The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  His relatives urged upon him that philosophy and eighty pounds a year would give him but a meager existence; he must reconcile himself to making money. Could he not study law? He tried for three painful years (1726–29). His health broke down, and almost his spirit too; for a time he lost his interest in ideas. “The law appeared nauseous to me”;76 he abandoned it, and returned to philosophy, with perhaps one deviation. Toward the end of February, 17 34, he left Edinburgh for London “to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life.”77 On March 5 Agnes Galbraith appeared before the Reverend George Home (David’s uncle), and confessed that she was with child. Brought before a session of the kirk, she declared “that Mr. David Home … is the father.” Doubting her veracity, the session remitted her to the next meeting of the local Presbytery; before this, on June 25, she repeated the accusation. According to the minutes of the Presbytery of Chirnside,

  the moderator … exhorted her to be ingenuous and confess if any other person was guilty with her.… The Presbytery having considered the affair, and being informed that the said David Home was gone out of the Kingdom, they remitted her to the Session of Chyrn-side, to make satisfaction to the rules of the Church.78

  This required that she should appear in sackcloth before the kirk, and be exposed in the pillory on three Sundays. In 1739 Agnes was again convicted of fornication.

  After a stop in London Hume proceeded to Bristol, and took a position in a merchant’s office. “In a few months I found that scene totally unsuitable to me.” He crossed over to France, where he could live more cheaply than in England. For a while he stayed at Reims; then he moved to La Fleche (some 150 miles southwest of Paris), for the Jesuit college there had an extensive library. The canny Scot entered into cordial relations with the priests, and was allowed to use their books. One of the fathers described him in later perspective as “too full of himself; … his spirit more lively than solid, his imagination more luminous than profound, his heart too dissipated with material objects and spiritual self-idolatry to pierce into the sacred recesses of divine truths.”79

  In the shade of the Jesuits Hume composed the first two books of his skeptical masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature. In September, 1737, he returned to England bursting with manuscript. He had trouble with publishers, for in December he wrote to Henry Home: “I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting out its noble parts, … endeavoring it shall give as little offense as possible.”80 The chief excisions were “reasonings concerning miracles”; these were stored away for use in safer days. The remainder, guaranteed to be unintelligible to antedeluvians, was published anonymously in two volumes in January, 1739, by John Noon of London. Hume sold the volumes outright for fifty pounds and twelve copies—not so bad a bargain for a book on logic and theory of knowledge by an unknown youth of twenty-seven. However, it was one of the peaks of modern philosophy.

  2. Reason Deflated

  The introductory “Advertisement” revealed Hume’s confidence in his powers: he proposed to study human nature in understanding and passions, and, in a third volume forthcoming, in morals and politics. He proceeded to analyze “impression” (sensation), perception, memory, imagination, thought, reason, and belief. This investigation of how we come to know is fundamental, for the validity of science, philosophy, religion, and history depends upon the nature, origin, and reliability of knowledge. It is a difficult discipline, for it deals with abstract ideas rather than with concrete objects; and thought is the last thing that thought seeks to understand.

  Hume begins by accepting as a starting point the empiricism of Locke: all ideas are ultimately derived from experience through impressions. These are external sensations like light, sound, heat, pressure, odors, taste, or internal sensations like stupor, hunger, pleasure, pain. A perception is a sensation interpreted; “noise” is a sensation, but “a knock at the door” is a perception. (Hume is not always precise or consistent in his use of these terms.) A man born blind or deaf has no idea of light or sound, because he has had no sensation of either. The ideas of space and time are derived from experience: the first is “the idea of visible or tangible points distributed in a certain order”; the second is the perception of sequence in our impressions.81 Ideas differ from impressions only in the lesser “force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind.”82 Belief “is nothing but a more vivid and intense conception of any idea; … it is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.”83

  In these definitions Hume seems to think of “the mind” as a real entity or agent experiencing, possessing, remembering, or judging impressións or ideas. As he proceeds, however, he denies the existence of any mind additional to the mental states—to the impression, perception, idea, feeling, or desire occupying consciousness at the moment.

  That which we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by different relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.… For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I aways stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated; nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity.… Aside from some metaphysicians … I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux.… The successive perceptions … constitute the mind.84

  So, at one blow from this brash youth, three philosophies fell: materialism, for (as Berkeley had shown) we never perceive “matter,” and know nothing but our mental world of ideas and feelings; and spiritualism, for we never perceive a “spirit” additional to our particular and passing feelings and ideas; and immortality, for there is no “mind” to survive the transitory mental states. Berkeley had demolished materialism by reducing matter to mind; Hume compounded the destruction by reducing mind to ideas. Neither “matter” nor “mind” exists. Forgivably the wits of the time dismissed both philosophers with “No matter; never mind.”

