by Will Durant
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.… When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority which I discover I … reject the greater miracle. There is not to be found in all history any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicions of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time attesting facts performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable: all which circumstances are requisite to give us a full assurance in the testimony of men. …
The maxim by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings is that the objects of which we have no experience resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.… It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.… It is strange … that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange … that men should lie in all ages.106
Hume went on to allege other obstacles to Christian belief: the calm neutrality of nature as between man and his rivals on the earth; the prolific variety of evils in life and history; the apparent responsibility of God for Adam’s sin, and for all sins, in a world where by Christian hypothesis nothing can happen without God’s consent. To avoid the charge of atheism, Hume put into the mouth of “a friend who loves skeptical paradoxes,” and whose principles “I can by no means approve,” a defense of Epicurus’ fancy that the gods exist, but pay no attention to mankind. The friend wonders why there cannot be an agreement between religion and philosophy not to molest each other, as he supposes there was in Hellenistic civilization:
After the first alarm was over, which arose from the new paradoxes and principles of the philosophers, these teachers seem ever after, during the ages of antiquity, to have lived in great harmony with the established superstition, and to have made a fair partition of mankind between them: the former claiming all the learned and wise, the latter possessing all the vulgar and illiterate.107
What a way to offer a truce!
In 1749 Hume returned to Scotland to live with his brother and sister on their estate at Ninewells. Two years later John Home took a wife, and David moved to Edinburgh. Now he sent to the press the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals which he hoped would replace the third volume of the Treatise. He reaffirmed the derivation of the moral sense from sympathy or social feelings; he rejected the Socratic identification of virtue with intelligence, and emphatically repudiated La Rochefoucauld’s notion that “altruistic” actions are egoistically motivated by the hope of pleasure from the social esteem they are expected to earn. The pleasure that we feel in such actions, said Hume, is not their cause but their accompaniment and result; the actions themselves are the operation of our social instincts.108
But the most noticeable feature of this second Enquiry is its elaboration of a utilitarian ethic. Twenty-three years after Hutcheson, thirty-eight years before Bentham, Hume defined virtue as “every quality of the mind which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others.”109 On this basis he justified the healthy pleasures of life as useful to the individual, and the double standard of morality as useful to society.
The long and helpless infancy of men requires the combination of parents for the subsistence of their young; and that combination requires the virtue of chastity or fidelity to the marriage bed.… An infidelity of this nature is much more pernicious in women than in men. Hence the laws of chastity are much stricter over the one sex than over the other.110
Of this Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals the fond author wrote: “In my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject), it is, of all my writings, … incomparably the best.” He added: “It came unnoticed and unobserved into the world.”111
4. Darwinism and Christianity
In 1751 he composed Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Of all the productions of his Mephistophelean mood this is the most devastating and irreverent. Three persons converse: Demea, who defends orthodoxy, Cleanthes the deist, and Philo, who is transparently Hume. Demea argues that unless we posit some Supreme Intelligence behind phenomena, the world becomes unbearably unintelligible; but he admits that his God is quite incomprehensible to human reason.112 Cleanthes reproaches Demea for trying to explain one unintelligibility with another; he prefers to prove God’s existence by the evidences of design in nature. Philo laughs at both arguments. Reason, he claims, can never explain the world or prove God. “What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain called thought, that we must make it the model of the whole universe?”113 As for design, the adaptation of organs to purposes may have resulted not from divine guidance but from nature’s slow and bungling experiments through thousands of years.114(Here is “natural selection” 1,800 years after Lucretius, 108 years before Darwin.) And even if we admit supernatural design, the imperfection of the adaptations and the myriad sufferings in the human and animal world reveal at best a god of limited powers and intelligence, or one quite indifferent to mankind. “Ultimately the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster.”115
One would imagine that this grand production has not received the last hand of the maker, so little finished is every part, and so coarse are the strokes with which it is executed. Thus the winds … assist men in navigation; but how oft, rising up to tempests and hurricanes, do they become pernicious! Rains are necessary to nourish all the plants and animals of the earth; but how often are they defective! how often excessive! … There is nothing so advantageous in the universe but what frequently becomes pernicious by its excess or defeat; nor has nature guarded with the requisite accuracy against all disorders or confusion.116
Worse yet, there is not only disorder amid the order (if you view the world as designed), there is, amid the abounding life, an always futile struggle against death.
