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Hume's Metaphysics: A New Theory of Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Paul Grimley Kuntz
Paul Grimley Kuntz
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
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Extract

A paper on Hume's metaphysics might be exceedingly short: we might say that Hume pricked bubbles but blew none. Most readers of Hume think there is nothing here to write about, unless anti-metaphysics be a form of metaphysics.l Hume's good repute rose with agnosticism and positivism, and it is characteristic of the Germans to credit Hume with being the awakener from dogmatic, that is, metaphysical, slumbers. Add to this those who deplore Hume as the antithesis of classical philosophy, and we have a chorus who would laugh down the claim that Hume had, as he claimed, a system. And indeed who cannot quote Hume's eloquent conclusion about ‘divinity or school metaphysics’: ‘Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion’ (EcHU 132, p. 165)?2

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 1976 , pp. 401 - 428
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

page 401 note 1 Hall, Roland, A Hume Bibliography from 1930 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar, lists only Zabeeh, F., ‘Hume on Metaphysics’, Theoria 27 (1961), pp. 12–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Walsh, W. H., Metaphysics (Hutchinson, London, 1963, ch. 7).Google Scholar J. A. Passmore has much on Hume as a methodologist, Hume as a positivist and phenomenologist, Hume as a sceptic, but there is no chapter on Hume as a metaphysician… Walsh concludes that Hume is among the boldest and the most attractive of metaphysicians, p. 195.

page 401 note 2 Works of Hume are abbreviated as follows:

A= An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature, J. M. Keynes and Pierro Sraffa, editors (Cambridge University Press, 1938).

NKS D = Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Smith, Norman Kemp, editor (Nelson, Edinburgh, 1947Google Scholar; N.Y., 1962).

D Aik = Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Aiken, Henry David (Hafner, N.Y., 1957).Google Scholar

EcHU = An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, with Hume's section numbers, followed by page number in Selby-Bigge, second edition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927).Google Scholar

EcPM = An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, followed by page numbering, Selby-Bigge, second edition (Clarendon Press, 1927).Google Scholar

L = A Letter from A Gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh, Mossner, Ernest C. and Price, John V. (Edinburgh University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

NHR = The Natural History of Religion in Hume on Religion, Wollheim, Richard, ed., Meridian Books (World, Cleveland, 1963).Google Scholar

T = A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford, 1896).Google Scholar

TEV = A Treatise of Human Nature, Lindsay, A. D., ed. (Dent, London, 1911)Google Scholar, 2 vols.

Burton, J. H. = Life and Correspondence of David Hume, Wm. Tait (Edinburgh, 1846)Google Scholar, 2 vols.

Greig, J.Y.T. = The Letters of David Hume (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1932).Google Scholar

NKS PDH = Smith, Norman Kemp, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines (Macmillan, London 1941).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 402 note 1 Wollheim correctly identifies the method but characterizes the results as destructive only. Hume on Religion, Meridian Books (Cleveland, 1963), p. 19.Google Scholar

page 402 note 2 Among the best positive interpreters are Charles Hendel, W., Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton University Press, 1925)Google Scholar; Pike, Nelson, ‘Hume on the argument from design’, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1970)Google Scholar; Collins, James, The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967)Google Scholar, chh. 1 and 2; George Stern, A Faculty Theory of Knowledge, etc. (see below n. 4).

One nineteenth-century leader of Scottish life and thought, Dr Henry Calderwood, attempted to rehabilitate Hume as a defender of the faith. However this reinstatement of Hume may ignore the irony of his statements about ‘our most holy religion’, at least Dr Calderwood took strong issue with the identification of Hume with atheism. Now Hume is presented as an agnostic and positivist, so we may say that ‘traditional view[s] of his position, though erroneous, still linger among us…’ Calderwood, Henry, David Hume (Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., 1898), p. 91.Google Scholar

page 402 note 3 Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, N.Y., 1925), p. 5Google Scholar; ‘Hume based his Dissertation on the Natural History of Religion upon his faith in the order of nature’, p. 83.

page 402 note 4 It may well seem inappropriate to ascribe to Hume a position of faith as well as some sort of metaphysical system.

