The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

it is drawn only, as the same poet tells us, from the left-handed vessel.

      The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded to us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness, the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy, the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust, the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains as far as possible, a mediocrity, a kind of insensibility in everything.¹

      It was only natural that the author of such a statement should have ceased to write systematic treatises and turned his efforts to essays and history, so much better suited to saying that “nothing is pure and entirely of a piece.”

      Hume’s retirement from philosophy strikes us as odd today partly because we no longer know the literary man, in the eighteenth-century sense, who took all of knowledge for his province and felt no obligation to devote himself exclusively to one. But it is also because we know of no other philosopher who was both so completely enthralled by the philosophical mood and so able to free himself from it. Those who have called Hume a sceptical philosopher have described inaccurately something they sensed—his distrust of all systems, hence of philosophy. He was not sceptical about the existence of the external world, or about man’s capacity for knowing something about it, but he was sceptical about man’s ability to make all his notions coherent and consistent, or to perceive a permanent truth. While driven by his puritanical habits to make a systematic truth of his doubts, his essential purpose, though not yet evident to himself, showed through. It led his readers to feel, though they could not properly explain it, a destructive spirit. Perhaps there cannot be a philosophical system compatible with Hume’s view of man—it may be no accident that systematic philosophy as we know it in the western world began with Plato, who first described man as a compound being. Any conception of man as one cannot perhaps be accounted for by philosophy, but only displayed in essays or history, aphorisms, poetry, or novels. In any case, Hume was the rare philosopher who remembered that there were more things in heaven and earth than philosophers dreamt of. He undermined philosophy with her own weapons, and then found even that not enough.

CHAPTER 7

       A Matter of Degree

      What Hume was really sceptical about is most obvious in his views on politics, with which he occupied himself in the years after he had recovered from his philosophical enthusiasm. He did not forget his philosophical interests, but let them take the more natural shape of a History of Natural Religion, a Dialogue on morals, and the Dialogues on Natural Religion. About politics, he never tried to construct a clearcut theory. There are a few sections on it in the Treatise, but essays and, even more, history were the appropriate vehicles. For Hume’s politics follows no logical scheme and offers no formulas. Although it is consistent in itself and of a piece with the rest of his thought, its pattern lives only in particular judgements. One can discover it in the way one comes to know a man’s character, by seeing him in many different moods and circumstances.

      What is obvious at once is Hume’s refusal to see political disputes as a struggle between good and evil. In the essays, where he commented on current issues, no side is presented as entirely wrong or wicked, and disagreement appears to be not only natural to the human condition, but, when properly conducted, useful. This was far from the prevailing tone in the political debates of his day, which circled around Walpole and Bolingbroke. Walpole, no longer at the height of his power, was being subjected to heated opposition of which Bolingbroke claimed to be the leader. Although both sides were really concerned with the details of party government and the developing cabinet system, each sought profound justification in Locke’s principles.

      The Whigs under Walpole paraded as the party that had defended the British constitution against Stuart usurpations. Charles I, they said, had deliberately violated the original contract between king and people; Charles II and James II had done the same, and attempted besides to impose Catholicism. William of Orange had restored the force of the original contract, and the Whigs were its devoted defenders. Bolingbroke argued that he and the Patriots were defending Old Whiggism against the party who, having overthrown the Stuarts, later deserted their principles. The liberty of the nation, he said, depended on preserving a perfect balance among the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic elements of the constitution. But Walpole’s policies had led the Crown to overwhelm the other parts of the government; its use of corruption had given it control of the standing army, appointments, elections, and administration; it had undermined the power of parliament and weakened the possibility of opposition. The true political division was no longer between Whig and Tory, but between the party of the court, Walpole’s party, and the party of the country, who were protecting the British Constitution against a usurping minister. There was, Bolingbroke argued, room for only one party, of the true patriots, the party of the country. If a corrupt parliament refused to assert itself and demand the rights due to it, the people, led by the Patriots, should have recourse to their natural rights and restore the old constitution, or make a new one.

      Hume refused in the first place to argue in these terms. The Whig doctrine of original contract annoyed him, not because it was used to justify the rebellion, but because it founded the right to rebel on an absurd notion—that government was first produced magically out of chaos by men who were at one moment capable of nothing but war and at another ready to agree on peace. Already in the Treatise, for all his philosophical enthusiasm, Hume had denied that there was any clear-cut origin of government, or any sharp division between a peaceful, social, and a warlike, pre-social state. Government, like all human things, had grown up over many years, somewhat haphazardly, as a consequence of a variety of events and influences. It was unlikely that men had ever lived as isolated individuals; they had always lived in families, and even if families warred with one another, within each there was peace. The association of families under a single government was brought about and has survived through a combination of force, habit, and rational assent. Tracing the origin of government to the consent of the people conflicted with experience which showed that consent counted relatively little in public affairs, especially when conditions were unsettled, as when a new government was being established, during “the fury of revolutions, conquests, and public convulsions.”¹ Thus Hume deliberately blurred the distinction between governments founded by force and governments originating in a contract, a distinction that had become a cliche of political theory: “The common situation of society is a medium amidst all these extremes.”²

      Indeed no argument about government in terms of a right established in the distant past was acceptable. Even disputes about the claims of particular persons or families to the throne seemed utterly unreasonable to Hume. One had only to look into the history of various nations, to study “their revolutions, conquests, increase, and diminution; the manner in which their particular governments are establish’d, and the successive right transmitted from one person to another,” to realize that loyalty to some king or line of kings displayed more “bigotry and superstition” than reason.³ The sort of conservatism that made the past as such a standard was to Hume just a form of revolutionary enthusiasm: “Those who form a pretended respect to antiquity, appeal at every turn to an original plan of the constitution, only cover their turbulent spirit and their private ambition under the appearance of venerable forms.”⁴ It was anyway best not to inquire too meticulously into origins, for “few governments will bear being examin’d so rigorously.”⁵ More than anyone else the English should beware of appealing to the maxims of their ancestors or of remote, uncultivated ages. For the further back one goes, the more barbarous English governments grow: “the only rule of government which is intelligible, or carries any authority with it, is the established practice of the age, and the maxims of administration, which are at that time prevalent and universally assented to.”⁶

      It