Books of the Day
The Terrible David
The Philosophy of David Hume. By Norman Kemp Smith. (Mac- millan. ergs.)
THE first two volumes of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature were published in 1739, the third in 174o. For some years the book- attracted little notice ; and when at last it became famous, the more shocking features of it were the ones which were chiefly emphasised. Hume, " the. terrible David," appeared to be the all-destroying sceptic, who taught (in the words of a contem- porary critic) that " man must believe one thing by instinct, and must also believe the contrary by reason " ; who held that inductive inference is nothing but habit, and when he came to examine our belief in an external world concluded that there is " a total opposition betwixt our reason and our senses " ; who degraded even personal identity into a fiction of the imagination and resolved the human mind into a disconnected bundle of perceptions ; and who in all these spheres reduced thinking to imagination, that is, to mere mechanical association of ideas. This picture of Hume prevailed almost to our own day. He was the man who pushed the Empiricist principles of Locke and Berkeley to their logical conclusion (has not every third-class student been taught to repeat that blessed phrase?) and thereby showed their utter bankruptcy.
But in quite recent years Hume's stock has suddenly begun to go up. -The later philosophy of Bertrand Russell, which has been described as " mathematics imposed upon Hume," has given a new lease of life to Empiricism, so long supposed to be dead and done with. We now have among us a very vigorous school of Neo-Empiricists, who look upon Hume as their master, and emphasise the constructive as well as the destructive side of his teaching.
Professor Kemp Smith does not wholly accept either of those estimates. According to him, Hume is not primarily a sceptic, nor even an Empiricist ; he is a " naturalistic " or " humanistic " philosopher, and his central doctrine is a doctrine of Natural Belief. There are two fundamental human beliefs which can neither be rationally established nor rationally refuted : the belief in causation and the belief in the continuing existence of material objects. Their sanction does not come from the senses, as a strict Empiricist would hold that it does ; the senses reveal to us only a flux of colours and shapes, sounds, smells, strains and aches, which have in themselves neither permanence nor invari- able order. Nor does it come from rational thinking; no one can prove that there are causal laws, as theorems in Mathematics can be proved, nor yet that there is a continuing external world. Those two beliefs do not fall within the province of proof or disproof; that province contains only Pure Mathematics and Formal Logic, where we have to do with " relations of ideas," not with " matters of fact." The Rationalists who tried to prove their truth and the sceptics who tried to disprove it were equally in the wrong. The conclusion of the matter is that these two beliefs are natural beliefs, which fall outside the sphere of reason altogether. Neither proof nor disproof has any relevance to them. The tendency to hold these beliefs is an ultimate and ineradicable element in human nature, and according to Hume in animal nature too. We cannot get rid of them even if we want to. We can neither justify them nor criticise them, for there is nothing more fundamental to which we could appeal.
How did Hume arrive at this view? Professor Kemp Smith makes the very interesting and novel suggestion that he reached it first in the field of Moral Philosophy. Hume's Moral Philo- sophy, as everyone admits, was much influenced by the Moral Sense doctrine of his older contemporary, Francis Hutcheson, who maintained that moral judgements are the expression not of reason, but of an unanalysable feeling or sentiment of approval and disapproval. Hume accepted this ; indeed, his own Moral Philosophy is in the main just a clearer and more cogent re- statement of the Moral Sense position. But (if Professor Kemp Smith is right) he went further than Hutcheson ever thought of going; he applied the same theory to our judgements about matters of fact. When we say " all flame is accompanied by heat " or " this table, which I see, continues in existence when I cease to see it," we are going beyond the bare data of observa- tion. Hume saw that reason could never justify such a leap ; and it occurred to him that those judgements, too, might be expressions of a feeling or sentiment—an unanalysable feeling of belief, which, like the feeling of moral approval and dis- approval, is natural to the human species and independent of reason or argument.
Professor Kemp Smith admits that alongside of the Hutchesonian or " biological " influence upon Hume's thought we must recognise another, the Newtonian or " mechanistic " influence. What Gravitation is in the physical world the
Association of Ideas might be in the mental world ; so it appeared to Hume at one time (the comparison is his own). In the days of his impetuous youth—he wrote the Treatise of Human Nature in his twenties—he was greatly excited by this prospect and pushed the Associationist line of explanation as far as it would go, or even farther. But as he grew older and saw more dearly the difficulties into which it had led him, he repented of his ardour ; the Newtonian influence faded and the Hutchesonian more and more prevailed. In the philosophy of his maturity, the Enquiries, we hear far less about the Association of Ideas. The stress is upon the " natural " character of our natural beliefs and upon the sharp line which separates their province, the province of " matters of fact and existence," from Logic and Mathematics, the province of reason.
This contrast and interplay between the " recessive " influence of Newton and the " dominant " influence of Hutcheson is the main theme of Professor Kemp Smith's book, and the clue which he uses to unravel the complexities and inconsistencies of Hume's thought. Whether he has wholly made out his case is perhaps open to doubt. Hume's doctrine of the Imagination, and especially the hints he throws out about the two levels at which it works—the superficial level of ordinary association of ideas (cf. Coleridge's "fancy "), and the deeper level where it appears as the architect of the common-sense world of things, selves and causes—may perhaps be susceptible of a less mechanistic inter- pretation. But however this may be, Professor Kemp Smith is a most admirable expositor and guide ; learned, patient, ingenious and, above all, sympathetic to his author, and careful at all times to give him the fullest possible run for his money. There can be little doubt that this is by far the best book on Hume's philosophy which has yet appeared—always excepting Hume's
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