DAVID HUME

The book on David Hume given as one of Professor Morley's series of English Men of Letters, could hardly have been entrusted to better hands than those of Professor Huxley. In the general tenour of their philosophical conclusions both the subject and writer of the biography substantially agree, and there is also a good deal of resemblance in the character of their intellects. Both are eminently characterised by the qualities of clearness and distinctness of vision, and precision and lucidity of statement. In their temperaments they, no doubt, differ considerably, and there is a strongly-marked contrast between the calm, cold spirit of Hume and the vigorous combativeness of Huxley. There is another difference between them of a more fundamental nature. Both are ready to recognise, or rather eager to affirm, the rigorous limits by which all human knowledge and human thought are restricted to the matter furnished by experience. But these limits having been accepted, the procedure of the two men is not exactly the same. With Hume all that lies outside the limits of experience— since we can know nothing of it, and it is childish to talk of, or care for, or be influenced by that which is and must remain essentially unknown—is for him virtually non-existent. That which we cannot in any degree know is equivalent for him with that which has no existence. But it is not so with Professor Huxley. He has, as has been said before, the tenets of unbelief, united with the temper of belief. He appears in many passages of his works to be haunted, and, indeed, almost oppressed, by the consciousness how much human feelings and human life, and the life and existence of nature, are influenced by the unknown amid which the little area of the knowable is but as a petty island in an infinite sea. And so it is that even in the case of self-assured science that visitations come of "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," and all the old problems and the primal sense of mystery come back again to the mind with undiminished force.

Professor Huxley's account of Hume and his philosophy appears to be animated by an eager spirit of recognition due from what is most essentially characteristic of modern thought to Hume, as its truest and earliest representative. Hume remains the strongest and greatest Agnostic who has contributed to the philosophical thought of the world. If the desire of his present expositor had been to show how much of the agnosticism of the present day is directly derived from Hume as, if not its parent, its first reducer to a scientific system, he could not have done so more effectually than he has in the present eminently readable and valuable little book.

 Only a small part of the work is devoted to the uneventful life of Hume. But that is sufficient to give an interesting picture of a singularly calm, shrewd, upright, independent, amiable man. It is curious to be reminded of the estimate of Hume formed by his mother, a woman of great merit and intelligence, who is said to have observed, " Our Davie's a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded." A remark possibly as apocryphal as a lately-quoted criticism on Napoleon Buonaparte—" A good fellow, but stupid." Hume is one of the large class of original thinkers who have owed very little to schools and universities, and he acquired his knowledge and discipline by study and life long reading. He was intended for the law, but the profession was distasteful to him, and he, as he says, "could think of no other way of pushing my fortunes in the world but that of a scholar and philosopher." His reading contributed to the calm stoical temper shown in his life, and he tells us that while reading Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch "I was continually fortifying myself with reflections, against death, and poverty, and shame, and pain, and all the other calamities of life." He resolved to "make a very frigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature." His earliest work, his Treatise on Human Nature, was composed before he was 25, and though he afterwards spoke of it as having fallen "deadborn from the press," it seems that it attracted attention, and was reviewed on its appearance as showing "incontestable marks of a great capacity, of a soaring genius, but young and not yet thoroughly practised." Subsequently he published his Essays, Moral and Political, which were received with much more notice and pecuniary success. His various philosophical and historical works followed, and broadened and raised his reputation till he became one of the recognised leaders of philosophic thought in Europe. He went to Paris as secretary of the embassy of Lord Hertford, and was received with honour in the highest circles of France. He returned to Edinburgh in possession of the "very opulent" income of £1,000 a year, and, as Mr. Huxley says, he "determined to take what remained to him of life pleasantly and easily," a result to which his easy, circumstances and charging temper contributed. Indeed, it may be said that the only malevolent emotion which ruffled, his peace of mind was hatred to England and Englishmen. When the London mob went into an ecstasy of excitement, cheering and Liberty," Hume wrote :—"Oh ! how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted, totally and finally—the revenue reduced to half—public credit fully discredited by bankruptcy— the third of London in ruins, and the rascally mob subdued! I think I am not too old to despair of being witness to all these blessings." He died at the age of 65, having just before written My Own Life. . . . .

In the account which Professor Huxley has given of Hume's philosophy, he has gone beyond the province of a compiler, and even of an expositor. In some points he shows that Hume has been inconsistent with his own most settled principles, in others that he has not sufficiently developed their consequences and results. He admits that "here and there, it must be confessed that more is seen of my thread than of Hume's beads. My excuse must be an ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear." In pursuance of this object he has endeavoured to exhibit and to harmonise Hume's views on the scope of philosophy, the origin and warrant of knowledge, necessary truths, miracles, the origin of religions and theology, the doctrine of immortality, liberty of the will, and the principles and sanction of morals. It is needless to say of Professor Huxley's work that it is throughout clear and intelligent, and the compressed space into which he has put his sketch of the remarkable labours of the great thinker is such as to mock any attempts at further condensation.

