DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE OR QUOTE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

DAVID HUME: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

JAMES A. HARRIS

CHAPTER 1

(From leaving college (1725) to the publication of Books One and Two of the Treat i s e (1739))

1.1.1.1 In the spring of 1725, at around the time he turned 14, David Hume ceased his studies at the College of Edinburgh and returned home to live with his mother, elder brother, and younger sister.1 He was to spend the next nine years living with them, making regular visits to Edinburgh and occasional journeys elsewhere in lowland Scotland, but resident most of the time at the family home of Ninewells in the village of Chirnside, nine miles or so west from the border town of Berwick on Tweed. The family was neither very rich nor very poor, and the house was neither very large nor very small. Ninewells probably had a modest library containing mostly devotional works, college texts, and agricultural handbooks. When he writes in letters of time spent there Hume invariably mentions his solitude, meaning, presumably, that there was no one in the vicinity with whom he could discuss matters literary and philosophical. His brother John also went to university at Edinburgh, and Hume would write some of his longest and most descriptive letters to him, but there appears to have been no intellectual affinity between them. Life at Ninewells would have been largely taken up with the business of running a farm and socializing with the neighbours. Somehow, though, in these circumstances Hume acquired an extraordinary literary self-confidence, sufficient to motivate him to move to France and to live there in complete isolation from family and friends while writing a book that he imagined would cause a revolution amongst the philosophers of his day. It caused no such revolution, but it is today a staple part of university courses in philosophy in the Anglophone world, and generates every year a large number of academic research papers and books. No fully satisfactory explanation of the origins of this book can be given. We know far too little about what Hume was reading, let alone about what he was thinking. But with the little documentary evidence that survives, in the form of letters and other manuscript material, it is possible to construct a narrative that goes some way, at least, towards making it how conceivable how a young man from the Scottish border country might have come to produce a book such as A Treatise of Human Nature. That is what this chapter aims to do.

1.1.2.1 In a letter he wrote in 1734 to an anonymous physician, a letter to which we will return frequently, Hume remarks in passing that ‘our College Education in Scotland’ consists in little more than ‘the Languages’.2 This is puzzling, for while it is true that the first year Hume spent as a student at the Arts Faculty of the University of Edinburgh, the academic session of 1721-22, would have been devoted to Latin language and literature (including history), and that the second year would have been spent learning Greek, the third and fourth years would have been given over to, respectively, logic and

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metaphysics, and natural philosophy. It might be that Hume was seeking to impress his correspondent with a casual urbanity and disdain for his provincial origins. It might be that Hume was, in general, sceptical of the value of a university education. In a letter written from France about a year later he says that ‘there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books’.3 As we shall see, there is some reason to think that at the time he wrote to the physician, he was emerging from being under the influence of the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury was hostile to most of what went by the name of university education. But it might also be that Hume really had left the University of Edinburgh feeling that the ability to read Latin and Greek, and probably also French, was the only useful thing that he had learned there.4 Of course, what he was taught may have made more of a mark than he realised, but there is no good reason to think that the teaching he received in either logic and metaphysics or natural philosophy engendered interests that he was inclined to pursue once he stopped being a student.

1.1.2.2 Certainly Hume is unlikely to have been much inspired by the logic and metaphysics teaching of Colin Drummond. Drummond seems to have kept exposition of the forms of the syllogism at the heart of his lecture course. Descartes and Locke had proposed the replacement of syllogistic formal logic with models of reasoning grounded in the way people actually reason when they are engaged in the business of replacing ignorance and falsity with knowledge, but Drummond’s pupils were given no sense of the excitement and significance of this revolution in philosophy. The one modern text that he taught from, the Logica of the Arminian Jean le Clerc, was probably used as an example of fashionable error.5 The teaching of logic was standardly done using examples of reasoning taken from theology, and Le Clerc had had the temerity to insert into his textbook an argument showing the incompatibility of predestination and divine justice, something that the pious Drummond would have found reprehensible.6 Notes taken by Drummond’s students make it plain that religious concerns were central to his understanding of his subject. The science of logic as Drummond taught it was primarily an analysis of the rather limited means by which human beings might improve their understanding of God and of their duties to Him. The emphasis was constantly upon the difference between ‘supernatural gifts’, ‘the light of revelation delineated on the sacred page, and the inward aid of divine grace’, and mere ‘natural gifts’, ‘the powers and faculties that humans are born with’. Faced with the general imperfection and blindness of fallen humanity, the professor of logic’s task was to instil in his students means of countering as much as possible natural tendencies toward error. The metaphysics Drummond taught was likewise conservative and orientated towards theology. The textbook he used was by a Dutch opponent of Cartesianism, Gerard de Vries.7 De Vries was best known for his attack on Descartes’s the supposition that human beings might have a ‘clear and distinct’ idea of God, and for a wholesale rejection of the innate ideas that Cartesians held were impressed on the mind by its creator. His assertion of inability of reason to bridge the gap between man and knowledge of God’s nature would have made him acceptable in Calvinist Scotland. De Vries based his positive metaphysics on Aristotle, and so it may be presumed that Drummond’s class was inculcated with the language of ‘substance, and substantial forms, and accidents, and occult qualities’ that Hume would ridicule in Book One of the Treatise.8 Hume’s own understanding of logic, moreover, would be thoroughly Cartesian and Lockean. Drummond gave Hume an edifice to destroy, not a path to follow.9

1.1.2.3 It can be presumed that Hume felt differently about what he encountered in the natural philosophy lectures of Robert Steuart. Although he was innovative enough to back his teaching up with experimental demonstrations, Steuart himself seems to have

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been an uninspiring lecturer.10 In his classroom, though, Hume would have been introduced to the achievements and method of Isaac Newton, by way of the textbooks of early Newtonians such as John Keill and David Gregory; and the rhetoric of Newtonianism, if not much of the actual substance of the Principia and Opticks, is a marked feature of all of Hume’s writings on human nature.11 Probably even more significant than Steuart’s lectures as far as Hume’s intellectual development was concerned was a class library that Steuart set up for his students in 1724, the very year when he was teaching Hume. An early catalogue of The Physiological Library survives, and the name ‘David Hume’ is on the list of those who contributed money for the purchasing of books.12 The core of the Library was an almost complete collection of the works of Robert Boyle: together these constitute over a tenth of the 400 or so books that made up the Library when it was first established. Natural philosophy (mechanical, experimental, and mathematical) was the Library’s major concern, but there were also substantial holdings in natural history, mathematics, and religion (natural and revealed). Books both ancient and modern were purchased: Lucretius and Seneca feature in the natural philosophy section, for instance. And there was room for a certain amount of metaphysics and epistemology in addition to hard science: Descartes’s Meditationes and Principia were bought, and also Locke’s Essay and Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité. Controversial figures such as Hobbes and Gassendi were not neglected, though Hobbes was represented by De Corpore alone. None of his political works were purchased, and nor was anything by Spinoza. It is perfectly possible that Hume continued to pay a subscription, and so retained borrowing privileges, even after completing his studies under Steuart, but no record survives of what in particular he, or anyone else, took out, and so there is no basis for speculation as to what in the Library Hume might have found useful as he read and planned in the years after he left college. What we can say, though, is that Hume certainly had every opportunity to educate himself comprehensively in the new culture of experimental science – and that he was thus more qualified than might at first appear when he became one of the Secretaries of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in 1751.

1.1.2.4 Attached to the Arts Faculty there were also professors of mathematics, history, and moral philosophy. There is no evidence that Hume took either history with Charles Mackie or moral philosophy with William Law. In view of the elevated place that moral philosophy later came to occupy in the arts syllabuses of the Scottish universities, Hume’s neglect of it as a student seem surprising, but it should be born in mind that at this time very few students were graduating from Edinburgh with any kind of arts degree. In 1738 it was reported in the minutes of the College’s Senatus Academicus as something of a novelty that ‘some Students of Philosophy’ – five in total – ‘were willing to print and defend Theses publicly in order to their receiving the degree of M.A.’.13 A student who did not intend to graduate did not need to be examined at the end of his course of study, and without final examinations there was no need for a syllabus to be imposed. It was therefore up to each student to decide what he spent his time on. There is some evidence that Hume studied mathematics with an extramural lecturer named George Campbell. A transcription in Hume’s handwriting survives of a short textbook on the theory of fluxions, Newton’s term for what we now call differential calculus. The transcription is dated 1726, which might suggest that Hume took a class of mathematics after he had finished the standard four-year course of study. It might just as well suggest, however, that Hume made the transcription a year or two after he took Campbell’s course, for a reason that can only be guessed at. Regardless of its purpose, the transcription shows that the sceptical examination of demonstrative reasoning developed in Part Four of Book One of the Treatise has some kind of connection with proficiency in a fairly advanced form of mathematics.14

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1.1.3.1 To the anonymous physician Hume wrote that in the years after college he gave himself over ‘almost equally to Books of Reasoning & Philosophy, & to Poetry & the Polite Authors’.15 There is no sign that, even if Hume had been impressed by modern natural philosophy in his final year, his interest was sufficient, for example, to prompt him to perform his own experiments. ‘My Own Life’ tells us that at a distance of fifty years it appeared to Hume that the main thing he acquired at college was ‘a passion for Literature’ that was to be the ‘the ruling Passion of my life, and the great Source of my Enjoyments’.16 It is likely that Hume had a hard time of it persuading his mother, the widow of a gentleman farmer, or his uncle, a minister of the Church, that ‘literature’ might provide him with a means of supporting himself in life. He was a younger son, and, so it would naturally be thought, he would need to acquire a profession if he was to live independently and be able at some point to marry and have a family of his own. ‘My studious Disposition, my Sobriety, and my Industry’, Hume says in ‘My Own Life’, ‘gave my Family a Notion that the Law was a proper Profession for me’.17 Law was indeed a fairly reliable means of making a modest fortune. Hard work was required, however, to master the skills and knowledge essential to it, and for such work Hume had no appetite at all. While his family supposed he was absorbing the lengthy compendia of Roman law which formed the basis of legal training in Scotland, he was in fact reading authors such as Cicero and Virgil. In his essay ‘Of Eloquence’, published in 1742, Hume implies that the study of law had become in modern times ‘a laborious occupation, requiring the drudgery of a whole life to finish it, and incompatible with every other study or profession’.18 This, however, is testimony to what Hume characterizes in ‘My Own Life’ as his ‘insurmountable Aversion to every thing but the Pursuits of Philosophy and general learning’ rather than an accurate account of the life at law.19 The history of eighteenth-century Scotland is replete with lawyers who managed to combine professional success with literary achievement. One of the most remarkable of these ‘philosophical lawyers’, Henry Home of nearby Kames, was to become a close friend and regular correspondent. It may be that at this point the two Homes had not yet met, but even so, the young David would surely have known that it was possible for a lawyer to aspire to more than success in his profession.20 The problem was presumably that Hume’s interest was in general learning, and not in the specialist studies of a trainee advocate.

1.1.3.2 The University of Edinburgh had Professors of both Scots Law and Civil Law. There is no evidence that he did, but Hume may have signed up for formal legal instruction at Edinburgh. The textbooks he says he neglected while secretly devouring Cicero and Virgil would very likely have been on the syllabus there. These were works by the Dutch jurists Johannes Voet and Arnoldus Vinnius. Hume does not mention what exactly it was that he was supposed to be reading, but it was probably Voet’s edition of the Pandects and Vinnius’s edition of the Institutes.21 The Pandects and the Institutes constitute two of the four elements of the compilation of civil law ordered by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D., and as such are fundamental to legal practise in jurisdictions, such as Holland and Scotland, which take their principles from Roman law. The Pandects, or Digest, comprises a comprehensive account, in fifty books, of the laws of Rome, while the Institutes was intended as a manual, in four books, for working lawyers. Vinnius’s edition of the Institutes was explicitly aimed at young students of law, and is liberally supplemented with explanatory notes. Hume would surely have been recommended to begin with Vinnius, and then to proceed to rather more demanding explication of the Pandects given by Voet. In his biography of Hume, the first written, Ritchie notes how surprising it is that in the elderly Hume’s account of his own life, ‘the Justinian code, the source of all that is valuable in the ancient polity of European nations, should be contemned, in behalf of any poetry which ever emanated from Rome’ (5). [But

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R a lawyer?] We need not, however, believe that Hume found nothing at all of use in his studies, such as they were, of Roman law. In the first pages of both Voet and Vinnius, for instance, Hume would have found the definition of justice as ‘constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi’ that he would later, in the Treatise, translate as ‘a constant and perpetual will of giving every one his due’, and that he would find unsatisfactory on account of its supposition ‘that there are such things as right and property, independent of justice, and antecedent to it’.22 Hume may have found the study of law boring, but an interest in the nature and origins of justice is a prominent characteristic of the moral philosophy of both the Treatise and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.23

1.1.3.3 In addition to its Chairs in Scots Law and Civil Law, since 1707 Edinburgh had had a Chair in Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations. The establishment of the Chair is evidence of the significance accorded in Scotland to developments in natural jurisprudence on the Continent following the publication in 1625 of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. As a matter of fact, the first appointee to the position, Charles Areskine, seems never actually to have done any teaching; and as we have noted there is no evidence anyway that Hume was ever a student of law at Edinburgh; but, even so, it is possible that at the time when he was half-heartedly reading Voet and Vinnius, he was also looking into Grotius as well.24 Some reason to believe that he would have been is provided by the fact that in a late letter to his nephew David Hume, who was training for the law at the time, Hume recommends the study of Latin and Greek literature ‘together with Voet, Vinnius, and Grotius’.25 In an account of the progress of philosophy in modern times, Dugald Stewart would claim that in Scotland the impression produced by Grotius and his successors in the science of natural law was ‘peculiarly remarkable’: ‘They were everywhere adopted as the best manuals of ethical and of political instruction that could be put into the hands of students; and gradually contributed to form that memorable school, from whence so many Philosophers and Philosophical Historians were afterwards to proceed’.26 The natural jurisprudence of Pufendorf was at this time already a central part of the moral philosophy teaching at both Glasgow and Aberdeen. Hume would surely have heard of Grotius and Pufendorf, and would equally surely have been curious about an intellectual development about which he had been told nothing while at college.27 Hume certainly read Grotius at some point. In An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Hume would claim that his theory of the origin of justice ‘is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius’, and back that claim up with a long quotation from De iure, Book Two.28

1.1.4.1 Whether or not he encountered Grotius at this time, mostly, we can be sure, Hume was reading the literature and philosophy that his years at Edinburgh had given him such a taste for. In ‘My Own Life’ he intimates that he while a student he worked harder at Latin than at Greek, and it is safe to picture Hume concentrating his energies upon the philosophy, history and poetry of classical Rome. He was reading modern literature as well, of course. There survives an edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks in which Hume signed his name with the date 1726. The first letter of Hume’s that we have, to a college friend named Michael Ramsay and dated July 4 1727, mentions a copy of Milton that Ramsay has lent him. In this letter, Hume portrays himself as spending much of his time alone, ‘confind to my self & Library for Diversion’.29 No mention is made here or in any other letter of the study of law, and it may be supposed that by this time Hume had given that up. But for what? We do know that Hume was already writing. In the letter to Ramsay he mentions ‘papers’ that Ramsay clearly already knew about, papers that he has refused to share with his friend on the grounds that ‘they were not polishd nor brought to any form’. They are, he says, merely

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disorganized and uncorrected thoughts. ‘All the progress that I made is but the drawing the Outlines, in loose bits of Paper; here a hint of a passion, there a Phenomenon in the mind account for, in another the alteration of these accounts; sometimes a remark upon an Author I have been reading. And none of them worth to any Body & I believe scarce to myself.’30 It would seem that Hume was already engaged in the study of the mind, though to what end it is impossible to tell. More revealing is the language he uses later in letter, where he declares that ‘My peace of Mind is now sufficiently confirmed by Philosophy to withstand the Blows of Fortune’, and describes himself as aspiring to attain a ‘Greatness & Elevation of Soul’ such as will enable him ‘to look down upon humane Accidents’.31 This sounds like the language of Stoicism, and when we take into account also what we will see him saying about himself in the letter to the physician, it becomes reasonable to assume that the Stoic meditations and attempts at self-discipline occupied a good deal of Hume’s time and energy in these early years. The inscription in 1726 of his name in an edition of the Characteristicks makes it at least possible that in this project he took Shaftesbury as his guide.

