HUME’S CHOICE OF DIALOGUE FORMAT FOR THE …
Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
HUME’S LITERARY DIALOGUES ON NATURAL RELIGION
Dale Jacquette, University of Bern, Switzerland.
1. Why Dialogues?
A variety of different motivations have been attributed to David Hume for adopting a conversational dialogue format in his posthumously published 1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.1 The predominant view is that Hume, having arranged in his literary will for publication of the manuscript within two years of his death, wrote in dialogue form in order to avoid damage to his reputation among a conservatively religious authority.2 The suggestion is that by writing in dialogue form, Hume distances himself from any of the conclusions that his fictional characters might defend in the Dialogues, just as the author of a play like William Shakespeare’s Macbeth depicting a king’s assassination would not normally be considered guilty of regicidal intent. By writing in dialogue form, Hume avoids any personal obloquy in what is then only the dramatization of a philosophical discussion between persons of different philosophical outlooks, none of which is easily identified with Hume.3
The documentary evidence that might support the standard explanation of Hume’s choice of dialogue form unfortunately is equivocal. There is an exchange of correspondence between Hume and his friend, the surprisingly philosophically timid Adam Smith, author of Wealth of Nations, concerning the inadvisability of publishing Hume’s Dialogues under any circumstances.4 There is the fact that Hume, having vacillated between asking Smith to publish the Dialogues after his death, and then bequeathing him all of his manuscripts except the Dialogues, and entrusting it instead, first, to his previous publishers, until finally turning over responsibility for the task to his like-named nephew David Hume.5 Hume’s name was to appear as author of the Dialogues, and having inflammatory anti-religious philosophical positions considered by dialogue from characters rather than in the form of a treatise, would not go very far then, as it would now, to disguise what seems to be Hume’s own narrowly constrained probabilistically conditional Deism, as defended by Cleanthes in the Dialogues.
These interesting background facts shed additional light on what must nevertheless be the primary internal evidence in Hume’s Dialogues themselves. Hume’s text under his name is distanced from any of the three main characters in the conversations on natural religion in a further way by framing the opening remarks of a fictional Pamphilus addressing a fictional Hermippus, and offering only to recount what purport to have been actual discussions between the three principal characters of Philo, Demea and Cleanthes. Pamphilus, a student of Cleanthes, explains that he was present but too young to participate. Oddly, then, Pamphilus, who claims to rely on his deeply etched memory of the occasion, offers a detailed justification for writing specifically on the philosophy of natural religion in dialogue form. It follows logically, then, that Hume as the author of the Dialogues must be identical with Pamphilus. It is Pamphilus’s voice that we hear first, and he has things to say about why it is challenging to write in dialogue form and why it is especially appropriate to do so specifically in writing about the philosophical promise and limitations of natural religion, all of which should be Hume’s burden to explain. If Hume = Pamphilus, then, like Pamphilus, Hume ≠ Philo, ≠ Demea, ≠ Cleanthes. Hume, identified with Pamphilus, is none of the three main dialogue speaking characters, even in disguise, but only a student of Cleanthes’ philosophy. Once we enter the book, Hume is no longer present in the first person. It is Pamphilus who thinks the choice of dialogue as a form needs explaining, and who offers an explanation in the prologue. Pamphilus serves as a neutral observer, a concierge to the interactions of three main interlocutors. He pleads his youth as grounds for not having any fixed opinion about any of these difficult matters concerning the existence and nature of God, and he is only there to report what he heard.6
If Hume assumes the persona of Pamphilus in the Dialogues, then he cleverly allows the onus of defending religious heterodoxy, even blasphemy in the judgment of some ecclesiastical critics, to fall on fictional characters with whom neither author Hume nor narrator Pamphilus can logically be identified. As Pamphilus, Hume is so distanced from the philosophical action of the Dialogues, that his pen permits Philo, Demea, and Cleanthes collectively to get into all the mischief Hume wants to stir up concerning what can and cannot be reasonably inferred from within the constraints of an epistemically respectable empiricist, experientially grounded natural religion. He can unreservedly air all the frankly anti-natural-religion conclusions at which he has arrived in his own skeptical thinking and uncompromising empiricist origins of all our ideas, without putting his name to any of these disreputable propositions.
Hume is Pamphilus, and Pamphilus, as we learn only as the Dialogues conclude, despite being a pupil of Cleanthes, is too young to have a horse in the race. Hume is thereby personally off the hook, in the sense of publishing only a fictional account of fictional conversations. The deeper fiction is that Hume as Pamphilus is not actually recounting philosophical dialogues between three disputants. Pamphilus is not truthful in this respect, and neither, therefore, is Hume. He is the author of a philosophical fiction. The standard explanation of why Hume writes in dialogue form attributes to him the choice of a literary devices by which his name on the book’s title page can only be properly understood throughout as having authored a work of fiction. Hume, on the standard explanation of his use of dialogue form in discussing natural religion, by these and similar artifices, skirts opprobrium in any direct or immediate sense touching himself or his good name in posterity. He is at most a student of the ideas that he as Pamphilus have heard other thinkers discussing. Despite this literary legalistic maneuvering to protect his posthumous reputation, the standard explanation maintains, Hume manages skillfully to communicate all of his skeptical doubts about the ability of natural religion to ascertain anything philosophically defensible concerning God’s attributes. It is to accomplish both of these purposes, to protect himself and have his say about the limits of natural religion, that Hume in this standard interpretation is most often said to have chosen to write dialogues concerning the argument from design for the existence of God and the limits of natural religion in trying to understand God’s nature.
The standard explanation is attractive, but is that David Hume? If Hume intends the Dialogues as a pure fiction, then how can its philosophical ideas be taken more seriously than trade entertainment literature? If the standard explanation is true, then Hume must think that with his name on the cover he can deceive any educated reader that he does not share the opinions that a leading figure in the Dialogues defends, then we misjudge Hume’s sagacity to the same extent that we uncharitably suppose Hume misjudges the readers of his book after his death. The standard interpretation, differently expressed, depicts Hume as a highly cautious thinker and writer who supposedly on prudential considerations alone in a climate hostile to Deism and religious free-thinking adopts a flimsy barricade of fictional identities and situations in order to lay out from behind a partition of masks some tough-minded arguments about the philosophy of natural religion that he hopes future readers will be able to see through and grasp what he would have openly declared in his own day were it not for the oppressive climate of religious persecution of the time.
Hume, however, does not demonstrate a similar caution in publishing other openly skeptical writings in relation to religion, and he withholds publication of two religiously controversial essays from the press during his lifetime only when his printer is threatened with a lawsuit. Hume himself is fearless in writing what he thinks, while never seeking deliberately to offend. Why, then, would he choose to write in dialogue form in order to preserve his reputation against religious traditionalist outrage after his death? How is Hume’s posthumous reputation supposed to remain untarnished if readers immediately after the book’s publication think that they can immediately read Hume’s own anti-religious sentiments between the lines of every dialogue exchange? If the ideas in the book arouse a religious backlash, regardless of which character expresses them, then blame and reproach are bound to attach to Hume as the Dialogues author, and cannot be deflected onto any fictional character. Surely Hume understands this. On the standard explanation’s assumptions, it should follow that Hume cannot assume that he can fool everyone by allowing his dialogue characters to give voice to his own religious skepticism, so why assume that he would do so in order to distract the unwary reader and shield himself from responsibility for the book’s controversial ideas?
