AN OLD-WORLD AGNOSTIC.*
PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S popular book on Hume deals less with the person and more with the thinker than we could have wished. He has made it rather a medium for the defence and completion of Hume's philosophical negations, than for the delineation of that first of the Agnostics as a man. Neverthe- less, there is a certain interest in seeing the Agnostic of the eighteenth century as he is represented and supplemented by the Agnostic of the nineteenth. And perhaps the most curious of the differences between them is the characteristic difference of temperament. Hume was a thinker who was, in the proper sense of the word, a sceptic. We do not mean that his judgment remained suspended, for it is pretty clear that, so far as it was made up at all, it was made up in the same sense as that of the modern Agnostics. But while the modern Agnostics go into the matters they discuss, with a certain ardour and scorn for compromise that belongs to the temperament of belief,—or disbelief,—and not to the temperament which delights to pronounce problems insoluble. it is clear that Hume's temperament was perfectly adapted to the tone of his philosophy. He found most problems insoluble, and was rather pleased than otherwise to find them insoluble. He sympathised neither with the Conservative nor with the Destruc- tive school of philosophy, if he detested anything in the world, it was the fanaticism of people who held any view with passion, It pleased him to think out a system which tended to make the links of conviction run looser in the mind than before, so that you might regard even error, so long as it was not fanatically held, with more indifference. Hume liked to see life easy-going. He lived before the days of "the earnest school ;" and that school would have incurred his serious displeasure. He was a sort of philosophical Horace, with modern Edinburgh for his favourite Eflosi, Jf(n. f letters. Edited by John Morley. Hume. London: Macmillan. city, in place of ancient Rome. Ile would not have quite approved Professor Huxley's zealous sincerity. He would have regarded with sad surprise the declamatory character of Professor Tyndall's polemic against the superstitious belief in the soul as a separate entity, and his tendency to become enthu- siastic and eloquent on the prospect of all our present energies vanishing like a wreath of morning cloud in "the infinite azure of the past." Hume would have said probably that while he agreed fairly with these thinkers, he could hardly enter into the inappro- priate warmth of their emotions concerning opinions so well calcu- lated to cool down rather than to raise human enthusiasm. His system was adapted,—and evidently this was one of its great merits in Hume's eyes,—to lower the general temperature of human conviction. After steeping yourself in his life and essays, if you have the art of entering for the time into the spirit of your author, you come out decidedly tepid,—a kindly cynic,—an easy-going Conservative,—a sceptic who likes to sacrifice to the decencies,—a utilitarian who defers to the high authority of Custom, a moderate epicure who is as proud of his cook as he is of his moderation, a scorner of popular passion, a careful apolo- gist for intelligent despotism, with a liking for studious temper, for agreeable vanity, for profound inquisitiveness, and for amiable and complacent incredulity. "Doctor," Hume said to his physician during his last illness, when that gentleman proposed to tell a friend that his patient was recovering, "as I believe you would not choose to tell anything but the truth, you had better tell him that I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire." He pleased himself in his last illness with suggesting the excuses he might offer to Charon for delaying the last voyage, and Charon's replies,—" I thought I might say to him, 'Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the public receives my alterations.' But Charon would answer, 'When you have seen the effect of them, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses, so, honest friend, please step into the boat.' But I might urge, 'Have a little patience, good Cha- ron; I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of the prevailing systems of superstition.' But Charon would then lose all temper and decency,—' You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a leave for so long a time ? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.'" This was within a week or two of Hume's death, when he was as certain of the approach of the end as every sign of it could make one whose intelligence was far above any vain clinging to false hopes. But Professor Huxley is not quite as proud of the tepid temper of his favourite philosopher as he is of his intellectual negations, and he fails to paint the reflection of the man's system in his character as he might easily have painted it. The spiritual lukewarmness of the great sceptic's kindly nature is a good deal ignored in his sketch. He does, indeed, give us Madame d'Epinay's amusing account of Hume acting the Sultan in a French charade between two of the prettiest women of Paris, who were impersonating the slaves of his seraglio :—" Il lea regarde attentivemant, il se frappe le ventre et lea genoux k plusieurs reprises, et ne trouve jamais autre chose Ii leur dire que,—' Eh bien ! mes demoiselles. Eh bien ! vous voila done. Eh hien ! vous voila! vous voila. ici ! Cette phrase dure un quart d'heure, sans qu'il pat en sortir. Une d'elles, se leva d'impatience. 'Ah!' dit-elle, ' je m'en 4tais bien doutee, cet homme n'est bon qu'a manger du veau !' " But this story only represents Hume's stiffness and awkwardness of manner, not the lukewarmness of his whole temperament. There seems to have been but one sentiment in Hume's life which rose at all to the point of ardour, and that was hatred of the English. "I am delighted," he wrote to Sir Gilbert Elliot, "to see the daily and hourly progress of madness and folly and wickedness in England. The consummation of these qualities are the true ingredients for making a fine narrative in history, especially if followed by some signal and ruinous convulsion, ni I hope will soon be the case with that pernicious people." But Hume's ardour on this one point is probably nothing but the reverse side of his frigidity on almost everything else in the world. What he evidently detested in the English was not merely their capacity for popular enthusiasm, but their incapacity for appreciating assaults upon it. His de- fence of the Tudors and Stuarts fell dead in England. The English were not interested in it. They would not even consider it. They simply ignored Mr. Hume's demonstration that they ought not to have been what they were,—and this he bitterly resented. He could endure intellectual acrimony much better than a capa..
city for enthusiasm combined with pachydermatous inability to feel his attacks. Evidently, he sincerely wished to see the English punished, and severely punished, for the thick-skinned- ness of their religious and political fanaticism,—for the indiffer- ence which they appeared to entertain towards the frigid Scotch critic, who so vainly threw cold-water on their principles and their conduct.
