the enthusiastic disciple of Epicurus, claimed for his master the glory of having lifted from the world the terror of the gods, of having left man free to study his own nature and to work out his own happiness. And I find on my shelves a recent work that bears the title “Morals without the Sanctions of Religion,” one of many that might be cited whose purpose is to study the good of man without making it dependent on God. It is, then, as an expression of a common enough idea, but as an uncommonly good expression of this idea, that I have settled upon David Hume for our third illustration of modern thought.

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It has for some time been rather the fashion to find the grounds of a man’s scientific beliefs in his personality and in the character of the environment in which he lives. And doubtless thinking, like any other activity, has its psychology, an insight into which is helpful enough, though it is notoriously easy to find that characteristic après coup which we should never have been able to predict beforehand.

When I say, then, that Hume had many human traits reminding us of the Philosophers of the Garden whose science is so sympathetic with his own, it must not be supposed that only such as are of like easy habit of body and companionable temper of mind should take to his principles. But it is interesting to note, after having followed the furious career of Bruno, looked in on the sober reclusion of Spinoza, that a different type of man may utter great thoughts; the type that could look back, at fifty-eight years, on a life well filled with profitable industry, and forward to one thus comfortably pictured in a letter to a friend: “I have been settled here [in Edinburgh] for two months, and am here body and soul, without casting the least thought of regret to London, or even Paris. I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in James’s Court which is very cheerful and even elegant, but too small to display my great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my life! I have just now, lying on the table before me, a receipt for making soupe à la reine, copied with my own hand; for beef and cabbage (a charming dish) and old mutton and old claret nobody excels me. I make also sheep-head broth in a manner that Mr. Keith speaks of it for eight days after; and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself apprentice to my lass to learn it. I have already sent a challenge to David Moncreiff: you will see that in a twelvemonth he will take to writing history, the field I have deserted; for as to the giving of dinners, he can now have no further pretensions. I should have made very bad use of my abode in Paris if I could not get the better of a mere provincial like him. All my friends encourage me in this ambition, as thinking it will redound very much to my honor.”

These “friends” to whom Hume refers, were at that time, as they had been throughout his life, the best of good company, that is, the kind for whom a good dinner would have been nothing had not good conversation been its sauce, but for whom the sauce was none the worse for dressing out a good dinner. In such good company, it is not a great matter that Hume should have been free of pleasant sallies after the manner of the letter I have quoted. It throws a higher light on his character when we find him preparing to receive his last, the unbidden guest in the same cheerful humor. “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he writes at the conclusion of his little sketch “My own Life.” “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of spirits; insomuch that were I to name the period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this latter period. I possess the same ardor as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could have but a few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

And there follows a characterization of himself that could indeed be hardly more detached were it written by a stranger. “I am,” he says, “or rather was (for that style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open social and cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.... My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary: and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them.... My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.”

It is hardly to convict this worthy Scot of misstatement, to point out that his pleasing picture of good will toward all men omits to record his two hatreds; hatreds as whole-hearted and constant as one could wish. One was for those he called “priests;” the other was reserved for Englishmen. “O! how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted, totally and finally--the revenue reduced to half--public credit fully discredited by bankruptcy--the third of London in ruins, and the rascally mob subdued! I think I am not too old to despair of being witness to all these things.” This, to his friend Sir Gilbert Elliot in 1768. It is curious to note that Hume lived just long enough to have heard of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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If, then, something of the nonchalance with which Hume throws off comfortable tradition is due to his personal character, much may be gathered respecting his motives for so treating common opinion from a study of his philosophical ancestry. For Hume is the fine fleur of a growth flourishing in the England of the 17th and 18th centuries, which in contrast to the Rationalism of the Continent, is usually called Empiricism. We find anticipations of an empirical philosophy in Bacon and Hobbes; but perhaps we should regard John Locke as the real founder of the school. Rationalism, as we saw in connection with Descartes and Spinoza, was inspired by the example of the mathematicians to hope that all science might be, as their science seemed to be, deduced from axioms called self-evident. These axioms appeared to be something more than the mere summing up of experiences. Between the undependable predictions of a weather prophet, who has frequently observed that a “twinge of rheumatism means coming storm,” and the confidence of the geometer that if two angles of a triangle measure 120° the other will be found to measure 60°, there seemed to the rationalist not merely a difference in degree of certainty, but a difference in kind of evidence. The former knowledge, unsatisfactory as it was, could only come after experience; the latter, beautiful in its precision, would seem to be at the command of a thoughtful man before experience. Hence, for the rationalist, experience fell to the level of a mere suggestor of truth, an awakener of thought; reason alone could demonstrate the suggestion.

