INTUITIVE RELIGION

Religion has appeared in various forms, but whether Pagan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, orthodox or unorthodox, it has always been understood to consist in the main of certain beliefs. Sentiments or emotions— such as wonder, reverence, aspiration — were supposed to accompany the beliefs as a matter of course, but their place was subordinate; belief was the essential thing. That was what religion really meant till about half a century ago, when a change began to take place which aims at reversing the order of its contents and obliterating the old sense. What is called the religious sentiment is exalted to the premier place, and belief is relegated to the background, or, rather, dispensed with altogether. The late Dr. Mathew Arnold, for instance, defines religion as "morality touched with emotion," without the slightest reference to belief of any sort. Professor Tyndall says, " It is wise to recognise man's religious sentiments as the forms of a force, mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, but capable of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere." Professor Seeley, of Cambridge, who is understood to be the author of a recent work on Natural Religion, defines it as "habitual and permanent admiration," and endeavors to show that the sentiment may get reasonable satisfaction in devotion to science, in the cultivation of art, in worship of this great and mysterious universe, even though there may be no Divine reality either within or beyond. Others, such as Comte in France and Mr. Frederick Harrison, his follower in England, have undertaken to construct a new religion on this emotional basis, a religion provided with a church and a form of worship, but with no god. The religious sentiment being, they say, ineradicable, must be satisfied somehow, and if we cannot get a god to worship we must be content to adore the noblest samples of human excellence we can find in the lives of the great and good of bygone ages. This they call the Religion of Humanity. Strange that men should care aught for a religion that dispenses with everything Divine. As Dr. Martineau observes :— " It is a pathetic thing to see how hard it is for the human soul to let its religion go ; to watch how those who, from loss of the Infinite Father, find themselves in an orphaned universe would fain attempt compensation by worshipping either each other or even, while its sacred look yet lingers, the mere scene where He was, and persuade themselves that it is still the same piety, though they stand alone, and no one reads their hearts or hears their orisons." It is not to a religion of this sort that Dr. Martineau invites our attention in the work before us— not a religion of sentiment merely, but religion in the old sense which the word invariably bore half a century ago ; religion, that is to say, in its theistic sense, implying the belief and worship of Supreme Mind and Will, directing the universe and holding moral relations with human life.
 The greater part of Dr. Martineau's work is devoted to an inquiry as to the origin of this belief and its sources in the constitution of human nature. The inquiry involves us at once in controversy with those who deny that we have in our mental constitution any valid sources of religious knowledge at all, and who therefore deny that we have any right to believe in God or to hope for a life to come. The agnostics, for instance, as their name indicates, utterly deny the possibility of religious or Divine knowledge. They admit that we may have notions, conceptions, ideas and what we call beliefs in regard to Divine things, but these do not constitute valid and verifiable knowledge ; they may be, for aught we can tell, mere subjective fancies, pure illusions, such "stuff as dreams are made of." The Positivist takes the same ground as the agnostic, only defining, perhaps, a little more precisely the limits of our knowledge. "We can know only phenomena, he says, things which admit of verification, because they can be seen, measured or weighed ; in other words, he admits that we may know nature or the aggregate of phenomena, but can know nothing whatever of the supernatural or producing cause of nature. Scepticism with some goes further still, for they have their doubts whether we are entitled to our belief in an external world at all. "We may have impressions of it in our consciousness, they say, but that the world outside is really in accordance with the impressions presented in consciousness we cannot by any means be sure. All these varying shades of agnostic doctrine, and more especially the phase of it last referred to, may be summed up in the dictum of J. S. Mill, that "we have cognisance only of feelings and states of consciousness." A doctrine like this, which would imprison us in our self-consciousness, and that so effectually as to deprive us of all possibility of getting into cognitive relations with the essential objects of religious belief, cannot be allowed to go unchallenged by a writer who aims at the establishment of religious belief on a natural and scientific basis. It is examined accordingly, and at great length, in Dr. Martineau's work. The various forms which the doctrine has assumed, all its ramifications, and all its modifications, from the days of Hobbes to Mill and Spencer, and from Kant to Comte, are here passed in review, and subjected to the keenest scrutiny. The result is to show that agnosticism or the doctrine of nescience in regard to Divine things is defective in every way it can be looked at, and that when agnostics insist upon the impossibility of attaining religious knowledge they create an obstacle which is entirely artificial, having no reasonable grounds to rest on, and which may therefore be put aside as a chimera. Dr. Martineau's own theory of knowledge is that known as the intuitional, and certainly it gives us a more satisfactory account of the constitution and range of our cognitive faculties than the agnosticism he repudiates ; for while the one would keep us "cabined, cribbed, confined," within the limits of self-consciousness, as in a mental prison, the other provides for us a means of egress, for it recognises the fact that in the very contents of consciousness itself we have witnesses of the existence of realities beyond. " All your self-consciousness is relative," he says, "and postulates the otherness of the objective term of the relation ; if you arbitrarily deny that postulate, I have nothing to say for it except that it is natural, inherently involved in the very law of thought itself. We have to trust something before we can know anything, and to assume the unveracity instead of the veracity of the primary relations of thought is to proclaim universal agnosticism, and reduce all intellectual procedure to the analysis of personal phenomena. For reasons already assigned we take the opposite course, and accept what each faculty reports as to its corelative term. That report is what we call an intuition." By this intuitive principle or law of thought we find ourselves so mentally constituted that we cannot know one thing without at the same time knowing something else which is co-relative to it. It is according to this law, for instance, that our cognitive faculties in making known to us phenomena oblige us to acknowledge also the existence of things which make phenomena. So with regard to nature and the supernatural — our knowledge of the one impels us to take cognisance of the other. " For all the changes within us and around us which constitute what we call nature," observes Dr. Martineau, "we are obliged to supply in thought a permanent ground. Change has no meaning and no possibility but in relation to the permanent, which is its prior condition ; and pile up as you may your co-existent and successive mutabilities, that patient eternal abides behind and receives an everlasting witness from them, whether unheeded or unguessed. . . . Nature, therefore, can never swallow up the supernatural any more than time can swallow up eternity ; they subsist and are intelligible only together, and nothing can be more mistaken than to treat them as mutually exclusive."