Hume's whole tendency as a philosophic thinker was of a kind to relax the tension of human life, and attenuate the importance of all human phenomena. He (like Professor Huxley) had no belief in any real ego behind the phenomena of impressions and memory. "What we call a mind," he said, "is nothing but a heap or col- lection of different perceptions, united together by certain rela- tions, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity." Professor Huxley blames him for the "nothing but" in this sentence, but adds that though a mind may be more than this, we can know nothing more of it than that it is this. That comes, we suppose, to much the same thing. Certainly, an ordinary judge of such matters would say that to reduce, or try to reduce, our conception of the mind to a series of perceptions united together,—not in relations, but by relations (whatever that may mean),—is to attempt to dissolve in thought that which is essentially one, into loose fragments. It is a defini- tion that forgets altogether to account for the word "I." How can there be a perception without a percipient ? But Hume gets rid of the percipient, or rather, merges the percipient in the per- ception. To Hume, the idea of self meant nothing but the idea of all the successive states of feeling which any man can remember. But which is the remembering and which the remembered element, in all these loose links, he never ex- plained. And when be defines pride and humility as an "idea of ourselves," which is, in the one case, "advantageous," and in the other, "disadvantageous," what he ought to mean is simply this,—that the proud man, in running over all the train of his own memories (not, mind, of those memories specially apper- taining to what an ordinary man would call himself, because it is the whole train of all his memories which, according to Linde, constitutes himself), feels a certain resultant sensation of pleasure ; while a humble man feels a resultant sensation of pain. Yet Hume was not and could not be consistent with his own theory, in this attempt to dissolve the necklace into its component beads and their relations to each other. For he says expressly, "When self enters not into the consideration, there is no room for either pride or humility ;" why, according to him, self must enter into the consideration of any conscious state, whatever it be,—the idea of self being to him only the idea of the whole seriesof these conscious states, so that IIume has no sooner resolved self into its elements, than he, with extravagant inconsistency, begins to distinguish the elements by their more or less close relation to self. It is just the same with his philosophy of cause. Cause is to him nothing but a uniform antecedent. He denies that there is anything but superstition in the notion that any sort of power passes from the cause into the effect. He believes that when I talk of controlling my thoughts, what I really mean is that a certain feeling of effort is followed by a change in the direction of my thoughts, just as one moment of time is followed by the next, or one grain of sand in the hour- glass by its successor, but in no other sense at all ; and that the idea which most men import into the word " control" is a pure chimmra. Hence Hume's causal philo- sophy is the anticipation of the causal philosophy of the Posi- tivists; it explodes causal philosophy, and gives the idea of "cause," as distinguished from the idea of uniform antecedent, notice to quit the mind altogether ;—only unluckily, it stays.
But though Hume tries to unloose the knot between cause and effect, when dealing with the philosophy of cause, he, like other Agnostics, takes refuge in that knot, as if he had never trifled with it, when he comes to attempt to rid himself of what seems to him the nightmare of free-will. Then he declares that if there were such a thing as free-will, all responsibility would be at an end. Why ? Because unless an action be ascribed to the char- acter of the man who commits it, the man cannot be said to be responsible for that act. Well, but if all that is meant by "ascribed," is implied in invariable consequence to an invariable antecedent, you might as well talk of "ascribing" one moment of time to the preceding moment, as of ascribing an action to the state of character which preceded it. The truth is, Hume and the Necessarians find it so much more important to untie the knot of real human responsibility, than even to relax the intellectual relation between cause and effect, that, in order to do away with free-will, they largely avail themselves of the very idea of causal connec- tion between the uniform antecedent and the uniform consequent, which they had previously endeavoured to exorcise, as one of the most unaccountable of human superstitious. Ilume's religious philosophy was like his mental philosophy. Ile was not insen- sible to the force of the argument from design, but the most that he inferred from it was that there was a First Cause, whose nature "probably bears some remote analogy to human intelligence." He disbelieved, as we know from his argument on miracles, the historical character of revelation, and yet, in his arguments on 'natural religion, he always refers somewhat jesuitically to revela- tion as the only source of anything that could be called know- ledge concerning the nature of God. In a word, Hume taught that the idea of self must be broken up into a loose string of perceptions ; that the idea of cause and effect must be broken up into a loose string of antecedents and consequents, connected by nothing but their invariable order ; that the idea of will must be broken up into the conception of inward cause, i.e., of inward expectation of antecedence and consequence; and that the idea of God must be resolved into a doubtful generalisation from the actual phenomena of the world,—good and evil, pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, being all equally taken into account, in the facts from the study of which we rise to the idea of an intelligent First Cause. In other words, he reduced, to the best of his ability, the sense of personality, the conception of causality, the principle of responsibility, and the principle of worship to the ghosts of themselves ; and thus left life a pallid thing of little meaning, which ought to be taken easily,—of which mode of dealing with it Hume at least undoubtedly set an excellent example.
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