In complete contrast with such a view-point, the empiricist came in the end to make experience the sole test of truth, even of such truth as the mathematician possessed. If the issue is between taking thought respecting all things with the rationalist, or everywhere trusting to observation with the empiricist, it is clear the latter has plausibility on his side. Who, closing his eyes and reasoning it out, could learn that there were just eight planets, and not seven or nine? If we must do one thing or the other exclusively, is it not easier to imagine that the axioms of geometry embody the experience of the ages and nothing more, than to suppose that equipped only with the pure reason, i.e., with the principles of logic, one could discover the one thinkable world to be that in which a person that is “I” should exist with a sheet of paper this moment before him and a fly buzzing by his ear?

So it seemed more and more as empiricism was developed at the hands of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Belief, we find Hume maintaining in the end, is all of a kind; it is the inference from an actual impression (A) to an expected impression (B), based on the remembered experience that A has always in the past been followed by B. Since this past experience is limited and since the remembrance of it may be defective, the belief based on the two can never amount to certainty.

Such an attitude may well be called sceptical when contrasted with the older rationalism, in that it denies the possibility of complete certainty in any field of science, substituting as the ideal of scientific evidence an ever-increasing balance of probability in favor of the opinion we are constrained to accept. But though to think of our body of accepted opinion after this manner is to induce an extreme flexibility of the imagination, which must be prepared to conceive that the firmest truth may be untrue and has only a more or less inadequate array of facts behind which to defend itself, yet it does not follow that nature is a fantastic dream, without order and coherence. Indeed, that experience which is to be our guide from now on, assures us of just the contrary, and the new evidence that would be required to make us admit that an event in exception to any well-founded law had really occurred would have to be overwhelming.

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Nowhere does Hume’s faith in the evidence upon which the best tested uniformities of experience base their claim to acceptance as nature’s laws, show itself more clearly than in his treatment of miracles. To an analysis of the evidence for such miracles as history records he devotes an entire section of his “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” (1748):

“A miracle” he there writes, “is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is ever esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of nature.... There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior.

“The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’” And Hume illustrates--“When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it is more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority which I discover I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”

As a specimen of the manner in which Hume would have one weigh the probabilities for and against miracles, we may take the oft-cited passage with which the discussions closes. “... Let us examine those miracles related in scripture; and not to lose ourselves in too wide a field, let us confine ourselves to such as we find in the Pentateuch, which we shall examine, ... not as the word or testimony of God himself, but as the production of a mere human writer and historian. Here, then, we are first to consider a book presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they are still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts which every nation gives of its origin. Upon reading this book, we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It gives us an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely different from the present; of our fall from that state; of the age of man extended to nearly a thousand years; of the destruction of the world by a deluge; of the arbitrary choice of one people as the favorites of heaven, and that people the countrymen of the author; of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing imaginable: I desire any one to lay his hand upon his heart, and after a serious consideration declare whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such testimony, would be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the miracles it relates; which is, however, necessary to make it to be received, according to the measure of probability above established.”