Stern, George, A Faculty Theory of Knowledge: The Aim and Scope of Hume's First ‘Enquiry’ (Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 1971)Google Scholar, argues forcefully that Hume defended ‘faith’, although not the content of ‘Church dogmas of his time’. Whether this ‘faith’ is ‘an independent faculty for the apprehension of the irrational concepts of religion’ and that faith is in this sphere prior to reason, are subsidiary problems on which the author is not as convincing (p. 127). Stern is particularly relevant to my argument in his dialectical claim that Hume is making a claim similar to A. E. Taylor's, that miracles are not the ground for a theistic metaphysic …‘We cannot expect to arrive at a meta-physic of any great worth so long as we confine our contemplation to the domain of formal logic, or epistemology, or even of experimental science’, p. 128 (from Taylor, A. E., Philosophical Studies, Macmillan, London, 1934, p. 363).Google Scholar Taylor then comes close, as does Stern, to specifying the object of Hume's philosophic faith as a ‘principle of order’.

page 403 note 1 Cohen, Ralph, The Critical Theory of David Hume, University Microfilms (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973) (Columbia Ph.D. 1952)Google Scholar sees in the letter no attention to method or metaphysics, only to human nature and literature.

page 403 note 2 Among those who restrict the new scene to psychology are Jessop, T. E., ‘Some Misunderstandings of Hume’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vi, no. 20 (1952), fasc. 2, pp. 159–60Google Scholar; and A. H. Basson protests that Hume seeks foundation for ‘a complete system of the sciences’: ‘The Sciences of Man’ must be broader than psychology. David Hume (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1958), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

page 404 note 1 On the importance of Galileo's method of hypothesis see Hendel, C. W., Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton University Press, 1925), pp. 324–6Google Scholar, but the influence of Newton is far more explicit, 383 ff.

On the close connection between Hume's metaphysics and the Newtonian movement, see Hurlbutt, R. H. III, ‘David Hume and Scientific Theism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), especially pp. 490–7.Google Scholar There is also Hurlbutt, R. H.; Hume, Newton and the Design Argument (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1956).Google Scholar

page 405 note 1 There is little discussion of Hume's principles of contradiction and excluded middle. A fine exception is Rescher, Nicholas, ‘Logical Analysis in Historical Application’, Methodos, 11 (1959), pp. 187–194.Google Scholar Perhaps only someone with a background in Leibniz would be sensitive to the crucial importance of such statements as ‘nothing, which he clearly conceives, could be esteemed impossible or implying a contradiction’ (D II). There are similar statements in EcHU 132 p. 164 and NHR XI, Wollheim, , Religion, p. 72.Google Scholar It would go too far to ascribe to Hume any commitment to real possibilities or possible existence, but there is a commitment to an ‘order of things’ which Whitehead contrasts to an ‘order of nature.’ This can be defended by saying that Whitehead's ‘eternal objects’ are not actual, mere forms of definiteness. Moreover, the shades of blue are not exhausted by the actual tones we have perceived in the concrete. Whitehead and Hume would agree on that surely.

page 406 note 1 Hendel, C. W., Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton University Press, 1925)Google Scholar, cites this conception of God as principle of order, from The New Theory of Vision, as among the main problems which were Hume's concerns along with relations between men and the efforts to achieve knowledge.

page 406 note 2 Hume states his position so that we might read him as a subjectivist in his theory of spatial, temporal or causal order. Order might then be categorial function of the mind or formal a priori categories we impose upon experience. But, concludes Metz, it is ‘likelier that he is to be understood in a naive empiricist way’. The superior order is between objects (der ‘übergeordnete Ordnungsbegriff auf der Seite der Objekte oder Inhalte, ohne dass das Form-Inhalt Problem schon erkenntnistheoretisch relevant geworden wäre. Die Ordnung als formale Kategorie ist von Hume nigends erfasst; er ist an dieser Stelle ebensoweit von Apriorismus entfernt wie überall sonst’.) David Hume: Leben und Philosophie (Frommann, Stuttgart, 1968), p. 145.Google Scholar Metz does not connect, as does this paper, Hume's theory of order with Newtonian methodology or with the theory of society, but stresses order as Hume's solution to the problem of how, if the mind is but a bundle of impressions, there can be any unity. The self is no mere bundle because ‘ideas fall into order’. Unless we are mad, the self can then be, even if no substance, an orderly system or organic whole. Ibid. p. 226.

page 408 note 1 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics (Macmillan, London, 1922), pp. 440.Google Scholar

page 409 note 1 Stewart, John B., The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (Columbia University Press, N.Y., 1963), Pp. 235–6.Google Scholar

page 409 note 2 2 Ibid. pp. 238–9.

