The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (review)

Paul Russell challenges the contemporary critical orthodoxy of the Treatise’s apparent indifference towards religion. Despite the Treatise’s eighteenth-century reception to vocal and frequent declamations of the contrary, current scholarship downplays any religious engagement. Russell believes that the religious context so crucial to the early modern perspective could, if reinvigorated, mediate a common ground for contemporary philosophical factions. The present-day philosophical schism presents two antithetical positions: either Hume is fundamentally sceptical and directs a rational enquiry (that he, in turn, subverts); or he follows the principles of naturalism that rely upon sentimental constructions. Russell’s interpretation “differs, not only from those who would emphasize one side of the skepticism/naturalism dichotomy at the expense of the other, but also from those who attempt to reconcile Hume’s skepticism and naturalism in the Treatise without any reference to his (fundamentally) irreligious aims and ambitions” (222). Russell explores a third moderating methodology that finds its foundation in the historical milieu of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century irreligion. This is a bold and novel approach. Russell greatly illuminates the early modern debate, and the controversy over of the spectre/reality of atheism left in the wake of the Terror of Malmsbury is broadly contextualized in this highly nuanced work. One of the more intriguing examples of the latter is Russell’s chapter “Atheism under Cover,” which develops a conjectural hypothesis using Hume’s epigrams to signal an alliance with other “free thinkers.” This argument maintains a subtle sophistication, but remains probable rather than proven. Russell’s great success is in providing a historical, intellectual foundation for Hume’s Treatise. The intellectual relation between Hobbes and Hume is a standout contribution to the Treatise’s antecedent influences. The structural affinities from “The Form and Face of Hume’s System” complement a more rigorous investigation a few chapters later in “The Nature of Hume’s Universe.” Hobbes’s basic influence on Hume’s faculty of “decaying sense” (86) is convincing, but it could use further analysis of their respective faculty models (instead of just a tacit recognition of their structural affinities). Despite, or perhaps because of, the impressive range of material, Russell often achieves his parallels and intellectual relationships too readily, and the correlations between thinkers can occasionally appear too exact through an affirmation of familiar generalities. As a variable intellectual trajectory, Russell’s position needs to resituate even those premises that are most familiar, which would make the intellectual relationships considerably more transparent.

In virtually all respects, Russell’s intellectual history provides an entirely credible and admirable series of philosophical juxtapositions. His exploration of the blind man’s potential to know colour and the correlative application to the abstract idea of God is an exceptional investigation that balances historical context with philosophical exegesis. His sagacious examples chart the relationships and debates on the validity of experience weighted against the tenets of abstraction. Russell tempers Hobbes’s rejection of the infinite with Descartes’s meditation on infinite substance, which, in the latter, then finds an English complement in Cudworth and in Clarke’s justification of reason. The arguments of Locke’s moderate concession to abstract universals within his experiential methodology quickly shift to the more radical Toland. A quick succession of concise argumentative interrelations between Collins, Law, and Berkeley follows, which allows an overarching significance to the weighted positions for both sides of the religious factions. With a rare degree of critical acumen, Russell takes this broad survey and applies the argument to Hume’s critique of religion, which, if not directly critical of God, then it is at least unfavourable to “our ideas as they relate to God’s most essential attributes” (94). With the application of this historical background and the realization of Hume’s covert censure of divine attributes, Russell introduces Hume’s subversive considerations on infinite and eternal attributes in the context of Clarke’s theological model that bases itself upon Newtonian principles. Russell...