Higher critical ability and wider knowledge have since Hume’s day been brought to bear upon the interpretation of such documents as the books of the Old Testament, and it is not as an ethnologist that he has any claim upon our attention. But the citation will serve to show that the skepticism of the empirical method is not of a kind greatly to disturb our confidence in the commonly accepted laws of nature. It will further serve to establish one point respecting Hume’s theology, a point which throughout all his hesitating utterances on this subject he never abandons, that, namely, if aught in the world as we know it points to a God, it is not the strange and exceptional, but the regular and law-abiding aspects of nature. To him, a wonder-working God is a superstition of the ages of ignorance and of the ignorant of all ages.

“Even at this day, and in Europe,” he writes in his “Natural History of Religion,” “ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant. He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of the joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all other circumstances which render that member fit for the use to which it is destined. To these he has been long accustomed, and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one; the fall and bruise of such another; the excessive drought of this season; the cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate operations of providence; and such events as with good reasoners are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it.”

But, he adds on this occasion, “many theists, even the most zealous and refined, have denied a particular providence, and have asserted that the Sovereign mind or first principle of all things, having fixed general laws, by which nature is governed, gives free and uninterrupted course to these laws, and disturbs not, at every turn, the settled order of events by particular volitions. From the beautiful connection, say they, and rigid observance of established rules, we draw the chief argument for theism; and from the same principles are enabled to answer the principal objections against it.”

It is in this “refined” variety that we shall expect to find Hume in the end, if among theists at all. Meanwhile it will be interesting to follow up this reference to a particular providence, belief in which Hume associates so closely with the acceptance of miracles.

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Section XI of Hume’s “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” is entitled “Of a Providence and of a Future State.” A literary device puts the argument in the mouth of a friend who has been invited by one referred to in the first person to imagine himself making a speech for Epicurus before an audience of enlightened Athenians. Accepting the challenge the friend opens his apology as follows: “The religious philosophers [O, ye Athenians], not satisfied with the tradition of your forefathers and doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly acquiesce) indulge a rash curiosity in trying how far they can establish religion on the principles of reason; and they thereby excite, instead of satisfying, the doubts which naturally arise from a diligent and scrutinous enquiry. They paint in the most magnificent colors the order, beauty and wise arrangement of the universe; and then ask, if such a glorious display of intelligence could proceed from the fortuitous concourse of atoms, or if chance could produce what the greatest genius can never sufficiently admire. I shall not examine the justness of this argument. I shall allow it to be as solid as my antagonists and accusers can desire. It is sufficient if I can prove, from this very reasoning, that the question is entirely speculative and that when I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.

“You then, who are my accusers, have acknowledged that their chief or sole argument for a divine existence is derived from the order of nature.... From the order of the work you infer that there must have been project and forethought in the workman.” Now, “if the cause be known only by the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities beyond what are precisely requisite to produce the effect.... No one, merely from the sight of one of Zeuxis’s pictures, could know that he was also a statuary or architect....

“Allowing, therefore, the gods to be authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they posses that precise degree of power, intelligence and benevolence which appears in their workmanship.... The supposition of farther attributes is mere hypothesis; much more the supposition that in distant regions of space or periods of time there has been or will be a more magnificent display of these attributes and a scheme of administration more suitable to such imaginary virtues.... Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be suited to the present appearances of nature, and presume not to alter these appearances by arbitrary suppositions in order to suit them to attributes which you so fondly ascribe to your deities.”

And the pleader proceeds to show that it is as useless to practice as unsupported by reason, to supplement the order of things we know by another for which there is no evidence.

“Are there any marks of a distributive justice in the world?” he puts it to his hearers. “If you answer in the affirmative, I conclude that since justice here exerts itself, it is satisfied. If you reply in the negative, I conclude that you have then no reason to ascribe justice in our sense of it to the gods. If you hold a medium between affirmation and negation by saying that the justice of the gods at present exerts itself in part, but not in its full extent, I answer that you have no reason to give it any particular extent, but only as far as you see it at present exert itself.”