1.1.4.2 The Characteristicks was different things to different people. Some took it as a serious and laudable defence of true religion and genuine virtue; to others it was an offensive assault on Christianity and on the very basis of moral worth.32 It is a complex and various work, containing, amongst other things, a reasonably formal philosophical ‘inquiry’ into the nature and foundations of virtue, a wide-ranging dialogue on religion and morality the subtitle of which is ‘A Philosophical Rhapsody’, and copious amount of ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’. It is most definitely not a treatise or dissertation, presenting a unified line of argument to a clearly articulated conclusion. Shaftesbury’s concern is first and foremost with conduct, with how life is lived, and with the identification of the goals that are most worthy of pursuit by adult human beings. Not that the Characteristicks contains anything resembling a teaching or a set of precepts by which to regulate one’s actions: its author is confident that the honest and dedicated inquirer will find within himself a guide, a means of countering the influence of fashion and dogma and faction. And therefore what Shaftesbury enjoins first and foremost is the business of acquiring self-knowledge. The very purpose of philosophy, he says, is ‘to teach us our-selves, keep us the self-same Persons, and so regulate our governing Fancys, Passions, and Humours, as to make us comprehensible to our selves, and knowable by other Features than those of a bare Countenance’.33 He gives this definition of philosophy in a part of the work entitled ‘Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author’. We can picture Hume especially interested by what Shaftesbury says here. Shaftesbury’s topic is the preconditions of authorship, and the preparations that need to be made by those intent on serious writing, whether in poetry or in philosophy. In an author, self-knowledge is especially important, for only once it is acquired can an author speak as a man to men, with strength of mind, and without regard for ‘opinion and fancy’. Self-knowledge is, needless to say, not something one can be taught by someone else. Nor is it easy to acquire. Shaftesbury preaches a discipline, something not dissimilar to a religion. The highflown language Hume uses in his letter to Ramsay makes it eminently possible to imagine the young Hume signing himself up to the cause.

1.1.4.3 Shaftesbury was sceptical of the value of conventional modes of education. The university, he thought, did the very opposite of enabling men to come to know themselves. The philosophy taught there is, he says, ‘dronish, insipid, pedantick, useless, and directly opposed to the real Knowledge and Practice of the World and Mankind’.34 He contrasts modern ‘super-speculative philosophy’, obsessed with the fine distinctions of metaphysics, with that more practical sort ‘which relates chiefly to our acquaintance, friendship, and good correspondence with ourselves’.35 It is always clear

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that he thought of the philosophy of the ancients, and of the Stoics in particular, as an infinitely better guide and model than the philosophy of the moderns. Shaftesburian Stoicism embodied a resistance to the conventional and the artificial. It encouraged an inwardly directed mode of enquiry, in the form of a search for what is good in itself, irrespective of opinion and historical contingency. And the good in itself was characterized in terms of reasoned pursuit of virtue and the philosophical subjection of ‘Ideas of Pleasure, the Suggestions of Fancy, and the strong Pleadings of Appetite and Desire’.36 Someone under Shaftesbury’s influence could be expected to be a self-consciously serious reader of Stoicism, and this is just what Hume shows himself to be in his letters to Ramsay and to the physician. To the former he writes that both the philosophers and the poets that he is reading ‘agree in peace of mind, in a Liberty & Independency on Fortune, & Contempt of Riches, Power & Glory. Every thing is placid & quiet; nothing perturbed or disordered’. He congratulates himself on the acquisition ‘in great measure’ of a ‘pastoral & Saturnian happyness’, but says that he knows that mere retreat from the affairs of the world is not sufficient to withstand ‘the Blows of Fortune’: ‘This Greatness & Elevation of Soul is to be found only in Study & contemplation, this can alone teach us to look down upon humane Accidents’.37 Seven years later Hume told the physician that ‘having read many Books of Morality, such as Cicero, Seneca & Plutarch, & being smit with their beautiful Representations of Virtue & Philosophy, I undertook the Improvement of my Temper a & Will, along with my Reason & Understanding. I was continually fortifying myself with Reflections against Death, & Poverty, & Shame, & Pain, & all other Calamities of Life’.38

1.1.4.4 We have seen that Hume described himself to the physician as inclined after college ‘almost equally to Books of Reasoning & Philosophy, & to Poetry & the Polite Authors’. This makes it clear that it would be a mistake to imagine him as at this time (or indeed at any other) wholly absorbed in philosophical questions. In the letter to Ramsay he portrays himself as reading widely, ‘sometimes a Philosopher, sometimes a Poet’ -- sometimes Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, sometimes Virgil’s Eclogues or Georgics. He was very likely reading Roman history – Tacitus, Sallust, Livy – as well. In this also we might suppose him to have been to some degree under the influence of Shaftesbury. ‘A good Poet, and an honest Historian,’ Shaftesbury wrote, ‘may afford Learning enough for a Gentleman.’39 Part of Shaftesbury’s ideal was the making of oneself into a ‘virtuoso’ as opposed to what the modern age called a ‘scholar’. The virtuoso was a man of all-round learning and taste, able to talk intelligently and engagingly on every topic, and possessed of cultivated powers of judgment and discernment. Hume would have found in the Characteristicks an intentional blurring on Shaftesbury’s part of the distinction between the moral and the aesthetic, between being a man of virtue and being a man of taste. The ideal was a high refinement of sensibility in general, and the development of a feeling for the inherent beauty of perfection of character. To this end, the faculty of taste needed to be exercised just as much as did reason and conscience, and extensive reading in ‘Poetry & the Polite Authors’ was one way in which such exercise could be done. There is much in the Characteristicks concerning the value of music and painting too, but throughout his life Hume seems to have been peculiarly indifferent to all non-literary forms of artistic expression.40

1.1.4.5 At the very end of the letter to Michael Ramsay that we have to rely upon for almost all of our knowledge of Hume’s intellectual activities after leaving college, Hume writes excitedly and hurriedly about a copy of Longinus that he has just acquired: ‘I think he does really answer the Character of being the great Sublime he describes, he delivers his precepts w[ith] such force as if he were enchanted w[ith] the Subject; And is himself an Author that may be cited for an Example to his own Rules by any who shall

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be so adventurous as to write upon his Subject’.41 Shaftesbury had written that ‘there can be no kind of Writing which relates to Men and Manners, where it is not necessary for the Author to understand Poetical and Moral TRUTH, the Beauty of Sentiments, the Sublime of Characters’.42 It is just possible, though, that in his enthusiasm for ‘Longinus’ Hume betrays the influence of another immensely significant figure in the literary culture of the age, Joseph Addison, whose essays on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ in The Spectator had given a prominent place to pleasure arising from the mixing of ‘Horrour or Loathsomeness’ with ‘Greatness, Novelty or Beauty’.43 It is true that it was of the essence of Shaftesburianism to set manners and society, the worldly concerns of The Spectator, against the more profound business of the cultivation of an enduring inner self; but everyone read, and re-read, The Spectator, and it is barely conceivable that Hume was an exception. A time would come when Hume intended to establish a journal himself that would combine the wit and charm of Addison and Steele with the political seriousness of some of the other journals of the period. Mentions made of Addison in Hume’s published writings show that Hume was entirely representative of his age in a deep admiration for Addison’s literary style. In one of his essays Hume quotes and endorses Addison’s definition of fine writing as consisting of ‘sentiments, which are natural, without being obvious’.44 A passage from the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, portrays Addison as, like Cicero and La Bruyere, a ‘philosopher’ of the kind ‘who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours’.45 Hume was himself seldom given in his writings to the mere representation of common sense of mankind, but even so it is safe to imagine him as a young man learning from Addison (and others, no doubt) how to write a polite English. His university instruction, after all, had been in Latin; and his native tongue was the Scots of Berwickshire.

1.1.4.6 Whatever writing he did at this time was possibly modelled along lines laid out by Shaftesbury in the ‘Soliloquy’, intended not for any kind of publication but rather as part of the self-formation necessary in a prospective man of letters. Hume would have been looking for a voice, a mode of expression by means of which to attract the interest of the polite world of letters so vividly represented in the pages of the Spectator. He would also have been looking for a subject to write about. His letter to a physician tells us something of what that subject turned out to be: ‘Every one, who is acquainted either with the Philosophers or Critics, knows that there is nothing yet establisht in either of these two Sciences, & that they contain little more than endless Disputes, even in the most fundamental Articles. Upon examination of these, I found a certain Boldness of Temper, growing in me, which was not enclin’d to submit to any Authority in these subjects, but led me to seek out some Medium, by which Truth might be establisht’.46 We need not conclude that here already is the resolve to begin on the Treatise’s project of a ‘science of man’ on ‘experimental’ principles. What is being described by Hume is rather the slow arrival of a sense of purpose, an intimation, but no more than that, of what might come of the general learning he had been acquiring.47

1.1.5.1 Before we proceed to the way in which Hume pursued his search for a means by which to establish truth in philosophy and criticism, it is necessary to say what little can be said about the place of religion in his early intellectual development. There is no reason to think that he would not have been brought up to be a practising and believing member of the Church of Scotland.48 He would have known well every chapter of The Confession of Faith instituted in 1647 as the means of ensuring uniformity of religion in Scotland, ‘and as a special means for the more effectual suppressing of the many dangerous Errors and Heresies of these times’.49 The Confession of Faith begins with an assertion of the primacy of revelation over the light of nature, asserts the three-fold

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nature of God, and the proceeds directly to ‘God’s Eternal Decree’, the doctrine of predestination, and the assertion that while ‘God from all Eternity did, by the most wise and holy Counsel of his own Will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the Author of Sin, nor is Violence offered to the Will of the Creatures, nor is the Liberty or Contingency of second Causes taken away, but rather established’.50 The original sin of Adam and the justice of God’s punishment of the whole human race are the animating themes of the entire document, and they are just as prominent in the two catechisms, Larger and Shorter, that Hume would doubtless have had to learn by heart. ‘What is the Misery of that Estate whereinto Man fell?’, it is asked in the Shorter Catechism: ‘All Mankind by their fall lost Communion with God, are under his Wrath and Curse, and so made liable to all Miseries in this Life, to Death it self, and to the Pains of Hell for ever’, it is answered.51 There is some reason to think that for a time he took his religion fairly seriously. On being asked by James Boswell in 1776 whether he was not religious when young, Hume replied that he was, ‘and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them. This, he said, was strange work; for instance, to try if, notwithstanding his excelling his schoolfellows, he had no pride or vanity’.52 The ‘Brief Heads of Self-Examination … collected out of the foregoing Treatise concerning the breaches of our Duty’ that Hume was referring to is thirteen pages long and lists about 500 possible ways of sinning.53

1.1.5.2 If Hume did come under the spell of Shaftesbury and the Characteristicks, his sense of the proper nature of religion would then have changed considerably. Shaftesbury was certainly not an atheist, but he had no affection for the Christianity of his day, primarily because he regarded it as having forgotten Christ’s original insistence on the importance of love and benevolence for one’s fellow men, and as preaching a ‘mercenary’ kind of virtue such as has its motive only in desire of reward. Furthermore, the reverence Shaftesbury had for the teachings of the ancients pushed him some distance away from the idea, strong especially in Calvinist Protestant countries such as Scotland, that men are made worthy in the eyes of God by Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and by that alone. ‘[W]e Christians’, he complains close to the beginning of the Characteristicks, ‘who have such ample Faith in our-selves, will allow nothing to poor Heathens’.54 He goes on to argue that it was a sign of the health of ancient cultures that philosophy had the right to question the pretensions of the religious and to effect a divide between true religion on the one hand, and mere superstition on the other. Shaftesbury was even prepared to criticize Saint Paul himself, and argue that philosophy properly understood, far from being vain and deceitful, ‘has the Pre-eminence above all other Science and Knowledge’: ‘By this Science Religion it-self is judg’d, Spirits are search’d, Prophecys prov’d, Miracles distinguish’d: the sole Measure and Standard being taken from moral Rectitude, and from the Discernment of what is sound and just in the Affections’.55 The religion promulgated in the Characteristicks is thus a religion of virtue, though it has a prominent place also for belief in an intelligent and benevolent creator of the universe, since, as Shaftesbury puts it, ‘Nothing indeed can me more melancholy, than the Thought of living in a distracted Universe, from whence many Ills may be suspected, and where there is nothing good or lovely which presents it-self’.56 Belief in a providential and rational order provides a support and reassurance for the virtuous person. Establishing that, contrary to appearances, human nature is an element of the supremely beautiful system of the universe is the principal concern of the dialogue ‘The Moralists’, a work designed, so Shaftesbury says, to rescue its reader from the grip of what is taught from the church pulpit and the university lectern.

