Chapter III: David Hume as a Metaphysician (2)

Here, indeed, we hasten to acknowledge with Hume that 'our line is too short to fathom the immense abyss' which we have now reached. But we need not, therefore, follow Hume to the lengths to which his insidious mock-modesty would fain entice us. We may concede to him that 'we have no idea of a Supreme Being but what we learn from reflection on our own faculties,' but we need not imitate him by perversely shutting our eyes to the evidences of an energy inherent in our own faculties, and thereby entitle him to insist on our joining him in denying that there is any evidence of energy in the Supreme Being. We need not, because constrained to admit that we know no more of the essence of divine, than we do of human, power, pretend that we cannot even conceive such a thing as divine power. Hume's affectation of profound ignorance on the subject must have occasioned unusual amusement in a certain quarter. The Devil can seldom have had a more hearty grin at his darling sin than when witnessing this peculiar exhibition of the pride that apes humility.

That Hume's ignorance was nothing but affectation is proved by his veering completely round immediately afterwards, and in his very next chapter, and almost in his very next page, pronouncing it to be 'universally allowed that matter in all its operations is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it.' Throughout the same chapter he argues in the same sense, and quite forgetting how obstinately he had just before contended that there are absolutely no such things as connection or power at all, he defies any one to 'define a cause without comprehending, as part of the definition, _necessary_ connection with its effect.' So highly, indeed, does he now rate that connecting power, whose very existence he had previously so vehemently denied, that he professes himself unable to set any limit to its efficacy. Even for those who should undertake to deduce from it the impossibility of any liberty of human will, and consequently of any human responsibility, pleading that, inasmuch as with a continued chain of necessary causes, reaching from the first great cause of all to every separate volition of every single human creature, it must needs be the Creator of the world who is the ultimate author of all volitions, and consequently solely accountable for every crime which man commits, he affects, with exceedingly ill-sitting sanctimoniousness, to have no better answer than that such belief, being impious, must be absurd and cannot be true. It did not suit his purpose to point out that the volitions of Omnipotence itself, equally with human volitions, are necessary effects of causes--the causes in their case being the other attributes with which Omnipotence is conjoined--and that as it is nevertheless impossible for the volitions of Omnipotence to be otherwise than absolutely free and uncontrolled, so there is no reason why human volitions likewise should not, in spite of the same objection, be as thoroughly free as our own feelings assure us they are.

Hume's sudden conversion, so amazing at first sight, from flattest denial to positivest assertion of causal power, becomes intelligible when he is seen immediately afterwards using his newly adopted creed as a fulcrum whereon to rest his argumentative lever in his assault upon Miracles. About that celebrated piece of reasoning, startling as the avowal may sound, there is, to my mind, nothing more remarkable than its celebrity, for, on close inspection, it will be found to be entirely made up of (1) the demonstration of a truism, and (2) the inculcation of a confessedly misleading rule. Not far from its commencement will be found a definition which, if correct, would leave nothing to dispute about. A miracle, we are told, is 'a violation of the laws of nature,' of laws which a firm and unalterable experience has established. But if so, _cadit quaestio_. Of course, there can be no alteration of the unalterable. No need, of course, of further words to prove that a miracle thus defined is an impossibility.

