Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1 ed.] 9781138087071, 9781032594286, 9781315110691, 1138087076

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HUME’S DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION A PHILOSOPHICAL APPRAISAL Edited by Kenneth Williford

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical and literary classic of the highest order. It is also an extremely relevant work because of its engagement with issues as alive today as in Hume’s time: the Design Argument for a deity, the Problem of Evil, the dangers of superstition and fanaticism, the psychological roots and social consequences of religion. In this outstanding and unorthodox collection, an international team of scholars engage with Hume’s classic work. The chapters include state-of-the-art contributions on the central interpretive questions posed by the Dialogues as well as major contributions relating the work to contemporary issues in Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Moral Psychology, and Social Philosophy. Additional contributions tackle the historical and philosophical background of the Dialogues, relating it to Hume’s own systematic philosophy, to the work of other key seventeenth and eighteenth-century figures – Locke, Clarke, Bayle, Cudworth, Malebranche, Spinoza, Lord Bolingbroke, and Voltaire, among others – to early modern neo-Epicureanism in the life sciences, and, notably, to what Darwin missed by thinking too much like William Paley and not enough like Hume’s Philo. Overall, this volume provides fresh and even groundbreaking perspectives on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It is essential reading for students and scholars of Hume, the History of Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and the History and Philosophy of Science. Kenneth Williford is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at The University of Texas at Arlington, USA. He works primarily in Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and the History of Modern Philosophy.

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion A Philosophical Appraisal Edited by Kenneth Williford

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter Kenneth Williford; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kenneth Williford to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-138-08707-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-59428-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11069-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691 Typeset in Goudy by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Phillip Cummins and Bertil Belfrage And for Anya, Lydia, Peter, and Sasha

Contents

Notes on the Contributors Preface, Acknowledgments, and Apologies Introduction

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KENNETH WILLIFORD

PART 1

Two Overtures to Raillery 1 Hume’s Dialogues: Cautious, Artful, and Funny

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SIMON BLACKBURN

2 Recipes or, Philosophy for Fun

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CLARK GLYMOUR

PART 2

Theistic “Proofs” 3 A Bayesian Double Negative: A Critique of Hume’s Treatment of the Design Argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and a Critique of the Design Argument Itself

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ELLIOTT SOBER

4 Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design TODD RYAN

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Contents

5 Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence

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ANNEMARIE BUTLER

PART 3

Matters of Interpretation 6 Hume’s “Artful” Masterpiece: The Dialogues and the Concealed Case for Atheism

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ANDREW PYLE

7 Not Hoist with His Own Petard: Hume’s Dance with Skepticism in Dialogues, Part I

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EVAN FALES

8 Demea’s Departure Revisited

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LORNE FALKENSTEIN

9 Hume’s Palimpsest: The Four Endings of the Dialogues

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EMILIO MAZZA AND GIANLUCA MORI

PART 4

Religion, Passion, and the Limits of Reason

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10 Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences”

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DAVID O’CONNOR

11 Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion

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JOHN P. WRIGHT

12 Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

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CHARLES NUSSBAUM

PART 5

Epicurus and Darwin, Strato and Spinoza

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13 Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis”

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JOHN REISS

14 Philo’s Trojan Horse: The World Soul Hypothesis and the Necessitarianism Inside PETE LEGRANT

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Contents

15 Philo, Strato and Spinoza

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KENNETH WILLIFORD

Index

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Contributors

Simon Blackburn retired from the Bertrand Russell Chair of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011. He retains a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and Visiting Chairs at the New College of the Humanities and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is an Honorary Foreign Member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and he is a member of the British Academy. His books include Spreading the Word (1984), Ruling Passions (1998), Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2005), How to Read Hume (Granta, 2008), Mirror, Mirror (2014), Truth (2016), and two volumes of collected papers. Annemarie Butler (PhD, Iowa) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. She specializes in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British philosophy, with several publications on the metaphysics and epistemology of David Hume and John Locke. She edited (with Donald Ainslie) The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise (2015). Evan Fales is Emeritus Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Iowa. He has written on such topics as essences, identity, and philosophy of religion and is the author of Causation and Universals (1990), A Defense of the Given (1996), Divine Intervention (2010), and Reading Sacred Texts (2021). His teaching and research interests also include modal logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Lorne Falkenstein is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Western University in London, Canada. He continues to work on Hume, Reid, and other Eighteenth-Century figures. Clark Glymour is the Emeritus Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and holds an appointment at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, University of West Florida as a Senior Research Scientist and an adjunct appointment in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He works primarily on machine learning, especially on methods for automated causal inference, on the psychology of human causal judgment, and on topics in mathematical

Contributors

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psychology. His books include Theory and Evidence (1980); Foundations of Space-Time Theories (with J. Earman, 1986); Discovering Causal Structure (with R. Scheines, P. Spirtes, and K. Kelly, 1987) Causation, Prediction and Search (with P. Spirtes and R. Scheines; 2nd edition, 2001); and Thinking Things Through (2nd edition, 2015). Pete LeGrant is Professor of Philosophy at Bakersfield College in Bakersfield, California. He works primarily in Early Modern Philosophy, especially the philosophy of Spinoza. He also has written on Metaphilosophy and its relation to the History of Philosophy. Emilio Mazza is Associate Professor at the IULM University in Milan. He works primarily in Modern Philosophy. He has published several papers on Hume, and is the co-editor (with E. Ronchetti) of New Essays on David Hume (2007). Recently he published (with G. Mori) an extensive article on Hume’s “Early Memoranda”. Gianluca Mori is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont. He is the author of several contributions on Pierre Bayle, Cartesianism, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, and Early Modern atheism. Recently, he published (with E. Mazza) an extensive article on Hume’s “Early Memoranda”. Charles Nussbaum is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published two books, the first on musical representation, ontology, and emotion (MIT 2007) and the second on pornographic fiction (Palgrave 2015). He has also published papers on the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics, and Kant in the journals Brain and Mind, Philosophical Psychology, Metaphilosophy, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Kant-Studien, among others. David O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University. His main philosophical interests are in Modern Philosophy—Hume in particular – and in Philosophy of Religion. Most of his published works are in one or the other of those fields, with his God, Evil, and Design (Blackwell 2008) being a crossover between the two interests. The book is a discussion, in the spirit of Hume, of some of the principal topics and thinkers in contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Professor O’Connor is the author of three other books in philosophy and of numerous articles in philosophical journals. At present, he is at work on a book about reading Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and his Natural History of Religion together. Andrew Pyle is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at The University of Bristol. He works primarily in the History and Philosophy of Science, with a special interest in Scientific Revolutions, and the Metaphysics and Epistemology of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (roughly Descartes to Kant). He is the author of Malebranche (2003), Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: A Reader’s Guide (2006), and Locke (2013). For many years, he was

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Contributors an active member of the British Society for the History of Philosophy and served on the editorial board of its journal, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

John Reiss is Professor of Zoology at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in Arcata, California. His research focuses on the developmental morphology, evolution, and ecology of amphibians, especially the origins and diversification of their metamorphic patterns. He also maintains interests in the History, Philosophy, and Theory of Biology, particularly Evolutionary Biology. He is the author of Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker (2009). Todd Ryan is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He works primarily in the History of Early Modern Philosophy. He is the author of Pierre Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics: Rediscovering Early Modern Philosophy (2009) and numerous papers and book chapters on Bayle and Hume. Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor of Philosophy and William F. Vilas Research Professor at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research is in the Philosophy of Science, especially in the Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology. In Philosophy of Biology, he has worked on the units of selection problem and on phylogenetic inference. In more general Philosophy of Science, he has worked on the conflict between Bayesianism and Frequentism, on the role of parsimony in scientific reasoning, the mind/body problem, animal cognition, causality, explanation, and reductionism. His books include The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (1984); Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (1988); Philosophy of Biology (1993); Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998, coauthored with David Sloan Wilson); Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science (2008); Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? (2011); Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual (2015); and The Design Argument (2019). He won the Lakatos Prize in 1991. In 2008, the American Philosophical Association named him Prometheus Laureate. In 2014, the Philosophy of Science Association gave him the Carl Gustav Hempel Award. Kenneth Williford is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at The University of Texas at Arlington. He works primarily in Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and the History of Modern Philosophy. John P. Wright is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. He is the author of The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (1983), Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: An Introduction (2009), and numerous articles and book chapters on Hume and on other Early Modern philosophers.

Preface, Acknowledgments, and Apologies

This collection is somewhat unusual as collections on Hume’s philosophy go. Purist Hume scholars will not go completely unsatisfied, but there is also fare for those into philosophical fusion cuisine. From the outset, the aim of this volume was to bring proper Hume scholars and historians of Early Modern Philosophy together with philosophers and other scholars who love the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The line-up underwent some evolution over the several years it has taken for this book to see the light of day, but I believe the end result has landed not too far from the original mark. So, in addition to contributions from John P. Wright, Lorne Falkenstein, Andrew Pyle, Annemarie Bulter, Todd Ryan, Emilio Mazza, Gianluca Mori, David O’Connor, and Pete LeGrant, we have contributions from Elliott Sober, Clark Glymour, and Evan Fales. Simon Blackburn, Charles Nussbaum, and myself fall somewhere between these descriptions (part-time Hume scholar or historian of Early Modern Philosophy, philosopher with a Hume habit); and John Reiss is a zoologist with a strong interest in the History and Philosophy of Biology (certain passages in his 2009 book, Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker, led me to think, rightly it turns out, that he might be interested in contributing). Speaking of the years it has taken me to get this book to the press, I should like to thank all the contributors for their Bodhisattva-like patience. A sequence of challenges and loops, internal and external, private and public, happy and sad, conspired to slow the work; this was in addition to the expected “coefficient of adversity” that is the lot of a department chair (in apparent perpetuity). Fortunately, no one’s tenure or promotion was at stake; and the pace of Hume scholarship, while not glacial, is not on a par with the current rate of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet either. I am sure that no one will read a paper in this volume and think that’s so five years ago! I should also like to thank Tony Bruce and Adam Johnson at Routledge for their equally saintlike patience. They have put up with failed deadline after failed deadline stemming, in part, from the irremediable cognitive bias that leads me (again and again and in spite of all past experience) to underestimate the time things will take. One could not wish for better editors. My love for the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR) goes back to the early 1990s; it was assigned reading for an undergraduate Philosophy of Religion

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class taught by Keith Burgess-Jackson at my undergraduate alma mater and current academic home, The University of Texas at Arlington. I read it in one sitting in the main library. I was, at the time, already moving away from the hardcore evangelicalism and right-wing politics of my positively “enthusiastic” late teen years, and the DNR, as they say, spoke to my condition. (Antiphilosophical scientists concerned about the detrimental effects of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, really ought to reflect on the fact that university philosophy classes are among the very few places that many American kids ever encounter a critical discussion of religious belief—but I digress.) Reading other works by Hume under the tutelage of Charles Nussbaum and the late Harry Reeder helped solidify my interest in the Great Infidel. In graduate school, at The University of Iowa, I studied the book, along with a good chunk of the Early Modern canon, with Phillip Cummins (and with Laird Addis (Spinoza and Leibniz) and Günter Zöller (Kant)). I turned a paper I wrote for Cummins on the DNR into one of my first publications (“Demea’s a priori Theistic Proof,” Hume Studies, 2003). My respect for the Early Modern/Enlightenment critique of natural and revealed religion (especially in Spinoza, Bayle, Hume, and Kant), much denigrated by evidentialist religious apologists to this day, has only deepened over the years, as has my interest in its broader historical context. Speaking of which, one curious thing I noticed back in 2003 was a certain blind spot many Hume scholars have when it comes to Philo’s rather blindingly obviously Spinozistic-sounding pronouncements in the DNR—all the more obvious since, in Part IX, arguments from Samuel Clarke, one of the handful of philosophers mentioned by name and quoted in the DNR, are attacked; and one of Clarke’s attacked arguments was itself explicitly aimed at Spinoza, as any reading of the pages around the text Hume cites should make abundantly clear. So, in attacking Clarke’s attack, Cleanthes and Philo are, in effect, defending Spinoza against Clarke. In 2007, I gave a talk called “Philo’s Stealthy Spinozism” at the Annual Conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, held in Rotterdam that year. Perhaps it was the fact that I was in Spinoza’s homeland or that Wim Klever was in attendance, but the talk was well received; and I resolved then to turn the talk into a paper (someday). I really had no idea how much work that would entail, but I intended to make that my own contribution to this volume. And so I have. It is, of course, far too large. But, I daresay, it makes the strongest and most detailed case yet made for the claim that Philo, much of the time, favorably represents a view in the Stratonistic-Spinozistic metaphysical ballpark and even flirts with the amor Dei intellectualis. And I felt that making this case to (most) Anglophone Hume scholars, who tend to be hyper-skeptical on this point, thanks in part to a long “Hume-never-read-Spinoza” commentarial tradition, demanded extraordinary measures. I apologize to everyone (readers, higher editors, contributors, and students) for this flagrant violation of editorial etiquette, but cutting the paper down to size would have delayed the appearance of the volume even further. I would be remiss if I did not use the mention of my graduate school alma mater, The University of Iowa, as an occasion to point out that this volume has a

