Of course, Hume challenged the very notion that we could have a “feeling” without an impression, and he thought any causal chain that linked the future to the past was unintelligible on the existing standards of reason. This suggests that naming Hume’s sense of order as a “basic theism” does not quite comport with his scathing denunciations of popular forms of Christianity, his exasperation with both false religion and traditional metaphysics, or his approach to philosophical truth. But Hume’s personal animus for traditional theism and his critical disposition toward vulgar religion do not automatically preclude a basic theism either. In fact, one can reconcile the theistic openness of his work with the elements that seem to oppose it: for example, his self-styled skepticism, his moral critique of popular Christianity, and his idea that to “conceive of something adds nothing to our idea of it” remain viable, crucial features of his thought even as we consider the modest sense of theism at its foundations. What I identify as Hume’s basic theism leaves room for expressions of doubt, invites moral criticism of anthropomorphic conceptions of God, and is consistent with the idea that the existence of something adds very little to our idea of it. It also supports his unique form of skepticism, an obstacle to which we will later attend. Whether I am pushing him further than he wanted to go remains an interesting question.
HUME’S EARLY SCIENCE OF SELF-UNDERSTANDING
Hume, raised Presbyterian by a single mother, claimed to have “never had entertained any belief in religion since he had begun to read Locke and Clarke” (around his twentieth birthday).6 These thinkers were seminal for his first philosophical work, now canonical, which was published when he was twenty-eight years old. John Rawls, in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, reminds us that its general content was “projected” when the author was fourteen, “planned” before he turned twenty-one, and largely “composed” before he was twenty-five. Thus it is safe, albeit somewhat cheeky, to note that this text, described as the greatest work of philosophy written in the English language, was conceived by a Scottish “tween” and written on his first major trip beyond his homeland. It is likely, given both the deep religious sentiments of his day and his break from the religious tradition of his family, that the young man’s first major effort would attend—even if only in an iconoclastic fashion—to issues pertinent for religion, especially belief in God. Perhaps the “new scene of thought” he referenced in his famous “Letter to a Physician” (LET, 1.17.3) would even recast religion and reconceive theism in ways that Locke and Clarke would appreciate.
As he matured, Hume distanced himself from the 1739 Treatise. In an autobiographical essay written just months before his death, he claimed, “Never a literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise. . . . It fell deadborn from the press” (L, 4). The description of the Treatise as “deadborn” was, in part, literary performance; by then he had breathed life back into it, corrected its errors, and rendered many of its most important arguments clearer in an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).7 Revisions notwithstanding, Hume did not distance himself from philosophical discourse on religion. The first Enquiry, in fact, consisted of twelve sections, two of which were explicitly and harshly critical of popular religion: “Of Miracles” and “Of Providence and Any Future State.” These sections, “castrated” from the early Treatise, challenged important beliefs of Christian believers. Their analysis rested, however, on the foundations of the critique of religion contained in the first philosophical work.
Despite Hume’s expressed disavowal of the Treatise and his rebranding of its most important interventions under a new banner, it still holds a unique place in Western thought and is usually given priority when it comes to the study of his philosophy. It is also elemental for his philosophy of religion. What is it about Hume’s philosophical first let serve that has allowed it to survive as the cornerstone of his thought in spite of his repudiations of it? What did the young Hume, suffering through his own “disease of the mind” during the planning and composing of the text, articulate here that survived redaction, landed in the first Enquiry, and served as foundational for his body of thought? What has brought my interest in basic theism to the doorstep of his inchoate philosophical classic?
The answers to these questions have to do with subtle historical and interpretive factors surrounding Hume’s early work.8 On the larger questions of the survival and canonization of the Treatise, perhaps this is a matter of the temperament behind the argument. The text is, in many ways, a radical statement written by a man-child in the Enlightenment Promised Land, convinced that philosophy was in need of an intervention. To him, the grand philosophical systems of the seventeenth century (e.g., Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) were abstruse and built on “weak foundations” (T, introd., 1). They employed self-certifying principles to establish timeless and transcendent truths about the nature of the universe and the essence of matter that led to vulgar theism and popular religion. Against these weak foundations the iconoclastic young man searched for firmer and more powerful ones to illuminate the moment of arising and evolution of our ideas, beliefs, and customs. Hume observed that nature, customary associations of the mind, tacit knowledge inherent in the customs of common life, and the passions served to ground our ideas, actions, and beliefs. The Treatise was both an original work of philosophy and an analysis of the state of philosophical discourse. It deftly raised questions about the overall aims of philosophical reflection—what made its claims intelligible, what its foundational criteria were, and how it might do something more than the trivial and the disputational. In this regard, the bold, unsullied, youthfulness of the Treatise made it stand out. Rejecting the standard positions and well-worn arguments regarding metaphysical reason, moral motivation, and the sources of religious belief, Hume’s challenge to philosophical authority seemed, paradoxically, both to undermine and celebrate belief in things that we could neither see nor touch.
To some of his contemporaries, the Treatise contained flashes of brilliance. To most it exposed him to be something of a philosophical acolyte trying to address the quandaries that dogged philosophical discourse and preoccupied religious thinkers from the position of an outsider. Acute in his recognition that the “love of wisdom” was stuck in a bind, he poignantly expressed a profound disillusionment early in the text: “We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all. For my part, I know not what ought to be done in the present case” (T, 1.4.7.7). The dilemma, as Hume saw it, was either to work within the confines of a philosophical method that strove for rational verification in the mode of Descartes or to abandon this sort of philosophical enterprise and discover a more adequate source for understanding our actions that would render our ideas intelligible. Hume thought the way to enhance our self-understanding and make our ideas clearer was to interrogate their sources. To serve this aim, he inaugurated a self-styled natural “science” in which he was, technically, both participant and observer. As the sole recorder and reporter of his own “scientific” data, he situated himself as an unchallengeable authority on experience. The mostly probable and provisional descriptions that he offered were marked by his unique reflective powers, which crucially relied on and critically undermined the very terms and categories that he interrogated (including the ideas of a self, Designer, and external objects). The flexible ideas ‘nature’ and ‘common life’ were the unique cornerstones of his extension of Baconian method.
In effect, the Treatise turned out to be something like a hand grenade thrown into the bunker of Enlightenment rationalism. The first Enquiry has, in some ways, remained its gentler companion text. The explosive critical elements of the Treatise guaranteed, paradoxically, that Hume would never receive a job in the academy and that he would be immortalized