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1.1.5.3 It would seem, however, that once Hume began moving away from the beliefs he had been brought up and educated into, he was unable to come to a halt when he reached this more philosophical and ‘natural’ religion. It was generally supposed at the time that the natural science of Boyle and Newton provided overwhelming evidence of the existence of a creator God. That would have been a constant theme of Robert Steuart’s lectures in natural philosophy, and Hume would have found the same confidence in the theological significance of modern science in The Spectator, for instance in No. 543, where Addison writes that ‘A Sir Isaac Newton … can look through a whole Planetary System; consider it in its Weight, Number, and Measure; and draw from it as many Demonstrations of infinite Power and Wisdom, as a more confined Understanding is able to deduce from the System of an Human Body’.57 But at some point in the late 1720s, Hume began to lose confidence in the whole idea of a rational basis for religious belief. This happened slowly, and was in all likelihood a painful business. In 1751, when he was at work on a first draft of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Hume would write to a friend that he had just burned an old notebook ‘wrote before I was twenty’ containing the ‘gradual Progress’ of his thoughts on rational proofs of the existence of God. ‘It began 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’.58 Boswell reports Hume saying that ‘he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke’.59 Neither Locke nor Clarke was a very conventional Christian, but both did produce a priori arguments, in Clarke’s case very lengthy ones, for the existence of a creator of the universe with the attributes traditionally taken to be possessed by God. Hume meant Boswell to understand that it was perceiving the weakness of such arguments that helped him on the way to unbelief.

1.1.5.4 Hume would have been well prepared by his Calvinist upbringing to be sceptical of the possibility of giving religion a foundation in reason. He would have been taught from an early age that reason in all human beings was corrupted as an effect of Adam’s sin, and as we have seen this doctrine would likely have been reiterated in the logic and metaphysics lectures of Colin Drummond. What made Hume unusual was that he had none of the emotional need for religion that, for most of his contemporaries, made it at the deepest level an irrelevance whether or not the principles of religion could be proven to be true.60 In the case of Boswell, for example, it is reasonably plain that the basis of his faith is not reason but the combination of a more or less permanent sense of guiltiness with a very lively fear of dying. Even in the self-consciously elevated and rarefied climate of the writings of Shaftesbury one senses the presence of a basic inability seriously to consider the idea that the universe has no father and governor. The Epicurean and Lucretian hypothesis that the world might be without origin and without an inherent principle order is simply too terrifying to contemplate. One finds again and again in the moral philosophy of the century the claim that, however naturally virtuous they might be, human beings need to believe in a providential order, and also in a life after death, if they are not to be reduced to despair by the way things go in the world.61 Hume, though, was different. Losing belief may have been a difficult process, but once it had gone, he appears not ever to have missed it.

1.1.6.1 Of course we do not, and cannot, know for sure how this loss of religious faith affected Hume. It does seem, though, that it did not get in the way of his programme of study. On the contrary. In the first half of 1729, according to the letter to the physician, four years of reading and reflection, and of increasing ‘boldness of temper’, suddenly gave rise to a new and definite sense of what he should turn his energies to. Unfortunately Hume is less than specific as to the content of this revelation.

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In a famous phrase he tells the physician that ‘there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought, which transport’d me beyond Measure, & made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it’.62 This is all he says. It is unlikely that the scene of thought that had opened up was a prospectus of A Treatise of Human Nature. For one thing, we should note the ‘seem’d’ in the quotation just given; for another, and as we shall shortly see, more time had to pass before something clearly recognisable as the project of the Treatise came into focus.63 All that we can safely suppose is that Hume now had an access of much increased self-confidence as regards a literary career. Means by which to end the controversies besetting philosophy and criticism seemed, perhaps, to be within his grasp. And then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, this self-confidence evaporated. Less than six months later, at the beginning of September 1739, so Hume wrote to the physician, ‘all my Ardor seem’d in a minute to be extinguisht’. For nine months afterwards Hume was paralysed by ‘a Laziness of Temper’, and by a kind of mental exhaustion that, five years later, he blamed on the effort he had expended on the philosophical disciplines of Stoicism – disciplines which may be useful for one living an active life, but which in a condition of solitude, where there is in truth little enough difficulty to be overcome, ‘serve to little other Purpose, than to waste the Spirits, the Force of the Mind meeting with no Resistance, but wasting itself in the Air, like our Arm when it misses its Aim’.64 There were symptoms of some kind of bodily distemper as well, most notably ‘what they call a Ptyalism or Watryness in the mouth’. The cure involved bitters and pills, a lot of exercise, and drinking every day ‘an English Pint of Claret Wine’. Slowly and carefully Hume resumed his studies. Two years after the breakdown he had a new project in hand, Shaftesbury had been left behind, and the seeds of the Treatise were being sown.

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1.2.1.1 Hume appears to recovered from his breakdown by summer 1731. The recovery was, however, only partial. The reason why Hume wrote to a physician in 1734 was that he was still troubled by an inability to concentrate upon intellectual things for any length of time. Even once the worst was over, he writes, ‘my Disease was a cruel Incumbrance on me. I found that I was not able to follow out any Train of Thought, by one continued Stretch of View, but by repeated Interruptions, & by refreshing my Eye from Time to Time upon other Objects’.65 But he continued reading and writing, at home at Ninewells, for another three years, until he headed south to England for a brief period as a merchant in the port city of Bristol, and then left Britain altogether for France. This was a crucial time in his intellectual development. It was presumably during this period of three years that the project of the Treatise was formulated. It is therefore frustrating that we know almost nothing about what Hume was reading, thinking, and writing at this time. Only one letter of the period survives, a letter that tells us that Hume was reading Bayle, but does not tell us anything else. There is an incomplete manuscript of an essay on the history of ‘chivalry and modern honour’ that probably dates from 1732. There is the retrospective account of his early development contained in the letter to the physician. And that is all.

1.2.1.2 The letter to the physician does give us an initial orientation. Here is what Hume says about how his mind stood, as he puts it, when the symptoms of his disease abated:

Having now Time & Leizure to cool my inflam’d Imaginations, I began to consider seriously, how I shou’d proceed in my Philosophical Enquiries. I found

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the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy concerning Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature upon which every conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, & the Source from which I wou’d derive every Truth in Criticism as well as Morality. I believe ’tis a certain Fact that most of the Philosophers who have gone before us, have been overthrown by the Greatness of their Genius, & that little more is requir’d to make a man succeed in this Study, than to throw off the all Prejudices either for his own Opinions or for this [those?] of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for the Truth of my Reasonings, which I have multiply’d to such a degree, that within these three Years, I find I have scribbled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own Inventions. This with the Reading most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French & English, & acquiring Italian, you may think a sufficient Business for one in perfect Health …66

We have seen that in the years immediately after he left college, Hume read widely in philosophy and literature, and that the lack of consensus as to fundamental principles among philosophers and critics caused him to ‘seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht’. Now, it seems, he had a conception of what that medium was. And what had shown him the way was not just speculative reflection, but practical experience. He had felt, and felt painfully, the mismatch that there was between human nature and the moral philosophy of antiquity. In the wake of this revelation, Hume had a more definite project. He was to be a scientist of the mind, an analyst of human nature who would replicate in the mental realm what Boyle and Newton had achieved in the natural. Hume’s investigations into human nature left him in the end with a wholly different conception of philosophy from that of any of his contemporaries; but there is, as we shall see, reason to think that it took some time for a distinctively Humean approach to the mind to be developed.

1.2.1.3 Hume was not alone in coming to think that what was needed at this time was a science of human nature based upon experience rather than upon invention.67 The success of the inductive method utilized by the new science of nature engendered a widespread belief that the time had come to try to apply that method in investigations into the functioning of the mind. And here, it was generally thought, Locke had pointed out the way to be followed. ‘Such a Multitude of Reasoners having written the Romance of the Soul, a Sage at last arose, who gave, with an Air of the greatest Modesty, the History of it’, wrote Voltaire: ‘Mr. Locke has display’d the human Soul, in the same Manner as an excellent Anatomist explains the Springs of the human Body’.68 Locke’s first, and immensely influential, move was to distinguish the question of how the mind worked from the question of what the mind was made of. He declared that he would ‘not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind; or trouble my self to examine, wherein its Essence consists, or by what Motions of our spirits, or Alteration of our Bodies, we came to have any Sensation by our Organs, or any Ideas in our Understandings; and whether those Ideas do in their Formation, any, or all of them, depend on Matter, or no’.69 This enabled a putative science of the mind to leave to one side the metaphysical disputes that had been a prominent feature of the philosophy of the previous century. It no longer mattered whether the mind was material or immaterial, nor what the means was by which the mind entered into causal relations with the body. Attention could be focused exclusively upon what experience told the careful observer about the mind’s powers of perception, judgment, memory, imagination, and so forth.

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We will see later in this chapter that the question of Hume’s debt to Locke as regards the workings of the mind is a complex one, but when it came to what Locke termed his ‘Historical, plain Method’, there was no disagreement.

1.2.1.4 In the early 1730s, then, Hume focused his thoughts on the application of Lockean method to criticism and morality. The passage quoted above from the letter to the physician implies that the kind of philosophical project Hume would have found pursued in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks no longer seemed viable. Shaftesbury intended to show the continuing relevance of ‘the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity’. He took it for granted that the picture of human nature drawn by men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius could be relied upon as accurate. Hume now felt he had reason to doubt that assumption. But we should note that he remained convinced that ‘every moral Conclusion’ was to be drawn from human nature – and not from the revealed Word of God, as many of his contemporaries believed it should be, nor from principles of pure reason, as some philosophers of the time had begun to suggest. It looks as though Hume kept faith in the basic understanding of the nature of moral philosophy shared by all ancient philosophers even while he had become sceptical of their psychological models. According to that understanding, claims about how human beings should live were to be derived from prior claims about their desires, needs, and capabilities. Morality was the means to the end of the realisation of the full expression and healthy functioning of that which is most essential to human nature. There was disagreement among the ancients as to what, exactly, it is that is most essential to human nature, and as to wherein the most perfect human happiness lies, but Stoics, Epicureans, and Aristotelians alike agreed as to the way in which moral philosophy should be done. Shaftesbury had sought to initiate a return to the ancient model, and in this he was successful. The ethical discourse of the ‘polite’ intellectual society of the eighteenth century, the society in which we can presume Hume wanted to find a place for himself, defined itself largely by its preference for the ancient way of doing moral philosophy. Here, after all, was a way of thinking about morality which would not be affected by irresolvable disagreements among the various Christian confessions. Here too was a way of treating taste that promised to give art and literary criticism what we would today call a ‘scientific’ basis. Claims about the beautiful and the sublime could be related to principles of the mind, so that the basis of aesthetic distinctions might at last be made intelligible. The project that Hume outlined in his letter to the physician was thus in important respects neither idiosyncratic nor revolutionary.

1.2.2.1 It is reasonable to suppose that as he developed his first theories concerning human nature and morality, Hume relied fairly heavily on two widely influential near contemporaries: Joseph Butler, the English divine who in 1726 had published a series of sermons on moral topics originally given at The Rolls Chapel in London; and Francis Hutcheson, from 1730 onwards Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and an author who, like Hume, had as his main concern elucidation of the basis in human nature of the principles of morality and criticism. What Hume would have found in Butler was, first and foremost, proof of the fruitfulness in ethics of the Lockean method of inquiry which gave priority to experience over a priori conceptual analysis. ‘There are two Ways in which the Subject of Morals may be treated’, Butler announced in the Preface to the Sermons: ‘One begins from inquiring into the abstract Relations of things: the other from a Matter of Fact, namely, what the particular Nature of Man is, its several Parts, their Oeconomy or Constitution; from whence it proceeds to determine what Course of Life it is, which is correspondent to this whole Nature’.70 Relying wholly on the latter way of treating morals Butler sought to show that life lived according to nature is, in the human case, life lived according to the dictates of a faculty

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of moral self-determination. In the course of his argument he concerned himself with showing the distinctness of phenomena which were, so he thought, too often confused by moral philosophers. One such distinction is between, on the one hand, ‘the cool Principle of Self-love, or general Desire of our own Happiness’, and on the other, ‘the particular Affections towards particular external Objects’, and Butler used this distinction successfully to refute the claim, popular among both the fashionable neo-Epicureans of the day and traditionalist Calvinist Christians, that it is impossible that human beings act out of genuine and selfless concern for the good of others.71 The force of this argument of Butler’s was accepted by Hume without reservation.72 There are, however, few other respects in which Hume adopted Butler’s substantive conclusions -- as distinct from Butler’s way of reaching those conclusions.73 If, as has been suggested here, Hume began his philosophical career under the influence of Shaftesbury, he may well have found Butler’s Sermons too sententious, too dry, and perhaps also simply too obviously religious. He would have been more responsive to the more urbane and stylish and ‘polite’ writings of Hutcheson, liberally sprinkled as they were with quotations from ancient authors, and as concerned with the nature of taste as they were with matters of morality.

1.2.2.2 Hutcheson’s first books, the Inquiry of 1725 and Essay of 1728, were written in a Shaftesburyan idiom, and intended for a readership that prided itself on its taste and refined sensibility.74 Like Butler, Hutcheson was concerned with showing the distinctness of things often confused, and, in particular, with the difference between the pleasures afforded by virtue and by beauty and the pleasures excited by satisfaction of mere bodily appetite. And like Butler, he wrote in opposition to a kind of fashionable cynicism that expressed itself in a tendency towards Epicurean principles, a cynicism as to the very possibility of disinterested pleasure, whether moral or aesthetic. His intention was that people should know themselves better, and love themselves better, and love their neighbours better too. For Hutcheson, careful attention to what experience reveals about human nature should be the principal concern of the philosopher. Philosophy would then provide a kind of mirror in which people would see themselves properly. ‘There is no part of Philosophy of more importance’, Hutcheson wrote in the first sentence of his first book, ‘than a just Knowledge of Human Nature, and its various Powers and Dispositions’.75 If Hutcheson’s philosophy of benevolence and beauty was enthusiastically welcomed by some, it was abhorrent to others, and his election by the University faculty to the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow was far from uncontested. The lecture that he gave at his inauguration, and that he published very soon afterwards, is best read as an uncompromising defence of his understanding of the point and purpose of philosophy. Adapting the language of Stoicism to the agenda of an empirically orientated and fundamentally Lockean science of human nature, it presented virtue as the perfection of the human condition, as a state in which pleasure is taken in goodness for its own sake, as itself a work of art, and one that each of us is able to make of himself. In the inaugural lecture, as elsewhere in Hutcheson’s writings, the more extreme and unpalatable aspects of Stoicism are dispensed with and replaced with an emphasis upon the ease with which virtue can be recognised and adopted as a way of life. The message is not one of the renunciation and abnegation, but one of the unity and harmony of all of the elements of human nature.