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special connection to it. I ended up doing an MA thesis on Berkeley with Phillip Cummins, who succeeded Richard Popkin, his own Doktorvater, at Iowa, and pivoted to concentrate on Philosophy of Mind. This was after spending a summer in Sweden studying Berkeley with Bertil Belfrage (of Lund University), a memorable and fruitful stint that Cummins facilitated. Hence my dedication of this collection to Cummins and Belfrage. But two other contributors to this collection, Todd Ryan and Annemarie Butler, completed their PhD theses under Cummins’ guidance, on Bayle and Hume, respectively. And there are three other Iowa connections represented in this volume. First, Evan Fales was one of my dissertation co-directors, and his interest in the DNR stems largely from his interest in the epistemology, psychology, anthropology, and sociology of religious experience, a complex topic to which he has made seminal contributions; I recall reading Hume’s Natural History of Religion together, alongside Émil Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life and William Alston’s deeply unconvincing Perceiving God. Second, Lorne Falkenstein was a visiting professor at Iowa near the tail end of my years of study there, and I well remember attending riveting lectures and discussions he gave on Hume’s treatment of religion in the DNR, NHR, and The History of England. Third, Pete LeGrant, who was in a cohort of grad students some years behind mine, wrote a dissertation on Spinoza under the guidance of David Cunning, Cummins’ successor at Iowa. I ended up serving on his dissertation defense committee in 2008. All of this is to just express some collective gratitude towards the Department of Philosophy at The University of Iowa and its legacy in the study of Early Modern Philosophy. Long may it live! Finally, let me thank my colleagues at The University of Texas at Arlington who have helped me, in one way or another, over the many years that I was (intermittently) working on this volume—specifically, Charles Nussbaum, Charles Chiasson, Martin Gallagher, Daniel Giberman, Eli Shupe, Charles Hermes, Miriam Byrd, Shaun House, Sally Parker-Ryan, Steve Gellman, Tim Wunder, Lonny Harrison, Trish Mann, Nathan Cooper, Felisha Hall, Beth Wright, Elisabeth Cawthon, and Dan Cavanagh. And let me thank Gregory Landini, Evan Fales, Lorne Falkenstein, Annemarie Butler, Todd Ryan, Elliott Sober, John Reiss, Andrew Pyle, Pete LeGrant, Clark Glymour, David O’Connor, Phil Halper, David Rudrauf, Clifford Clapp, Josh Weisberg, Uriah Kriegel, Miguel Ángel Sebastián, Emilio Mazza, Gianluca Mori, and Gianni Paganini for conversations, debates, bits of correspondence, sharing of texts, encouragement, much-deserved ribbing, etc. over the last several years in connection with this volume. And finally finally, let me thank Anya, Lydia, Peter, Sasha, and baby Anya for everything!

Introduction Kenneth Williford

1 Opening Reflections and Pointers Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR) is, by common consent, both a philosophical and a literary masterpiece. In the genre of philosophical dialogues, at least as written in European languages, it ranks alongside Plato’s best; and, closer to its own time, perhaps only Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) and parts of Alciphron or, The Minute Philosopher (1732) approach it. By contrast, Leibniz, for example, is generally regarded a truly ungifted dialogue writer (witness the Nouveaux Essais, finished in 1704); and, as great as Bayle’s literary skills could be, few would count his Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius (published posthumously in 1707) among the exemplars. Much the same can be said for Malebranche’s many attempts in the genre (between roughly 1677 and 1708). For better luck, one may go to Hume’s friend, Diderot, whose Skeptic’s Walk (completed in 1747), D’Alembert’s Dream (1782), and Jacques le fataliste et son maître (published posthumously in 1796) occasionally (and arguably) exhibit some skill in the compelling delivery of philosophical dialogue; but one will still find Hume’s DNR philosophically subtler and richer, even if the encyclopedist did have a certain panache. Among earlier examples, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632, alluded to by Philo in Part II of the DNR) is not without its literary charms, though the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638) is far too didactic. And, if we may be forgiven for summarily skipping over the rest of the Renaissance, as well as the Middle Ages and late Antiquity, Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, one of Hume’s models, indeed has its literary merits; but the long, uninterrupted discourses of Balbus the Stoic and Velleius the Epicurean, philosophically and historically fascinating though they are, are not among them. Be these off-the-cuff opinions as they may, this collection is not devoted to the DNR qua piece of literature. Discussions of interpretive matters and some new spins on old controversies are to be found, but the main thrust of all the papers in this volume is philosophical, with variable inflections on systematic or historical issues. That the DNR is, to this day, a philosophically relevant text can be inferred from the fact that debate over the Design Argument (especially in its “Fine-Tuning” guise) versus variations of the competing multiverse hypothesis DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-1

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(which traces back at least to Democritus and makes a kind of showing in Part VIII of the DNR) shows no signs of slowing down. And something similar can be said about the Cosmological Argument, the Problem(s) of Evil, and the possibility of a socially beneficial religiosity devoid of superstition, “enthusiasm”, and other forms of irrationalism. The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision that has kept “Intelligent Design Theory” (IDT) from being taught (legally anyway) in U.S. public schools as a live alternative to evolutionary theory has surely been a setback for the ID movement, but determined ID partisans are finding other ways—even if it means slowly dismantling U.S. public schools state by state. And it was not so long ago, during the heyday of the “New Atheists”, that Richard Dawkins appeared regularly on mainstream media outlets and that his The God Delusion could cause something of a furor (Dawkins 2006). Perhaps less likely to provoke such strong reactions, though no less devastating to the pretensions of IDT, is Elliott Sober’s superb and elegant 2019 The Design Argument.1 If one sees less discussion of IDT in mainstream media outlets, the debate is, perhaps unsurprisingly, alive and well on the Internet, where, in a multiverse of underwhelming content, one can find some truly excellent material, for example, the documentaries directed by Phil Halper (aka skydivephil).2 Obviously, no one would suggest that debates over these topics have not advanced conceptually and empirically since 1779.3 To take one example, the application of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory to the analysis of the Design Argument (see, e.g., Salmon 1978, Sober 2019) and the Evidential Problem of Evil (see, e.g., Sober 2015, 246–251 and many of the papers in Howard-Snyder (ed.) 1996) has sharpened our understanding of the issues at stake, sometimes in Hume’s favor, sometimes, arguably, to Hume’s detriment.4 Still, the DNR has stood the test of time reasonably well. I daresay it has stood up better, in terms of the overall plausibility of its main arguments, seen from the contemporary angle, than many of the arguments in other canonical texts from the Early Modern period, for example, Descartes’ Meditations, Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Leibniz’s Monadology, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Almost no one would take, say, Descartes’ main moves in the Meditations seriously (apart from the Cogito), but Philo’s argument that the moral indifference of the First Cause(s) of the universe is the most parsimonious of the four available hypotheses is still certainly worthy of serious consideration (cf. Sober 2015, 251). One might say that this is because Philo does not really present any dramatically new and innovative arguments but rather merely refines and powerfully repackages older lines of reasoning. I’ll concede that there is a grain of truth in this, especially with regard to Bayle’s treatment of many of the issues in the DNR, upon which Hume undoubtedly drew (see, e.g., Paganini 2023, Ch. XII; Mori 2021, 226–256). Moreover, one might say, when one of Hume’s characters does proffer a Humean argumentative novelty, as Cleanthes does when he argues (in Part IX) that the very notion of a necessarily existent being is either nonsensical or self-contradictory, the result is an interesting philosophical failure. Again, there is some truth in this. No one would argue that the DNR is a sacred text, after all.

Introduction 3 Perhaps what has helped the DNR weather the years is not so much its treatment of any specific theistic, atheistic, or skeptical argument but the crisscrossing three-way dialectic, involving several dimensions, that entangles its interlocutors in rapidly shifting alliances. This, in addition to the rich history of debate the DNR elegantly encodes, allows for both clarity with respect to the central issues of natural theology (and atheology) and a great deal of complexity and ambiguity. Like all great texts it won’t sit still; it raises more questions that in resolves; it invites incompatible, sometimes gripping, but always underdetermined interpretations. This crisscrossing dialectic centers around certain key polarities relevant to issues of theology. There are the epistemological polarities: epistemic confidence (dogmatism) vs. epistemic diffidence (skepticism), and a priori vs. a posteriori approaches to theological and metaphysical questions. There are onto-theological (multi-) polarities: anthropomorphism vs. mysticism vs. outright atheism. There are the explanatory (multi-)polarities: chance (Epicureanism) vs. necessity (Stratonism-Spinozism) vs. design (theism).5 And there are the socio-ethical (multi-)polarities: “true religion” vs. “genuine theism” vs. “vulgar” superstition and fanaticism (or “enthusiasm”). Cleanthes represents epistemic confidence, the a posteriori approach, anthropomorphism (at least about God’s intellectual and moral attributes) and “genuine theism”, here understood to mean traditional monotheism though not necessarily tied to any revealed religion (though we can imagine Cleanthes as some sort of liberal Presbyterian—see Wright, this volume). Curiously, and rather nontraditionally, Cleanthes seems willing to hold that God exists contingently (an implication of what he says at DNR IX.5–6, pp. 64–65 (Coleman page numbers here and throughout))—there just happened to be a Designer of the World. Cleanthes, moreover, does not seem terribly concerned about the obvious regress problem this position invites or the fact that parsimony seems to favor naturalism of some sort (see DNR IV. 13, p. 40). Philo officially represents skepticism or agnosticism but is willing to play Cleanthes’ game and assume epistemic confidence for the sake of argument (DNR II.11, p. 22). And in that role, Philo represents the a posteriori approach, which does not, contrary to Cleanthes’ hopes, lead to anthropomorphism. It leads, rather, to some form of naturalism, either a necessitarian (Stratonic or quasi-Spinozistic) variety (DNR VI.12, p. 50) or a version of Epicureanism (DNR VIII.2–9, pp. 58–61)—in either case, and whether the universe itself exists necessarily or only contingently, an anthropomorphic God is an explanatory superfluity. And this, even if one calls the universe or First Cause(s) ‘God’, would be considered atheism by every “genuine theist”. Philo, instead, embraces “true” or “philosophical and rational” religion which consists entirely in contemplating and understanding Nature and has a bearing on virtue and morality (if it does at all) only in an indirect way, since that contemplation tends to calm one’s passions and ennoble one’s mind, which dispositions are more conducive to beneficial social interaction than the depression, fear, self-righteousness and fanatical mania popular religions (and arguably all forms of traditional monotheism) tend to induce (see Wright, this volume and Williford, this volume).

