Authors: Tobias Smollett
Humphry Clinker (2 page)
⦠the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.
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The contrast is between admiration of regularity and order on the one hand, and fear and anxiety in face of disorder on the other. Where the world appears, as it does to the vulgar, capricious and uncertain it is natural for the imagination to construct a number of deities, whose differing attributes and personalities can be invoked as appropriate. The ideas of the various gods arise from our ignorance by a process in which emotion, mediated by the imagination, leads to beliefs in deities that are constructions of the mind:
We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These
unknown causes
, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear; and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependance
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Thus polytheism rather than monotheism is the first form of natural religion.
It should be noted that in the
Natural History
, and elsewhere in his writings on religion, Hume is prepared to adopt a distinction between âtrue' and âfalse' religion. The origin of polytheistic beliefs in fears and hopes exemplifies what he calls âsuperstition', and he is willing to regard this together with another form of religious belief originating in emotion, âenthusiasm', as âthe corruptions of true religion', as âtwo species of false religion'. There is thus a similarity here with the deists, who also regarded many forms of devotion and ritual as superstitious. Hume's list is:
⦠ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or⦠any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity.
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But this similarity should not obscure from us his opposition to deism. The
Natural History
undermines the deist claim that âtrue religion', in the form of something like Herbert's âcommon notions', can be recommended on the grounds that it has always been accepted in all places. There is no argument for true religion based on the âuniversal consent of mankind'.
A distinction between the true religion of the wise and the superstitions of the vulgar is found already in Cicero's dialogue on which Hume's work is modelled. There Cotta, the spokesman for the Academic school, says:
With the ignorant you get superstitions like the Syrians' worship of a fish, and the Egyptians' deification of almost every species of animal; nay, even in Greece they worship a number of deified human beings⦠and with our own people Romulus and many others, who are believed to have been admitted to celestial citizenship in recent times, by a sort of extension of the franchise! Well, those are the superstitions of the unlearned; but what of you philosophers? How are your dogmas any better?
Hume, too, considers that to demonstrate that superstition and enthusiasm originate in ignorance, fear, hope, elation, flights of fancy and so on, is not to discredit true religion. The wise, the philosophers, may yet have grounds for a rational belief in a
supreme creator and in the world as ordered and governed by divine providence. Are these dogmas any better? Is it possible to construct a rational natural theology, even if men and women are not generally led to religion by reasoning?
It is this question which is debated between the three characters in the
Dialogues.
Following Cicero's model, each character represents a different position on the central questions of natural theology. Can reason establish the existence of God? What can be known by reason of the nature and attributes of God? Can there be a reasoned solution to the conflict between divine goodness and divine power, given the existence of moral evil and natural suffering? What answer a philosopher or theologian gives to these questions is determined in part by his or her epistemology. It is necessary now to give an outline of a central aspect of Hume's own epistemology, as it is found in his earlier writings.
In the
Treatise
he argues that the fact that one phenomenon, or âobject' as he usually says, is the cause or effect of another is never something which is discoverable simply by reflecting on what is contained in our idea of it.
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In order for us to know that fire burns us or bread nourishes us, we must experience the effect of fire or bread on our bodies. He expresses this by saying that we cannot have
a priori
knowledge of the causes and effects of objects. This contrasts, he thinks, with what holds in, say, mathematics. Here we can know that one object is related to another simply by abstract reflection. We can see that 16 is the square of 4 just by examining our ideas of these numbers. The necessary relations between numbers are thus relations
of ideas;
they are purely conceptual, and can be known
a priori.
One mark of truths which are relations of ideas is that the negations of such truths (e.g. that 16 is not the square of 4) are inconsistent and lead to a contradiction. In contrast, however certain we may be that fire burns us, we can imagine without contradiction a possible state of affairs (different from what actually obtains) in which we are not burned by fire. That fire burns us is thus simply a
matter of fact
, not an
a priori
necessary truth.
In the
Treatise
Hume therefore distinguishes between two
domains, relations of ideas and matters of fact. Using terms in a technical, philosophical sense, he calls the domain of relations of ideas
knowledge
, and the domain of matters of fact
probability.
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In this technical sense, it is a matter of probability that fire burns us. This does not mean, for Hume, that we cannot be certain that fire burns. Certainty is a matter of the degree of conviction that we feel about a thing, and we can be certain of something whose negation is still quite conceivable.
That we have beliefs about the causal properties of objects is itself a matter of fact. The question why fire burns us is a question for natural sciences â physics, chemistry, physiology â to answer. The question why we believe that fire burns us, however, is of a kind which, Hume thinks, has not previously been successfully answered. Evidently, that something is the case is not itself an explanation of why we believe that it is the case. The question of the origin of human beliefs is included in what Hume calls âthe science of man'. This science, the theory of human nature, is a foundation for all other sciences, both natural and moral. (By moral science or moral philosophy Hume does not mean just the study of morality, but also of politics, aesthetics, history.)
There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz'd in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending
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therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.
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Hume's theoretical explanation of our beliefs about the causal properties of objects begins with his account of experience â it is from experience and not from
a priori
reflection that we discover that fire burns us. That is hardly news; but what gives Hume's account part of its distinctive character is his conception of experience. This conception has its origin in the thought of some of his predecessors, especially Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche (1638â1715), John Locke (1632â1704) and George Berkeley (1685â1753).
