Humphry Clinker Read online

  Many deists, then, held that religion is originally a rational response to the evidence of God’s existence and providence displayed in nature, and that religious cults, rituals and mysteries, taking many forms and with proliferations of creeds, are all corruptions of the one true natural religion. Deism in this form was, in Hume’s opinion, wholly mistaken. In The Natural History of Religion he argues against Herbert’s attempt to show an original, rational monotheism at the base of all religions. The idea of divine providence, he says, does not in fact originate in a rational, detached admiration for the beauty and order of nature. Rather, religion originates in our emotional responses to the uncertainties of life, in our feelings of insecurity and vulnerability in a hostile world. Admiration of the regularity of the motion of the planets and appreciation of the divine wisdom increased by the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton is not the common state of men’s minds. Although the wise, who are concerned with theoretical explanation, may be led to the idea of a single supreme creator, the vulgar, ordinary men and women, are moved by

  … the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.4

  The contrast is between admiration of regularity and order on the one hand, and fear and anxiety in face of disorder on the other. Where the world appears, as it does to the vulgar, capricious and uncertain it is natural for the imagination to construct a number of deities, whose differing attributes and personalities can be invoked as appropriate. The ideas of the various gods arise from our ignorance by a process in which emotion, mediated by the imagination, leads to beliefs in deities that are constructions of the mind:

  We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear; and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependance 5

  Thus polytheism rather than monotheism is the first form of natural religion.

  It should be noted that in the Natural History, and elsewhere in his writings on religion, Hume is prepared to adopt a distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ religion. The origin of polytheistic beliefs in fears and hopes exemplifies what he calls ‘superstition’, and he is willing to regard this together with another form of religious belief originating in emotion, ‘enthusiasm’, as ‘the corruptions of true religion’, as ‘two species of false religion’. There is thus a similarity here with the deists, who also regarded many forms of devotion and ritual as superstitious. Hume’s list is:

  … ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or… any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity.6

  But this similarity should not obscure from us his opposition to deism. The Natural History undermines the deist claim that ‘true religion’, in the form of something like Herbert’s ‘common notions’, can be recommended on the grounds that it has always been accepted in all places. There is no argument for true religion based on the ‘universal consent of mankind’.

  A distinction between the true religion of the wise and the superstitions of the vulgar is found already in Cicero’s dialogue on which Hume’s work is modelled. There Cotta, the spokesman for the Academic school, says:

  With the ignorant you get superstitions like the Syrians’ worship of a fish, and the Egyptians’ deification of almost every species of animal; nay, even in Greece they worship a number of deified human beings… and with our own people Romulus and many others, who are believed to have been admitted to celestial citizenship in recent times, by a sort of extension of the franchise! Well, those are the superstitions of the unlearned; but what of you philosophers? How are your dogmas any better?

  Hume, too, considers that to demonstrate that superstition and enthusiasm originate in ignorance, fear, hope, elation, flights of fancy and so on, is not to discredit true religion. The wise, the philosophers, may yet have grounds for a rational belief in a supreme creator and in the world as ordered and governed by divine providence. Are these dogmas any better? Is it possible to construct a rational natural theology, even if men and women are not generally led to religion by reasoning?

  It is this question which is debated between the three characters in the Dialogues. Following Cicero’s model, each character represents a different position on the central questions of natural theology. Can reason establish the existence of God? What can be known by reason of the nature and attributes of God? Can there be a reasoned solution to the conflict between divine goodness and divine power, given the existence of moral evil and natural suffering? What answer a philosopher or theologian gives to these questions is determined in part by his or her epistemology. It is necessary now to give an outline of a central aspect of Hume’s own epistemology, as it is found in his earlier writings.

  In the Treatise he argues that the fact that one phenomenon, or ‘object’ as he usually says, is the cause or effect of another is never something which is discoverable simply by reflecting on what is contained in our idea of it.7 In order for us to know that fire burns us or bread nourishes us, we must experience the effect of fire or bread on our bodies. He expresses this by saying that we cannot have a priori knowledge of the causes and effects of objects. This contrasts, he thinks, with what holds in, say, mathematics. Here we can know that one object is related to another simply by abstract reflection. We can see that 16 is the square of 4 just by examining our ideas of these numbers. The necessary relations between numbers are thus relations of ideas; they are purely conceptual, and can be known a priori. One mark of truths which are relations of ideas is that the negations of such truths (e.g. that 16 is not the square of 4) are inconsistent and lead to a contradiction. In contrast, however certain we may be that fire burns us, we can imagine without contradiction a possible state of affairs (different from what actually obtains) in which we are not burned by fire. That fire burns us is thus simply a matter of fact, not an a priori necessary truth.