1.2.2.3 A salient aspect of Hutcheson’s philosophy for Hume at this point in his development would surely have been his insistence that the moral faculty, the means by which human beings make moral judgments, is to be understood as a mode of sensation rather than of rationality. This was a point on which Butler had not been clear. In a ‘Dissertation of Virtue’ published in 1736 he would claim that it did not matter whether the moral faculty was called conscience, moral reason, moral sense, or divine reason.76

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Hutcheson, however, was categorical in his insistence on the propriety of talk of a ‘moral sense’ and of the concomitant possibility of identifying the virtuous with kinds of human behaviour that excite a particular, though indefinable, sensation of pleasure. The kind of behaviour in question was benevolent behaviour, behaviour intended to increase the happiness of others, or at least to reduce their unhappiness; yet there was nothing in benevolence considered in itself, so to speak, that identified it as worthy of praise. No amount of analysis of ideas, or concepts, could show that one way of acting is good and deserves rewards, while another way of acting is vicious and merits punishment. To beings with only a faculty of reason and no feelings, the language of morality would quite simply make no sense at all. Moreover, no overall goal in life can be shown, prior to a consideration of the pains and pleasures that a particular human being is susceptible to, to be more rational than any other. If you are the (very rare, according to Hutcheson) kind of person who is moved only by selfish considerations, then no amount of reasoning will be able to alter your way of living. Our fundamental orientations in life are set by our emotions, and cannot be contested or changed by principles of reason. This was a main argument of Hutcheson’s Inquiry. It met with a great deal of opposition from those worried about its consequences for the idea that morality consists of duties that it is incumbent upon all human beings to obey, regardless of how they happen to feel. Hutcheson then defended himself against his critics in the Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, appended to his second book, the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions. ‘[W]hat Rule of Actions can be formed, without relation to some End proposed?’, Hutcheson asked in the Illustrations: ‘Or what End can be proposed, without presupposing Instincts, Desires, Affections, or a moral Sense, it will not be easy to explain’.77 Hume would do little more than restate the arguments of the Illustrations in the brief attack on rationalism which cleared the ground for his own theory of morals in Book Three of the Treatise. 78

1.2.2.4 Hutcheson’s case against reason as the source of moral judgments, together with Butler’s case against the hypothesis of inevitable human selfishness, gave Hume his points of departure for his examination of human nature as a source of truths in morals.79 Such truths were to be derived from the passions and not from reason (nor from Biblical revelation); and the passions were not all selfish. Yet this, obviously enough, left a great deal undetermined. The passions needed to be described and categorised, so that it might be made clear in which ways moral conclusions depended upon them. If morality was not simply what is in the interests of the individual, then what was its connection with human nature? The claim that Hutcheson made in his inaugural lecture, that virtue is a state of perfection which is attainable by the full development of every aspect human nature, was built upon the analysis of the passions he had given in the Essay. There he had utilized the rhetoric of experimental science in the repudiation of the selfish theory. Attempts by modern writers to clear up confusions introduced into philosophy by the ‘schoolmen’ of the Middle Ages had, Hutcheson claimed, gone too far in the direction of simplicity for simplicity’s sake. A vogue for ‘system’ and theoretical neatness had resulted in an insufficient attention to what is obvious to untutored reflection. In inquiries into the passions, according to Hutcheson, ‘we need little Reasoning, or Argument, since Certainty is only attainable by distinct Attention to what we are conscious happens in our Minds’.80 And what such distinct attention reveals, it turned out, is the continuing viability of the old Stoic division of the passions first into love and hatred, and secondly into joy, sorrow, desire, and fear. The passions divide into love and hatred ‘according as the Object is good or evil’; they divide into joy, sorrow, desire, and fear ‘according as the Object is present or expected’.81 The only major modification that needed to be made to the Stoic theory was an acceptance of a positive and useful role for the perturbations, or ‘uneasy sensations’, that all too often accompany the passions as we human beings experience them. What Hume wrote to the

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physician might be evidence that by 1734 he thought that here, at least, Hutcheson had made a false step. Modern arguments for the selfishness of the passions might be no good, but that did not mean that experience-based study of the mind must simply return to the theories of the ancients. There were other avenues of investigation to pursue. It was perhaps in order to find alternative ways forward that Hume turned, as he at some point certainly did, to a serious reading of the neo-Epicurean philosophy that Hutcheson so trenchantly criticized.

1.2.3.1 The title-page of the first edition of Hutcheson’s Inquiry declared that it is a book ‘in which the principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are Explain’d and Defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees’.82 The author of The Fable of the Bees was Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré to England who began adult life as a surgeon but who quickly turned to writing and became one of the great controversialists of the early eighteenth century. It is beyond doubt that Hume read the Fable at some point in the planning of the Treatise. Its arguments are alluded to several times in Book Three, and Mandeville is referred to in the Introduction, along with Locke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson, as one of the ‘late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing’.83 Like the Characteristics, The Fable of the Bees is a complex and multifarious work, deploying a number of quite different literary strategies, and lacking in anything resembling a clearly definable line of argument. The book grew out of a poem called ‘The Grumbling Hive’, an allegory first published in 1705 and designed to make it plain that in a flourishing commercial society, such as the Britain of the early eighteenth century, traditional virtues such as frugality, scrupulous honesty, and self-denial did more harm than good. Continuing prosperity depended, rather, on the very things moralists tried to suppress: on avarice, pride, envy, and a taste for luxury. In 1714 an enlarged edition was published, now with the title The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, with a series of ‘Remarks’ in which various aspects of poem were explicated in some detail, and with in addition a more straightforwardly philosophical commentary entitled ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue’. Further editions, with further additions, followed; and in 1729 a wholly new second part was published. As Hume would surely have known, in 1723 the Fable was considered for prosecution as a public nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mandeville’s radically innovative examination of the basis of national power and prosperity provided Hume with the larger theme of the essays in political economy that he would publish in 1752. Mandeville made it plain to Hume just how much the discourse of politics needed to change in order to be adequate to modern conditions. The discovery of Mandeville’s Fable was thus an immensely significant event in Hume’s intellectual development. We will consider Hume’s engagement with Mandeville from various angles in the chapters of this book. For the moment, though, we can restrict ourselves to a consideration of what Hume would have found in Mandeville as regards the question of human nature as a source of the principles of morals.

1.2.3.2 The occasion of the Middlesex Grand Jury’s interest in the Fable of the Bees was a new and enlarged edition of work containing an attack on the value of ostentatious works of public charity such as schools for the children of the poor, and also ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, a thorough-going assault on the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury, ‘a late Author, who is now much read by Men of Sense’ and who, contrary to the opinions of the generality of moralists and philosophers, ‘imagines that Men without any Trouble or Violence upon themselves may be naturally Virtuous’.84 The first half of the ‘Search’ is a criticism of the notion of the ‘good in itself’, the good considered as distinct from the merely useful or merely agreeable, a notion that as we have seen is at the heart of Shaftesbury’s ethics, and that is central too to Hutcheson’s. Hutcheson, in

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fact, had used a quotation from Cicero concerning the good in itself, what Cicero termed the honestum, as the epigram for the Inquiry taken as a whole. The agenda of moral philosophy for Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was to identify a realm of value distinct from the vagaries of fashion and opinion, in the form of pure benevolence, and to show that human beings are naturally orientated towards it. Mandeville, as we shall shortly see, believed that real benevolence of any kind is an impossibility for human beings. But his concern in the first part of the ‘Search’ was with the very idea that anything might be said to be good in itself. His reply was very simple. It was that experience provides no evidence that such a thing as the good in itself exists. Human beings have never been able to agree as to what is really good and what is really evil. In morals there is as little consensus as is in matters of taste. Like Hutcheson, Mandeville believed that our judgments and actions are determined most fundamentally by our passions. The problem is that it is precisely in their passions that people differ most strikingly from each other. To a man brought up in ease and comfort, mild mannered and good natured, the calm benevolence in terms of which the good in itself is defined in the Characteristics might come naturally. ‘Had this noble Person been of a Warlike Genius or a Boisterous Temper’, however, ‘he would have chose another Part in the Drama of Life, and preach’d a quite contrary Doctrine’.85 A man such as Shaftesbury was naturally disposed not to be much disturbed by desire of sensual pleasure. Another man, with more violent passions, could not be expected to be mended by neo-Stoic maxims and precepts, for violent passions can be subdued only by passions of yet greater violence.

1.2.3.3 Like Hume in his letter to the anonymous physician – it is not impossible that Hume was helped towards the views he expressed in that letter by a reading of The Fable of the Bees – Mandeville believed that resuscitations of ancient moral philosophy such as had been attempted in the Characteristics were an obstacle to a proper understanding of human nature. Not only was it true that ‘the hunting after this Pulchrum & Honestum is not much better than a Wild-Goose-Chace’, but, also, ‘The imaginary Notions that Men may be Virtuous without Self-denial are a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy, which being once made habitual, we must not only deceive others, but likewise become altogether unknown to our selves’.86 The first sentence of Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Origin of Virtue declares, as if no argument were necessary, that ‘All untaught Animals are only solicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others’.87 This sounds like the doctrine of necessary selfishness that Hume in all likelihood rejected from the very beginnings of his investigation into human nature. But what Mandeville goes on to develop is an extremely sophisticated form of psychological egoism which presented a much more serious challenge to belief in a more generous picture than the crude hedonism of fashionable Epicureans. His key insight was that of all the selfish pleasures to which human beings are by nature inclined, pride is the most potent. What people want most of all, Mandeville believed, is praise, and with it the ability to think well of themselves that comes from belief that they are well thought of by others. And people want this so much that it does not much matter to them whether the praise is sincere or whether it is mere flattery. It does matter, though, who the praise comes from. The good opinions of superiors tend to feel like so much condescension. The good opinions of equals, by contrast, are always delicious. We therefore expend most of our time and energy on elevating ourselves above others as much as is possible, or, what is just as good, creating the illusion that we are superior to those around us. ‘We all look above our selves,’ Mandeville writes in the one of the ‘remarks’ on the poem ‘The Grumbling Hive’, ‘and, as fast as we can, strive to imitate those, that some way or other are superior to us’.88 Everyone, from the poorest labourer’s wife in the parish through tradesmen and on to the favourites of princes, is possessed by this ‘Emulation

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and continual striving to out-do one another’. When we are able to think ourselves superior to others, we can imagine ourselves admired by them, and then we are able to admire ourselves. In Part Two of the Fable Mandeville distinguishes between an elemental self-love given to all animals for self-preservation and what he calls a ‘Self-liking’ that ‘is so necessary to the Well-being of those that have been used to indulge it; that they can taste no Pleasure without it’.89

1.2.3.4 Pride, or self-liking, provided Mandeville with the resources necessary to explaining the origins of virtue, or, at least, the origins of the appearance of virtue. Because he took it as obvious that no one is virtuous -- that is, concerned to further the good of others -- by nature, what was needed was an account of how virtue, or its facsimile, is manufactured. In the first volume of the Fable Mandeville gave an instrumental role to a class of people he calls ‘Politicians’, who, knowing well the strengths and frailties of our natures, exploit the delight in flattery that each of us has in virtue of our pride to create ex nihilo the entire system of morality. In return for the various kinds of restraint and self-sacrifice that virtue requires, we are offered the reward of praise. We are told how superior human beings are to mere animals, and how noble and dignified it is suppress the bestial appetites that endanger peaceful co-existence. In addition the crafty politicians, the ‘Lawgivers and other wise Men’, divided human beings into two classes, the low and grovelling and poor and voluptuous on the one hand, and the lofty and high-minded and intellectual and refined on the other. The superior class, in its self-conceit, could be sure to take upon itself a concern for the good of society as a whole, and would do the organising and governing necessary to the efficient functioning of the social machine. The lower class would do all the actual work, and though not much better than animals in fact, they would try to think of themselves as better, and in order to be praised by their superiors, and to think well of themselves, would hide their imperfections as best they could and ‘cry up Self-denial and Publick-spiritedness as much as any’.90 In this manner, the first human beings were, or at least might have been, ‘broke’: ‘from whence it is evident, that, the first Rudiments of Morality, broach’d by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security’.91 Here, plainly, we have the polar opposite of the view espoused by Shaftesbury and reiterated by Hutcheson. There is nothing at all natural in virtue. In every respect it is completely artificial.

1.2.3.5 In the Treatise Hume would explicitly criticise the idea that morality might have had its origins in the wiles of ‘skilful Politicians’. It is possible, though, that he found food for thought in the manner in which Mandeville refined and complicated his view of the foundations of virtue in Part Two of the Fable. The basic supposition that virtue involves a conquest of original human nature remains in place in Part Two, but politicians play a much reduced role, and the emphasis is placed instead upon history as the motor of moral development. ‘[W]e often ascribe to the Excellency of Man’s Genius, and the Depth of his Penetration’, says one of the participants in the dialogue that constitutes Part Two, ‘what is in Reality owing to length of Time, and the Experience of many Generations, all of them very little differing from one another in natural Parts and Sagacity’.92 The notion of an extended process of development of the manners and morals that make it possible for men to live in society with each other allows Mandeville to give a more nuanced answer to the question of whether or not ‘sociability’ is something natural to human beings. The new view is ‘That Nature had design’d Man for Society, as she has made Grapes for Wine’.93 Men are fitted in various ways for social life just as grapes have characteristics that allow them to be turned into wine. In both cases, a certain set of conditions has to obtain before transmutation can take place; and in the

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case of social man, the conditions are provided in by the slowly evolving and expanding networks of familial and tribal relations, by the development of systems of government, law, and, crucially, language. Hence ‘Men become sociable, by living together in Society’.94 We cannot be sure that Hume read Part Two of the Fable. But it is surely likely that it would have been read, and read carefully, by someone looking in the first half of the 1730s for the right way of understanding the connection between human nature and the principles of morality.