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Experience is characterized subjectively, from the point of view of the person having the experience, and is a
matter of the immediate content of consciousness. Our experience of fire, say, consists essentially in our having before our minds a
perception
of fire. Hume makes clear that his talk of perceptions in the mind as constituents of experience is part of a scientific theory. He says that âthe vulgar confound perceptions and objects'. Unreflective, ordinary men and women fail to distinguish between the fire and the perception of fire. They think that, in their experience of fire, the fire itself is a constituent of their consciousness and is, in some way, immediately before the mind. But here, as elsewhere, common assumptions and science diverge: â⦠philosophy informs us, that everything, which appears to the mind, is nothing but a perception.'
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Consciousness, for Hume, has two forms, feeling and thinking. When we feel, the warmth of the fire, the sensation of warmth, the sight of the flames, and the pleasure we get are all perceptions of the kind he calls âimpressions'. When we think, as now, of such a situation, the perceptions before our minds are called âideas'. Ideas, he argues, are copies of and originate from impressions. This aspect of Hume's theory has many ramifications. But one consequence is the denial that we can have ideas which, so to speak, go beyond the basis of impressions. This thesis is employed in the
Dialogues
by Philo to support the view that the nature of God is incomprehensible. Strictly speaking, we can have no
idea
of the divine nature:
Our ideas reach no farther than our experience. We have no experience of divine attributes and operations. I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself.
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Although the content of our ideas cannot outrun the materials provided by experience, there is an obvious and important way in which we constantly think of things we have not experienced. If I see a child put her hand in the flame (I have that impression), I shall at once think that she will be burned (I have that idea). This idea, that she will be burned, is not derived from seeing her being burned. I think of what will happen before I see it happen. Anyone who has had the same kind of experiences of fire as I have had will
do the same. This mental process (Hume calls it an âoperation of the mind') is a universal feature of human nature. It is essential to our life. It is a major task of the theory of human nature to explain this process. Hume regarded himself as the first person ever to do so successfully.
We must note at once that the question is not, why does fire burn? It is obvious that we all learn to make such inferences, from what we experience to what will happen next, long before we have any scientific understanding of the processes of nature. For Hume, what we do is to infer a cause or an effect (in the example, the effect of being burned) from an effect or a cause that we currently experience. Our capacity to perform these causal inferences does not depend upon our having a scientific theory of how the cause produces the effect. In most cases we are simply ignorant of the inner workings of nature. (In fact, Hume believes that we never can have any
ultimate
explanation of why things happen in nature as they do.)
It is also clear, he says, that we could never infer the effect of some cause we experience unless we had previously had experience of a relevant kind. Locke tells a story of an Oriental prince being told by a traveller from Europe that in his country, when it becomes very cold, the water in the canals becomes solid, so that it could bear the weight of an elephant. The prince replies that until then he had believed what the traveller told him of Europe, but now he knows that he is a liar. Hume, recalling the story, says, âThe Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly.' Since the prince had no experience of the relevant kind of phenomena, he had no reason to believe that the effect of cooling water beyond a certain point is that it becomes solid. In no case, Hume argues, can we establish causal connections
a priori.
It is previous experience of what Hume calls the âconstant conjunction' of causes and effects, and such experience alone, which enables us to âreason justly' from causes or effects which we perceive to effects or causes which we do not perceive. This form of reasoning is quite distinct from
a priori
reasoning in the domain of âknowledge', which is based simply upon relations between
ideas. It is based on experience, and, being in the domain of âprobability', Hume calls it
probable reasoning
.
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What the theory of human nature must do is explain how it is that experience of the conjunctions of causes and effects in our past experience leads to our being able to reason from a perceived phenomenon to its unperceived cause or effect. The essential feature of such reasoning, for which an explanation is required, is that what we
infer
is always a phenomenon
of the same kind
as those phenomena of which we have had previous experience. We always make inferences which presume that causal connections in nature are
uniform.
Why?
One possibility to be considered is that we make this presumption because we have a reason to do so. Hume thinks that this hypothesis cannot be correct. That causal connections between phenomena are uniform (that the same kind of cause always produces the same kind of effect) is not a necessary truth which we could have an
a priori
reason to believe. We can without contradiction imagine the negation being true â we can conceive a change in the course of nature. However, the only other sort of reason we could have would be to infer it from the evidence of past experience. We would then be inferring it by probable reasoning. But we were seeking an explanation of why probable reasoning has the character it has; and so it is circular to explain this by assuming probable reasoning already.
An alternative explanation, and the one which Hume favours, is that probable reasoning is not dependent on any other prior âoperation of the mind'; in fact, it is a kind of
instinct.
In the section of the
Treatise
called âOf the Reason of Animals', he emphasizes the link he thus makes between this form of human reason and the instincts of other animals: âTo consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls.'
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Although he here says that reason is an âunintelligible' instinct, he does propose an account of the mechanism in the mind by which it operates. For the moment we can postpone outlining this. For the purpose of considering the
Dialogues
some other comments are needed.