A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous; fear, anxiety, terror agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the newborn infant and to its wretched parent; weakness, impotence, distress attend every stage of that life, and it is at last finished in agony and horror.… Observe, too, … the curious artifices of nature, in order to embitter the life of every living being.… Consider that innumerable race of insects, which either are bred on the body of each animal, or flying about, infix their stings in him.… Every animal is surrounded with enemies, which incessantly seek his misery and destruction.… Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other.117 …
Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences.… How hostile and destructive to each other! … The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.118
The conflicting evidences of good and evil in the world sugg
est to Philo a duality or multiplicity of competing gods, some of them “good,” some “bad,” and perhaps of diverse sex. He maliciously suggests that the world
was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; … or it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and, ever since his death, has run on at adventure, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.119
As like as not the world, as the Brahmins asserted, “arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels.… Why may not an orderly system be spun from the belly as well as the brain?”120 So creation would be generation. Or conceivably “the world is an animal and the deity is the soul of the world, actuating it and actuated by it.”121
After all this badinage Philo comes back to design, and admits that “the pause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some analogy to human intelligence.”122 And he apologizes for his scandalous cosmologies:
I must confess that I am less cautious on the subject of natural religion than on any other.… You in particular, Cleanthes, with whom I live in unreserved intimacy, you are sensible that notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed upon his mind, or pays more profund adoration to the divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, or design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems as at all times to reject it.123
Despite this peace offering, Hume’s friends pleaded with him not to publish the Dialogues. He yielded, and locked the manuscript in his desk; it did not see print till 1779, three years after his death. But his fascination with religion lured him back to the subject, and in 1757 he published Four Dissertations, of which one attempted a “Natural History of Religion.” At his publisher’s insistence he withdrew two other essays, which were printed when he was beyond fear and reproach: one on immortality, the other a justification of suicide when a person has become a burden to his fellow men.
The Natural History combines Hume’s old interest in religion with his new interest in history. He has passed beyond attacking old beliefs to inquiring how mankind came to adopt them. But he is not inclined to patient research, even among the scanty materials then available on social origins; he prefers to approach the problem by psychological analysis and deductive reasoning. The mind of primitive man interpreted all causation on the analogy of his own volition and action: behind the works and forms of nature—rivers, oceans, mountains, storms, pestilences, prodigies, etc.—he imagined acts of will by hidden persons of supernatural power; hence polytheism was the first form of religious belief. Since many forces or events were harmful to man, fear had a large share in his myths and rituals; he personified and sought to propitiate these evil forces or demons. Perhaps (Hume slyly suggests) Calvin’s God was a demon, cruel, malicious, arbitrary, and difficult to appease.124 Since the good gods were conceived as like human beings except in power and permanence, they were supposed to give aid and comfort in return for gifts and flattery; hence the rituals of offerings, sacrifices, adoration, and solicitous prayer. As social organization increased in size and reach, and local rulers submitted to greater kings, the world of divinities underwent a like transformation; an order of hierarchy and obedience was ascribed in imagination to the gods; monotheism grew out of polytheism, and while the populace still knelt to local deities or saints, cultured men worshiped Zeus, Jupiter, God.
Unfortunately religion became more intolerant as it became more unified. Polytheism had allowed many varieties of religious belief; monotheism demanded uniformity. Persecution spread, and the cry for orthodoxy became “the most furious and implacable of all human passions.”125 Philosophy, which among the ancients had been left relatively free as the religion of the elite, was compelled to become the servant and apologist of the faith of the masses. In these monotheistic creeds—Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism—merit and “salvation” were more and more divorced from virtue and attached to ritual observance and unquestioning belief. In consequence educated persons became either martyrs or hypocrites; and as they rarely chose martyrdom, the life of man was tarnished with lip service and insincerity.
