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BOOK REVIEWS 275 The prevailing idiom of Wood's study of the political dimension of the Essay is more left-of-center than that of the other two studies, but a reader would have to be pretty reactionary not to be impressed at the way that familiar texts and familiar history can take on a new look and a new life under the scrutiny of an exceptionally well-read social historian of ideas. There is room here for a fruitful dialogue and debate between internalist and externalist perspectives, from which the historian of "pure" philosophy can only benefit. I found some of the detail more convincing than the broad theme. Wood starts from the recognition that the Essay was written not for, and if anything against, the professional cloistered philosopher. He sees Locke as helping to mold one set of values, and criticize another, of the emerging bourgeoisie or practical men of affairs, though he is not claiming that there was any clear class consciousness at this time or even that Locke was fully conscious of the interests he reflected. The theme depends for its plausibility---or unfalsifiability--on its inherent vagueness. To escape the charge of anachronism Wood defines the bourgeoisie so elastically that it oscillates from aristocracy to laborer, from educated via ordinary educated to just plain ordinary . He sometimes puts more weight on individual passages (e.g., from the Epistle to the Reader and II.xxii.lo at 41ff.) than greater sensitivity to their role in Locke's argument might justify. A similar elasticity infects the use of historically authentic concepts like "latitudinarianism." Locke gave up rather than embraced latitudinarianism in the Shaftesbury era, and it needs a closer analysis of the argument of Essay IV than Wood, or even Woolhouse, offers, to see the distance between Lockean and latitudinarian epistemology. Wood is best on big issues like Locke's Baconianism (chaps. 4-5) and the influence of early social anthropology on his social-environmentalist picture of the development of ideas, knowledge, and opinion (chap. 7). Wood is also good on details like Locke's philosophical view on mechanics, laborers, and natives (115ff., 13off.), and myopic view of collective substances (163). But he tends to play down some salient ingredients of Locke's system, like the amount of activity (not passivity) of the mind in perception, and the important differences between Locke's theorizing about mixed modes (which suits the social-environmentalist theme) and his theorizing about substances (where our ideas are subject to constraints of experience which ensure a high degree of interpersonal agreement and make possible the essentially collaborative activities of the natural philosophers). But this is a stimulating book and will repay re-reading. M.A. STEWART University of Lanca,Wr John P. Wright. The Sceptical Realism of David Hume. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp. x + 269. $29.50. Of the two elements of the title in this book, it is realism that is not customarily associated with Hume. The author attempts to show that Hume affirmed the ontological reality of both an externally existing object beyond experience and of necessary causal connections in return natura. (For brevity's sake I shall refer to this double claim 276 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY as the realist thesis.) Granting the force of Hume's skeptical arguments against this thesis, Wright is obliged to contend that it is affirmed in a modality distinct from that which generates its skeptical denial. He finds this modality of affirmation in a psychophysiological model of imagination and belief which operates independently of considerations of truth and falsity. He holds that Hume "puts forward a theory that our connections with reality are formed at a non-rational instinctive level" (~2). ' This is an interesting interpretation and Wright's book is overall quite good, but a number of questions need to be addressed before one can entertain the realist thesis he proposes. Conjoining skepticism with some nonskeptical alternative in interpreting Hume is of course not new, but Wright is not offering a mere update of the commonly held view that Hume's is a philosophy of natural belief. Such an interpretation applies to Hume's treatment of matters of...

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