 Having thus cleared the way for a direct treatment of the Theistic problem, Dr. Martineau proceeds to deal with our belief in God as Cause. As we get our belief in God as Cause from the intellectual intuition of causality, we have first of all to determine what we mean by causality. It implies, of course, a relation between cause and effect ; but what do we mean by that relation? Is it merely a relation of customary sequence ? In other words, do we mean that the cause is just that which is customarily antecedent, and that the effect is just that which is customarily consequent ? Causality, we are told by Hume, MM. Kant and Comte and all the psychologists who take more or less an agnostic view of things, means just that and nothing more. In opposition to them all, but in perfect consistency with his own views of metaphysical truth, Dr. Martineau asserts that causality is more than customary sequence in the order of phenomena, and that we only get at the full meaning of the relation when we emphasise it as consisting in action or energy. That is to say, causality implies force or power, it being the very essence of the antecedent that it must be dynamic or operative in order to produce the effect. In support of this view of the case, he points to the fact that the very writers who seek to deprive causality of any dynamic meaning cannot help using language which conveys the dynamic idea. Dr. Martineau goes even further, than this, for he identifies causal energy or force with will. He maintains that we get our first notions of causality by our own exercise of it in willing. "We rest," he says, "on the position that power is known to us exclusively by our own exercise of it— not in the mere muscular delivery of an act, but in the internal intuition or direction of it; that in our intuitive belief of causality we mean that all phenomena as such issue from power which is not phenomenal ; that each phenomenon is determined to be this and not that by an act of will, immediate or mediate ; and that in thinking of causation we are absolutely limited to the one type known to us ; and so, behind every event, wherever its seat and whatever its form, must exist, near or far, the same idea taken from our own voluntary activity. This, it is plain, is tantamount to saying that all which happens in nature has one kind of cause, and that cause a will like ours; and the universe of originated things is the product of a supreme mind, and precisely thus, by no less immediate steps, are we carried by the casual intimation to the first truth of religion."
 It may be a surprise for some of his readers to find that Dr. Martineau attaches great importance to the argument from design. There is an idea abroad that evolution has somehow undermined the grounds of the argument, Paley employed it with much skill and force in his Natural Theology ; but as the principle of natural selection is incompatible, say evolutionists, with the idea of design the argument is now deemed worthless. Dr. Martineau is not opposed to evolution, so far as we can see; he appears to be rather in favor of it. At all events, he is thoroughly master of Darwinian principles, and it is certain that he has not on that account lost faith in design. It may be frankly admitted that our fuller knowledge of nature's method necessitates some modification of the crude conceptions and mechanical contrivances on which Paley based his argument ; but such admission furnishes no reason to conclude that "any expressions of mind which were present to Paley are lost to us."
 In the first volume of his great work, Dr. Martineau, as we have seen, treats of God as Cause ; in the second volume he proceeds to inquire into the grounds of our belief in God as a being of moral perfection, holding moral relations with human life. In dealing with this part of the Theistic problem he takes the same course as he had taken previously, his aim throughout being to find the grounds of our belief in the constitution of our nature. Starting from self-consciousness or self-knowledge, all that is required of us if we would find a pathway open to divine knowledge is that we should trust the veracity of our faculties, and accept what each reports as to its co-relative term. In other words, as we have to trust something before we can know anything, we may as well accept the guidance of our intuitions. Speaking of the trustworthiness of an intuition, he says : — "We have seen what it gives us in the case of volitional experience, viz., an objective causality ; by parallel presentation in the case of moral experience, we shall find it gives us an objective authority ; both alike being objects of immediate knowledge, on the same footing of certainty as the apprehension of the external world. This statement, however surprising to those who are unaccustomed to look into the ultimate grounds of human cognition, is deliberately made. I know of no logical advantage which the belief in finite objects around us can boast over the belief in the infinite and righteous cause of all."
 Step by step as we advance new difficulties arise. Having attained from the inward sources of knowledge the idea of God as the Highest, and having learned from the same source to attribute to Him supreme benevolence and justice, and all the other constituents of Divine perfection, we have now to carry our idea into the sphere of outward things for verification. But as soon as we proceed to apply the test we encounter problems which have sorely perplexed men in all ages;for the scheme of things in which we find ourselves placed is hardly such as we should expect from the benevolence and righteousness of an Infinite Being. "Why is there so much suffering in the world ? To say the very least of it this evil indicates imperfections somewhere. But what business have imperfections in the work of an Infinite Being? Has He not power to bar them out? The general answer is that we have to deal, not with unconditioned infinitude, but with a definite system conditioned by the laws of development, and embraced within some larger project, in whose ultimate perfection all present imperfections vanish. If this be so we may regard the liability of both animals and men to suffer pain as subservient to ulterior purposes of paramount good, and meanwhile with regard to the liability of animals, we may take refuge in the fact that in their case pain is not by any means preponderant, nor without alleviations and palliatives which greatly relieve its aspect. Man suffers more than animals, partly because of his intellectual endowment, and partly because of his moral nature, which, in some of its essentials, would be unmeaning without it. Suffering is also the discipline through which our moral nature gains its true elevation.