Let us suppose, however, the word _unalterable_ to have been used here by a slip of the pen instead of _unaltered_, and that Hume really meant by a miracle any alteration of what had previously appeared to be the constant course of nature. Even so, we shall have him contending that no amount, however great, of testimony however unimpeachable, ought to be accepted as adequate proof of such an alteration. Of what he urges in support of this position much may be at once dismissed as altogether irrelevant. That the most honest witness may be the dupe of optical or auricular illusion, or of a distorting or magnifying imagination; that there is in many minds a natural predisposition to believe in the marvellous, and that the love of astonishing often gives exaggerated expression to the exaggerations of the fancy; that self-interest and religious zeal often furnish additional motives for mendacity, and that testimony, even when sincere at first, is apt to become corrupted at every stage as it passes from hand to hand, or is committed to paper--all this, together with any further enumeration of circumstances calculated to invalidate testimony, is quite beside the real question. It merely proves what no one needs to have proved, the propriety, viz., of weighing evidence and balancing adverse probabilities; and even though it proved in addition that of all the so-styled miracles on record, there is not a single one the evidence for which is sufficient, it would still prove nothing to the purpose. For Hume is arguing against the credibility, not of any miracles in particular, but of all miracles in general, those included the witnesses for which are of indisputable intelligence and undisputed veracity. Be the quality of the testimony what it may, no quantity of it, according to him, can be sufficient. This is the essence of his thesis, the only part of it in which there is any novelty, and in behalf of this part all that he has to say may be resolved into a sophism, followed by a repetition of the same begging of the question, as is involved in his afore-cited definition of a miracle. In substance it runs as follows. All testimony is at best but a description of the results of sensible experience--of observations of the senses--but the most faithful description must needs be a less vivid presentation of truth than the reality described. A single original is better evidence than any number of copies. Your own personal experience is more trustworthy than any number of mere records of the experience of other people, and where the two conflict, the former always deserves preference. Now the personal experience of each one of us assures us that many sets of natural phenomena take place in perfectly invariable sequences, in sequences so invariable as to appear to be, and to be familiarly spoken of as, manifestations or operations of certain inflexible laws of nature. Within our experience there has never been a single deviation from any such law. Wherefore, though all the rest of mankind should unite in asserting that they have observed such a deviation, we ought not to believe them. Even though, for example--the example, however, being not Hume's, but my own--we were, on leaving home some morning, to hear on all sides that, while we were yet in bed, the sun was seen to rise in the west instead of the east, and though we found the statement repeated in the 'Times' and 'Daily News,' and presently afterwards saw it posted up at the Exchange as having been flashed by electric wire from New York and Kurrachee, we are not for a moment to doubt that these reiterated and mutually corroborative statements are utterly false. For, numerous and consistent as they may be, they are but copies of the experience of other people, while, although we may have to oppose to them only our own single experience, still that single experience is original, and therefore of more worth. The value, moreover, of any experience is, irrespective of originality, determined by the difference in number between the results of opposite kinds which it has discovered. The smaller number is deducted from the larger, and the balance represents the probability that the results which have most frequently occurred hitherto will continue to occur henceforward. The larger the deduction thus to be made, the smaller the probability, and _vice versa_; and when the deduction is _nil_, or when there has hitherto been complete uniformity, the probability becomes virtual certainty. When two original experiences are opposed to each other, their respective values, ascertained in the same manner, are compared, and trust is reposed in one or the other accordingly. Now, according to these principles, difficult as it might be in the case supposed for any one to conceive what motive all the rest of the world could have for lying, it would be still more difficult to believe them to be speaking truth. For why do we ever believe anything that anyone says? Why but because we have learnt by experience that, when people have no apparent motive for lying, they commonly do speak the truth? But the same experience which has taught us this has taught us likewise that people do now and then lie without apparent motive. At best, therefore, there is never more than a probability that people are speaking the truth, while in this instance, the supposition that they might be speaking the truth would imply that there may be a truth against which there is proof amounting to certainty. For what they affirm is that something has happened the very reverse of what has invariably happened before in the same circumstances. Is it not infinitely more likely that people should be lying as they have often done before, than that the invariable course of nature should have undergone a variation? With evidence on the one side that has never yet deceived, with no evidence on the other save what has often proved deceptive, how can we hesitate which to accept? Even though the unanimity of testimony be such as might otherwise be deemed complete proof, it is here met by absolutely complete proof in the shape of a law of nature. The greater probability overwhelms the lesser. The stronger proof annihilates the weaker, leaving none of it behind, so that whoever still persists in believing that a law of nature has been violated, must be content to do so without one particle of proof. No quantity of testimony can furnish the smallest proof of a miracle unless the falsehood of the testimony would be a greater departure from antecedent uniformity--in other words, would be a greater miracle--than the miracle which it attests. Unfortunately it is but too notorious that there is not, and never has been, such a thing as uniform truthfulness of testimony to depart from.

Such, unless most unintentionally injured by compression, is Hume's famous argument against miracles, of which the author was sufficiently proud to boast openly that in it he had discovered what 'will be useful, as long as the world endures,' as 'an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion,' but which, as I nevertheless venture to repeat, is compounded in about equal moieties of transparent sophism and baseless assumption. For is it not the veriest juggle of words to insist on the necessary inferiority of copies to an original, without adverting to the indispensable proviso that the original with which the copies are compared should be the original from which the copies have been taken? May not a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' quite possibly be equal in force and vividness of expression to the original painting by Benjamin West bearing the same name? Might it not be wise to trust rather to an Airy, or a De la Rue, or a Lockyer's account of what he had observed during a solar eclipse than to your own immediate observations on the same occasion? Besides, this first branch of Hume's argument, if sound, would tell quite as much for, as against, miracles, rendering it equally incumbent on actual witnesses to believe, as on all but actual witnesses to disbelieve. If you are always to prefer your own original experience to mere descriptions given by other people of theirs, then should it happen to be yourself to whom the sun appeared in the west at an hour when, according to custom, he ought to have been in the east, you are not to allow the protestations of any number of persons who, happening at the time to have been looking the other way, saw the sun in his usual place, to persuade you that what you saw was a mock sun or an _ignis fatuus_. Rather than imagine that your own senses can have deceived you, you are to suppose that all about you are in a league to deceive you. For precisely the same reason for which you should reject even universal testimony in favour of a miracle which you have not witnessed, you are equally to reject universal testimony in opposition to a miracle the similitude of which you have witnessed.