If Hume’s greatest priority was simply to avoid damaging his future reputation, then he could have achieved this purpose by destroying the Dialogues, as he tells Sir Gilbert Elliot he burned a skeptical treatise in philosophy of religion that he had written earlier in his career.7 Or he could have published the Dialogues anonymously, just as we have them, minus his name. Perhaps he considered this and was dissuaded by the thought that he would be thereby risking a compounded criticism of cowardice and lack of philosophical commitment in the likelihood of his authorship’s later discovery. He had shown the manuscript of the Dialogues to a number of friends, there was a scattered correspondence concerning them, and his printer and publisher knew of them. Such subterfuge in any case never seems to have occurred to Hume, at least not as a factor in choosing to write about natural religion in dialogue form. Hume is not reluctant to assert his authorship, but proudly posthumously publishes the Dialogues under his name.8 He is evidently not motivated exclusively or even primarily by concerns for his later reputation, except insofar as he may think his reputation will actually or eventually be enhanced by publishing the book. He no doubt wants to avoid a tirade of religious dogma and bigotry, especially during his lifetime, but he accomplishes all of these purposes by having the book produced after his death and under his name. It does not add anything useful to these explanations to suggest that Hume writes dialogues on the philosophy of natural religion in order to conceal his own philosophical attitudes, and for Hume’s readers after his death to be able if pressed to demur, step away from and disown the most controversial anti-religious ideas expressed by his Dialogues’ fictional characters.
Hume’s Dialogues, whatever his reasons for choosing to write in this form, do not articulate a unified philosophy of religion. Instead, the Dialogues represent a virtual stand-off between opposed arguments and philosophical starting points supporting very distinct philosophical attitudes toward the scope and limits of natural religion. It is a discussion that, more realistically than many philosophical dialogues, never achieves final resolution, except to the self-contained satisfaction of some of the individual fictional participants. The three disputants as the dialogues break up at the end seem to disagree without resolution with each other, much as they did at the beginning, and they have all made good points. It took time and patience exhausted to discover exactly where their differences lay, and in the process a worthwhile conceptual clarity is achieved. The reader is tested as to which arguments emerge as strongest among the interlocutors, and where the most interesting persistent philosophical problems still remain. In this and other respects, Hume’s Dialogues follow the venerable model of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), also written in dialogue form, but with a distinctly ‘Academic’ or Platonic bias against the Stoics.9 Hume’s characters, significantly, boldly stand their mutually incompatible grounds. None of them is as thoroughly beaten down, as, say, Hylas by Philonous in George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, or as anyone besides Parmenides who tries to talk philosophy with Socrates.10 The implied inability to resolve philosophical differences concerning natural religion is precisely what Hume’s skeptical philosophy should lead us to expect in all his published philosophical writings, beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature.11
Anyone familiar with Hume’s skepticism in his time as today will immediately see in his Dialogues his personal philosophical signature endorsing a diluted Deism that is not quite theism and not quite atheism. The position that seems to triumph in the philosophical exchange Pamphilus reports between Philo, Demea, and Cleanthes is that the existence but not the nature of a divine intelligent architect of the universe is probably knowable. The argument from design in its most persuasive guise can at most support belief in the conditionally probable existence of a divine creator or Deity, but that beyond this tepid concession we cannot on the same empirical grounds conclude anything of substance concerning God’s nature, essence, properties or attributes. Deism acknowledges the conditional probability that the world was divinely, intelligently created, while leaving moral beings free to act without consideration of the creator Deity’s properties and especially will. Natural religion cannot philosophically justify any proposals as to whether and if so what God wills, and whether or not God has any specific will concerning human beings. This is potentially dangerous stuff. Without a solemn doctrine articulating what God wills, no theistic religion can command a following. It would be no wonder then if Hume were sufficiently apprehensive about the public reception of such subversive ideas.12
2. Hume’s Skepticism in the Philosophy of Religion
Hume is skeptical where matters of God’s nature are concerned. He is therefore skeptical, in effect, about substantive theistic religious teachings in every tradition. Hume’s skepticism is more but not so general as to exclude all possibility of knowledge. As a skeptic, Hume targets natural religion as only one among a larger category of confused philosophical enthusiasms. He is generally skeptical about the meaning and certainly the truth of any proposition involving ideas that do not originate in acts of perception or impressions of sensation or reflection. Hume’s skepticism catches in its net not only natural religion, but philosophical belief in the existence of thought-independent substance external to the mind, the subject, self, person or soul as a unified entity, the infinity or infinite divisibility or spatiotemporal extension, and the nature and modality of causation beyond temporally ordered spatially contiguous regular successions specifically among our ideas of physical events.
Hume is obligated ideologically and methodologically to consider the efforts of natural religion to prove that God exists on experiential grounds in the argument from design. For Hume, there is no other conceivable way in which God’s existence might be proved, and upon criticism, Cleanthes, characterized by Pamphilus as a thinker of ‘accurate philosophical turn’, concludes that the argument has at best a qualified and questionable success. There are fundamental problems that the Dialogues highlight, concerning especially the strength of inference by which the existence of God is supposed to be implied by the perceivable natural order in the universe, on the analogy of the design and appointment of means to end inherent in human-made mechanical artifacts like pocket-watches and water-mills.
It is in the spirit of the age to rely upon the experience of empirical phenomena for answers to outstanding philosophical problems. The climate of thought, that Hume also shares, represents, and carries forward in his own way, was powerfully shaped in large part, especially in Great Britain at the time, by the stunning intellectual successes of Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy, and more specifically by his kinematics or geometrical physics in the ‘System of the World’, expounded in his monumental 1687 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.13
We can think of Hume’s empiricism as taking up the banner of Newton’s natural philosophy and purifying it of some of its vestigial seventeenth century rationalist encumbrances, making it more true to itself and extending it from physics in natural philosophy to the complementary study of moral philosophy. Hume describes the Treatise in its subtitle as ‘Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into MORAL SUBJECTS’.14 He seems thereby to apply Newton’s famous dictum, ‘Hypotheses non fingo’, in the Scholium Generale of the 1713 second edition of the Principia from natural to moral philosophy. He extends Newton’s remark from its original intent in natural philosophy, specifically with respect to withholding speculation about the metaphysics of gravity beyond the observable phenomena, more generally to include the practice of moral philosophy. Dividing philosophy rather too sharply into natural and moral, Hume in his day distinguishes as moral philosophy several branches of what are referred to today as philosophy of mind, epistemology, and value theory at the foundations of ethics, social-political philosophy, and aesthetics.15
Speculation is rife as to exactly what Newton means by denying that he ‘feigns’ or fabricates as hypotheses. Obviously scientific inquiry and explanation of the sort that Newton personifies thrives on the making and testing of empirical hypotheses. We formulate a hypothesis about some natural phenomenon that we want to understand, and then we try to confirm (Hempel) or disconfirm (Popper) the hypothesis.16 It is always a win-win situation for the advance of science, regardless of whether an interesting hypothesis is observationally or experimentally confirmed or disconfirmed, because it always teaches us something we did not previously know about how the world works. To take away hypothesis formulation from that process of exact scientific knowledge seeking seems not only in opposition, but hypocritical or even inconsistent, as a description of what his readers know perfectly well is built on what Newton also calls hypotheses. Is Newton, then, caught up in some kind of contradiction? Are the hints at a methodology or philosophy of science in the Scholium Generale at odds with Newton’s own official scientific practice, providing him with what he should have known were abundant counterexamples to his not framing hypotheses? We could, but we need not rush to say so. Newton, it might be argued, must mean something different from ‘hypothesis’ in this context than its most general use in contemporary methodology and philosophy of science, as a proposition that has a certain function in the search for truth in natural or experimental philosophy.