 Another difficulty in the moral aspect of the world is the apparent abandonment of human history to the conflict of rude force. This is a feature of history that must be looked at squarely, since the pessimist tries to make the most of it. Selecting historical phenomena of the most perplexing character, such as the extermination of tribes and races, the blight thrown upon superior civilisations by the invasion of barbarian hordes, the long prevalence of slavery and persecution, the baffled struggles of patriotism, and the martyrdoms of crushed faiths, the pessimist wants to know if these and other triumphs of might over right are at all compatible with the belief that a righteous will presides over human affairs. In opposition to this pessimistic view of things, Dr. Martineau thinks it "possible to show that, in human affairs, each lower form of character is intrinsically weaker than its immediate superior, so that the tendency, in the strife of parties, of politics, of races, of religion, and consequently of all historical development, is towards higher conditions and a more complete equipment of right with strength." Under the light and guidance of this tendency, which, may be called a law of history, he is able to show that the facts adduced in evidence of the reign of force admit of a very different interpretation ; and that history, so far from being a record of lost causes and triumphs of rude unscrupulous strength, attests the ever advancing development of reason and right. The section of his work in which he makes good this position is brilliant and impressive. As a contribution to what is called "the Philosophy of History," it is truly invaluable.
 The greater part of the second volume is occupied with disquisitions on three important topics, viz., the relative validity of Theism and Pantheism, the Psychology and Ethics of Determinism and Free Will, and finally the question of a Life to come. Of these three topics the latter seems to us to have most claim on our attention. The question of a life to come is always a pressing and momentous one, and the treatment of it by a thoroughly competent thinker is of special interest at the present day, when eminent men of science are advancing opinions which tend to deprive humanity of its dearest hope. Dr. Martineau's treatment of this great problem is sound and satisfactory so far as it goes, for though he does not pretend to settle it by positive demonstration, the subject not admitting demonstration of that sort, he is able to meet the scientists on their own ground, and to show that they have no right to prejudge the question in the summary way they have attempted. They confidently assert that it is impossible for our conscious life to survive the organic life, and if we ask, why impossible? they tell us the one is inseparably connected with the other; that thought is a function of the brain, and must therefore cease when the organ is gone. Dr. Martineau denies the assumption, availing himself of their own admissions to confute it. Professor Tyndall, for instance, is forced to admit that "the passage from the physic of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable; " that "definite trains of thought, and definite molecular actions in the brain occur simultaneously, but we do not know why." The admission is of far-reaching significance, for if scientists of such eminence are thus forced to confess profound ignorance as to the nature of the connection between the physic of the brain and the facts of consciousness, what warrant have they for pronouncing so positively against the possibility of our surviving death ? In further support of his view of the case, Dr. Martineau applies, with great effect, the law of conservation of energy.
 "In its physical aspect," he says, "death presents simply a case of transformation of energy ; the organic compounds of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen losing their precarious equilibrium and resolving themselves into more stable inorganic combinations, themselves destined hereafter to be partially taken up into new living forms. In crossing the mortal line, the total energy which had manifested itself in the heat and whole 'work' of the body is not altered, though every organ is cold and every function at rest ; part of it has become potential, locked up in durable substances that may remain idle for ages, and part is busy in setting up new chemical arrangement on a vast scale. This latter part is the exact equivalent of the muscular contractions which have gone out, and the nervous tension which has subsided, and, were it tested by a dynanomoter, would give account of these alone. But we should miss in it any element answering to the thoughts, the affections, the volitions, which were the concomitants of these in the living man ; they are unrepresented in the transformations. Consider the significance of this absence. If these mental activities are included in the category of 'energy,' then, since they are not transformed, they still continue, for were they extinct the law of conservation would be broken. If they are not included, if the cycle of energy is perfect without them, then they lie outside the physical world and are foreign to its fates. To treat consciousness as at once a superfluous appendage, and yet a liable partner of the perishable organism, is pure self-contradiction."
 Having thus warded off unfavorable presumptions against the possibility of a future life, Dr. Martineau proceeds to consider the moral aspects of the problem. His argument amounts to this : that the features characteristic of our nature are above the measure of our present lot, and irresistibly suggest an ulterior term of existence. Our intellectual faculties, for instance, are adequate to indefinitely more than the present term of life allows them to accomplish. Our affections also, and our aspirations, reach a depth of intensity far beyond the exigencies of the present, and if they are to be extinguished at death it cannot be said that our nature is framed in harmony with our condition, since it is overcharged with intensities of feeling that run to waste. Turning to our moral nature, we find that its vaticinations are in accordance with those of the intellectual and spiritual, "distinctly reporting to us that we stand in divine relations which indefinitely transcend the limits of our earthly years." The argument, as put by Dr. Martineau, is most impressive.
 Dr. Martineau's work is beyond all question, one of supreme value. It is a great work in every respect, whether we regard the vast importance of the subjects investigated or the learning, eloquence and intellectual power with which the investigation is conducted or the solid and satisfactory reasoning by which the conclusions are sustained. All the most difficult problems which the greatest thinkers have attempted to solve, from the days of Plato down to Darwin and Spencer, are here grappled with once more ; the most imposing theories of the German, French and English schools, and the latest speculations of modern science are subjected to the keenest scrutiny ; the whole question as to what is possible for us to know of the origin and the end of things is thoroughly threshed out, and the chaff separated from the wheat. We have no hesitation in saying that the work establishes its author's reputation as a match for the agnostic philosophers of the day, and we should like to know what they have to say in reply to him.