  Freedom of will, in this dissolving view, is impossible: there is no mind to choose between ideas or responses; the succession of mental states is determined by the order of impressions, the association of ideas, and the alternation of desires; “will” is merely an idea flowing into action. Personal identity is the feeling of continuity when one mental state recalls previous mental states and relates them through the idea of cause.

  But cause too is only an idea; we cannot show it to be an objective reality. When we perceive that A (e.g., flame) is regularly followed by B (heat), we conclude that A has caused B; but all that we have observed is a sequence of events, not a causal operation; we cannot know that B will always follow A. “All our reasonings concerning cause and effect are derived from nothing but custom.”85 The “laws of nature” that we talk of are merely sequences customary in our experience; they are not invariable and necessary connections in events; there is no guarantee that they will hold tomorrow. Science, therefore, is an accumulation of probabilities subject to change without notice. Metaphysics, if it pretends to be a system of truths about ultimate reality, is impossible, for we can know neither the “causes” behind sequences nor the “matter” behind sensations nor the “mind” allegedly behind the ideas. And so far as we base our belief in God on a chain of causes and effects supposedly leading back to a “Prime Mover Unmoved,” we must abandon that Aristotelian sophistry. All things flow, and certainty is a dream.

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p; After spreading devastation about him with the invincible Excalibur of his intellect, Hume pauses for a moment of modesty. “When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions than when I consider the objects concerning which I reason.”86 He knows as well as we do that certainty is not necessary for life, nor for religion, nor even for science; that a high degree of probability suffices for crossing a street or building a cathedral, or saving our souls. In an appendix he admits that there might be, after all, a self behind ideas, a reality behind sensations, a causal connection behind persistent sequences. Theoretically he stands his ground: “I have not yet been so fortunate as to discover any very considerable mistakes in the reasonings delivered in the preceding volumes.”87 But in practice, he amiably confesses, he abandons his skepticism as soon as he drops his pen.

  Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, and whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that all is uncertain, … I should reply … that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion.88 … I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.89 … Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason; and by the same rule he must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, though he cannot pretend, by any arguments of philosophy, to maintain its veracity.”90

  In the end Hume turns his back upon argument as a guide to life, and trusts to animal faith, to the belief, based upon custom, that reality is rational, permeated with causality. And by asserting that “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our natures,”91 Hume, twenty-seven, holds out his hand to Jean Jacques Rousseau, twenty-six, in youth and theory, as he was destined to do later in friendship and tragedy. The cleverest reasoner in the Age of Reason not only impeached the causal principle of reason, he opened a door to the Romantic reaction that would depose reason and make feeling its god.

  The second “book” and volume of the Treatise continues the dethronement of reason. Hume rejects the attempts of philosophers to build an ethic upon the control of passion by reason. By “passion” Hume means emotional desire. “In order to show the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavor to prove, first, that reason alone can never be a motive for any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction [against the force] of the will.”92 “Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse” (an echo of Spinoza?). To still further épater les bourgeois, Hume adds: “Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions [the illuminating and co-ordinating instrument of desires], and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”93

  He proceeds to a subtle analysis of the “passions”—chiefly love, hate, compassion, anger, ambition, envy, and pride. “The relation which produces most commonly the passion of pride is that of property.”94 All passions are based upon pleasure and pain; and ultimately our moral distinctions have the same secret source. “We tend to give the name of virtue to any quality in others that gives us pleasure by making for our advantage, and to give the name of vice to any human quality that gives us pain.”95 Even the concepts of beauty and ugliness are derived from pleasure and pain.

