The Pursuit of Certainty

4. A New Scene of Thought

CHAPTER 4 A New Scene of Thought To achieve his purpose, Hume had to show that man had no extraordinary powers like those claimed for him by others. Philosophers as well as the vulgar, Hume declared, felt obliged to assign "some invisible intelligent principle" for anything that surprised them. As they could not understand the effect either of the mind on the body, or of the body on the mind, they asserted that "the Deity is the immediate cause of the union between soul and body." Sometimes philosophers felt impelled to go further, Hume continued boldly, and they extended "the same inference to the mind itself, in its internal operation ." They described ideas as "nothing but a revelation made to us by our maker." Rather than trace an idea to the influence of human will, they spoke only of the "universal creator, who discovers it to the mind, and renders it present to us. Thus, according to these philosophers, everything is full of God."1 Hume meant to cut the ties between man and God, and restore man to a purely human nature, such as the pagans found sufficient before Christianity removed man into a higher, more spiritual sphere. It would seem that Hume's way had been well prepared by Hobbes and Locke, because they are commonly described as empiricists and iconoclasts who broke decisively with the Christian picture of man. Unlike continental philosophers, they were concerned not so much to satisfy purely intellectual curiosity, to discover the true constitution of knowledge or the essence of things, as to condemn certain prevailing intellectual fallacies and their unfortunate moral consequences. They wished in different ways to restrain human speculation within its proper confines, and to correct what Locke called the disposition of men to "let loose their thoughts into the vast ocean of 1. Enquiry, pp. 7o-71. A New Scene of Thought 35 Being." But from Hume's standpoint, neither of them provided anything more than a variation on the traditional view. Hobbes spoke of reasoning, rather than of reason, and he described man as fundamentally a creature of passion, whose well-being was promoted by passion as much as by reasoning; and he was, in a sense, as persuaded of human fallibility as Montaigne. In this respect he belongs, as Hume does, to the sceptical late scholastic tradition.1 But not only was his emphasis on man's brutishness uncongenial to Hume; Hobbes offered nothing useful to Hume because his attention was centred on the achievements of reasoning, rather than on exploring the implications of his view that reasoning was concerned solely with causes and effects. Although he defined philosophy modestly as "the establishment by reasoning of true fictions," he retained unbounded confidence in the truths he allowed it to establish. Hume's concern was entirely with the nature and limits of reason, and it led him to reverse Hobbes's conclusions. It made him antagonistic to Hobbes's geometrical style of argument and to his whole dogmatic manner of dealing with human questions. Locke's philosophy was more nearly to Burne's purpose. He was in the first place temperamentally more congenial, not so possessed as Hobbes was by the pursuit of system, and more inclined to emphasize the folly of human ambitions. Although his philosophy was used by Clarke and others to bolster systems that Hume equated with scholasticism, it was directed against the arrogant verbalism of the schools, the Deism of Lord Herbert founded on innate principles, the sermons and political orations that elevated current prejudices into immutable truths. By attacking the belief in innate ideas and principles, and tracing human knowledge to its origins in sense, Locke's Essay on Human Understanding stripped away the protection enjoyed by a number of empty abstractions and inherited prejudices, and made it respectable to question elaborate systems. Thus it sanctioned the doubts of those beginning to grow restless under the rule of dogmatic theology, whether of the middle ages or of the Puritans. The disposition that Hume and Locke shared was perfectly expressed in Locke's statement: proud man, not content with that knowledge he was capable of, and which was useful to him, would needs penetrate into the hidden cause of things, lay down principles and establish maxims to himself about the operations of nature, and then vainly expect that nature-or in truth God-should proceed according to 1. Cf. Michael Oakeshott, Introduction to Hobbes, Leviathan (Blackwell) pp. Iii ff. [52.14.240.178] Project...