* A Study of Religion : Its Sources and Contents. By James Martineau, D.D., LLD., late Principal of Manchester New College, London. 2 vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 11 August 1888, page 4

DR. FLINT ON AGNOSTICISM.

Professor Flint recently delivered in Edinburgh, the sixth and last of the present series of Croall lectures on Agnosticism. He said that the whole agnosticism of the present day flowed from Hume and Kant as its two great fountain heads. Of the two, Kant was the greater philosopher, but the lesser agnostic. He surpassed Hume in constructiveness, inventiveness, and other qualities ; but he did not equal him in critical acuteness and clearness ; and, one single feature excepted, his whole agnosticism might be found more sharply and finely delineated in the writings of his predecessor. Hume was undoubtedly one of those " dead but sceptred sovereigns who still ruled our spirits from their urns." Probably, of all the eminent Scotsmen of the 18th century he was the one who had most affected the general course and character of British and European thought. And his influence viewed as a whole had been, it seemed to him (the lecturer), decidedly for good. It was not merely the scepticism of an individual thinker; it was a scepticism which had been present and operative in the speculations of some generations of thinkers, although it had not previously shown itself in its full force and in the light of open day. Hume concluded his treatise on the Natural History of Religion with words which faithfully described his whole speculative attitude toward religion :

" The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld ; did we not enlarge our views, and, opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy."