  In the Treatise Hume therefore distinguishes between two domains, relations of ideas and matters of fact. Using terms in a technical, philosophical sense, he calls the domain of relations of ideas knowledge, and the domain of matters of fact probability.8 In this technical sense, it is a matter of probability that fire burns us. This does not mean, for Hume, that we cannot be certain that fire burns. Certainty is a matter of the degree of conviction that we feel about a thing, and we can be certain of something whose negation is still quite conceivable.

  That we have beliefs about the causal properties of objects is itself a matter of fact. The question why fire burns us is a question for natural sciences – physics, chemistry, physiology – to answer. The question why we believe that fire burns us, however, is of a kind which, Hume thinks, has not previously been successfully answered. Evidently, that something is the case is not itself an explanation of why we believe that it is the case. The question of the origin of human beliefs is included in what Hume calls ‘the science of man’. This science, the theory of human nature, is a foundation for all other sciences, both natural and moral. (By moral science or moral philosophy Hume do
es not mean just the study of morality, but also of politics, aesthetics, history.)

  There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending9 therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.10

  Hume’s theoretical explanation of our beliefs about the causal properties of objects begins with his account of experience – it is from experience and not from a priori reflection that we discover that fire burns us. That is hardly news; but what gives Hume’s account part of its distinctive character is his conception of experience. This conception has its origin in the thought of some of his predecessors, especially Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), John Locke (1632–1704) and George Berkeley (1685–1753).11 Experience is characterized subjectively, from the point of view of the person having the experience, and is a matter of the immediate content of consciousness. Our experience of fire, say, consists essentially in our having before our minds a perception of fire. Hume makes clear that his talk of perceptions in the mind as constituents of experience is part of a scientific theory. He says that ‘the vulgar confound perceptions and objects’. Unreflective, ordinary men and women fail to distinguish between the fire and the perception of fire. They think that, in their experience of fire, the fire itself is a constituent of their consciousness and is, in some way, immediately before the mind. But here, as elsewhere, common assumptions and science diverge: ‘… philosophy informs us, that everything, which appears to the mind, is nothing but a perception.’12

  Consciousness, for Hume, has two forms, feeling and thinking. When we feel, the warmth of the fire, the sensation of warmth, the sight of the flames, and the pleasure we get are all perceptions of the kind he calls ‘impressions’. When we think, as now, of such a situation, the perceptions before our minds are called ‘ideas’. Ideas, he argues, are copies of and originate from impressions. This aspect of Hume’s theory has many ramifications. But one consequence is the denial that we can have ideas which, so to speak, go beyond the basis of impressions. This thesis is employed in the Dialogues by Philo to support the view that the nature of God is incomprehensible. Strictly speaking, we can have no idea of the divine nature:

  Our ideas reach no farther than our experience. We have no experience of divine attributes and operations. I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself.13

  Although the content of our ideas cannot outrun the materials provided by experience, there is an obvious and important way in which we constantly think of things we have not experienced. If I see a child put her hand in the flame (I have that impression), I shall at once think that she will be burned (I have that idea). This idea, that she will be burned, is not derived from seeing her being burned. I think of what will happen before I see it happen. Anyone who has had the same kind of experiences of fire as I have had will do the same. This mental process (Hume calls it an ‘operation of the mind’) is a universal feature of human nature. It is essential to our life. It is a major task of the theory of human nature to explain this process. Hume regarded himself as the first person ever to do so successfully.

  We must note at once that the question is not, why does fire burn? It is obvious that we all learn to make such inferences, from what we experience to what will happen next, long before we have any scientific understanding of the processes of nature. For Hume, what we do is to infer a cause or an effect (in the example, the effect of being burned) from an effect or a cause that we currently experience. Our capacity to perform these causal inferences does not depend upon our having a scientific theory of how the cause produces the effect. In most cases we are simply ignorant of the inner workings of nature. (In fact, Hume believes that we never can have any ultimate explanation of why things happen in nature as they do.)

