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ABOLITIONISM RichardS. Newman AMERICAN MILITARY HISTORY

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Charles L. Cohen AMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY
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ADOLESCENCE Peter K.Smith AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY
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AESTHETICS Bence Nanay AND ELECTIONS L.SandyMaisel
AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION AMERICAN POLITICS
Eddie S. GlaudeJr RichardM. Valelly
AFRICAN HISTORY JohnParker and THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
Richard Rathbone Charles 0.Jones
AFRICAN POLITICS Ian Taylor THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
AFRICAN RELIGIONS RobertJ. Allison
Jacob K. Olupona AMERICAN SLAVERY
AGEING Nancy A.Pachana Heather Andrea Williams
AGNOSTICISM Robin LePoidevin THE AMERICAN SOUTH
AGRICULTURE Paul Brassley and Charles Reagan Wilson
RichardSoffe THE AMERICAN WEST Stephen Aron
ALEXANDER THE GREAT AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY
Hugh Bowden Susan Ware
ALGEBRA PeterM. Higgins AMPHIBIANS T.S.Kemp
AMERICAN BUSINESS HISTORY ANAESTHESIA Aidan O'Donnell
Walter A. Friedman ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Michael Beaney
Eric Avila ANARCHISM Colin Ward
AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS ANCIENT ASSYRIA Karen Radner
AndrewPreston ANCIENT EGYPT IanShaw
AMERICAN HISTORY ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART AND
PaulS. Boyer ARCHITECTURE Christina Riggs
AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge
David A. Gerber THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY Amanda H.Podany
G. Edward White ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
ANCIENT WARFARE BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS
Harry Sidebottom Michelle Baddeley
ANGELS DavidAlbertJones BESTSELLERS John Sutherland
ANGLICANISM MarkChapman THE Bl BLE John Riches
THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair Bl BLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Eric H. Cline
Tristram D. Wyatt BIG DATA Dawn E. Holmes
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM BIOCHEMISTRY Mark Lorch
Peter Holland BIOGEOGRAPHY MarkV. Lomolino
ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia BIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee
THE ANTARCTIC Klaus Dodds BIOMETRICS Michael Fairhurst
ANTHROPOCENE Erle C. Ellis BLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell
ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller BLASPHEMY Yvonne Sherwood
ANXIETY Daniel Freeman and BLOOD Chris Cooper
Jason Freeman THE BLUES Elijah Wald
THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS THE BODY Chris Shilling
Paul Foster THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
APPL! ED MATHEMATICS Brian Cummings
Alain Goriely THE BOOK OF MORMON
THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr Terryl Givens
ARBITRATION Thomas Schultz and BORD ERS Alexander C. Diener and
Thomas Grant Joshua Hagen
ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn THE BRA! N Michael O'Shea
ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne BRANDING Robert Jones
ARISTOCRACY William Doyle THE BRICS Andrew F. Cooper
ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION
ART HISTORY DanaArnold Martin Loughlin
ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland THE BRITISH EMPIRE AshleyJackson
ART! FICIAL INTELLIGENCE BRITISH POLITICS TonyWright
MargaretA. Boden BUDDHA Michael Carrithers
ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY BUDDHISM Damien Keown
Madeline Y. Hsu BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown
ASTROBIOLOGY David C. Catling BYZANTIUM Peter Sarris
ASTROPHYSICS James Binney CALVINISM Jon Balserak
ATHEISM Julian Baggini ALBERT CAMUS Oliver Gloag
THE ATMOSPHERE Paul I. Palmer CANADA Donald Wright
AUGUST! NE Henry Chadwick CANCER Nicholas James
AUSTRALIA Kenneth Morgan CAPITALISM James Fulcher
AUTISM Uta Frith CATHOLICISM Gerald O'Collins
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Laura Marcus CAUSATION Stephen Mumford and
THE AVANT GARDE Rani LillAnjum
David Cottington THE CELL TerenceAllen and
THE AZTECS Davfd Carrasco Graham Cowling
BABYLONIA Trevor Bryce THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
BACTERIA Sebastian G. B. Amyes CHAOS Leonard Smith
BANKl NG John Goddard and GEOFFREY CHAUCER David Wallace
John 0. S. Wilson CHEMISTRY PeterAtkins
BARTHES Jonathan Culler CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami
THE BEATS David Sterritt CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
BEAUTY Roger Scruton Kimberley Reynolds
CHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham Simon Critchley
CHRISTIAN ART BethWilliamson COPERNICUS Owen Gingerich
CHRISTIAN ETHICS D. Stephen Long CORAL REEFS Charles Sheppard
CHRISTIANITY LindaWoodhead CORPORATE SOCIAL
Cl RCADIAN RHYTHMS RESPONSIBILITY Jeremy Moon
Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman CORRUPTION Leslie Holmes
CITIZENSHIP RichardBellamy COSMOLOGY PeterColes
CITY PLANNING Carl Abbott COUNTRY MUSIC RichardCarlin
CIVIL ENGINEERING CREATIVITY Vlad Glaveanu
David Muir Wood CRIME FICTION RichardBradford
CLASSICAL LITERATURE William Allan CRIMINAL JUSTICE
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Julian V. Roberts
Helen Morales CRIMINOLOGY Tim Newburn
CLASSICS MaryBeard and CRITICAL THEORY
John Henderson Stephen EricBronner
CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard THE CRUSADES ChristopherTyerman
CLIMATE Mark Maslin CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and
CLIMATE CHANGE Mark Maslin Sean Murphy
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY A. M. Glazer
Susan Llewelyn and THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Katie Aafjes-van Doorn Richard Curt Kraus
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE DADA AND SURREALISM
Richard Passingham David Hopkins
THE COLD WAR RobertJ. McMahon DANTE Peter Hainsworth and
COLONIAL AMERICA AlanTaylor David Robey
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN DARWIN Jonathan Howard
LITERATURE Rolena Adorno THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
COMBINATORICS RobinWilson Timothy H. Lim
COMEDY MatthewBevis DECADENCE David Weir
COMMUNISM Leslie Holmes DECOLONIZATION Dane Kennedy
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE DEMENTIA Kathleen Taylor
Ben Hutchinson DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick
COMPETITION AND DEMOGRAPHY Sarah Harper
ANTITRUST LAW Ariel Ezrachi DEPRESSION Jan Scott and
COMPLEXITY John H. Holland Mary Jane Tacchi
THE COMPUTER Darrel Ince DERR! DA Simon Glendinning
COMPUTER SCIENCE DESCARTES Tom Sorell
Subrata Dasgupta DESERTS Nick Middleton
CONCENTRATION CAMPS Dan Stone DESIGN John Heskett
CONFUCIANISM Daniel K. Gardner DEVELOPMENT Ian Goldin
THE CONQUISTADORS DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
Matthew Restall and Lewis Wolpert
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto THE DEV! L Darren Oldridge
CONSCIENCE Paul Strohm DIASPORA Kevin Kenny
CONSCIOUSNESS SusanBlackmore CHARLES DICKENS Jenny Hartley
CONTEMPORARY ART DICTIONARIES Lynda Mugglestone
Julian Stallabrass DINOSAU RS David Norman
CONTEMPORARY FICTION DIPLOMACATIC HISTORY
Robert Eaglestone Joseph M. Siracusa
DOCUMENTARY Fl LM EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
Patricia Aufderheide EXPLORATION Stewart A. Weaver
DREAMING J. Allan Hobson EXTINCTION Paul B. Wignall
DRUGS Les Iversen THE EYE Michael Land
DRUIDS BarryCunliffe FAIRY TALE MarinaWarner
DYNASTY Jeroen Duindam FAMILY LAW Jonathan Herring
DYSLEXIA MargaretJ. Snowling MICHAEL FARADAY
EARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly Frank A. J. L. James
THE EARTH MartinRedfern FASCISM Kevin Passmore
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE Tim Lenton FASH ION Rebecca Arnold
ECOLOGY Jaboury Ghazoul FEDERALISM MarkJ.Rozell and
ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta ClydeWilcox
EDUCATION GaryThomas FEMINISM MargaretWalters
EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch FILM MichaelWood
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN FILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak
Paul Langford FILM NOI R James Naremore
THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball Fl RE AndrewC. Scott
EMOTION Dylan Evans THE Fl RST WORLD WAR
EMPIRE Stephen Howe Michael Howard
ENERGY SYSTEMS NickJenkins FOLK MUSIC MarkSlobin
ENGELS TerrellCarver FOOD John Krebs
ENGINEERING David Blackley FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DavidCanter
Simon Horobin FORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser
ENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate FORESTS JabouryGhazoul
THE ENLIGHTENMENT FOSS! LS KeithThomson
JohnRobertson FOUCAULT Gary Gutting
ENTREPRENEURSHIP PaulWesthead THE FOUNDING FATHERS
and MikeWright R. B. Bernstein
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS FRACTALS Kenneth Falconer
StephenSmith FREE SPEECH NigelWarburton
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS FREE WILL Thomas Pink
Robin Attfield FREEMASONRY Andreas Onnerfors
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW FRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons
Elizabeth Fisher FRENCH PH ILOSOPHY
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS StephenGaukroger and Knox Peden
Andrew Dobson THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
ENZYMES Paul Engel William Doyle
EPICUREAN ISM CatherineWilson FREUD AnthonyStorr
EPIDEMIOLOGY RodolfoSaracci FUNDAMENTALISM MaliseRuthven
ETHICS Simon Blackburn FUNGI Nicholas P. Money
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY TimothyRice THE FUTURE Jennifer M. Gidley
THE ETRUSCANS ChristopherSmith GALAXIES John Gribbin
EUGENICS Philippa Levine GALILEO Stillman Drake
THE EUROPEAN UNION GAME THEORY Ken Binmore
Simon Usherwood andJohn Pinder GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh
EUROPEAN UNION LAW GARDEN HISTORY Gordon Campbell
Anthony Arnull GENES Jonathan Slack
EVOLUTION Brian and GENIUS Andrew Robinson
DeborahCharlesworth GENOMICS JohnArchibald
GEOGRAPHY JohnMatthews and THE HISTORY OF LIFE
DavidHerbert Michael Benton
GEOLOGY Jan Zalasiewicz THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS
GEOPHYSICS William L owrie Jacqueline Stedall
GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE
GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle William Bynum
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS
Andrew Bowie J. L. Heilbron
TH E GHETTO BryanCheyette THE HISTORY OF TIME
GLACIATION DavidJ.A. Evans LeofrancHolford-Strevens
GLOBAL CATASTROPHES HIV AND AlDS AlanWhiteside
BillMcGuire HOBBES RichardTuck
GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY HOLLYWOOD Peter Decherney
RobertC. Allen THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
GLOBAL ISLAM Nile Green JoachimWhaley
GLOBALIZATION Manfred B. Steger HOME MichaelAllen Fox
GOD John Bowker HOMER Barbara Graziosi
GOETHE Ritchie Robertson HORMONES Martin Luck
THE GOTHIC Nick Groom HORROR DarrylJones
GOVERNANCE Mark Bevir HUMAN ANATOMY
GRAVITY TimothyClifton Leslie Klenerrnan
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND HUMAN EVOLUTION BernardWood
THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY
HABEAS CORPUS AmandaTyler JamieA. Davies
HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson HUMAN RIGHTS AndrewClapharn
THE HABSBURG EMPIRE HUMANISM Stephen Law
Martyn Rady HUME JamesA. Harris
HAPPINESS DanielM.Haybron HUMOUR NoelCarroll
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE THE ICE AGE JamieWoodward
Cheryl A. Wall IDENTITY FlorianCoulrnas
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS LITERATURE IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden
Tod Linafelt THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
HEGEL Peter Singer Paul Klenerrnan
HEIDEGGER MichaelInwood INDIAN CINEMA
THE HELLENISTIC AGE Ashish Rajadhyaksha
PeterThonernann INDIAN PHILOSOPHY SueHamilton
HEREDITY JohnWaller THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
HERMENEUTICS Jens Zimmermann RobertC. Allen
HERODOTUS JenniferT. Roberts INFECTIOUS DISEASE Marta L.Wayne
HIEROGLYPHS PenelopeWilson and BenjaminM. Bolker
HINDUISM Kirn Knott INFINITY Ian Stewart
HISTORY JohnH. Arnold INFORMATION Luciano Floridi
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and
MichaelHoskin David Gann
THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
WilliamH. Brock Siva Vaidhyanathan
THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD INTELLIGENCE lanJ. Deary
JamesMarten INTERNATIONAL LAW Vaughan Lowe
THE HISTORY OF CINEMA INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Khalid Koser
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner
Christian Reus-Smit MADNESS AndrewScull
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY MAGIC Owen Davies
Christopher S. Browning MAGNA CARTA NicholasVincent
IRAN Ali M. Ansari MAGNETISM Stephen Blundell
ISLAM Malise Ruthven MALTHUS Donald Winch
ISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein MAMMALS T. S. Kemp
ISLAMIC LAW Mashood A. Baderin MANAGEMENT John Hendry
ISOTOPES Rob Ellam NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer
ITALIAN LITERATURE MAO Delia Davin
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey MARINE BIOLOGY PhilipV.Mladenov
HENRY JAMES Susan L. Mizruchi MARKETING
JESUS Richard Bauckham Kenneth LeMeunier-FitzHugh
JEWISH HISTORY David N. Myers THE MARQUIS DE SADE
JEWISH LITERATURE llan Stavans John Phillips
JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves MARTYRDOM JolyonMitchell
JUDAISM Norman Solomon MARX PeterSinger
JUNG Anthony Stevens MATERIALS Christopher Hall
KABBALAH Joseph Dan MATHEMATICAL Fl NANCE
KAFKA Ritchie Robertson Mark H.A. Davis
KANT Roger Scruton MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers
KEYNES Robert Skidelsky MATTER .GeoffCottrell
Kl ERKEGMRD Patrick Gardiner THE MAYA MatthewRestall and
KNOWLEDGE Jennifer Nagel AmaraSolari
THE KORAN Michael Cook THE MEANING OF LIFE
KOREA Michael J. Seth Terry Eagleton
LAKES WarwickF. Vincent MEASUREMENT David Hand
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MEDICAL ETHICS Michael Dunn and
Ian H. Thompson Tony Hope
LANDSCAPES AND MEDICAL LAW Charles Foster
GEOMORPHOLOGY MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham
Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles andRalphA. Griffiths
LANGUAGES Stephen R. Anderson MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
LATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark Elaine Treharne
LAW Raymond Wacl<s MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS JohnMarenbon
Peter Atkins MEMORY Jonathan K. Foster
LEADERSHIP Keith Grint METAPHYSICS StephenMumford
LEARNING Mark Haselgrove METHODISM WilliamJ.Abraham
LEIBNIZ MariaRosaAntognazza THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
C. S. LEWIS JamesComo Alan Knight
LIBERALi SM Michael Freeden MICROBIOLOGY Nicholas P.Money
LIGHT Ian Walmsley MICROECONOMICS Avinash Dixit
LINCOLN AllenC.Guelzo MICROSCOPY TerenceAllen
LINGUISTICS PeterMatthews THE MIDDLE AGES MiriRubin
LITERARY THEORY JonathanCuller Ml LITARY JUSTICE EugeneR. Fidell
LOCKE John Dunn Ml LITARY STRATEGY
LOGIC Graham Priest AntulioJ. Echevarria II
LOVE Ronald deSousa MINERALS DavidVaughan
MARTIN LUTH ER Scott H. Hendrix Ml RACLES Yujin Nagasawa
MODERN ARCHITECTURE NEWTON Robert Iliffe
AdamSharr NIELS BOHR J. L.Heilbron
MODERN ART DavidCottington NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner
MODERN BRAZ! L AnthonyW. Pereira NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
MODERN CH!NA Rana Mitter Christopher Harvie and
MODERN DRAMA H.C. G. Matthew
Kirsten E.Shepherd-Barr THE NORMAN CONQUEST
MODERN FRANCE George Garnett
Vanessa R. Schwartz NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS
MODERN INDIA CraigJeffrey ThedaPerdue and Michael D. Green
MODERN IRELAND SeniaPaseta NORTHERN IRELAND
MODERN ITALY AnnaCento Bull Marc Mulholland
MODERN JAPAN NOTHING FrankClose
Christopher Goto-Jones NUCLEAR PHYSICS FrankClose
MODERN LATIN AMERICAN NUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine
LITERATURE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria Joseph M.Siracusa
MODERN WAR Richard English NUMBER THEORY RobinWilson
MODERNI SM Christopher Butler NUMBERS Peter M. Higgins
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Aysha Divan NUTRITION DavidA. Bender
and Janice A. Royds OBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger
MOLECULES Philip Ball OCEANS DorrikStow
MONASTICl SM StephenJ. Davis THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi Michael D.Coogan
MONTAIGNE William M.Hamlin THE ORCHESTRA D. KernHoloman
MOONS DavidA.Rothery ORGANIC CHEMISTRY
MORMONISM GrahamPatrick
Richard Lyman Bushman ORGANIZATIONS MaryJoHatch
MOUNTAINS Martin F. Price ORGANIZED CRIME
MUHAMMAD Jonathan A.C. Brown GeorgiosA.Antonopoulos and
MULTICULTURALISM AliRattansi GeorgiosPapanicolaou
MULTILINGUALISM JohnC.Maher ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
MUSIC NicholasCook A. EdwardSiecienski
MYTH Robert A. Segal OVID Llewelyn Morgan
NAPOLEON David Bell PAGANISM Owen Davies
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS PAIN Rob Boddice
Mike Rapport THE PALEST!NIAN-1 SRAELI
NATIONALISM Steven Grosby CONFLICT Martin Bunton
NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE PANDEMICS ChristianW. McMillen
Sean Teuton PARTICLE PHYSICS FrankClose
NAVIGATION Jim Bennett PAUL E.P.Sanders
NAZI GERMANY JaneCaplan PEACE OliverP.Richmond
NEOLIBERALISM Manfred B. Steger PENTECOSTAL!SM William K. Kay
and Ravi K. Roy PERCEPTION BrianRogers
NETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and THE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R.Scerri
MicheleCatanzaro PHILOSOPH!CAL METHOD
THE NEW TESTAMENT TimothyWilliamson
Luke Timothy Johnson PHILOSOPHY EdwardCraig
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS PHILOSOPHY IN THE ISLAMIC
LITERATURE Kyle Keefer WORLD PeterAdamson
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY PURITANISM FrancisJ. Bremer
Samir 0kasha THE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW QUANTUM THEORY
Raymond Wacks John Polkinghorne
PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS RACISM Ali Rattansi
David Wallace RADIOACTIVITY ClaudioTuniz
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE RASTAFARI Ennis B. Edmonds
Samir 0kasha READING BelindaJack
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION THE REAGAN REVOLUTION GilTroy
Tim Bayne REALITY JanWesterhoff
PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards RECONSTRUCTION Allen C. Guelzo
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins THE REFORMATION Peter Marshall
PHYSICS Sidney Perkowitz REFUGEES Gil Loescher
Pl LG RIMAGE Ian Reader RELATIVITY Russell Stannard
PLAGUE Paul Slack RELIGION Thomas A.Tweed
PLANETS DavidA. Rothery RELIGION IN AMERICA Timothy Beal
PLANTS Timothy Walker THE RENAi SSANCE Jerry Bratton
PLATE TECTONICS Peter Molnar RENAi SSANCE ART
PLATO JuliaAnnas Geraldine A. Johnson
POETRY Bernard 0'Donoghue RENEWABLE ENERGY NickJelley
POLITICAL PHI LOSOPHY David Miller REPTILES T. S. Kemp
POLITICS Kenneth Minogue REVOLUTIONS Jack A. Goldstone
POPULISM Cas Mudde and RHETORIC RichardToye
Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser RISK Baruch Fischhoff andJohn Kadvany
POSTCOLONIALISM RobertYoung RITUAL Barry Stephenson
POSTMODERNISM ChristopherButler RIVERS Nick Middleton
POSTSTRUCTURALi SM ROBOTICS AlanWinfield
CatherineBelsey ROCKS Jan Zalasiewicz
POVERTY PhilipN. Jefferson ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway
PREHISTORY Chris Gosden THE ROMAN EMPIRE
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Christopher Kelly
Catherine Osborne THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
PRIVACY Raymond Wacks David M. Gwynn
PROBABILITY John Haigh ROMANTICISM Michael Ferber
PROGRESSIVISM WalterNugent ROUSSEAU RobertWokler
PROHIBITION W. J. Rorabaugh RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
PROJECTS Andrew Davies THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY
PROTESTANTISM MarkA.Noll Richard Connolly
PSYCHIATRY TomBurns RUSSIAN HISTORY Geoffrey Hosking
PSYCHOANALYSIS Daniel Pick RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly
PSYCHOLOGY GillianButler and THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Freda McManus S.A. Smith
PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC SAi NTS Simon Yarrow
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis SAMURAI MichaelWert
PSYCHOPATHY EssiViding SAVANNAS Peter A. Furley
PSYCHOTHERAPY TomBurns and SCEPTICISM Duncan Pritchard
EvaBurns-Lundgren SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION EveJohnstone
Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy SCHOPENHAUER
PUBLIC HEALTH VirginiaBerridge ChristopherJanaway
SCIENCE AND RELIGION STEM CELLS Jonathan Slack
Thomas Dixon STOICISM Brad Inwood
SCIENCE FICTION David Seed STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION David Blackley
Lawrence M. Principe STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
SCOTLAND Rab Houston THE SUN PhilipJudge
SECULARISM AndrewCopson SUPERCONDUCTIVITY
SEXUAL SELECTION MarleneZuk and Stephen Blundell
Leigh W. Simmons SUPERSTITION StuartVyse
SEXUALITY Veronique Mattier SYMMETRY Ian Stewart
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SYNAESTHESIA Julia Simner
Stanley Wells SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES SYSTEMS BIOLOGY Eberhard 0.Voit
Bart van Es TAXATION Stephen Smith
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS AND TEETH Peter S. Ungar
PO EMS Jonathan F. S. Post TELESCOPES GeoffCottrell
SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES TERRORISM CharlesTownshend
Stanley Wells THEATRE MarvinCarlson
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW THEOLOGY David F. Ford
Christopher Wixson THINKING AND REASONING
SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt Jonathan St B.T. Evans
SILENT Fl LM Donna Kornhaber THOUGHT Tim Bayne
THE SILK ROAD James A. Millward Tl BETAN BUDDHISM
SLANG Jonathon Green MatthewT. Kapstein
SLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Tl DES David George Bowers and
Russell G. Foster Emyr Martyn Roberts
SMELL MatthewCobb TOCQUEVILLE HarveyC. Mansfield
ADAM SM 1TH ChristopherJ. Berry LEO TOLSTOY Liza Knapp
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL TOPOLOGY Richard Earl
ANTHROPOLOGY TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
John Monaghan and PeterJust TRANSLATl ON Matthew Reynolds
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY RichardJ.Crisp THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
SOCIAL WORK Sally Holland and Michael S. Neiberg
Jonathan Scourfield TRIGONOMETRY GlenVan Brummelen
SOCIALISM Michael Newman THE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline
SOCIOLINGUISTICS John Edwards TRUST Katherine Hawley
SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce THE TUDORS John Guy
SOCRATES C.C. W.Taylor TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN
SOFT MATTER Tom Mcleish Kenneth 0. Morgan
SOUND Mike Goldsmith TYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna
SOUTHEAST ASIA James R. Rush THE UNITED NATIONS
THE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell Jussi M. Hanhimaki
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES
Helen Graham David Palfreyman and PaulTemple
SPANISH LITERATURE Jo labanyi THE U.S. CIVIL WAR Louis P. Masur
SPINOZA Roger Scruton THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie
SPIRITUALITY Philip Sheldrake THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
SPORT MikeCronin DavidJ. Bodenhamer
STARS Andrew King THE U.S. SUPREME COURT
STATISTICS DavidJ. Hand Linda Greenhouse
UTILITARIANISM WATER John Finney
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and WAVES Mike Goldsmith
Peter Singer WEATHER Storm Dunlop
UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent THE WELFARE STATE David Garland
VETER INARY SCIENCE James Yeates WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill
THE VIKl NGS Julian D. Richards WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
THE VIRTUES Craig A. Boyd and WORK Stephen Fineman
Kevin Timpe WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford THE WORLD TRADE
VOLCANOES Michael J. Branney and ORGANIZATION
Jan Zalasiewicz Amrita Narlikar
VOLTAI RE Nicholas Cronk WORLD WAR 11 Gerhard L. Weinberg
WAR AND RELIGION Jolyon Mitchell WRITING AND SCRIPT
and Joshua Rey Andrew Robinson
WAR AND TECHNOLOGY ZIONISM Michael Stanislawski
Alex Roland EMILE ZOLA Brian Nelson

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 James A. Harris

HUME
A Very Short Introduction

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 OXFORD
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for Florence and Bertie
Acknowledgements xix

List of illustrations xxi

Abbreviations xxiii
Introduction 1

Human nature 4

Morality 29

Politics 53
Religion 81

Postscript 1 04

References 1 09

Further reading 113

Index 119
I am very grateful to friends who took the time to read through
the first draft of this book and offer comments and advice that
improved it many ways: Donald Ainslie, Michael Gill, Wim
Lemmens, Max Sltjonsberg, Mark Spencer, and Richard
Whatmore. Of course all remaining errors and infelicities are
entirely my own responsibility. I benefited also from suggestions
made by an anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press.
Jenny Nugee, Luciana O'Flaherty, and the Vety Short
Introductions production team gave me valuable assistance.