Newton in denying that he makes hypotheses seems to mean more specifically that he refuses to speculate concerning the unobservable nature of gravity beyond its perceivable effects. Newton’s natural philosophy is an effort to discover exact analogies between abstract geometry and the occurrence especially of causally related physical events involving objects moving in space and time. The context in which Newton remarks that he frames no hypotheses is one in which he explains that in the mathematicization of natural events he is unable to go beyond the phenomena of gravity to explain how gravity functions independently of its objectification in appearance. As to what gravity itself is, the nature of gravity, so to speak, Newton hazards no hypotheses, as he equivocally declares:
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign [non fingo] hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.17
Nor, similarly, will Hume venture to explain what causation or causality is, the invisible cause-and-effect relation of regularly successive events, nor allow experientially-grounded ideas of ‘necessary [causal] connexions’ into philosophically respectable explanations of any conceivable perceptions.18 Hume does not offer a three-part analysis of either causation itself or causal connection into regular succession, temporal priority of cause over effect, and spatial contact or propinquity.19
The latter requirement as a condition for causation itself would rule out the possibility of action at a distance, implying that remote causation is never anything other than a chain of proximate causal connections. Such conclusions might be welcome rather than the reverse in scientific quarters, but is it the kind of proposition concerning the speculative metaphysical nature of causation beyond all perceptual phenomena to which Hume in his principled skepticism is generally unwilling to offer any positive philosophical commitment. Whether self-consciously or not, Hume, in the spirit of Newton’s revolutionary science, is vehement that we can never say anything positive about the nature of causation, or project metaphysical hypotheses beyond the empirical phenomena concerning hidden connections governing perceivable event regularities, just as Newton says that he advances no hypotheses concerning the nature and workings of gravity beyond the observations his science explains and predicts.
If causation itself as a relation is not perceivable, then the question, not lost on Immanuel Kant, as to whether causation is something objective belonging to the world of phenomena, or something subjective belonging instead to human experience and judgment of the world. Causation might then be ontically dependent on experience-transcending conditions of thought and the way in which we experience the world rather than on the world itself or as it would be independently of perception, the Kantian Ding an sich, thing-in-itself or -as-it-is-in-itself.20 What Hume offers instead of an analysis of causation is an exercise in philosophical anthropology. In the same three-part analysis, he does not explain causal connection, but the experiential origin of our idea of causal connection, asking, effectively, what is our idea of causation and where does it come from?21 His task is to understand how the mind could have arrived at such an idea. As to the nature or even the existence of causation or causality itself, Hume finds it philosophically irresponsible to speculate. Like Newton’s constraints on the pretenses of a proper philosophy of science trying to grasp the hidden or phenomena-transcending workings of gravity, Hume’s perception-driven empiricist philosophy of mind and epistemology permits only an account of how the mind may have devised its idea of causal connection from its perceptions of spatiotemporal events, of regular succession, temporal priority and spatial contact. It is a billiard table model of causal interaction, which we may suppose applies throughout nature at the microphysical level, and thereby explains the mind’s category of causally interconnected events. In that regard, Hume’s concept of causation is significantly more impoverished than Newton’s.22
As to whether the picture is true, correct or accurate, whether the idea of causation corresponds to causation as a real relation outside or independently of thought, Hume staunchly maintains that we cannot justifiably conjecture. Trying to do so brings us only to the point that we say more about our idea of causation, and not about causation itself independently of our ideas. The same is true for Hume in other areas of metaphysics. Causation is not the only category or relation to fall under the empiricist juggernaut of Hume’s Fork.23 Hume’s critique of metaphysical pretensions specifically regarding causation as a necessary connection of events was nevertheless compelling enough to awaken Kant, as he says in Prolegomena, from his dogmatic (rationalist) slumbers.24 The reverberations of Newton’s Hypotheses no fingo through Hume also reach Kant, where it permeates deeply into the Transcendental Aesthetic and concepts and categories of the pure understanding in Kant’s 1781/1787 Critique of Pure Reason.25
We cannot offer an authoritative metaphysics of substance and substances themselves, if Hume is right, nor of persons or the ego or self, as opposed to an account of the mind’s idea of substance, persons, and itself. Which is quite another thing. We may talk only about ideas when we believe ourselves to be talking about things, but Hume insists philosophically on the difference.26 We can thereby characterize Hume’s empiricism as a more faithful and thorough application of Newton’s Hypotheses non fingo to all of philosophy, excluding terms for perceptually ungrounded ideas. Hume can then maintain a scrupulous avoidance of speculation on the real nature of things beyond the limit of what can be known concerning impressions and ideas as the only constituents of thought.27 Hume goes so far as finally to question even Newton’s own classical mathematical assumptions in the development of his kinematics.28
Applying the ‘experimental method of Reasoning’ to the moral sciences, Hume does not propose a kinematics of philosophical thought. He does not project the dialogues of Socrates and Phaedrus onto an ovoid in order to predict what Socrates will say next, in the way that Newton offers geometrical analogies in order to explain the motion of a planet or star. What Hume does instead in every instance is to curb back the pretensions of a speculative metaphysics, to rein it in with reminders that our only stock of legitimate ideas for thought in any domain are those that ultimately derive from immediate sense impressions. A legitimate idea can account for itself, explain its origin or the origin of its cognitive predecessors in sensation, perception, or reflection. Anything else has no business littering the philosopher’s desk. It is for just this reason that Hume is often rightly described as a skeptic. He does not advance bold new hypotheses in metaphysics, but rather makes us reconsider and draw back from former especially rationalist philosophical assumptions. He wants to help keep philosophy within its proper sphere, respecting its proper empirical experiential limits, and avoiding the equivalent of pseudo-science, as seen in the previous century’s extravagant metaphysical system builders.29
Writing in dialogue form is a literary device that Hume might exploit if he is genuinely skeptical about anything that might be said, pro or contra, concerning the Deity’s properties, in excess of acknowledging the probability of such an entity’s existence. If Hume were not skeptical, then he could have simply written a treatise in which he plainly set forth his philosophical objections to natural religion and the argument from design as it was developed by William S. Paley and others at roughly this time.30 Hume does this in his plain-spoken equally potentially provocative 1757 treatise, The Natural History of Religion, in which Hume can be understood as implying that all religion has a natural scientific psychological explanation, for which no reference to supernatural beings or forces is required.31 He apparently did so also in his treatise on the subject that he consigned to the flames. There is, on the other hand, an important difference for Hume between natural religion and a natural history of religion. The latter is a subject about which philosophy can be definite even if fallible, as in other empirical matters, here in the anthropology of religion as a cultural sociological phenomenon. Natural religion itself, as opposed to a natural history of religion, is quite another thing, and its propositions need to be subjected to the same high level of philosophical scrutiny, in the course of which Hume discovers that his general skepticism applied to any ideas lacking a legitimating experiential origin in immediate impressions of sensation.32
3. Hume’s Choices and Publication History of the Dialogues