  It is also clear, he says, that we could never infer the effect of some cause we experience unless we had previously had experience of a relevant kind. Locke tells a story of an Oriental prince being told by a traveller from Europe that in his country, when it becomes very cold, the water in the canals becomes solid, so that it could bear the weight of an elephant. The prince replies that until then he had believed what the traveller told him of Europe, but now he knows that he is a liar. Hume, recalling the story, says, ‘The Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly.’ Since the prince had no experience of the relevant kind of phenomena, he had no reason to believe that the effect of cooling water beyond a certain point is that it becomes solid. In no case, Hume argues, can we establish causal connections a priori.

  It is previous experience of what Hume calls the ‘constant conjunction’ of causes and effects, and such experience alone, which enables us to ‘reason justly’ from causes or effects which we perceive to effects or causes which we do not perceive. This form of reasoning is quite distinct from a priori reasoning in the domain of ‘knowledge’, which is based simply upon relations between ideas. It is based on experience, and, being in the domain of ‘probability’, Hume calls it probable reasoning.14 What the theory of human nature must do is explain how it is that experience of the conjunctions of causes and effects in our past experience leads to our being able to reason from a perceived phenomenon to its unperceived cause or effect. The essential feature of such reasoning, for which an explanation is required, is that what we infer is always a phenomenon of the same kind as those phenomena of which we have had previous experience. We always make inferences which presume that causal connections in nature are uniform. Why?

  One possibility to be considered is that we make this presumption because we have a reason to do so. Hume thinks that this hypothesis cannot be correct. That causal connections between phenomena are uniform (that the same kind of cause always produces the same kind of effect) is not a necessary truth which we could have an a priori reason to believe. We can without contradiction imagine the negation being true – we can conceive a change in the course of nature. However, the only other sort of reason we could have would be to infer it from the evidence of past experience. We would then be inferring it by probable reasoning. But we were seeking an explanation of why probable reasoning has the character it has; and so it is circular to explain this by assuming probable reasoning already.

  An alternative explanation, and the one which Hume favours, is that probable reasoning is not dependent on any other prior ‘operation of the mind’; in fact, it is a kind of instinct. In the section of the Treatise called ‘Of the Reason of Animals’, he emphasizes the link he thus makes between this form of human reason and the instincts of other animals: ‘To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls.’15 Although he here says that reason is an ‘unintelligible’ instinct, he does propose an account of the mechanism in the mind by which it operates. For the moment we can postpone outlining this. For the purpose of considering the Dialogues some other comments are needed.

  As we have seen, Hume intended his theory of human nature to provide a foundation for other sciences:

  Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN;… ’Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings.16

  His account of the ‘operation’ of probable reasoning should, therefore, contribute to ‘changes and improvements’ in natural science and natural religion. The theory as summarized above applies initially to those inferences we make from causes and effects in everyday life, and these are characteristically immediate and unreflective. When I see the child
put her hand in the fire, I infer at once that she will be burned. Although the inference arises from my past experience of the effects of fire, I do not even call this experience to mind. Hume recognizes, however, that we also make inferences of a more reflective nature. For example, when our experience is limited in extent, we proceed with more caution. We try to review what experience suggests. We begin to form what he calls ‘general rules’ to guide our more reflective reasonings. These form the basis of the even more elaborately reflective methodological principles of the natural scientist. One thing we then do is deliberately to seek experience of the conjunctions of phenomena, in experimentation. What the theory of human nature should do is enable us to recognize that the basis of a proper methodology, in any science, should be the natural workings of the human mind. That follows from the discovery that all reasoning is, in essence, a kind of natural instinct. In realizing this, we see what we can hope to achieve in any area. For example, we realize that we simply cannot discover natural laws in science by a priori reasoning. We understand that ‘philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected.’17

  As any natural theologian must, each character in the Dialogues assumes an epistemology. An epistemology not grounded in the theory of human nature is, for Hume, mistaken in itself, and therefore incapable of supporting conclusions in natural theology. Although both Demea and Cleanthes are made to employ principles drawn from Hume’s own theory in criticism of the other speakers, Philo’s methods of reasoning are the closest of the three to Hume’s. By skilfully putting themes from his own philosophy into the mouths of his characters, and equally by having them also represent other types of philosophy opposed to his own, Hume aims to achieve the ‘changes and improvements’ which he considers so desirable in natural religion. He considers it especially desirable that his theory of human nature is applied to natural religion because the subject is not purely theoretical, but has a practical relation to how we should live.