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Demea, then, represents epistemic confidence but of the a priori sort, even if that epistemological preference is rooted in some combination of religious zeal, religious fear, and personal rigidity (DNR II.10, p. 21; DNR, p. 5) or just a “metaphysical head” (DNR IX.11, p. 66). Demea is, like Philo, an antianthropomorphite but of the mystical, almost apophatic variety (DNR III.11–13, pp. 33–34), which Cleanthes regards as well-nigh indistinguishable from (Philo’s) atheism. Indeed, what important difference is there between calling the universe, with its non-anthropomorphic and perhaps ultimately incomprehensible inherent principle(s) of order ‘God’ and calling some supposedly other, nonanthropomorphic but “non-natural”, and equally ultimately incomprehensible being ‘God’? Demea vis-à-vis Philo can be perceived in exactly the same way that Malebranche’s contemporaries perceived him vis-à-vis Spinoza. Demea’s religiosity, then, would seem to be some mixture of superstition and “enthusiasm” or fundamentalist fervor, questionable or unstable as a form of “genuine theism” and always in danger of engendering anti-social psychological tendencies (as evidenced by Demea’s departure, DNR XI.18, 21, pp. 87–88). We can then read the “message” of the DNR in something like the following way: If you are not going to be a skeptic but want to maintain some traditional form of theism, beware! The evidence trail does not lead in that direction. It leads, rather, to some form of naturalism, especially if parsimony is to govern our beliefs in this domain: if we must simply accept a fundamental principle of order at some level, why not simply assign it to the universe itself? (DNR IV.9, p. 38) The design intuition may be hard to shake, but when one digs just a little bit, one realizes that intelligent design is only one possible ordering principle among many other possible ones. And there are neither good a priori nor good a posteriori reasons for favoring it over its competitors (DNR IV.10, 12, 14, pp. 38–40). The a priori path (encapsulated in the Cosmological Argument (with, yes, one a posteriori but completely uncontroversial premise—viz., something exists!)) has just as good a claim to lead to naturalism as it does to traditional theism (DNR IX.7, 10, pp. 65–66). And the a posteriori path, even apart from the specific problems of the Design Argument, likewise leads to some form of naturalism. As just noted, some principle (or set of principles) must be accepted as the basic, unexplained principles of all order in the Cosmos; parsimony would suggest that it is (or these are) inherent in the Cosmos itself (even if that were to mean that the Cosmos “thinks” in some sense) rather than in some “extra” being outside of it. Traditional theism, with its transcendent God, supposedly morally good but with completely incomprehensible plans, does not fare terribly well in this game, even if it cannot be ruled out—we can’t be sure, after all, that a parsimony principle is probative in this sui generis domain of inquiry (DNR I.10, p. 11). The “message” continues: If you decide to be a skeptic but want to maintain some form of traditional theism, then beware! This means, of course, you are not playing Cleanthes’ a posteriori evidential game and not playing Demea’s a priori “confidence game” either. And one would think that a skeptic in these matters ought simply suspend judgment and just get used to living with doubt (DNR I.11, pp. 11–12). How can one go from skepticism to faith? Here is a way: Turn your

Introduction 5 skepticism into a tool for crucifying your intellect, and undermine your reason entirely (DNR I.19–20, pp. 15–16). That will probably take arguments; but once you’ve thrown away your ladder, don’t look down; try to forget you used reasoning the get there. Once you have arrived, however, all things become possible: Believe on Jesus or believe that 2 + 2 = 5, or that it is perfectly morally acceptable for an almighty being to create relatively helpless creatures ex nihilo knowing full well that most of them (why not all?) are bound for eternal torment. Reason and evidence no longer determine where you go; you are absolutely free in one sense, but, in another, you are now surely a slave to non-rational factors—superstition, indoctrination, delusional zeal. But stop thinking about that! It is not for no reason that Philo brackets his official skepticism by the end of Part I, deals with Cleanthes and Demea on their own epistemic turf throughout the work, and then suddenly comes out as a fideist at the very end. “A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason,” he concludes, “will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity: While the haughty dogmatist, persuaded, that he can erect a complete system of theology by the mere help of philosophy, disdains any farther aid, and rejects this adventitious [i.e., external] instructor. To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian … .” (DNR XII.33, p. 102). Philo has demolished “haughty dogmatism” of both varieties (a priori and a posteriori, i.e., Demea’s and Cleanthes’, respectively) and returned to the skepticism set to the side at the beginning. And, just as with Bayle, on whom Philo’s apparent endorsement of fideism is surely modeled, one can only see him saying this with a devious smile. On the other hand, should we form any definite expectations about the behaviors and pronouncements of a sincere skeptical fideist? Perhaps sincere fideists are behaviorally indistinguishable from insincere ones. This very brief sketch of the dialectic and the “message” of the DNR is, of course, controversial from start to finish. It can serve as rough, provisional compression for the newcomer and, perhaps, as a little fodder for some argument for the old devotee of the text. Readers new to the DNR should be aware that there is an endless secondary literature on the book, and I will not attempt to summarize even a meaningful fraction of it here. A few suggestions, some perhaps idiosyncratic, will have to suffice. The introductory and supplementary parts of Norman Kemp Smith’s 1947 (2nd) edition of the DNR still make a good place to being one’s journey; and Dorothy Coleman’s 2007 edition also contains excellent supplementary material (as do Hilary Gaskin’s (1993) and Richard Popkin’s (1998) editions, it must be said). We eagerly await a new, critical edition of the DNR. Such an edtion was being edited by the late M.A. Stewart and was (and hopefully still is) slated to appear sometime in the Oxford Clarendon Hume Edition series. For the newcomer and old hand alike, the guides by Andrew Pyle (Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: A Reader’s Guide, (Pyle 2006)) and David O’Connor (Hume on Religion, (O’Connor 2001)) can be very fruitfully consulted. For understanding how the DNR fits into Hume’s overall philosophy of religion and its historical context, Gaskin’s classic 1978 (1988, 2nd ed.) Hume’s

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Philosophy of Religion is still very much worth perusing, but it should be supplemented by more recent works that provide more context and more perspectives, for example, Richard Fogelin’s 2017 Hume’s Presence in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Tom Holden’s 2010 Specters of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism, Alan Bailey’s and Dan O’Brien’s 2014 Hume’s Critique of Religion: “Sick Men’s Dreams”, and especially Paul Russell’s 2008 The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion, and Gianluca Mori’s 2021 Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach. For deeper dives into Hume’s life, work, and historical context, Mossner’s classic but dated biography, The Life of David Hume (2nd ed., 1980), remains one of the best places to start. One may also fruitfully consult M.A. Stewart’s papers collected in Hume’s Philosophy in Historical Perspective (Stewart 2022). And, of course, there are the very useful and compendious Oxford, Cambridge, Blackwell, and Bloomsbury handbooks and companions to Hume (and to Hume’s Treatise); see Russell 2016, Ainslie and Butler 2015, Bailey and O’Brien 2015, Radcliffe 2011, Norton and Taylor 2008, Traiger 2008. Again, these are just a few suggestions; many many more can be derived from the bibliographies belonging to the papers in this volume, the contents of which I now briefly summarize. 2 Idiosyncratic Summaries of the Contributions to the Present Volume The reader should be aware that my summaries are occasionally a bit idiosyncratic and sometimes indicate as much a train of thought a given contribution put me on as they do the primary content of the contribution. If I communicate some of my own “enthusiasm” then the summaries will have done their job; but one should be careful not to attribute everything I say to an author. Each contribution has its own abstract, if one wants a more pedestrian accounting. But it would be boring simply to repeat abstracts here. I spend more time on some contributions than others, but this should in no way be taken as indicating a ranking. Every chapter in this volume has something excellent to offer, if I may say so. The present collection is divided into five sections based upon rough thematic similarities. The first two contributions, in the first part, which I have entitled “Two Overtures to Raillery”, are, really, brief homages to Hume and to the DNR that one can regard as preludes to the deeper study of the work. Simon Blackburn’s brief homage, which I have entitled (with Blackburn’s consent) “Hume’s Dialogues: Cautious, Artful, and Funny”, and which could double as a preface to the whole volume, provides a concise summary of some of the key circumstances behind Hume’s decision to have the DNR published only after his death, as well as the “cautious and artful” character of the work. Notably, Blackburn discusses the abuse Adam Smith received from the religiously bigoted for writing his famous letter to William Strahan in praise of Hume’s character and cheerful disposition in the face of death (the letter can conveniently be found in Kemp Smith’s edition of the DNR). Given the persistence of this atmosphere of intolerant religious zealotry, we can well understand Hume’s caution about publishing the DNR, even if Hume must have known that a good number

Introduction 7 would fail to notice his many instances of irony as such. Blackburn also captures and projects nicely his own sense of the attitude behind the DNR. That attitude is one that says, if I may compress its expression further, “Come on, lighten up a bit when it comes to religion!” When belief in God is, once we have moved away from crude anthropomorphism, reduced content-wise to belief in “something-I-knownot-what” or, as it is sometimes still put these days, “a Higher Power”, what are theists and atheists really fighting about? Perhaps we should rather be decent, good-natured people who know how to have a good laugh, rather than deranging our souls with the anxious thought that we silly humans are the objects of divine love or hate. Of course, as Eco’s The Name of the Rose well depicts, laughter at “divine matters” (and maybe just laughter as such) is arguably a first step in the direction of infidelity. Clark Glymour is the author of our second “prelude”, which I have titled (with his permission) “Recipes or, Philosophy for Fun”. Like Blackburn, Glymour sees the fun side in Hume’s DNR. Specifically, Glymour sees fun in the knots and contradictions into which Hume ties all of his characters—in addition to Philo’s supposed “reversal” and his final fideism, we might mention less noticeable ones like Cleanthes’ castigation of those “barbarous” and ignorant people who refuse to trace the lineages of organisms temporally back beyond one or two generations only to make essentially the same refusal himself when it comes to the origin of the designer (compare DNR III.9, p. 32 with DNR IV.13, p. 40). Glymour also sees a good deal of fun in the wildly unconstrained imaginative scenarios Hume’s Philo cooks up in offering alternatives to the design hypothesis. Indeed, one does get a kick out of imagining the universe as the production of something like a (Upanishadic) Cosmic Spider or, one might add in the same vein, produced by the efficient methods of the Egyptian God, Atum. Likewise, imaging the world as produced by an infant deity or one in its dotage, or a fractious “design team”, has, in addition to humor, a certain explanatory advantage—no wonder things are not quite right! The imagination and wit on display in the DNR, Glymour tells us, provide us with a kind of “recipe book for defeating arguments from Nature for religious superstitions”. But Glymour’s contribution also makes for a “serious”, concise and incisive overview of some key issues in the Philosophy of Science (underdetermination of theory by data, causal inference, and the demarcation problem), problems one can easily espy in the DNR with the right kind of eyes. Part 2 of the collection I have entitled “Theistic ‘Proofs’”, with the word ‘proofs’ in scare quotes, since the status of the Design Argument and that of the Cosmological Argument constitute the very issues in question. What exactly are the arguments? What, if anything, do they show? And, of course, there is the time-honored tradition of calling them “proofs”, even though the usage is looser (so as to incorporate inductive arguments) than what tends to be its contemporary usage. The section begins with Elliott Sober’s “A Bayesian Double Negative: A Critique of Hume’s Treatment of the Design Argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and A Critique of the Design Argument Itself”. This contribution is (needless to say) a superb analysis of Hume’s treatment of the

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Design Argument in the DNR and includes an analysis of the Design Argument as such. Continuing and much improving upon a tradition I believe begun by Wesley Salmon (1978), Sober uses the tools of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory to illuminate and clarify the issues essential to the Design Argument. Sober does not take issue with Hume’s conclusion that the argument is flawed; it is rather the details of Hume’s analysis that Sober finds problematic. In particular, he thinks that the problem with the argument is much deeper than just that relevant similarities and differences can be difficult to calibrate so as to enable one to evaluate the strength of an analogy argument (and thereby compare competing analogy arguments—e.g., the Design Argument vs. the “Cosmic Vegetable” Argument). Rather, given our epistemic position with respect to both the observable universe and its conceivable causes (e.g., God, gods, chance, eternal cosmic reproduction), and bracketing epistemically useless forms of Bayesianism, we are at a loss as to how to assign the prior probabilities and the “likelihoods” (that is, the probability of our evidence given a hypothesis) required to enable us to compute the conditional (posterior) probability of the design hypothesis or its competitors. Without relying on other arguments (which would render appeal to the Design Argument otiose), we can’t reasonably assign prior probabilities to the existence of a God traditionally conceived or any of Its competitors; and without independently arrived at information about the intentions of such a God (or Its variants), we can’t know how probable it is that It would wish to design creatures at all (let alone design such Schopenhauerian wonders as the food chain). All efforts to tweak these “likelihoods” to get a favorable outcome are ad hoc and can equally well be employed by the opponents of the design hypothesis. And a radical subjectivist Bayesianism that reduces rationality to mere consistency with the axioms of probability should carry no weight here—in that case (I add), one might as well make the endorsement of the Design Argument a matter of taste. Sober dedicates his essay to John Earman, whose well-known analysis of Hume’s argument against the rationality of believing in miracles similarly applied the tools of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory to Hume’s detriment. Hume has been defended by Fogelin (2003) and by Evan Fales (2021, who briefly summarizes his response to Earman (2000) in his contribution to this volume). It will be interesting to know if readers of Sober’s analysis disagree with him and defend the view that Hume’s analysis of the Design Argument in the DNR does actually contain, in embryonic form, many of the points Sober makes. Next up, Todd Ryan’s “Cleanthes’ Challenge and the ‘Irregular’ Argument from Design” treats (and, in the editor’s view anyway) dispatches a whole tradition of interpretation that has grown up around Cleanthes’ ambiguous claim that the Design Argument is some sort of “irregular” argument. The idea has been that Cleanthes is, essentially, claiming that the Design Argument is, in one way or another, not really subject to the canons of probabilistic inference because it has some special feature. Cleanthes says “… if the argument for theism be, as you pretend, contradictory to the principles of logic; its universal, its irresistible influence proves clearly, that there may be arguments of a like irregular nature”