Hume is not afraid to say what he believes, even when its content is unpopular or controversial. The example of Hume’s The Natural History of Religion, published in Hume’s lifetime, fully testify to this, along with the essay ‘Of Miracles’, appearing as Section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in first and second editions in 1748 and 1777.33
On the other hand, Hume’s 1755-1756 essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ were deemed too sensitive for his publisher Andrew Millar, and, under threat of legal proceedings, were replaced in the originally planned Five Dissertations to result in the truncated Four Dissertations, substituting the more innocuous essay, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, and published without the offending material in 1757.34 It was not until seven years after his death, in 1783, that ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ appeared in an edition of essays pre-authorized for publication by Hume.35 Otherwise, Hume at most sometimes cushions his conclusions so as not to give undue offense, though never at the cost of making his meaning clear. Like a sensible person, Hume listens to the advice of friends who seem to have his interests at heart. His good and gifted friend Adam Smith, thinking the manuscript was some kind of social dynamite, urges excessive caution, and Smith may even have wanted to withhold publishing the Dialogues indefinitely, as a reflection of his honest concern for Hume’s reputation in the public mind. Hume did not strongly share Smith’s excessive discretion, and, wanting to avoid distractions during his remaining years, prescribed a two-year interval for the publication of the Dialogues after his death. Hume is justly proud of the Dialogues, of what he has accomplished in them philosophically and as a literary endeavor. He may care what becomes of his reputation once he is dead, but, more importantly, he seems to want his reputation to depend, among other things, on the Dialogues.36
Rather than expressing Hume’s distrust of Smith to carry out his wishes concerning the Dialogues, nor as a snub of any kind to his longtime friend, I prefer to see in the provision made by the last minute codicil added to his will, Hume’s gentlemanly decision, knowing Smith’s views on the matter, to avoid putting his friend in a moral dilemma. He spares Smith the conflict of conscientious loyalties to Hume’s reputation over Hume’s desire that the Dialogues be published. At the same time, Hume gives Smith a comfortable distance from any perceptions of seditious anti-religious content of the book on his own part and during his own remaining lifetime, as Hume, by arranging for posthumous publication, was similarly avoiding any imprecations among his contemporaries. The fact that Hume does not share Smith’s concerns about the reputation risks and greater social dangers of publishing the Dialogues is amply demonstrated by the fact that Hume specifies in the final codicil to his will that his own nephew, also conveniently named David Hume, later jurist and legal scholar, is to oversee the publication of the text. If Hume had shared Smith’s sense that to be associated with the publication of his Dialogues was likely to bring adverse consequences, then he could hardly have made it his request to visit calamity upon a beloved and respected namesake nephew, especially while still a young man with the prospect of a promising career before him.
The only reasonable explanation is that Hume, out of respect for Smith’s difference of opinion and more guarded moral inclinations, arranged for the posthumous publication of the Dialogues in a way that would free Smith of any moral conflict between the obligations of a loyal friend and advisor concerned about Hume’s reputation after his death, or even of the social repercussions of publishing the book, and as executor of his friend’s literary will.37 Hume’s provision released Smith from any immediate association with what Smith in his correspondence with Hume clearly considers a philosophical-theological powder keg with a real potential to disrupt the social order.38 In the event, the publication of Hume’s Dialogues went largely unnoticed, attracting only a few critics immediately at the time. As Hume predicted, the book did not ignite any sort of moral backlash against Hume’s reputation, nor did it undermine the foundations of civilization.39
What Humean idea could we have of God, supposing that we can reasonably infer that there is a great enough intelligent designer and builder to have made the universe? Is God ‘old’ and wise? Or is the God of our world a youthful apprentice in a divine craft school, who made our world as a prototype to develop his or her or its skill? Now, of course, it is our world, and here we are stuck in it, if we rightly conclude from the empirical evidence that it was created by God. However, God may have moved on to other things since then and simply ignores the infinitely many worlds he, she or it made before making the latest most divine interest absorbing world, which unfortunately is not the world we inhabit. If the best that natural religion can do is to argue on very generous grounds that there is probably a divine creator of the phenomenal universe that we inhabit, then no specific content as to God’s will, or whether God has a will, let alone a will directed in any way toward human beings, can be validated by ideas deriving from immediate impressions of sensation and reflection. There will exist instead, as there does in fact, a wide array of different empirically insupportable faiths concerning God’s will, precisely as we find throughout history and in the world today.40
Hume’s The Natural History of Religion already offers anthropological and individual psychological accounts of the historical development of religions as a social phenomenon. Religion in Hume’s hands becomes a subject whose origins and the origins of whose concepts and putative ideas, can be studied like any other natural phenomena and related plausibly to such occurrent states of mind as sense experiences and emotions, beliefs and desires. Hume, in this disarming way, secularizes religion. He brings it alongside any other social practice, the contents of whose genuine ideas are explainable as resulting from cognitive manipulation of immediate sense impressions. Otherwise, Hume will strategically ask, what are we supposed to be talking about? The world outside of our ideas? For that, exactly as when questions arise about substance, the self, and the unseen workings of cause and effect relations, Hume’s answer is an uncompromising skepticism toward any speculative metaphysics. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume, in a moment of rare hyperbole, goes so far as to demand that books containing nothing but such speculative metaphysics be incinerated.41 What we know, if Hume is right, are the existence and their contents of our ideas insofar as they are available to reflection. A world existing independently of thought and outside of our ideas is something in which Hume allows we may be psychologically compelled to believe, while repeatedly insisting that the true nature of existence independently of our ideas must obviously remain beyond the reach of our ideas, and hence of any meaningful philosophical reasoning in which we can engage. We cannot have an adequate idea of substance, person or self, causation, infinite divisibility, or God, thinks Hume, so there can be no correct argument to take us from any true assumptions we like to the conclusion that God has or fails to have any particular property, especially the property of having any particular will toward or with respect to humanity.
What we experience in the anthropology of comparative religion, Hume maintains, is a wide proliferation of equally unsupported proposals concerning the nature of God. As a matter concerning which we can have no adequate ideas, it is fruitful ground for imagination, for charismatic persuasion, institutional reinforcement of religious beliefs, and many different types and grades of force. Questions of God’s will toward human beings, for us as individuals in particular, Hume shows, cannot be answered by the resources of natural religion, any more than they can by the resources of natural philosophy or modern science.42 Where do the answers come from then instead? Religions themselves speak of individuals receiving and communicating revelations. Anthropologically speaking, someone makes them up, combining properties experienced in different things into a composite fictional being, and they are disseminated through a culture in all the usual ways, including word of mouth, printed text, propagandistic art, political and police decree, education and religious training. Different cultures respond to the need to have something to say about God’s ineffable will in different ways, and these differences are influenced even when they are not fully determined by geographical, geological, genetic, environmental, or sociological factors. We can investigate these things just as we can investigate the progression of religious ideas in different cultures from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, from stone to bronze, iron, and steel ages, in the evolution of cultures known to Hume.