I wrote this book at home during the lockdown necessitated by the

COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. That dark and
difficult time was made brighter and easier by my family. My wife
Jennifer was, as always, supportive and encouraging in every way.
Our children Florence and Bertie were extraordinarily cheerful
throughout, despite being denied many of the things that they
most enjoy in life. Their good humour was an example and an
inspiration. Also, I thank Sune, Lotte, David, and Elias Segal for
their friendship and hospitality.
list of illustrations

1 From the manuscript of 5 Drawing of Hume by Louis

Hume's 1734 letter to an Carrogis, c.1764 66
anonymous physician 6 Louis Carrogis (Louis de
Reproduced by permission of'J'he Carmontelle)
Royal Society ofEdinburgh; from David Hume
The Royal Society ofEdinburgh's National Galleries ofScotland.
David Hume Bequest, held on deposit
at the National Library of Scotland.
Photographed by James Harris. 6 Frontispiece to the 1770
edition of The History of
2 The title-page ofA Treatise of England, from a drawing
Human Nature 23 of Hume by John
Title-page ofA Treatise qfHuman Donaldson 77
Nature (1739). Simon Francois Revenet;
after John Donaldson
3 The title-page of the 1748 David Hume
edition ofEssays Moral National Galleries of Scotland
and Political 39 Bequeathed by William Finlay
Watson 1886.
Title-page ofEssaysMom], and
Political (1748).
7 Portrait in oils of Hume by
4 Portrait in oils of Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766 82
Allan Ramsay, 1755 48 Allan Ramsay
Allan Ramsay David Hume
David Hume National Galleries ofScotland
National Galleries ofScotland Bequeathed by Mrs Macdonald
Hume to the National Gallery of
Accepted by HM Government in lieu
Scotland and transferred.
oflnheritance Tax, 2008.
 8 From the manuscript of 9 Hume's tomb on Calton
Dialogues concerningNatural Hill by Aeneas Macpherson,
Religion 94 1789 105
Reproduced by permission ofThe Aeneas Macpherson
Royal Society ofEdinburgh; from Hume's Tomb on Calton-Hill,
The Royal Society ofEdinburgh's Edinburgh
David Hume Bequest, held on deposit
National Galleries of Scotland.
at the National Library ofScotland

::I
::c

xxii
DNH Dialogues concerningNatural Religion and The
Natural History qfReligion, ed. J. C. A Gaskin,
World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993.
E Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and
the Principles ofMorals. ed. L. A Selby-Bigge,
3rd edn, revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford
University Press, 1975.
EMPL Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed.
Eugene F. Miller, revised edition, Liberty
Fund, 1987.
HE The History ofEngland, 6 vols, Liberty
Fund, 1983.
LDH The Letters ofDavid Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig,
2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1932.
T A Treatise qfHumanNature, ed. L. A Selby-Bigge,
revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford University
Press, 1978.
In a poll conducted by the BBC in 2005, David Hume was voted
the second greatest philosopher of all time. He won more votes
than Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Plato, and Kant, and was beaten
only by Karl Marx. Other polls have singled him out as the
philosopher of the past with whom present-day philosophers most
identify, and as one of the most influential Scots of the past
thousand years. This book provides a brief but comprehensive
introduction to his thought.

Hume was born in 1711 and died in 1776. He was a

contemporary-and friend-of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin. He was a central figure in what
we now call the European Enlightenment. He was deeply
interested in the ancient world, but he also believed that the world
he lived in was fundamentally different from ancient Athens and
Rome, and he sought to fashion a philosophy that was suitable to
modern conditions. This was to be a philosophy that was
answerable to the facts of ordinary human experience, that was
sceptical of claims made by authority and tradition, that had made
its peace with the passions and sentiments. Unusually for his time,
Hume believed that it was obvious that the modern world was
superior to the ancient, if not always in its art and culture, then
certainly in the quality of the lives lived by ordinary human
beings. There had, he thought, been undeniable progress in
 science and government. Thanks largely to the rise of
international commerce, people were living freer and happier lives
than had ever been possible before. Philosophy, he thought, had a
role to play in understanding this process ofimprovement-and in
identifying possible threats to it.

Hume's works are now a staple ofuniversity philosophy courses

worldwide, and are the subject ofa major academic industry. But
Hume himselfwas never a university professor. He was instead
what we might now call a public intellectual, and wrote for a wide
audience ofnon-specialists, an audience that included women as
well as men. In the 18th century, philosophy was often not so
much a distinct subject matter as a particular style ofthought,
impartial and objective, precise and backed by evidence. It was an
age ofphilosophical religion and philosophical politics, and also of
philosophical chemistry and philosophical geology. Hume
believed that philosophy defined in this way was vitally important
E as a means ofmoderating political, religious, and cultural
::E factionalism. His works taken as a whole can be thought ofas a
rebuke to the idea that philosophy must be unwor ldly and
disengaged from the concerns ofeveryday life. They challenge us
to think again about what philosophy might have to offer the
world outside the walls ofthe academy.

In 18th-century Britain, those who contributed to intellectual

debate tended to be members ofthe professions. Ifnot university
professors, they were church ministers, or lawyers, or physicians.
Like another great contemporary, Samuel Johnson, Hume
cultivated a wholly new kind ofliterary identity, that ofthe
independent man ofletters, who made his living from his writings
alone, and who wrote as his own man, free ofobligations either to
a patron or to a publisher. Across the Channel, Voltaire had shown
what it was possible for a man ofletters to achieve, in the way of
fame and wealth, given sufficient talent and self-belie£ Voltaire
also, in an entry to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, gave
the term 'gens de lettres' a canonical definition. The man ofletters
2
was a manifestation ofthe 'esprit philosophique' ofthe modern
age. He did not aspire towards universal knowledge, yet had the
critical and linguistic ability to make any field ofstudy his own.
Until recently, the man oflearning was kept out ofsociety,
secluded in the monastery or university. Now his writings, and his
conversation, were a necessary part ofsocial life, and had
contributed to the instruction and polish ofthe nation.

Ofall Hume's works, it is his first,A Treatise ofHuman Nature,

that has the most secure place on university reading lists today.
But the Treatise is anomalous in its sheer difficulty, and in the
obscurity ofits structure and organizing principles. Disappointed
by the reception it met with, Hume turned afterwards to the much
more popular form ofthe essay, both as a means ofreformatting
his theory ofhuman nature, and as the medium for his further
explorations ofmorality and ofpolitics. Following the ancient
examples ofPlato and Cicero, and the modern examples of
Fontenelle and Shaftesbury, he chose the dialogue form for his Q.
C
most profound consideration ofthe question ofwhat we can know 0
about the first cause ofthe universe. He also wrote an enormously ::J

successful narrative history ofEngland from the Roman invasion

to the 'Glorious Revolution' of1688. All ofthese texts will be given
due attention here.

The reader will find an outline ofHume's career as a man ofletters

woven into the chapters ofthis short book. But this is not a
biography, and for the full story ofHume's life, it will be necessary
to look elsewhere-in the first instance, to Ernest Campbell
Mossner's classic The Life ofDavid Hume. Our main concern here
is with Hume's ideas. We begin with his revolutionary theory of
human nature, we move on to his no less strikingly innovative
discussions ofmorality and ofpolitics, and we end with his
sceptical and subversive philosophy ofreligion.

3
Chapter 1
Human nature

David Hume's first published work,A Treatise ofHuman Nature,

originally came in two parts, one on 'the understanding' and the
other on 'the passions'. These subjects, Hume told the reader,
'make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves' (Txi). The
chain of reasoning concerned a question as old as philosophy
itself, the question of the relationship between the rational and
the emotional elements of human nature. That relationship had
often been depicted in terms of antagonism and combat.
Individual happiness and social harmony depended, philosophers
had often claimed, on reason winning the battle. In the Treatise
Hume argued that the whole idea of human nature as site of
conflict between reason and passion was a mistake. Properly
understood, reason was not a faculty of mind entirely different
and distinct in kind from the passions. Reasoning was often, in
fact, 'nothing but a species of sensation', a matter merely of
'follow[ing] our taste and sentiment' (T 103). But this was nothing
to worry about, because, taken as a whole, the passions were able
to organize and regulate themselves. It is not impossible that this
highly unorthodox conception of the fundamental structure of
human nature had its source in Hume's own experience of the
implausibility of the traditional account of the reason-passion
relationship.

4
A letter to a physician
Early in September 1729, when he was 18 and still living in the
house he had grown up in, Hume suddenly became a mystery to
himself For four years, since he had left college at Edinburgh, he
had been engaged in a strenuous and solitary course of study and
reflection, with the aim of eventually making his way in the world
as a scholar and philosopher. He had worked hard, to the
exclusion of almost everything else in life, but he had been happy.
Now, though, all his ardour seemed to have deserted him.
Suddenly he had no appetite for learning. He felt fine when he put
his books to one side, and this made him sure that there was
nothing really wrong with him. He was being lazy. He simply
needed to work harder. Months passed, and he became aware of
physical symptoms indicating that there was more to his condition
than mere laziness. He followed the advice of his doctor, took the
prescribed medicines, and did more exercise. That helped, he
recovered some of his energy, and put on a lot of weight. But in the
spring of 1734, four and a half years later, something was still
wrong. When he returned to reading and writing, he continued to
be dogged by an inability to concentrate. He worried that he would
never be able to realize his ambitions. He worried that somehow he
had damaged himself with the intensity of his application to his
studies. Unable to understand what he was going through, Hume
wrote, without revealing his name, to one of the most famous
doctors of the day, asking whether his case was a common one,
whether he could hope to recover, how long it would take, and how
complete a recovery would be (WHi 12-18) (Figure 1).

Hume's endeavours in his teenage years had not been purely

speculative. He described to the celebrity physician how he had
taken the moral philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome so
seriously that he had tried to follow the rigorous mental exercises
recommended by writers like Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch. His

5
 :::J
::c

I. From the manuscript ofHume's 1734 letter to an anonymous

physician.

goal had been to improve his 'temper' and 'will' as much as his
reason and understanding. Young though he was, he had tried to
think himselfinto the frame ofmind ofthe sage who was not
bothered by the prospect ofdeath, or poverty, or shame, or pain,
or any ofthe other calamities oflife. In retrospect, however, he
6
realized that there had been something not only pointless, but also
harmful, in this kind of philosophical regimen. He had not been
living an active life, he had been by himself most of the time, and
had had, in reality, no reason to fear any of the harms he was
steeling himself against. The whole business had been an
immense waste of mental energy, and the fact that it had also
made him physically ill forced Hume to ask himself if there might
not be something fundamentally misconceived in the philosophy
according to which he had been trying to live.

The moral philosophy of the ancient world, Hume wrote in his

letter, had proceeded on the basis of a set of unexamined
assumptions about human nature and about how human beings,
possessed of such a nature, ought to go about making themselves
happy. Stoic philosophers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch
took it that human beings were most themselves when they were
most rational, and that the highest happiness lay in mastering the :c
C

emotions that got in the way of seeing the world from a properly CII
::,

rational point of view. Hume now found himself doubtful as to

whether this really was the truth about how human beings ought
to conduct themselves. Life should, of course, be lived in accord
with nature. Human nature was the proper point of departure for
moral philosophy-and for every other kind of philosophy too. But
first it needed to be determined what human nature actually was.

Like many others in Europe at the time, Hume believed that a

new era in 'natural philosophy: what we now call natural science,
had been announced by Francis Bacon at the beginning of the 17th
century. The idea of a fresh start in our knowledge of the natural
world had then been made a reality by the work of men such as
William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and, especially, Isaac Newton.
Through rigorous application of a method grounded in experience
and observation, the modern natural philosophers had shown how
completely worthless almost all the science of the ancient world
was. There had been some 'experimental' work done on human
nature already, and in the Treatise Hume would acknowledge, in
7
 particular, ground-breaking contributions by British philosophers
such as John Locke, the third earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard
Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler. What he
imagined to himself, though, was a comprehensive, systematic
analysis of human nature, comparable in its ambition to Newton's
great work The Principles ofNatural Philosophy.

Soon after Hume wrote his letter about his illness and his new
intellectual ambition, he left Scotland for the first time. He
travelled first to Bristol, where in the employ of a sugar merchant
he experimented briefly and apparently unsuccessfully with an
active life not devoted to letters and learning. He then crossed the
Channel to France. Having spent time in Paris and Rheims, he
settled in the small town of La Fleche in Anjou. He seems to have
chosen it because it was a cheap place to live, and perhaps because
of Scottish connections, rather than because it was where
Descartes had gone to college. He would spend three years there
E working on a theory of human nature that would, so he thought,
:f effect a revolution in philosophy.

Mental anatomy
As Hume understood it, the business of the scientist of human
nature was, in the first instance, quite different from that of the
moralist who had advice for human beings about how they should
live their lives. The moralist could be compared to a painter,
whose aim was graceful and engaging depictions of the life of
virtue, intended to help people make virtue, not vice, their goal.
The kind of work that Hume thought needed to be done, on the
other hand, could be compared to that of an anatomist, who began
by peeling back the skin and flesh, and whose concern was
internal bodily parts that, in themselves, might be hideous to
handle and examine. The anatomist's job was not to make the
insides of the human body seem beautiful. It was simply to
describe the body as it actually was. Similarly, the philosopher of
human nature needed to describe what he found in an entirely
8
neutral and objective manner, without making evaluative
judgements of any kind. Hume probably took the image of
philosophy as anatomy from Mandeville, who in The Fable ofthe
Bees had compared 'they that examine into the Nature of Man,
abstract from Art and Education' to 'those that study the Anatomy
of Dead Carcases'. Mandeville had also claimed that what such
mental anatomy showed was that man's 'vilest and most hateful
Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for
the largest, and according to the World, the happiest and most
flourishing Societies'.

It may have been that Hume had developed his early enthusiasm
for ancient moral philosophy in the company of Shaftesbury's
major work Characteristicks ofMen, Manners, Opinions, Times.
There he would have found an essentially Stoic moral philosophy
updated in accord with the literary and aesthetic sensibility of the
modern world. Shaftesbury presented the reader with a variety of
strategies for self-discovery and for the cultivation of an
independence of mind that would provide protection from bodily
and worldly evils. The way Hume describes his youthful ambitions
to the unnamed doctor makes him sound like one of the many
who came under Shaftesbury's influence in the early 18th century.
But when he lost his faith in this kind of philosophy, he would
have found a kindred spirit in Mandeville, according to whom
Shaftesbury was the prime example of a philosopher who thought
only of what he wanted himself to be like, and had no awareness
at all of his actual nature. 'One of the greatest Reasons why so few
People understand themselves; Mandeville proclaimed, 'is, that
most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and
hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really
are: Shaftesbury's notions of human nature were a compliment to
humankind. What a pity it was that they were not true.

The anatomy of human nature, according to Mandeville, revealed

that each human being's mind is, in essence, a 'compound of
various Passions: and that these passions control people whether
9
 they want them to or not. To look beneath outward appearances is
to see that, in their psychology as in their physiology, human
beings are not very different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The fact that human beings, unlike animals, live in large political
and commercial societies can be explained without recourse to the
supposition of any uniquely human capacities. Hume, too,
believed that an 'anatomical' approach to human nature revealed
fundamental similarities between human beings and animals. T he
major defect of the systems of the mind developed by philosophers
was, he thought, that they tended to suppose that the concerns
and aptitudes of philosophers provide insight into human nature
as such. To focus on the similarities between human minds and
animal minds was a salutary corrective to the distortions that such
a supposition introduced into the science of human nature.

Another key influence on Hume's study of human nature was

Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. Like Locke,
E Hume imagined that in the beginning, at the time of our birth, the
:f mind is a blank sheet, completely empty of ideas, waiting to be
filled by the results of sensory contact with the outside world. Of
course, there are basic principles of mental functioning which
inform how the mind operates on the inputs from the senses. But
all of our notions and beliefs, and all but the most elementary of
our desires, are the product of experience. To make sense of
ourselves, then, it was necessary to try to reconstruct how mental
life as we know it might have developed by way of the
accumulation of, and interaction between, an almost infinite
number of individual perceptions and sensations. It was pointless,
however, to involve actual physiology in the attempt to discover
order in the apparent chaos of the inner life. To do that was
inevitably to get caught up in fraught debates about the relation
between mind and body which had dogged the philosophy of the
17th century, and which Locke's purely experience-based method
enabled his followers to put to one side. Locke had transformed
the study of the mind and its powers by sticking resolutely to that
method, particularly insofar as he had identified the limits of what
10
the understanding enables us to understand. Hume began his
anatomy of human nature with further examination of the
understanding, and with the apparent discovery that it is even less
reliable than Locke had imagined.

The understanding
One of the earliest of Hume's surviving letters tells us that at the
same time that he was planning a new, anatomical, science of
human nature, he was reading the French sceptic Pierre Bayle
(LDH i 12). In a devastating critique of the moral casuistry of
mainstream French Catholic culture, Bayle had revived styles of
argument characteristic of ancient Pyrrhonism, a school of
extreme scepticism intent on showing that no proposition can be
proved any more likely to be true than its negation. His goal had
been to undermine the whole idea of a rational Christianity such
as could be taught in schools and seminaries, and to show that the
foundation of true religion had to be a faith given directly to
human beings by God himself Confidence in reason, in other
words, was completely unjustified. Such confidence was likely to
lead to error, and sin. Hume did not share Bayle's religious
objectives, but he was deeply impressed by the French
philosopher's assault on the pretensions of philosophy. During his
time in La Fleche, he would have had access to the library of the
college there, and could have read widely and deeply in its
collection of both ancient and modern sceptical texts. Pyrrhonist
themes are woven into many of Hume's writings, nowhere more
strikingly than in the theory of the human understanding laid out
in Book One ofA Treatise cifHumanNature, the dramatic
culmination of which is a cry of despair in the face of what looked
like a choice 'betwixt a false reason and none at all' (T 268).

The first step towards this apocalyptic conclusion was an

investigation into the workings of the understanding in its
everyday guise, as the means by which human beings make
judgements about the world that lies beyond the bounds of their
11
 immediate experience. Philosophers-with the notable exception
of Locke-had traditionally restricted their attention to how it is
that we are able to achieve absolute certainty, in mathematics and
other kinds of pure enquiry where it is possible to demonstrate
that such-and-such must be true. Hume was more interested in
probabilistic judgements about matters of contingent fact: that is,
in the judgements that we make, using our experience, about how
the future will be, how things might have been in the past, and
what might explain what is happening in the world now. This was
the ordinary business of ordinary people reflecting on matters of
ordinary concern. But it was also, albeit in a much more carefully
regimented manner, the business of natural scientists trying to
make better sense of the world around us, and the business too
of anatomists of human nature trying to make sense of the
world within us. What Hume wanted to know was how the
understanding enables us to form beliefs about what the weather
will be like tomorrow, about why our army lost the battle, and
about how rainbows appear in the sky.
::I
::c

Such beliefs, Hume decided, are all beliefs about causes and
effects. We are able to analyse our experiences in a variety of ways,
in terms for example of what resembles or is identical with what,
in terms of how things are related in time and space, and in terms
of proportion and degree and contrariety. But it is the causal
relation 'that can be trac'd beyond our senses, and informs us of
existences and objects, which we do not see or feel' (T74). And
what Hume discovered as he examined how it is that we form
beliefs about causes and effects was that reason, in one important
sense of the word, is not involved. When we form a belief about
tomorrow on the basis of what has regularly happened in the past,
we do not make use of any general principle that would entitle us
to say that we are using the past to prove that tomorrow this is
more likely to take place than that. To be entitled to say such a
thing, we would have to combine a description of how things have
been in the past with confidence that the laws of nature never
change. Then, and only then, would we be entitled to use past
12
experience to make a rational inference about the future.
The problem is that there is no way of proving that the laws of
nature never change. Our only basis for what we believe about the
laws of nature is, after all, our past experience. And we cannot use
that to prove that our past experience is a reliable guide to how
things will be in the future. Nor is there any way of abstracting
from experience to prove that it just must be the case, as a matter
of metaphysical or logical necessity, that the laws of nature never
change. For we can imagine that the laws of nature might have
been different from what we have experienced them to be.

There is then no possible source for a general principle concerning

the immutability of the laws of nature. That means that our causal
beliefs have to be explained without recourse to such a principle.
And that means, Hume concluded, that when we form beliefs
about the future on the basis of the past, we are not making
inferences and drawing conclusions. Rather, the mental processes
involved are mere habits of association, whereby some regularly
experienced conjunction of events prompts us to believe that, for
example, a cloudy sky will soon be followed by rain. When we
open the curtains and see a grey sky outside, the idea that it will
rain before long just feels more compelling-as Hume puts it, it
has more 'vivacity'-than the idea that we are in for a long hot day
of sunshine. It was not reason but rather custom that was, Hume
claimed, 'the guide of life' (T 652).

This discovery of the centrality to our cognitive lives of automatic

associations of ideas was what Hume himself took to be his
primary contribution to the science of human nature. It did not
mean that we form our beliefs about the world in a blind and
random manner. On the contrary, it was plain that there are
principles or rules by means of which the formation of causal
beliefs is generally and naturally regulated. For instance, we tend
to assume that, as Hume put it, '[t]he same cause always produces
the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the
same cause' (T173). But the ubiquity of patterns of association in
13
 our thought about the future and past did mean that we have no
obvious reason to pride ourselves on possessing a special faculty of
reason that distinguishes us from and elevates us above the rest of
the animal kingdom. Just like the other animals, we rely on
custom and habit, not rational insight into the unchangeability of
nature, in our decisions about how to respond to the world
around us.

That was an unnerving conclusion to reach, but, in itself, it did not

mean that our natural belief-forming processes were
untrustworthy. Worries about the reliability of the understanding
arose only when Hume realized that, properly speaking, we have
no idea at all what we are talking about when we call one thing the
cause of another. We come to believe that one thing is the cause of
another when the two things in question have presented
themselves in our experience in a particular way. They have
regularly come into contact with each other, one thing comes
E before the other in order of time, and they have been constantly
f conjoined with each other such that one thing never appears
without being followed by the other. But to say that the first thing
is the cause of the second is to say more than this. It is to say that
there is some means by which the first thing makes the second
thing happen. It is to say that there is some kind of necessary
connection between the two things, such that given the first thing,
the second must happen. And, Hume argued, we have no insight
into whatever it might be that necessarily connects a cause with its
effect. All we have experience of is the constant conjunction.
When we talk of the power that a cause has to make the effect take
place, we are merely projecting onto the world the sense we have
that the effect definitely will follow the cause.

The very idea of one thing being the cause of another appeared,
therefore, to be the product of an illusion of the imagination. And
Hume could not help worrying about whether we should allow
ourselves to be guided by such illusions. 'Nothing� he reminded

14
himself, 'is more dangerous to reason than flights of the
imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes
among philosophers' (T 267). So perhaps the philosopher should
reject the promptings of the imagination, and believe only what he
could be absolutely certain about. The problem was that it was
fairly easy to show that, when subjected to critical reflection, all
certainty degenerates into mere probability, and that probability
diminishes to the point where there could be no confidence at all
in the matter under consideration. It was a matter of ordinary
experience that no one is so confident of his powers of reasoning
that he does not accept that sometimes he makes mistakes. But
any judgement about the chance of an error in a particular case
had to go along with an acceptance that that judgement itself
could be erroneous. And a judgement of the likelihood of error
about that could, in turn, be mistaken. And so on.

It was at this point that Hume found himself apparently faced ::c
C

with a choice between, on the one hand, a 'false', or deceptive, 0J

::,

reason, in the form of a reason that was merely a disposition of the

associative imagination, and, on the other hand, a reason that was
'no reason at all' because it destroyed confidence in every single
one of his judgements and beliefs. It looked as if Bayle and the
Pyrrhonists were right, and that the rational thing to do was to
accept the sceptical conclusion and suspend judgement altogether.
Yet this, Hume quickly discovered, was impossible. In reality he
had no choice but, at some point, to look up from his desk, leave
his study, re-engage with the world, and carry on forming beliefs,
and acting on them, like everyone else. And as soon as he did so,
the philosophical arguments that had made him lose confidence
in his everyday habits of mind looked absurd. 'I dine, I play a
game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my
friends', Hume reflected; 'and when after three or four hours'
amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so
cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to
enter into them any farther' (T 269).

15
 The whole project of an accurate and anatomical examination of
human nature-in fact, of anything at all-looked as though it had
run into the sand. But Hume found that there was a part of him
that wanted to carry on regardless. And this undimmed curiosity
was sufficient to make him sceptical about the scepticism he had
reasoned himself into. In other words, it made him sceptical about
the philosophical reasoning that had, for a moment, robbed him
of his confidence in the power of understanding that he would
have to rely on in his further investigations into human nature.
Perhaps it did not matter that it was not possible to prove that his
understanding was reliable in the judgements it made and the
beliefs it formed. Perhaps the philosopher should simply accept
his essentially animal nature, and submit to the involuntary
cognitive processes that he shared with every other human being.
He had no insight into the real nature of causal powers, nor into
whatever it was that was responsible for the laws of nature being
what they were. But this did not stop him forming beliefs about
causal connections in nature; nor did it seem to be a reason not to
:I
:c indulge his desire to know more about the things that interested
him most: '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' (T 271).

The passions
Hume had discovered that the understanding, the special activity
which philosophers had fixed upon to define human beings and to
distinguish them from the other animals, was, in reality, the work
of habitual and automatic associations of ideas. The associative
imagination took the felt vivacity of the perceptions of the senses,
and transferred it to ideas of the causes and effects of those
perceptions, thereby giving those ideas a felt firmness or strength
that distinguished them from mere conceptions and fancies. Thus
the various different kinds of mental activity-perceiving,
conjecturing, remembering, judging, believing-were
distinguished simply by how they felt, rather than by being based
16
in autonomous faculties of the mind. The cognitive dimension of
human nature was constructed and animated by the ebb and flow
of these feelings. This meant that it no longer looked plausible to
suppose that the human mind was structured by a categorical
division between reason on the one hand and emotion on the
other. The traditional distinction between reason and feeling had
collapsed, to the extent that reasoning was in itself, as Hume put
it, 'nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our
souls' (T179).

It followed that the dynamics of the practical life had to be

reconceived along the same lines. 'Nothing is more usual in
philosophy, and even in common life', Hume noted, 'than to talk of
the combat of passion and reason' (T 413). Most moral philosophy,
both ancient and modern, had been founded on a way of thinking
according to which we are obliged to regulate our actions by
reason and to oppose and subdue any passions which pose a ::c
C

challenge to reason's authority. This was the way of thinking that a,

:::J

Hume, in his letter to the physician, described himself as having :::J

e­
a,

subscribed to in his youth. It was, Hume now saw, a way of �

thinking that was fundamentally mistaken. The combat between
practical reason and passion is in fact a combat between different
kinds of passions, between passions that feel so 'calm' that we
mistake them for acts of reason, and 'violent' passions that are as
uncomfortable and disruptive as all passions are usually supposed
to be. It is not a combat that the violent passions are bound to
win, because violence is not the same thing as strength. It is
perfectly possible for a calm passion to be so deeply embedded in
a person's nature that it is able to resist the pushes and pulls of the
violent passions. This, and not success in the techniques of
self-mastery, was what philosophers were talking about when they
talked about the government of the passions by reason.

Questions immediately arose however. Without a faculty of reason

empowered to discipline and control the passions, how exactly
was their violence to be overcome? How was strength of mind, the
17
 prevalence ofthe calm passions over the violent, to be achieved?
What, ifanything, made it possible to establish order, in human
nature, and in society at large?

