The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

and heavenly cities, but what in fact happened had little relation to such pronouncements.

      This mundane attitude determined Hume’s view of the Civil War. He chose to write about it because he thought it “the most curious, interesting, and instructive part of our history.”¹ He did not see it as an occasion when the armies of God and Satan met. It was a time when certain ambiguities and contradictions in the Constitution could no longer be tolerated, and an unfortunate congruence of events and passions had produced a catastrophe instead of the peaceful adjustment that might have been. What had happened then, as always, was determined by a series of small decisions and actions in which, perhaps, ideals played a part. The king’s failure to answer parliament’s petition immediately, Buckingham’s rivalry with Richelieu, the abilities of Pym, the king’s personal deficiencies, the ambitions of Cromwell, were at least as important as the imposition of ship money and the fear of Catholicism.

      Hume therefore blamed no man, not even any group of men: “the truth is, there is so much reason to blame, and praise, alternately, king and parliament, that I am afraid the mixture of both in my composition being so equal, may pass sometimes for an affectation, and not the result of judgement and evidence.”¹ He defended the Stuarts against those who charged them with having precipitated the Civil War, not because he considered their policies faultless, but because he believed that they had played a relatively small part in the whole picture. He could not cast the king as the villain of the piece because he saw even a king as one of many men harnessed together by circumstances, passions, personal and legal ties. This refusal to believe that any man or conviction can alone determine the course of history, and the tendency to reduce great historical events to so many ordinary occurrences and unforeseen consequences gave Hume’s history its air of calm, which, as he lacked the novelist’s talents, amounted almost to dullness. For what grandeur is there left in a decision of state when one has been told that the king threw himself on the bed and cried, “I told you this before?” It is the same standpoint that led Tolstoy to describe Napoleon’s pudgy hands and Montaigne to commend Tacitus for attending to private manners and tendencies rather than to “universal battles and commotions.” It was a standpoint that made Hume’s history admired for its civilized tone in the salons of Paris, and moved Victorians to condemn him, at the very least, for frivolity.

      Insofar as the grand ideals men professed had any influence, they were always, Hume felt certain, pernicious. Worldly interests paraded as high-minded patriotism, religious enthusiasm masked crude ambition. Cromwell and Pym and their followers fared badly in Hume’s hands because he was certain that: “Equally full of fraud and ardour, these pious patriots talked perpetually of seeking the Lord, yet still pursued their own purposes.”² He attributed the calmer spirit under the later Stuarts to the fact that cant and hypocrisy had been detected, and pretensions to greater purity had become suspect. It was significant, he pointed out, that whereas the patriots of the ’40’s called themselves the “godly party,” the anti-papists of ’79 were content to describe themselves as the “good” and the “honest” party, “a sure prognostic that their measures were not to be so furious, nor their pretensions so exorbitant.”¹

      Yet the genuine or sincere idealist worried Hume even more than the spurious one. For once the cause became sacred, it could be made to sanctify anything. As ultimate benefits grow more inspiring, benevolence here and now seems less needful, and thus holy purposes beget a “narrow contracted selfishness.”² Religious enthusiasm was a species of such idealism, and Hume blamed it for the worst evils of the Civil War. He considered the conduct of the parliamentary party laudable, he said, “till they push’d their Advantages so far as to excite a Civil War … and to this Extremity nothing carry’d them but their furious Zeal for Presbytery: a low Bigotry, with which they sully’d a noble Cause.”³ Religious enthusiasm was a delusion that made men think they were “above ordinances,” and “unlimited and unrestrained by any rules which govern inferior mortals.” It led astray even men as noted for “temper, insinuation, address, and profound judgement” as Henry Vane, whose excellent understanding was so corrupted by such “whimsies, mingling with pride,… that sometimes he thought himself the person deputed to reign on earth for a thousand years over the whole congregation of the faithful.”⁴ It had converted the truly noble principles which had inspired the constitutional struggle into “the most virulent poison.”⁵ Destruction was ever the result of religious enthusiasm because “popular rage … must be attended with the most pernicious consequences, when it arises from a principle which disclaims all control by human law, reason, or authority.”⁶

      In later times, when idealism was no longer linked to God, and the danger was not of religious enthusiasm, Hume would have spoken against its modern equivalents—faith in the master race, the class struggle, progress, or equality. For they, too, have inspired men to “disclaim all control by human law, reason, or authority” in the name of a higher glory. His remarks on a species of egalitarianism are a fair illustration of what he might have said in our time: In a perfect theocracy, governed by infinitely intelligent beings, distribution of honours and goods according to virtue might perhaps work. But if ordinary men try as much, “the total dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence.” For the “uncertainty of merit” and the “self-conceit” of each man would make it impossible to establish any “determinate rule of conduct.” It is all very wed for fanatics to suppose “that dominion was founded on grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth;” reasonable men, and the civil magistrate, put such “sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers,” and maintain firmly that “a rule, which, in speculation may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice totally pernicious and destructive.”¹

      Whatever its shape or form, glory had no place in Hume’s politics. He had little tolerance for grandiose schemes—the old Romans were, he declared, “the general robbers of the world, whose ambition and avarice made desolate the earth, and reduced opulent nations to want and beggary.”² What struck him about Pericles was not what he did for the glory of Athens but that when he lay dying, and his friends began enumerating “his great qualities and successes, his conquests and victories, and his nine trophies erected over the enemies of the republic,” the dying hero suddenly interrupted them to say, “You forget the most eminent of my praises, while you dwell so much on those vulgar advantages in which fortune had a principal share. You have not observed that no citizen has ever yet worne mourning on my account.”³ And in the Treatise, Hume concluded his discussion of pride and courage with an admonition against heroism. Of course, in a way, one had to admire the hero’s dazzling character, and so mankind generally sang his praises. But “men of cool reflexion,” who think not only of the hero himself, more readily disparage heroism. They remember: “The infinite confusions and disorder which it has caused in the world, … the subversion of empires, the devastation of provinces, the sack of cities. ”.”⁴ Heroism destroys peace and liberty, and is therefore a plague.

      Any government that attempts to reform its subjects is no less dangerous. The function of government is not to change men. That is better left to time and accident:

      Sovereigns must take mankind as they find them, and cannot pretend to introduce any violent change in their principles and ways of thinking. A long course of time with a variety of accidents and circumstances, are requisite to produce those great revolutions, which so much diversify the face of human affairs. And the less natural any set of principles are, which support a particular society, the more difficulty will a legislator meet with in raising and cultivating them. It is his best policy to comply with the common bent of mankind and give it all the improvements of which it is susceptible.¹

      Radical or violent action rarely brings the improvement it promises. Although tyrannicide was much approved of in ancient times because it freed mankind from “many of these monsters, and seemed to keep the others in awe, whom the sword or poniard could not reach,” experience has taught modern men that such means do not usually achieve their ends. On the same grounds, Hume opposed war against France, whatever her ambitions. The best protection against the danger that the French might establish a universal monarchy was to maintain steady resistance through a balance of power, and to hope that “the natural revolutions of human affairs,