Introduction 9 (DNR III.8, p. 32). The challenge has been to articulate what this “universal … irresistible influence” consists in while still preserving the idea that there is, at some level, a rational inference involved and not merely some kind of powerful non-rational psychological propensity (which latter Hume clearly thinks is likely to be the case). The search for the essence of such an “irregular argument” is associated with an interpretive move according to which Cleanthes is, after this point in the text, no longer committed to the analogical version of the Design Argument he first proposed and has shifted to a new argumentative strategy, one involving the advocacy of such “irregular arguments”. The reader will have to judge, but the editor thinks that Ryan has made a very compelling case that there is no such shift and that taking the very idea of such “irregular arguments” (as interpreted in this commentarial tradition) to its conclusion involves attributing gross incoherence to Cleanthes (and possibly to Hume). Isn’t a much more natural and charitable reading of Cleanthes’ statement one according to which he is arguing that Philo’s destructive analysis of it must be flawed (and thus it must after all be a good argument by the canons of probabilistic inference) since, if not, we would have to impute a fairly egregious cognitive illusion to a multitude of people (from the completely uneducated up to professors of natural philosophy, like Newton) who find the argument powerfully compelling? If so, we need not embark on the wild snark hunt that is the quest for the essence of an “irregular argument” nor attribute to Cleanthes the view that there is a “natural belief” involved in arriving at the design conclusion. Rather, the task Cleanthes sets for himself is to show us what is wrong with Philo’s analysis of the Design Argument and that it does finally stand up to criticism based on the accepted canons. This means we should not take him to be committed to antecedent of his conditional. The appeal to “natural belief” is something which, to my mind anyway, smacks of the highly objectionable attempt simply to circumvent critiques of the rationality of religious belief by “going external” in the manner of Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology” (Plantinga 1993a, 1993b and 2000; see Fales 2009 for criticism). There is a kind of thinly-veiled conflation of causation and justification involved that no amount of terminological legerdemain can long hide and no amount of conceptual revision can render more palatable to reason. And even if, in the Humean context, there are natural but unjustifiable beliefs (e.g., in personal identity, causal necessitation, an external world populated with persistent objects, natural regularities), a belief in a single, personal, all-powerful God is clearly not among them: it is not for no reason that Hume went to so much trouble to argue, in the Natural History of Religion, that polytheism emerged prior to monotheism and that there can be an oscillation between them. If there is a “natural belief” in this ballpark it may just be that there is some source of the order in the universe or some sort of Totality; but depending on what one means by ‘source’ and ‘Totality’ and where one locates them, this belief, even if natural, may also be rational. I hasten to add that Ryan’s treatment of these matters is much more methodical, nuanced, subtle and patient than my summary lets on. Needless to say, I, in any case, believe it makes a major contribution to the literature on the DNR and potentially has more general connections to debates in the epistemology of religious belief.

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The final paper in this division is Annemarie Butler’s “Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence”. Butler turns her attention to what is one of my favorite parts of the DNR, Part IX, where Demea presents a version of the Cosmological Argument. This part of the DNR tends to get less attention than it deserves, and Butler’s treatment is fresh and original. Generally, it is assumed that Hume is targeting Samuel Clarke’s version of the Cosmological Argument, presented in his 1705 A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, since, after all, Clarke is quoted in Part IX. However, Butler argues, Cleanthes’ “decisive” criticism of the argument (according to which it is incoherent or contradictory to purport to demonstrate the necessary existence of anything) more effectively targets Locke’s version of the Cosmological Argument (presented in Book IV, Chapter 10 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) than Clarke’s, since Clarke would simply reject the empiricist principles from which Cleanthes objection is drawn, something Locke could not have so easily done. This would help explain why Cleanthes, even though he calls his objection “decisive” and claims he is “willing to rest the whole controversy upon it”, goes on to offer two more objections to the argument that meet Clarke on his own turf: Cleanthes objects to the idea that an infinite causal chain would itself require a further causal explanation; and he objects that, even granting all its premises, the argument does not preclude identifying the necessary being with the material universe (à la Spinoza). There is, of course, no reason to think that Hume had only Clarke or only Locke in mind. In fact, Demea calls the argument “the common one” indicating that it has been made by many. Indeed, there is no need even to mention the fact that versions of the argument can be found in Antiquity and, of course, Islamic and Thomistic philosophical theology; one can find plenty of Early Modern versions of the “proof” in addition to those of Clarke and Locke—one finds versions in Cudworth, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Raphson, for example. By including a variety of criticisms, some making empiricist assumptions, others not, Hume covers the bases, so to speak. In highlighting this, Butler’s rich study helps to resolve a good deal of the commentarial confusion that Cleanthes’ response (made with a little help from Philo) has elicited. Hume has been accused of misunderstanding Clarke’s argument, of conflating the Ontological and Cosmological Arguments, or of crudely begging the question against those who do not share the empiricist account of the “idea” of existence or the concept of necessity. If Hume’s target was more a hydra than a dragon, if the argument could be launched by philosophers with diverging epistemological, modal, and semantic background assumptions, one can make good sense of the fact that Cleanthes offers more than one line of criticism. Finally, Butler’s discussion of the Causal Maxim in both Locke and Hume is the most in-depth and sophisticated treatment vis-à-vis empiricist epistemological principles that I know of. Part 3, which I have dubbed “Matters of Interpretation”, collects those contributions that deal with some long-standing interpretive issues surrounding the DNR. In “Hume’s ‘Artful’ Masterpiece: The Dialogues and the Concealed Case for Atheism”, Andrew Pyle argues (persuasively in my view, but I recognize my own bias) that the DNR can well be interpreted as an atheistic work. While Hume’s traditional religious opponents (at least the ones that did not take his

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occasional Baylean fideistic pronouncements seriously) have long thought the “Great Infidel” to be a proponent of atheism, the tendency among many interpreters of the DNR has been to ascribe either agnosticism or some sort of theistic or deistic message to the work, either an “attenuated deism” or a full-blown theism based on “natural belief”. Pyle does not deny that these interpretations have some textual basis, but he argues that, with just a little reading between the lines, one can readily interpret the position that emerges through Philo as atheistic, even if one wants to attach the label ‘God’ to the First Cause of the universe. The most reasonable thing to believe, bracketing skepticism for the moment, is that the First Cause does not have plans, did not create the universe through an act of will (let alone speech), and is completely morally indifferent. No card-carrying theist would fail to recognize such a position as atheistic, however one chooses to appropriate words from the theological tradition. What does one do with the textual basis in Hume for the competing, non-atheistic interpretations? One will have to see if they agree with Pyle’s treatment of these. I will only point out that it helps to remember Hume’s context, not only his immediate context but the context of critical ambiguity on religious matters pioneered by Bayle, which, we might argue, Hume took to a new level in the DNR—and at the very end, in Philo’s concluding fideism, we see the nod to old Pierre. Moreover, Hume surely could not have failed to be aware that he was creating a text with this rich set of ambiguities in it. In that sense, the task of champions of this or that interpretation of the text is only to make the textual bases crystal clear; this Pyle succeeds in admirably, something even opponents of the atheistic reading will have to concede. Next up, in “Not Hoist with his own Petard: Hume’s Dance with Skepticism in Dialogues, Part I”, Evan Fales defends a view of the DNR that is very close to, if not exactly the same as, Pyle’s. For Fales, the issue is whether Philo’s (and Hume’s, according to Fales) skeptical treatment of religious hypotheses must, in all consistency, apply to scientific hypotheses as well. Fales argues that this is far from the case and that Philo (Hume) is right, early on in the DNR, to challenge Cleanthes’ characterization of natural theology as a successful branch of natural science. Fales does not limit himself to the Eighteenth-Century context but lays out arguments drawn from his own years of work in the Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Religion to craft a position that one could imagine a modernday Philo readily accepting. It all turns on what one would think to be fairly straightforward matters: one has no good reason to believe in explanatorily gratuitous entities—tails that wag no dogs, so to speak; and, given competing explanatory strategies, ontologically conservative ones, especially if they have been successful in multiple prima facia disparate domains, are, ceteris paribus, preferable to those that require the introduction of categorically new entities (thus, e.g., naturalistic explanations of mystical and religious experiences drawn from Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Social Sciences, are preferable to supernatural explanations of them; cf. Fales 2010). In other words, parsimony, consilience, and observational continuity carry a lot of epistemic weight—more weight than the theist

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has yet been able to move. This is certainly in the spirit of Philo and would justify a motivated skepticism towards religious claims that cannot be extended to the “unobservables” sometimes postulated in the sciences. One should compare what is, in effect, Fales’ take on the demarcation problem with Glymour’s. Is there a debate to be had between them? In one sense, Fales does not see a demarcation problem: natural theology and arguments from religious experience can be treated with precisely the same epistemic tools with which we treat any common sense or scientific hypotheses; and when so weighed, they are found quite wanting. Religious hypotheses, then, are not categorically different from commonsense or scientific hypotheses; rather, they are just hypotheses about the world that have not fared very well epistemically speaking. In “Demea’s Departure Revisited”, Lorne Falkenstein, once again, makes an impressive, well-argued, and completely innovative contribution to the literature on the DNR. At the end of Part XI, Demea finds an excuse and makes an exit—“Demea’s Departure”, as it is has come to be called. Why does Demea leave? I think it is safe to say that most readers regard the departure as having to do with things Philo has already said. My own money, along with that of other commentators, has long been on the point (at DNR XI.18, p. 87) where Demea seems to perceive that Philo, in even suggesting that God, qua First Cause, is ultimately responsible for the evil in the world, is not really his ally, and that Philo’s views about the “incomprehensibility” of the divine attributes are really tantamount to atheism. But, Falkenstein argues, Hume has Demea leave precisely so that Philo will not explicitly say that the First Cause is indifferent to virtue and vice and that God cannot intelligibly be said to make moral judgments, even though this is an evident corollary of what Philo does say. In other words, Falkenstein argues that Demea’s departure enables Hume not to have to say in print that God (or the First Cause) does not actually care about how humans behave; though this is indeed implied. This “prospective” view of Demea’s Departure may sound counter-intuitive at first, but Falkenstien provides compelling evidence that, indeed, Hume recognized this as a theological corollary of his own moral theory and deliberately refrained from saying it explicitly in print. On Falkenstein’s view, the DNR, strictly speaking, ends in Part XI, and Part XII is there as a kind of epilogue in which Philo (Hume) has the opportunity to argue, with no interference from dour Demea, that the rejection of “genuine theism” and the acceptance of this implication about divine amorality are not in any way inconsistent with virtue and do not inexorably lead to the corruption of morals. In fact, there is a case to be made that a philosophical religion of sorts might even be conducive to virtue, though perhaps only indirectly. And if one is a theist, and even accepts the Design Argument, one can recognize a kind of intelligence behind human morality—it is conducive to the maintenance of our social species, perhaps the one sort of thing, vis-à-vis organisms anyway, that this otherwise imperturbable Designer could be said to care about. This, of course, would not satisfy traditional theists (like Demea); whatever the psychology behind it—ressentiment, fear, superstition, or, more charitably, an acute sense of the injustice of things, they want and need

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a Judge and Punisher. But I have gotten carried away. At all events, Falkenstein, has delivered an interpretation of the Demea’s Departure that is as subtle and illuminating as it is “out of the box”. In “Hume’s Palimpsest: The Four Endings of the Dialogues”, Emilio Mazza and Gianluca Mori address anew, and with a bounty of fascinating historicocontextual details, the issue of the multiple, even contradictory, “literary” conclusions one finds in the final part of the DNR. Does Philo reverse course and embrace the Design Argument, after all his prior criticisms, and advocate theism? Does Philo embrace a rationalist-atheistic approach along the lines of Bayle’s Stratonism? Does Philo advocate a radical deism along the lines of Lord Bolingbroke? Does he advocate anti-religious skepticism? Mazza and Mori argue that, in effect, Philo advocates all of these conflicting positions in Part XII. But what they have in common is a rejection of religion “as it has commonly been found in the world” (DNR XII.22, p. 98)—vulgar superstition and “enthusiasm”. Drawing upon their almost unrivaled knowledge of the relevant Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century literature, Mazza and Mori argue that these different endings correspond to different “layers” of the text dating to different times during which Hume concentrated his efforts on revising the text (hence their use of the term, ‘palimpsest’). They suggest that, had Hume lived longer, the concluding part of the DNR might well be less polyphonic. We cannot know for sure, of course; all we can be reasonably sure of is that Hume was happy enough with these multiple endings to arrange for their posthumous publication. We can, moreover, be grateful to Mazza and Mori for showing us just how aware Hume was of Continental, especially French, debates on natural theology and atheism. Due to a long tradition of, in effect, Anglophone chauvinism in Hume studies, many Hume scholars do not look carefully enough at Diderot, d’Holbach, Voltaire and others writing on these very topics in roughly the same time frame. This is all the odder, since we know Hume knew personally and interacted with many of them. The depth of erudition Mazza and Mori have brought to bear on the DNR cannot be praised highly enough. They have taken DNR scholarship in its contextual aspect to a new level. Part 4 of this collection I have entitled “Religion, Passion and the Limits of Reason”. It gathers three thematically related papers that have a connection to Hume’s wider philosophy of religion and systematic philosophical concerns. The division begins with a chapter by David O’Connor, “Natural Religion’s ‘Dangerous Consequences’”, which could, arguably, also have been placed in the previous section, since one of its burdens is to argue that Philo, despite some textual appearances, is not inconsistent (a charge leveled at Philo by some commentators, e.g., Foley 2006 and Mazza & Mori, this volume). But its second division is about what O’Connor regards as one of the broader aims of the DNR, namely, to offer a sustained argument that natural religion menaces theism in a way that skepticism about natural religion does not. In other words, skepticism about natural religion is less dangerous to theism than is a carefully carried-through natural theology. If it is to avoid an anthropomorphic conception of the deity, natural theology tends to lead ultimately in the direction of atheism or perhaps some form