page 409 note 3 NKS D 25, although he agrees with T. H. Huxley that almost nothing remained of Hume's theism, then claims Hume was writing in the tradition of Plato's Laws, as interpreted by Cicero: Hume accepted Providence in this sense: ‘Divine Existence, he teaches, is the source or principle of order, i.e. the principle determining the regular course of nature - the order which by its fixed laws enables us to arrange our lives with providence and foresight, and in so doing to benefit by the goods which “Providence” has provided.’ Is it going too far to claim that here philosophic and religious truth coincide? Kemp Smith is clear that He rejects only the kind of God who ‘is influenced by Prayers or Sacrifices’, an atheism found in Mr Leechman's sermon. If the Deity affirmed is the ‘principle of order’, then even if we could not be grateful to it, as to a person whom we know, even then we should be grateful for such orders that enable us to develop a wise ordering. Hume fails to make this distinction, but I venture to think it more reasonable in his system than to attribute to Hume a view of ‘Providence’, as does Kemp Smith. Greig, J.Y.T., The Letters of David Hume (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1932), 1, pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

page 410 note 1 The concept miracle, defined as an event that does not occur in accordance with any law, requires logically that we know all the laws of nature. The notion is then inapplicable. See Gareth B. Matthews, review of Jeffners, Anders, Butler and Hume on Religion, in Philosophical Review 77 (1968), p. 370.Google Scholar How could such an elementary objection have escaped those who accepted such a definition? The texts reveal, I believe, that the miracles used violated regularities then believed perfectly known, and if there were other so-called exceptions, that they could readily be fitted into our scientific scheme. The positive point is that there is the assumption of order in all events. In the rather hostile essay by Taylor, A. E., ‘David Hume and the Miraculous’, Philosophical Studies (Macmillan, London, 1934)Google Scholar, the theist concedes that miracles cannot be used as a justification of theism but that theism must be based on the cursus ordinarius of Nature (p. 363).

page 411 note 1 It makes more sense to say that EcHU is ‘inconclusive’ rather than ‘negative’; it ends with maybe some form of theism rather than a flat no ( Hume, HendelSelections, Scribner's, N.Y., 1927, xix).Google Scholar

The link between EcHU and NHR is the effort to state the principle of ‘genuine theism’. The introduction to NHR may be a feigned certainty, but nothing in the sceptical rejection of the arguments compels the believer to ‘suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion’. (Wollheim, p. 31). Between 1748 and 1757 had come The History of England.

page 413 note 1 Henle, Robert J., Method in Metaphysics (Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 1951)Google Scholar, on the fallacy of ‘only’, passim.

page 415 note 1 I would feel better about the title if I could find these very words in Hume. In many ways he is a pluralist. ‘There are many different kinds of Certainty…’ Greig, J.Y.T., Letters (Oxford, 1932), 1, 187.Google Scholar

page 415 note 2 Laing, B. M., ‘Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,’ Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), p. 183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 416 note 1 NKS D, p. 99. Perhaps the most thorough examination of the ambiguities is Laing, B. M., ‘Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), pp. 182–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 416 note 2 Laing, B. M., David Hume (Benn, London, 1932), pp. 183–7Google Scholar raises the issue with regard to miracles, but the question of chance seems to me of wider metaphysical interest. It seems to me a defect of the Dialogues and general attention to Hume on order that it has been too preoccupied with theological aspects of metaphysics.

page 416 note 3 NKS D noted this ambiguity and named it ‘argument from design and an argument to design’, p. 72. The most thorough examination is Hurlbutt, R. H. III, ‘David Hume and Scientific Theism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 17 (1956), pp. 486–97.Google Scholar

page 416 note 4 Hendel, Charles W. Jr, Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton University Press, 1925), p. 343.Google Scholar

page 416 note 5 Laing, B. M., ‘Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), pp. 182–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 417 note 1 Taylor, A. E., ‘The Present-Day Relevance of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Aristotelian Society Supplement, vol. 18 (1939), esp. pp. 180–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 417 note 2 Laing, B. M., ‘Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), p., 186n.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 418 note 1 Weinberg, Julius R., Abstraction, Relation, and Induction: Three Essays in the History of Thought (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1965), pp. 116–17.Google Scholar The conclusions are based entirely on Hume's Treatise.

page 419 note 1 Price, H. H., ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume's Philosophy’, Philosophy, XL (1940), p. 13.Google Scholar

page 419 note 2 Henderson, L. J., The Order of Nature, An Essay (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1925), pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

page 419 note 3 Lovejoy, A. O. GCB doesn't mention Hume, as Dr Laing notes in ‘Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Philosophy, vol. 12 (1937), p. 190.Google Scholar He does nothing towards showing how hierarchy enters into the conception of the world order.