These were especially pressing questions for Hume because the

passions that are most salient in his anatomy ofhuman nature are
intrinsically violent passions like pride, shame (Hume's word is
'humility'), love, and hatred. These are the passions that had been
ofmost interest to Mandeville too, but Hume would have also
found them thoroughly explored in 17th-century French moralists
such as Blaise Pascal, the due de la Rochefoucauld, and Jean de la
Bruyere. They are passions that were supposed by these writers to
set human beings at odds both with themselves and with other
people. In England Thomas Hobbes had described pride, or
'glory', as one ofthe 'principall causes ofquarrell' which turns
man's natural condition into a state ofwar ofevery man against
every man. Hume believed that animals as well as human beings
feel pride, shame, love, and hatred. But animals do not live in
::I
::c intensely competitive commercial societies in which the struggle
for status and recognition is as intense as the struggle for survival.
It mattered then, that, having removed a controlling faculty of
reason from human nature, Hume had an account to give ofhow
the violent passions are tamed and suppressed.

Pride, shame, love, and hatred are classified by Hume as 'indirect'

passions. They are different in kind from simple and immediate
responses to present or future good and evil, like joy and sorrow,
or hope and fear. Their indirectness lies in the fact that they are
complex mental phenomena which arise from ideas ofourselves in
our relations with a wide variety ofcauses ofpleasure and pain. I
feel pride, for example, when a cause ofpleasure is related in some
more or less intimate way to me. I feel love for you-the kind of
love that might also be called 'esteem'-when a cause ofpleasure is
related in the same kind ofway to you. The object, or focus, of
pride is, Hume claimed, always myself, just as the object or focus
oflove was always another person. That is just a basic feature of
18
how the mind works. But the fact that so many different things
can be causes ofpride and esteem-our possessions as well as all
kinds ofpersonal merit and accomplishment-implied that the
causation ofthe indirect passions is not in each case the work of
an innate and specific principle ofmind, but is rather to be
understood in terms ofthe particular instantiation ofquite
general laws ofmental functioning. Hume was especially
interested in how the relation ofownership, or property,
insinuates itselfinto our emotional lives to the point where it is
the principal cause ofthese 'indirect' passions. He was, after all,
living in a world in which 'houses, equipage, furniture, cloaths,
horses, [and] hounds' (T 310) appeared to matter as much, ifnot
more, than anything else in life.

The hold ofthe indirect passions upon us is strengthened by the

fact that they are intensely social. My pride in my fine house, for
example, is immeasurably heightened by my awareness ofthe :c
r::
esteem that you and everyone else feels for me as its owner. Hume CJ
:,
:,
explained our responsiveness to the feelings and opinions of
others in terms of'that propensity we have to sympathise with
others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and
sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own'
(T 316). Sympathy-not here a form ofcompassion, but rather a
kind ofattunement to the states ofmind ofother people-is
absolutely central to the world ofthe passions as Hume describes
it. It gives us the vivid, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful,
sense we always have ofourselves as standing in relation with
other people. It makes the human condition a condition of
unavoidable sociability. It explains why man is 'the creature ofthe
universe, who has the most ardent desire ofsociety, and is fitted
for it by the most advantages'. After all, '[w Je can form no wish,
which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps,
the greatest punishment we can suffer' (T 363).

Sympathy combines with our interest in property to generate a

form oflove or esteem which Hume took to be particularly
19
 prevalent in human nature. This is the admiration we feel for the
rich and powerful. Such admiration, he observed, is usually
unconnected to an expectation that we might personally benefit
from the wealth and influence of those we look up to. Our esteem
for riches is generally disinterested, just like our contempt for
indigence and poverty. Sympathy explains this otherwise
mysterious phenomenon. It makes sense of why we take vicarious
pleasure in the pleasure taken by the rich and powerful in their
riches and power. And in the process it goes some way towards
explaining why highly stratified societies are not pulled apart by
tensions arising from inequalities of wealth and social standing.
Of course there is bound to be resentment and envy on the part of
the poor and powerless when they compare their lives with the
lives of their superiors. But, Hume suggested, this resentment
usually produces not a desire to overturn the social order, but,
instead, a desire on the part of the lower orders to improve their
situation relative to those around them. For we care much more
about how we stand in our relations with our peers than about the
::I
:c distance between us and the rich and famous.

In his analysis of the passions Hume's attitude was self­

consciously that of the cool and objective anatomist. He made no
value judgements about the way in which human beings show
themselves to be just as concerned about their property as about
their virtue. The prominence of pride in human life, fixed upon as
a sign of corruption and sinfulness by the French moralists of the
17th century, and by Scottish Calvinists too, was merely described,
and not judged. The same goes for our obsession with the lives
and possessions of the rich and powerful, and for the distaste we
feel at the sight of poverty and degradation. Instead, Hume went
to great lengths to show how the associative model of the mind
that he had sketched in his account of the understanding could be
developed so as to apply also to the myriad complexities of the
emotional life. It is here that his ambition to put the science of the
mind on a rigorously experimental footing, so that it might be
comparable in explanatory sophistication to the science of nature,
20
is most obvious. Hume seized on 'experiments to confirm this
system' and displayed them in the minutest detail. He was
especially proud of having identified a 'double relation of ideas
and impressions' that explained every operation of every indirect
passion, no matter what the cause of the passion was taken to be:
in every case, '[t]hat cause, which excites the passion, is related to
the object, which nature has attributed to the passion; the
sensation, which the cause separately produces, is related to the
sensation of the passion' (T 286).

Working in this spirit, Hume did not make it his business to give
advice about how the passions should be regulated, so that the
violent passions were contained and controlled. This was
theoretical, not practical, philosophy. As such, it was a philosophy
wholly different in kind to that which Hume had experimented
with in his teenage years. But it was, at the same time, a
philosophy which addressed the problem that practical moralists :c
C

had always concerned themselves with, the problem of the cu

:,

government of the passions. The startling message of Hume's :,

C
theory of the passions was that the passions could be left to govern
themselves. This was what the centrality of sympathy to the
emotional life made it possible to conceive. For sympathy ensures
that my pride, esteem, and so forth are attuned to yours, so that a
process of accommodation and moderation goes on all the time, as
each one of us seeks the social satisfactions they crave. Human
nature, on this picture, is to a significant extent defined by the
social contexts in which human beings always live. '[T]he minds
of men are mirrors to one another' (T 3 65), Hume remarked, and
just as mirrors are not in control of the reflections they give, so
also our feelings, and beliefs, cannot help but be impinged upon
by the feelings and beliefs of those around us. This was why
Hobbes had been wrong in his claim that the natural state of
human beings is a state of permanent antagonism and conflict.

That said, there were even so obvious limits to our sympathetic

sociability-limits that, at last, brought into view a fundamental
21
 difference between human beings and the other animals.
The societies that human beings live in are so large and complex
that peace and order require the invention ofmoral codes, and
ofgovernment and political power too.

Second thoughts?
Hume left La Fleche in the summer of1737. He travelled to
London, in order to find a publisher for his new system ofthe
understanding and the passions.A Treatise efHumanNature
appeared in the book shops in January 1739, with a subtitle
describing it as 'An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental
Method ofReasoning into Moral Subjects'. (By 'moral subjects'
Hume meant matters that were, as Samuel Johnson put it in his
Dictionary, 'such as [are] known or admitted in the general
business oflife', as distinct from the more exact and rarefied
concerns ofnatural philosophy.) On the title-page (Figure 2)
E Hume put an ambiguous motto from Tacitus: 'Rara temporum
f felicitas, ubi sentire quce velis; €:1 quce sentias, dicere lied ['Rare
happiness ofthe times, when you may think as you will, and speak
as you think']. Was Hume saying that he was glad to have been
able to follow his anatomical argument where it led him, and not
to have had to pretend to share the didactic concerns ofthe
moralizing 'painter'? Or was he hinting that there was more he
wanted to say, but felt unable to put into print? Were there, for
example, religious implications to his theory ofhuman nature that
he was unwilling, for the moment at least, to spell out? To many of
his readers, Hume's silence about, for example, the role ofGod's
grace in the regulation ofthe passions would have been deafening.

The Treatise contains much more than it has been possible to

describe here. One ofthe four 'parts' ofBook One on the
understanding concerns our ideas ofspace and time, and whether
time and space can be divided into ultimately indivisible parts.
Hume's treatment ofprobabilistic reasoning by itselfstretches
over almost 200 pages. It is followed by a comprehensive
22
 A

OF

Human ature
BEING·

An. AT'I'El\!PT to introd��e the ex­

perimental· Method of· Reafoning
I N T 0

M.ORAL · SUBJECTS. :c
C

QI
::,

R.ara te�rum filicita1, wi ft1ttire-, . qutZ .vl'liI ; f:J qutlJ

fintitu, Jiar, licet.. . · · ., TA cl T.

VoL. I.
0 F T.H E

U N D E R S T A N D I N G.

LONDON:
Prin.ted .for JoliN NooN, at the IP'hitt-H-art, near
Mnrir's-Chap,·11 in Gh,apjirk.
M DCt; XXXIX.

2. The title-page ofA Treatise ofHumanNa'ture.

 treatment of'the sceptical and other systems ofphilosophy' that
takes in, among other things, the origins ofthe beliefin an
external world, the metaphysics ofmaterial nature, and the basis
ofthe idea ofa single selfthat stays the same through time. Book
Two's application to the passions ofthe experimental method of
reasoning is exhaustive and sometimes exhausting in its attention
to the minutiae ofthe economy ofthe emotions. It enumerates the
wide range ofdifferent causes ofpride and shame and oflove and
hatred. It analyses in detail how a variety offactors increases and
decreases the violence ofpassions. Along the way, Hume examines
the age-old question ofwhether freedom ofaction is compatible
with the necessitation ofchoice by motives. He argues that it is.
The contrary view-what philosophers today call
'incompatibilism'-is motivated by a misunderstanding ofcausal
necessity. Once necessity is redefined along the lines argued for in
Book One ofthe Treatise, the problem, so we are told, simply
disappears.

f It is not at all clear how, or whether, everything in the Treatise fits

together into a single coherent line ofargument. Soon after it was
published, Hume brought out a brief'abstract', or summary,
intended to draw attention to his principal discoveries. These, he
believed, were the treatment ofprobable reasoning, and the role
he ascribed to the associative imagination. In 1748 he published a
completely rewritten version ofBook One, entitled Philosophical
Essays concerning Human Understanding. Later he changed the
title to An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. As in the
abstract ofthe Treatise, the focus in the Enquiry was exclusively
upon Hume's new account ofreasoning about matters of
empirical fact, along with its sceptical implications for insight
into the relation between causes and effects. 'By shortening &
simplifying the Questions', he told a friend, 'I really render them
much more complete.Addo dum minuo [I add by taking away]'
(LDHi 158). Then in 1757he published a greatly stripped down
'Dissertation on the Passions'. It further emphasized Hume's view
that the passions are 'susceptible ofas accurate a disquisition, as
24
the laws of motion, optics, hydrostatics, or any part of natural
philosophy'.

The question raised by the way Hume repackaged the arguments

of the Treatise in later works is whether it implies that he had lost
confidence in the parts of his first book that disappeared from
view as a result. No second edition of the Treatise ever appeared,
and late in life Hume wrote an 'Advertisement' for his collected
philosophical works which disowned it as a 'juvenile work, which
the Author never acknowledged' (E 2 ). 'I was carried away by the
Heat of Youth & Invention to publish too precipitately; he
explained in the letter quoted from above. 'So vast an
Undertaking, plan'd before I was one and twenty, & compos'd
before twenty five, must necessarily be very defective. I have
repented my Haste a hundred & a hundred times: But what,
exactly, was it that he came to repent? The streamlining of
argument in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding ::c
C

suggests that, at the very least, he regretted having tried to do too 01

:::,
many things at once. The Treatise does not give the impression
that its author was in complete control of his text. Sometimes one
has the sense that Hume wanted above all to collect together every
good idea and argument he had ever thought of, without concern
for principles of narrative order and logical architecture.

It is possible that Hume also came to worry that the scepticism on

display in Book One of the Treatise lent itself to misinterpretation,
as if he were actually endorsing the extreme doubt that he so
dramatically articulates at the conclusion of his examination of
the understanding. Take, for instance, his treatment of belief in an
external world in the section 'Of scepticism with regard to the
senses'. Hume begins by asserting that it is pointless to ask
whether or not things really exist outside the mind. 'That is a
point: he insists, 'which we must take for granted in all our
reasonings' (T187). Yet when he has completed his long
investigation into the causes which prompt us to believe in the
continuing and independent existence of material objects, he finds
25
 himself no longer so sure. For the perceptions on the basis of
which we construct the world of experience have none of the
coherence and constancy that we attribute to their supposedly
objective and enduring causes. Neither sense perception itself nor
reason is able to explain belief in an external world. Only the
imagination can explain it, and, as in the case of causal reasoning,
the means by which the imagination does its work here are not
such as to inspire confidence in the result. At the end of the
section Hume admits that he 'cannot conceive how such trivial
qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can
ever lead to any solid or rational system' (T217). Taking
everything into account, he now feels more inclined to place no
confidence at all in his senses than to maintain the implicit trust
that he started out with.

Was Hume saying, then, that the rational thing to do was not to
believe in an external world? Was he setting philosophy against
common sense and ordinary belief, and forcing the reader to
:I
::c choose between them? Was this the real message of Book One of
the Treatise? Was the talk in the final section of the curative
properties of backgammon and dining with friends no more than
an attempt to disguise where the argument really led? In the
Enquiry Hume appears keen to make it clear that this is not how
he should be read. A very brief summary of 'Of scepticism with
regard to the senses' is introduced at the end of the book as an
instance of 'excessive scepticism� the kind of argumentation that
might appear plausible in the classroom or study, but that is
immediately subverted by 'action, and employment, and the
occupations of common life' (E 159). Pyrrhonism is, by definition,
useless. It cannot be put into practice, for it undermines the very
basis of action as such. Hume does not say here that there is
anything wrong, logically speaking, with extreme scepticism. But
he does do his best to put distance between it and moderate
scepticism. Moderate scepticism is 'durable and useful' (E 161). It
reminds us of the limited nature of our intellectual faculties, and
enjoins us to restrict our enquiries to subject matters which those
26
faculties are suited to. This, Hume wanted the reader to believe, is
the kind of scepticism that issues from his account of the
understanding.

Uniformity and difference

As he changed his mind about how his theory of human nature
should be presented to the reader, Hume did not give up on the
idea that there really is such a thing as a single human nature,
shared by all human beings in all times and all places. All human
beings, he was sure, reason in the same way about their lives and
the world around them. All human beings are subject to the
passions of pride, shame (or 'humility'), love, and hatred. 'It is
universally acknowledged', Hume claimed in the Enquiry
concerning Human Understanding, 'that there is a great
uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and
that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and :c
C

operations' (E 83). Yet this was compatible, Hume wanted to IOI

:::1

insist, with the fact that human life is different in different times e­n!
:::1
IOI

and places. It was still possible to talk, as people in the 18th

century liked to do, of countries as having distinctive 'national
characters', such that particular sets of habits, manners, and
morals are more frequently met with in one people than among
their neighbours. In his essay 'Of National Characters' Hume
argued that his theory of sympathy provided an explanation of
national particularity, and that therefore it was not necessary to
appeal, as many (including Montesquieu) did, to 'physical causes'
such as climate, soil, and landscape.

National character could change through time. Hume's History qf

England was, in part, a study of how English-and indeed
European-manners had changed with the decline of feudalism
and the rise of manufacturing and commerce. However, when
Hume looked beyond Europe, his historical imagination failed
him. What he saw as a lack of achievement in manufacturing, arts,
and sciences elsewhere in the world suggested to him that there
27
 are different 'kinds' or 'species' of men, and that non-Europeans
are 'naturally inferior to the whites'. As purported evidence for this
repellent proposition, Hume observes that 'there are Negroe [sic]
slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered
any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without
education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in
every profession' (EMPL 208 fn.). Somehow it did not occur to
Hume that there might be non-biological causes, in the form of
grotesquely inhumane treatment, that might explain what slaves
of African origin were and were not able to achieve when they
found themselves among Europeans. His endorsement of innate
racial difference was picked up and used by such defenders of
slavery as the plantation owner Edward Long in his 1774 History
ofJamaica.

It is hard not to feel that, despite its pretensions to universalism,

Hume's interest in 'human nature' was really an interest in human
E beings as they conducted themselves in the particular kind of
i society, modern commercial society, in which he happened to live.
The slave trade, of course, did much to make that kind of society
possible. As in England and France, merchants and investors in
Scotland became vastly wealthy through profits made in the
Caribbean plantations to which hundreds of thousands of African
slaves were transported. But Hume found almost nothing to say
about modern slavery. It is mentioned in his works only once, in
the context of a discussion of whether or not the modern world
was more populous than the ancient (seeEMPL 429). Hume, like
almost all of his contemporaries, averted his eyes from this part of
the substructure of commercial society, and concentrated his
attention on, as he put it himself, 'men's behaviour in company, in
affairs, and in their pleasures' (Txxiii).

28
Hume's theory of human nature was initially intended to be the
foundation for 'a system of the sciences'. The system would
comprise analyses ofmorals, 'criticism' (what we now call
aesthetics), and politics. When complete, it would amount to a full
examination of'almost every thing, which it can in any way import
us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the
improvement or ornament ofthe human mind' (Txx). But after he
had finished his account ofmorality, in Book Three of the Treatise,
Hume gave up on the whole project, and renounced aspirations to
systematicity. He turned instead to writing briefand elegant
essays on miscellaneous moral and political topics. He also
changed his literary persona. No longer merely an 'anatomist' of
human affairs, he now allowed himselfto be read as seeking to
have a positive, improving influence on manners and morals. The
culmination of Hume's experiment with the combination of
anatomy and 'painting' was An Enquiry concerning the Principles
ofMorals, the book which he would judge to the best of all ofhis
writings.

Fragments of a system of the sciences

While he waited to see what the literary world would make of the
first instalment ofA Treatise ofHuman Nature, Hume finished
Book Three, 'OfMorals'. The principal question to be addressed in
29
 his treatment ofmorality had been introduced already, in Book
'Iwo, when he mentioned 'the controversy, which oflate years has
so much excited the curiosity ofthe publick, whether ... moral
distinctions befounded on natural and original principles, or
arise.from interest and education' (T 295). This was a question
which Mandeville's writings, in particular, had made pressing. In
his major work, The Fable qftheBees, Mandeville had argued that
no moral distinctions are founded on natural principles, and that
all arise from interest and education. Human beings, according to
Mandeville, are not naturally sociable creatures. They have to be
manipulated and coerced into cooperating with each other and
respecting authority, and the invention ofmoral rules and
institutions is an essential part ofthis process ofsocialization. In
his discussion in Book 'Iwo ofvirtue and vice as the causes ofpride
and 'humility', Hume had put the question ofthe naturalness of
morality to one side. Now, though, equipped as he was with a
worked-out theory ofhuman nature, he was in a position to
E::I address it head on.
:c

His answer was that, while some ofmorality has a basis in natural
principles, important parts ofit do not. A large part ofBook Three
ofthe Treatise is given over to arguments intended to prove that
the virtue ofjustice, in particular, is artificial. By Justice' Hume
meant respect for rights ofproperty, and for the rules which
determine how property is transferred from one person to
another, as well as for the contracts which make it possible for
transfers ofproperty in the future to be guaranteed by actions
taken by one party in the present. Rules fixing the distinction
between possession and property, and the conveyance ofproperty
between individuals, are essential to the peaceful social life of
human beings. But, Hume argued, they are not rules that human
beings are naturally disposed to follow or to regard as morally
obligatory. A reliable respect for them depends in the first instance
upon a disciplined regulation ofself-interest such as can only be
inculcated through upbringing, education, and societal pressure.
As obedience to the rules becomes a matter ofsecond nature, so
30
the sense arises in each individual that there is a distinctively
moral value to such obedience. Sympathy attunes them to the
benefits of the rules to society at large. In this way the limits of
natural sympathetic sociability are extended, and human beings
learn to accommodate themselves to the needs and expectations of
all members of society.

Similarly artificial, Hume argued, is the sense of an obligation to

obey the state simply because it is the state, regardless of one's
views about the characters and aims of those who happen to
possess political power. In the wake of the social contract theories
of Hobbes and Locke, that was not a very controversial claim to
make-though, as we will see in Chapter 3, Hume was highly
critical of how the contractarians themselves explained the basis
of political obligation. Much more unpalatable to his
contemporaries was Hume's further claim that, similarly, there is
nothing natural in a woman's obligation to chastity. But
Mandeville was mistaken to go so far as to claim that all of
el
morality is artificial. There are virtues that have no dependence on �
artifice and contrivance. There are character traits that naturally
elicit esteem, or contempt, without having to be seen in the
context of systems of conventions that make extensive human
society possible. The benefits are obvious of such virtues as
'[m]eekness, beneficence, charity, generosity, clemency,
moderation, [and] equity' (T 578). The 'natural humanity' that
prompts us to act in these ways is plainly something to be admired
and cherished, in each and every case of its exercise.

In his inaugural lecture as professor of moral philosophy at the

University of Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson had countered
Mandeville by insisting that 'the best of the ancient writers' were
right in their view that virtue is 'the best and most perfect life
according to nature'. Hume sought to find a way between
Mandeville on the one hand and Hutcheson on the other.
Hutcheson was well known for having claimed, in answer to
Mandeville, that human beings possess a special 'moral sense� by

31
 means of which they distinguish between virtue and vice without
any consideration of self-interest. By the same token, Hutcheson
had argued in earlier writings, it was obvious that it is wrong to
claim, as some philosophers had, that moral judgements are the
work of a faculty of pure reason, comparable in their certainty to
proofs in mathematics and logic. Hume agreed with Hutcheson
that morals are not matters of pure reason. This was obvious from
the fact that moral judgements 'excite passions, and produce or
prevent actions' (T 457). Even so, Hume was not prepared to
accept the existence of a special 'moral sense' comparable to the
senses of sight, hearing, and smell. (The fact that he gave a section
of Book Three the title 'Moral distinctions deriv'd from a moral
sense' is therefore misleading.) Hutcheson was right to have
objected to Mandeville that distinctively moral ideas of approval
and disapproval cannot be reduced to judgements of self-interest.
But those ideas could be explained in other terms. The capacity
for sympathy that Hume appealed to in his analysis of the
E passions provided a means of understanding them as pleasurable
f and painful responses to the pleasures and pains of other people.
Morality could be explicated in terms of utility, supplemented,
Hume argued, by ideas of what was 'agreeable'.

To reject the idea that the making of moral distinctions is the

work of reason was not to embrace an extreme subjectivism.
Neither Hutcheson nor Hume was saying that there is no
possibility of error in moral judgement. It is true that, as Hume
put it, 'when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious,
you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature
you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation
of it' (T 469). In other words, you mean that you have a feeling or
sentiment of displeasure and uneasiness. But this does not detract
from the reality of vice, or of virtue. Moral judgements can be
compared to judgements about sounds, colours, smells, and heat
and cold. Modern philosophers like Locke had established that
such 'secondary qualities' were, in Hume's words, 'not qualities in
objects, but perceptions in the mind' (T 469). But, of course, it
32
remained the case that I could be wrong when I judged that
something was blue not red, or sweet not sour. Almost all people,
given the right conditions, agree when it comes to colour, or
flavour. Disagreement can usually be explained by poor light or
distance, or temporary or permanent damage to the sense of taste.
In morals, too, a standard of correctness is provided by the normal
functioning of the faculty of sympathy, which is to say, by general
agreement as to what is praiseworthy and blameworthy.

Hume's plan had been to move on from morality to further books

of the Treatise on 'criticism' and on politics. As it turned out,
though, Book Three marked the end of Hume's projected 'system
of the sciences'. He went on to write a great deal about politics, in
essays and in The History ofEngland. But about criticism, and the
principles of artistic taste, he wrote comparatively little. It is not
clear why. Hume's letters, as well as a profusion of references in
his published works, tell us that he was deeply interested in the
arts, especially in literature and history, ancient and modern. The
earliest of his surviving letters describes him reading Milton and
Virgil. On his deathbed he read the Greek satirist Lucian and the
recently published first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall qfthe
Roman Empire. Yet Hume did not attempt anything on the scale
of, for example, his friend Lord K.ames's two-volume Elements of
Criticism, or the Aberdeen professor George Campbell's equally
substantial Philosophy ofRhetoric.

That said, Hume would make one enduring contribution to what

we now call aesthetics, in the form of an essay entitled 'Of the
Standard of Taste', first published in 1757. Here he addressed a
question that naturally arose from his acceptance of Hutcheson's
view that judgements of value are a function of sentiment, not
reason. If that is the case, is the consequence that, as the saying
goes, there is no arguing about matters ohaste? That might be a
matter of common sense, but, Hume observed, it contradicts
another piece of common sense, which is that there would be
something completely absurd in maintaining that, for example,
33
 there is no difference between the achievement of, say, Milton and
some completely obscure poet whom no one has ever taken
seriously. Extreme subjectivism was no more appropriate in
criticism than it was in morals. The task Hume set himself in 'Of
the Standard of Taste' was how to combine the existence of
'general rules of art', sufficient to distinguish between the good
and the bad, with a commitment to aesthetic sentimentalism. His
suggestion was that we understand the rules of art to have their
source in the cultivated sensibility of experienced critics. T he 'true
standard of taste and beauty', Hume argued, is '[s]trong sense,
united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by
comparison, and cleared of all prejudice' (EMPL 241).

The History ofEngland would provide Hume with the

opportunity to display his own sense of taste and beauty-and to
reveal further how, despite his extraordinary adventurousness of
mind, he was in some ways marked by the assumptions and
E prejudices of his age. It seems remarkable now, for example, that
::E in his survey of the artistic achievements of the reign of James I,
he should focus on the 'many irregularities, and even absurdities'
in Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson 'were equally
deficient in taste and elegance� and '[t]he great glory of literature
in this island, during the reign of James, was lord Bacon' (HE v
151, 153). Paradise Lost was Milton's 'capital performance', Hume
accepted, but 'there are very long passages, amounting to near a
third of the work, almost wholly destitute of harmony and
elegance, nay, of all vigour of imagination' (HE vi 151). Of all the
writers of the Restoration period, 'Sir William Temple is almost
the only one, that kept himself altogether unpolluted by that
inundation of vice and licentiousness, which overwhelmed the
nation' (HE vi 544).

Of essay writing
Sometime in the early 1740s Hume decided that the systematic
science of man undertaken inA Treatise ofHuman Nature was
34
misconceived. He had had very high hopes for the first volumes of
the Treatise, and was disappointed by the reception they met with.
They were not completely ignored, but they did not effect the
philosophical revolution that he had imagined they would. A long
and demanding book like the Treatise, Hume now thought, was
not suitable to the literary culture of the age. While he was
working on Book Three of the Treatise, Hume had written a
number of essays, apparently with a view to starting an
Edinburgh-based magazine modelled on The Spectator, the
enormously influential paper published daily by Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele between March 1711 and December 1712.
Nothing came of that plan. Instead Hume published two self­
standing volumes of moral and political essays in 1741 and 1742.

