The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, and the Source from which I wou’d derive every Truth in Criticism as well as Morality… within these three Years, I find I have scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own Inventions. This with the Reading most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French, and English, and acquiring the Italian, you may think a sufficient Business for one in perfect Health. … But my Disease was a cruel Incumbrance on me.

      He found himself, Hume explained, unable to concentrate, strangely ill at ease, and generally incapable of delivering his opinions “with such Elegance & Neatness as to draw to me the Attention of the World, & I wou’d rather live & dye in Obscurity than produce them maim’d & imperfect.”³ It was fitting that Hume should have recovered the strength to complete his task in France.

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 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 Hume’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 those laws which his maxims had prescribed to him; whereas his narrow weak faculties could reach no further than the observation and memory of some few facts produced by visible external causes, but in a way utterly beyond the reach of his apprehension;—it being perhaps no absurdity to think that this great and curious fabric of the world, the workmanship of the Almighty, cannot be perfectly comprehended by any understanding but His that made it. Man, still affecting something of the Deity, laboured by his imagination to supply what his observation and experience failed him in; and when he could not discover the principles, causes, and methods of Nature’s workmanship, he would needs fashion all those out of his own thought, and make a world to himself, framed and governed by his own intelligence. … They that are studiously busy in the cultivating and adorning such dry barren notions are vigorously employed to little purpose.¹

      Many of the practical conclusions that Locke drew from his philosophy were pleasing to Hume. Since human knowledge falls short of perfectly comprehending what exists, men ought not to think they were at the centre of the universe or try to capture a timeless insight into the whole. They had better reconcile themselves to their more modest powers which vouchsafed them only very partial glimpses of truth. They should concentrate on what they could learn by experience and observation, in order to improve the useful arts, and not yearn to know more. For knowledge of the quality of things was beyond their reach, and served only to employ “idle or over-curious brains. All our business lies at home.”²

      But the other, positive purpose of Locke’s philosophy was just what Hume set out to combat. For Locke intended also that his survey of human understanding and powers “to see to what things they are adapted” would show that although men had not the full blaze of sun to light their way, yet “the candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes.”³ He was concerned to defeat not only the pretensions of the scholastics, but also the apparent amorality of Hobbes. And against Hobbes, he argued that man was after all a rational creature, who could discern through his reason a certain and universal moral law. Human powers were not great enough to put any conclusion beyond rational criticism, but man could perfectly well rely on his own powers to guide him in ordinary life and particularly in moral questions. Thus Locke hoped, while clearing away false notions, “to raise an edifice uniform and consistent.”

      His new edifice, however much it seemed to depart from the established picture of man, still emphasized man’s affinity to God. Locke made sensation the first and most primitive source of ideas, but not the sole source of knowledge. It was supplemented not only by another passive power, reflection—“the capacity of the mind to receive impressions made on it by its own operations,” but also by an active power of the mind, intellect, which created ideas of relation—abstract, general, and universal ideas. Repeatedly, Locke reminded his readers that neither sensation nor reflection could produce general or abstract ideas, and that the power of producing them distinguished man from brutes: “this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them [brutes]; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man