Hume's First Principles (review)

88 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY appraisal of his time can help us understand how it all could have looked to a most pious, most scientificallyoriented and quite erudite intellectualthen. We should be grateful to doctors Clair and Girbal for reviving Lamy's work, and for their good edition of it. RICHARD H. POPKIN University o] Cali]ornia, San Diego Hume's F~rst Principles. By R. F. Anderson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Pp. xv + 189.$5.00.) This book is intended to be a critical examination of "Hume's writings in metaphysics" and of "the more basic elements of Hume's philosophy." Assuming that Hume constructed a synoptic metaphysics, Professor Anderson hopes that "by examining his system, seeking to discover its basic principles and to determine whether it be consistent within itself," he could discover clues to his underlying metaphysical system , which is hidden in the labyrinth of his writings. Granted that there are inconsistencies and ambiguities in Hume's system, Anderson's "aim, rather, is to employ such apparent inconsistencies and ambiguities as clues in the investigation of that system which Hume has bequeathed to us. It may be found, upon further study, that an evident inconsistency is resolved in some more fundamental part of the system; or it may be found that it reflects a still deeper inconsistency. Whatever the outcome, a more complete understandingof Hume's philosophy will result." What emerges from this study is a supposed discovery of an assumed hidden materialistic and mechanistic system of metaphysics, which resembles closely that of Santayana, in that a realm of subsisting essences (Perceptionsl) is presented floating above the dark and unknowable region of material substances. Parts I and II seem to be preludes to Part III, in which under the chapters headed The Doctrine o] Matter, The Nature of Unl~nown Causes, Material Foundations o] Knowledge, and Necessity in Matter o] Reasoning, Hume's alleged mechanistic materialism is exposed. The arguments put forth in support of Hume's materialism are all remarkably murky. As an example, notice the following argument, which appears in the first paragraph of Chapter n, The Doctrine o] Matter: A singular remark in the Enquiries, which I have already noted, suggests a beginning point for our search into Hume's doctrine of connections. In speaking of the soul and its command over the will he indicates that the self may be a substance: 'Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends..?' Since this substance may be a material one, and since a mechanism appears to be involved, it would seem useful to commence with Hume's doctrine of matter and its operations. Yet so scanty are his remarks concerning matter that the student of his works might reasonably conclude that he possesses no doctrine of matter at all. It is true that Hume does not, like Berkeley in his Dialogues, expressly deny the existence of matter. His reluctance to refer to matter in explaining any part of his doctrine, however, leads to the impression that, as an admirer of Berkeley, he is following the lead of that phi, losopher (p. 93, my italics). Nevertheless, on the basis of one of Philo's cosmogonies, (not "that the world is a vegetable ," or that it is "an animal," but that it is composed of the finite number of atoms), and some few scattered remarks in the Treatise and in the Enquiries (where in fact Hume employs the language of the vulgar, which comprises also the language of the physicists and the anatomists, and not the language of moral philosophers, i.e. epistemologists), the author conchides that: Hume does hold for the existence of matter in the form of atoms whose apparent qualities are all real or "primary" (p. 101) and "that a doctrine o] matter does ]orm an integral part o] Hume's philosophical system." Not only he revealed that he holds there are atoms pos- BOOK REVIEWS 89 sessing the qualities we naturally suppose material things to possess, but also discloses that these atoms--these "minute parts"--are the actual causes of every event.... Inasmuch as the...