1.2.4.1 Mandeville presented his sketch of a historical theory of the origins of society and morals and politics as a correction of versions of Epicureanism popular in the seventeenth century. Sir William Temple, whom Hume read and whom we shall have occasion to say more about in later chapters, is offered up for particular criticism on account of the implausibility of his story of how men got out of the state of nature. The Treatise provides evidence that Hume read other modern Epicureans including the French libertins erudits Saint-Evremond and La Rochefoucauld.95 The Epicureans, following the lead of both Lucretius and Epicurus himself, laid emphasis on the artificiality of morality, in ways that exposed them to the charge of promulgating a licentious cynicism as to the reality of the obligation to virtue. They held that in many respects the difference between virtue and vice, and between good taste and bad, was conventional, and just as dependent as manners on opinions that changed from place to place and from historical age to historical age. Their neo-Stoic opponents, including Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, sought to distinguish sharply between morals and mere manners. The obligation to virtue according to these writers came from human nature itself – a claim that, as we have noted, their more conventionally religious critics were apt to find just as suspicious as the conventionalism of the Epicureans. At a time when it was coming to seem increasingly important to keep the ‘polite’ realm of literary and philosophical disputation separate from the realm of doctrinal religion, the question of the difference between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ in human affairs took on great significance. Finding a natural basis for morality was an essential part of the construction of a public sphere free of intellectual domination by the church. Whether or not Hume’s reading and thinking progressed along precisely the lines that have been suggested here, from an early interest in Shaftesbury through Butler and Hutcheson to an engagement with Mandeville, it is therefore not surprising that the difference between the natural and the artificial is at the heart of the earliest surviving piece of philosophical writing from Hume’s pen, the fragmentary ‘Historical essay on chivalry and modern honour’.96

1.2.4.2 This, it may be presumed, is one of the ‘inventions’ mentioned by Hume in his letter to the physician. In it Hume sketches an explanation of the origins of the ideals of bravery, ‘extreme Civility’, and extravagant chastity characteristic of the knights of the Middle Ages. These ideals, Hume argues, are to be seen as distinctively modern – which is to say, as having no precedent in the world of ancient Greece and Rome. They are the result of the barbarian conquest of Rome, and of the way in which Rome’s ‘Moorish & Gothic’ conquerors, overawed by the civilisation they had vanquished, attempted to imitate its both its manners and its cultural achievements. By the time Rome fell, the Christian religion had discredited the philosophy of Greece; and so when they began to acquire, as Hume puts it, ‘the Relish of some degree of Virtue & Politeness beyond what they had ever before been acquainted with’, the barbarians had nothing to work with other than the tribute normally paid to courage in battle by the rude and warlike peoples. What they did was to turn courage into ‘something great & gallant, beyond what of themselves they cou’d ever have conceiv’d, & far beyond what they had any light or Example of to guide them in the Attainment of’. At the same time, they drained courage of its usual association with roughness and savagery, by mixing it with

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the Christian notion of love, and producing as a result the ideal of the brave yet courteous and genteel ‘Cavalier’, determined to display his valour in battles with giants, but at the same time humbly submissive to all damsels in distress. What Hume adds to this rather conventional historical narrative is an explanatory psychological mechanism that may be regarded as a first fruit of his study of human nature. ‘’Tis observable of the human Mind’, he says, ‘that when it is smit with any Idea of Merit or Perfection beyond what its Faculties can attain, & in the pursuit of which, it uses not Reason & Experience for its Guide, it knows no Mean, but as it gives the Rein & even adds the Spur to every florid Conceit or Fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of Nature’. The essay as it survives is incomplete. It is possible that in its missing final section Hume went on to offer an account of how ideas of honour prevalent in his own time, ideas that continued to be expressed in the form of duels, developed out of the chivalric code of the medieval period.

1.2.4.3 ‘An historical essay on chivalry and modern honour’ is evidence that history was a concern of Hume’s from early on in his intellectual development.97 Obviously enough, this essay is not the result of anything resembling genuine historical research. The idea that the modern era began with the end of the Roman empire, the contrast of ‘Grecian’ plainness and simplicity with ‘Gothic’ wildness and rudeness, the interest in the conquering barbarians as the originators of much that is distinctive of later European culture – these are prominent among the commonplaces of eighteenth-century thought. What is striking, however, is the fact that it is to history that Hume turns in this first treatment of manners and their development out of principles of human nature. In Shaftesbury and Hutcheson there is little interest in the actual origins of the fashions and opinions held up for comparison with the deeper truths contained in the philosophy of the ancients. Hume’s history of modern honour, unoriginal though it is, might thus be a sign of the attainment of a measure of independence from those who had been his first intellectual role-models. And in this turn toward history, there might be detectable the influence of Mandeville, whose view of all of morality as a work of artifice had made necessary an account of how the construction might have taken place. Certainly there are moments in the essay where the influence of Mandeville is tangible.98 For example, Hume gives a key role to ‘Politicians’ and their selfish encouragement, in precept as much as in example, of courage as the virtue ‘absolutely necessary in Wars, the chief Business & Source of Greatness, in all uncivilizd Nations’. It is not the Mandeville of the Fable that is most prominent here, however. Prior to writing the essay Hume very likely read An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, ‘by the Author of the FABLE of the BEES’. He would have found there ‘Modern Honour’ coupled with chivalry, contrasted with both Christian and Greco-Roman morality, and defined as ‘a Principle of Courage, Virtue, and Fidelity, which some Men are said to act from, and to be aw’d by, as others are by Religion’.99 Hume echoes a speculation made by Mandeville that in both Greek and Latin the word for virtue has its origins in the word for courage; adopts Mandeville’s view of the legends and romances of chivalric culture, with their tales of superlative bravery mixed with the strictest virtue, as, blatant perversions of truth; and follows Mandeville in pointing out the ways in which a devotion to honour may lead to criminality as well as to absurdity. But the psychological principle deployed to explain how it was, ‘by the necessary Operation of the Principles of Human Nature’, that the notions constitutive of modern honour gained their initial hold on the imagination of the barbarian conquerors of Rome appears to have been Hume’s own invention. It is not unlikely that Hume’s own experience of the difficulty of following the precepts of Stoicism provided that principle with an experiential source. Its operation is, he says, ‘observable in Philosophy, which tho it cannot produce a different world in which we may wander, makes us act in this as if we were different Beings from

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the rest of Mankind; at least makes us frame to ourselves, tho’ we cannot execute them, Rules of Conduct different from these which are set to us by Nature’.

1.2.4.4 In other respects, though, not least in the confidence with which it distinguishes between what is ‘set to us by Nature’ and what ‘runs … quite wide of Nature’, the essay suggests that the hold of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had not been fully broken. A contrast between the ordinary functioning of the mind and the ‘fantastic’ and ‘monstrous’ products of the imagination structures the entire argument. The system of modern honour represents a perversion of the sentiments by the imagination. Hume’s analysis is thus continuous with the sharp differentiation between the natural and the artificial that we have seen to be at the heart of the Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s moral philosophies. In both the Inquiry and the Essay Hutcheson had described how the imagination, through the association of ideas, alters our opinions and our passions. He had, for example, written of how ‘when Opinion, and confused Ideas, or Fancy comes in, and represents some particular kinds of Gratifications, or great Variety of them, as of great Importance; when Ideas of Dignity, Grandure, Magnificence, Generosity, or any other moral Species, are joined to the Objects of Appetites, they may furnish us with endless Labour, Vexation, and Misery of every kind’.100 In the essay on modern honour, Hume echoes such views. But by the time he came to write the Treatise, Hume’s opinion of the association of ideas had undergone a total revolution. As we will see, in the Treatise association is understood to be the most basic engine of mental life. It is characterised in an entirely value-free way – and Hume would later draw attention to his use of association as constituting his principal contribution to the science of the mind. In the essay on chivalry, we can conclude, Hume has yet to formulate the fundamental principles of his philosophy of human nature. He is caught between Hutcheson on the one hand and Mandeville on the other, and is looking for a satisfactory way of combining what is best in both. He quite possibly spent much of the time before he went to France occupied by this problem. The Treatise can in large part be read as the solution.

1.2.5.1 Before we turn to Hume’s move to France and the writing of the Treatise there, we should say more about the letter to the anonymous physician which has been our only guide in our speculations concerning the period immediately following the breakdown of 1729-31. What survives is in fact a draft of a letter, and there is no evidence that it was ever sent. If it was sent, it was sent without a signature. All Hume is willing to tell the addressee is that he is ‘your Countryman, a Scotchman’. The reason why Hume was unwilling to identify himself lies, presumably, in the frank and confessional character of the letter. It gives a very full account of Hume’s physical and emotional state during the crisis which interrupted his reading and writing, framed by the history of his intellectual progress which has been so liberally quoted from in this chapter. The letter is undated as well as unsigned, but it must have been written in March or April 1734, for we know that it was in February of that year that Hume left Ninewells for Bristol, having, as he says in the letter, ‘resolved to seek out a more active Life’. Three more years of study intermixed with regular exercise and rest had not seen Hume escape from under the cloud of ‘a Weakness rather than a Lowness of Spirits’. He had found that ‘Study & Idleness’ were very bad for this condition; he would now try ‘Business & Diversion’. The letter makes it plain that Hume had tried hard to understand his affliction. He had reflected on analogies between the ups and downs of his moods and descriptions of religious experience given in ‘the Writings of the French Mysticks, & in those of our Fanatics here’: ‘when they give a History of the Situation of their Souls, they mention a Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit, which frequently returns, & some of them, at the beginning, have been tormented with it many Years. As this kind of Devotion depends entirely on the Force of Passion, & consequently of the Animal

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Spirits, I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty parralel’.101 We will see in later chapters that Hume’s interest in the psychology of religious devotion did not stop here. There is reason to think that Hume’s interest in Mandeville led him to read an early work of his, the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, where he would have found the phrase ‘the Disease of the Learned’, used in the letter, and an analysis of what is termed ‘the Waste of Spirits’ that may well have been the model for Hume’s description of his case.102

1.2.5.2 We cannot be certain whom the ‘Scotchman’ was that Hume intended this letter for. There are two obvious candidates. One is John Arbuthnot, who would die the next year after a long career as physician (he attended Queen Anne on her deathbed) and man of letters (he was a close associate of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope).103 The other is George Cheyne, who also distinguished himself in both medicine and literature.104 In 1733 Cheyne had published The English Malady, a treatise on melancholy and related distempers which someone who had read Mandeville on ‘hypochondriack and hysterick diseases’ would probably have interested himself in as well. In his book Cheyne made manifest an interest in mysticism which may, if he was the addressee, have prompted Hume’s reflections on the analogy between melancholy and the ‘Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit’ experienced by the intensely religious. Furthermore, if it was Cheyne to whom Hume wrote, and if the letter was actually sent, we have the beginnings of an explanation as to why Hume went to France once it became clear that the life of the merchant was not for him. Cheyne was a close friend of the man who would receive Hume in Paris ‘with all imaginable Kindness’, the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, Jacobite sympathiser, Catholic convert, and author of the celebrated Voyage de Cyrus.105 It is not obvious how Hume made Ramsay’s acquaintance. Cheyne may have suggested that Hume spend time in France, and given him an introduction to Ramsay. This is speculation, however. All we know for sure about the decision to leave Bristol for France is what Hume says in ‘My Own Life’: ‘In 1734, I went to Bristol with some Recommendations to eminent Merchants; but in a few Months found that Scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a View of prosecuting my Studies in a Country Retreat; and I there laid that Plan of Life, which I have steddily and successfully pursued: I resolved to make a very rigid Frugality supply my Deficiency of Fortune, to maintain unimpaired my Independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except Improvement of my Talents in Literature’.106

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1.3.1.1 Other than the fact that Hume met the Chevalier Ramsay in Paris, nothing is known of his first visit to the French capital. By early September 1734 he was in Rheims, to the east of Paris in the province of Champagne. A letter from Rheims to Michael Ramsay contains observations upon both the town and the manners of the French people in general. There is a sort of studied worldliness to the letter, as Hume argues for the paradoxical idea that the ostentatious and obviously insincere civilities of the French manifest ‘more real Politeness’ than do the plain sincerities of the English. Politeness, Hume claims, is not of the heart. Rather, it is essentially external and public, and its function is above all to preserve order and peace in society. Hume says he has been struck by the fact that he has as yet seen no public quarrels in France, ‘tho’ they are every where to be met with in England’.107 ‘[I]t must be confest’, he continues, ‘that the little Niceties of the French Behaviour, tho’ troublesome & impertinent, yet serve to polish the ordinary Kind of People & prevent Rudeness & Brutality’.108 There is something

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distinctly Mandevillean about this whole line of argument.109 Hume shows himself aware that it might appear strange ‘that I who have stay’d so short a time in France & who have confest that I am not Master of their Language, shou’d decide so positively of their manners’; he excuses himself with the claim ‘that ’tis with Nations as with particular Man, where one Trifle frequently serves more to discover the Character, than a whole Train of considerable Actions’.110 National characters, and their determinants, would be the subject of an essay Hume published 14 years later. In Rheims Hume made the acquaintance of the Abbé Noel-Antoine Pluche, Jansenist priest and man of letters, and was given use of his library. In a letter to a friend he had made in Bristol, James Birch, Hume writes that ‘It is my pleasure today to read over again Locke’s Essays and The Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr. Berkeley which are printed in their original state and in French copy. I was told … that [the Abbé Pluche] received new works of Learning & Philosophy from London and Paris each month, and so I shall feel no want of the latest books’.111 It would seem that at this time Hume’s interests were extending from morals and criticism to the epistemological and metaphysical questions that would be explored in Book One of the Treatise.

1.3.1.2 In the spring of 1735, in search of somewhere still cheaper to live, Hume moved from Rheims to La Flèche in Anjou. He would stay there for two and a half years. In another letter to James Birch, Hume describes La Flèche as ‘a neat, well-built but small Town, very pleasantly situated, on the Banks of a River, & in one of the finest Provinces of France. The People are extremely civil, & sociable; & besides the good Company in the Town, there is a College of a hundred Jesuits, which is esteem’d the most magnificent both for Buildings & Gardens of any belonging to that Order in France or even in Europe’.112 It may be presumed that such a college had a good library, though, thanks to its destruction during the French Revolution, no record survives of what that library contained. It is perhaps not completely fanciful to imagine Hume using the library to read widely and deeply in the French philosophical tradition. Hume may have turned from Berkeley to Berkeley’s principal influence, Malebranche, and from Malebranche to the complex world of French philosophico-religious dispute, populated by Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and a host of others, including the mathematician Hume refers to in the Treatise’s discussion of space and time, Nicolas de Malezieu. It is difficult to imagine Hume being able to discuss his reading with the priests whose library this was – though in a letter from later in his life Hume does describe a conversation with one of them as the origins of the central argument of his discussion of miracles, written for the Treatise but published a decade later in Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding.113 In a letter of 1737 Hume describes himself as having been ‘alone in perfect Tranquillity in France’.114 The Treatise certainly has the feel of a book written in intellectual isolation, rather than being the product of the to and fro of debate and discussion. It is a kind of philosophical monologue.115 Voices other than that of its author, questioning or requesting clarification and restatement, are not to be heard.