He (the lecturer) knew no words which seemed to him to paint more truthfully the final issue of a thorough and consistent agnosticism. But what a dismal, a dreadful issue ! For the vast majority of mankind, who certainly could not escape into the regions of philosophy, no hope, no refuge ; but the doom of living and dying in the darkness of delusion, in the belief of a lie. For the few who, like Hume himself, could escape into them, no prospect beyond that of finding them as empty, as unreal, as unsatisfying, as he had repeatedly and pathetically confessed himself to have found them, and as obscure, as enigmatic, as uncertain as religion was declared to be. Such an agnosticism might, under the government of a wise and omnipotent God, serve important and beneficial purposes in the world ; but the final end to which it logically led showed that it could never be the last word as to the interpretation of the universe or the significance of human life. Its doom to ultimate failure was written on its whole nature. Truth must conquer an enemy which avowed that it had a firm hold of no truth. The real response to the universal cry of the human heart, " Who will show us any truth, any good ? " could not be its response. It must be the one which had come down to them through many ages, and already proved itself a joy and strength to countless souls—"Lord, lift Thou upon us the light of Thy countenance."

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1870 - 1907), Saturday 19 May 1888, page 9

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

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) PHILOSOPHER AND HISTORIAN.

 (By "I.S.O.")
 The bi-centenary of David Hume which occurred on the 26th ult., is a fitting time to recall the main incidents in the career and the principal achievements of one of Scotland's most illustrious sons. In spite of his great and acknowledged abilities and of his many undoubted services to his own nation and to the intellectual world in general, his name has, in the past, evoked to a remarkable degree the suspicion and dislike of the majority of his fellow-countrymen; on account of his openly expressed scepticism, concerning opinions and views held by a large section of professing Christians. However, after a lapse of two hundred years, with that clearer recognition of their real value which time, and distance lend to a life and a life's work; we may now survey his writings with that freedom from prejudice for which Hume himself pleads. In these days of widely entertained and pronounced views as to liberty of thought and speech, many are apt to regard with increased and increasing indifference those influences which disturbed the opinions so characteristic of his day.
  When Hume reached manhood, Scotland seemed to offer no opportunity for the use or cultivation of such peculiar talents as he possessed. He accordingly journeyed to France, where, stimulated by the scholarship around him, he wrote his first work—a "Treatise on Human Nature," published in parts between 1737 and 1740. The book met with little public favour, but learned men hailed its author as a distinguished thinker and an adept in abstract reasoning. His "Essays" followed, and in these—the essay on miracles in particular—Hume first antagonised the religious feelings and practice of his time. Amongst the evangelical section Hume came to be both hated and feared, and he was unreservedly denounced as an evil influence. At this period religious belief in Scotland permitted of little or no latitude. Between the hard and fast creed of the professor of an ironclad Calvinism and the contempt for all creeds of the absolute unbeliever no middle way was recognised. Hume's books were resented as tending to undermine religious earnestness, and, in the eyes of the popular party, their author was an arch-infidel. Hume learned to his cost the strength and value of the opposition he had aroused. To it was due his failure to carry the appointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh and also that of Logic in Glasgow. But to-day his "Enquiry concerning Human Understanding," and his "Treatise" are text-books in the very class-rooms to which he was refused admission as a teacher in his life-time. In building up with unswerving resolution and conspicuous ability his system of philosophy he erected a barrier in his progress to university distinction. His ability, his attainments, his teaching power were admitted, but sufficed not to stem the tide of adverse public opinion.

 But if Hume was at variance with the religious feeling of his countrymen, he was equally beyond them in his political and social philosophy. In his "Essays Moral and Philosophical," he proceeds to point out the evils which inevitably flow from universal suffrage, from aristocratic privilege, and from absolute monarchy and concludes, "that an hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals and a people voting by their representatives form an ideal government." To speak of a king as ruling by divine right and as God's vicegerent on earth is, in his opinion, only calculated to excite laughter. Here is a profound political truth from his "First Principles of Government," which evidences how far Hume was before his times:—"As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion; it is, therefore, on opinion only that government is formed, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free." On the whole, Hume's political opinions are tinged by his sceptical cast of mind. He sees but little good in existing institutions. Nevertheless, he now and again exhibits a clear vision of the future. Writing shortly before his death he expresses regret that the two most civilised nations of Europe, Britain and France, should be on the decline, and that barbarians like the Goths of Germany and Russia should be rising in power and renown. He favoured the extension of the suffrage and predicted from it the very results which are happening in our own day. He looks for a time when the electors will exact definite pledges from candidates, when, in short, members of Parliament will become in truth delegates of their constituents.