The interpretation of Hume’s motives, as wanting to both have his say on natural religion and protect his reputation after death, is not obviously insupportable. Especially in the early days after completing the Dialogues, sometime between 1751 and 1755, as the chronology is usually judged, and certainly by 1771, Hume may have wanted to suppress the work for fear of repercussions while he was still seeking employment in a religiously touchy environment.43 The fact that Hume suffered discrimination on the basis of his philosophical skepticism is well-documented, and lends support to the standard explanation of his decision to write about natural religion in dialogue form. The question is whether Hume’s choosing to write in dialogue form for the one and only time in his literary career on the topic of natural religion did so in order to protect his reputation and address concerns about the potential social impact of the Dialogues. We know that when Smith saw the manuscript for the first time, it was already in dialogue form. Although Hume had previously written and subsequently destroyed a manuscript in treatise form skeptical of religion, we have no knowledge that the more recently composed content of the Dialogues was ever written in anything other than dialogue form. Nor do we know Hume’s exact reasons for destroying the early discourse on religion. Smith advises Hume against publishing the text, but with respect to a work that is already written as a series of dialogues. Thus, Hume could not have been responding to Smith’s timorous publication concerns in choosing to write in dialogue form, but either had those concerns himself prior to hearing them from Smith, or choose a dialogue format for different reasons. The suggestion that Hume might have shared Smith’s concerns we have previously refuted by the fact that Hume turns the responsibility to publish over to his homonymous nephew.
It remains that Hume must have had other motivations for electing to write on natural religion in dialogue form. Another explanation for Hume’s adopting the dialogue form is suggested by the proposal that Hume could not bear to cover the same ground again in expository discursive prose the topics of his previously discarded treatise-style manuscript. If so, then Hume’s situation parallels that of Berkeley, who writes his 1713 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous shortly after the manuscript for the unpublished Part II of Berkeley’s 1710 A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge reportedly went missing during his travels in Italy.44 This explanation makes more sense, and is strengthened by the near precedent for Hume in Berkeley’s similar experience, than the implausible suggestion that Hume writes in dialogue format in order to disguise his own religious views from a censorious public.
It seems strained to suppose that Hume would have taken out the double insurance policy of both delaying publication until after his death and writing in dialogue form in order to avoid the bad reputation that might have accompanied expressing himself too freely about some of these controversial matters. The time - line seems wrong. Hume would have had to have decided on the dialogue format from the very beginning as his first wave of protection from being immediately identified with the most watery imaginable Deism, assuming as do many interpretations that Hume in the Dialogues sympathizes most strongly with Cleanthes. Then only later Hume would have had to add the further precaution of arranging to withhold publishing the Dialogues until after his death. Here the example of Hume’s essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ is instructive, because Hume had not been reluctant to publish these discussions, even though he withheld them under pressure in the end. He had been willing to go forward, and relented only after his printer demurred. If Hume thought that he could conceal his own opinions and take refuge in the frank ambiguities of author attitude afforded by writing in dialogue form, leaving everyone to guess which if any of the participants speak for him, then why deliberately postpone publication until after his own death? If he thought there was any risk of anyone suffering guilt by association, then why leave instructions to have these ideas published so immediately after his death, within two years, and by his well-regarded nephew? Why not decide instead not to publish at all, or have the manuscript sealed for publication only until after a period of time that would outlast any of his then surviving friends and the posterity of his more distant family members? What specific role would the composition of the work specifically as lengthy dialogues accomplish or add to the measures that a prudent person would otherwise have taken under these kinds of circumstances?
Besides attributing cowardice of a sort to Hume, the interpretation leaves important points unexplained. Since we have no paper trail of earlier compositions on the subject worked out in ordinary prose, no treatise or dissertation from Hume on the limitations of the argument from design for the existence of God or of natural religion generally in proving God’s nature or attributes, we must assume that Hume envisioned his writing on the topic to require or at least to lend itself to dialogue form right from the start. Hume dies in 1776, but we know that he was engaged in writing the The Natural History of Religion at the same time he was writing the Dialogues, and that he finished the Dialogues, roughly as we have the book today, in the period between 1751-1755. Hume publishes the Natural History, but deliberately delays the Dialogues. He may have rightly supposed that the Natural History would not be as inflammatory as the Dialogues. In any case, from these several facts we can reasonably piece together the conclusion that Hume was working on the Dialogues as dialogues for at least twenty years before his death. His previous writings, excluding his massive multi-volume work on The History of England, and anyway his contributions to philosophy, were not particularly well-received during his lifetime, and we might just as easily infer that Hume wanted to avoid the embarrassment of punishing reviews and journalistic rebuke or even condemnation from the pulpits around Great Britain and especially in his native largely Calvinist Scotland. If so, however, why would he have risked publishing anything controversial whatsoever on the philosophy of religion?45
The explanation does not ring true. We must recall that already in the Treatise in 1739, Hume had chosen as the epigram for the book a quotation from the Roman senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, in his Historiae I.1, ‘Rara temporum felicitas, ubi fentire, que velis; & que fentias, dicere licit’.46 The Latin extols ‘The rare good fortune of an age in which we may feel what we wish, and say what we feel’. Hume may have changed his mind about the temper of his day between the glowing youth of the Treatise and the sober experienced judgment of the Dialogues concerning the public reception of his uncompromising empiricism. However, if he did still believe that he could think and say respectfully whatever he wanted about any topic, then the explanation of his both adopting a dialogue format for his open-minded critique of natural religion and argument from design needs to account for the significant weather change in his outlook in something more concrete than generalities about the cautions of mature reflection.
There must be something else to say. There must be another, better account of why Hume chose the dialogue form right from the outset over several decades of writing and rewriting the Dialogues. If it was not to avoid defamation or to spare his friends and family embarrassment, then perhaps the answer is that Hume understood dialogues as singularly appropriate for the expression of precisely the arguments he considered most essential to appreciating the scope and limits and difficulties of attaining to any certainty concerning the propositions of natural religion.
4. Pamphilus as Hume’s Ostensible Fictional Persona
With this historical and philosophical background in place, we are at last in a sound position to assess Pamphilus’s explanation of why Hume’s book is written as dialogues. If it is correct to identify Hume with Pamphilus, as the character Hume officially presents himself as being in the Dialogues, then, Hume’s famous irony notwithstanding, we may suppose that Pamphilus in attempting to justify the dialogue format of the text, is speaking for Hume and giving reasons that Hume accepts, on which his writing about natural religion and the argument from design for the existence of God is predicated.
