Hume's Natural History of Perception

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Notes

¹Quotations from the Treatise are from A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by Norton and Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and citations will follow the (recent) convention of book, part, section and paragraph numbers, followed by page references to the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition (A Treatise of Human Nature ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon, 1978)).

² The Natural History of Religion, in David Hume: Principal Writings on Religion including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, ed. by J. C. A Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1993). I have included the section numbers in references as well as page numbers. The NHR was first published as one of the Four Dissertations of 1757.

³Robert Fogelin entitles chapter 7 of his (1985) ‘The Natural History of Philosophy’ and argues that much of book 1 part 4 of the Treatise should be read as a natural history of philosophical doctrines, understood as a study of their psychological causes. He does not notice the parallels between SWRS and the NHR. Nor does Keith Yandell (Yandell: 1990) who nevertheless traces some parallels with the styles of explanation in the NHR and those of the Treatise.

⁴Penelhum (1975: 62)

⁵Bennett (1971: 313)

⁶Fogelin (1985: 64)

⁷My use of ‘vulgar’ is a not intended to correspond precisely to Hume's use of the term in religious topics. Vulgar religion comprehends beliefs that are sustained by both hope (enthusiasm) and fear (superstition), and the NHR only deals with this second kind of ‘vulgar’ religion. Furthermore when such passions are operative monotheism can also be vulgar. The sense of ‘vulgar’ in my discussion is that of the earlier form of belief, and is guided by the SWRS sense of the term.

⁸A different proposition from saying that reasoning is a necessary condition for the belief being in place: see below.

⁹For other discussions, see Falkenstein (2003), Malherbe (1995), Webb (1991), Yandell (1976) and (1990: Pt I, chap. 2), and my ‘Understanding Hume's Natural History of Religion’.

¹⁰Representative texts include Herbert of Cherbury's The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (1705); John Toland's Letters to Serena (1704); Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). For discussion, see, for example, Harrison (1990) and Rivers (2000: 52ff).

¹¹Hume does not, as is often supposed, try to justify these claims on the basis of the historical record. His opponents think that the historical record does not go as far back as the beginnings of religion. Instead his account is supposed to offer a theoretically superior account of the origins of the belief. See Malherbe (1995) and my ‘Understanding Hume's Natural History of Religion’.

¹²See also Hume's letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto, 10 March 1751. The tendency is noted in the Treatise, and invoked to explain the ‘fictions’ of ‘antient philosophy’. There is:

a very remarkable inclination in human nature, to bestow on external objects the same emotions, which it observes in itself; and to find every where those ideas, which are most present to it. This inclination, ‘tis true, is supress'd by a little reflection, and only takes place in children, poets, and the antient philosophers. It appears in children, by their desire of beating the stones, which hurt them: In poets, by their readiness to personify every thing: And in the antient philosophers, by these fictions of sympathy and antipathy. We must pardon children, because of their age; poets, because they profess to follow implicitly the suggestions of their fancy: But what excuse shall we find to justify our philosophers in so signal a weakness?

(T 1.4.3.11; SBN: 224–5)

That polytheism and the errors of ‘antient philosophers’ have the same root in this disposition is made explicit in the NHR.

¹³Pears (1984) For further discussion of the role of motivated irrationality in Hume's philosophy, see the relevant sections of my Projection and Realism in Hume and my ‘Understanding Hume's Natural History of Religion’.

¹⁴Something like this can be found in Herdt (1997: 172ff).

¹⁵

As the causes, which bestow happiness or misery, are, in general very little known and very uncertain, our anxious concern endeavours to attain a determinate idea of them; and finds no better expedient than to represent them as intelligent voluntary agents like ourselves; only somewhat superior in power and wisdom.

(NHR V: 152)

¹⁶Barry Stroud (1977: 100) says constancy is the important relation and ‘“coherence” plays only a supplementary role’ in Hume's account. Constancy ‘is what is responsible for getting the belief in the continued and distinct existence of objects in the first place’ (ibid.). See also Pears (1990: 184ff).

¹⁷‘We shall afterwards see many instances of this tendency’ (T 1.4.2.35; SBN: 204).

¹⁸‘But as the interruption of the appearance seems contrary to the identity, and naturally leads us to regard these resembling perceptions as different from each other, we here find ourselves at a loss how to reconcile such opposite opinions’ (T 1.4.2.36; SBN: 205).

¹⁹‘Again, were we fully convin'd, that our perceptions are dependent, and interrupted, and different, we shoul'd be as little inclin'd to embrace the opinion of a double existence’ (T 1.4.2.52; SBN: 215–16).

²⁰

The only conclusion we can draw from the existence of one thing to that of another, is by means of the relation of cause and effect, which shows, that there is a connexion betwixt them, and that the existence of one is dependent on that of the other. The idea of this relation is deriv'd from past experience, by which we find, that two beings are constantly conjoin'd together, and are always present at once to the mind. But as no beings are ever present to the mind but perceptions; it follows that we may observe a conjunction or a relation of cause and effect betwixt different perceptions, but can never observe it betwixt perceptions and objects.

(T 1.4.2.47; SBN: 212)

²¹See my Projection and Realism in Hume.

²²For further discussion, see my ‘Understanding Hume's Natural History of Religion’.

²³‘Of the immortality of the soul’ in David Hume: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: 1985), 598.

²⁴(1999: 210).

²⁵(1997: 214–15).

²⁶This last point raises an overall question about Hume's intentions in SWRS. Some see his sceptical swoon as in some ways at odds with his ‘science of the mind’. What Hume is really up to in SWRS is a cognitive-psychological explanation of certain sort. Hume's ‘science of the mind’ includes an interest in ‘[describing] introspectively inaccessible psychological mechanisms…[and] not epistemological [issues] in the traditional sense’, and giving an account of our ‘construction’ of the external world at the ‘sub-personal level’ (Weller 2001: 276). Hume's science of the mind involves, in embryo, mechanisms that are ‘sub-doxastic’, and ‘modular’ (Biro 1993: 45). These are all concepts that do not apply to beliefs or epistemic agents but at a level of psychology below them. Hume, however, has an unfortunate tendency to conflate these causal issues with epistemic ones (Weller 2001: 278). I suspect that Hume's account is deliberately destabilizing not merely the result of his failure to make distinctions that he could have made. Obviously, I cannot discuss this in depth here.

²⁷Key discussions of this issue, originally deriving from Kemp Smith, include Butler (1960), Gaskin (1974) and (1988) and McCormick (1993).

²⁸Letter to Gilbert Elliot, 10 March 1751, reprinted in Gaskin's 1993 Oxford Edition of the Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, 26–8.

²⁹For thoughts of my own on this, see my Projection and Realism in Hume.

³⁰Earlier versions of this paper were read at Stirling, Aberdeen and St. Andrews Universities and I am grateful for the useful comments of those audiences. John P. Wright and the anonymous referee for this journal helped to improve this paper quite considerably and I am indebted to both. Thanks, of a different sort, to A. Flintoff, P. F. B. Edmund, and S. M. S. Pearsall.