 Hume's maturer ideas on the nature of religion are contained in his "Natural History of Religion" and in his "Dialogues on Religion." In the second of these more especially, he elaborates his ideas. He was firstly and chiefly an inductive and speculative thinker intensely interested in the difficulties attending all research, and the best efforts of his life were directed to enquire in to the conditions of certainty in knowledge. As a thinker he lived apart, reserving to the printed page the public presentation of his speculations. Huxley, one of his biographers, and a frank and occasionally a severe critic, admits that Hume anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny, and they are polytheistic rather than monotheistic, because the first ideas of religion arose, not from a contemplation of the works of Nature but from the hopes and fears which actuate the human mind. All of Hume's biographers, including Calderwood, agree that a careful study of his works gives direct contradiction to the old idea that Hume was an "atheist." In philosophy he was certainly a sceptic in regard to everything that transcends individual experience, but nowhere in his writings can be found proof that his views on religion deserve the traditional and erroneous condemnation. This rested partly on and arose from the intolerance of ignorance, and was partly due to the difficulty of distinguishing between a man's theory and his faith. His philosophic scepticism necessarily reacted to some extent on faith and feeling, but it never eclipsed them. "He started," as Professor Calderwood remarks, "with the assumption that certainty depends altogether on the senses, and, as the knowledge of God cannot come in this way, religion was for him exclusively a matter of faith. No life of Hume can be accurate which describes him as an atheist." The prominence given to the sceptical element in his philosophy is largely responsible for the prevalence of the idea, but, in our day, a deliberate and critical examination of his writings enables us to form a truer and more favourable judgment.

 Hume's sceptical spirit attended him in all his enterprises. In spite of his earnest endeavours in his "History of England" to be dispassionate and fair to all parties, this spirit tinges the narrative. So much was this felt at the time that the History gave in some quarters more offence than all his philosophical writings. He has also been wildly attacked for his alleged gross perversion of facts. But many of his shortcomings in this respect are clearly traceable to his want of of knowledge of the common law of England and his too great reliance on ancient and unsupported chronicles. Notwithstanding all this, his book possesses and deserves popularity for the grace of its style and the easy flow of its narrative.

It is difficult for us in these days to realise the conditions existing in Hume's time in Scotland in the matter of religious belief. Intolerance was its strongest feature, an intolerance differing only in degree from that which included the stake and the rack among its instruments of regeneration. The God of the time was scarcely ever a God of love and pity, but was always conceived as a Deity ever on the outlook for transgression and ever ready with abundant punishment, both in this world and the next. As a natural corollary to this, the power of evil was invested with a personality which to us touches on the ridiculous and the pathetic. There was no parish in Scotland unacquainted with him, and the aged man or woman who could not recite instances of personal encounters with Satan or his agents was regarded as one who had neglected his or her opportunities in life. Scotsmen of all classes had indeed created God and Devil in their own image. In such a community as this it is no matter for wonder that Hume's writings aroused an intense feeling of repugnance and hostility. The educated were mostly with him and were his friends, but even they feared to incur the odium which open and avowed championship would excite. When asked by Hume, shortly before his death, to edit and superintend the publishing of the "Dialogues," Adam Smith declined the task, and when the book did appear, it bore no imprint and no publisher's name. To-day the "Dialogues" attract attention, not by their heterodoxy, but solely on account of their close reasoning, liberal views, and somewhat pitiless logic.

 To Hume Scotland and progress owe much. His writings, whatever their faults, and however much his conclusions may be traversed, gave an impetus to philosophical study and inquiry which has not yet been exhausted, and in his own domain he still holds a foremost place. The two centuries which have passed since his birth have been productive of what in his own words he describes as "a sensible change in the opinions of men by the progress of learning and of liberty," and to this end he has largely helped. He dealt mainly with the perennial aspects of the problems he discusses, and hence the abiding value of his treatment of them.

 The West Australian 6 May 1911,