The best internal evidence we have for Hume’s intentions in choosing a dialogue form are Pamphilus’s opening remarks to Hermippus. There we are provided with several pages of explanation as to why dialogues in particular were deemed appropriate for Hume’s subject. Although Pamphilus and Hermippus are just as fictional as Philo, Cleanthes and Demea, Pamphilus, who does not take part in the discussion, is supposed to be an eye-witness reporter to Hermippus of the dialogues that took place between the three principals, and he porticos the Dialogues with a detailed explanation as to why the dialogue form is appropriate in particular for the topic of natural religion. Pamphilus after this preamble disappears from the group, until he is casually mentioned by Philo as an aside near the end of the dialogues’ penultimate paragraph.47
There is, on reflection, something strange about Pamphilus in his role as gate-keeper to the Dialogues. Pamphilus remarks on the challenges of writing in dialogue form, and the rarity of its success. Since the genre itself poses difficulties for the philosophical writer, it is natural to wonder why it is chosen in the present instance. However, Pamphilus is not supposed to be describing the written composition of philosophical ideas in dialogue form, but a real dialogue between three speakers that actually took place. It would not make sense to justify the choice of dialogue form to express what are supposed to be dialogues. Pamphilus plays a double role, the point of which may be to indicate right from the start that the reader of Hume’s Dialogues is entering into a purely fictional discussion of philosophical ideas, none of which are necessarily accepted by any living person. It is the unspoken equivalent of the explicit disclaimer one finds at the beginning of novels and at the cinema, largely for legal and insurance purposes, that any resemblance of the characters to real persons is unintended and coincidental. Pamphilus prepares the reader to consider the problem:
It has been remarked, my Hermippus, that, though the ancient philosophers conveyed most of their instruction in the form of dialogue, this method of composition has been little practiced in later ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those who have attempted it.48
Expository writing in the form of a discursive treatise or dissertation lends itself more readily to the presentation and critical evaluation of arguments, which, Pamphilus observes, in contrast with ‘the ancient philosophers’ who often wrote dialogues, is ‘now expected’:
Accurate and regular argument, indeed, such as is now expected of philosophical inquirers, naturally throws a man into the methodical and didactic manner; where he can immediately, without preparation, explain the point at which he aims; and thence proceed, without interruption, to deduce the proofs, on which it is established.49
Reasonably enough, Pamphilus remarks that if the point of a given exercise in philosophy is to present a systematic theory of philosophical ideas, then the dialogue form seems hardly appropriate. From this we may accordingly conclude that Hume in the Dialogues does not have a system of conclusions to propose, and is not in the position of someone who can present himself as having mastered the topics contained in the book, to the point where he can instruct the reader in the discoveries of an inquiry in roughly the same manner as a teacher to a student. This Pamphilus denies:
To deliver a system in conversation scarcely appears natural; and while the dialogue-writer desires, by departing from the direct style of composition, to give a freer air to his performance, and avoid the appearance of author and reader, he is apt to run into a worse inconvenience, and convey the image of pedagogue and pupil.50
Such is the first horn of a dilemma that to Pamphilus argues even more strongly against the advisability of writing philosophical dialogues under normal circumstances and with respect to ordinary philosophical topics. Quite possibly Hume has in mind Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae (The Consolations of Philosophy), Anselm of Canterbury’s dialogues De Veritate (On Truth), De Libertate Arbitrii (On Freedom of Choice), and De Casu Diaboli (On the Devil’s Fall from Grace), where the two participants in all three dialogues are explicitly ‘the Teacher’ and ‘the Student’, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, or even Berkeley’s relatively recent Three Dialogues, where Philonous has the better of Hylas consistently throughout.51 To avoid such infelicities and ruin the dramatic illusion of a genuine dialectic between real thinkers, Pamphilus believes, when the dialogue writer in fact has a philosophical system of ideas to present, requires more stage setting, dissembling of an author’s genuinely held positions, and interchange between characters, than the propositions to be finally defended may generally justify. If the purpose is to spell out a philosophical doctrine, then the trappings of conversation in dialogue format with those objectives in mind simply does not seem to be worth the effort on the author’s part, nor the reader’s patience in wading through all the ins and outs of discussion. The average audience might better appreciate a non-theatrical communication of the essential propositions, definitions of concepts, and articulation of propositions by means of more conventional arguments in the treatise-style of philosophical prose. Pamphilus continues:
Or if he carries on the dispute in the natural spirit of good company, by throwing in a variety of topics, and preserving a proper balance among the speakers; he often loses so much time in preparations and transitions, that the reader will scarcely think himself compensated, by all the graces of dialogue, for the orders, brevity, and precision, which are sacrificed to them.52
Having explained the difficulties and reasons why one might choose not to adopt a dialogue format for expressing philosophical ideas, Pamphilus now makes a concerted plea for exceptions to the rule. There are special cases in which the dialogue form comes into its own and is ‘peculiarly adapted’ to the subject, for the sake of which, despite the pitfalls of dialogue-writing, philosophical dialogue alone is strongly recommended:
There are some subjects, however, to which dialogue-writing is peculiarly adapted, and where it is still preferable to the direct and simple method of composition.53
The exceptions against the dialogue format in philosophy are now catalogued by Pamphilus. Having spelled these out, he then declares that the subject of natural religion in particular lends itself to exploration in dialogue form, justifying the dispute he reports as supposedly having taken place between Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea. The first point Pamphilus mentions as favoring dialogue in a philosophical treatment of natural religion is when a conclusion is both so obvious and important that it bears repeated emphasis. Since it is so obvious, we risk boring a reader by stating what any reasonable person already knows and understands. If it is sufficiently important, however, then a responsible philosophical investigation cannot afford to leave it unsaid. The charm of the dialogue format, as we enter into the interactions with characters entertaining a lively discussion, is that it permits repeatedly expounding vital truths without simply reiterating the same proposition in the discursive form of a treatise to which philosophy may otherwise seem to be limited.
Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious, that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important, that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate the triteness of the subject, where the vivacity of conversation may enforce the precept, and where the variety of lights, presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant.54
From what is obvious but important Pamphilus turns next to what is just the opposite, the obscure and uncertain. These points of philosophical criticism also call for and are best served by the dialogue format. They require a variety of ideas in opposition, stemming from distinct philosophical perspectives. For authors who not have arrived at any definitely settled opinion in the matter, but find it worthwhile to have the controversies themselves articulated as different points of view, the dialogue form is especially recommended. In a dramatized discussion of ideas, contradiction criticism and counter-criticism all have their place, and where together they can play a key role in enabling a reader to appreciate the depths of argument available to several different sides of an open-ended philosophical dispute. Pamphilus now adds:
Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation. Reasonable men may be allowed to differ, where no one can reasonably be positive…55
Anything too obvious but still important, according to Pamphilus, or too obscure and uncertain, where even the author may not know exactly what philosophically should be concluded, may find its optimal expression in philosophical dialogues. This is precisely what Pamphilus concludes concerning the topics of natural religion, as the subject matter of the dialogues his remarks to Hermippus are offered by way of general introduction. The obvious but important truth for dialogue treatment is the existence of God, as contrasted most sharply in the next paragraph with the question of God’s nature or attributes, the qualities and relations God possesses or in which God participates. First, Pamphilus includes natural religion as belonging to the legitimate expressive form of philosophical dialogue by virtue of the obvious but important truth of God’s existence:
Happily, these circumstances are all to be found in the subject of natural religion. What truth so obvious, so certain, as the being of a God, which the most ignorant ages have acknowledged, for which the most refined geniuses have ambitiously striven to produce new proofs and arguments? What truth so important as this, which is the ground of all our hopes, the surest foundation of morality, the firmest support of society, and the only principle which ought never to be a moment absent from our thoughts and meditations?56
Next we are informed that, however obvious and important God’s existence may be as justification for the ‘novelty’ of its emphasis in a dialogue format between different speakers of different philosophical ideologies and methodological orientations, the attributes of God, God’s nature or character, whatever might be said substantively concerning God’s properties beyond the proposition that God exists, satisfies the second category of aptness for inclusion in philosophical dialogue, not by virtue of being obvious, but because of its obscurity and uncertainty. If we cannot know exactly what to say about God’s nature, then there may be no better philosophical recourse than to consider a variety of different opinions in the field, to let the differences in rational judgment be held forth, critically examined, and, where it appears that no final or definitive conclusions are to be drawn, perhaps to let the discussion end honestly as it must in a recounting of the best solutions philosophy can offer, even if they end only in a justified stalemate of irresolution. As Pamphilus maintains:
But in treating of this obvious and important truth; what obscure questions occur, concerning the nature of that divine Being; his attributes, his decrees, his plan of providence? These have always been subjected to the disputations of men: Concerning these, human reason has not reached any certain determination: But these are topics so interesting, that we cannot restrain our restless inquiry with regard to them; though nothing but doubt, uncertainty, and contradiction, have, as yet, been the result of our most accurate researches.57
If we take Pamphilus’s pronouncements literally and at face value, then, anticipating the contents of Hume’s Dialogues, their direction and the endpoint reached by the three main participants, it seems unmistakable that the Dialogues, as we have proposed, amount to a defense of Deism. It is the philosophical position that God’s existence can be known to at least a certain reasonable degree of probability via the argument from design, on the experiential grounds of natural religion, as Voltaire among other leading thinkers of the Enlightenment also held, but that nothing specific about God’s nature can be justified on the basis of reasoning based on the only available empirical evidence.58
To suppose otherwise is to engage in speculative metaphysics of precisely the sort that Hume from the outset of his philosophical career is everywhere at pains to denounce. He does the same also and for the same general reasons in the theologically less sensitive case of mind-independent substance, the person or self as a unified substantial entity, the infinite divisibility of extension, and the true nature of causation and causal connection. If, on the other hand, Pamphilus no more speaks for Hume than do any of the other specific characters in the Dialogues, then we have no basis for inferring that Hume intends the Dialogues as a defense of Deism that deliberately results, as under the circumstances it must, in a standoff between opposed opinions as to the nature as distinct from the existence of God.