Or is it possible for a question to be more distinctly begged than when, to the question whether a miracle has occurred, it is answered that a miracle is not a miracle unless there be uniform experience against it; that uniformly adverse experience is direct and full proof against anything; and that therefore there must always be full proof against miracles? What is here taken for granted to be full proof is the very thing requiring to be proved. If past uniformity really be a pledge for continued uniformity, of course there can be no departure from uniformity. If the whole question does not at once fall to the ground, it is because no question has ever really arisen. But what shadow of pretext is there for treating an hitherto unvaried course of events as necessarily invariable? From past experience we have deduced what we are pleased to call _laws_ of nature, but it is morally impossible that we can seriously think, whatever we are in the habit of saying, that these laws are self-denying ordinances whereby nature's God has voluntarily abdicated part of His inalienable prerogative. The utmost efficacy we are warranted in ascribing to them is that of lines marking certain of the courses within which God's providence is pleased to move. But how can we pretend to know for how long a season such may continue to be the divine pleasure? How do we know that the present season may not be the first of an alternating series, and that it may not at any moment terminate, and be succeeded by one of an opposite character? What though we have some shadow of historical evidence that most physical phenomena have been going on in much the same order for some six thousand years, is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day? Might not as well some scientific member of an insect tribe of ephemera, whom ancestral tradition, confirmed by personal experience, had assured that an eight-day clock had already gone on for six days, pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other provisions the force of these isolated clauses may, in novel combinations of circumstances, be counteracted by some latent and hitherto unsuspected force? Or is it not, at all events, open to their divine promulgator to suspend their operation at his pleasure? May it not conceivably have been preordained that the globe of our earth, after revolving for a given number of ages, in one direction, shall then, like a meat-jack, or like an Ascidian's heart,[31] reverse its order of procedure, and commence a contrary series of revolutions? Or might not He who prescribed to the earth its rotatory movement, will that the rotation should for some hours cease, and that the sun should in consequence seem to stand still, as it is recorded to have done at the command of Joshua? Improbable as these suppositions may be, who that has not been taken into counsel by his Creator can presume to say that they may not be correct? The events which they involve are not inconceivable, and whatever is not utterly inconceivable may possibly occur, however numerous the chances against its occurrence. It is not then the fact that 'past experience,' however unvaried, affords full proof of the future existence of any event, or constitutes certainty against the future existence of the reverse of that event. Completest uniformity of experience cannot create a certainty by which any opposite probability would be completely annihilated. It only creates a probability which, however great, is still only a probability, and which would become a smaller probability by deduction from it of any opposite probability. But mere probability, however great, always includes some doubt as to its own correctness, some suspicion that its opposite may possibly be correct. How much soever, therefore, uniform experience may vouch for the inviolability of natural laws, it always remains possible for those laws to be violated, and, as miracles are nothing else but violations of natural laws, it always remains possible for miracles to happen. But since miracles are possible, testimony to their occurrence may, with equal possibility, be true, and no further refutation can, I submit, be needed for an argument which insists that all such testimony should be set aside without enquiry as self-evidently false.

Had Hume been content to insist that testimony in favour of miracles should never be received without extreme doubt and hesitation, his lesson might well have passed without further objection than that of its being superfluous for any one with sense enough to profit by it. Nor might it have been easy to discover a flaw in his logic, although he had gone so far as to maintain that no one of the miracles as yet on record is either adequately attested, or would, even if it had undoubtedly occurred, afford sufficient evidence of any religious truth. The best and only adequate evidence for any religious creed is the satisfaction which it affords to the soul's cravings and promises to the soul's aspirations; and no rational Christian would be at all the more disposed to turn Mussulman, even though it should be demonstrated to his entire conviction that Christ did not raise Lazarus from the dead, and that Mahomet did turn the hill Safa into gold, instead of prudently confining himself to boasting that he could have effected the transmutation if he had thought proper. But for the purpose which Hume had in view, it was necessary to establish, not merely the doubtfulness, but the absolute falsehood of the miracular testimony on which, in his opinion, 'our holy religion' rests, in order that the character of the superstructure being inferred from that of the foundation, both might be condemned together. There is, however, an irreligious as well as a religious fanaticism, and, though it is difficult, while looking at Hume's portrait, to credit the owner of that plump, good-humoured face with feeling of any sort warm enough to be termed fanatical, it is humiliating to note from his example into what strange inconsistency the coolest and calmest judgment may be warped by irreligious prejudice. Having not long before, in order to disparage _natural_ religion, emphatically denied the existence of any causal connection between successive events, he now, in order equally to discredit the very possibility of _revealed_ religion, tacitly assumes that same connection, not simply to exist, but to be of an efficacy which no disturbing forces can impair. Admitting that 'the Indian prince who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost' was wrong in his belief, Hume will have it that the prince nevertheless 'reasoned justly.' Although recognising truth to be the sole worthy object of quest, he yet enjoins rigid adherence to a rule which he is aware must inevitably lead to frequent error.

Rather strikingly contrasted, in respect of execution, with Hume's chapter on Miracles, comes the one next in order on a Providence and a Future State, which, for the skill with which the fallacy involved in it is disguised, may be regarded as quite a masterpiece of false reasoning. Among its leading propositions there is but one which does not command immediate assent. That we can argue but from what we know; that of causes, known to us only by their effects, our estimate ought to be exactly proportioned to the effects; that of a Creator manifested only by His works, no higher qualities, no greater degrees of power, intelligence, justice, or benevolence, can be confidently predicated--whatever be conjectured--than are apparent in his workmanship: all this, on one moment's reflection, is perceived to be indisputable. Needs must it be, however reluctantly, admitted that nothing can be more illogical than to return back to the cause, and infer from it other effects beyond those by which alone it is known to us, or to infer from creative attributes, distinctly manifested, the existence of other and not apparent attributes, endowed with some efficacy additional to that possessed by the former. But does it hence follow that faith in a superintending Providence is so mere a matter of 'conceit and imagination,' a faith so absolutely irrational as Hume considered it? A candid examination of God's works will warrant us in coming to a widely different conclusion. Among those works is man--a being who, in spite of the utter insignificance of his greatest _performances_, is capable of forming most exalted _conceptions_ of justice, benevolence, and goodness in general, and of feeling the most eager desire to act up to his own ideal. If the divine notions of goodness in its several varieties be not identical with the human, it can only be because they are superior; and so, too, of the divine love of, and zeal for, goodness. It cannot be that the Creator is inferior to the creature in virtues which the creature derives from Him alone. Demonstrably, therefore, God is good and just in the very highest degree in which those qualities can be conceived by man. Demonstrably, too, since the universe is the work of His hands, He must be possessed of power which, if not necessarily unbounded, is at least as boundless as the universe. Thus, rigidly arguing from effects to causes, and scrupulously proportioning the one to the other, man sees imaged on the face of creation a creator, both realising his highest conception of goodness, and wielding measureless might. Is not such a being worthy to be looked up to, and confided in, and adored and loved as a superintending providence? Is not faith in such a providence not simply not irrational, but the direct result of a strictly inductive process? And would it be an irrational stretch of faith sanguinely to hope, if not implicitly to believe, that an union of infinite justice with measureless might may, in some future stage of existence, afford compensation for the apparently inequitable distribution of good and evil which, according to all experience, has hitherto taken place among human beings?