The essay form promised a means of combining philosophical

ingenuity and innovation with a language and argumentative style
suited, as the Treatise apparently was not, to the expectations and
capacities of the reading public. Hume's first collection of essays
began with an essay about the writing of essays. There he
portrayed himself as 'a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the
Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation' (EMPL 535). He
expressed regret that learning had up until recently been confined
to universities and monasteries. This, he claimed, had had a bad
influence both on taste and on the conversation of the polite world.
For what could there be to write and talk about without knowledge
of history, poetry, politics, and philosophy? The result was bound
to be literature that was little more than gossip-or literature that
strained for dramatic effect for its own sake. At the same time,
learning, by locking itself away from the world, had degenerated
into pedantry and stylistic barbarousness. The essayist would
remedy these two problems simultaneously, by teaching learning
to be polite and conversable, and by insinuating matters of
interest and importance into drawing rooms and clubs.

Hume's way of expressing his ambitions as an essayist owed a

great deal to Addison. 'Mr Spectator', the character invented by
35
 Addison to serve as his own mouthpiece, had declared that he
wanted it to be said of him that he had 'brought philosophy out of
closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and
assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses'. Like Addison, Hume
conceived of the essay as a means of addressing a specific
readership. The very rich were 'too much immers'd in Pleasure';
the very poor were 'too much occupy'd in providing for the
Necessities of Life, to hearken to the calm Voice of Reason' (EMPL
546). Those who were situated in between great wealth and
extreme poverty, in 'the Middle Station of Life', stood to gain most
from what the essayist had to offer. They had need of all the
virtues, those of industry and integrity as well as those of
humanity and affability, and had a better chance than either the
great or the humble of acquiring both wisdom and practical
ability. The essayist spoke to those in the middle station as an
equal, and encouraged them to recognize their situation as the
happiest of all, particularly insofar as they were the best placed to
E know the pleasures of friendship. The poor were too often
f prevented by their poverty from doing the good services out of
which friendships are made; while the rich had always to worry
that they were esteemed only for their wealth.

In an essay entitled 'Of Avarice' Hume addressed a vice to which,

perhaps, those in the middle station in life were especially liable.
He noted that while the obsession with acquiring money for its
own sake had always been condemned by moralists and
philosophers, it was hard to find a single example of anyone
having been cured of it. Hume offered the reader not a cure for
avarice, but rather an ingenious explanation of its cause. It is
usually found in old men, or in men 'of cold tempers: because it is
impossible for the human mind to lack passion entirely, and this is
the passion that best suited the state of those in whom all other
concerns have died away to nothing. Why is it that such a cold and
spiritless passion is so often taken to extremes? Hume's answer
was that this is because the coldness of the avaricious man makes
him insensible to ordinary concerns for reputation, friendship,
36
and pleasure, so that his passion is not moderated, as passions
normally are, by awareness of how he stands in the eyes of others.
There is nothing to be done about avarice but to laugh at it. Hume
was 'more apt to approve of those, who attack it with wit and
humour, than of those who treat it in a serious manner' (EMPL
571). He ended the essay with a fable of his own invention, intended
to do no more than add to the already copious stock of witty jokes
at the miser's expense.

Just as important to Hume as it had been to Addison was the

devising of a literary style that would appeal to women as well as
men. Mr Spectator had observed that women 'compose half the
world, and are by the just complaisance and gallantry of our
nation the more powerful part of our people'. Likewise, Hume
described women as 'the Sovereigns of the Empire of
Conversation', and dec lared that they were 'much better Judges of
all polite Writing than Men of the same Degree of Understanding'
(EMPL 535, 536). In an essay 'Of the Study of History' Hume
concerned himself with recommending history to women 'as an
occupation, of all others, the best suited both to their sex and
education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of
amusement, and more entertaining than those serious
compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets'
(EMPL 563). History, in other words, was better for women than
either novels or sermons and manuals of religious devotion. In
another essay, 'Of Love and Marriage', Hume addressed matters
with which women were usually supposed to be naturally more
concerned than men, and took it upon himself to explain to his
female readership why men complained about the married state
as often as they did.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that in his essays Hume

did no more than thoughtlessly reinforce the sexist prejudices of
his time. It is true that he was no radical when it came to relations
between men and women. In his discussion of chastity in Book
Three of the Treatise, Hume failed to challenge the assumption
37
 that it was more important for women than for men to be
restrained in their indulgence of the appetite for sexual pleasure.
On the other hand, in classifying chastity and modesty as artificial
virtues, he went some way towards demystifying them. It was
'obvious', Hume claimed, that there is no 'foundation in nature' for
the restrictions imposed by society upon the speech, dress, and
behaviour of women. The only question worth discussing was how
the idea of the need for such restrictions arises 'from education,
from the voluntary conventions of men, and from the interest of
society' (T 570). And in the explanation he offered of why sexual
continence is valued more in women than in men, and of why the
habits associated with such continence continue to be valued in
women even after they have passed child-bearing age, Hume
made it obvious that there was no need to appeal either to religion
or to some kind of intrinsic authority possessed by husbands and
fathers over wives and daughters. Instead, all that needed to be
taken into account was the fact that, while a father was expected
E pay for the upbringing and education of his children, trivial
to
f facts of biology meant that only a woman's chastity guaranteed
that the children he was financially responsible for really were
his own.

Similarly, when, in an essay 'Of Polygamy and Divorces', Hume

argued in favour of monogamy and against voluntary divorce, he
did so in a manner intended to highlight the fact that what he was
arguing for was a set of conventions, not a matter of natural law.
In other times and places, both polygamy and divorce had been
permitted. But there was much to be said for 'our present
European practice with regard to marriage' (EMPL 190). Wives
were treated better by their husbands where one man was
matched with one woman. Where divorce was not permitted,
children were spared the fate of being committed to the care of an
indifferent or even hostile stepmother. It was easier for love
between man and woman to develop into the calm and sedate
affection of friendship, and the permanence of the union of the
interests of husband and wife prevented each from having reasons
38
 __J
3. The title-page of the 1748 edition ofEssays Moral andPolitical.
This was the first of Hume's works not published anonymously.
39
 to be suspicious of the other. The argument of the essay served to
make intelligible what might otherwise have seemed to be a
wholly arbitrary imposition.

As Hume saw it, the essay was above all a vehicle of moderation.
The characteristic posture of the essayist was that of someone
seeking to navigate a passage between opposites, so as to
produce consensus and harmony where before there had been
disagreement and conflict. The essay brought together the worlds
of learning and of polite conversation. It brought together the
concerns and manners of men and of women. And it allowed
Hume to present his ideas as sensible compromises that showed
the way beyond entrenched and poorly motivated philosophical
extremes. In one of his earliest essays, 'Of Moral Prejudices', he
pointed to the middle ground between those who cynically made
fun of the very ideas of friendship, honour, and patriotism, and
those who thought human beings capable of perfecting themselves
E through the transcendence of the concerns of everyday life. The
::E essay form was a way of reframing, not abandoning, Hume's
search for an understanding of the human condition that was
answerable to the truth of our experience of ourselves (Figure 3).

Anatomical painting, painterly anatomy

With the turn to the essay came a change of mind on Hume's part
about how he might approach the 'moral subjects' that remained
his principal concern. While he was finishing Book Three of the
Treatise he had a correspondence with Hutcheson, in the course of
which Hutcheson complained about the overly austere and
anatomical tone of Hume's prose. There was lacking, in Hume's
paraphrase of Hutcheson's objection, 'a certain Warmth in the
Cause of Virtue' (LDH i 32). Hume replied that this was an
inevitable shortcoming of the kind of book that he was writing,
but that, even so, he would see what he could do 'to make the
Moralist & the Metaphysician agree a little better' (LDH i 33). To
this end, he added a rather cursory final paragraph to Book Three
40
indicating 'the happiness, as well as ...the dignity of virtue'
(T 620 ). In the years that followed, he seems to have decided that
more could be done towards making anatomy compatible with the
practical concerns of the moralizing painter. Here was another
opposition that the essay form could help to overcome.

Hume's understanding of how anatomy and painting might agree

is, however, not easy to characterize. For, as he intimated in the
essay 'OfAvarice', moral improvement was not straightforwardly
his goal. He did not seek to instruct his readers how they could be
more perfect than they ordinarily were. The account of human
nature given in Books One and Two of the Treatise, with its
redescription of reason as a habit-driven operation of the
associative imagination, made it impossible for Hume to believe
that philosophy, in its traditional guise as an appeal to a
distinctively human capacity for rational autonomy, might be able
to increase the virtue and happiness of human beings. Of course
it was true that there were a few people who enjoyed doing
philosophy, for whom, indeed, philosophy was an essential part of
a life worth living. But it would be absurd to pretend that this was
true of humankind as such.

In the essay 'Of Moral Prejudices' Hume identified the Stoics as a

school of philosophers especially given to assuming that the
cultivation of rationality could improve-even perfect-the human
condition. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hume had biographical
reasons to be sceptical of Stoicism's claims for itself He broadened
out his critique of philosophy's therapeutic ambitions in a group of
essays on 'the sentiments of sects, that naturally form themselves
in the world, and entertain ideas of human life and happiness'
(EMPL 138). In these essays Hume impersonates, in turn, the
Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonist, and the Sceptic. Writing in the
first person, he summarizes the views of the first three of these
schools of thought as to how happiness was to be achieved. The
Epicurean makes the case for retreat from the world and the
cultivation of the pleasures of friendship and conversation.
41
 The Stoic speaks up for the active pursuit ofvirtue for its own
sake. The Platonist advocates contemplation ofthe perfection of
the divine mind. The Sceptic, in contrast, doubts whether
happiness lies in any one particular approach to life. Philosophers
in general are too given to ignoring 'the vast variety ofinclinations
and pursuits among our species; where each man seems fully
satisfied with his own course oflife, and would esteem it the
greatest unhappiness to be confined to that ofhis neighbour'
(EMPL 160). Philosophy can offer no medicine for every human
mind. The apparent worth ofeach and every object in life is
determined by the passions, and there is little that anyone can do
about the passions that happen to predominate in their character.

It is reasonable to suppose that in 'The Sceptic', Hume spoke for

himself. He consistently refused to set himselfup as a teacher of
how life ought to be lived. Instead, what he offered readers was
something like a mirror in which they might see themselves as
they really were, and so gain a realistic understanding oftheir
::I
:c capacities. In an essay 'Ofthe Dignity or Meanness ofHuman
Nature' he rejected both the views ofthose who exaggerate human
potential, by representing man as having been made in the image
ofGod, and the views ofthose who reduce man to the status ofan
animal superior to other animals only in his vanity. Where, in the
Treatise, he had himselfinsisted on comparisons between man
and animal, now he worried about the consequences of
depreciating the human species. He was, he wrote, 'ofopinion,
that the sentiments ofthose, who are inclined to think favourably
ofmankind, are more advantageous to virtue, than the contrary
principles, which give us a mean opinion ofour nature' (EMPL
81). This did not mean that he was prepared to go along with
those who portrayed human beings as demigods, whose faculties
ofreason and will were so many signs ofman's heavenly origins.
What was needed in order to gain an accurate understanding of
our capacities was for us to give up constantly comparing
ourselves with God on the one hand and with the animals on the
other, and to focus attention on human nature by itself, so as to
42
gain a clearer appreciation of the character of the motives that
shape our lives.

This, of course, had been precisely Hume's concern in Book Two of

the Treatise, but there, maintaining the rigorous objectivity of the
anatomist, he had refrained from any evaluation of human nature
as such. He had not addressed the question, answered in one way
by Mandeville and in a diametrically opposite way by Hutcheson,
of the extent of human selfishness. Was it true that, really, there
was no such thing as friendship or public spirit? In 'Of the Dignity
or Meanness of Human Nature' Hume argued that those who
believed this had been led astray, by the fact that acts of virtue or
friendship are pleasurable, and by the fact that such acts help to
satisfy our perennial desire for praise. It was wrong to infer
fundamental selfishness from these facts, first because virtue
produces pleasure, and does not arise from it; and secondly
because, as Hume put it, '[t]o love the glory of virtuous deeds is a
sure proof of the love of virtue' (EMPL 86). Negative, pessimistic
el.
estimations of human nature had the effect of discouraging people �
from exercising their natural tendencies to virtue, by making them
believe that it is impossible for them to be what, in fact, they
would find pleasure in being. The anatomy of human nature could
serve a practical purpose by ridding people of misconceptions of
themselves and their abilities. It would show that human beings
were fitted by nature with dispositions to both their own
happiness and the good of society at large.

This was as far as Hume would go towards a philosophy of

improvement and edification. In need of a position in society, in
1744 he allowed his name to be put forward for the professorship
of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, but when he
failed to get the job, he was not very disappointed. It is hard to
imagine him doing what professors of moral philosophy were
expected to do-which was to teach boys in their early teens their
duties as fathers, husbands, citizens, and Christians. After a brief
period as a tutor to the mentally unstable Marquess of Annandale,
43
 Hume spent almost two years with the British army as secretary to
General James St Clair. Then he returned to the family home in
Chirnside, and in an extraordinary burst of intellectual energy
wrote a number of major works, including a new book of moral
philosophy. Initially conceived of as a series of self-standing but
interconnected essays, it was published in 1751 as An Enquiry into
the Principles ofMorals.

The morality of common life

In 1746, while taking part in an abortive British attack on the
French town ofL'Orient, Hume witnessed the aftermath of a
suicide attempt on the part of an army officer desperate not to
have his honour tarnished by being sent home on account of
nothing more serious than exhaustion and hunger. As the law
required, Hume called for a surgeon, but the officer soon died
from his self-inflicted wounds. 'Never a man exprest a more steady
E Contempt of Life', Hume wrote in a letter, 'nor more determind
:E philosophical Principles, suitable to his Exit' (LDH i 97). Perhaps
as a result of this experience, Hume later wrote (but never
published) an essay on suicide, in which he argued that taking
one's own life is not necessarily a transgression of one's duties
either to God, to our neighbour, or to ourselves. Suicide 'may be
free from every imputation of guilt or blame'-'according to the
sentiments of all the antient philosophers' (EMPL 580). The
absolute injunction against it ran counter to natural feeling, and
was a prime example of how religious superstition violated
ordinary moral common sense. Hume's rewriting of his moral
philosophy was not motivated solely by a desire to make it easier
to read. To a significant extent, it was informed by a vivid sense
that there were ways in which Christian moral culture ran counter
to the moral sentiments, with the result that people lived
unhappier lives than they needed to.

The fundamental problem with the ethical theory of Christian

modernity, Hume thought, was its obsession with the idea that
44
some actions deserve to be called good in themselves, regardless of
what their consequences turn out to be. Not giving in to the
temptation to commit suicide was supposed to be morally
admirable, even if the life that was thereby preserved was a
miserable one. Refraining from 'self-murder' and staying at one's
post in life was, simply, a matter of duty, and doing one's duty was
intrinsically praiseworthy, just because it was one's duty-which
meant, just because it was what God required of one. Hume's view
was that this entire line ofthought was an alien imposition upon
natural moral feeling. It was not an exclusively modern, Christian
line of thought. The Stoics accepted the permissibility of suicide,
but they, too, had written in praise of the good in itself, what was
really good even if it so happened that no one acknowledged it to
be good. As Hume saw it, however, it was always appropriate to be
suspicious of the moral hero who placed himself at odds with the
common sense of his time and place. Vanity all too often explained
an ostentatious concern for duty for duty's sake, regardless of the
consequences. Commonsensical moral thought, by contrast, was
able to justify itself to itself, precisely because it dwelled upon the
obvious benefits and harms of courses of action. The plain utility
of virtue was the principal theme ofAn Enquiry concerning the
Principles ofMorals.

Usefulness was obvious in the case of'social virtues' such as

benevolence and justice. In fact it was so obvious that there was
every reason to conclude that these virtues were valued solely on
account of their utility. If human circumstances were to change so
much that rules ofjustice were no longer useful, abiding by those
rules would no longer properly be regarded as virtuous. In the
Treatise Hume had used the utility of conventions regarding
property as part of his argument that justice is an artificial, not a
natural, virtue. The fact that such conventions are essential to
human society made it plausible that they had been invented to
serve that purpose. There was no need to postulate an innate
disposition to attach moral significance to them. Now, though,
Hume was no longer interested in pointing to the artificiality of
45
 justice. In a footnote to an appendix, he dismissed the whole issue
as a 'merely verbal' dispute (E 308).

In answer to the question ofwhy the utility ofan action or practice

prompts us to call it morally good, Hume postulated a principle of
'humanity' that naturally interests us in the well-being ofothers.
'It appears: he wrote, 'that a tendency to public good, and to the
promoting ofpeace, harmony, and order in society, does always, by
affecting the benevolent principles in our frame, engage us on the
side ofthe social virtues' (E 231). The same principle explained
moral approval ofvirtues useful to their possessor rather than to
society at large, such as good sense, enterprise, frugality,
temperance, and perseverance. 'Humanity' was perhaps explicable
in terms ofthe faculty ofsympathy described in the Treatise, but
the details ofits operation were another thing not relevant to
Hume's present purposes. It was the fact ofthe existence of
humanity that mattered. It meant that there was no need to
E suppose that human beings are motivated only by self-interest. To
f take human nature to be fundamentally selfish made it natural to
look to considerations ofduty for duty's sake, cutting against the
grain ofinclination, as the basis ofmoral judgement and action.
But, as Hume had argued in the essay 'Ofthe Dignity or Meanness
ofHuman Nature', the selfish theory was not a view ofhuman
nature supported by observation and experience.

Hume acknowledged that an emphasis on the utility ofvirtue led

to a blurring ofthe usual distinction between distinctively moral
character traits and bodily and mental endowments, which were
more a matter ofluck than ofchoice and effort. For just as good
sense, enterprise, and frugality are useful to their possessor, so
also are beauty, bodily strength and dexterity, and hereditary
wealth. Both kinds ofquality are praised because they are useful,
and this seemed to undermine the basis for supposing that there is
a significant moral difference between them. Many estimable
traits, attributes, and abilities are also valued on account ofwhat
Hume termed their 'agreeableness', either to ourselves, or to
46
others (or to both). In addition to its good effects, there is, for
example, something immediately pleasing about benevolence, in
'the very softness and tenderness of sentiment, its engaging
endearments, its fond expressions, its delicate attentions, and all
that flow ofmutual confidence and regard, which enters into a
warm attachment oflove and friendship' (E 257). But there is the
same immediate appeal to good humour, wit, and even
cleanliness.

To acknowledge these facts was, obviously enough, to downgrade

the moral significance ofwill and choice. The idea that the sphere
ofmoral goodness is limited to the sphere offreedom and
responsibility was, Hume thought, another peculiarly modern and
Christian idea. It was at odds with the sentiments both of'the
antient philosophers' and ofeveryday life. The same could be
said ofthe idea that there was something morally admirable in
'monkish virtues' such as '[c]elibacy, fasting, penance,
mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, [and] solitude'
(E 270). There is nothing either useful or agreeable to such
practices. On the contrary, they serve only to stupefy the
understanding and to harden the heart, to corrupt the
imagination and to sour the temper. They could, then, be
transferred to the catalogue ofvices, not virtues.

Plenty ofHume's moderately religious friends and contemporaries

would have agreed about the pointlessness ofcelibacy and fasting.
Yet they found it impossible to accept that there was no more to
morality than the useful and the agreeable. Hume would be widely
criticized for omitting the voluntary and the dutiful from his
analysis ofpersonal merit, even by Adam Smith, who in many
ways was deeply influenced by Hume's ideas. Humanity, Smith
remarked, 'is the virtue ofa woman'. 'The most humane actions;
he continued, 'require no self-denial, no self-command, no great
exertion ofthe sense ofpropriety'. Hume's point, however, was
precisely that morality does not need to be regarded as a matter of
self-denial and self-command and exertion. He meant to
47
:I
:c

4. Portrait in oils of Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1755.

represent virtue as something engaging, easy, and familiar.

Virtue's sole purpose 'is to make her votaries and all mankind,
during every instant of their existence, if possible, cheerful and
happy; nor does she ever willingly part with any pleasure but in
the hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their
lives' (E 279). The virtuous life is the life that human beings
naturally want to live. The happiness that virtue brings is possible
48
here and now. It does not require divine grace, nor any other kind
ofradical reform ofthe self

The Enquiry concerning the Principles ofMorals was intended to

empower and inspire self-confidence in its readers. It showed
them what they were really like. Contrary to what they were told
by ministers and moralists, they were not selfish beings who
needed ideas ofduty in order to overcome their natural
inclinations. There was nothing wrong with their natural
inclinations. They could trust their sentiments as guides to life.
More than once Hume declared that the Enquiry was his favourite
among his books, and he did so perhaps because it was where he
made it clearest that his commitment to analysis and 'anatomy',
evident here in his uncovering ofthe ubiquity in the moral life of
the useful and the agreeable, was not at odds with the ordinary
commitments ofeveryday life. For, just like everything else,
philosophy itselfwas good only insofar as it was useful, and,
ideally, agreeable as well.

Moral progress
Hume was not blind to the fact that, just as different nations had
different characters, different societies had different moral codes.
In a :fictional dialogue published with the Enquiry, he compared
the morals ofancient Athens with those ofmodern France. The
Athenian man ofmerit, given to pederasty, able to marry his
half-sister, and in the habit ofleaving unwanted children outside
to die, 'might, in this age, be held in horror and execration'; while
the French man of merit, unconcerned about his wife's adultery,
servile in the face oftyranny, and disposed to fight to the death
over trivial points ofhonour, 'might, with the Athenians, be an
object ofthe highest contempt, even ridicule' (E 333). These were,
though, merely different ways in which the same fundamental
moral principles expressed themselves. All ofthe qualities and
practices extolled by both the Athenians and the French were
valued on account oftheir being useful or agreeable, to oneselfor
49
 to others. As one ofthe speakers in the dialogue expresses the
point, '[t]he Rhine flows north, and the Rhone south; yet both
spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated in their
opposite directions, by the same principle ofgravity' (E 333).

Comparison ofthe modern world with the ancient was an

18th-century obsession, and it was common to think that in
respect ofmoral culture, at least, the modern world was inferior to
the ancient. It was common, moreover, to suspect that the modern
world was inferior even to the ages ofdarkness and violence that
had followed the decline and fall ofRome. Then at least, and as in
the ancient world, men had valued liberty and independence
above all things, and had been willing to devote themselves wholly
to service to the nation. Now, by contrast, men had been made
selfish and soft by the fruits ofmanufacturing and commerce, and
were more concerned about their private lives than about the good
ofthe community at large. One ofthe most striking aspects of
Hume's moral thought is his unwillingness to buy into this
::l
:c narrative ofmoral decline. He was convinced that, on the contrary,
there were significant respects in which the modern world of
commerce was not just different, but also morally superior to the
ancient. Hume was as interested in ancient Greece and Rome as
any ofhis contemporaries, but he was no nostalgist. He was
confident that, far from being a source ofcorruption, commerce
and a thriving market for luxury goods went along with the
improvement, not only ofstandards ofliving, but ofmorals
as well.

There were, ofcourse, some respects in which the ancient world

was indeed morally superior to the modern. Its attitude to suicide
was one salient example. The moral philosophy ofCicero, in
particular, was more wholesome than that ofpopular Christian
manuals ofethics such as Richard Allestree's The liVhole Duty ef
Man. In many respects, Hume thought, Christianity had been a
disaster for the moral culture ofEurope. But the wounds it had
inflicted had not been fatal. Ignoring the Christian religion's own
so
 condemnations ofworldly concerns, modern European nations
had devoted themselves to the pursuit ofriches, and as they had
done so they had discovered, as Hume put it in an essay 'Of
Refinement in the Arts', that 'industry, knowledge, and humanity,
are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found ...to
be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly
denominated, the more luxurious ages' (EMPL 271). A sign ofthe
superiority ofthe modern world was the fact that it was-so
Hume found reason to believe-considerably more populous than
the ancient. '[I]fevery thing else be equal� he claimed, 'it seems
natural to expect, that, wherever there are most happiness and
virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people'
(EMPL382).

It was not the case, however, that Hume was blind to the
persistence of widespread human unhappiness and suffering. He
may not have acknowledged the evils ofslavery in its modern
form, but his writings provide ample testimony to a conviction
that, regardless ofthe ways in which things were improving in the
age ofcommerce, it remained true that the pains oflife were
usually greater than the pleasures, in both number and intensity.
Hume pointed this out when discussing the question ofhow the
existence ofevil, natural as well as moral, could be compatible
with the supposition ofa benevolent God. In an early manuscript
fragment, he declared that he was 'apt to regard human life as a
scene ofmisery, according to the sentiments ofthe greatest
a es as well as ofthe generality ofmankind, from the beginning
he world to this day'. 'Victuals, wine, a fiddle, a warm bed, a
!-£fee-house conversation', he added, 'make a pitiful figure, when
--·-··~•CC. T'.__pared with racks, gravels, infamy, solitude, and dungeons:
!;;: :'.'1-iuirne had no time at all for the Christian response that, when
in the larger context ofthe workings ofprovidence, natural
e•-·· . _____ moral evils were revealed to be a means ofproducing

good than otherwise would have been possible. There

no evidence, he retorted, for the hypothesis ofa

51
 Nor was there evidence that such progress as had taken place in
the modern world was bound to continue. In December 1750, just
as Hume was finishing work on An Enquiry concerning the
Principles ofMorals, the young Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
gave a lecture in Paris entitled 'A Philosophical Review of the
Successive Advances of the Human Mind'. It presented a picture
of the human race as slowly but endlessly marching towards
greater and greater perfection. Hume had no such confidence.
Nothing guaranteed that the current age of improvement would
not be followed by decay and decline. Human beings remained
permanently liable to inflict great harms upon themselves and
upon others, through factionalism in politics, and fanaticism in
religion.

::I
:c

52
Politics, Hume wrote in the Treatise, 'consider[s] men as united in
society, and dependent on each other' (Txix). In other words,
politics considers men as living under government. For, unlike
animals, human beings need government to keep them united in
all but the smallest societies, and to make them accept their
mutual dependence. Part of politics, for Hume, was an
understanding of each individual's obligation to the government
he or she lives under. It provided an account of that obligation's
source, and also of its limits. This was a general question about
political life as such. Hume was sceptical, though, about how
much there was to say about political society in the abstract. 'I am
apt ...to entertain a suspicion', he confessed, 'that the world is still
too young to fix many general truths in politics, which will remain
true to the latest posterity' (EMPL 87). In the essays which he
published in the early 1740s he focused mostly on the party divide
that was a peculiar feature of the British political culture of the
time. In a new collection of essays published in 1752 he considered
what he took to be the distinctively modern political question of
how government should act with respect to international trade.
He spent the rest of the 1750s writing a study of the origins of
Britain's unique form of political liberty, in the guise of a history of
England 'from the Invasion ofJulius Caesar to the Revolution
in 1688'.

