The Pursuit of Certainty

3. The Combat of Reason and Passion

CHAPTER 3 The Combat ofReason and Passion When he surveyed the scene, Hume found enemies of an affable virtue also outside the Kirk. There were many alternatives to Presbyterian theology, ranging from what seemed to be rank materialism to a theology that offered redemption and virtue to all men. They differed in purpose and form from the Kirk's doctrine, but not significantly, to Burne's mind, in moral spirit. Hobbes, who had provoked the philosophical speculation that dominated England in Burne's time, did not attract Hume. By emphasizing man's egoism and brutishness, Hobbes seemed only to have accepted the Calvinist portrait of man in order to support a different, but equally unappealing, conclusion. Yet Hobbes's opponents, led by the Cambridge Platonists, were no more satisfactory . In trying to answer Hobbes by showing that morality was not arbitrary and variable, but eternal, objective, and demonstrative, they seemed just as bound to God's service and quite as certain that they knew God's purposes as any dogmatic Presbyterian. Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were reacting against Puritanism. Although many of them were connected with Emmanuel College, that "seminary of Puritans," they had become impressed by an aspect of Calvinism that had for long been neglected in Scotland. Like the earlier Protestants, their feelings of closeness to God emboldened them to challenge and renounce whatever seemed to conflict with their duty to Him. When they found they could not accept the established interpretation ofCalvinism, theytransformed Emmanuel College from a haven for extreme puritans into the home of a vigorous, intellectual opposition to them. Against both Calvinism and Hobbes, the Cambridge Platonists argued that God had made man not a "sorryworth- 22 David Hume less piece fit for no use,"1 but an image of Himself. They were repelled by the doctrine of predestination, and were convinced that man need believe only in his own power to perfect himself. Since God had written the moral law within the image He made, man had only to exercise his reason to discover it. Thus the Cambridge Platonists found in Scripture a gentler, more generous faith than the puritanism they had inhabited. Far from disdaining anyone who professed somewhat different words, they insisted that character mattered more than creed. Their emphasis fell not on sin or on dogma, but on reason-the "Light of Nature" and "the Candle of the Lord." But from Hume's standpoint, this exaltation of reason was no great improvement on Presbyterian dogma. The doctrine of the Cambridge Platonists implied that moral truth could be discovered with the same certainty and precision as mathematical truth. And there was no dearth of valiant philosophers who would undertake the task of showing how morals could actually be reduced to an exact science. The most outstanding was Samuel Clarke, regarded during Hume's youth as England's leading intellectual light. In some ways Clarke was attractive to a rebel against the Church. His rational arguments for religion had helped to undermine Hume's faith in the divinity of Christ, and he was in several circles suspected of heresy. He managed nevertheless to advance steadily up the ecclesiastical ladder until he became Rector of St. James, and he gathered around him the most vigorous controversialists and promising young philosophers of the day. The public flocked to hear his lectures against "those atheists Hobbes and Spinoza," as well as his sermons, full of logic and obscurity, which set forth in cumbrous periods the official morality of the day. Clarke's success came partly from his ability to give a practical and popular form to the abstract, mathematical view of the universe that had been framed in the seventeenth century, under the inspiration of Descartes and Newton, and was now coming into its own. It was a view of the world that tried not to traffic with the textures, colours, and sounds of material things or the feelings of mortal beings, but emphasized quantity-"hard, cold, colourless, silent and dead."2 That this view might be extended to morals had been suggested by Locke, when he occasionally assimilated moral to mathematical truth. However much he differed from the Cambridge Platonists in meta1 . F. J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (1926), p. 61. 2. E. A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations ofModern Science, (London, 1932) pp. 236-37. The Combat ofReason and Passion 23 physics, he spoke their language about morality, about the "eternal and unalterable nature...