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of deism so attenuated that, practically speaking, it might as well be atheism—if we are talking about a deity simply indifferent to moral and natural evils. By contrast, suspension of judgment about these matters allows one a certain space—one almost thinks of Kant’s “limiting knowledge to make room for faith”, though this may not be O’Connor’s intention at all. O’Connor does make a case for the “quasi-skeptical-theist” reading of Philo (and Hume) that is worth grappling with very seriously. He concludes that “Philo/Hume’s overall, skeptical point is that we do not have access to the kind of information that we would need to advance either a viable, probabilistic natural religion or a viable, probabilistic natural irreligion”. To be sure, there is plenty of textual basis for such a reading. One should, however, contrast O’Connor’s reading with Fales’. I leave it to the reader to determine if Fales and O’Connor are at hermeneutic or systematic odds with one another or if, scratching a little further, one finds a convergence. Suffice to say that both agree that the pursuit of natural theology ends badly for traditional theism. In “Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion”, an insightful and powerfully argued paper, John P. Wright uses Hume’s moral philosophy as a key to interpreting Philo’s position on the moral consequences of religious belief. He takes Cleanthes’ position to be the traditional one according to which religious belief is conducive to virtue because it provides a check on human passions and pretensions, and, for those in need of blunter instruments, it can provide a hovering threat of punishment or promise of reward—carrots and sticks. In this, Wright sees some of Hume’s contemporaries—Francis Hutcheson, Hugh Blair, and Adam Smith. Philo, according to Wright, maintains that no religious belief of any kind need have a beneficial effect on morality; in fact, the tendency for popular religion, driven by fear, ignorance, and mania, is quite in the other direction. Moreover, Philo’s “true religion” or “philosophical and rational religion” provides no moral norms, as it consists in nothing but a descriptive (if extremely limited) knowledge of the “First Cause”. Now, given that Hume thinks that reason is a slave to the passions, what are we to make of his (or Philo’s) intentions? Could Hume really be trying to rationally persuade people to avoid something with deep roots in human passions? Natural religion is not, on its own, expected to have any positive effects on morals—the best it can hope for is to be neutral. But popular religion is certainly worse, according to Philo (with a nod to Bayle), than no religion at all. Moreover, it is certainly rooted in human passions and not reason. So, what is a philosopher like Hume to do or say on this score? Wright makes a very strong case that, for Hume (and presumably Philo), certain beliefs give rise to certain passions, where this is a kind of rational motivation (at least conditionally). (For example, if I believe there is an assailant lurking in the dark near me, my fear (given that I care about my life) will be well motivated.) Moreover, those beliefs can be challenged rationally. (Someone shows me that it was only tree in the dark and the rustling of a cat.) And if they are undermined, they tend to, in turn, undermine the emotional responses based on them. Accordingly, if rational discourse convinces us that belief in an angry God is unfounded, our religious fear and trembling will tend to dissipate. Hence, Hume’s project of attacking the foundations of religious belief

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(both revealed and natural) is not completely foredoomed to failure simply because religion has its deepest roots in fear and other passions. If one likes, the “passion” for having evidentially well-founded beliefs can, via the beliefs it engenders, indirectly check the specific passions based on evidentially ill-founded beliefs by uprooting those beliefs at the epstemic level. Moreover, the passions that predispose one to have ill-founded beliefs in the first place can be indirectly mollified in the same way. For anyone who has struggled with religious superstition and fear (often reinforced in childhood) and gained some control over them, this account will surely ring true. Wirght makes a convincing case that this account is also a highly plausible interpretation of Hume’s own thoughts on the matter. Rounding out the section is Charles Nussbaum’s “Philo’s Two Designers & Humean Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”. Nussbaum takes up one version of the “attenuated deism” interpretation of Hume’s overall intention in the DNR. According to that version, the Design Argument is not so weak as to be completely unworthy of serious consideration. The phenomena of apparent design, especially in the organismic and ecosystemic strata of reality, offer at least some plausible evidence for the claim that the world was designed by an intelligence. However, this is not the sort of deism that would attribute to that designer anything like a human morality. The evidence extends only to the nonmoral attributes of the designer. But not all is lost. In a remarkable convergence (or near convergence) with Lorne Falkenstein’s paper for this volume, Nussbaum argues that this sort of deism is not at odds with the idea that the designer designed us to engage in pro-social (or “moral”) behaviors as part of our proper biological functioning. Indeed, it is almost a contradiction to suggest that social animals could survive, let alone thrive, without a good deal of cooperation and mutual concern. Were there not a good deal of “mutual aid” and “fellow feeling” programmed into us by the designer, we would have gone extinct a long time ago—or we would not be recognizably human or even primate. So, an amoral designer makes social creatures that, as such, must by and large follow what come to be regarded as moral precepts. This may sound like a move in the direction of a naturalistic utilitarianism, but there is still too great a coefficient of misery in the world for it to be reasonable for us to believe that the designer is aiming at maximizing happiness for its creatures. If that were so, and the designer sufficiently powerful, we might expect (skeptical theism aside for the moment) the world to be quite different; we might expect Philo’s four circumstances, on which so much animal and human suffering depends, to be quite otherwise. Instead, we can see morality as just an expedient the designer has used to facilitate the bare perpetuation of the human species. This expedient can be reduced to a handful of moral maxims and even expressed as a kind of “true” or “philosophical and rational” religion—in this it is not too far from Kant’s “religion within the limits of reason alone” (articulated in his 1792 book of the same name). The framework of the position, however, starts to look rather evolutionary—if only there were system of cranes (as Dennett might put it) that could obviate the need for an intelligent skyhook. An implication of Nussbaum’s interpretation seems to be that Hume must have thought Philo’s “Old Epicurean

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Hypothesis” to be, on the whole, less plausible as an account of (apparent) teleology than the design explanation that regards it as more than merely apparent. In any case, amoral design might as well be evolutionary “design”—they arrive at the same arrangement and have the same (real or merely “as if”) telos. Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there is something distinctive about the human moral apparatus that sets it apart from the lesser apparatus on offer in other quadrants of the social animal world. We are capable of a greater and greater scale of moral amelioration. Thanks to our greater capacity for sympathy, augmented by our more powerful empathic imaginative powers, we can expand our circle in ways that presumably animals are not able to do. This means, in turn, that even if a society has its Hobbesian thickets or its Rousseauian chains, we need not be stuck. In other words, even if we were made by an amoral designer, ours is a world in which moral progress is possible. This picture of Hume is somewhat at odds with conception of him as a rather pessimistic and conservative thinker. Not that Nussbaum paints Hume as a utopian socialist, of course. It is more a question of where on the optimism-pessimism social spectrum Hume falls. If Nussbaum’s estimate is that Hume (or at least Hume’s Philo) is more optimistic than some grumpy nay-saying conservatives, this is not at all because he takes Hume to be radical. His Hume, it seems to me, is a moderate liberal sort, who recognizes the possibility of socially propagating moral progress but also thinks it cannot happen overnight. In a way, if we just replace his Hume’s intelligent amoral designer with evolution, Nussbaum’s Hume can perhaps be seen as a precursor of NineteenthCentury moral-evolutionary progressivism. I am going beyond Nussbaum’s text, but not by much. His subtle discussions of contemporary moral and social issues fit seamlessly with his discussions of Hume (and Kant to boot). The fifth and final section is named after people: Epicurus and Charles Darwin, on the one hand, Strato of Lampsacus and Spinoza, on the other. This is because, for all the naturalistic alternatives to design that Philo floats, they can, arguably, be put into two main categories: Epicurean and Necessitarian. Epicurus is, of course, associated with the former, while Spinoza, the Stoics, and the much lesser known Strato are associated with the latter. Darwin is thrown in in a prospective way, since one can regard the theory of evolution by natural selection as but a clarification, modification, and extension of an explanation of biological order that goes back to the Greek Atomists (and possibly even to Empedocles, see Sedley 2007, 43 f.), gets restated by Epicurus, then by Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, which work became enormously popular in the Early Modern period (see Wilson 2008), and is stated again by Maupertuis, Hume’s Philo in the DNR, and others. This is the idea that eons of unguided configuration and reconfiguration of matter could, without any designing hand, hit upon physical systems that are able to maintain homeostasis, maintain their forms across fluctuations in their constituting material, and reproduce. Clearly, any such entity would have to look sort of “designed”—at least look well enough designed to perform these functions, depending, as it would, on reciprocally interacting but functionally differentiated parts. It would have, that is, the very sort of structured, readily functionally interpretable complexity that suggests the handiwork of an intelligent designer.

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In Antiquity, Epicureanism (whether called by that name or not) was the main alternative explanation to intelligent design. And it used what we might today call “multiverse” reasoning to secure its conclusion. As the old analogy goes, the longer the monkey bangs on the typewriter (assuming the monkey’s keystrokes are genuinely random or “ergodic” in their placement), the more probable it is that the monkey will produce any string you like—War and Peace, the Annals of Ennius (see De Natura Deorum II.93; Cicero 2008, 80), the Bible, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. If the monkey bangs for infinitely many years, then it is a virtual certainty that every text will find its place in the set of produced texts. Likewise, if there are infinitely many universes in which matter is undergoing unguided combination, we should not be surprised if stable worlds with living organisms eventually arise in some of them. Or, to take Philo’s variation in DNR VIII, if there is a vast though only finite number of “transpositions” possible for the material world, but those transpositions go on for eternity, we would expect the same result: we should not be surprised if this materially finite world cycles through periods of relative stability and sometimes gives birth to living things (which would, again, simply have to look sort of “designed”). Of course, prior to Darwin and Wallace, Epicurean accounts of the natural world had a weaker story about species variation, even if there were some inklings of evolution and species transformation (both in Antiquity and in Hume’s own day, see, e.g., Gregory 2007, Bowler 1989, 77 f.). Moreover, it seemed somehow like a cheap victory to derive from “multiverse reasoning” worlds in which buck and doe, goose and gander, hen and rooster, cow and bull, etc., along with the Epicurean equivalents of Adam and Eve, all just happened to “pop” into existence by unguided transpositions of matter on the same planet at roughly the same time with all their many trans-species anatomical similarities. In fact, Newton, and Clarke following him, regarded these similarities as evidence for design, since there is nothing that seems absolutely necessary about animal body plans and, on Epicurean principles, we might expect to see far more radical variations than we actually do.6 If, on the other hand, all life traces back to a common ancestor (or some small number of independently arisen common ancestors, a possibility Darwin did not rule out in 1859), then we need only a quasi-Epicurean account of the very first life and need not imagine a Noah’s Ark of fully formed pairs of all sexually reproducing species crawling out of swamps or emerging from the ground or crystalizing from the air! We only need one “warm little pond”, as Darwin once put it. Natural selection (and drift) can take care of the rest. Appropriately, the first paper in this section, “Hume, Darwin and the ‘Epicurean Hypothesis’”, is by a zoologist who is also deeply engaged in the History and Philosophy of Biology, John O. Reiss. Reiss’s 2009 book, Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker, is an immensely erudite and historically informed account of the ways in which an implicit normative teleology, rooted in the influence of thinkers like Paley on Darwin, still muddies conceptual waters in evolutionary theory. Reiss argues that Cuvier’s conception of “conditions for existence”, which connects with the very sorts of Lucretian or Epicurean things that Philo and Maupertuis say about organisms and traces back to the those ancient sources, for all