53
 Political obligation
Hume included allegiance among the 'artificial' virtues sharply
distinguished, in Book Three of the Treatise, from those 'natural'
virtues, like benevolence, charity, and generosity, which we
approve ofbecause each and every instance of them plainly has a
tendency to the good of mankind. It might well not be obvious
why it is a matter of moral obligation to obey the laws laid down
by those in power. That obligation, after all, derives not from the
moral character of the laws themselves, but rather from the simple
fact that they are made by those who claim authority to compel us
to obey. And no human being, it would seem, possesses by nature
special attributes that make it morally compulsory to do as they
command. That this individual, or that family, has the right to
command allegiance must ultimately always be a matter of
convention, even if the origins of the convention are ancient and
cii
forgotten. In his rejection of the idea of natural political authority,
§ Hume agreed with Hobbes and Locke, and disagreed with those
who believed that a king's right to command could be derived
directly from the will of God.

On the other hand, Hume found it impossible to accept the

accounts given by Hobbes and Locke of the construction of
political power. Those accounts locate the source of an individual's
duty of allegiance in a voluntary and conscious act of consent.
This, Hume argued, was implausible for at least two reasons. The
first was that almost no one in ordinary life is aware of having
done or said something by means of which they could be said to
have consented to the government they live under. The second was
that, even if this problem could be overcome, perhaps by means of
the notion of'tacit' or 'implicit' consent, there appeared to be no
way of explaining the obligation to obey in terms of a prior
obligation to keep to the terms of a promissory agreement. For it
is no more obvious why there is a moral obligation to keep
promises than it is why there is a moral obligation to allegiance.

54
The former kind ofobligation is no more natural than the latter.
Both, in the end, have to be accounted for in terms ofbeneficial
consequences ofgeneral adherence to a convention.

The idea that it is a moral duty to maintain allegiance derives,

according to Hume, from the fact that 'the execution ofjustice, in
the stability ofpossession, its translation by consent, and the
performance ofpromises, is impossible, without submission to
government' (T 546). For this reason, submission to government is
plainly in our interests. In addition, our natural tendency to
sympathize with those harmed by instances ofinjustice
supplements self-interest with the sense that the obligation to
obedience is moral as well as merely prudential. In this way belief
in the authority ofgovernment develops automatically and
involuntarily. Allegiance is, like so much oflife on Hume's picture
ofhuman nature, a matter of unconsciously acquired habit. Also a
matter ofhabit, Hume added, is acceptance ofthe particular form
ofgovernment one happens to have been born under. To �
demonstrate their legitimacy, most regimes have nothing to �
appeal to other than the fact that they have been in power for a
long time. Usually their power is the product ofviolence, not
agreement. But in politics, according to Hume, origins do not
matter. 'Nothing: he points out, 'causes any sentiment to have
greater influence upon us than custom, or turns our imagination
more strongly to any object' (T 556).

The role played by utility in the origin ofthe idea ofa moral duty
ofallegiance enabled Hume to combine, on the one hand, a
rejection ofconsent as the basis ofpolitical obligation with, on the
other, an acceptance ofthe right ofresistance that many (though
not all) consent theorists had been keen to establish. For where
government fails to ensure the execution ofjustice, where
property and contracts are not protected, where there is disorder
and fear instead oforder and confidence, there is bound to be a
loss ofconfidence in government, and, in the end, a dissolution of
the opinion that the government must be obeyed. The regime in
55
 place will then, regardless of how long it has been in place, look as
though it is doing more harm than good. It will be natural for
there to be a feeling that it needs to be replaced by another. The
�dea that a regime has to be obeyed regardless, and that resistance
is always and everywhere necessarily a crime, is obviously
incompatible with the purposes which government was invented
to serve.

Even so, Hume thought, it is very seldom that a people can be

absolutely certain that the consequences of trying to effect a
change of government will be better than putting up with the
incompetence, or worse, of the current regime. Philosophy is not
capable of defining precisely when the right of resistance should
be exercised. It was true that the existence of such a right was
especially clear in a mixed government such as England's, where
each element of the constitution had the right to defend its
powers and privileges against incursions on the part of the other
5 elements. But that did not make it any easier to apply principle to
� practice. In a carefully oblique, and very brief, discussion of the
implications of his treatment of the right of resistance for the
so-called Glorious Revolution-'that famous revolution, which has
had such a happy influence on our constitution, and has been
attended with such mighty consequences' (T 563)-Hume
insinuated that it had not been clear even in 1688 that resistance
was justifiable.

The justification of the Revolution, Hume went on, lay in,

precisely, its 'influence' and 'consequences'. The present
Hanoverian regime was no different from most others in relying
for its legitimacy on the passage of time. 'Time and custom give
authority to all forms of government', Hume explained, 'and all
successions of princes; and that power, which at first was founded
only on injustice and violence, becomes in time legal and
obligatory' (T 565). The mere suggestion that the transfer of the
crown from James II to William III had been an instance of
'injustice and violence' was incendiary, but Hume would not be
56
disposed to change his view even in the fraught conditions ofthe
aftermath ofthe Jacobite rebellion of1745. On the contrary, he
then wrote new essays on political obligation expressly designed to
highlight the baselessness ofthe crass triumphalism ofthose who
had defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie.

In 'Ofthe Original Contract' Hume laid out what has since

become the classic critique ofconsent theory. In 'Ofthe Protestant
Succession' he balanced the case for the transfer ofthe crown to
the (Protestant) House ofHanover against the case for its
remaining with the (Catholic) House of Stuart, and found that, as
things had stood in the run-up to 1714 and the accession ofGeorge
I, the advantages ofsuch a transfer had not obviously outweighed
the disadvantages. What, forty years on, demonstrated the
legitimacy ofthe Hanoverians was not high political principle, but
simply the fact that the Hanoverians were the ones in power, and
that things had gone reasonably well since they had taken over.
Hume told a friend that he hoped he had 'examin'd this Question
as coolly & impartially as ifI were remov'd a thousand Years from
the present Period' (LDHi 112).

The politics of moderation

The Revolution ofl688 put in place a constitution which
settled-ifnot in the minds ofJacobites, then in the minds ofthe
vast majority-the great constitutional disputes ofthe 17th
century over royal prerogative and parliamentary privilege. It did
not, however, end the vicious party disputes that had shaped
British politics since the breakdown in the 1670s ofthe post-Civil
War consensus. 'Tories' remained at loggerheads with 'Whigs', and
tensions heightened as first George I and then George II looked
to the Whig Sir Robert Walpole to conduct the business of
government as Britain's first 'prime minister'. In the 1720s and
1730s an unstable coalition ofTories and disaffected Whigs
positioned themselves as a 'patriotic' opposition to Walpolean
'corruption', and gave voice to their complaints in a journal,
57
 The Craftsman, mostly written by the ex-Jacobite Henry St John,
Lord Bolingbroke.

In his first collection ofEssays, Moral and Political, P:Ublished in

1741, Hume informed the reader that he had taken The Craftsman
as his model as well as The Spectator. But what Hume in fact
intended to do was apply the moderation and balance of the
Addisonian essay to the contemporary political scene, in order to
make it comprehensible why British politics took the form it did.
This, again, was a kind of'anatomy'. The goal was not to heal the
party divide, but to understand it better, and so to stop both sides
of the divide using complaints about factionalism for factional
purposes.

There was, Hume thought, no point in pretending that in modern

Britain party rivalry could be replaced by a patriotic politics of
national unity. In a country with a mixed constitution, where the
E principal offices of government were divided between monarch
:E and parliament, it was inevitable that there would be hostility
between, on the one side, those who gave pre-eminence to the
crown as the basis of authority and stability, and, on the other
side, those who looked to parliament for the defence of rights and
liberty. For how, exactly, the balance of power was to be settled in
a mixed constitution was bound to be a matter of opinion. Some
people would be disposed to trust the crown and fear the people,
others would be disposed to trust the people and fear the crown.
In the language of the time, there was bound to be a 'court' party
and a 'country' party. The opposing principles of these two parties
were, Hume argued, 'the genuine divisions in the British
government' (EMPL 71).

The basis of party dispute was, then, disagreement between

judgements of self-interest. There were those who took their
interests to be best defended by the crown, and those who took
their interests to be best defended by parliament. The problem in
Britain was that this division had been complicated, and made
58
especially dangerous, by disagreements about supposed matters of
principle. The Tories combined support for the crown with belief
in divine right and indefeasible succession which entailed that
only one family, the Stuarts, had a right to the throne. The Whigs
combined faith in parliament with belief in a right of resistance,
which entailed that it was in the end for parliament to decide who
had a right to the throne. 'Parties from principle', Hume declared,
'especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to
modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and
unaccountable phcenomenon, that has yet appeared in human
affairs' (EMPL 60).

Religious differences intensified political differences. A party that

stood for authority and order was bound to be the party of the
established church, since, as Hume put it, '[l]iberty of thinking,
and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power,
and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded'
(EMPL 65-6). A party that stood for liberty and protection of the
rights of the individual, by contrast, was bound to be favoured by
religious dissenters, since they could hope that it might establish,
if not universal freedom of religion, then at least some toleration
of religious heterodoxy. Like all religious disagreements, this was a
disagreement that had a tendency to turn violent. Refusal to
extend the scope of toleration could be portrayed as monarchical
tyranny. Dissenting criticism of the Church of England could be
portrayed as seditious hostility to the monarchy itself The case of
modern Britain helped confirm Hume's suspicion that Christianity
had an ability unique among religions to turn political disputes
into excuses for oppression and persecution.

In the age of Walpole and Whig supremacy, British party politics

had become 'unnatural', even 'monstrous' (EMPL 612). A
traditionally 'country' party, associated with religious dissent, was
in power; and a traditionally 'court' party, associated with the
established church, was in opposition. Hume did not accept that
this meant that old party labels had lost their meaning.
59
 Bolingbroke's claim that now there was only a divide between
those who believed in the value ofthe post-1688 constitution, and
a corrupt clique ofpower-hungry Whigs, was a self-serving
obfuscation ofthe political facts. The Tories had reinvented
themselves as a party ofliberty and the Revolution settlement, but
remained committed above all to monarchical principles, which
was ultimately what explained the animosity between them and
the Hanoverian kings. They could not wholly accept a king put on
the throne by parliament, and such a king was bound to be hostile
to them. The Whigs had become the party ofauthority and the
recipients ofoffices and pensions given by the crown, but, ifforced
to choose, they would choose liberty over allegiance to a particular
royal family. It was for these reasons that the Church ofEngland
remained attached to the Tories, and Dissenters still connected
themselves with the Whigs. Party politics was, then, at bottom,
what it always had been, which meant that a return to the
conflicts ofthe previous century was always possible. To
E understand this, Hume thought, was to understand how
f important it was that there be moderation on both sides ofthe
party divide.

Hume hoped that such moderation would be fostered by a

demonstration that there was a contradiction built into the
extreme language each party used in its attacks on the other.
Whigs claimed that no one but Walpole was capable ofdefending
the Revolution settlement, while Tories claimed that, on the
contrary, Walpole and his policies would destroy it. Both lines of
argument, Hume pointed out, were incompatible with the
veneration their exponents professed to feel for the constitution
put in place after 1688. The constitution as both parties described
it was not such as to be reliant on one man for its continued
existence, and nor was it such that one man might do it fatal
damage. The whole point ofa good constitution, after all, was that
it did not matter who occupied positions ofpower. A good
constitution was, as the saying had it, a government oflaws, not
men. The rule oflaw was what distinguished a free system of
60
government, the kind ofgovernment that both parties said they
valued above all things, from absolutism.

This, however, was an argument that could itselfbecome a source

ofirrational, and dangerous, animosity. Hume was well aware
that, divided into factions though they were, the British-or
rather, perhaps, the English-could come together in an arrogant,
and uninformed, sense oftheir superiority over most oftheir
fellow Europeans. British liberty was routinely trumpeted as a
rebuke to despotism on the continent, and to French despotism in
particular. But, Hume thought, overvaluation by the British of
their constitution was as pernicious as undervaluation.
Moderation required an appreciation ofthe fact that there were
respects in which absolute states were superior to free ones. Hume
made this point in a substantial essay 'Ofthe Rise and Progress of
the Arts and Sciences: where he argued that while it was true that
the origins oflearning and culture lay in freedom, and while the
sciences tended to flourish most in republics, it was in monarchies �
such as France that the arts were being brought to perfection. �

The crucial fact here was that in modern Europe, absolute

monarchies had become, as Hume put it, 'civilized'. Kings no
longer sought to impose themselves into every aspect of
government. Administration, including most importantly the
administration ofjustice, had been allowed to become
independent ofthe whims ofa single man. This meant, Hume
argued in an essay 'OfCivil Liberty: that it was no longer true that
absolutism entailed despotism and the absence ofliberty. Civilized
monarchies, just as much as republics, could be called
governments oflaws, not men. 'They are found susceptible of
order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree; Hume
rhapsodized. 'Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the
arts flourish; and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a
father among his children' (EMPL 94). There was an international
dimension to the moderation that Hume sought to instil in his
readers. A sober, anatomical understanding ofBritain's situation
61
 required a tempering ofclaims about the unique virtues ofthe
country's constitution.

Political economy
In the essay 'OfCivil Liberty' Hume argued that republics such as
the Netherlands and almost-republics such as Britain were doing
well at international trade only because in pure monarchies like
France commerce was still regarded as not the proper concern
ofa man ofhonour. That, however, was hardly likely to be a
permanent barrier to French commercial success. Quite generally,
Hume pointed out, trade had not been regarded as an affair of
state until the 17th century. It was not until England and the
Dutch Republic had, despite their modest size, achieved opulence,
grandeur, and military success that kings and their ministers
recognized the importance ofan extensive commerce. Neither the
political philosophers ofthe ancient world nor those ofthe Italian
city states had had anything to say about how government should
::I
::c address itselfto the questions oftrade. What would soon become
known as the science ofpolitical economy was still in its infancy.
In a new series ofessays largely written, like An Enquiry
concerning the Principles ofMorals, while he was at home in
Chirnside between 1749 and 1751, Hume devoted himselfto
making the politics ofcommerce better understood. His goal in
Political Discourses was not a systematic treatment such as would
soon be laid out in Smith's The Wealth qfNations. Instead, he
wanted to persuade his readers to re-examine their assumptions,
and to get them thinking critically about what had become
accepted as mere common sense.

Most fundamentally, Hume wanted his readers to reconsider the

traditional idea that the wealth generated by commerce was
inevitably a threat to a nation's moral health. There was a
powerful current ofpolitical thought that held up the fierce
independence ofancient Sparta and ofthe Roman republic as
the essence ofliberty, and that saw commerce, and especially the
62
trade in luxury goods, as fatal to austere patriotic commitment
to the good ofthe state over the good ofthe individual. As we
saw in Chapter 2, Hume's contrary view was that an increase in
national prosperity naturally went along with an improvement in
manners and morals. This was one reason why it was wrong to
see the history of the modern world as a story ofdecline. It was
true that Spartan and Roman values had lost their appeal, but
that did not mean that modern states must be weaker than
their ancient ancestors. What the examples of the Dutch
Republic and England showed was that in fact successful
commerce made states stronger. Here was a new, distinctively
modern understanding ofliberty, in the form of the protection
ofproperty and the unrestricted expression ofenterprise. The
spirit ofcommerce was identical with the spirit ofliberty so
understood. Hume, Smith would remark, was the first writer
on politics to have seen the tight connection between
commerce, good government, and the liberty and security
ofthe individual. l
2
Cl
The question for politicians, then, was how they could help
commerce have its naturally beneficial effect on the condition of
the nation. Hume was sure that this question was being answered
in the wrong way. It was understandable that people would
assume that the proper goal of commerce was the accumulation of
money, where money was another name for gold and silver. On
this assumption, commerce was a kind ofwar between nations,
and a sign that the war was being won was that money was
flowing into one nation and out ofthe others. In other words, a
'positive' balance oftrade was what mattered, and it would be
achieved by making sure that the value ofexports was always
greater than the value ofimports. An essential means ofmaking
as much money as possible from exports, moreover, was to keep
wages low. It was understandable to think this way, Hume
accepted, but it was also completely mistaken. Money was not
what commerce was about. It was a means, not an end. It was no
more than an instrument ofexchange, not the wheel oftrade, but,
63
 as Hume put it, 'the oil which renders the motions ofthe wheels
more smooth and easy' (EMPL 281).

It was not obvious, Hume asserted in this essay, that it mattered

how much money a country possessed. Prices would always adjust
to the quantity ofmoney, rising as it increased, falling as it
decreased. It was not even straightforwardly the case that
amassing money was advantageous to a state's dealings with other
states. Money was useful in wars and negotiations, but it also had
the effect ofmaking a country's exports more expensive to other
countries-and ofmaking a poorer country's imports cheaper. Yet
there clearly was some connection between money and national
prosperity. Countries which had seen a significant addition to
their holdings ofgold and silver-as had many European
countries since the discovery ofthe Americas-had seen rises in
the standard ofliving. Countries where there was a shortage of
gold and silver were, even ifthey had a flourishing population and
E copious food supply, incapable ofasserting themselves on the
f international stage. Hume argued that the explanation lay in the
effects ofincreases in the quantity ofmoney. A rise in the quantity
ofmoney stimulated the economy regardless ofthe amount ofthe
money in the economy to start with. It generated new wealth,
which the state could tax and use to improve its international
standing.

An increase in the money supply had these effects because ofthe

way in which it stimulated industry and enterprise. There was a
period between the arrival ofnew money and the eventual
concomitant rise in prices when landowners and merchants and
traders would put the money to work, borrowing from those who
brought the money in, and trying to gain an advantage over their
competitors by investing in new techniques and taking on
additional labour. They would then find they had more disposable
income, to reinvest, but also to spend on themselves and on their
families. They would buy finer clothes and build bigger houses,
which would in turn increase the prosperity ofothers. Eventually
64
money would diffuse itselfthrough the population and prices-of
both commodities and labour-would increase to a point where
the economy slowed down again. Before that happened, though,
an efficient tax regime would ensure that the state enriched itself
just as did the population at large. Most important to any
country's economy, in other words, was the appetite and ability of
its people to make use ofincreases in the money supply. The
supposed effects ofa scarcity ofmoney were actually, as Hume put
it, the 'collateral effects' ofthe manners and customs ofa people
not disposed to work to improve their standard ofliving.

It followed that what a government needed to do in its

management ofthe national economy was above all to allow
habits ofindustry and enterprise to have their usual effects.
Government had a duty, ofcourse, to protect property and enforce
the rule oflaw. It also had a role to play in the coordination of
effort necessary to large capital projects such as the construction
ofbridges and harbours. But mostly what government needed to
do was to get out ofthe way, and allow landowners,
manufacturers, and traders to conduct their businesses as they
judged best-even ifthat meant the export ofessential
commodities such as wheat and wool, and the import ofthe
products ofcommercial rivals. Tariffs and controls were, in
general, unnecessary and counterproductive. Trade should be as
free as possible, allowing for the occasional need for the protection
offledgling industries. Taxes should be levied in a way that would
stimulate, not inhibit, economic activity.

Hume was encouraging a reconceptualization ofthe nature of

national wealth. A country's prime resource was not its stock of
money, but rather the energy and inventiveness ofits people. At
the same time, Hume sought to persuade his readers to rethink
their understanding ofinternational relations. The logic oftrade
was entirely different from that ofthe zero sum competition for
territory and resources (especially gold and silver) in which
European states had been engaged since the end ofthe 16th
65
cu
E
::I
::c:

5. Drawing of Hume by Louis Carrogis, c.1764.

century. There was a not a finite amount of wealth to be divided
among the countries of the world. In order for a country to enrich
itself by trade, it needed its neighbours to be able to afford to buy
its products, and in order for them to be able to do that, they too
needed to develop the arts and sciences of agriculture and
manufacture. In an essay added in 1758, Hume declared that it
was therefore 'not only as a man, but as a British subject' that he
prayed for 'the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy,
and even France itself' (EMPL 331).

All European countries had taken on massive amounts of debt to

pay for the wars in which the contest for new raw materials and
markets was played out. Britain was no exception. Hume rejected
arguments that a national debt was no cause for concern because
it was, in effect, a debt which the nation owed to itself. There was
always an international dimension to a country's indebtedness,
regardless of the fact that its principal creditors were its own
citizens. A crisis in Britain's external relations would be bound to
tempt desperate politicians to raid and exhaust the funds put
aside for debt repayment, with fatal consequences for its creditors
and creditworthiness. Alternatively, the country might decide that
it was no longer willing to take such risks, and that in future it
would play no part in the preservation of a balance of power in
Europe. It might prefer to see its neighbours oppressed and
conquered-to the point where it itself lay at the mercy of the
conqueror. Britain was taking on so much debt, Hume feared,
that, in an unstable world, its choice would ultimately be between
the 'natural' and 'violent' deaths of its public credit.

The history of British liberty

Hume published Political Discourses to international acclaim in
1752. It was, he later wrote, 'the only book of mine that was
successful on the first publication'. The year before, he had finally
left the family home and set up house in Edinburgh. Scotland's
capital was at just this time seeing the first signs of the cultural
67
 and scientific developments that would soon give it a claim to be
regarded as a significant contributor to the Europe-wide
intellectual revolution that we now call the Enlightenment. A
'Philosophical Society' had been founded in 1749, Adam Smith
was giving public lectures on recent developments in rhetoric and
jurisprudence, and the city's literati were starting a new literary
journal, The Edin"&urgh Review. A self-consciously 'moderate'
party ofministers was beginning to make itselfheard in the
annual General Assembly ofthe Church ofScotland. Hume found
a place at the heart ofthis ferment ofactivity as Librarian to
Edinburgh's Faculty ofAdvocates. The job did not pay much, but
it did give Hume easy access to a wide ranging and up-to-date
collection of30,000 books. It was the perfect position for
someone whose next literary project was a new British history,
beginning with the union ofcrowns in 1603 and ending with the
Revolution of1688. Hume had been thinking about writing a
history for some time. Now he had the opportunity.

£ The History qfGreat Britain was published in two instalments, in

1754 and 1757. Hume then decided that in order to make full sense
ofwhat had happened in Britain in the 17th century, it was
necessary to start with the reign of the House ofTudor. After all, it
was with the Tudors that-so Hume wrote to a friend-modern
history began: 'America was discovered: Commerce extended: The
Arts cultivated: Printing invented: Religion reform'd: And all the
Governments ofEurope almost chang'd' (LDHi 249). The
completion ofthe story, however, turned out to require that he
take things all the way back to the Roman conquest. In this way
what had begun as a history ofGreat Britain became a history of
England alone-though, inevitably, relations with Scotland were a
constant theme, along with relations with Ireland and France.
Despite the fact that the pre-Tudor part ofEnglish history turned
out to be 'a Work ofinfinite Labour & Study' (LDH i 321), it took
only four years to make the journey all the way back from
Elizabeth to the Roman invasion. Hume had finished his
historical labour and study by 1762.
68
In the Stuart volumes of the History Hume presented his reader
with a sceptical examination of the narratives constructed by both
Whigs and Tories for use in the party political battles that the
Revolution had failed to bring to an end. In the first instance this
required a reopening of the question of who had been responsible
for the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the Cromwellian
tyranny of the 1650s. Whigs pinned the blame on the Stuart kings,
and their ministers, for systematically violating the ancient
privileges of people and parliament. Tories, by contrast, blamed
successive Houses of Commons for failing to contain republican
radicals, who, inspired by a Puritan hatred of the political and
ecclesiastical establishment, refused to respect the equally ancient
prerogatives of the crown and the Church. Hume sought to weave
together key themes from both perspectives on the history of the
first half of the 17th century. T he Commons-egged on by
religious extremists-had indeed continually put pressure on the
established balance of power between king and parliament, as
they had become aware of, and sought to exploit, a growing l
financial advantage over the crown. James I and then his son [
Charles had failed to understand the way the ground was shifting
under their feet, and had exacerbated the tension by reasserting
their right to prerogative powers that, in truth, they were no
longer able to exert.

T he ensuing disaster was the fault of both sides. It also failed to

solve the underlying problem. Charles II and James II would
continue to appeal to tradition and precedent in order to lay claim
to rights-crucially, to an income from parliament sufficient to
enable the crown to play its role as the executive arm of the
state-which parliament was increasingly disposed not to
recognize. T his tempted each king to try to rule without
parliament, something that was only possible, in fact, with the
secret :financial support of the king of France. Tension between
king and commons (and lords) was further heightened, in the end
fatally, by the Catholic sympathies of the later Stuarts. In 1688,
when the openly Catholic James II announced the birth of a son
69
and heir, parliament looked across the North Sea to William of
Orange, the Protestant husband ofJames's Protestant half-sister
Mary, to solve the problem once and for all. Henceforth England
would have a monarch who could not help but recognize his, or
her, fundamental dependence upon the good will ofparliament.

Hume described England's journey towards 1688 in a carefully

even-handed way. What doctrinaire Whigs represented as
malevolent Stuart despotism, Hume portrayed as a series of
mistakes on the part ofmen whose ignorance ofpolitical reality
was as understandable as it was regrettable. Hume appeared, in
fact, to go out ofhis way to bring out the virtues ofthe Stuart
kings, along with the vices and absurdities oftheir enemies.
Summing up at the end ofthe reign ofCharles I, he opined that
the king's 'virtues predominated extremely above his vices, or,
more properly speaking, his imperfections : For scarce any ofhis
faults rose to that pitch as to merit the appellation ofvices' (HEv
542). James II was 'more unfortunate than criminal' (HE vi 520).
Resistance and revolution in 1688, ultimately beneficial though it
had turned out to be, was in no way comparable to the overthrow
ofa Nero or a Domitian. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was
a bigot and a hypocrite, a man whose religious fanaticism was
never anything other than a mask for his overheated political
ambition.

What Hume repeatedly emphasized was that the Stuarts could be

excused their mistakes about the extent oftheir prerogative
powers because the image they had had ofEnglish kingship had
been a reality during the age that had gone before them. Contrary
to cherished myth, Stuart tyranny had not been preceded by a
golden age ofliberty under Elizabeth. England under the Tudors
had been just like modern-day Turkey-18th-century Europe's
favourite example of'Asiatic despotism'. Whig historians of
Elizabeth's reign had 'been so extremely ignorant ...as to extol her
for a quality, which, ofall others, she was the least possessed of: a
tender regard for the constitution, and a concern for the liberties
70
and privileges ofher people' (HE iv 354). What was more,
parliament, supposedly the voice ofthe spirit ofEnglish liberty,
had consistently failed to challenge the idea that Tudor monarchs
had ofthe extent oftheir authority. Elizabeth had been popular
for so much ofher long reign precisely because she ruled in
perfect conformity with the opinion ofthe people at large.