1.3.2.1. What Hume wrote during his time at La Flèche was the culmination of the enquiry into human nature, and the search for a theory more accurate than any proposed by the philosophers of antiquity, that he had started upon in the aftermath of the nervous collapse of 1729-31. What would guarantee the credibility of the theory was a reliable method, the ‘plain historical Method’ of Locke’s Essay that had already been used to good effect by Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson and Butler, but that would now be deployed to produce the comprehensive analysis of all the basic faculties of the mind that none of those philosophers had attempted. In order to give his method maximal respectability, Hume conjoined with his Lockeanism the rhetoric of the Newtonian science. It had by this time become a commonplace to assert Newton’s

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supremacy as the greatest natural philosopher that had ever lived.116 Hence it is no surprise to find Hume, in the introduction to the Treatise, taking upon himself the explanatory modesty of Newton’s natural philosophy, its willingness to accept the limits imposed upon speculation by experience, and its abhorrence of ‘conjectures and hypotheses’. We are not to expect an elucidation of the very most fundamental principles of the mind, from which, in the manner of seventeenth-century philosophy, more particular principles will be pretended to be deduced. There will come a point where we just have to accept that it is impossible to find a yet more general principle able to account for the laws we have formulated on the basis of our experiments. In the science of the mind, Hume warns the reader, there is a chance that the limits of explanation will be discovered very quickly indeed, since the mind’s experimentation upon itself tends to conceal its natural modes of operation. ‘We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of common life,’ Hume concludes, ‘and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension’.117

1.3.2.2 What Hume would publish first would be a work comprising two ‘books’, the first dedicated to the understanding, the second to the passions. There is little reason to doubt that his primary concern remained the establishment of truths in criticism and morality – and also, as the Advertisement of the Treatise makes clear, in politics. But what had to come first was a new account of the core of human nature, of the most basic cognitive and conative dimensions of the mind. This would provide a secure foundation for future investigations. Book One of the Treatise begins with an extraordinarily compressed recapitulation of the argument of Books One and Two of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. The case is made against the existence in the mind of innate ideas and principles. Ideas are divided into the simple and the complex. Complex ideas are divided in turn into ideas of relations, of modes, and of substances. At the same time, however, Hume makes it plain that he is doing more than merely following Locke’s lead. He introduces new terminology right at the outset, distinguishing between ‘impressions’, ‘all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul’, and ‘ideas’, ‘the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning’.118 In a footnote, Hume claims that in this he seeks to do no more than ‘restore the word, idea, to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions’.119 The explication of ideas, then, will be carried out in terms of their reduction to the impressions from which they derive. Locke’s key move, the refusal to mix analysis of the powers of the mind with the question of the physiological basis of thought, remains intact. Impressions are divided into those of reflection, which follow upon ideas, and those of sensation, the study of which ‘belongs more to anatomists and natural philosophers than to moral; and therefore shall not at present be enter’d upon’.120 Hume concludes the opening part of the Treatise with an endorsement of a principal argument of George Berkeley, one of Locke’s most trenchant critics. Where Locke had appeared to be willing to accept that the abstract ideas of most interest to philosophers are by their nature general and lacking in particular determination, Berkeley had argued that all ideas are in fact particular, and that generality is a function only of language. The meaning of the word ‘time’, for example, is to be explained in terms of particular instances of experienced duration, and not in terms of some supposed idea of temporality as such of which actual days and hours and minutes are instantiations. In a rare expression of praise for a contemporary, Hume declares that he looks upon Berkeley’s argument concerning abstraction as ‘one of the greatest and

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most valuable that has been made of late years in the republic of letters’.121 He would have been well aware that this was not a view shared by most of Berkeley’s readers at the time. Hume meant his reader to be startled by the combination of the familiar and the strange in the beginning of his Treatise.

1.3.2.3 By the time he has reached the end of Book One and started upon Book Two, things have become more unsettling still. A scepticism about the capacities of reason has been developed such as neither Locke nor Berkeley would have been prepared to accept, and the familiar picture of the understanding as controller and director of the emotions has been entirely dispensed with. Reason, it has turned out, is not up to the task assigned to it by the Stoic philosophers Hume was reading at Ninewells in his first years as an apprentice man of letters. Turned upon itself, it finds itself to be full of contradictions, and unable to provide us with reasons to believe any one thing rather than its contrary. Reason is not the authoritative governor of the passions, but rather, as Hume put it in what was perhaps the single most shocking passage of the entire Treatise, merely their slave, able to do nothing more than to serve and obey them.122 This made it necessary for a new explanation to be given of how it is that the passions are subdued and how ordinary social life is made possible. That is the task that occupies Hume in Book Two of the Treatise, and his principal guide here would seem to have been the author of The Fable of the Bees. This debt is nowhere acknowledged, but what Hume presents in Book Two – what in a sense he has to present, given what has been revealed about the impotence of reason in Book One – is an account of how the passions regulate themselves, and the regulation of passion by passion is Mandeville’s chief theme. It is, moreover, most unlikely that it was without premeditation that Hume began his treatment of the passions with an explication of pride, the passion that is the cornerstone of Mandeville’s theory of sociability in both parts of the Fable. Nevertheless, there are important respects in which Hume disagrees with Mandeville, not least in his refusal to endorse the thesis of fundamental selfishness and in the role he gives to ‘sympathy’. Hutcheson, it is reasonable to suppose, remained an important influence. Indeed, as we shall see, it is possible that Hutchesonian ideas are in play in Book One of the Treatise as well.

1.3.3.1 It may have been that the initial impetus behind the radical reconstruction of the relation between reason and passion that Hume presented in the Treatise came from a reading of the French sceptic Pierre Bayle in the early 1730s. In a letter of March 1732 Hume thanks his friend Michael Ramsay for ‘your trouble about Baile’, and adds that he hopes that ‘it is a Book you will yourself find Diversion & Improvement in’.123 Perhaps Hume had asked Ramsay, who lived in Edinburgh, to buy (or borrow) for him a copy of one of Bayle’s books, and to bring it with him when he next came to visit, but to make use of it himself in the mean time. It is not possible to say with certainty which book by Bayle Ramsay had troubled himself over. It could have been the Oeuvres Diverses, published relatively recently in 1727. But it is just as, if not more, likely to have been the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a book which was undoubtedly important to Hume during the writing of the Treatise. The Dictionnaire provided him with numerous brilliant demonstrations of the impossibility of the speculative metaphysical knowledge sought after by philosophers ancient and modern. Hume follows Bayle very closely in arguing towards the end of Book One of the Treatise that both materialist and immaterialist theories of the mind are riddled with absurdity and contradiction.124 He relies heavily on Bayle also in the part of Book One, ‘Of the ideas of space and time’, that comes immediately after his recasting of the elements of Locke’s philosophy. This is perhaps the most puzzling part of the entire Treatise, in respect both of the details of its arguments and its overall purpose. It is possible that Hume was entirely serious in

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offering a system of indivisible sensible minima as the solution to the skeptical antinomies concerning space and time posed by the Greek sceptic Zeno; but it is also possible that the point of the whole discussion is meant merely to show the impossibility of giving a satisfactory philosophical account of two of the most basic of all our concepts. Either way, Hume’s argument is given its structure by Bayle’s article ‘Zeno’, and Hume follows Bayle in his rejection of both infinite divisibility and the possibility of a vacuum.

1.3.3.2 Hume was however no more a strict disciple of Bayle than he was of Locke – or of anyone else. He meant to be original, and the single most innovative part of Book One of the Treatise was its examination of the nature of reasoning involved, not in the construction of elaborate metaphysical theories, but in the forming of commonplace beliefs in everyday life. In the Abstract, or summary, of Books One and Two that he would publish in 1740 in order to try to boost sales, Hume says that here was following up an observation made by Leibniz to the effect that it is ‘a defect in the common systems of logic, that they are very copious when they explain the operations of the understanding in the forming of demonstrations, but are too concise when they treat of probabilities, and those other measures of evidence on which life and action intirely depend, and which are our guides even in most of our philosophical speculations’.125 Here ‘logic’ is understood to be a part the science of the mind, and not the essentially normative discipline that it is today. Logic’s ‘sole end’, Hume says in the Abstract, ‘is to explain the principles and Operations of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas’.126 The philosophers of the modern period who had taken the reasoning faculty as their subject – including Locke, Malebranche, and Pascal – had written much about the way in which certainty is attained in mathematics and other ‘demonstrative’ disciplines, but they had not given sufficient attention to the ways in which beliefs are formed about matters with respect to which probability, not certainty, is the most that can be hoped for. This was a large omission indeed. Not only is it the case that life outside of the mathematician’s study is entirely regulated by judgments of probability, but the inductive natural philosophy of Boyle, Newton, and all the great scientists of the day was focused exclusively upon matters of empirical fact about which no certainty is to be had. In the longest of all of the parts of the Treatise, Part Three of Book One, Hume gave a detailed account of the reasoning that ordinary people and scientists do about matters of fact past, present, and future. Such reasoning, he decided at the outset, is conducted always in causal terms. When we concern ourselves with what once was, we consider the past as cause of the present; when we concern ourselves with what will be, we consider the present as cause of the future. What was needed, therefore, was an analysis of the way in which we reason about causes and effects: both an explanation of how we make causal inferences, and an explication of the ideas of cause, effect, and their connection.

1.3.3.3 Locke had laid it down that there are two grounds of probabilistic belief, ‘The conformity of any thing with our own Knowledge, Observation, and Experience’ and ‘The Testimony of others, vouching their Observation and Experience’.127 It was a consideration of testimony as a source for rational belief that led Hume to examine the epistemic status of reports of miracles – an examination that, as already mentioned, was to be excised from the published version of the Treatise. With respect to the first of Locke’s grounds of probability, Hume discovered a problem, the problem of how, exactly, observation and experience can be used as a basis for reasoned inferences about what the future or past. What would enable such inferences would be certainty that the laws of nature do not change and that nature is uniform and regular in its operations. But where might such certainty come from? How can we be sure that the laws of nature will not change between now and the time about which we want to make predictions, or that the laws of nature were not different in the distant past? It is not logically impossible that the

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laws of nature be different at one time than at another. The truths stating the laws of nature are not necessary truths with the same status as those of mathematics: to deny that they are truths does not generate contradictions. Nor, however, is it possible to use experience to prove that the laws of nature are do not change. That would be to reason in a circle, since we have only a limited amount of experience of the laws of nature, and what we are looking for is, precisely, reason to believe that what we have experienced is a good basis for forming beliefs about what we have not experienced. So it looks as though there is no reason to believe that the laws of nature do not change. And yet, even so, we very obviously do use the experience we have to make predictions about the future and to form explanatory hypotheses regarding the past. Hume’s conclusion is that we do so without making use of a principle to the effect that nature is constant and uniform in its operations. The beliefs that we form about the future and the unexperienced past are not inferences, or any other kind of rational operation. ‘When the mind, therefore’, Hume says, ‘passes from the idea of one object to the idea of belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate the ideas of these objects and unite them in the imagination’.128 What we are used to think of as a process of reasoning is in fact the work of the imagination. This was not an intrinsically sceptical point to make, and is not presented by Hume was such. In making it he was not recommending that we no longer use experience as a basis for forming beliefs about the causes and effects of the world we see around us. Rather, he sought to make it plain that the cognitive processes responsible for our most elementary beliefs were as yet very poorly understood.129

1.3.3.4 If reason was not involved in the production of everyday beliefs about the future and the past, then belief itself could not be what philosophers had taken it to be. In the everyday case, at least, belief was clearly the result neither of an intuitive grasp of truth nor of inference from premises to conclusion. What, then, was it? How does believing that, for example, it will rain tomorrow differ from merely conceiving that it might? The idea of rain is the same in the two cases, there is no difference of content, and so the difference must lie in the attitudes taken towards the idea, the ways in which they are regarded in conception on the hand and in belief in the other. But, again, what is the difference? ‘Here’, Hume says in the Abstract, ‘is a new question unthought of by philosophers’.130 His answer to the question is that what distinguishes belief from conception is a matter of feeling. An idea that is believed in as a reality feels different from an idea that is not so believed in. It has what Hume terms ‘an additional force and vivacity’; it is ‘more strong, firm and vivid’; it is more ‘lively’. Hume was aware that these words are vague and do no more than give an approximate characterisation of what it is to be in the grip of belief. In an ‘Appendix’ to Books One and Two published, almost two years later, with Book Three, he places emphasis more upon what he calls belief’s ‘greater firmness and solidity’ than upon liveliness and vivacity. Beliefs, he says there, ‘strike upon us with more force; they are more present to us; the mind has a firmer hold of them, and is more actuated and mov’d by them’.131 However they are described, the important point is that they are similar to the impressions which make up our actual first-person present-moment experience of the world. Impressions force reality upon us, and so do beliefs. It is not impossible that Hume was helped towards his characterization of belief by Hutcheson’s picture of the making of moral distinctions and judgments of beauty as functions of discrete senses rather than reason. Hutcheson presents no theory of belief as such, and Hume never acknowledges Hutcheson’s influence upon this aspect of his philosophy, but Hutcheson did at the very least provide a precedent in his use of feeling to do work that reason had been shown unable to do.132

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1.3.3.5 In addition to the question of the nature of belief there was that of how belief is produced. Here also Hume claimed to have identified a problem that no one before him had suspected to exist. Even if Hutcheson really was an influence with respect to the definition of belief, he could be no help in specifying how beliefs about the future and past are generated, since there is obviously no ‘sense’ at work in such cases. The explanation Hume gives involves, in fact, a dramatic reversal of one of the principal tenets of Hutcheson’s entire philosophy. In his differentiation between the natural and the merely artificial and conventional, Hutcheson had made use of processes of association, through which naturally reliable principals of mind are corrupted by bad company, religious bigotry, and political factionalism. In this Hutcheson had followed Locke, who had portrayed the association of ideas as a disease of the mind, a ‘sort of Madness’, which ‘gives Sence to Jargon, Demonstration to Absurdities, and Consistency to Nonsense’.133 Hume, however, saw in association the means by which to explain the very most basic aspects of mental functioning. Beliefs about the future, say, have their origins in a certain amount of experience of one kind of thing following another kind of thing, experience which generates a habitual disposition to associate the two things together, such that given the first thing, an idea of the second naturally arises in the mind. Not only does the idea arise, but in the process of association some of the vivacity and force of the impression of the first thing is transferred to the second, causing the idea of the second to attain the status of a belief. Much of Part Three of Book One is taken up with a full development of this account, including an elaborate analysis of the production of different degrees of probabilistic belief: belief based on experience which only partially supports it, belief derived from contradictory experience, belief formed by means of analogy. Hume also explains the formation of kinds of belief which are generally taken to be unwarranted, for example beliefs arising from ‘general rules’ not themselves grounded in experience – in other words, from prejudice. If anything can entitle the author of the Treatise to ‘so glorious a name as that of an inventor’, Hume says in the Abstract, ‘’tis the use he makes of the principle of the association of ideas, which enters into most of his philosophy’.134

1.3.3.6 Hume began his analysis of reasoning in terms of causes and effects with the observation that experience is of no use in explication of the power or efficacy by means of which causes supposedly make their effects happen. It is ordinarily thought to be part of the idea of cause and effect that there is some kind of necessary connection between them, but there appears to be no impression of such a connection from which its idea could be taken. Here, again, Hume was following Locke, and indeed most other philosophers of the period.135 But then what are we talking about when we speak of a necessary connection between causes and their effects? ‘There is no question,’ Hume says, ‘which on account of its importance as well as difficulty, has caus’d more disputes both among antient and modern philosophers. than this’.136 Hume’s answer is in essence that we derive the idea of necessary connection from our minds, from the feeling of being forced by experience to believe that this will happen and not that, a feeling which is projected out onto the world to be basis of the conviction that it is impossible that there be any event without a cause. Hume declares that this is the most violent paradox in the entire Treatise. It is followed, however, in Part Four of Book One, by a series of further paradoxes, as he deploys a whole series of sceptical arguments against the very possibility of certainty, against the existence of an external world of physical things existing independently of their being perceived, against the ancient metaphysics of substance and the modern metaphysics of a distinction in kind between ‘primary’ properties such as shape and size and ‘secondary’ qualities such as colour and taste, against personal identity through time, and against the possibility of speaking coherently about the ontology of the mind. He also turns scepticism against itself, pointing out that even if there are good

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reasons not to trust reason, not to believe in an external world, and not to believe in one’s continued existence through time, one cannot help but believe in these things as soon as one stops attending to the philosophical arguments against them. Nature, in the form of the association-driven imagination, is too strong for philosophical reason. The sceptic continues to reason and believe even while he believes that he ought not to – which is, of course, very fortunate for him.