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of Cuvier’s own anti-evolutionism, fits contemporary evolutionary biology better than the “blind watchmaker” analogy, which misleads us, sometimes, into asking the wrong questions or being puzzled by phenomena that are completely unsurprising on a more Epicurean conception. In Philo’s words, which make up one of the epigraphs to Reiss’ book: “It is in vain … to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables, and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain known how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted?” (DNR VII.9, p. 61). There is a certain analogy here with the so-called Weak Anthropic Principle according to which, roughly, intelligent beings should not marvel that the part of the universe in which they live satisfies the conditions necessary for their very existence (Reiss 2009, 19–20)—how else could it be? The details are beyond the scope of this introduction; suffice it to say that Reiss develops Cuvier’s (ultimately Epicurean) insight into sophisticated conceptions of biological function and adaptation that do all the needed conceptual work while undercutting any deep analogy between natural selection and intentional design. In his contribution to this volume, Reiss takes a deep dive into the controversies surrounding neo-Epicureanism in biology in Hume’s own day and allows us to see Philo’s “Old Epicurean Hypothesis” in Part VIII in an entirely new historical light. Reiss also connects Philo’s Epicureanism and, more generally, Eighteenth-Century biological Epicureanism with the Nineteenth-Century emergence of Darwin’s work. Reiss argues that a version of the Old Epicurean Hypothesis indeed provides, in retrospect, a naturalistic explanation of organismic order that succeeds in undermining the argument from such order and adaptedness to design and a designer. Echoing Not by Design, he goes on to argue that by ignoring Philo’s hypothesis (and its ancient and Eighteenth-Century antecedents) Darwin was able to view his theory of evolution by natural selection as more original than it in fact was. It is true that Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, had a certain liking for the DNR, but he was more attracted to Philo’s hylozoic speculations than to his Epicurean one. But, as Francis Haber (1959, 250–251; cf. Burbridge 1998) once pointed out, the 1801 third edition of E. Darwin’s Zoonomia found itself checked and criticized the very next year by Paley’s Natural Theology. Charles Darwin, Reiss argues, was working with Paley in mind, not the Epicurean tradition or Hume’s Philo. But taking a wider view of things, Reiss argues, Darwin’s theory is best seen not as a replacement for Paley but rather as a refinement and consummation of the ancient Epicurean Hypothesis. Care must be taken here, since the design theorist will tend to hear only “tornado in junkyard makes airplane”. Unguided processes are sometimes called “random” in this context, but that is misleading. Even for the Epicureans, randomness was confined to the inherent motion of particles (the clinamen or “swerve”). Everything above the scale of atoms was governed by geometry. If literally random movements resulted in two atoms with the right shapes for “sticking together” colliding, the collision was random, but the sticking was not. Of course, now we know that much more than Euclidean geometry governs atomic (and sub-atomic) interactions.

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I gather that we don’t really know if quantum fluctuations are in some way comparable to the Epicurean clinamen, nor do we know if some multiverse theory is true. But this matters little in the present context. We know that there are at least roughly 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe (and maybe many more that we will never be able to observe). And there are at least roughly 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. This is a plenty large miniquasi-multiverse (if I may) for Epicurean experiments under the constraints of our laws of nature to result in abiogenesis events; and some of these events may then kick off the jabbering reproduction-driven, path-dependent drift-and-selection process that can, given enough time, lead to a rich, if sometimes phantasmagoric, biosphere. All of this is to say that even if the “genesis” of the first replicators was achieved by an Epicurean, even literally random process, the subsequent history of life is not random in the “tornado-in-the-junkyard” sense. It is not a random matter which of two organisms will be better able to survive and reproduce in a given environment, nor are the constraints stemming from path dependence random. They are, of course, all unguided. In that sense, then, a contemporary Epicureanism can provide the cranes needed to explain away the cosmic skyhook of design, to use Dennett’s (1995) terminology. In that same book (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), Dennett described Philo’s Epicurean hypothesis as “Hume’s Close Encounter” (1995, 28–33). If Reiss is right, the encounter is much closer than Dennett suspected. The historical detail with which Reiss makes his case adds a contextual richness to this exciting and, no doubt, controversial claim that is not to be missed. The last two papers in the collection take up the other form of naturalism Hume’s Philo introduces, namely, some form of “hylozoic” or “cosmoplastic” necessitarianism. The quoted terms stem from Ralph Cudworth’s taxonomy of atheisms described in his monumental and enormously influential 1678 multivolume study, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Wherein All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted, and Its Impossibility Demonstrated. Apart from versions of Epicurean (“Democritic”) atheism and “hylopathic” atheism (see my contribution for a discussion), Cudworth devoted a great deal of attention to “hylozoism” (“Stratonic”) and “cosmoplastic” (“pseudo-Stoic”) atheisms. Hylozoic atheism is the view that the entire universe is, in some sense, alive. Cudworth associated it with Strato of Lampsacus, the successor of Theophrastus as the head of the Lyceum. Strato’s works did not survive, but Cicero, in De Natura Deorum and Academica, attributed, at least on one interpretation (see Long 1986, 152), a kind of theo-naturalism to him according to which “… all divine power lies in nature” (De Natura Deorum I.35; Cicero 2008, 16). Comsoplastic atheism is like Stoic theism, according to which a providential God is the Soul of the World, but without the providence. In other words, it is kind of logical or metaphysical and not teleological necessitarianism. The ‘plastic’ part of the term refers to one global organizing principle or “plastic nature”, as Cudworth called such principles. The “World Soul” according to cosmoplastic atheism, is, like the theistic Stoic’s anima mundi, also a vivifying and organizing principle of the whole Cosmos; but it does not have a plan and it is not aiming for the Good

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or the Rational. It is, rather, acting by something much more akin to logical or mathematical necessity. Spinoza was, with some controversy and perhaps ultimately quite wrongly, widely associated with the Stoic World Soul doctrine from the late Seventeenth Century to the end of the Eighteenth. That Spinoza would be associated with pseudo-Stoic or cosmoplastic atheism should then be no surprise. Moreover, it turns out that almost immediately after the publication of The True Intellectual System, hylozoic atheism came, by various routes, to be associated with Spinozism as well, even though it seems likely that Cudworth himself had the Cambridge physician and natural philosopher, Francis Glisson in mind with when he spoke of “Strato’s Ghost”. Cudworth’s Strato was a hylozoist, and noncosmoplastic hylozoists allow a certain role for chance in the cosmos, whereas cosmoplastic atheists do not, since they regard the entire universe as being organized in a kind of “top-down” manner. But in 1679, Henry More, in a work directed partly against Spinoza, came to associate Glisson and Spinoza for what he perceived to be a common hylozoism (manifesting as panpsychism in Spinoza’s case) and substance monism. Essentially from then on, Cudworth’s “Ghost of Strato” epithet came to be associated with Spinoza, while Glisson was largely forgotten (see my contribution for detailed references for the above and the below). Apparently independently, Bayle associated Spinoza and Strato but not for a supposedly shared hylozoism or monism (in fact, Bayle, probably rightly, doubted whether Strato was either of these (again, cf. Long 1986, 152)). Rather Bayle associated them for a shared naturalistic necessitarianism according to which it is the universe and its laws that constitute the Necessary Being, and nothing outside the universe itself is explanatorily necessary (or perhaps even conceivable, strictly speaking). Leibniz further popularized Bayle’s association of Strato and Spinoza in the 1710 Theodicy. And there were many other lines that led to the same set of associations, even if there were important differences, if one scratched. Suffice it say, then, that when Philo considers the World Soul hypothesis or the hypothesis that the universe is like an animal or like a vegetable, he is entertaining hypotheses that anyone who had read Cudworth, Bayle, Leibniz or a host of other, lesser-known figures would have known to be hypotheses in the Stratonic-Spinozistic ambit (whatever the differences over certain details there might be, e.g., over substance monism strictly conceived). Add to this Philo’s explicitly stated preference for necessitarianism (DNR VI.12, p. 50) and one will begin to wonder why it has taken so long for the idea that Philo’s is at times gesturing towards Spinoza to become the consensus view in Hume studies. My own contribution deals with this very question and the historical and historiographical matters it involves. Pete LeGrant’s contribution treats the matter from the point of view of a Spinoza scholar. Wearing those lenses, how can one see Philo’s hypotheses and expressed preference for necessitarianism? LeGrant argues that Philo’s necessitarianism comes, like a kind of Spinozistic Trojan Horse, within his version of the World Soul hypothesis. He argues that Philo’s application of the concept of the World Soul involves significant and underappreciated differences from better-known deployments of the concept. By

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this contrast, LeGrant shows that Philo’s somewhat concealed necessitarianism is similar to Spinoza’s. In effect, LeGrant identifies Philo’s World Soul hypothesis as a kind of cosmoplastic atheism, to revert to Cudworth’s terminology—a necessitarian World Soul without a telos, if you like. LeGrant goes on to present two objections to Philo’s World Soul hypothesis, and concludes that, given only the resources Hume afforded him, Philo would have been unable to respond to them effectively. However, he argues, given additional resources, Philo’s hypothesis could be salvaged. In particular, he suggests, drawing on the work of Peter Kail on Hume on conceivability and possibility (e.g., Kail 2003), that Hume’s Philo would be able to defend necessitarianism about the laws of nature; and (I would add) this is echoed by what Philo says about necessity (and, in effect, prima facie conceivability) in mathematics at DNR IX.10, p. 66. If LeGrant’s study is, in effect, a kind of historically modulated exercise in systematic philosophy, my own, entitled “Philo, Strato & Spinoza”, is a full-blown historical and textual analysis of the Philo-as-crypto-Spinozist issue. I should apologize to everyone for inflicting such a large number of pages on them, but, apart from the fact that it would take even more time to remove all redundancies and reduce my paper to a reasonable size, and leaving the scandalous abuse of editorial privilege unmentioned, there is one good reason such a study has to be long. This is because there is, among most Anglophone Hume scholars in any case, an extremely strong bias against the very idea that Philo might be flirting with Spinozism or something in the ballpark. Hence, I felt the need to go into a great deal of detail and to provide a rather hypertrophied scholarly apparatus of notes and references to clinch the case. After reviewing what I call the historiographical shibboleths that have prevented and still prevent some Hume scholars from seeing what is right in front of them, I provide reasonably detailed background discussions of, inter alia, Cudworth’s taxonomy of atheisms and ontology of “plastic natures”, Bayle’s development of Stratonism and attack on Cudworth, the general association of Spinoza with both Strato and the Stoics from the late Seventeenth Century to the mid-Eighteenth Century, the fact that Malebranche (with whom, I argue, we are meant to associate Demea) was routinely charged with inadvertent and crypto-Spinozism for, among other reasons, the very definition of God that Demea quotes (at DNR II.2, p. 18); and, most glaring of all, the fact that in their tag-team rebuttal of Demea’s a priori (Cosmological) argument in Part IX, Cleanthes and Philo (explicitly, by name and quotation) attack Clarke’s own argument against Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature. In case that was not clear enough: The very passage from Clarke that Cleanthes quotes nearly verbatim is taken from a portion of Clarke’s Demonstration where Clarke is explicitly (i.e., by name) arguing against Spinoza. In thus arguing against Clarke on that point, Cleanthes and Philo are defending Spinoza on the point in question. This is in broad enough daylight. With all of this background in hand, I march through the entire DNR and show how Philo’s defense of naturalistic necessarianism and other StratonicSpinozistic themes weaves through the entire work (even, in a way, through the Epicurean Part VIII). I conclude by defending the view that what Philo has in mind by “true religion” or “philosophical and rational” religion in Part XII is