Tudor power was in part a consequence ofHenry VIII's break with

Rome and the consequent combination ofthe roles ofhead of
state and head ofthe Church. After the Reformation, religion was
'the capital point, on which depended all the political transactions
ofthat age' (HE iv 176). Puritanism raised its head not long
afterwards, and Hume was prepared to accept that, in an era of
political absolutism, it was religious enthusiasts who kindled and
preserved 'the precious spark ofliberty' (HE iv 145-6). It was a
mistake, however, to suppose there was any sense in which the
Puritans articulated an intrinsically English thirst for freedom.
The majority ofthe English still favoured 'Romish' ritual in church
services, and Elizabeth's caution and compromise in religious
matters was an important part ofwhat made her so popular with
her people.

Just as important as the consequences ofthe Reformation, on

Hume's analysis, were the consequences ofchanges made by
Henry VII to the feudal law ofproperty. From this time onwards it
was possible for the great landowners to mortgage and alienate
their land, which simultaneously freed up capital for consumption
ofluxury goods, and gave an incentive to new, middle-ranking
proprietors to increase the productivity oftheir farms. This was
the moment when the breakdown offeudal aristocracy began, as
the balance ofpower in the English constitution slowly began to
shift away from the nobility and towards the House ofCommons.
Yet it would take 200 years for this massive alteration in the
dynamics ofEnglish politics to work itselfout. The immediate
consequence was a power vacuum created as noble families
became more interested in conspicuous consumption than in
71
 maintaining huge numbers of armed retainers. It was this vacuum
that the Tudor monarchs quickly moved to fill, replacing a
permanently unstable network of baronial rivalries with a much
more autocratic, top-down system of national administration.

The Tudor period, then, saw the end of what had been a long and
often violent struggle for domination between kings and barons.
Whig historians wanted to find in the Middle Ages evidence of the
resuscitation of supposedly ancient conceptions of the rights of
the individual and of parliament, but Hume agreed with the Tory
critics of this interpretation of key events such as Magna Carta
and the first meetings of the House of Commons. There had been,
he argued, no idea of individuals having rights independently of,
and potentially against, the monarch. Freedoms were taken to be
grants of the crown. The structure of parliament had undoubtedly
changed during the reign of Henry III, when Henry invited
knights from the shires and deputies from the boroughs to join his
E body of advisers, but this was merely a means whereby Henry
f sought to counter the power of the aristocracy. It was not a
recognition of an age-old right of the people to be part of the
legislative process. The king thought that this new power in the
constitution would be more submissive than the barons; and the
people thought that the king would, in return for their
submission, protect them from the predations of their feudal
superiors.

Hume accepted that the signing of the Magna Carta by John in

1215 was an epochal event. But this was so only when one
considered its very long-term effects. At the time it marked no
revolution in the standing of the individual in relation to the
power of the crown. 'It only guarded', Hume claimed, 'and that
merely by verbal clauses, against such tyrannical practices as are
incompatible with civilized government, and, if they become very
frequent, are incompatible with all government' (HE i 487). And it
did very little to change how kings actually governed. Its clauses
were routinely ignored by English monarchs until the end of the
72
17th century. It took that long, in other words, for the crown to
accept that its freedoms, just as much as those ofits subjects, were
bound and defined by law. In its 13th-century context, moreover,
Magna Carta was a victory for the barons, not for the people at
large. It meant that they, and no longer the king, were 'really
invested with the sovereignty ofthe kingdom' (HE i 447).

Magna Carta was a sign that the feudal system oflaw, imposed on
England in the wake ofthe Norman conquest in 1066, was
beginning to break down. Yet this process ofdissolution could not,
according to Hume, be understood as the reclamation ofa freer
and more 'balanced' form ofgovernment that had existed among
the Anglo-Saxons. For one thing, the consequence of1066 had
been the complete obliteration ofall previously existing legal
forms. It really had been a conquest, and not, as Whigs liked to
think, a temporary occlusion ofan enduring tradition ofcommon
law. For another thing, there was little to admire when one looked
back beyond the reign ofWilliam I. What some fondly called true �
English liberty was in fact mere anarchy. No middle ground was [
discernible between the tyrannical licentiousness ofan
ungovernable nobility and the demeaning slavery oftheir
dependants. '[T]he great body ofthe people, in these ages', Hume
observed, 'really enjoyed much less true liberty, than where the
execution ofthe laws is the most severe, and where subjects are
reduced to the strictest subordination and dependance on the civil
magistrate' (HE i 168-9). It was, in other words, nonsense to
claim, as Montesquieu did in The Spi,rit ofLaws, that the origins
ofmodern English freedom were to be found in the forests ofa
thousand years ago.

Having written and published his history ofEngland backwards,

beginning with the Stuarts and ending with the Middle Ages,
Hume assembled a collected edition ofall six volumes in 1762.
Taken as a whole, the History qfEngland combined a great deal of
Tory critique ofWhig myth-making with a larger, and
fundamentally Whig, confidence in the benefits ofthe Revolution
73
 of1688. The Revolution, Hume concluded, 'gave such an
ascendant to popular principle, as has put the nature ofthe
English constitution beyond all controversy'. 'And it may justly be
affirmed', he added, 'without any danger of exaggeration, that we,
in this island, have ever since enjoyed, ifnot the best system of
government, at least the most entire system ofliberty, that ever
was known amongst mankind' (HE vi 531). At the same time,
however, Hume undercut both Tory and Whig approaches to
English history by depicting 1688 as the product ofhistorical
forces that had worked themselves out mostly regardless of
personalities and policies. Where individuals and their decisions
had been important, it had been because ofconsequences
unintended and unforeseen. It was the adoption ofthis elevated,
disengaged, philosophical perspective that gave Hume, as he put it
in a letter, 'the impudence to pretend that I am ofno party, and
have no bias' (LDH i 185).

E The overall political lesson that Hume offered his reader was that,
:E far from restoring England's ancient constitution, the Revolution
had put in place an entirely new balance ofpower between crown
and parliament. Taken as a whole, English history was a story ofa
succession ofdifferent constitutions: the pre-Norman, the feudal,
the Tudor, and the modern. 'The English constitution, like all
others', Hume remarked, 'has been in a state ofcontinual
fluctuation' (HE iv 355). The History ofEngland, then, could be
seen as, paradoxically enough, an attempt on Hume's part to
release British politics from the grip ofhistory. Since the Civil
War, history had been used as a political weapon. Hume's message
was that, properly understood, it could serve the polemical
purposes ofneither party. In any age, Hume claimed at the end of
the volume he wrote last, 'the only rule of government, which is
intelligible or carries any authority with it, is the established
practice ofthe age, and the maxims ofadministration, which are
at that time prevalent, and universally assented to' (HE ii 525).

74
Solving the problem of style
Hume did not intend the History ofEngland to be read only as an
extended piece ofpolitical philosophy. He took seriously the task
ofrecounting the history ofthe British from 'when Caesar ...first
cast his eye on their island' (HE i 6) to the Declaration ofRight
presented by parliament to William and Mary in February 1689.
The History was meant to find a place among, while contrasting
with, the many other histories ofEngland written in the first half
ofthe 18th century. It would be distinctive, Hume hoped, precisely
insofar as it was less political-less partisan, more impartial-than
history writing in English tended to be. Voltaire had noted that
the English had yet to produce a history worthy ofan
international readership. The reason was the fact that '[oJne half
ofthe nation is always at variance with the other half'.'[T]he
English have memorials ofthe several reigns', Voltaire decided,
'but no such thing as a history: Montesquieu had come to the
same conclusion, explaining this failure ofthe English in terms of
the extreme form ofliberty that prevailed among them. Such
liberty was bound, Montesquieu thought, to produce faction,
and faction was bound to produce factional history. Hume set
out to prove that it was possible for an English-or rather
British-historian to transcend party politics and write in a
manner comparable to Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Sarpi, and,
indeed, Voltaire himself

Hume declared in a letter that 'My views ofthings are more

conformable to Whig principles; my representations ofpersons to
Tory prejudices' (LDH i 237). Impartiality was to be achieved not
so much by adopting an entirely new perspective on the reigns of
English kings and queens as by combining perspectives that were
usually assumed to be incompatible. The overall argument was, as
we have seen, a vindication of1688, and so a vindication also of
the moves made to limit royal power by successive parliaments in

75
 the 17th century. But at the same time, as we have also seen,
Hume refused to follow Whig historians in condemning the Stuart
kings as nothing but power-hungry tyrants. He wanted to show
them to be human beings deserving, as all human beings must be
in extreme circumstances, ofsympathy and a measure of
compassion. In his depiction ofthe execution ofCharles I, for
example, he is not afraid to echo some of the themes ofroyalist
hagiography. During his final days, Hume's Charles is a model of
dignity and self-control. He sleeps soundly despite the fact that
work was being done round the clock on the scaffold outside his
window. He forgives his enemies before the axe falls. And his
death fully restores him to the favour of his people, so much so
that on hearing ofit '[w]omen are said to have cast forth the
untimely fruit oftheir womb', while '[oJthers fell into convulsions,
or sunk into such a melancholy as attended them to their grave'
(HEv 541).

E There is more, in other words, to Hume's History than

f philosophical detachment. In another letter he told a friend that
'The first Quality ofan Historian is to be true & impartial; the
next is to be interesting' (LDHi 210). Here 'interesting' means
being such as to engage sympathy and sentiment. There are many
places in the book where analytical precision gives way to what
can only be called melodrama. 'No age, no sex, no condition was
spared; Hume writes in his description of the Irish rebellion of
1641. 'The wife weeping for her butchered husband, and
embracing her helpless children, was pierced with them, and
perished by the same stroke' (HE v 341). The punishments
inflicted in the west ofEngland after the failure ofMonmouth's
invasion in 1685 are itemized in the same gory detail, not
excluding 'the wanton savage' Colonel Kirke's instruction that
music be played to accompany the 'dancing' of those whose feet
shook as they were hanged (HE vi 462). Another way ofdescribing
Hume's technique might be to say that he alternated the
dispassionate observation of the philosopher with the emotional
manipulation ofthe novelist.
76
 f.

6. Frontispiece to the 1770 edition ofTheHutory ofEngland, from a

drawing ofHume by John Donaldson.

77
The History ofEngland (Figure 6) was intended to reach a
maximally wide readership, among Tories as well as among
Whigs, among women as well as among men, among Frenchmen
(and other Europeans) as well as among the Scottish and English.
Hume wanted, above all, to be readable. Another important
means to that end was, simply, brevity. Long though it is, Hume's
History is shorter than most others, and was not published in
massive folio volumes that needed to be read on a desk or lectern.
Most editions comprised eight small 'quarto' volumes. They were
printed in large numbers. They sold at a relatively cheap price.
And they made their author a wealthy man. Hume made more
than £4,000 from the sale of the rights to the successive
instalments of the History-perhaps £500,000 in the money
of today.

Reasons for pessimism

Hume wrote the History ofEngland at a time when he felt
moderately optimistic about Britain's political prospects. The
decisive defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden in 1746 meant
that the traumas of the previous century could be left behind. For
a moment, at the end of the reign of George II, he allowed himself
to hope that a new political era was about to start. In a new essay
'Of the Coalition of Parties', he welcomed the development of a
kind of politics that 'affords the most agreeable prospect of future
happiness, and ought to be carefully cherished and promoted by
every lover of his country' (EMPL 494). A new king would be
followed by new ministers, and by the fall of a government, led by
the Whig William Pitt, that had involved Britain in what appeared
to be an endless, and infinitely expensive, war with France over
who would be dominant in America.

Pitt was indeed dismissed by the new king George III, but war
continued until 1763. In a new edition of his Essays published a
year after the Treaty of Paris, Hume made changes to his
discussion of the national debt which suggested that his optimism
78
had already deserted him. Indeed, as he contemplated the extent
to which politicians had mortgaged future tax income in order to
pay for the Seven Years War, Hume :finally lost all confidence in
the supposed benefits of British liberty. The cost of servicing the
national debt would soon, he thought, be too great for any
government. A choice would have to be made between the
interests of the country's creditors and the interests of the country
itself. The same choice would have to be made by other countries
too, but Britain, Hume worried, was at a peculiar disadvantage.
For Britain's creditors were, in large part, those who ran the
country. They were members of the House of Commons and the
House of Lords-or were closely connected with them. Parliament
would therefore naturally resist any move to default on the
national debt. In an absolutism like France, by contrast, it was
possible in principle for the monarch to default regardless of the
complaints of his creditors. When Hume looked to the future, he
saw-mistakenly, of course-disaster for Britain, and triumph for
its ancient enemy.

Hume's pessimism increased as the 1760s wore on. In 1768-9 he

witnessed riots in London following the expulsion from the
Commons of the dissident MP and journalist John Wilkes. Hume
was appalled by what he saw as the government's pusillanimity in
dealing with the mob. He told Turgot that the chaos provided
decisive evidence against the idea that society was progressing
towards perfection. England was, he thought, in the grip of
political madness. The rioters had no grievances worthy of the
name. They demanded liberty without having any understanding
of what it meant, and, most dangerously of all, without awareness
that liberty was an empty word without the protections offered by
countervailing forces of authority. Hume wrote a new essay, 'Of
the Origin of Government', to try to make this clear. The
enfeeblement of the executive meant that the balance of power in
Britain was shifting towards the mass of the people, and that,
Hume had no doubt, was bound to be followed by the rise of a
demagogic Caesar-figure who would trample on the principles of
79
 the constitution in the name of the brutish majority. Any move
towards republicanism in a state as large as Britain, Hume told his
nephew, 'can ...produce only Anarchy, which is the immediate
Forerunner of Despotism' (LDHii 306).

News of first discontent and then open revolt in the American

colonies confirmed Hume in his sense that the British form of
government was falling apart. So incompetent were those in
power that the loss of the empire was nothing other than what
they deserved. It was also true, however, that it was 'in the Nature
of things' that the union with America 'cannot long subsist' (LDH
ii 237). America's growth in population and assertiveness meant
that very soon the cost of keeping the colonies under the mother
country's rule would be greater than the income generated by
taxation of American trade. 'Nations, as well as Individuals; Hume
wrote to a friend, 'ha[ ve] their different Ages, which challeng[e] a
different Treatment' (LDHii 288). The American colonies were no
e longer young and childlike, and nothing good would come of
i pretending otherwise. Rather than try to hang on to them at any
cost, it would be in Britain's interests to let them go, and to trade
with them on equal terms. This was what Hume meant when he
said in a letter written in October 1775 that 'I am an American in
my Principles, and wish we would let them alone to govern or
misgovern themselves as they think proper' (LDH ii 303). Hume
died soon after the Declaration of Independence, but, had he lived
longer, would have been surprised neither by the British state's
refusal to let America alone nor by its eventual defeat.

80
Hume was extremely unusual among his contemporaries in
having no emotional need for the promises and reassurances of
the Christian religion. When it came to religion, even more so
than when it came to politics, he was a bystander, with no positive
commitments to defend. His letters make it clear that, looked at
from this detached point of view, religion and religious people
very often seemed absurd. He appears seldom to have refrained
from making a joke at the expense of the pious and the
sanctimonious whenever the opportunity presented itself But at
the same time Hume was fascinated by religion, and wrote a great
deal about it. He examined the rational basis both of belief in the
teachings revealed by sacred texts such as the Christian Gospels,
and of belief in the 'natural' religion supposedly accessible to all
human beings through the use of reason. The sceptical outcome of
these investigations was supplemented-as, given religion's
ubiquity, it needed to be-by an identification of the sources of
religious belief in human nature. In many places in his writings,
Hume considered the effects, usually deleterious, of religion on
both morality and politics. It is not clear, though, what practical
consequences, if any, Hume expected his writings on religion to
have (Figure 7).

81
::I
:c:

7. Portrait in oils of Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766.

Religion in Hume's early writings

At first Hume intended to apply the scepticism ofA Treatise cif
Human Nature directly to questions in the philosophy of religion.
Then he changed his mind. In a letter sent in 1737he described
himself as 'at present castrating my work, that is cutting off its
nobler parts; that is endeavouring it shall give as little offence as
possible' (LDH i 25). One of the parts in question was 'some
82
Reasonings concerning Miracles', a version of which was later
included inAnEnquiry concerning Human Understanding. It is
possible that the manuscript fragment on evil described in
Chapter 2 was also originally meant for inclusion in the Treatise.
Religion is barely mentioned in the published text, but there are
places where the religious implications of Hume's arguments
would have been both clear and, for the believer, unsettling. A
good example is the examination in Book One of the general
philosophical principle 'that whatever begins to exist, must have a
cause efexistence' (T78). That principle was an essential premise
in the case for the necessary existence of a creator God, but,
according to Hume, there was no demonstrative argument
capable of proving it to be true. Hume also doubted the coherence
of the idea of an immaterial soul, and argued that it had no more
to recommend it than the materialism of the 'famous atheist'
Spinoza (T 241).

The overall tendency of theTreatise, as we saw in Chapter 1,

was to direct enquiry away from metaphysical matters, and
towards empirical questions concerning ordinary life. Yet the
reader who moved on from the Treatise to the essays that Hume
wrote in the 1740s would have looked in vain for unequivocally
positive treatment of what was, for most men and women in the
18th century, the most important dimension of human existence.
Most of the references to religion in the essays are critical in tone.
In a Calvinist country like Scotland, hostility to prevailing
attitudes was implicit in Hume's remark in 'Of the Dignity or
Meanness of Human Nature' that he was 'of the opinion, that the
sentiments of those, who are inclined to think favourably of
mankind, are more advantageous to virtue, than the contrary
principles, which give us a mean opinion of our nature'
(EMPL 81). In an essay 'Of Superstition and Enthusiasm',
Hume identifies two species of false religion, one that sounds
like Catholicism, one that sounds like Protestantism, and leaves
unclear the nature of the true religion that is an instance
of neither.
83
 Superstitious fear ofthe unknown, Hume argues in that essay,
generates a disposition to place faith in 'ceremonies, observances,
mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or in any practice, however
absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends to a
blind and terrified credulity' (EMPL 74). The enthusiast's
confidence in being the direct recipient ofdivine favour, on the
other hand, leads to a state offrenzy in which reason and morality
are dispensed with in favour ofthe guidance supposedly provided
by inspiration from above. These two corruptions ofreligion,
Hume points out, have different and opposing political
consequences. While superstition gives rise to the dominion of
priests, the spirit ofenthusiasm is the spirit ofliberty, insofar as it
valorizes the individual conscience and promotes the cause of
toleration. In the essay 'OfParties in General', however, Hume
describes how, even in non-Catholic countries, religious differences
are crucial to the process whereby the natural opposition of'parties
from interest' is turned into the much more complex, and much
more dangerous, opposition of'parties from principle'.
::I
:c

More hostile still was a footnote on the priestly vocation in the

essay 'OfNational Characters'. Hume claims there that few
people-'or none'-have a propensity to religion sufficient in
degree and constancy to support them in their calling. Priests,
therefore, are always at war with their natural inclinations, and
sustain the appearance of dedication and fervour only 'by a
continued grimace and hypocrisy' (EMPL 200). Moreover, vices
such as ambition, pride, rancour, and vindictiveness tend to be
inflamed among clergymen, so that it is wise for any government
to be always on guard against their machinations. This did not
mean that it was impossible for ministers to be virtuous. What it
meant was that the humane, humble, and moderate priest was
beholden for those virtues 'to nature or reflection, not to the
genius ofhis calling' (EMPL 201).

A reputation for irreligion was a part ofwhat denied Hume the

Edinburgh pr-0fessorship ofmoral philosophy in 1744-5. The case
84
against his candidacy was constructed out of passages from the
Treatise which supposedly revealed 'universal Scepticism',
'Principles leading to downright Atheism: and 'Errors concerning
the very Being and Existence of a God'. After his theory of the
understanding had been very publicly traduced in this way, Hume
perhaps felt that he had nothing to lose by being more open about
what he took to be the consequences of his scepticism for religious
belie£ InAn Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he
included not only a section on miracles, but also a section denying
the possibility of inferring intelligence and design from what we
experience of the order of nature. The point, he claimed, was that
the real foundation of religion was not reason but faith. Then,
during the same period when he wroteAn Enquiry concerning the
Principles ofMorals and Political Discourses, he composed the
first draft of a much lengthier exploration of the possibility of
giving a rational basis to belief in a creator God with traditional
attributes such as wisdom and omnipotence. Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion, however, would not be published until after
Hume's death.

Miraculous Christianity
Hume devised the principal argument of 'Of Miracles' while he
was in La Fleche writing the Treatise. It could be that he had been
reading French attempts to establish the truths revealed in the
Gospels using recent philosophical work on evidence and
probability. He would almost certainly have read Logic, or, theArt
efThinking by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, and taken note
of how it treated the key episodes in early Christianity as historical
events to which rules concerning the credibility of testimony could
be applied in the same way as to events in secular history. What
Arnauld and Nicole sought to show was that it is reasonable to
accept the testimony of the Gospels despite the inherent
implausibility of some of the stories they recounted. Hume
describes in a letter how, during a conversation with a Jesuit
priest, it occurred to him that this could not possibly be right
85
 (LDH i 361). For he had developed a quite different conception of
probability, according to which the evidence against the truth of a
story of a miracle is always bound to be at least as strong as the
evidencefor its truth, regardless of the apparent reliability of
testimony in question.

The issue here was not the abstract metaphysical question of

whether or not miracles are possible. The general scepticism about
metaphysics which Hume developed in the Treatise made it
impossible for him to answer that question either way. The issue,
rather, was reports of miracles, and whether experience can ever
provide reason to believe them. The way to begin, then, was with a
consideration of testimony in general. What makes it reasonable,
in normal circumstances, to believe testimony is the fact,
established by experience, that human beings are usually inclined
to tell the truth, and that they are 'sensible to shame, when
detected in a falsehood' (E 112). This is sufficient for there to be a
E presumption in favour of believing people, even complete
f strangers whose reliability we have no way of knowing. But it does
not follow that it is reasonable to believe whatever one is told. For
we do, of course, have experience of people lying, or being
deceived. We have to balance experience of humankind's general
veracity against the particularities of the situation, both with
regard to the person giving the testimony and with regard to the
story we are being told. In some cases, the result will be that we
are unable to believe that story. Hume's argument was that belief
in a story of a miracle will always be irrational, regardless of the
apparent reliability of the person recounting the story.

It was precisely Hume's sceptical account of belief-his picture of

our ignorance of the causal powers possessed by things in
themselves, and of belief as the product of custom and habit-that
enabled him to reach this conclusion. Belief about matters of fact,
about what does and can happen in the world, is shaped entirely
by experience. In other words, it is shaped by repeated instance of
conjunctions of types of event. So where the matter of a fact
86
reported in a piece of testimony is such as has rarely been
observed, the degree of belief is bound to be minimal. And where
there has been no experience at all, we have no idea what to
believe. It is natural, for example, for someone who has never seen
water freeze not to believe stories of water turning solid so that
people can walk upon it. Now; a miracle is, by definition, not just
an unusual event, or an event that cannot be explained because of
an incomplete understanding of the laws of nature, but an event
that is directly contrary to the laws of nature. A miracle is an
interruption of the natural order of things, caused directly by God.
'There must, therefore; Hume points out, 'be a uniform experience
against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not
merit that appellation' (E 115). Our experience of the world speaks
uniformly and unambiguously in favour of the falsity of any and
every purported account of miraculous events.

It is worth emphasizing that this was not meant by Hume as a way

of proving that miracles never happen. Instead, it was meant to
show that reasonable people, when faced with a report of a
miracle, will always find the report incredible. For all of their
experience of the world will be against it-and (so Hume had
shown in the Treatise) they have nothing other than experience on
which to decide what to believe. It is possible, in principle, for
uniform experience against every miraculous event to be
countered by uniform experience in favour of the reliability of the
particular person providing the testimony in question. Then the
reasonable person will not know what to believe, and will suspend
judgement altogether. But, Hume goes on to argue, in fact there is
no case where it is just as likely that the report of the miracle is
true as that it is false. In fact there are always reasons to doubt the
veracity or sincerity of a reporter of a miracle, even when one puts
the intrinsic incredibility of the report to one side.

No account of a miracle, according to Hume, is supported by a

number of educated, honest, and disinterested witnesses sufficient
to make it unreasonable to believe that the account is false. Then
87
 there is the fact that people like to tell stories that will elicit
surprise and wonder in their audience, together with the fact that
people like being surprised and made to wonder, and the fact that
people who tell stories know that about their audiences. It is
surely significant, furthermore, that reports of miracles are
especially prevalent, as Hume put it, 'among ignorant and
barbarous nations', and that where such reports prevail among
civilized peoples, it will be found that they were transmitted by
'ignorant and barbarous ancestors' (E 119). And, finally, it stands
to be noted that every report of a miracle taken as support of a
particular religion is directly contradicted by all reports of
miracles taken as support of other religions. At least, this is so on
the assumption, which of course every monotheism makes, that
only one religion can be true.

Hume's conclusion is that it is a mistake to imagine that the

Gospels might provide historical evidence of the actuality of
e Christ's miracles, and hence of the truth of Christ's redemptive
f message. 'Our most holy religion', Hume declares, 'is founded on
Faith, not reason' (E 130). Christian belief is itself a miracle, a
subversion of reason such as could only be effected by God
himself It is not clear how seriously Hume imagined his reader
would take this as a recommendation to restrain reason in order
to make room for faith. He surely knew that 'Of Miracles' would
be taken by most readers as suggesting that the whole of
Christianity was a superstitious delusion on a par with stories of
the curative capacities of the tomb of the abbe de Paris or of the
Emperor Vespasian's spittle.