1.3.3.7 In this scepticism about scepticism the presence of Bayle is tangible again, in particular the Bayle picked up on and endorsed by Mandeville. In one of the key works collected in the Oeuvres Diverses, the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète, Bayle had shown at length, in Mandeville’s words, ‘That Man is so unaccountable a Creature as to act most commonly against his Principle’.137 He had in the same context argued that people’s religious beliefs are irrelevant when it comes to determining the moral character of their actions, and that there is no more difficulty to conceiving of a virtuous atheist than there is to conceiving of an immoral Christian. This line of argument impressed Mandeville, and it impressed Hume too.138 But it would be a mistake to imagine that it came perfectly easily to Hume, to accept philosophy’s defeat at its own hands. At the very end of Book One of the Treatise Hume presents what appears to be a dramatized account of his own state of mind as he first realized the full extent of the scepticism he had unleashed and then found a way of putting it one side so that he could proceed with his study of the passions and of morality, criticism, and politics. When we reflect on our powers of understanding, he declares, we are faced with a choice between conceiving of them in terms of a faculty of reason which subverts itself and reduces to zero the probability of any and every proposition it considers, or in terms of automatic dispositions of the imagination which have nothing rational about them at all. And faced with such a choice, Hume seems to lose his grip on himself and on the purpose of philosophical enquiry. ‘Where am I, or what?’, he asks; ‘From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me. I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty’.139 There are echoes of the language of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks in this passage, and it is tempting to read it in consequence as a final farewell, so to speak, to a youthful infatuation with the Shaftesburyan, and Stoic, conception of philosophy as discovery of the essential truth about oneself through the exercise of reason.140 The philosopher, Hume has discovered, is no different in kind from other people. He has no special faculty of insight, and no special grasp of the nature of human existence. Hume describes himself as recovering his equilibrium by means of an evening with friends, dining, conversing, and playing backgammon, and as returning to his studies later inspired by nothing more elevated than a mixture of curiosity and ambition.

1.3.4.1 The subjects that Hume’s curiosity pushes him on to investigate are, he says, ‘the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me’.141 It is to the government of the passions that he turns first: not the government of the passions by reason, but instead the government by the passions of mind and of action. Hutcheson’s account of the passions is entitled An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions. There many books published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with similar titles, all, like Hutcheson’s Essay, coupling analyses of the passions with recommendations as how they can be regulated. It is a very striking feature of Book Two of the Treatise that it has no didactic aspirations whatsoever. It is purely descriptive, or, to

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use a word that Hume would introduce in Book Three to characterise his entire approach to philosophy, anatomical. Here, again, one feels the influence of Mandeville. At the beginning of the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, Mandeville has one of the participants in the dialogue declare that ‘What Moralists have taught us concerning the Passions, is very superficial and defective. Their great Aim was the Publick Peace, and the Welfare of Civil Society; to make Men governable, and unite Multitudes in one common Interest’. He continues: ‘The Moralists have endeavour’d to rout Vice, and clear the Heart of all hurtful Appetites and Inclinations: We are beholden to them for this in the same Manner as we are to Those who destroy Vermin, and clear the Counties of all noxious Creatures. But may not a Naturalist dissect Moles, try Experiments upon them, and enquire into the Nature of their Handicraft, without Offence to the Mole-catchers, whose Business it is only to kill them as fast as they can?’ And a little later he adds: ‘most of the Passions are counted to be Weaknesses, and commonly call’d the Frailties; whereas they are the very Powers that govern the whole Machine; and whether they are perceived or not, determine or rather create the Will that immediately precedes every deliberate Action’.142 This is the spirit in which Hume examines the passions.

1.3.4.2 Hume’s desire to be recognised as an innovator is immediately apparent in Book Two. His analysis of the passions is organised around a distinction between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ passions that was his own invention. In the category of ‘direct’ passions fall the passions that were the principal concern of most writers on the subject, beginning with the Stoics: they include ‘desire, aversion, grief, joy, fear, despair and security’, all of which ‘arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure’. In the category of ‘indirect passions’ fall those which ‘proceed from the same principles, but by the conjunction of other qualities’: they include ‘pride, humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, with their dependants’.143 Hume devotes two out of three parts of Book Two to the indirect passions, and one section of the third part to the direct passions. The indirect passions were the passions most of interest to satirists, sceptics and cynics, to those, from Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld through to Mandeville and Swift, interested in showing human nature to be rather less admirable than people generally like to believe. Hume terms them ‘indirect’ because they are generated, as he says, by the ‘conjunction’ of good or evil, pain or pleasure, with the ‘qualities’ that people, ourselves and others, possess. I might feel simple desire at the sight of a beautiful house. But if the house belongs to me, it is pride that I will feel; and if the house belongs to you, I will feel love (in the form of admiration), and possibly envy too. The indirect passions arise out of connections that obtain between people and their possessions – not just material possessions, of course, but also their characters, and their families. Which indirect passion I feel about the beautiful house will depend on the relation it stands in in relation either to myself or to others. And, as Hume emphasizes, they have a strongly social component. Pride is intensified by my sense of how I am regarded by others, as, of course, is humility (or shame). Love and hatred are intensified and diminished by my sense of how the object of my love or hatred is regarded by others. The indirect passions are thus going to be the salient passions in societies, such as those of eighteenth-century Europe, obsessed with property, with visual appearance, and with social status.

1.3.4.3 The passions on which Hume focuses are pride, humility, love and hatred. His approach is to separate out three questions concerning each them. First, there is the question of, so to speak, the feel of the passion, the distinctive subjective experience of being in its grip. The feeling in every case is, Hume says, indefinable, and there is nothing for the philosopher to say about it. Then there is the question of the passion’s object, what it is that the passion is directed at. In the case of pride and humility, the object is oneself; in the case of love and hatred, the object is another person. Again, there is not much for

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the philosopher to say about this: it is simply a brute fact about the passions that they have the objects that they do. Thirdly there is the question of the passion’s cause, what it is that makes me proud or ashamed of myself, what it is that makes me love or hate another. And here there is a job for the philosopher, since the causes of the passions are both great in number and vast in variety. The passions are excited by qualities of the mind such as wit, good sense, judgment, learning, courage, justice and integrity; by physical qualities such as beauty, strength, agility, skill in sporting pursuits, and dexterity; and by things we are related to in any number of ways, including ‘Our country, family, children, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs, cloaths’.144 But how is it that all these things are such as to give rise to pride or humility, love or hatred? It is not plausible, Hume says, to imagine that it is with the cause of passions as it is with their objects. Nature is parsimonious in its operations, and is most unlikely to have fitted us with ‘original’ or innate dispositions to be pleased by each of these things, and to be pained by their absence. It is true, as Hume puts it with his age’s usual confidence in the uniformity of human nature through history and around the world, ‘that in all nations and ages, the same objects still give rise to pride and humility; and that upon the view even of a stranger, we can know pretty nearly what will either encrease or diminish his passions of this kind’.145 But this is surely evidence of the existence of general principles able to explain the operations of all the various passions in each and every one of us. It is an unskilful and ignorant natural philosopher who has recourse to a new explanatory principle every time he meets with something to account for. Just as modern physical science takes theoretical simplicity and elegance as its ideal, so will Hume’s science of the passions. As in the case of the understanding, it is the mechanism of association that turns out to be at the heart of the matter, picking up on relations between ideas and creating dispositions of mind to move from one idea to another, and picking up also on relations between impressions, to the same effect.

1.3.4.4 It might have been in order to distance himself from Hutcheson’s approach to the mind that Hume emphasized the importance to his analysis of the passions of the discovery of maximally general explanatory principles. Hutcheson, after all, had postulated not only a distinct ‘moral sense’, but also a sense of beauty, and a sense of honour. As we will see in the next chapter, Hume’s principal goal in his moral philosophy is to show that an explanation of the moral sentiments has no need of a special sense of morality. But Hume was equally hostile to the Mandevillean view that all of the passions, and indeed all of the moral sentiments, can be depicted as manifestations of the single principle of human selfishness. The key to navigating a middle way between Hutcheson and Mandeville lay in a principle of the mind that Hutcheson had not ignored, but that was not central to his theory: what he called ‘the public sense’, and what Hume introduces as ‘that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own’.146 No quality of human nature is more remarkable than sympathy, Hume says, ‘both in itself and its consequences’. In the context of the analysis of the passions, sympathy’s role is to explain the importance we attach to the feelings and opinions of others, and how it is that those feelings and opinions sometimes increase and sometimes diminish the passions that we are subject to. Sympathy is matter of being tuned into and responsive to other people, of it being usually impossible for us not to be affected by our sense of how we are seen by others. On some theories, sympathy involves me imagining myself into the situation of the other, and it is possible for this approach to be made consistent with the selfish theory of human nature: what I actually do, it was sometimes said, is think myself into the other’s situation and imagine what I would feel were I that other person.147 On Hume’s view, by contrast, sympathy involves being affected, even infected, by the state of the other. Hume depicts emotion as a kind

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of contagion which can be ‘caught’ by those around us. And this contagiousness turns out to be the key to Hume’s explication of the basis of human social life. There is no need of Mandevillean ‘politicians’ in order for peaceful coexistence in society to be possible. We are always already sociable beings, concerned at how we are seen by others, in need of their approval and admiration.

1.3.4.5 Sympathy, then, allows Hume to depict the realm of the passions as more or less self-regulated, in so far as the regulation of the passions of each person is carried out by that person’s attunement to the passions of those around him. It is in this way that the consequences of the sceptical destruction of the faculty of reason in Book One are mitigated. The fact that the passions govern themselves means that they do not need to be governed from outside by the understanding. This somewhat takes the sting from arguments made in the third part of Book Two concerning, first, the will, and, secondly, practical reason. The will had traditionally been conceived of as a kind of executive power in the mind, as the means by which choices are made and decisions implemented. Hume can find no place for such a faculty in an experientially grounded science of the mind. It is a matter of plain experience, he argues, that, given the usual circumstances, actions reliably follow their usual motives. Certainly we all speak and act as if we regarded people as entirely predictable in what they do. And where we accept that they are not predictable, or that they have acted out of character, we assume that there is still some motive or circumstance that would, if we knew it, make their actions perfectly intelligible. We speak and act, in other words, as if human behaviour is just as much a matter of necessity as the behaviour of animals, the growth of plants, and the operation of weather systems. The fact that we do not understand human behaviour well enough to grasp the nature of the necessary connections that there seem to be between motives and circumstances and actions is not evidence of any deep difference between human beings and the natural world, since, as has already been seen in Book One’s account of causal reasoning in general, we do not in any case of a putative causal connection have insight into what it is in the cause that makes the effect happen. And the fact that human behaviour looks to be determined wholly by motive and circumstance means that there is nothing for a faculty of will to do in an explanation of why we do what we do. There is therefore no place for an executive faculty of choice and decision-making in Hume’s theory of the mind. The will is reduced to the status of a kind of epiphenomenal accompaniment to action: Hume describes it as, merely, ‘the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind’.148

1.3.4.6 Thus Hume, like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, portrays the motions of our bodies and minds as as thoroughly necessitated as the motions of insects and rocks, but he does so in way intended to rid the doctrine of necessity of its usual threatening and subversive connotations. He presents it as, simply, a matter of common sense and ordinary experience.149 The idea that the will is free and that by means of it we are able to countermand the influence of motive and circumstance is portrayed as nothing more than a philosopher’s myth. Hume adopts the same approach when he turns to an explicit discussion of the role of reason in action. His target here is the idea that human nature is a site of conflict between reason on the one hand and passion on the other. The philosopher wants us to believe that this is the most fundamental dimension of human existence, and that life is lived well only to the extent that the conflict is won by reason. ‘On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded’, Hume observes; ‘nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, as popular declamations, than this suppos’d pre-eminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine

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origin of the former have been display’d to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on’.150 Hume’s own position is not the sceptical one that reason is bound always to lose out to passions that have all the advantage when it comes to strength and persistence. Rather, it is that no such conflict between reason and passion ever takes place. Reason by its very nature is unable to enter into a contest with passion for control over human life. Reason, as we might say now, is purely theoretical in its concerns, and the most it can do with respect to action is to identify means to ends and point out that some ends are unattainable. The real struggle is one that takes place between passions. It only seems as though we are caught between reason and passion because some passions are so ‘calm’, and cause so little disorder in the soul, that they feel as though they are not passions at all.

