Toward a Humean True Religion. Andre C. Willis

and theological principles. Descartes commenced his project with universal doubt from the consciousness of an individual human subject and employed a priori concepts in service of timeless, transcendent ideas. To a large extent, the experimental method of Newton sidestepped this deep doubt. It allowed that nonmaterial forces caused physical effects (Newton held no notion of uniformity or necessary connection) and denied both Cartesian dualism and the immortality of the soul. Still, like Descartes, Newton embraced a conception of God as infinite and eternal. Roughly speaking, Hume cosigned Newton’s “experimental method of reasoning.” He worked from experience, or the “bottom up,” in response to Descartes’s “top-down” approach to philosophical “truths.” Against Cartesianism he wrote, “If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything” (E, 12.3.6) and “Cartesian doubt, therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable” (12.1.3). Hume wanted to subdue the passions for a priori method with his a posteriori technique. Further, he affirmed nature, habits of mind, and the power of common life against metaphysical reasoning. His work privileged experience and belief over abstruse reason and skepticism: he aimed “only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours” (1.4).

      Hume relied on Descartes’s privileging of the mind and individual subjectivity, but he directly challenged two prominent conclusions derived from the a priori method that were important for religion: the innate idea of an infinite, omnipotent God and the notion that the soul was immaterial and immortal. Descartes’s statement, “true ideas, which are innate in me, of which the first and most important is the idea of God” was contested by Hume: “The Cartesians, proceeding upon their principle of innate ideas, have had recourse to a supreme spirit or deity. . . . But the principle of innate ideas being allow’d to be false, it follows that the supposition of a deity can serve us in no stead” (T, 1.3.14.10).¹⁹ Note his dissatisfaction is with the idea of God as innate, not the belief in order and an Orderer (basic theism). The Treatise argues that we gain little usable knowledge when we merely assume the existence of deity at the beginning of our philosophical quest. We learn most about the operations of our mind and discover a more usable conception of deity as we observe humans undergoing repeated experiences “as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” (introd., 10).

      Descartes, whose views on the soul evolved throughout his career, not only inherited the notion of the soul as immaterial and immortal from the Scholastics but also became an apologist for it with his assertion, in the Sixth Meditation, that the res cogitans was indivisible and therefore immaterial and eternal. Hume refuted this conclusion by arguing that it went well beyond the proper purview of philosophy. He wrote, “matter and spirit are at bottom equally unknown and we cannot determine what qualities may inhere in the one or in the other.”²⁰ I take this to mean that the soul cannot bring about the effects that the Cartesians expect (i.e., thought). For “we shall never discover a reason, when any object may or may not be the cause of any other” (T, 1.4.5.30). As far as Hume was concerned, the soul was not the source of thought and Descartes’s argument for the soul as both immortal and immaterial rested on weak foundations.

      Hume’s early philosophical works navigated between and responded to a vast array of philosophical strategies and temperaments. Against Cartesian a priori conceptions of deity, he highlighted experience and nature and described our predilection to believe in basic theism as largely derived from hidden powers of nature and teleological principles of mind. In tone and content the Treatise asserted probabilistic conclusions in response to the hubris of Cartesian claims. Adroit in his contentions and mostly modest in his conclusions, the Humean flair that manifested in the Treatise offered a stylistic challenge to the Cartesian method. More or less, in the presence of strong deistic assertions (Tindal and Morgan), Hume emphasized the skeptical. When the skepticism went extreme (as in atheism and Pyrrhonism), Hume affirmed the propensity for belief. He mitigated abstruse philosophy (Cartesianism) with nature and common life, and to those who read him as dogmatically antireligious he had a basic theism and an inchoate category ‘true religion.’ Intellectually nimble and philosophically dexterous, the young Hume borrowed from Descartes yet moved beyond him to accept implicit beliefs mediated through custom, which could not satisfy the seminal demands of abstract reason of the Cartesian approach.

      PYRRHONISM

      In the unfolding literary drama of Hume’s early work, his response to Pyrrhonism further reflected the adeptness of his approach. Concerning Hume’s skepticism, Nicholas Capaldi writes that “no issue has engendered more misunderstanding in Hume scholarship than this one.”²¹ I shall not delve into the full range of skeptical interpretations here. I simply explain that Hume equated Pyrrhonism with an egregious form of skepticism, then he relied on nature, beliefs, and habits as fundamental for experience. Hume generally possessed an affinity for skeptical solutions in epistemology and sensitivity to the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment. He offered, however, two inseparable arguments against the Pyrrhonian attitude.²² The first held that one cannot actually act from a thoroughly Pyrrhonian consciousness in common experience; thus, Pyrrhonism was impossible. The second argument stipulated that the Pyrrhonian method of hesitation produced no convictions; therefore, Pyrrhonism was impractical.

      The Treatise gives mostly probable conclusions, makes provisional judgments based on observation, and traces the origins of our most significant beliefs. On its argument the complete suspension of judgment is simply not viable for a philosophical thinker. It is, in fact, impossible. Thus, Hume’s early work conciliates between belief and skepticism. His “mitigated skepticism” reminds him to be humble in his judgments and “diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical convictions” (1.4.7.14). Defending himself in his Letter from a Gentleman against being labeled a Pyrrhonian, Hume writes,

      As to Scepticism with which the author is charged, I must observe, that the doctrine of the Pyrrhonians or Scepticks have been regarded in all ages as Principles of mere Curiosity, or a Kind of Jeux d’ esprit, without any Influence on a Man’s steady Principles or Conduct in Life. In Reality, a Philosopher who affects to doubt of the Maxims of common Reason and even of his Senses, declares sufficiently that he is not in earnest, and that he intends not to advance an Opinion which he would recommend as Standards of Judgment and Action. (2)