5. Epilogue
When we set aside the finally insupportable suggestion that Hume writes about natural religion in dialogue form because he dreads the consequences of appearing in print as an unequivocal champion of Deism or even atheism in his day, then we are left with what appears to be the correct answer to the riddle as to why Hume chooses to write on the topic of natural religion, to examine its arguments, in dialogue form. If Hume does not do so in order to avoid censure or protect his reputation, the remaining choice would seem to be, as Pamphilus plainly states, that he chooses to write in dialogue form because he cannot do otherwise, because the questions at issue themselves must end philosophically in indecision as to any proposition concerning the nature, properties, qualities and relations of God, and in particular with respect to what God may or may not will concerning the human beings that God probably created. If Hume is right, then philosophy of religion can never advance beyond the impasse of discussion to which Philo, Demea and Cleanthes are reduced, beyond which point they cannot advance by means of philosophical reasoning and argument. It is to make this point as unmistakably clear and evident as possible, by showing what happens when all the arguments are set upon the table by energetic thinkers, and subjected to close philosophical scrutiny, that Hume chooses dialogues to present his thoughts about the inconclusive prospects by which natural religion beginning with the argument from design is circumscribed and to which it is ultimately limited.59
NOTES
1All references are to the thirteenth printing of Norman Kemp Smith’s 1947 edition of Hume 1979.
2Kemp Smith, in his introduction to Hume 1979 speaks for many commentators, when he explains, p. 43: ‘…it is in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that the problem of expressing his mind freely, while yet not too greatly violating the established code, meets Hume in its most difficult form. For in the Dialogues he is doing precisely what was above all else forbidden, namely, to make a direct attack upon the whole theistic position.’ Kemp Smith represents a reasonable and, as it happens, majority view in Hume scholarship concerning Hume’s reasons for writing dialogues. There are competing explanations as to why Hume writes in dialogue form, but it is not my purpose to enter into polemics with alternative accounts. Briefly to consider just one example, Hurlbutt’s explanation of Hume’s motivations as literary, artistic or aesthetic in Hurlbutt 1963, especially pp. 213-243, ‘The Dialogues as a Work of Art’, seems correct or anyway reasonable, as far as it goes. Hume undoubtedly has literary as well as philosophical ambitions in all of his writing, and especially in the Dialogues, which unfold as a kind of philosophical drama for a theatre of ideas. The aesthetic explanation, nevertheless, cannot be the complete or final answer to the question as to why Hume writes in dialogue form, because it does not consider Hume’s more primary ostensible motivation, in the fact that the methodological constraints of his ‘moral philosophy’ do not permit decisive answers one way or the other concerning matters of religious belief. Natural religion involves a choice of topics that falls outside the competence of philosophical inquiry. We can reach any firm consensus, but, like the characters in Hume’s Dialogues, remain of many opinions concerning the possibility of knowing God’s attributes.
3See Mossner 1936. For criticism and an opposing interpretation of who if anyone speaks for Hume in the Dialogues, compare Morrisroe, Jr. 1969.
4Mossner 1980, pp. 592-603.
5The provision for his nephew David Hume to have charge of publishing the Dialogues was made in a codicil to his will dated 7 August 1776. Mossner, p. 592, refers to the archives of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ix, 24.
6Pamphilus states, Hume 1979, pp. 128-129: ‘My youth rendered me a mere auditor of their disputes; and that curiosity, natural to the early season of life, has so deeply imprinted in my memory the whole chain and connection of their arguments, that, I hope, I shall not omit or confound any considerable part of them in the recital.’
7Hume, Letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1751, in Hume 1932, Volume I, p. 154: ‘Any Propensity you imagine I have to the other Side [Philo’s skepticism in the Dialogues] crept in upon me against my will: And tis not long ago that I burn’d an old Manuscript Book, write before I was twenty which contained, Page after Page, the gradual Progress of my Thoughts on that head. It begun with an anxious Search after Arguments, to confirm the common Opinion: Doubts stole in, dissipated, return’d, were again dissipated, return’d again; and it was a perpetual Struggle of a restless Imagination against Inclination, perhaps against Reason’.
8Mossner 1980, p. 592: ‘The Dialogues were Hume’s pride, as he admitted to William Strahan: “Some of my Friends flatter me, that it is the best thing I ever wrote. I have hitherto forborne to publish it, because I was of late desirous to live quietly, and keep remote from all clamour.”’ Mossner, ibid., pp. 319-320, also cites the relevant correspondence to prove that it was the combined forces of the Reverend Hugh Blair and Sir Gilbert Elliot that persuaded Hume not to publish the Dialogues during his lifetime.
9 Cicero 1933.
10Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous [1713; 1725; 1734]. Third edition [1734] in Berkeley 1948-1957, Volume 2. See Smiley 1995. An alternative viewpoint to the usual picture of Socrates brow-beating his philosophical discussants is given by Beversluis 2004.
11Hume 1978, especially Book I, Part II, Section VI and Part IV, Section II.
12Hume’s Dialogues were judged sufficiently subversive of religion to warrant a republication with a refutation under the same cover, by Balguy 1782.
13Newton 1972.
14Hume 1978, p. xi.
15Newton, 1972, Scholium Generale, 530. Volume II, p. 764: ‘Rationem vero harum gravitates proprietatum ex phaenomenis nondum potui deducere, & hypotheses non fingo.’
16The classic sources are Hempel 1945, Popper 1965 and Popper 1968.
17Newton 1999), Volume I, p. 943. It is anomalous for Cohen and Whitman to translate Newton’s ‘fingo’ for ‘I make’ or ‘I fabricate’ as ‘I feign’. This is a legitimate but seldom used equivalent, where to speak of feigning a Latin speaker could more naturally choose to adfecto, affecto, ementior, mentior, or assimilio. The word conveys Newton’s apparent intended meaning rather exactly if ‘I feign’ is expanded as ‘I pretend to make’ or ‘I pretend to fabricate’ no hypotheses.
18Hume 1978, especially Book I, Part III, Section III, pp. 78-82. Among an extensive secondary philosophical literature, see especially Beauchamp and Rosenberg 1981, and Eells 1991. Strawson 1992. Blackburn 2001. Millican 2009. The view of necessary causation as developed by G.W. Leibniz and others is typified also by the French humanist physician, Johannes Fernelius, in his massive 1548 discourse, De abditus rerum causis. See Fernel 2005.