  If we consider all the hypotheses which have been formed … to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature [as in the beauty of the human body], by custom [as in admiring slenderness in women], or by caprice [as in the idealizing delusions of impeded desire], is fitted to give pleasure and satisfaction to the soul.… Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. … Beauty is nothing but a form which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts which conveys pain.96

  Love between the sexes is compounded of this sense of beauty, plus “the bodily appetite for generation and a generous kindness and good will.”97

  In March, 1739, Hume returned to Edinburgh. He eagerly searched the journals for reviews of his two volumes, and suffered the consequences. “Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”98 But when he wrote this in old age he had forgotten, perhaps through oblivescence of the disagreeable, that several reviews appeared within a year after the publication of his book. Nearly all of them complained that it was hard to understand, and that the author allowed his youth to show by frequent references to himself and to the epochal novelty of his ideas. “What is most offensive,” said a typical censor, “is the confidence with which he delivers his paradoxes. Never has there been a Pyrrhonian more dogmatic.… The Lockes and Clarkes are often, in his eyes, but paltry and superficial reasoners in comparison with himself.”99

  Saddened but resolute, Hume prepared for the press the third volume of his Treatise, containing Book III, “Of Morals.” It appeared on November 5, 1740. Its analysis of morality displeased the rationalists as much as the theologians. The rules of morality are not supernatural revelations, but neither are they the conclusions of reason, for “reason,” Hume repeats, “has no influence on our passions or actions.”100 Our moral sense comes not from Heaven but from sympathy—fellow feeling with our fellow men; and this feeling is part of the social instinct by which, fearing isolation, we seek association with others. “Man’s very first state and situation may justly be esteemed social”; a “state of nature” in which men lived without social organization “is to be regarded as a mere fiction”;101 society is as old as man. Being members of a group, men soon learned to commend actions advantageous—and to condemn actions injurious—to the community. Furthermore, the principle of sympathy inclined them to receive or imitate the opinions that they heard around them; in this way they acquired their standards and habits of praise and blame, and consciously or not they applied these judgments to their own conduct; this, and not the voice of God (as Rousseau and Kant were to imagine) is the origin of conscience. This law of sympathy, of communal attraction, is, says Hume, as universal and illuminating in the moral world as the law of gravitation in the material cosmos. “Thus, upon the whole,” he concluded, “I am hopeful that nothing is wanting to an accurate proof of this system of ethics.”102

  Volume III attracted even less attention than Volumes I and II. As late as 1756 the remnants of the eleven hundred copies that constituted the first edition of the Treatise were still cluttering the publisher’s shelves. Hume did not live to see a second edition.

  3. Morals and Miracles

  It was clear that he could not subsist by his pen. In 1744 he made an unsuccessful attempt to secure a professorship in the University of Edinburgh. Doubtless with some humiliation he accepted (April, 1745) a position as tutor to the young Marquis of Annandale at a fee of £300 a year. The Marquis went insane; Hume found that he was expected to be the keeper of a lunatic; there were quarrels; he was dismissed (April, 1746), and had to sue for his salary. For a year (1746–47) he served as secretary to General James St. Clair; the salary was good, the food was good, and in July, 1747, Hume returned to Edinburgh owning and weighing many more pounds than when he left. In 1748 the General re-engaged him, as secretary and aide-de-camp, on a mission to Turin; now David encased himself in a flaming scarlet uniform. James Caulfield (future Earl of Charlemont), then a student in Turin, was impressed by Hume’s intellect and character, but dismayed by his flesh.

  The powers of physiognomy were baffled by his countenance … to discover the smallest trace of the faculties of his mind i
n the unmeaning features of his visage. His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility.… The corpulence of his whole person was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than that of a refined philosopher.103

  The same Caulfield claims to have seen Hume (aged thirty-seven) on his knees before a married countess (aged twenty-four), professing his devotion and suffering the pangs of despised love; the lady dismissed his passion as “a natural operation of your system.” According to the same reporter Hume fell into a fever and tried to kill himself, but was prevented by the servants. Another Scot relates that in his illness Hume “received Extreme Unction” from a Catholic priest. Hume, we are told, excused both gallantry and unction on the ground that “the organization of my brain was impaired, and I was as mad as any man in Bedlam.”104 In December, 1748, he retired to London and philosophy, having now raised his fortune to a thousand pounds.

  Resolved to get another hearing for the ideas of the Treatise, he published in 1748 An Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding, and in 1751 An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. In an “Advertisement” prefixed to a posthumous edition (1777) of these Enquiries he disclaimed the Treatise as a “juvenile work,” and asked that “the following pieces may-alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.”105 Students of Hume have in general found more meat in the earlier than the later works; these cover the same ground in perhaps a less belligerent and incisive style, but they reach the same conclusions.

  After repeating his skeptical analysis of reason, Hume offered, as Section X of the first Enquiry, that essay “Of Miracles” which the publisher had refused to print in the Treatise. He began with his usual self-assurance: “I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument … which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures.” And then he let loose his most famous paragraphs: