the genuine theism of true religion—the source of which is the basic theism of Hume’s philosophy—has religious significance: it points us toward another dimension of the universe, sustains our overall sense of order and relationality, bears on our sense of who we are and what we can do, and opens us to possibilities beyond those that we can conceive. Perhaps Hume would have taken something like this genuine theism as implicit for his true religion. This fundamental belief in general providence, unlike its counterpart in false religion (belief in particular providence), could lead to a sense of equipoise, stability, and humility. These are the practical life outcomes and amenable results of religion when it remained in its proper office.
Cartesian Rationalism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism
To establish either or both weak and strong forms of my premise—that the Treatise does not foreclose a sense of basic theism—we must rescue the text from its skeptical interpreters. The conventional skeptical reading forecloses the possibility of our justifiably holding belief in basic theism. It also nullifies the constructive potential of Hume’s descriptive project and denies the tacit knowledge inherent in custom. Further, a thoroughly skeptical reading of the Treatise prohibits us from intelligibly attaching meaning to many of our most useful ideas and beliefs. Thus, to read the text simply as a skeptic is automatically to eliminate the possibility that a basic theism might be presupposed by its argument. Against traditional skeptical interpretations, I argue that Hume’s philosophy successfully navigated between a critique of Cartesian rationalism and the embrace of Pyrrhonian skepticism. Charting a way between Pyrrhonism and Cartesianism, the Treatise shows dexterity and some ambiguity in its approach to skepticism. These nuances are often lost by that slice of interpreters who quickly reduce Hume to a skeptic, and they are overlooked by those who reject his basic theism out of hand.
The Treatise acknowledges both Cartesianism and Pyrrhonism as coherent systems of thought and compelling philosophical approaches.18 Skeptical interpretations situate the text either as full-blown in the Pyrrhonian spirit or as a critical annihilation of the Cartesian approach. There is partial truth to each of these claims. The Treatise, however, neither thoroughly embraces nor fully rejects either method; it merely repositions them in relation to experience and belief. For example, against Pyrrhonism, the Treatise affirms the inescapability of certain ideas and beliefs; against Cartesianism, it confirms that we have warrant to hold certain ideas and beliefs as projections of our imagination or habits of the mind. For Hume, philosophy that begins with universal doubt (Cartesianism) and philosophy that refuses to assert conclusions (Pyrrhonism) are species of dogmatism. The Cartesians reason demonstratively to timeless conclusions of false philosophy and vulgar religion; they dogmatically resist the power of experience. Pyrrhonism, a brand of excessive skepticism, employs skeptical arguments that ultimately lead to nowhere; they dogmatically resist the power of belief. Hume writes, “the skeptical and dogmatical reasons are of the same kind, tho’ contrary in their operation and tendency” (T, 1.4.1.12).
CARTESIANISM
The introduction to the Treatise implies that it was partially catalyzed by Cartesianism: “Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts and of evidence of the whole, these are everywhere to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself” (T, introd., 1). This disgrace is multiplied, Hume claims, because the philosophical method of “the most eminent philosophers” (e.g., Descartes) supports the beliefs of popular religion. This is disturbing to Hume, for “the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous” (1.4.7.13).
Hume’s dissatisfaction with false metaphysical speculation and the conclusions it inspired for popular religion, namely the innate idea of a supernatural deity and immortal, immaterial souls, led him to work from the “analogy of nature” (T, 1.4.6.35) and the observation of experience. This approach challenged seminal aspects of the Cartesian method as it built on Newton’s quest (best represented in his 1687 Principia mathematica) to find evidence through observation of the physical world to ground scientific and theological principles. Descartes commenced his project with universal doubt from the consciousness of an individual human subject and employed a priori concepts in service of timeless, transcendent ideas. To a large extent, the experimental method of Newton sidestepped this deep doubt. It allowed that nonmaterial forces caused physical effects (Newton held no notion of uniformity or necessary connection) and denied both Cartesian dualism and the immortality of the soul. Still, like Descartes, Newton embraced a conception of God as infinite and eternal. Roughly speaking, Hume cosigned Newton’s “experimental method of reasoning.” He worked from experience, or the “bottom up,” in response to Descartes’s “top-down” approach to philosophical “truths.” Against Cartesianism he wrote, “If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything” (E, 12.3.6) and “Cartesian doubt, therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable” (12.1.3). Hume wanted to subdue the passions for a priori method with his a posteriori technique. Further, he affirmed nature, habits of mind, and the power of common life against metaphysical reasoning. His work privileged experience and belief over abstruse reason and skepticism: he aimed “only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours” (1.4).
Hume relied on Descartes’s privileging of the mind and individual subjectivity, but he directly challenged two prominent conclusions derived from the a priori method that were important for religion: the innate idea of an infinite, omnipotent God and the notion that the soul was immaterial and immortal. Descartes’s statement, “true ideas, which are innate in me, of which the first and most important is the idea of God” was contested by Hume: “The Cartesians, proceeding upon their principle of innate ideas, have had recourse to a supreme spirit or deity. . . . But the principle of innate ideas being allow’d to be false, it follows that the supposition of a deity can serve us in no stead” (T, 1.3.14.10).19 Note his dissatisfaction is with the idea of God as innate, not the belief in order and an Orderer (basic theism). The Treatise argues that we gain little usable knowledge when we merely assume the existence of deity at the beginning of our philosophical quest. We learn most about the operations of our mind and discover a more usable conception of deity as we observe humans undergoing repeated experiences “as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” (introd., 10).
Descartes, whose views on the soul evolved throughout his career, not only inherited the notion of the soul as immaterial and immortal from the Scholastics but also became an apologist for it with his assertion, in the Sixth Meditation, that the res cogitans was indivisible and therefore immaterial and eternal. Hume refuted this conclusion by arguing that it went well beyond the proper purview of philosophy. He wrote, “matter and spirit are at bottom equally unknown and we cannot determine what qualities may inhere in the one or in the other.”20 I take this to mean that the soul cannot bring about the effects that the Cartesians expect (i.e., thought). For “we shall never discover a reason, when any object may or may not be the cause of any other” (T, 1.4.5.30). As far as Hume was concerned, the soul was not the source of thought and Descartes’s argument for the soul as both immortal and immaterial rested on weak foundations.
Hume’s early philosophical works navigated between and responded to a vast array of philosophical strategies and temperaments. Against Cartesian a priori conceptions of deity, he highlighted experience and nature and described our predilection to believe in basic theism as largely derived from hidden powers of nature and teleological principles of mind. In tone and content the Treatise asserted probabilistic conclusions in response to the hubris of Cartesian claims. Adroit in his contentions and mostly modest in his conclusions, the Humean flair that manifested in the Treatise offered a stylistic challenge to the Cartesian method. More or less, in the presence of strong deistic assertions (Tindal and Morgan), Hume emphasized the skeptical. When the skepticism went extreme (as in atheism and Pyrrhonism), Hume affirmed the
