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

The persistence of the religious spirit under the most varied cultural circumstances suggests the superficiality, though not necessarily the irrelevance, of those explanatory theories that view religion as the symptom of some profound, but theoretically superable, social or personal disorder. Certainly the most influential of these, the Marxist and the Freudian, cannot be dismissed as mere errors; they have too clearly perceived certain regular abuses of religious sensitivity, and they have stated these in such a bold and open way that it seems unlikely that anyone could resist their simple truth: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people …’ [Marx]; ‘religion [is]… the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’ [Freud].

God, as viewed by Muslims, Jews and Christians, is a transcendent being. To say that God is transcendent is to say, among other things, that spatiotemporal predicates do not apply to him. He is disembodied and absolutely immutable. God, nevertheless, is on this same view an agent. He makes things happen, he answers prayers, he judges, he forgives, he punishes, he guides, etc. The concept of God as a being worthy of worship seems to require that God be an absolutely eternal being on the one hand with all that this entails and a being that is absolutely just, merciful, forgiving, loving, good, on the other. It is the predication of such attributes of God that yields the concept of transcendent agency. This means in effect that for a being to be God this being must be, at least, a disembodied agent. But the concept of a disembodied agent, it is argued, is a contradiction in terms.

I want to say a few words to dispel certain silly mistakes made about the Hindu notion of devās by Westerners not of this tradition. It is common for Westerners, and especially for certain tendentious devotees of Semitic traditions – most notably the Christian one – to accuse Hinduism of ‘polytheism’, meaning by this the nonsense that enlightened Hindus believe there to be a multitude of ‘gods’, all equivalent to the single Semitic one. But this is simply false. The Hindu equivalent, so far as there is one, to Christianity's ‘God, the Father, Supreme Being or Person’, is Brahman, manifest as Īśvara, and sometimes called ‘Purusottama’ (lit. ‘Supreme Personl’: see Bhagavad Gītā, 15: 15–18), and of which there is only one.

In this paper, I shall be concerned to show: (1) that Winch believes that there can be different conceptions of ‘agreement with reality’; (2) that Wittgenstein agrees with this, but emphasizes the difficulty of understanding such conceptions; (3) that Winch realizes this difficulty, and yet still tries to gain understanding of primitive social institutions in terms of their sense of the significance of human life, in terms of the limiting notions of birth, death and sexual relations; (4) that such a notion of the significance of human life cannot be made sense of without an understanding of the concept of agreement with reality which undergirds it; (5) that Winch's position is internally incoherent.

Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has even evoked the attacks of philosophers and theologians.1 Mysticism to many conjures up images of monks meditating in caves; it is generally pictured as esoteric, otherworldly, irrational, and at best irrelevant to the daily lives of human beings. If what we say below is correct, it will be seen that mysticism is none of these but is rather a singular human experience that lies at the foundations of civilization.

In recent years the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have received much attention from philosophers in general and especially from philosophers interested in religion; and there is no doubt that Wittgenstein's legacy of thought is both highly suggestive and highly problematical. It seems likely, however, that the vogue which Wittgenstein now enjoys owes not a little to his peculiar place in the development of modern philosophy and, in particular, of that empiricist tradition in philosophy which stems from what has been called the revolution in philosophy in the early decades of the present century.