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Hume Studies Volume XIX, Number 2, November 1993, pp. 237-252 David Hume, Spinozist ANNETTE C. BAIER Recent commentators on Hume's Treatise, such as Jane Mclntyre1 and Paul Russell,2 have emphasized the role of Samuel Clarke as Hume's target in several parts of that work—"Why a Cause is Always Necessary," and "Of the Immortality of the Soul"—as well as in the section on reason's role in moral judgment. Now if Hume sees Clarke's views as the sort he wants to replace with his more secular and naturalist alternative, then Clarke's perceived targets could reasonably be expected to be seen as Hume's perceived allies, at least on some important matters. And as Paul Russell has emphasized, the chief enemy that Clarke recognizes is Spinoza. I agree with Russell that we should see Hume as reacting as positively to Spinoza's Ethics and Theologico-Political Treatise as he reacts negatively to Samuel Clarke's attacks on Spinoza. But of course Spinozism in an empiricist mode is Spinozism with a considerable difference , as ethics written in Hume's preferred nonabstruse style (and increasingly nonabstruse from Treatise to Essays and Enquiries) sets a different tone from ethics in ordine geométrico. As Spinoza chose his mode of presentation to exhibit the sort of controlling reason whose ability to know nature and guide human nature his axioms, postulates, theorems, corollaries, and scholia try to establish, so Hume also chooses his manner of presentation to exhibit the sort of intellectually curious, historically aware, imaginative, and sympathetic reflection on human nature that his more theoretical works elevate to a position of authority in our thinking, feeling, and acting. But then rationalism in a naturalist mode was rationalism with a considerable difference, Annette Baier is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA. 238 Annette C. Baier and naturalism unites Spinoza and Hume. The differences between them are important, but should not blind us to the agreements. First a brief word on the frustrating question of whether Hume read Spinoza himself, rather than just Bayle's entry on Spinoza. As far as I know, we have no direct evidence that he did. But the circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming. As Wim Klever writes, "It is hardly possible to maintain that Hume's acquaintance with Spinoza's work was only indirect."3 He clearly read Malebranche and Leibniz, and they read Spinoza. He was a friend of Pierre Desmaixeaux, a known Spinozist. As Hume's correspondence documents, and as Paul Russell has emphasized, the young Hume frequented Spinozist meeting places in London (such as the Rainbow Coffeehouse, Lancaster Court, where he stayed while arranging for the publication of the Treatise), and surely knew Anthony Collins, as well as knowing of Clarke's disputes with him and with Bentley and Toland. But the circumstantial evidence that I shall be concerned with are shared doctrines, including shared peculiar doctrines. Two thinkers might independently of one another arrive at similar accounts of our moral psychology , even accounts as strikingly similar as are Spinoza's and Hume's on sympathy, emotional ambivalence, and vacillation, especially with Malebranche as intermediary. But will anything except the transmission of opinion account for such oddities as a deliberately double definition of a key concept, as an account of sympathy that takes its force to come from the surplus vivacity of the sympathizing person's sense of self? Or for such unorthodox suggestions as that God ("The cause of the universe, whatever it be") can as reasonably be thought of as an infinite spatially extended being as an infinite thinking being? (Demea's Spinozistic contribution in Dialogues, Part III.) It is one thing to deny that thinking of the sort that we are familiar with could be an attribute of an eternal perfect being, another to suggest that physical attributes can be attributed with no more (or less) absurdity. Demea wants to rest simply with saying that God is supremely eminent, neither spirit nor matter but gloriously mysterious. What Spinoza had said was that both thought and extension were what could be thought of as constituting the essence of the only substance, God-or-Nature, while...

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