Looking only at the results which have arisen from Hume's philosophy, the student is tempted to doubt whether any thinker, from the days of Aristotle downwards, ever succeeded in exercising a more profound and permanent influence on the currents of human thought. This is not so much due to the commanding intellectual power of the man—considerable as this was—as to the fact that he, with that good fortune which only comes to men of great insight and sagacity, placed himself in the direct line which human thought has since his time mainly pursued. On one side Hume is to be largely credited with supplying the stimulus which initiated the cause of intellectual thought which gave birth to the philosophy of modern Germany, which, whatever may be thought of its results, will always remain one of the most wonderful movements of the intellectual powers of mankind. As every student of philosophy knows, the obligations of Kant to Hume were great and direct, and much as the philosopher of Königsberg differed in his completed results from the Scotch thinker, it remains true that it was the pregnant doctrine of Hume respecting causation that first set Kant on that analysis of the conditions of human knowledge which gave birth to the famous Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which exerted so profound an influence on modern philosophy. While these were among the results of the influence of Hume in Germany, in England the effects of his teachings have been different. There it has been rather the negative, the limiting and restricting influences of his philosophy, that have been the most powerful, or we might say the most seminative. To us he has been, as we called him before, the first and the greatest of the Agnostics, and that spirit which is everywhere found in present day thought, even in the most unlooked-for quarters, which exhibits itself by a cheerful or a sad, an eager or a despairing recognition of the very narrow limits within which human knowledge is confined, this is traceable by direct ascent to Hume as its source and first representative. That spirit which, when it finds transcendental metaphysicians disputing about the Unconditioned or the Absolute, or theologians consigning each other to perdition about differences regarding matters about which they know no more than a child, reminds them how rigidly human knowledge is restricted by the limits of human experience, and that all beyond this is to us as the "luminiferous ether" or the infinity of space—that is to say, mere void forms of thought—all this is the spirit of Hume still potent in its mild, cold, keen, slightly sarcastic intelligence. His method of thinking has received a vast accession of strength from the growth of physical science. That method was essentially the application to the method and products of thought of the system of experimental inquiry which had proved so powerful and productive in the field of science. Since his days the realm of science has enormously enlarged. Its sovereignty is now so vast and commanding that the forces which formerly opposed its growth have shrunk and faded in its presence. The addition to the mental arsenel of mankind of a new and most potent organism of thought, the idea of evolution, has changed and transformed all human knowledge. Starting from the facts of experience, inquiry has been enabled to discover an experiential origin of what seemed most intuitive and transcendental in the world of ideas, and we have been able to discover in the race education and race inheritance of humanity sufficient origin for all those instincts and ideas which are given, as it were, a priori to the individual. It has proved that by strictly adhering to the rule of limiting ourselves to the bounds of experience those bounds have widened, and the term experience has acquired a new meaning. It now signifies not the narrow petty experience of one individual life, but all the vast aggregate of the thoughts and observations, and sentiments, and education of the great whole of humanity, from its dawn on the world to the present day, a great and matchless inheritance, wider, richer, more ample, more various than the wildest imaginations of metaphysics or myth, and at the same time a living reality in which even the meanest of mankind has a share and interest.

It would be far beyond our limits to attempt to indicate even the main points in which Hume and modern Agnosticism are at one with each other. The method on which the Scottish philosopher relied for the destruction of the fallacies of false metaphysics and superstition was "to inquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects. We must submit to this fatigue, in order to live at ease ever after; and must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterated." Upon which Professor Huxley remarks, " Near a century and a half has elapsed since these brave words were shaped by David Hume's pen, and the business of carrying the war into the enemy's camp has gone on but slowly. Like other campaigns, it long languished for want of a good base of operations. But since physical science, in the course of the last 50 years, has brought to the front an inexhaustible supply of heavy artillery of a new pattern, warranted to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest skulls, things are looking better; though hardly more than the first faint flutterings of the dawn of the happy day, when superstition and false metaphysics shall be no more, and reasonable folks may 'live at ease,' are as yet discernible by the enfants perdus of the outposts." It is in the new science of the present generation that the labours of Hume and other pioneers of human emancipation find their strongest ally. Those labours would appear but merely negative and even destructive in confining the thought of mankind within the narrow limits of experience and reality, were it not that science has during the last generation taught us how rich those limits are in unexplored resources. And if, after all, it remains true that the human mind refuses to be restricted by any such bounds, and persists in trying to pierce the obscurity beyond, these efforts will at least be made in a different spirit from that of the childhood of the race. Man will be content to regard a mystery as a mystery, and will call darkness darkness, without trifling with his hopes and his yearnings so far as to people the very home of mystery with myths and legends and dreams of his own, and then to present these as answers to his difficulties and solutions to his doubts.

*English Men of Letters: Hume, by Professor Huxley. London: Macmillan and Co. 1879.

Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), Saturday 21 June 1879, page 8