Experimental theism
It was not unusual in the early 18th century to combine scepticism
about the literal truth of the Bible with confidence in the
possibility of a religion of reason that was 'natural' in the sense that
it was available to all human beings, regardless of whether or not
they had heard of Jesus Christ. Where in the past natural religion
88
had been taken to be the product of a priori reasoning-based, for
example, on the maxim that every beginning ofexistence had to
have a cause-the success of'experimental philosophy' in the
age ofHarvey, Boyle, and Newton had encouraged some to
think that science by itself provided conclusive reasons to believe
in an intelligent creator of the universe. In 1748 the Scottish
mathematician Colin Maclaurin claimed that 'The plain argument
for the existence of the Deity, obvious to all and carrying
irresistible conviction with it, is from the evident contrivance and
fitness of things for one another which we meet with throughout
all the parts of the universe.' This was an argument from the
apparent adjustment of means to ends revealed everywhere in
nature. The universe looked like a work of human manufacture,
only on an infinitely larger scale, and it therefore seemed plausible
to suppose that its creator had an intelligence analogous to,
though again infinitely greater than, the intelligence of the
human mind.
iE'
The question was whether this propensity to believe was, as Hume g·
put it in a letter, 'somewhat different from our Inclination to find
our own Figures in the Clouds, our Face in the Moon, our Passions
& Sentiments even in inanimate matter' (LDH i 155). The
argument to design had yet to be given a formal statement. In the
manuscript that was eventually published as Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion, Hume stages a discussion of the argument
between three characters, one of whom tries to state it as clearly
and convincingly as possible, while the other two subject it to
probing criticism. The defender of the argument, Cleanthes, is
described as possessing an 'accurate philosophical turn' (DNH
30). One of the critics, Demea, attacks the argument from the
point of view of'rigid inflexible orthodoxy'-which means, from
the point of view of the Calvinism that had been prevalent in
Scotland since the Reformation. Such Calvinism preferred the
certainties of a priori argument to the probabilism of experimental
religion, but rested confidence ultimately in man's 'consciousness
of his imbecility and misery' (DNH 95). Philo, the other critic, is
89
 said to be 'careless' in his scepticism. In other words, he has no
particular cause to defend, and is interested only in where the
argument leads. Most readers suppose that Philo speaks for Hume
himself. As we will see, such an assumption is not completely
unproblematic.

All three participants agree at the outset that the question under
discussion is not the existence but the nature ofGod. That is, they
accept that the universe has a cause responsible for its creation
and its preservation through time. They differ with respect to
what can be known about that cause, and how. Cleanthes' position
is that experience-ordinary everyday experience combined with
the results ofscientific investigation-plainly tells us that the
world is, in his own words, 'nothing but one great machine,
subdivided into an infinite number oflesser machines, which
again admit ofsubdivisions, to a degree beyond what human
senses and faculties can trace and explain' (DNH 45). Our legs, for
example, are perfectly contrived for walking and climbing. Every
::i
:c part ofthe eye is designed to make sight possible. In both their
physiology and their passions, 'and the whole course oflife before
and after generation', the male and female ofeach species appear
intended together for that species' propagation. Everywhere we
look, we see order, proportion, and the arrangement of parts to
serve the purposes ofa larger whole. The similarity between the
works ofnature and works ofhuman art is, Cleanthes insists,
self-evident and undeniable. 'What more is requisite', he asks, 'to
show an analogy between their causes, and to ascertain the origin
ofall things from a divine purpose and intention?' (DNH 54).

Demea objects that this argument gives up on 'the adorable

mysteriousness ofthe divine nature' (DNH 47). According to him,
it is ofthe essence ofreligion that God should be both certain in
his existence and unknowable in his wisdom and justice. Philo,
too, objects to what he terms Cleanthes' 'anthropomorphitism'. A
more careful assessment ofwhat we know about the universe
shows that the analogy between nature and works ofhuman
90
contrivance is much, much weaker than Cleanthes claims.
Cleanthes wants to make eaYperience the basis of our knowledge of
the attributes of God. And, unfortunately for the purposes of
theological argument, our experience is too limited for any sure
conjecture about the cause of the universe. We know only one part
of that universe. In other parts there may be principles of
operation quite different from human intelligence, and it may be
that it is by one or other of those unknown principles that God's
nature is to be known. No matter how well we know our part of
the universe, we only know it now, and have no idea either of what
it might have been like in its 'embryo-state' or of what it might be
developing into. Any safe causal hypothesis in experimental
science depends on an amount of observation of the pairings of
like causes with like effects, but, plainly enough, no one has ever
observed the generation of a universe.

Philo goes on to argue that none of the traditional attributes of

God can be established by experimental means. Everything that
we encounter in the world is finite, and so Cleanthes' style of
reasoning must renounce any claim to be able to show God's
infinity. There are many ways in which the world appears not to
be perfect. Even if we allow that this is a merely superficial
perspective on things and that what appear to be faults (bodily
pains, for example) are in reality aspects of perfection, still, there
may well be faults that we know nothing about, and that cannot
be explained away in this fashion. Even if the world were
completely perfect, could we be sure that its perfections were due
to perfection on the part of its maker? 'Many worlds might have
been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this
system was struck out: Much labour lost: Many fruitless trials
made: And a slow, but continued improvement carried on during
infinite ages in the art of world-making' (DNH 69). Nor is there
any firmer evidence of the unity of God. A house is made by many
men. Why should the universe not be the work of many deities?
Or if that seems extravagant, perhaps two deities, one male and
one female?
91
 This last question leads to others in a similar vein. Cleanthes
claims that the universe is like a machine. But perhaps that is a
false analogy. Perhaps the universe is better compared to a living
creature, an animal, or a vegetable. It might well be said to be like
an organized body, with an inherent principle oflife and motion, a
continual but regular circulation ofmatter and repair ofdamage,
each part working incessantly to preserve itselfand thereby
preserving the whole. And its manner ofgeneration might
therefore be supposed to be more like that ofa living organism
than that ofa house or a loom. As the dialogue goes on, Philo
produces a series ofincreasingly bizarre variations on this theme,
intended to show that there is a range ofpossible explanations for
the universe each just as empirically plausible as the hypothesis
with which Cleanthes began. The only conclusion to reach, Philo
says, is that 'we have no data to establish any system of
cosmogony. Our experience, so imperfect in itself, and so limited
in both extent and duration, can afford us no probable conjecture
concerning the whole ofthings' (DNH79 ). The rational course of
::I
::c action, when it comes to the nature ofthe cause ofthe universe, is
a total suspense ofjudgement. Philo amplifies this triumph of
scepticism by proceeding to a demolition ofthe traditional kind of
a priori proofofGod's existence favoured by Demea, followed by
an assault on all attempts to explain away the existence ofevil,
whether natural or moral.

It puzzles many readers ofthe Dialogues that in the work's final

part, Philo appears to step back from a position ofpure
scepticism. No one, he tells Cleanthes, has a deeper sense of
religion than he does. 'A purpose, an intention, a design', he says,
'strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and
no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to
reject it' (DNH116). It seems that here, as at the end ofBook One
ofthe Treatise, a total suspense ofjudgement is impossible.
Making a special effort, one can be a sceptic some ofthe time,
perhaps, but the rest ofthe time a natural tendency to belief
reasserts itsel£ Does this mean that Hume holds that scepticism
92
about natural religion is as artificial and ultimately untenable as,
say, scepticism about the existence of an external world? Or is he
merely dissimulating here, pretending for prudential reasons to
endorse a commonsensical position that, in fact, he has
completely undermined in the main part of the text?

These are not the only possible conclusions to draw. It could be

that all that Philo is admitting is that the works of nature look as
though they are the work of an intelligent designer. It is possible,
with some ingenuity, to come up with explanatory hypotheses that
have an equal amount of empirical evidence, but the first and
most natural thing to think about the world around us is that all
of it was contrived by a being with ideas and purposes analogous
to those of human beings in their far simpler and inferior works of
art and manufacture. The theist will accept, in fact insist, that,
even so, there is an immeasurable difference between the human
and the divine mind. For his part, the sceptic will not deny, given
the 'coherence and apparent sympathy' in all the parts of nature,
that there is likely to be some essential similarity between the
different fundamental principles at work in those different parts.
And if the sceptic admits that, as he must, then he will not deny
that it is 'probable, that the principle, which first arranged, and
still maintains order in this universe, bears ...also some remote
inconceivable analogy to the other operations of nature, and
among the rest to the reconomy of human mind and thought'
(DNH 120). All the theist and sceptic are disagreeing about is
exactly how immeasurably different the cause of the universe is
from the human mind.

What Philo is trying to do here, perhaps, is to spell out the

difference between scepticism on the one hand, and atheism on
the other. He wants to make it clear that unlike the atheist, he is
not offering a substantive thesis intended as an explanation of the
appearance of contrivance in the world as we experience it. His
position is compatible with theism, but it is not in itself a species
of theism in any usual sense of the word. Philo emphasizes this
93
 8. From the manuscript ofDialogues concerningNatural Religion.

§ when, in the last pages of the Dialogues, he denies that his

extremely minimal 'true religion' has any implications whatsoever
for how life ought to be lived. Cleanthes says that '[r]eligion,
however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all' (DNH
121). He thinks that the idea of a life after death, in particular, is a
necessary support of morality, because people's commitment to
moral principles can only be guaranteed if they believe that there
will be punishment and reward in the life that follows this one.
Philo-and, certainly, Hume himself-could not disagree more.
There is no need to pretend that the content of true religion is any
more substantial than it really is. Most people do not need positive
religious commitment of any kind to maintain their attachment to
what, in the Enquiry concerning the Principles ofMorals, Hume
called 'the party of human-kind against vice or disorder, its
common enemy' (E 275). Religion which claims to have more
content than true religion can have is, in reality, almost always
worse than no religion at all.

94
The origin of religion in human nature
If, as Hume argues in both 'OfMiracles' and Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion (Figure 8), religion had no
foundation in reason, then why has religious belief been a feature
of almost every society in human history? This is the question
that Hume addresses in 'The Natural History ofReligion'. It is
not clear when he wrote this work, but it may have been yet
another product ofthe time he spent at home in Chirnside
between 1749 and 1751. It was published in 1757, part ofa
collection entitled Four Dissertations that also included
Hume's rewrite ofBook Two ofthe Treatise. This is unlikely to
have been a coincidence, since the origin ofreligion in the
passions was a major theme ofthe 'Natural History'. Another
major theme was the morally pernicious consequences of
superstition.

A natural history ofreligion considered religion as a merely

natural phenomenon, rather than as a set ofdoctrines and
practices derived directly from divine revelation. It considered
religion as an element ofthe process whereby human society
improved, as Hume put it, 'from rude beginnings to a state of
greater perfection' (DNH135). It portrayed religion as the
product, like other aspects ofculture, ofthe interaction between
the principles ofhuman nature and the physical environment in
which early human beings found themselves placed. The fact that,
'iftravellers and historians may be credited', some nations have no
sentiments ofreligion, and that there are so many different forms
ofreligion, suggested to Hume that religion does not begin in 'an
original or primary impression ofnature, such as gives rise to
self-love, affection between the sexes, love of progeny, gratitude,
resentment'. It is, rather, an effect ofone or more ofthose primary
principles, and as such 'may easily be perverted by various
accidents and causes' (DNH134).

95
 It was usual, both among apologists for Christianity and among
proponents of a 'natural' religion of reason, to suppose that the
earliest religion had been monotheistic. Pagan polytheism, on this
view, was a corruption of religion in its original and pure form.
Hume turns this narrative on its head. He argues that the
evidence provided by history and by the practices of 'the savage
tribes ofAmerica, Africa, and Asia' (DNH 135) suggests that
polytheism and idolatry were the first manifestations of the
religious impulse. They were probably an expression of ignorance
and an acute sense of precariousness on the part of the earliest
human communities. The first ideas of religion arose from fear,
and from hope that something could be done to assuage that fear.
In the most primitive societies, it must have seemed almost
entirely out of human control whether there was life or death,
health or sickness, plenty or want. People therefore looked to
supernatural powers to explain the vicissitudes of existence, and
looked to them also for means of making life easier to endure.
Inevitably, they supposed that those powers were, though superior
::I
:c in understanding and power, much like them in their motivations
and satisfactions.

Monotheism replaced polytheism not as a result of a new

appreciation of the arguments of natural religion, but rather as a
further expression of the tendency to project human
characteristics onto supernatural powers. In idolatrous nations it
would have happened that one god was selected as the object of
special worship and adoration. This god was imagined to be
particularly concerned with the good of one particular people.
Alternatively, he was imagined to be more powerful than the other
gods, and to rule over them like a king over inferior magistrates.
Seeking to please this one god with praise and flattery, his votaries
dreamed up ever more impressive titles for him, until they got to
the point where their language was full of his infinity, unity, and
simplicity. At the same time, however, they continued to believe
that he had passions like a human being, and needed to be pleased
and placated, by any number of absurd rites and rituals. Not
96
seeing the contradiction here, people allowed themselves to
believe, for example, that the best way to win God's favour for your
children was 'to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of
skin, about halfthe breadth ofa farthing', or that the wearing of
the scapular was the secret to recommending yourselfto an
infinite being who existed from eternity to eternity (DNH 158).

To see religion in the context ofhuman passions was to see it as

something unstable and always changing. It was natural, Hume
argued, that people's needs could not long be answered by the idea
ofa God whose infinitude and perfection served ultimately to
remove him from their comprehension. The most fundamental
need ofall is the need for happiness, and, in order to think of
religion as a means ofachieving happiness, mediators and
subordinate agents were invented to interpose between man and
God. These in turn became themselves the object ofreverence and
worship, and thus, with such things as the cult ofthe Virgin and
altars dedicated to saints, monotheism effectively turned back into �
polytheism. 'It is remarkable', Hume observed, 'that the principles
ie:§
ofreligion have a kind offlux and reflux in the human mind, and
that men have a tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to
sink again from theism into idolatry' (DNH158). Although Hume
did not make the point himself, it was obvious that the Protestant
Reformation could, from this point ofview, be seen as just another
episode in the endless cycle, a reassertion ofmonotheism that
would, in turn, be followed by a return to polytheism.

Polytheism is always absurd, but at least it is generally tolerant of

diversity in religious beliefand practice. It sits lightly on the mind,
and is seldom the cause offanaticism or violence. Monotheism, by
contrast, is according to Hume inherently intolerant. History is
full ofthe bloody consequences of cleaving to a single, jealous
God. Those consequences are more shocking than even the
human sacrifices that used to be required by some pagan religions.
Whereas sacrificial victims were selected at random, it was
specifically virtue, knowledge, and the love ofliberty that most
97
 offended the Roman Catholic inquisition, so much so that
countries visited by the inquisitors were left 'in the most shameful
ignorance, corruption, and bondage' (DNH163). Things were
different in Protestant countries, and the Dutch Republic and
England in particular were remarkable for their tolerance of
dissent. But, Hume insists, such tolerance was the result of the
efforts of politicians, always working in opposition to the narrow,
sectarian sentiments of priests.

Polytheism, moreover, with its limited and fallible divinities,

encourages human beings to think they can emulate their
gods-'[h]ence activity, spirit, courage, magnanimity, love of
liberty, and all the virtues which aggrandize a people' (DNH
163-4). The virtues inspired by monotheism are very different.
Instead of fights with monsters, resistance to tyrants, and all-out
defence of the patria, there are the 'monkish virtues' that Hume
excoriated in the Enquiry concerning the Principles qfMorals. The
morality of monotheism is a morality of 'whippings and fastings,
::I
:c cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience'
(DNH164). It saps the spirit and debases the character. Its
inevitable corruption of the sentiments is intensified by the
suspicion that what God most wants from his votaries is not what
is natural and instinctive, but instead what goes most violently
against the grain of human inclination. This explains the common
observation that fervour and strictness of religion are very far
from being a reliable sign of a person's good moral character. It
also explains the fact that, far from making people happy, religion
engenders anxiety, fear, and self-loathing.

Hume chose to publish 'The Natural History of Religion' at a

moment when his friends among the 'moderate' wing of the
Church of Scotland were under intense pressure from
traditionalist members of the religious establishment. What had
particularly provoked the anger of the 'orthodox' was the success
of a play-a blank verse tragedy called Douglas-not only written
by a minister, but enthusiastically attended, even on Sundays, by a
98
large proportion of the clergy of Edinburgh and its surrounding
towns and villages. At the same time moves were made to expel
Hume from the Church, in order, presumably, to provoke his
friends into defending him. (They did defend him, and the moves
failed.) Hume's response was to publish Four Dissertations with a
fulsome dedication to John Home, the author of the offending
play. He also added to the Natural History a long footnote
mocking the idea that a theatre might be 'the porch of hell', and
using the doctrine of predestination, still fervently preached by
traditionalists in Scotland, as a prime example of the immorality
of modern religion. It increased the piquancy of this attack on
orthodoxy that the footnote was almost entirely taken up with a
quotation from a Scottish writer, Andrew Ramsay, who himself, in
Hume's ambiguous words, 'had so laudable an inclination to be
orthodox, that his reason never found any difficulty, even in the
doctrines which free thinkers scruple the most, the trinity,
incarnation, and satisfaction' (DNH 191). What made Ramsay
object to predestination was, simply, his 'humanity'. i.2i'
o·

The future of religion

Once he had completed The History qfEngland, Hume found
himself unsure what to do next. He considered publishing
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, but was talked out of it by
friends, probably because they did not want more trouble from the
traditionalists in the Church of Scotland. Another possibility was
to add to the History by bringing the narrative forward into the
18th century, perhaps to the accession of George I. The renewal of
factional politics in England, though, made that an unappealing
prospect. It would have required access to private papers held in
the archives of the nobility, and Hume was not sure that such
access would be granted him. When the offer came, then, of a job
as secretary to the British ambassador to France, Hume happily
accepted. He was in Paris from 1763 until 1766. There he got to
know many of the great men and women of the French
Enlightenment, but found most of them, intellectually speaking,
99
 not to his taste. They were zealous, even violent, in their opinions,
where Hume was detached and disengaged. Edward Gibbon
recounted how d'Holbach, La Mettrie, and their friends 'laughed
at the scepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of atheism with
the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule
and contempt'.

For the French philosophes, religion remained a powerful enemy

of the progress of reason and liberty. The Encyclopedie, the great
vehicle of Enlightenment engineered by Diderot and d'Alembert,
had been suppressed in 1759 and placed on the Church's Index of
forbidden books. Both Rousseau's Emile and The Social Contract
were condemned by the Par liament of Paris in 1762. Many of what
we now think of as the major works of 18th-century French
thought had to be published clandestinely outside France, or
could not be published at all. The situation in Britain was, from
Hume's point of view, very different. For centuries, in the ages of
E superstition, Britain too had been subject to the overweening
:E efforts of popes and bishops to influence its political affairs. Then
in the 17th century it had seen a great explosion of enthusiasm. In
the History ofEngland Hume gave detailed accounts of the
violent and cruel consequences of both forms of religious excess.
He also described how, in a magnificent example of an unintended
and unforeseen consequence, the often bizarre and always
extreme appetite for religious change on the part of the Puritan
element of the House of the Commons in the 1630s and 1640s
contained the seeds of the Revolution of 1688. But as this process
worked itself through, England's religious fervour had burnt itself
out to almost nothing. In 1752 Hume added to his essay 'Of
National Characters' a passage in which he claimed that the
British were 'now settled into the most cool indifference with
regard to religious matters, that is to be found in any nation in the
world' (EMPL 206).

Evidence for the truth of this claim was provided by the 'Wilkes
and Liberty' riots in London in the late 1760s. While Hume hated
100
everything to do with Wilkes and his mob ofsupporters, it had to
be admitted that religion-apart from routine anti-Catholicism­
was completely absent from these upheavals. Neither Wilkes nor
his supporters claimed, in the manner ofCromwell and his
followers in the New Model Army, to be inspired by divine
assurance ofthe justice oftheir cause. Wilkes, in fact, had the
reputation ofbeing a libertine, possibly even an atheist.

In an essay from 1741 about the future ofthe British form of

government, Hume detected a sudden change in public opinion
caused by the progress oflearning and liberty. 'Most people, in
this island', he claimed, 'have divested themselves ofall
superstitious reverence to names and authority: The clergy have
much lost their credit: Their pretensions and doctrines have been
ridiculed; and even religion can scarce support itselfin the world'
(EMPL 51). It was not, ofcourse, that the British had suddenly all
become unbelievers. But they were not any longer prepared to
fight over religious matters, and were prepared to tolerate a
relatively large amount ofdiversity in doctrine and practice.
Voltaire might have had an explanation ofthis development in his
picture ofChristians, Jews, and Muslims at the London Stock
Exchange, all devoted to the religion ofmaking money, and
reserving the name ofinfidel only for bankrupts.

In Scotland, less commercially developed as it was than England,

the spirit ofreligion was, for the moment at least, stronger. Hence
the trouble made for Hume and the Church ofScotland's
moderates in the 1750s, and hence, perhaps, Hume's continuing
unwillingness to publish the Dialogues. Yet the days were long
gone when the Church could inflict civil penalties on those judged
to be insufficient in their adherence to the Westminster
Confession ofFaith. The most that the orthodox could have visited
upon Hume was the social awkwardness ofnot being able to be
received in the houses ofhis friends in Edinburgh. To Hume, the
efforts ofhis enemies never seemed anything more than absurd.
The more the devout attempted to interfere in moral and political
101
 affairs, the more ridiculous they made themselves appear. There
was nothing like the Calas Affair to persuade him to follow
Voltaire in coming to see religious bigotry as a genuine threat to
the modern age's success in the improvement of manners
and morals.

Adam Smith reported in a letter that on his deathbed Hume joked

about asking Charon to delay taking him across the Styx to the
underworld until he had 'the pleasure of seeing the churches shut
up, and the Clergy sent about their business'. When the letter was
later published together with Hume's brief autobiography, the joke
was toned down, with Hume made to say that what he desired was
to witness 'the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of
superstition'. In both texts, though, Hume acknowledges that
Charon's reply would be that he would have to wait hundreds of
years for anything to change. In all probability Hume found it
difficult so much as to imagine what a world without organized
E religion would look like. When, in one of the essays in Political
i Discourses, he sketched his own 'idea of a perfect commonwealth',
he included a church organized along Presbyterian lines, with an
autonomous ecclesiastical court for each county-though with the
provision that the civil magistrate could take any case away from
the church courts, and could try or suspend any of the presbyters
who manned them (see EMPL 520).

The implication of the 'Natural History of Religion' was that

religion is so deeply intertwined with some of the most basic
human passions that, even though it does not spring from a
primary principle of human nature, it can be expected to manifest
itself, in some form or other, in any conceivable future of the
human race. It seems unlikely that Hume imagined that the
sceptical arguments of 'Of Miracles' and the Dialogues would have
much of an effect on the general propensity of human beings to
invent systems of superstition to calm their anxieties and give
plausibility to their hopes. On his account of human nature, after
all, reason is nothing more than 'the slave of the passions'-'and
102
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them'
(T 415). The most that could realistically be expected was that,
with the development of political stability and the growth of
material prosperity, religious sentiments would continue to
diminish in intensity, and so have ever fewer harmful moral and
political effects.

103
The History ofEngland, published in complete form in 1762, was
in one sense the end of Hume's career as an author. He wrote only
a handful of miscellaneous pieces in the years that followed. The
longest of them was a self-justifying account (in French) of the
dramatic deterioration of the friendship he had formed with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the end of his time in Paris, written in
order to pre-empt Rousseau's publication of his side of the story.
For reasons that are not at all clear, Hume regarded this quarrel as
'the most critical affair, which, during the whole course of my life,
I have been engaged in' (LDH ii 54). In its aftermath he returned
to public service, this time as an Under-Secretary of State in the
Northern Department, responsible for government business in
northern Europe. But after two years in London he headed back
to Edinburgh, and had a grand house built in the city's recently
developed New Town. He was now, thanks to a combination of the
success of the History and the pensions attached to the various
military and government positions he had held, a very wealthy
man. But in the spring of 1775 he fell seriously ill with a bowel
disease that, after a painful decline which he bore with remarkable
equanimity, killed him in August 1776.

In another sense, the publication of The History qfEngland was

very far from the end of Hume's literary career. Hume was a
compulsive rereader of his own books, and took the opportunity
104
9. Hume's tomb on Calton Hill by Aeneas Macpherson, 1789.

presented by each new edition to make alterations both major and

very minor. He joked to his publisher William Strahan that 'one half
of a man's life is too little to write a book, and the other half too little
to correct it' (LDHii 234,304). So far as he himself was concerned,
Hume's achievement as an author was contained in just two works,
the Nistory, and a collection of what he described as his
'philosophical' writings, entitled Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects. (The choice of title was strange, given that the Essays and
Treatises contained almost everything Hume wrote apart fromA
Treatise efHumanNature.) He wanted these two works to be as
correct as he could possibly make them. His final letter to Strahan,
written two weeks before his death, was a request for a small change
to be made to the Enquiry concerning the Principles efMorals.

The very last thing that Hume wrote was a brief autobiography, to
be prefixed to future editions of his works. 'My Own Life' is a
complex and enigmatic text. Part of its point, in a final dig at the
'orthodox: was to show that it was possible for the religious sceptic
105
 to die a calm and even happy death. Another thing that Hume
wanted to make clear was that the challenges he had issued to
received opinion in philosophy, morals, politics, history, and
religion had not prevented him from making a great deal ofmoney
from his books. 'My Own Life' gave a very selective account of
Hume's career, but contained a fairly detailed description ofhis
progress from 'a very rigid frugality' to the 'opulence' and
'superfluity' of'a Revenue ofa 1000 pounds a year'. Just as striking,
however, is the pose that Hume strikes of having been constantly
embattled, always misunderstood, and permanently on the
receiving end ofdisapprobation-'and even Detestation'. This is a
picture of Hume's place in 18th-century letters that too many ofhis
readers have been willing to accept. It is, at best, only halfthe truth.

Twice in 'My Own Life' Hume mentions the rough treatment he

had received at the hands ofthe circle ofBishop William
Warburton. He singles out for special complaint Richard Hurd's
E Remarks on Mr Hume's Natural History <ifReligion, as being full
f of'the illiberal Petulance, Arrogance, and Scurrility, which
distinguishes the Warburtonian School'. He could have objected
also to the misrepresentations and ad hominem attacks contained
in the Aberdonian philosopher James Beattie's Essay on the Nature
and Immutability efTruth, a book whose success earned its author
an honorary degree from Oxford and a pension from the king. He
was well aware ofthe dislike he had excited in Samuel Johnson,
who told James Boswell that Hume was a man entirely consumed
by vanity, and that Hume's report ofhis state ofmind on his
deathbed was the work either ofa liar or ofa madman. The
problem with 'My Own Life' is that it pretends that this kind of
thing was all there was to the reception of Hume's writings in his
lifetime. The only positive responses it mentions are those of the
primates ofEngland and Ireland to the first volume of the
History-'which', as Hume puts it, 'seem two odd Exceptions:

What goes unmentioned in Hume's autobiography is the almost

universal acc laim that he won among the leading intellectuals of
106
his day. Both philosophers and historians, in Scotland, England,
France, and further afield in Europe and in America, engaged
seriously with his work. The Treatise, as Hume does not fail to
mention in 'My Own Life', was not a great success. But more or
less everything that Hume wrote afterwards was read by more or
less everyone, and the reactions of Warburton, Hurd, Beattie, and
Johnson were not representative. In Scotland, Hume's works were
replied to in detail by George Campbell, Lord Karnes, Thomas
Reid, Adam Smith, and Robert Wallace. Richard Price in England
wrote a careful response to 'Of Miracles', and Hume and Josiah
Tucker debated the comparative trading advantages of poor
countries over rich ones. Hume was an inspiration to both
Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon. He was an extraordinary
success among the French philosophes. He became friends with
Benjamin Franklin, and was read by those on both sides of the
American Revolution. In 1767 a friend told him that he 'never met
with any person who could pretend to any degree of taste & sense
who did not look upon your work to be as entertaining and
instructive as that of almost any other author which the world has
ever produced'.