Were it desirable to amplify the apology with which this paper commenced, some additional justification of the freedom of the foregoing criticisms might be found in hints thrown out by Hume in various parts of the treatise which we have been examining, and particularly in its concluding chapter, that in many of his most startling doctrines he was but half in earnest. Hume's temperament, too cool for fanaticism, had yet in it enough of a certain tepid geniality to save him from becoming a scoffer. The character which he claims for himself, and somewhat ostentatiously parades, is that of a sceptic or general doubter--a character in which, when rightly understood, there is nothing to be ashamed of. To take nothing on trust, to believe nothing without proof, to show no greater respect for authority than may consist in attentive and candid examination of its statements, to accept only verified facts as bases for reasoning on matters of fact and existence--these are golden rules of philosophical research, principles in which lies the secret of all real progress in any of the higher departments of science. By Hume they were adopted _con amore_, and with keen appreciation, not more of their practical utility, than of the sport which he perceived them to be capable of yielding. His serious purpose was to unmask the numberless pretences which in politics, political economy, metaphysics, morals, and theology he found universally current as gospel truths; to expose the ambiguity and contradictions latent in popular thought, and in the popular forms of expression which are so apt to be mistaken for thought, and to indicate the only safe mode of investigation and the only trustworthy tests of genuine knowledge; his favourite amusement to put time-honoured commonplaces on the rack, and demanding their _raison d'etre_, to pass on them summary sentence of extinction if they failed to account satisfactorily for their existence. Unfortunately, in his keen enjoyment of the fun of the thing, he not unfrequently overlooked the solid interests at stake. Like a huntsman who, for the sake of a better run, should outrace his quarry, or who, seeing that the dogs were close upon the hare, should, in order to prolong the chase, start a fresh hare, kept till then snug at his saddle-bow, so Hume, in the excitement of metaphysical pursuit, instead of stopping to gather up whatever verified affirmations came in his way, would prefer to follow any new negation that he espied, or, if momentarily accepting any affirmation as established, would proceed forthwith to affirm its direct opposite with the view of neutralising both. In this, his practice resembled that of metaphysicians in general, who take a singular delight in setting themselves riddle after riddle, which they either assume to be hopelessly insoluble, or which they no sooner solve than they use the solution as the subject of another riddle involving its predecessor in redoubled perplexity. Now, little harm, and little, perhaps, of anything but good, might thereby be done if the lovers of this game were content to play it by themselves, without inviting others to join who are constitutionally unfit for such intellectual wrestling. But mental exercises may to philosophers be health and invigorating sport, and yet be death to the multitude; and Hume, as an Utilitarian, stands self-condemned for making ordinary people uncomfortable by challenging them to disputations confessedly leading no whither, and bewildering them with confessedly 'vain and profane babblings, and strivings after words to no profit, but to subverting of the hearers, and overthrow of the faith of some.' And it is as poor an excuse for this wanton tampering with other people's creeds, as it is poor amends for its mischievous consequences, that Hume offers when, after watching for a while his puzzled disciples blown about by the winds of adverse doctrine that he has let loose upon them, he proceeds to rally them on their 'whimsical condition,' which he speaks of as a mere laughing matter got up chiefly for amusement. It is only an aggravation of offence that, while, on the one hand, he solemnly pronounces everything to be 'a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery,' he, on the other hand, cheerily exhorts us not to suffer the 'doubts raised by philosophy to affect our actions.' 'Nature,' he says, 'is always too strong for principles, will always maintain her rights, and prevail, in the end, against all reasoning whatever.' 'The great subverter of Pyrrhonism,' he continues, 'is actual employment and the occupations of common life,' in presence of which its overstrained scruples 'vanish like smoke.' Although real knowledge consists solely in knowing that we know nothing, and in doubting everything, and although sceptics may 'justly triumph' in principles which lead them to deny even the attraction of gravitation, still they had better beware how they act on these principles, lest by stepping unconcernedly out of window they come fatally to grief on the stones below, and so the sect and its tenets be annihilated together. So, or to such effect, Hume: but how can there be just ground for pride in speculations which, as their own professors admit, would, on the first attempt to reduce them to practice, be shattered to pieces by hard facts? That cannot possibly, even on Hume's recommendation, be accepted as metaphysical truth, which flatly contradicts common sense, nor can there be any unbecoming self-confidence in seeking, even though Hume pronounce the search hopeless, for metaphysical truth, with which common sense may be reconciled.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. By James Mill. Edition of 1869, with Notes by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater, George Grote, and John Stuart Mill, vol. i. pp. 78 _et seq._

[30] Mill's 'Logic.' 5th Edition. Vol. i. p. 377.

[31] 'There is a class of animals called Ascidians, which possess a heart and a circulation, and up to the year 1824 no one would have dreamt of questioning the propriety of the deduction, that these creatures have a circulation in one definite and invariable direction; nor would any one have thought it worth while to verify the point. But in that year M. von Hasselt, happening to examine a transparent animal of this class, found to his infinite surprise that after the heart had beat a certain number of times, it stopped, and then began beating the opposite way, so as to reverse the course of the current, which returned by-and-by to its original direction.'--_Huxley's Lay Sermons_, p. 95.