page 420 note 1 Taylor, A. E., ‘Symposium: The Present-Day Relevance of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, Aristotelian Society Supplement, vol. 18 (1939), p. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 420 note 2 Stern, George, A Faculty Theory of Knowledge: The Aim and Scope of Hume's First ‘Enquiry’ (Bucknell University Press, 1971), pp. 128–9.Google Scholar

page 420 note 3 This statement is not formally spelled out by Rescher, Nicholas in ‘Logical Analysis in Historical Application’, Methodos, vol. II (1959), pp. 187–194Google Scholar, but I believe it fits Hume's logical assumptions.

page 420 note 4 There is a considerable literature on the is/ought distinction, and it is now known to readers of philosophical journals as ‘Hume's Law’. Among noted articles are Maclntyre, A. C., ‘Hume on “Is” and “Ought”’, The Philosophical Review, LXVIII (1959), 451–68Google Scholar, and R. F. Atkinson, ‘Hume on “Is” and “Ought”: A Reply to Mr Maclntyre’, Ibid. LXX (1961), 231–8, and many subsequent essays.

page 421 note 1 Nahm, Milton C., The Artist as Creator: An Essay of Human Freedom (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1956)Google Scholar, deals with the ‘great analogy’ between the artist and God, when ‘God’ is understood both as Hebraic-Christian creator and Platonic demiurge. But Hume's use of it is ignored. Rather Hume figures only in rejecting the ‘intangling brambles’ of metaphysics derived from ‘the craft of popular superstitions’ (pp. 61, 63).

page 423 note 1 Berkeley, George, A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical Writings (Everyman Library, J. M. Dent, London), 1910 (1926), pp. 243–4.Google Scholar

page 423 note 2 Pike, Nelson, ed. and com., Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, N.Y. 1970), pp. 233–5.Google Scholar

page 424 note 1 Hendel, Charles W., Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton University Press, 1925), p. 328.Google Scholar

page 424 note 2 Smith, J. S. Boys, The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 37 (October 1936), p. 348.Google Scholar

page 425 note 1 Walsh, W. H., Metaphysics (Hutchinson, London, 1963), p. 195.Google Scholar

page 425 note 2 Hartshorne, Charles and Reese, William L., Philosophers Speak of God (The University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 435.Google Scholar

page 427 note 1 NKS D 122 misquotes the hypotheticals as categoricals, making Hume's mind very flatly dogmatic, and missing the humour of the man. Hume is quite as free from taking Deism seriously as he is from taking any religious orthodoxy as its own proponents would wish it taken. Although Huxley quotes the hypotheticals, he also turns them into categoricals, but after an argument supporting the negative interpretation of Hume's results. Professor [T. H.] Huxley, Hume (Harper and Bros, N.Y. [n. d.]), pp. 143–4, 151–2. The only helpful interpreter here is Hendel who spots the whole argument as an example of deism, and that there is ‘one natural religion discoverable by reason at all times’ apart from the artifice of priests, is a position to which Hume's NHR put an end…Hendel SPDH 396 n.

MacNabb ends his article ‘Hume, David’ with this remote analogy statement as Hume's own exclusive and simple, but characterizes this as an empty concession. Even if Hume rejects as superstitious ‘the moral attributes of God, providence, immortality, and the whole Christian story from the Fall to the Day of Judgment’ there is much left to consider seriously as ‘true or philosophical religion’. Why identify theism with a peculiar kind of Christianity? The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Paul Edwards, Macmillan, N.Y., 1967), IV, 89.Google Scholar

page 427 note 2 Nathan, G. J., ‘Hume's Immanent God’, in Chapell, V. C., Hume (Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1966), pp. 396–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 427 note 3 Laird, John, Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Dutton, N.Y., 1931), p. 302.Google Scholar

page 428 note 1 Smith, Norman Kemp, Philosophy of David Hume, p. 565.Google Scholar Earlier Kemp Smith quoted Shaftesbury ‘For Nature Will Not Be Mocked’ (p. 138).

page 428 note 2 Hume could not employ a Platonic move to a ‘pre-existive order and contrivance of God's ideas’. Anderson, John, ‘Design’, The Australasian journal of Psychology and Philosophy, XIII, no. 4 (December 1935), p. 252.Google Scholar And even if order is assumed to require an ordering mind, he is not free to assume only one mind. McPherson, Thomas, ‘The Argument from Design’, Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 122 (July 1957), p. 220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although it is simpler to say that the theistic proposition means no more than the universe has such order as it has, more complexity is needed (Ibid. p. 228). Those who have claimed that Hume chooses ‘principles of theism in preference to those of naturalism’ are vague as to what these ‘principles’ are. Hendel, SPDH, 347, 330–1, 398. But they can be made clear enough when one pays close attention to order.