Hume, in other words, was at the very centre of the

Enlightenment. This does not mean that his works expressed the
views of the Enlightenment's intellectual mainstream. They did
not. For the most part-Adam Smith in The Wealth ofNations was
a rare exception-his contemporaries responded to him in order
to disagree. But from Hume's point of view, that was exactly as it
should be. He did not write in order to gain disciples or create a
school. What he wanted, instead, was open debate about all issues
of importance to modern men and women, debate conducted
according to the highest intellectual standards, but also with
civility, generosity, and good humour. It may be that the attempt
of Hume and his contemporaries to create a discursive space in
which such debate was possible gives us the best definition of
what the Enlightenment was. It may also be the best answer to the
question of why the Enlightenment still matters.
107
Chapter 1: Human nature
'they that examine into the Nature ofMan': Bernard Mandeville,
TheFable qfthe Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford University
Press, 1924), vol. i, pp. 3-4.
'One ofthe greatest reasons why so few People understand
themselves': Mandeville,Fable, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 39.
'Hobbes had described pride': Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed.
Richard Tuck, revised student edition (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), p. 88.
'as Samuel Johnson put it': Samuel Johnson,A Dictionary ofthe
English Language (London, 1755), 'Moral'.
'a brief"abstract", or summary': Hume,AnAbstract ofa Book Lately
Published; Entituled,A Treatise qfHuman Nature (London, 1740).
'susceptible ofas accurate a disquisition, as the laws ofmotion':
'Dissertation of the Passions', in Hume, Four Dissertations
(Edinburgh, 1757), p. 181.

Chapter 2: Morality
'Hutcheson's inaugural lecture': Francis Hutcheson, 'On the Natural
Sociability of Man: in Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural
Sociability ofMankind, trans. and ed. James Moore and Michael
Silverthorne (Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 93-4.
'brought philosophy out of the closets and libraries': The Spectator, ed.
Donald F. Bond, 4 vols (Oxford University Press, 1965), vol. i, p. 44.
'compose half the world': Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. i, p. 21.

109
 'the virtue of a woman', 'no self-denial': Adam Smith, The Theory of
Moral, Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and Alan Macfie (Oxford
University Press, 1976), pp. 190-91.
'More than once Hume declared that the Enquiry was his favourite':
Hume, Letters, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 227; 'My Own Life', ed. Gordon
Brown, pp. 95-6.
'an early manuscript fragment': M.A. Stewart, '.An Early Fragment on
Evil: in M.A. Stewart andJ. P. Wright (eds), Hume and Hume's
Connexions (Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), pp. 160-70.
'Turgot gave a lecture': 'A Philosophical Review of the Successive
Stages of the Human Mind: in Turgot on Progress, Sociology and
Economics, trans. and ed. Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge University
Press, 1973).

Chapter 3: Politics
'Hume, Smith would remark, was the first writer': Adam Smith,
The Wealth ofNations, ed. R. H. Campbell,A. S. Skinner, and
W. B. Todd (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 412.
'the only book of mine that was successful on the first publication':
::l Hume, My Own Life, ed. Gordon Brown, p. 95.
:c
'It was nonsense to claim, as Montesquieu did': Baron de
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne Cohler,
Basia Miller, and Harold Old.mixon (Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 165-6.
'Voltaire had noted': Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation,
ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford World's Classics, 2009), pp. 110-11.
'Montesquieu had come to the same conclusion': Spirit of the Laws,
trans. and ed. Cohler et al., p. 333.

Chapter 4: Religion
'The case against his candidacy': as summarized in Hume, A Letter
from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1745).
'In 1748 Colin Maclaurin claimed': Colin Maclaurin,AnAccount of
Sir Isaac Newton's Discoveries (London, 1748), p. 381.
'Edward Gibbon recounted how d'Holbach': Edward Gibbon, Memoirs
of my Life, ed. Betty Radice (Penguin, 1984), p. 136.
'Voltaire might have had an explanation': Voltaire, Letters concerning
the English Nation, ed. Cronk, p. 30.

110
½.dam Smith reported in a letter': The Correspondence ofAdam Smith,
ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 163.
'the joke was toned down': the 'Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to
William Strahan, Esq; is often printed with 'My Own Life', e.g.
EMPL xliii-xlix, HE i xxxv-xl.

Postscript
'a self-justifying account': Expose Succinct de la Contestation qui s'est
Elevee entre M Hume et M. Rousseau, Avec les Pieces Justificatives
(London, 1766).
'My Own Life': reprinted in many editions of Hume's works, e.g. DNH
3-10, EMPL xxxi-x:li, HE i xvii-xxxiv, LDH i 1-7; but see esp.
Hume, My Own Life, ed. Gordon Brown (2nd edn, Royal Society of
Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 77-92 (a facsimile of the manuscript) and
93-9 (a transcription of the manuscript).
'who told James Boswell': James Boswell, The Life ofSamuel Johnson,
ed. David Womersley (Penguin, 2008), pp. 234, 314-15.
'In 1767 a friend told him': see James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual
Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 472, 574 n. 62.

111
Hume's works
Reliable texts of all of Hume's published works, including The History
ofEngland, are freely available on the Hume Texts Online website at
<www.davidhume.org>. The best edition ofA Treatise efHuman
Nature remains the one produced by L.A. Selby-Bigge in 1888, as
revised by Peter Nidditch and published by Oxford University Press in
1978. It is still in print, as is Selby-Bigge's combined edition (again
revised by Nidditch) ofAn Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles ofMorals
(Oxford University Press, 1975). There have been several more recent
editions ofAn Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, including
one in the Oxford World'sClassics series by Peter Millican (2008).
There are also several recent editions ofDialogues concerning Natural
Religion, including one in the Oxford World'sClassics Series by
J.C.A. Gaskin (1993), which also contains The Natural History ef
Religion. For the moment the most convenient edition of Hume's
Essays Moral, Political, and Literary is published by Liberty Fund
(edited by Eugene F. Miller, 1987). Liberty Fund is the publisher also
of the only complete version of The History ofEngland since the 19th
century, printed in six volumes (foreword by William B. Todd, 1983).
Oxford University Press is currently producing a new scholarly edition
of all of Hume's works, including The History ofEngland. For details
of the volumes published so far, visit the 'Clarendon Hume Series'
pages of the Oxford University Press website ( <www.oup.com>). There
is as yet no modern edition of Hume's correspondence, but Oxford
University Press has kept in print both J. Y. T. Greig's 1932 The Letters

113
 ofDavid Hume and Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner's 1954
New Letters qfDavid Hume.

Hume's life
Easily the best edition of 'My Own Life', complete with photographs of
Hume's manuscript and full commentary, is by Iain Gordon Brown
(second revised and expanded edition, Royal Society of Edinburgh,
2017). John Robertson's article on Hume in the Oaford Dictionary of
National Biography is a reliable, concise account of Hume's life. The
standard full biography is still Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of
David Hume, revised edition (Oxford University Press, 1980).
Mossner's focus is the man, not his ideas. T he only intellectual
biography is James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography
(Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Human nature
New life was breathed into the study of Hume's theory of human
111
nature by Annette C. Baier,A Progress ofSentiments: Reflections on
§ Hume's Treatise (Harvard University Press, 1991). The fullest account
:r:
of Mandeville's impact on Hume is Mikko Tolonen, Mandeville and
Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society (Voltaire Foundation, 2013). On
Hume on the understanding, see David Owen, Hume's Rea,son
(Oxford University Press, 1999), and Donald C. Ainslie, Hume's True
Scepticism (Oxford University Press, 2015). On Hume on the
passions, see Jane L. McIntyre, 'Hume's "New and Extraordinary''
Account of the Passions� in Saul Traiger (ed), The Blackwell Guide to
Hume's Treatise (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 199-215, and
Jacqueline A. Taylor, Reflecting Subjects: Pa,ssion, Sympathy, and
Society in Hume's Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015). Context
for Hume's claims about a single human nature and about Africans in
relation to Europeans is provided by Aaron Garrett, 'Human Nature', in
Knud Haakonssen (ed), The Cambridge History ofEighteenth-Century
Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 160-233, and
Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the
Limits ofProgress, trans. Jeremy Carden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
For a fuller account of the Treatise along the lines sketched in
Chapter 1, see James A. Harris, 'A Compleat Chain of Reasoning:
Hume's Project inA Treatise ofHuman Nature, Books One and Two',
Proceedings ofthe Aristotelian Society 109 (2009): 129-48.
114
Morality
A convincing exploration of the moral philosophy of Book 3 of
A Treatise ofHuman Nature is Rachel Cohon, Hume's Morality:
Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford University Press, 2008). Hume's
intentions as an essayist are well described in Nicholas Phillipson,
'Hume as Moralist: A Social Historian's Perspective: in S. C. Brown
(ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Harvester Press, 1979),
pp. 140-61; and in MarkBox, TheSuasiveArt ofDavidHume
(Princeton University Press, 1990). The practical dimension of Hume's
writings on morality is the focus also of Donald T. Siebert, The Moral
Animus qfDavidHume (University of Delaware Press, 1990). The best
account of the 18th-century background for Hume's moral thought is
Colin Heydt, Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God,
Self, and Other (Cambridge University Press, 2018). On the Enquiry
concerning the Principles qfMorals, see especially Annette C. Baier,
'Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals: Incomparably the Best?',
in Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (ed.), A Companion toHume (Blackwell
Publishing, 2008), pp. 293-320, and also Jacqueline A. Taylor (ed.),
ReadingHume on the Principles of Morals (Oxford University Press,
2020). On Hume's contributions to 'criticism', a good point of
departure is Peter Jones, 'Hume on the Arts and "The Standard of
Taste": Texts and Contexts', in David Fate Norton and
Jacqueline A. Taylor (eds), The Cambridge Companion toHume,
second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 414-46.

Politics
The most important study of Hume's political thought remains
Duncan Forbes,Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge University
Press, 1975). Essential context is provided by H. T. Dickinson, Liberty
and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Methuen, 1977), and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and theAtlantic Republican Tradition
[1975], Princeton Classics edition (Princeton University Press, 2016).
A reliable, brief account is given by Knud Haakonssen, 'The Structure
of Hume's Political Theory', in Norton and Taylor (eds), The
Cambridge Companion toHume, pp. 341-80. Paul Sagar, The Opinion
of Mankind:Sociability and the Theory of theStatefromHobbes to
Smith (Princeton University Press, 2018) contains a rich and
provocative examination of Hume's theory of political obligation.

115
 Hume's contribution to the 18th-century British debate about the
politics of party is well described in Max Skjonsberg, The Persistence of
Party: Ideas ofHarmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Cambridge University Press, 2021). On the elements of Hume's
political economy, see Andrew Skinner, 'Hume's Principles of Political
Economy', in Norton and Taylor (eds), The Cambridge Companion to
Hume, pp. 381-413, and also Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind,
A Philosopher's Economist: Hume and the Rise ofCapitalism
(University of Chicago Press, 2020).A powerful interpretation of
Hume's writings on commerce is developed in essays collected in
Istvan Hont, Jealousy ofTrade: International Competition and the
Nation State in Historical Perspective (Harvard University Press,
2005). Nicholas Phillipson, David Hume: The Philosopher as
Historian (Penguin, 2011) is an elegant treatment of Hume's
intentions as a historian, usefully supplemented by Tom Pye, 'Histories
of Liberty in Scottish Thought, 1747-1787', Ph.D. dissertation,
Cambridge University, 2018. See also the essays in Mark Spencer (ed.),
David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer (Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2013); and Roger L. Emerson, 'Hume's
cu Histories: in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish
§ Enlightenment (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 127-54.
:c

Religion
The best general guide to Hume on religion is still J. C.A. Gaskin,
Hume's Philosophy ofReligion, second edition (Macmillan, 1988). For
a condensed and updated version of Gaskin's interpretation, see his
'Hume on Religion', in Norton and Taylor (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Hume, pp. 480-513. On the Scottish context, see
Thomas Ahnert, The Moral Culture ofthe Scottish Enlightenment
1690-1805 (Yale University Press, 2014). On the wider 18th-century
British debates about revealed and natural religion, see the two
chapters by M.A. Stewart in Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge
History ofEighteenth-CenturyPhilosophy, pp. 683-730. Strong claims
are made about the 'irreligious' agenda of the Treatise in Paul Russell,
The Riddle ofHume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion
(Oxford University Press, 2008). Useful background for Hume's
discussion of miracles is provided by David Wootton, 'Hume's
"Of Miracles": Probability and Irreligion: in M.A. Stewart (ed.),
Studies in the Philosophy ofthe Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 191-229.A summary of philosophical
116
debate concerning 'Of Miracles' is provided by Peter Millican, '1\venty
Questions about Hume's "Of Miracles": Philosophy 68 (2011): 151-92.
As a way into the Dialogues, Norman Kemp Smith's introduction to
his 1935 Oxford University Press edition has worn well. See also
Andrew Pyle, Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion:
A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2006). A good answer to the question
of what Hume might have meant when he talks about 'true religion' is
given by Don Garrett, 'What's True about Hume's "True Religion?"',
Journal qfScottish Philosophy 10 (2012): 199-220. Help with
understanding Hume's intentions in The Natural History ofReligion
is provided by Richard Serjeantson, 'David Hume's Natural History
ofReligion (1757) and the End of Modern Eusebianism', in Sarah
Mortimer and John Robertson (eds), The Intellectual Consequences
ofReligious HeterodoaJY 1600-1750 (Brill, 2011), pp. 267-95; and
Jennifer Smalligan Marn.sic, 'Refuting the Whole System? Hume's
Attack on Popular Religion in The Natural History ofReligion:
The Philosophical Quarterly 62 (2012): 715-36.

117
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g.,
52-53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

religious belief 81, 84-5, 88,

95,98-9
Addison, Joseph 34-7, 58 Bayle, Pierre 11, 15
aesthetics see criticism Beattie, James 84, 106-7
America 68, 78, 80, 96, Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Lord
106-7 57-60
anatomy 10-12, 16,18, 20-2, 29, Boswell, James 106
43-4, 58,61-2 Boyle, Robert 7-8, 88-9
ancient constitution 69,72, 74 Bristol 8
ancient literature 33 Bruyere, Jean de la 18, 20-1
ancient philosophy 5-9,11, 17, Burke, Edward 106-7
31-2, 41-2, 47, 50-1 Butler, Joseph 7-8
ancient world, modem world
compared with 1-2, 28,
49-51,62-3
animals, human beings compared Calvinism 20-1, 83, 89-90
with 9-10,13-14, 16-18, 21-2, Campbell, George 33, 106-7
42-3 causal maxim 82-3, 88-9
Arnauld, Antoine 85-6 causal reasoning 11-16, 25-6
association of ideas 13-14, 16-17, cause, definition of 14, 22-5
20-1 Charles I 69-70,75-6
atheism 84-5, 93-4, 99-100 Charles II 69-70
chastity 31, 37-8
Christianity 11, 18, 51,81, 85-6,
88,96
Bacon, Francis 7-8, 34 influence upon morality and
belief 10-11, 16-17, 21, 25-7, 55 politics 44-5, 47-51, 59

119
 Church ofEngland 59-60, Essays, Moral and Political (1741,
69, 71 1742,1748) 29,40,61-2,83
Church of Scotland 67-8,98-102 'The Epicurean' 41-2
Cicero 3,5-7,50-1 'OfAvarice' 36-7,41
'Coalition ofParties' 78 'Of Civil Liberty' 61-2
commerce 2,9-10,18,27-8,50-1, 'Of the Dignity or Meanness of
67-8,101-2 Human Nature' 42-3,46,83
contract theory 31,54-7 'OfEssayWriting' 35
criticism 33-4 'Of Love and Marriage' 37
Cromwell, Oliver 69-70, 100-1 'Ofthe Middle Station in
Life' 35-6
'OfMoral Prejudices' 40-2
'OfNational Characters' 27-8,
D'Alembert,Jean Le Rond 2-3,100 84,100
debt,national 67, 78-9 'Of the Original Contract' 57
design argument 84-5,95 'Of Parties in General' 84
Dialogues concerning Natural 'OfPolygamy and Divorces' 38-40
Religion 3,84-5,95, 99-103 'Of Refinement in the Arts' 50-1
Diderot,Denis 2-3,100 'Ofthe Rise and Progress ofthe
Douglas 98-9 Arts and Sciences' 61
'Of the Study of History' 37
'Of Superstition and
:I Enthusiasm' 83-4
:t:
Edinburgh 5,34-5,67-8,98-9, 'The Platonist' 41-2
101-2,104 'The Sceptic' 41-3
University ofEdinburgh 43-4, 'The Stoic' 41-2
84-5 'Whether the British Government
Elizabeth I 70-1 Inclines More .. : 101
Encyclopedie 2-3,67-8,100 evil,problem of 51,82-3,92
Enlightenment 1-2,67-8, external world 22-7,92-3
99-100,107
Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding 24-7,82-5
'Of Miracles' 88,102-3 feudalism 27-8,71-4
Enquiry concerning the Principles Four Dissertations 95,98-9
ofMorals 29,43-4,49,52, 'The Natural History of
93-4,104-5 Religion' 98-9
'A Dialogue' 49-50 'Of the Passions' 24-5,95
monkish virtues 69-70,98 'Ofthe Standard ofTaste' 33-4
principle ofhumanity 46-9 France 8,28,49-50,61-2,65-70,
utility and agreeableness 44-7 78-9,99-100,106-7
Essays and Treatises on Several Franklin,Benjamin 1-2,106-7
Subjects 104-5 free will see liberty and necessity

120
 Hurd,Richard 106-7
Hutcheson,Francis 7-8,31-4,
George I 57-8,99-100 40-1,43
George II 57-8,78
George III 78-9
Gibbon,Edward 33,
99-100,106-7 Irish Rebellion 76
Glorious Revolution 56-7, 60-1,
70,73-4
government 1-2,16,21-2,53,
55-8,60-3,65,74,84
Jacobitism 56-8,78
civilized 72-3 James I 34,69
Guicciardini,Francesco 75 James II 56-7,69-70
John,King 72-3
Johnson,Samuel 2-3,22,106
justice 30-1,45-6,55-6,61-2
Harvey, William 7-8,88-9
Henry III 72
HenryVII 71-2
HenryVIII 71
Karnes,Lord 33,106-7
History qfEngland 34,74-8,
Kirke,Colonel 76
99-100,104-6
pre-Tudor period 68,72-3
readership 78
religion 100
sales 78 La Fleche 8, 11,22,85-6
Stuart period 69-71,75-6 La Mettrie,Julien Offray de 99-100
style 78 'Letter to a Physician' 8
Tudor period 68,71-2 liberty (political) 50,53,58-63,73,
Hobbes,Thomas 18,21,31, 75,78-80,84,98,100
54-5 history ofBritish 74-5
Holbach,Paul-Henri Thiry, liberty and necessity 22-4
baron d' 100 Locke,John 7-8,10-12,31-3,54-5
Home,John 98-9 Long,Edward 27-8
Douglas 98-9
human nature 4
anatomy of 10-11
evaluation of 42-3 Machiavelli,Niccolo 75
passions 21-2 Maclaurin,Colin 88-9
reason 16 Magna Carta 72-3
and religion 98-9 man ofletters 2-3
and Stoic philosophy 8 Mandeville,Bernard 7-10,18,
uniformity of 28 29-32,43

121
 Milton, John 33-4 'Of the Populousness of Ancient
miracles 82-5,88,95 Nations' 28
money 63-7 'Of the Protestant Succession' 57
Monmouth Rebellion 76 political obligation 57
Montesquieu,Charles-Louis de Port Royal Logic 85-6
Secondat,baron de 27, Price,Richard 106-7
73,75 Puritanism 69, 71, 100
moral sense 30-3,55 Pyrrhonism 11,15,26-7
Mossner,Ernest Campbell 3
'My Own Life' 105-7

race 27-8
Ramsay,Andrew 98-9
natural abilities 46-7 reason 8, 16
'Natural History of Religion' and the passions 16-18, 102-3
98-9, 102-3 Reformation 68, 71,89-90,97
monotheism and Reid,Thomas 106-7
polytheism 96-8 religion 4, 105-6
predestination 98-9 design argument 95
religion and morality 97-8 and human nature 83-4,
natural religion 95 98-9, 102-3
Newton,Isaac 7-8,88-9 miracles 88
::i Nicole,Pierre 85-6 and morality 49,97-8
::c
Norman Conquest 73 and politics 59-60,
69-71, 100-2
Treatise ofHuman
Nature 22,82-3
'Origin of Government' 79-80 resistance,right of 55-9, 70,98
Rochefoucauld,due de la 18,20-1
Rome 1-2,5-7,50
Rousseau,Jean-Jacques 1-2,
Paris 8,52,99-100, 104 100,104
party politics 61-2
Pascal,Blaise 18,20-1
passions 1-2,4,9-10,16,21-5,27,
31-2,36-7,41-2,89-90, Sarpi,Paolo 75
98-9,102-3 scepticism 11, 15-16, 22-7,41-3,
direct 18-19 69, 81-9,92-4, 99-100,
indirect 18-21 102-3,105-6
religious 98-9,102-3 science of human nature 9-11,
philosophy 2 13-14,20-1,34-5
Pitt,William,the Elder 78-9 science of the mind see science of
Political Discourses 53,67-8,84-5 human nature
'Idea of a Perfect Scotland 8,28,67-8,83,89-90,
Commonwealth' 102 98-9, 101-2,106-7

122
Shaftesbury,third earl of 3, 7-9 Turgot,Anne-Robert-Jacques
Shakespeare,William 34 52, 79-80
slavery 27-8,51
Smith,Adam 1-2,47-9,62-3,
102,106-7
Sparta 62-3 utility 31-2,44-7,55-6
Spectator 34-7,58
Spinoza,Baruch 82-3
'Standard of Th.ste' see Four
Dissertations Virgil 33
Stoicism 5-7, 9, 41-2,44-5 virtues 8-9, 20-1, 35-6, 43-5, 70,
Strahan,William 104-5 83-4,98
suicide 44-5 artificial 29-33, 37-8,54-6
sympathy 19-21,27,30-3, 75-6 monkish 47-9,98
natural 54
social 45-6
Voltaire (Franc;ois-Marie
Tacitus 22 Arouet) 2-3, 75, 101-2
Temple,Sir William 34
testimony 86-8
toleration 59, 84,97-8,101
Treatise qfHuman Nature 3-4, Wallace,Robert 106-7
22-7,34-5, 40-1,43,82-3,86, Walpole,Sir Robert 57-61
92-3, 106-7 Warburton,William 106
'.Abstract' 24-5 Whiggism 57-61, 64,69-76
'Of Morals' 29-33, 37-8,54-7 Wilkes,John 79-80,100-1
'Of the Passions' 21-4 William of Orange,William III
'Of the Understanding' 16, 22-4 69-70
religion 22,82-3 women 2,31,37-40,47-9,78

123
EXISTENTIALISM
A Very Short Introduction
Thomas Flynn
Existentialism was one of the leading philosophical movements of
the twentieth century. Focusing on its seven leading figures,
Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty and Camus, this Very Short Introduction provides
a clear account of the key themes of the movement which
emphasized individuality, free will, and personal responsibility
in the modern world. Drawing in the movement's varied
relationships with the arts, humanism, and politics, this book
clarifies the philosophy and original meaning of 'existentialism' -
which has tended to be obscured by misappropriation. Placing
it in its historical context, Thomas Flynn also highlights how
existentialism is still relevant to us today.

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GERMAN
PHILOSOPHY
A Very Short Introduction
Andrew Bowie

German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction discusses the

idea that German philosophy forms one of the most revealing
responses to the problems of 'modernity'. The rise of the modern
natural sciences and the related decline of religion raises a
series of questions, which recur throughout German philosophy,
concerning the relationships between knowledge and faith,
reason and emotion, and scientific, ethical, and artistic ways
of seeing the world. There are also many significant philosophers
who are generally neglected in most existing English-language
treatments of German philosophy, which tend to concentrate
on the canonical figures. This Very Short Introduction will include
reference to these thinkers and suggests how they can be
used to question more familiar German philosophical thought.

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KEYNES
A Very Short Introduction
Robert Skidelsky

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is a central thinker of the

twentieth century, not just an economic theorist and statesman,
but also in economics, philosophy, politics, and culture. In this
Very Short Introduction Lord Skidelsky, a renowned biographer
of Keynes, explores his ethical and practical philosophy, his
monetary thought, and provides an insight into his life and
works. In the recent financial crisis Keynes's theories have
become more timely than ever, and remain at the centre of
political and economic discussion. With a look at his major
works and his contribution to twentieth-century economic
thought, Skidelsky considers Keynes's legacy on today's society.

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SCOTLAND
A Very Short Introduction
Rab Houston

Since Devolution in 1999 Scotland has become a focus of

intense interest both within Britain and throughout the wider
world. In this Very Short Introduction, Rab Houston explores
how an independent Scottish nation emerged in the Middle
Ages, how it was irrevocably altered by Reformation, links with
England and economic change, and how Scotland influenced
the development of the modern world. Examining politics, law,
society, religion, education, migration, and culture, he
examines how the nation's history has made it distinct from
England, both before and after Union, how it overcame internal
tensions between Highland and Lowland society, and how it
has today arrived at a political, social and culture watershed.

Houston's survey is clear and certainly concise.

Clare Beck, The Scotsman

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THE MEANING
OF LIFE
A Very Short Introduction
Terry Eagleton

'Philosophers have an infuriating habit of analysing questions

rather than answering them', writes Terry Eagleton, who, in
these pages, asks the most important question any of us ever
ask, and attempts to answer it. So what is the meaning of life?
In this witty, spirited, and stimulating inquiry, Eagleton shows how
centuries of thinkers - from Shakespeare and Schopenhauer to
Marx, Sartre and Beckett - have tackled the question. Refusing
to settle for the bland and boring, Eagleton reveals with a mixture
of humour and intellectual rigour how the question has become
particularly problematic in modern times. Instead of addressing
it head-on, we take refuge from the feelings of 'meaninglessness'
in our lives by filling them with a multitude of different things: from
football and sex, to New Age religions and fundamentalism.

'Light hearted but never flippant.'

The Guardian.

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SOCIAL MEDIA
Very Short Introduction

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