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nothing other than Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis. This is the intellectual side of Spinoza’s vera religio as opposed to its public-facing, anodyne moral component emphasized in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. This march through the DNR allows for the discussion of a great number of sub-topics that certainly deserve fuller treatment. I will mention only one: the issue of Hume’s knowledge of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century debates about the age of universe (and, of course, the earth within it). The issue of the age of the world comes up in Part VI. The supposedly young age of the earth makes for one of Cleanthes’ objections to Philo’s hylozoic hypothesis. We know that Hume was interested in this question. However, we don’t find a great deal of discussion of the matter among scholars. We do find Hume mentioned in this context by historians of Geology. I had hoped to find such a scholar to write an essay for this collection, but it was not to be. I propose it, then, as an interesting project for some enterprising Hume scholar with a liking for the History of the Earth Sciences. What had Hume read on this matter? Just his friend, Buffon? Did he read Thomas Burnett? Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed? And did he significantly influence James Hutton? I have a long note that could serve as launching pad for a thorough investigation of this question, but, of course, I could not do it justice myself—“let those go farther who are wiser or more enterprising” (DNR IV.13.40). 3 Concluding Reflection: The Tao of Editing or, Lousy Excuses Before closing, a brief word is in order about references to the DNR and to Hume’s works in this volume. I had initially imagined that it would not be hard to impose rigid uniformity on this score, but I quickly realized that there is no consensus among Hume scholars about this, especially with regard to the DNR. So, I have, for the most part, decided to leave the decision about which editions to refer to up to the authors themselves. Some have chosen to give the SelbyBigge & Nidditch (SBN) page numbers for references to the Treatise and Enquiries; some have not. Some (like me) like the older Roman-numeral heavy style of referring to Hume’s sections and subsections; some do not. I have generally (probably out some irrational nostalgia for Kemp Smith’s edition) imposed Roman numerals at least on references to parts of the DNR across all the papers; but one will otherwise find a mixture when it comes to Hume’s other texts (as well as texts by Locke, Cicero, and others). Sometimes I have used ‘p.’ to indicate page numbers where these could otherwise be conflated with paragraph numbers (as in references to Coleman’s edition of the DNR). And in some cases, I have used the paragraph symbol ‘¶’ just to be crystal clear. Some bibliographies contain a little more information about texts than others; some bibliographies use abbreviations for all of Hume’s works (e.g., THN, EHU, NHR); others do not. I have left some of this up to the authors, but I have usually at least inserted the original publication date of texts in one way or another (e.g., ‘Hume 2000/1739–40’ for Hume’s Treatise). As for the DNR itself, all the major editions (Kemp Smith, Gaskin, Popkin, and Coleman) have their partisans

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among the authors represented here. Perhaps a new critical edition, if it arrives, will bring some uniformity to the sub-discipline. All in all, my initial bureaucratic will-to-uniformity gave way to a more permissive “let many bibliographical flowers bloom” attitude. This may irk more rigid readers (and if it irks some contributors, I do apologize). But there are many reasons for not being overly fastidious and Procrustean in these matters: Authors tend to be attached to their bibliographical preferences, which I have tried to accommodate to some extent. There is something to be said for fighting the rigid schoolmaster in our scholarly selves, plagued as it is by Emerson’s “hobgoblin of little minds”. The “Confucian” activity of historical pedantry needs a “Taoist” break to maintain its own sanity and freshness. One needs to realize that a typo does not actually doom a good argument (contrary to certain popular memes). More persnickety scholars need to stop sublimating their lost religious self-righteousness into a personal editorial Inquisition. And isn’t it nice, in the age of soulless, automated bibliographies to see the marks of human struggle and failure? And so on. I trust, in any case, that the truly interested will have no trouble finding the passages and texts they need, one way or another; and, after all, we’re not talking about complete bibliographical anarchy (even if the academic Puritans among us, who have no concept of Wisdom or Balance and for whom all sins are equivalent, will surely see it otherwise). Enjoy! Notes 1 See also the historical and systematic An Introduction to Design Arguments by Benjamin Jantzen (2014). 2 See, for example, his “The Fine Tuning Argument: Physicists & Philosophers Reply” ( Halper 2022a) and “The Fine Tuning Argument: The Critics Strike Back” ( Halper 2023). On the Kalam Cosmological Argument, see his “Does the Big Bang Prove God? The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Experts Reply” ( Halper 2022b) and “The Kalam Argument: Experts Strike Back” ( Halper 2022c). They can all be found on the skydivephil YouTube channel. The catchy titles of these films should not mislead; the films contain extensive interviews and discussions with the likes of Roger Penrose, Alan Guth, Sean Carroll, Carlo Rovelli, Hans Halvorson, Alex Velinkin, and others of similar stature. 3 The older, Galen-Paley approach has not disappeared, however. And if one simply brackets the overwhelming evidence for common descent, it can still be quite striking—arguably more so than the Fine-Tuning version of the argument, with all its appearance of sophistication. A recent, beautifully presented work by a contemporary Paley is a case in point: The First Inventor: Discovering Design in Nature by C.W. Clapp (2020). Clapp is an engineer with a real talent for explaining the physical and functional principles operative in nature’s “designs” and for making illuminating comparisons with engineered human artifacts relying on the same principles. Apart from sections on barbs (including on tick mouthparts), camouflage (for both predators and prey), mimicry (including the venomous stone fish), and thorns, one gets the feeling that the natural world, according to Clapp (and reminiscent of Hume’s Cleanthes), is a generally benign place. One could imagine augmenting his section on Chemistry with sub-sections on hemotoxins and neurotoxins in venoms or his section on Mechanics with a sub-section on the bite force of shark or crocodile jaws. One could also imagine a

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version of Clapp’s book that was something of a cross between Lewis Held’s (2009) Quirks of Human Anatomy and Stanislaw Lem’s “Golem XIV”. Lem’s Golem speaks of evolution, but every such question must also be faced by any ID theorist. Golem asks ( Lem 1984, 21, 23): “Why did it go from consummate solutions [e.g., photosynthesis] taking their power and vital knowledge from a star, wherein every atom counted, and every process was quantitatively attuned, and descend to any cheap, jury-rigged solutions—the simple machines, the levers, the pulleys, planes, inclines, and counterbalances that constitute joints and skeletons? Why is the basis of a vertebrate a mechanically rigid rod and not a coupling of force fields? Why did it slip down from atomic physics into the technology of your Middle Ages? … . It is as if brilliant engineers assisted by lightning-fast computers were to erect buildings that began tilting as soon as the scaffolding was removed—veritable ruins! It is as if one were to construct tom-toms from circuit boards, or to paste billions of microchips together to make cudgels.” We can, of course, already hear the skeptical theists reaching for the Mysterious Ways of God and the more traditional for the Fall of Humanity (which somehow ruined everything for the animals too), but I digress. 4 Something similar can be said about the application of Bayesian confirmation theory to Hume’s account of the (ir)rationality of belief in miracles. See Earman (2000); but see Fogelin ( 2003) and Fales (2021, 46–85) for criticisms of Earman. 5 One finds this (multi-)polarity clearly enunciated in De Natura Deorum (II.88; Cicero 2008, 78): Balbus, the Stoic says “Suppose some carried … [Posidonius’ orrery] to Scythia or Britain. Surely no one in those barbaric regions would doubt that the orrery had been constructed by a rational process? Yet our opponents here profess uncertainty whether the universe, from which all things take their rise, has come into existence by chance or some necessity, or by divine reason and intelligence.” 6 In Section IX of his 1705 A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Clarke writes, “… in all the greater species of animals where was the necessity for that conformity we observe in the number and likeness of all their principal members? And how would it have been a contradiction to suppose any or all of them varied from what they now are? To suppose indeed the continuance of such monsters, as Lucretius imagines to have perished for want of the principal organs of life, is really a contradiction. But how would it have been a contradiction for a whole species of horse or oxen to have subsisted with six legs or four eyes?” And in a note to the first sentence in this passage, Clarke cites Newton’s Optics (Quaestio 23): “… the uniformity in the bodies of animals … must be allowed the effect of intelligence and choice” ( Clarke 1998/1705, 50 and 50n42). For the newcomer to comparative (esp. vertebrate) anatomy, a great place to begin is with a wonderful book of photographs ( Barral (ed.) 2011) of the collection of skeletons housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris within the Jardin des Plantes (the stomping grounds of Buffon and, later, Cuvier).

References Ainslie, D. C. and Butler, A. (eds.) 2015. The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, A. & O’Brien, D. 2014. Hume’s Critique of Religion: “Sick Men’s Dreams”. New York & London: Springer. Bailey, A. & O’Brien, D. J. (eds.) 2015. The Bloomsbury Companion to Hume. London: Bloomsbury. Barral, X. (ed.) 2011. Evolution. Text by J.-B. de Panafieu, photos by P. Gries. New York: Seven Stories Press. Bowler, P. J. 1989. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Burbridge, D. 1998. “William Paley Confronts Erasmus Darwin: Natural Theology and Evolutionism in the Eighteenth Century”. Science & Christian Belief, 10, 49–71. Cicero. 2008. The Nature of the Gods. P. G. Walsh, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clapp, C. W. 2020. The First Inventor: Discovering Design in Nature. Weatherford, TX: C.W. Clapp. Clarke, S. 1998/1705. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and Other Writings. E. Vailati, (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Dennett, D. C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Earman, J. 2000. Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fales, E. 2009. “Darwin’s Doubt, Calvin’s Calvary”. In Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, pp. 309–322. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fales, E. 2010. Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles. London: Routledge. Fales, E. 2021. Reading Sacred Texts: Charity, Structure, Gospel. Denver: GCRR Press. Fogelin, R. J. 2003. A Defense of Hume on Miracles. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fogelin, R. J. 2017. Hume’s Presence in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foley, R. 2006. “Unnatural Religion: Indoctrination and Philo’s Reversal in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”. Hume Studies, 32(1), 83–112. Gaskin, J. C. 1988. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregory, M. E., 2007. Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species. London: Routledge. Haber, F. 1959. “Fossils and the Idea of a Process of Time in Natural History”. In B. Glass, O. Temkin, and W. L. Straus (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, pp. 222–264. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Halper, P. (dir.) 2022a. “The Fine Tuning Argument: Physicists & Philosophers Reply”. https://youtu.be/jJ-fj3lqJ6M Halper, P. (dir.) 2022b. “Does the Big Bang Prove God? The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Experts Reply”. https://youtu.be/pGKe6YzHiME Halper, P. (dir.) 2022c. “The Kalam Argument: Experts Strike Back”. https://youtu.be/ femxJFszbo8 Halper, P. (dir.) 2023. “The Fine Tuning Argument: The Critics Strike Back”. https:// youtu.be/zNH-ZgSpBuQ Held, L. I. 2009. Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body. Cambrdge: Cambridge University Press. Holden, T. A. 2010. Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard-Snyder, D. (ed.) 1996. The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jantzen, B. C. 2014. An Introduction to Design Arguments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kail, P. 2003. “Conceivability and Modality in Hume: A Lemma in an Argument in Defense of Skeptical Realism”. Hume Studies, 29(1), 43–61. Lem, S. 1984. Imaginary Magnitude. M. E. Heine, trans. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Long, A. A. 1986. Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mori, G. 2021. Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Mossner, E. C. 1980. The Life of David Hume. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norton, D. F. and Taylor, J. (eds.) 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, D. 2001. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Religion. London: Routledge. Paganini, G. 2023. De Bayle à Hume: Tolérance, hypothèse, systèmes. Paris: Honoré Champion. Plantinga, A. 1993a. Warrant: The Current Debate. New York: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, A. 1993b. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, A. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pyle, A. 2006. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: A Reader’s Guide. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Radcliffe, E. S. (ed.) 2011. A Companion to Hume. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Reiss, J. 2009. Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russell, P. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. New York: Oxford University Press. Russell, P. (ed.) 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salmon, W. C. 1978. “Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume’s Dialogues”. Philosophical Studies, 33(2) 143–176. Sedley, D. 2007. Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sober, E. 2015. Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sober, E. 2019. The Design Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, M. A. 2022. Hume’s Philosophy in Historical Perspective. J. A. Harris & J. P. Wright (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traiger, S. (ed.) 2008. The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wilson, C. 2008. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part 1

Two Overtures to Raillery

1

Hume’s Dialogues Cautious, Artful, and Funny Simon Blackburn

On 15 August 1776, Hume wrote to his friend, Adam Smith: My dear Smith, I have ordered a new Copy of my Dialogues to be made besides that which will be sent to Mr. Strahan, and to be kept by my Nephew. If you will permit me, I shall order a third Copy to be made, and consigned to you. It will bind you to nothing, but will serve as a Security. On revising them (which I have not done these 15 Years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written. You had certainly forgotten them. Will you permit me to leave you the Property of the Copy, in case they should not be published in five years after my Decease? Be so good as to write me an answer soon. My State of Health does not permit me to wait Months for it. The last sentence proved all too true, for ten days later Hume was dead. Hume had reason to take pains over the publication of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR). Earlier in 1776, he wrote to remonstrate with his publisher, William Strahan, who had cold feet about making the work public: “I seriously declare, that after Mr Millar and you and Mr Cadell have publicly avowed your publication of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, I know no Reason why you should have the least Scruple with regard to these Dialogues.” Yet Hume himself had suppressed publication of the Dialogues until within a short time of his death, and he knew that many friends, including Adam Smith, had counselled against their publication at all. So much so that in spite of Hume’s deathbed wish, Adam Smith was sufficiently reluctant to play any part in having the Dialogues published that in the end he left it to Hume’s nephew to do so. From a present-day perspective, such caution seems unnecessary. Hume’s good friend and correspondent Hugh Blair, himself a minister of the Church of Scotland, said that “they bring together some of his most exceptionable reasonings; but the principles themselves were all in his former works”, and he was right (see Price 1974). The principles included the empiricism underlying causal inferences, and the severe restriction on the scope of a priori reasoning. Hume’s infidelity was itself well known, but it was 20 years since it had prevented his appointment to chairs of DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-3