19Hume 1978, Book I, Part III, Section II, pp. 73-78.
20Kant, ‘Preface’ to 2004, pp. 4, 7: ‘[N]o event has occurred that could have been more decisive for the fate of this science [metaphysics] than the attack made upon it by David Hume...Hume proceeded primarily from a single but important concept of metaphysics, namely, that of the connection of cause and effect’. Thereafter, Kant famously writes, p. 10: ‘I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.’
21Hume 1978, Book I, Part III, Sections II, VI and XIV-XV, pp. 73-78; 86-94; 155-176.
22Newton accepts a category of effectus emanativus or ‘emanative effect’, an emanation from God by which space and time are created as God’s sensorium, as Newton also hints in the 1730 version of his Opticks, that Hume would find highly problematic. See Newton 2004, pp. 21-26.
23Hume’s Fork is a dilemma concerning the possible origin of ideas, based on Leibniz’s exclusive distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact. See Flew 1961, pp. 53-55; Flew 1987, pp. 43-48.
24Hume 1978 writes, in ‘An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, entitled A Treatise of Human Nature &c.’ [1740], §35: ‘It will be easy to conceive of what vast consequence these principles must be in the science of human nature, if we consider that, so far as regards the mind, these are the only links that bind the parts of the universe together, or connect us with any person or object exterior to ourselves. For as it is by means of thought only that anything operates upon our passions, and as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.’ The idea undoubtedly originates with Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. See also Janiak 2007.
25Kant 1965, A19-B73 on the Transcendental Aesthetic; and on thing-in-itself, B67-68 and passim.
26Hume 1978 Book I, Part II, Section VI, ‘Of the idea of existence, and of external existence’, p. 67: ‘[N]o object can be presented resembling some object with respect to its existence, and different from others in the same particular; since every object, that is presented, must necessarily be existent. A like reasoning will account for the idea of external existence. We may observe, that ’tis universally allow’d by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.’ Later, in Part IV, Section II, ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses’, Hume concludes: ‘We may well ask,” he writes, “What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but ’tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings’. An excellent source on the topic is Wilson 2008. See also Wright 1983.
27Jacquette 2001.
28For a detailed bibliography of Hume’s objections to infinite divisibility, see previous note supra 23. On Berkeley’s criticism of infinity, infinite divisibility and infinitesimals in the calculus or mathematical analysis, Jesseph 1993.
29Hume’s skepticism concerning speculative metaphysics is especially well-developed by Norton 1982.
30Paley 1802 is perhaps the best known, but by no means the only exponent of the argument from design in eighteenth century philosophy of religion, though his representative study post-dates Hume.
31Hume 1956.
32See Parker 2003. Fosl, 1999. Note that for Hume ideas can also originate with impressions of reflection, but that the mind can only reflect on ideas that have an ultimately perceptual experiential derivation.
33Hume 1975, First Enquiry, Section X, ‘Of Miracles’, pp. 109-131. Also Section XI, ‘Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State’, pp. 132-148.
34Hume’s original manuscript for Five Dissertations was actually printed and ready for distribution in 1756. It circulated in advance among a number of readers, when influential jurists the Attorney General William Murray, Lord Chancellor, Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, and Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London, threatened to prosecute Hume’s publishers and printers William Strahan and Andrew Millar, if released with its offending contents. It was then that Hume and Strahan agreed to alter the essays and title, eliminating ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, and replacing them with ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Reduced from Five to Four Dissertations, the modified collection was published in 1757. See Mossner 1980, Chapter 24, ‘Four Dissertations’, pp. 319-335.
35A comprehensive account of the suppression of Hume’s essay ‘Of Suicide’ is given by Mossner 1950.
36Note supra 5.
37Hume dies 25 August 1776, and Smith 17 July 1790. Ross 2010.
38See Stanley 2006.
39Ibid., p. 19: ‘Hume also proposed in his letter of 3 May 1776 to Smith that neither Smith himself nor Strahan could object to anything in My Own Life, that it was ‘inoffensive’, and so should be published without delay. This is contra it being seen as ‘objectionable’ in the way the Dialogues might be, though Hume does his best to persuade Smith and Strahan in his letters to them that the Dialogues would not occasion any great negative reactions (and in the event, Hume was correct).’ Exceptions shortly after publication of Dialogues include Hayter 1992, and Milner 1990. See Mossner 1977.
40Hume 1979, especially Parts IX-X, pp. 188-202. See Gaskin 1978, pp. 22-40. Jacquette 1985.
41Hume 1975, First Enquiry, Section XII, p. 165.
42See Tweyman 1986. Mounce 1999.
43Mossner 1980, pp. 150-165.
44Berkeley, Letter to Samuel Johnson, 25 November 1729, Philosophical Correspondence Between Berkeley and Samuel Johnson 1729-30, in Berkeley 1948-1957, Volume 2, §5, p. 281: ‘As to the Second Part of my treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, the fact is that I had made a considerable progress in it; but the manuscript was lost about fourteen years ago, during my travels in Italy, and I never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject.’
45We know that Hume sought a position as Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1745, and that he was denied because of an unflattering report of his ‘character’. Hume may have thought it the better part of wisdom and discretion thereafter not to provide his academic enemies with even more ammunition than they believed themselves already to possess against his qualifications, as he sought to make his way in the world. An extensive discussion of the writing and publication history of Hume’s Dialogues to supplement Mossner 1980 is found in Kemp Smith’s ‘Introduction’ to Hume 1979, Appendix C, pp. 87-96. See especially Hume 1932, correspondence between Hume, Smith, Strahan, and Hume’s nephew. Hume 1978, Book II, Part III, Section II, p. 409: ‘There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than in philosophical debates to endeavour to refute any hypothesis by a pretext of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.’
46Hume 1978, p. ix.
47Hume 1979, p. 228. Philo says: ‘To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian; a proposition which I would willingly recommend to the attention of Pamphilus: And I hope Cleanthes will forgive me for interposing so far in the education and instruction of his pupil’.
48Ibid., p. 127.
49Ibid.
50Ibid.
51Boethius 1962. Anselm 1967. Galileo 2001. The example of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues may have been foremost in Hume’s mind, or possibly Plato’s, when Pamphilus remarks on the defects of philosophical dialogues in which one character dominates the opinions and arguments of all other participants.
52Hume 1979, p. 127.
53Ibid.
54Ibid.
55Ibid., p. 128.
56Ibid.
57Ibid.
58Voltaire 1962. See the entry, ATHEE, ATHEISME — ATHEIST, ATHEISM, where one detects no irony or sarcasm in Voltaire’s apparently decisive remarks, p. 104: ‘What conclusion shall we draw from all this? That atheism is a most monstrous evil in those who govern; that it is the same in councilors, even though their lives be innocent, since they may influence men who hold office; that even though it is less disastrous than fanaticism, it is almost always fatal to virtue. Above all, let us add that there are fewer atheists today than ever, since philosophers have recognized that there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design, etc., and that pure grain does not come from rottenness.’ Later, on the same page, Voltaire writes, ibid.: ‘Unphilosophical geometers have rejected final causes, but true philosophers accept them; and, as a well-known author has said, a catechist announces God to children, and Newton demonstrates him to the wise.’
59I am grateful to Jason Wakefield for useful bibliographic suggestions made in response to a previous version of this essay.
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