1.3.4.7 It follows that strength of mind, the virtue that philosophers would like to present as the result of the suppression of passion by reason, is to be understood in terms of, in Hume’s words, ‘the prevalence of the calm passions over the violent’.151 Hume gives no advice as to how such prevalence can be ensured. In light of what he has said about the will and practical reason it is not obvious what we can each of us do about the configuration of passions that determines our character. In the final part of Book Two an analysis is given of the dynamics of the passions, of how passions increase and diminish in violence as a result of such things as custom and repetition, the operations of the imagination, the opening up and reduction of distance in space and in time, and changes in judgments of probability. Again, Hume refuses to offer anything in the way of the hortatory and didactic, and confines himself to the purely explanatory and ‘anatomical’. The philosophical pose adopted here could hardly be further from that of the Stoics and from that of neo-Stoics such as Shaftesbury. And in a final audacious twist, philosophy is reconceptualised as itself a passion, which is to say, as one passion among the many others at play in human nature. Philosophy as Hume describes it here is simply an expression of natural curiosity. It has a hold on some strong enough to cause them to destroy their health and neglect their fortunes, but it is in truth no more mysterious or elevated a concern than a passion for hunting, with which it has, according to Hume, many similarities. With this Hume’s first published book reached its conclusion. The brief discussion ‘Of curiosity, or the love of truth’ returns the reader to the drama of the conclusion of Book One, and reinforces the sense that Hume’s new science of human nature embodied a new vision of philosophy itself. We will see in the next chapter, however, that in distancing himself from the elevated aspirations of the ancients and their modern followers, Hume was not giving up altogether on the idea that there might be a practical role for philosophy to play.

1.3.5.1 Having completed a full draft of Books One and Two of the Treatise, Hume travelled to London in the autumn of 1737 to find a publisher. He journeyed via Tours, from where he wrote to Michael Ramsay and made recommendations as to what would help him understand the manuscript he was about to be sent. Ramsay should ‘read once over le Recherche de la Verité of Pere Malebranche, the Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr Berkeley, some of the more metaphysical Articles of Bailes Dictionary; such as those [?] of Zeno, & Spinoza. Des-Cartes Meditations would also be useful but [?] don’t know if you will find them easily among your Acquaintances’. These, Hume says, will enable Ramsay to ‘easily comprehend the metaphysical Parts of my Reasoning’, by which is meant, presumably, the second and fourth parts of Book One, and perhaps also certain aspects of that book’s third part. It is hard to know how seriously to take this

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advice of Hume’s. The reading list he was giving Ramsay was in itself a very demanding one; and it is just not true that Malebranche, Berkeley, Bayle and Descartes make anything in the Treatise easily comprehensible. Just as significant as this indication of the intellectual company Hume now took himself to be keeping is what he goes on to say: that as to the non-metaphysical parts of his reasoning, ‘they have so little Dependence on all former systems of Philosophy, that your natural Good Sense will afford you Light enough to judge of their Force and Solidity’.152 Hume is likely referring to the explanatory account of probabilistic reasoning in the third part of Book One and to the entirety of Book Two. In letters written to Henry Home once in London this sense on Hume’s part of the originality of what he had written is more marked still. He tells Home that his opinions and his terminology are so new that he cannot give even ‘a general notion’ of the argument of the Treatise.153 He says also that his ‘principles’ are ‘so remote from all the vulgar Sentiments on this Subject, that were they to take place, they wou’d produce almost a total Alteration in Philosophy’.154 Hume does not say exactly what it is that he took to be revolutionary in his book, but it may be imagined that he had in mind its assault on the role of reason in the production of belief and the regulation of the passions, and the replacement of the picture of man as a rational animal with a picture of human nature as determined almost entirely by the interplay of feelings.

1.3.5.2 Hume had surely made Henry Home’s acquaintance during his time at Ninewells between 1725 and 1734. Home’s family home at Kames was only ten miles away. By the late 1730s the legal career of the future Lord Kames was beginning to take off. It had taken Home to London in the spring of 1737, and there, with a self-confidence that was entirely characteristic, he had twice called on Joseph Butler, then in the service of the Queen, because he had been impressed by Butler’s recently published Analogy of Religion. On both occasions there was philosophical conversation.155 Hume’s letters to Home make it plain that the latter had recommended that his friend also try to make Butler’s acquaintance. An endorsement from Butler would, after all, facilitate the publication of Hume’s book. Home wrote a letter of introduction; Hume, in order that Doctor Butler would not be offended by anything he might find in the Treatise, ‘castrated’ his book, and cut off what he describes to Kames as its ‘noble Parts’.156 Hume does not say what these parts were.157 Nor do we know whether they were reattached when the book was eventually sent to the printers for publication. They probably were. At any rate, the meeting between the Anglican clergyman and the aspiring young author never took place. Butler was not in town when Hume called on him. Somehow or other, Hume found a publisher for his book even so, despite the fact that he wanted it to appear anonymously, and also despite the fact that he had, and desired, neither patron nor subscribers to underwrite the cost of printing. A copy of the agreement between him and John Noon of Cheapside survives, dated 26 September 1738. It stipulates that in return for fifty pounds and twelve bound copies, Hume would give Noon the right to ‘have hold and enjoy the sole property benefit and advantage of [the Treatise] not exceeding one thousand copies thereof’.158 The book would be printed in two volumes, of octavo size.159 No second edition would appear unless Hume bought at full price all unsold copies of the first. The Treatise sold at ten shillings (i.e., half a pound Sterling) a copy. This was a safe enough investment on Noon’s part, and two years later Hume would describe himself as having ‘concluded somewhat of a hasty Bargain with my Bookseller from Indolence & an Aversion to Bargaining’.160 At the end of January 1739 there appeared on the shelves of Noon’s shop A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, with an enigmatic epigram from Tacitus on its title page: ‘Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire, quæ velis; & quæ sentias, dicere licet’, ‘Rare are the happy times, when one can feel what one wants, and say what one pleases’.161

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1 Hume went to college younger than most, but not much younger. His brother John, for example, went when he was XX. Nor was it unusual to leave college without graduating: see Grant, Story of the University, vol. 1, p. 26 2 3 4 John Boswell learned French from Scott: PRCPE 20 (1990), pp. 68-9. 5 Logic sive arts ratiocinandi, Amsterdam, 1692. 6 Drummond called pious by Boswell. John Loudon’s criticism of modern logices: Stewart pp. 15-16. 7 Probably Exercitationes rationales de Deo Divinisque Perfectionibus (Utrecht, 1685; 2nd edition with attack on innate ideas 1695). 8 T 219 9 John Boswell, who took Drummond’s class in 1726-27: ‘He begun his Colledge with reading Homer, and the Gr. Testatment. He dwelt far longer by far on the parts of speech than Mr Scott did. He likewise sed Herodian with us, Clerk [Le Clerc]’s Logics, Devry [De Vries]’s Metaphys. & a small compend of Logics of his own. These were but few as none that Lov’d said study they thought it a pedantic inspid thing. It was said that Mr Drummond did not manage them wt spirit enough, we had no public impunging of Theses save only in our owne Class where there was so little Care taken that the students often gott one another’s Theseses to read. Mr Drummond was a Pious man, & of some Learning, & was mighty civil & kinde to all his scholars, even to the poorest of them’ (69). 10John Boswell, took Stuart’s class 1727-28: ‘Mr Robert Stuart Pr. of natural Philosophy was call’d an universal scholar, with all this he had a facetious (or affected at least) temper. He was little in stature of a swarthy complection, dress’t carelessly, was for most part chewing tobacco; you would have thought that in his Class He was more at pains to make you laugh than to teach you N. Phyl. He took his head much up about Church affairs, & was said to have been realy a Pious man. He was kinde to all but especially to poor good Ladds. I learn’d with him | Keill’s Introduct. to N. P. [James] Gregory’s optic. his own Hydrostat. and Keil’s Astronomy’ (pp. 69-70); Carlyle says that ten years or so later he was ‘worn out with age’ and that he ‘had never excelled’ 11 Keill, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy (1720) (but originally in Latin NB) 12 Physiological Library; Barfoot 13 Grant i 277; three of the graduands we will meet below: Hugh Blair, William Cleghorn, John Witherspoon; Grant’s remark about how this was in the interests of the Church: i 279-80. 14 Berkeley maths books in Hume library 15 LDH i 13. 16 MOL 17 MOL 18 EMPL 102. 19 MOL 20 [see Ramsay of O on Forbes of Culloden: vol 1, 63] 21 Johannes Voet, Compendium juris juxta seriem pandectarum, adjectis differentiis juris civilis et canonici; Arnoldus Vinnius, Institutionum seu Elementorum D. Justiani. There was a copy of the former in [the Hume library], but, being a copy of the 1732 edition, it cannot have been the book used by Hume when a reluctant student of law in the 1720s. 22 T 526

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23 See also discussion of Roman law, and ref to Institutes Bk 2 Tit. 1 § 28, at T 512 fn 24 1667 edition of De iure in Hume library; also a 1689 edition of Grotius on the Xian religion. 25 Archiwum p. 138 26 Works i 93. 27 Hume’s Greek teacher had written an annotated compendium of Grotius while a Regent: Emerson, Essays, p. 10. 28 E 307. 29 LDH i 9. 30 LDH i 9. 31 LDH i 10. 32 See Rivers 33 C i 283 34 C i 334 fn. 35 C i 292 36 C i 312 37 LDH i 10. 38 LDH i 14. 39 C i 122. 40 Emerson ‘The man who…’; Nor does Hume appear to have been very responsive to the beauties of nature, which might explain his unusual resistance to the supposed force of the argument from design. 41 LDH i 11. 42 C i 336 43 Spectator no. 412 44 EMPL 191. Quotation from Spectator no. 345. A passage from the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, portrays Addison as, like Cicero and La Bruyere, a ‘philosopher’ of the kind ‘who purposes only represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours’ (E 7). Ref in standard of taste 45 E 7. 46 LDH i 13. 47 In the Advertisement to XXX, H claims that T was conceived and planned while he was still at college. This is surely an exaggeration. Doesn’t fit with letter to physician. 48 School curriculum overwhelmingly religious until some time in the 19th century: Emerson, Essays, p. 56 49 Conf p. 4 50 Conf p. 17 51 Conf p. 217 52 Boswell; 53 WDM 412-25. It is a little strange that Hume had been given The Whole Duty of Man to read. Its author was Anglican rather than Presbyterian. But Boswell evinces no surprise at it, and when Hume confesses to Hutcheson he takes his catalogue of virtues from Cicero and not from The Whole Duty of Man, the implication is that Hutcheson would recognise the Whole Duty as an instance of overly strict orthodoxy. 54 C i 6 55 C i 297-98. 56 C ii 70 57 Spectator 543 58 LDH i 154. 59 Boswell

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60 Hume appears to have had an early interest in religious mysticism – in the letter to the physician he mentions that he has been looking into the writings of both the French mystics ‘& in those of our Fanatics here’ – but there is no reason to think that he felt any affinity for it. 61 ‘Answering Bayle’s question’ 62 LDH i 13. 63 Here I agree with Brandt; also Stewart 64 LDH i 14. 65 LDH i 16. 66 LDH i 16. 67 Hobbes 68 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, London 1733, p. 98. 69 Essay 1.i.2, p. 43. 70 Butler Pref 71 72 73 But see JPW piece in Hume and Hume’s Connexions; and Penelhum 74 Thus to be contrasted with H’s later works intended for students 75 Hutcheson Pref to Inq 76 Butler Dissertation §1 77 Illustrations, p. 284. 78 Kemp Smith on Hutch and Hume 79 NB, FN in PECHU I re just these features of Hutcheson and Butler 80 Essay, p. 2. 81 Essay, p. 58 82 Dropped in later editions; why? 83 THN xvii; ‘England’ 84 FB i 371. 85 FB i 382 86 FB i 380 87 Fable, p. 27 88 FB i 132. 89 FB ii 141. 90 FB i 33. 91 FB i 33. 92 FB ii 149. 93 FB ii 205. 94 FB ii 211. 95 See T … 96 Dating 97 H claims in the letter that he read all of modern literature. That would have included history. He may well have learned Italian in order to read the histories of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The latter is referred to in THN. 98 In what follows I am indebted to John P. Wright, ‘Hume on the origin of modern honour: a study in Hume’s philosophical development’, XXX 99 EOH p. 14 100 Essay 101 LDH i 17. 102 THHD; here and in the following para I owe much to JPW … 103 Burton and Mossner

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104 JPW 105 XXX; Hume on Ramsay in NHR 13.7. Hume describes his reception in Paris by Ramsay at LDH i 22. 106 MOL 107 LDH i 20 108 LDH i 21 109 Tolonen Hume Studies 110 LDH i 21. 111 Philological Quarterly 52 (1973), pp. 314-5. 112 Mossner 1947 p. 32 113 Miracles letter: LDH i 361 114 NLDH 2. 115 review which mentions the ‘egotisms’ 116 Indeed, in the Letters concerning the English Nation, Voltaire is willing to accept the proposition that Newton is a greater man than ‘Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, &c.’: ‘That Man claims our Respect, who commands over the Minds of the rest of the World by the Force of Truth, not those who enslave their fellow Creatures; He who is acquainted with the Universe, not They who deface it’ (pp. 83-4). Such hyperbole was not unusual: see [Buchdahl, Feingold]. 117 THN Intro p. xix. 118 THN p. 1 (1.1.1.1). 119 THN p. 2 fn. 120 THN p. 8 (1.1.2.XXX). 121 THN p. 17 (1.1.7.1). 122 THN p. 415 (2.3.3.XXX). 123 LDH i 12. 124 Spinoza article 125 T Abs 647; Theodicy XXX 126 T Abs 646. 127 Essay IV.xv.4, p. 656. 128 THN p.92 (1.3.6.XXX). 129 Owen, Garrett, etc 130 T Abs 652 131 T App 624 132 NKS; Hutcheson not the only moral sense theorist 133 Essay II.xxxiii.18, p. 401. 134 T Abs 661-2 135 Locke on reflection as source of idea of power 136 T 156 (1.3.14.XXX). 137 FB i XXX 138 M’s book on religion; H’s memorandum 139 T 269 (1.4.7.XXX). 140 Echoes of C 141 T 271 (1.4.7.XXX) 142 EOH, pp. 4, 5, 6. 143 T 276-7: 2.1.1.XXX. 144 T 279: 2.1.2.XXX. 145 T 281: 2.1.3.XXX 146 T 316: 2.1.11.XXX. 147 Hobbes/Mandeville/Smith

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148 T 399: 2.3.1.2. 149 See my book… 150 T 413: 2.3.3.1. 151 T 418: 2.3.3.XXX. 152 Polish letters 153 LDH i 23-4. 154 NLDH 3. 155 See Ross, pp. 35-6. 156 NLDH 3. 157 It is fairly plain from Hume’s letter to Kames that the ‘nobler’ parts of the Treatise cut off so as not to offend Butler did not, as is commonly thought, include the first draft of what would become ‘Of Miracles’. 158 NLS 23159/4. 159 Sher on book sizes 160 LDH i 38. 161 Russell on epigram?