In less combative moods Hume condoned a measure of hypocrisy. When he was consulted as to whether a young clergyman who had lost his faith should remain in the Church and accept its preferments, David answered, Remain.
Civil employments for men of letters can scarcely be found.… It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar and their superstition to pique oneself on sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a point of honor to speak the truth to children or madmen? … The ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to our innocent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which it is impossible to pass through the world.126
5. Communism and Democracy
Tiring at last of debate on issues that on his own view were determined by feeling rather than by reason, Hume in his later years turned more and more to politics and history. In 1752 he published Political Discourses. He was surprised by its favorable reception. Britain was glad to forget the destructiveness of his theology in the conservatism of his politics.
He had some sympathy with aspirations toward a communistic equality:
It must indeed be confessed that nature is so liberal to mankind that, were all her presents equally divided among the species, and improved by art and industry, every individual would enjoy all the necessaries, and even most of the comforts, of life.… It must also be confessed that wherever we depart from this equality we rob the poor of more satisfaction than we add to the rich, and that the slight gratification of a frivolous vanity in one individual frequently costs more than bread to many families and even provinces.
But he felt that human nature makes an egalitarian utopia impossible.
Historians, and even common sense, may inform us that however precious these ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really at bottom impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men’s different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues … the most rigorous inquisition is requisite to watch every inequality on its first appearance, and the most severe jurisdiction to punish and redress it.… So much authority must soon degenerate into tyranny.127
Democracy, like communism, received Hume’s sympathetic rejection. It is, he thought, “a principle … noble in itself, … but belied by all experience, that the people are the origin of all just government.”128 He dismissed as childish the theory (soon to be revived by Rousseau) that government had originated in a “social contract” among the people or between people and ruler:
Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in history, have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.… It is probable that the first ascendant of man over multitudes began in a state of war.… The long continuance of that state, … common among savage tribes, inured the people to submission.129
In this way monarchy became the almost universal, the most lasting, and therefore presumably the most practical, form of government. “An hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, a people voting by their representatives, form the best monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.”130
Besides disposing in advance of Rousseau, Hume used his lucid Addisonian style to discard in advance Montesquieu’s theory of climate as a determinant of national character. In Essays, Moral and Political, whose second edition appeared almost simultaneously (1748) with The Spirit of Laws, Hume wrote: “As to physical causes I am inclined to doubt of their operation in this particular; nor do I think that men owe anything of their
temper or genius to the air, food, or climate.”131 National character follows national boundaries rather than climatic zones; it is determined principally by laws, government, the structure of society, the occupations of the people, and the imitation of neighbors or superiors.
Under these local varieties human nature is basically the same in all times and climes; the same motives and instincts, made necessary by the demands of survival, produce in all ages and places essentially the same actions and results.
Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the action and enterprises which have been observed among mankind. Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English; you cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishes us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions are so many collections of experiments, by which the political or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science.132
In the Political Discourses, and in Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects (1753) Hume made substantial contributions to economic thought. He rejected the view of the French physiocrats that all taxes fall ultimately upon land; they fall at last, he believed, upon labor, for (here he echoes Locke) “everything in the world is purchased by labor.”133 Even before the Industrial Revolution had taken form he foresaw that the workers would “heighten their wages” by combination. He condemned the financing of governmental expenditures and enterprises by high taxes and frequent bond issues, and predicted that such fiscal measures would bring “free governments” to “the same state of servitude with all the nations that surround us.”134 Money is not wealth; to mint more of it than is needed for the convenience of commerce is to raise prices and hamper foreign trade. The false mercantile theory that still led European states to stress exports, block imports, and accumulate gold would deprive Europe of the international benefits derivable from the ability of each nation, through soil and climate and special skills, to produce specific goods at minimal cost and of optimal quality. He dared to pray,
