to support two men. The threat to render the chair virtually valueless gave them a voice in appointments. Rouet may have taught only a civil history course but that is unlikely.
40. William Rouet, Universal History Notes, National Library of Scotland [NLS], 4992\188.
41. Ibid., 34.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 36.
44. Ibid., 1–31. The lectures are undated but probably come from c. 1752–55. The lectures may have been given to the Glasgow Literary Society, which met after 1752 and of which Hume was later a member. On the other hand, they may have been part of a special course for students or discourses given to the University. See also Carol Gibson-Wood, “George Turnbull and Art History at Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century,” RACAR 28 (2001): 7–18, especially 10–12.
45. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and “Religious Realignment Between the Restoration and Union” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–68; Allen, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
46. NL 88–89.
47. The Histoire ecclésiastique par M. Fleury, Prêtre, Prieur d’Argenteüil, & confesseur du Roy (vols. I–XXX) was continued by others as Histoire ecclésiastique pour servir de continuation à celle de Monsieur l’Abbé. The book is not by Cardinal Fleury, who also wrote history, but by Claude Fleury (1640–1723).
48. “M. Fleuri has given us an excellent work which bears that title; he has added to that a discours raisonné more estimable and precious than his history. This judicious writer, in developing in his discourse the means by which God has conserved His Church, sets out at the same time the abuse on which this species of writing is apt to slip. It is right in principle to say ‘that it is true that truth is one and entire; that if religion is true, the history of the Church is also; that truth ought not to be opposed to truth, & that the ills of the Church have been great, but they serve to confirm the promises of God who will defend it to the end of time against the powers and efforts of Hell.’” Encyclopédie, 1:1052n44.
49. Ibid., 1:1052.
50. Ibid., 2:335–37.
51. Ibid., 3:642–43. Wharton did write a treatise on clerical celibacy, but he was best known as an editor of historical sources, many of which Hume had used in writing his History of England and for attacks on the Jesuits.
ARTIFICIAL LIVES, PROVIDENTIAL HISTORY, AND THE APPARENT LIMITS OF SYMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING
Once regarded as the hero of positivism, Hume is now widely appreciated as a proponent of a hermeneutic philosophy of history. In pursuing his project of developing a science of human culture, of “introducing the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,” Hume recognized that human actions cannot be understood unless grasped as intentional, as performed for reasons, and not simply explained as falling under a covering law. This enterprise requires that the historian be capable of entering into the logic governing foreign beliefs and practices. Still, Hume draws limits to the scope of hermeneutic analysis. On Hume’s account, theistic belief is self-contradictory, requires self-deception, and gives rise to unintelligible behavior. The “moral scientist” is thus licensed to suspend the hermeneutic enterprise and turn to other kinds of explanation. Are these limits justified? We cannot assess them by recourse to external standards, since no such standards are available to us. We can, though, assess them from within, developing an internal critique. The boundaries Hume sets for the range of sympathetic understanding are plausible only if “artificial lives” can be clearly distinguished from the wide range of variation exhibited by “natural lives.” As we will see, on closer examination the distinction crumbles; theistic belief and practice offer no intrinsic barrier to understanding. Indeed, Hume’s own historiographical practice offers evidence of this. Further, Hume’s refusal of providential history can be made plausible only if something like his distinction between natural and artificial lives can be maintained; absent this, Hume’s own philosophical history emerges as itself providential in character.
Hume’s argument that religious lives constitute a special exception to the task of arriving at an internal grasp of foreign perspectives is sometimes replicated by Hume scholars, as we see in Donald Livingston’s endorsement of Hume’s critique of providential history. Moreover, the special treatment Hume gave to theism has helped to legitimate modern historiography as an enterprise that is not merely methodologically naturalistic but actually metaphysically naturalistic. It remains the case in contemporary historiography that religion is often subjected to reductionistic analysis in scholarship otherwise devoted to the task of understanding people on their own terms.1 The cost, in terms of missed opportunities for understanding, is high.
Relinquishing the Search for External Standards
David Hume: Philosophical Historian, published in 1965 by David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin, played a key role in catalyzing a reassessment of the relationship between Hume as historian and Hume as philosopher. It did so by characterizing Hume’s historical writings as an expression of his constructive skepticism. The selection of texts—from Hume’s Treatise, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, History of England, essays, and letters—along with the editors’ introductory essays, issued a challenge to the established view that there was no intrinsic connection between Hume’s philosophical and historical work. At times, Hume’s philosophy had been viewed as antihistorical; indeed, even his overtly historical writings had been judged to be antihistorical.2 Norton and Popkin insisted instead that even Hume’s “most ‘philosophical’ work is historical.”3 While the essential nature of reality cannot be known, the regularities of experience can be, and it is with these that the historian is occupied. Nevertheless, Norton argued that Hume’s new skeptical science was hounded by the same skeptical problems that its focus on appearances was designed to avoid. What is appearance and what is reality, in this case with respect to the past? “In the science of man as much as in purely speculative metaphysics, a criterion of truth appears to be lacking, so that custom and education, one’s personal experiences, play an overriding, though logically indefensible, part in the formation of the judgments and claims making up that science—just as the skeptics had claimed they did in the formation of man’s speculative theories.”4 Norton argued that Hume developed an implicit critical method in response to this problem, seeking to authenticate written documents and weigh the value of testimony. Nevertheless, Norton concluded that the assessment of evidence remains finally “a matter of personal opinion and prior decision”; there is “still no external or shared standard by which evidence can be evaluated.”5 He appealed to “Of Miracles” to bolster his claim that Hume consciously accepted the fact that individual experience is our final standard, seeing this as the only way to avoid a patent circularity in the argument (i.e., disputes over the past are settled by appealing to the past). We decide a priori whether we will take certain kinds of evidence seriously or not, and we do so on the basis of our own experience. Hume’s method, then, is permeated with subjective elements. Norton concludes that “Hume’s critical method, and with it, the science of man, failed, failed as he surely suggests all enterprises conceived after his model must fail”—even if we cannot