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philosophy in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. There is little in the Dialogues more incendiary than this from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU), which had been published nearly 30 years previously, in 1748: While we argue from the course of nature, and infer a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed, and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle, which is both uncertain and useless. It is uncertain; because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless; because our knowledge of this cause being derived entirely from the course of nature, we can never, according to the rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause with any new inference, or making additions to the common and experienced course of nature, establish any new principles of conduct and behaviour. (EHU XI.110, 125; SBN 142) Furthermore, the discussion in the Enquiry follows the section on miracles, which might be thought a more direct attack on the heartfelt tenets of Christianity than anything in the Dialogues. By his own account Hume thought of that argument while talking with a Jesuit of “some parts and learning”, and it “much gravelled my companion”. But he met the response that the argument couldn’t be solid since it operated equally against accepting the Gospel as against accepting other miracles “which observation I thought proper to admit as a sufficient answer” Hume tells us, ironically. He had cautiously cut that argument out of the Treatise, before its publication: “I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its noble parts, that is, endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible”, he wrote to his friend, Henry Home (Lord Kames) in 1737, but he abandoned that caution in the Enquiry. The probabilistic argument against accepting testimony for miracles, at least when they are presented as being of use to religion, does not recur in the Dialogues, which are entirely about natural reasoning, available to anyone who thinks about the matter, independent of any special revelations. So why did Hume’s caution return sufficiently to make him suppress the book during his lifetime? Virtually all the many rebuttals and refutations that had appeared after the earlier work were philosophically negligible, and for the last decade of his life, Hume had sufficient status to be immune to any harm they could do. Yet the Dialogues are indeed cautious and artful, as well as a masterpiece both of philosophy and, for those of us able to take religion lightly, of comedy. The entertainment is cemented into the structure of the work, for where many writers might have had one apologist for natural religion, and one skeptic, Hume provides us with two religious apologists.1 Nominally the pair of believers, Cleanthes and Demea, should be fighting shoulder to shoulder, but long before the curtain comes down each has accused the other of being little better than atheists. Cleanthes’s anthropomorphism leaves him unable to do better than a “wild and unsettled system of theology, little better than none at all”, and Demea’s a priori reasonings are “of little consequence to the cause of true piety and religion”. This would not be so significant but for the fact that these two positions are ones that many believers will be holding in tandem, whether or not they are

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conscious of doing so. Hume supposes, with reason, that in a believer’s mind there will almost inevitably be an oscillation between them. Demea represents one great plank of religion, the abstract idea of something-we-know-not-what, independent of space and time, immutable, necessarily existent and underpinning the entire natural cosmos. This is what Pascal had called the God of the philosophers, simple, undivided, changeless, and containing the whole of time and space in one consciousness. But then for religion to be practical, there is the need to put some flesh on this, finding something with human emotions such as love and concern, that watches our doings, listens to our prayers, offers solace and hope, and has the authority to deliver moral instruction: the tribal God of Abraham and Isaac.2 This, if it is to be argued for, requires Cleanthes’s approach, the argument from the way of the world to a designer; and it implies being able to put a pious filling into the nature of the designer. All this Demea vehemently rejects, since no such argument can deliver any inkling of what its supernatural being or beings may be like. It is no more possible to keep these two approaches to theological reality in harmony than it would be to think of an abstract object, such as the number seven, as being at the same time a good parent, a being who listens to our pleas, or which is suffused with love and desire. It is not just the lack of harmony between the two approaches that Hume exposes. He is also concerned with the intrinsic weaknesses of each of them. If Demea had really provided a solid hypothesis of a necessary being underlying the contingencies of the cosmos, then one prop of religious belief might be saved, even if the other has to be given up. And if Cleanthes had really provided a solid ground for the loving, concerned, listening parent-figure, we could perhaps do without the metaphysics of necessary existence. Unfortunately, however, Demea founders on the rock that we cannot really make sense of his necessarily existent being, for since it must be “unknown, inconceivable qualities” that make for the necessary existence of anything “no reason can be assigned why these qualities may not belong to matter” (DNR IX.7, p. 65). Cleanthes meanwhile, the spokesman for religious argument as modelled on the analogy with scientific theory, founders on the rock of his supernatural architect being so indeterminable as to be useless. Cleanthes can provide no reason for supposing that his architect acts singly, or is particularly good at the trade of designing universes, or has anything resembling the Christian virtues of being all-good, all-knowing, or allloving. Arguing from the way of the world we get no sense of any such superlatives3. Not everyone in Hume’s world was able to take religion lightly enough to appreciate the comedy. By the year of his death, Hume may have been beyond the reach of the zealots of the Church of Scotland, but neither they nor their English counterparts had fallen silent. Only a few years before James Beattie had published his book An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, a vulgar attack on Hume and his philosophy, for which he found himself pampered by the whole English establishment and sent back to Aberdeen with a handsome pension from King George III. Smith himself burned his fingers shortly after Hume’s

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death by writing a famous letter, published in 1777, praising Hume and describing Hume’s cheerful anticipation of his death. Smith later wrote of this that “A single, and as I thought, very harmless, sheet of paper which I happened to write concerning the death of our late friend Mr Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made on the whole commercial system of Great Britain” (Smith 1987, 249; letter to Andreas Holt of 26 October 1780) and although this is probably an exaggeration, the 18th-Century equivalent of a Twitter storm certainly did break out. Smith finished his published letter with a paraphrase of the epitaph on Socrates that closes the Phaedo: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit” (Smith 1987, 220; letter to William Strahan of 9 November 1776). And it was this unstinting praise for an infidel that outraged the faithful establishment. The charge was led by George Horne, then president of Magdalen College, Oxford, vice-chancellor of the University, and later bishop of Norwich.4 The pamphlet does little more than quote at length a rhetorical passage from “that silly, bigoted fellow Beattie” as Hume had called him. The main burden is that any person who was insensitive or wicked enough to whisk the consolations of a happy afterlife from needy and miserable humanity could never deserve praise for benevolence and virtue. Presumably, Beattie and Horne had forgotten that while a pallid vision of a beatific life after death is indeed on offer in Christianity, so are the more vivid terrors of a life of eternal torment; and it might be thought a useful result of benevolence and virtue to free people from fear of those. Hume, I believe, had some sympathy for reasoning to the divine architect from the order and complexity of the world as we know it. In a letter to a friend, Gilbert Elliot of Minto, written while he was writing the Dialogues in 1751, Hume took on the character of Cleanthes, albeit ironically, and asked for assistance in bolstering the argument to design: “We must endeavour to prove that this propensity (i.e. the propensity to admit the argument as cogent) is somewhat different from our inclination to find our own figures in the clouds, our faces in the moon our passions and sentiments even in inanimate matter. Such an inclination may, and ought, to be controlled, and can never be a legitimate ground of assent” (in Hume 1932, Vol. I, 155; letter of 10 March 1751). Of course, he never found any such proof, and the middle chapters of the work abundantly show that it is not to be had. But above all, the passage from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, quoted above, emphasizes that the kind of theological hypotheses touted by Cleanthes and Demea are useless. Philo has of course helped to ram that message home, and this surely provides the right context for understanding the supremely ironical final section of the Dialogues where Cleanthes, having been discomfited or routed throughout the work, is finally awarded victory by the supposed auditor, the child Pamphilus. This would indeed be an extraordinary volte-face did Hume not make it as clear as he does that any cup of comfort that Cleanthes, or those following him, might sip, is empty. It has been diluted down to nothing at all. You

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can stir your brain with supernatural imaginings, Hume is saying, but you can draw nothing from them. They afford no basis for any inference to what to expect, how to behave, or who to believe, any more than finding our own face in the moon would do. Rise up to a something-we-know-not-what if you wish—you will find plenty of fellow travellers doing so—but when you come back down you cannot bring a single legitimate or meaningful inference with you. Hume is characteristically generous to those who, like the innocent child Pamphilus, take the journey up, but on the journey back they can only bear superstition and delusion or, more properly, nothing at all. As Wittgenstein later remarked in a different context, “Nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said” (Philosophical Investigations, §304). We also see why, with his usual economy of effort Hume does not need dogmatically to deny the existence of something-we-know-not-what.5 Better just to laugh at supposing that either assertion or denial properly has any significance for us, here on earth. When the content is emptied out, we are to be skeptics, or infidels, but not atheists, nor even agnostics insofar as they imagine a significant issue with a yes-or-no answer, about which we need to wait and see. With his characteristic good humour, poise, calm, and benevolence, Hume simply suggests that we abandon theological vocabulary altogether, refuse to join the queue, and get on in the world as we have it with being as useful and pleasant as we can to ourselves and others. Notes 1 There are echoes here of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, but in that work, the several disputants represent different schools of classical philosophy. Philo is a descendant of Greek skeptical or Academic philosophy, but the other two do not seem to have any such ancestry. 2 The contrast is emphasized in these terms by Pascal (“‘Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob’ non des philosophes et des savants”), writing his memorial of his religious awakening in 1654 (see Pascal 1976, 43–44). Pascal had no more confidence that reason could underwrite faith than did Hume. 3 It is worth noticing that Thomas Hobbes had reached a very similar conclusion. Hobbes held that any attempt to describe God or to tease out his properties was doomed to contradiction and failure, and that language in which descriptions of God appear to be made expresses oblations rather than propositions. See Thomas Holden’s Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion ( Holden 2023). 4 A letter to Adam Smith, L.L.D on the Life, Death and Philosophy of His Friend David Hume, Esq. By one of the People called Christians, published by Oxford in 1777. Adam Smith’s biographer, Ian Simpson Ross, mentions an “unchristian fury” excited in England and cites Ramsay of Ochtertyre as a source for supposing that “Every sober Christian” in Scotland had been shocked by Smith’s encomium ( Ross 2010, 339). But whether or not so many people were shocked, Ramsay of Ochtertyre only cites the one same pamphlet (see Allardyce 1888, 466–467 cited in Ross). 5 Just as, in spite of occasional lapses, he does not need to deny the bare logical possibility of miracles and would be betraying his own philosophy if he did so. He simply shows that in the context of religious discussion, no stories testifying to their occurrence have any chance of being credible.

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References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1932. The Letters of David Hume, Vol. I. J. Y. T. Greig (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, D. 2007/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. S. Buckle (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.) Hume, D. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. D. Coleman (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Other Primary Literature Pascal, B. 1976. Pensées. L. Brunschvicg & D. Descotes (eds.). Paris: GF-Flammarion. Smith, A. 1987. The Correspondence of Adam Smith. E. C. Mossner & I. S. Ross (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Secondary and Other Literature Allardyce, A. (ed.). 1888. Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons. Holden, T. 2023. Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, J. V. 1974. “The First Publications of David Hume’s ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 68, 2, 119–127. Ross, I. S. 2010. The Life of Adam Smith (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

Recipes or, Philosophy for Fun Clark Glymour

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. —A Treatise of Human Nature, I.iv.7

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is one of the few philosophical works ever written that is fun to read. The Dialogues are funny, and Hume surely meant them to be: he spent 25 years perfecting the jokes. Part of the fun is us. If you have ever been 12 years old and outside with a buddy or two at night, looking at the stars, you have probably enacted a pre-adolescent version of the Dialogues. What if the stars are eyes peering down at us? Or, if you were so lucky that one of your companions was e.e. cummings, what if the moon’s a balloon? Hume reminds us of the good times. The humor in the Dialogues is of two sorts. One is the tangles and contradictions and boxes the characters are put into. Hume was no dramatist, and, wanting characterization, some imagination is required to see the humor in the logical knots. The other, which requires no imagination, is the hatful of silly proposals and scenarios that issue from Cleanthes and Philo: the world is a machine; no, it’s an animal; no, it’s a plant; no, it’s a spider; God is a Big Human; no, he’s an unchanging blob; no, he’s a bunch of guys; no, he’s an incompetent child; no, he’s a dying old man. Imagine a voice in the sky understood in every language, and imagine self-reproducing books. This is all a lot of fun. Spiderman as the genesis of the world is still a good ploy. The Dialogues confutes claims that the empirical world provides evidence of any kind of god Hume’s Christian neighbors could abide. It does so by showing that the accompanying reasonings, and by implication their unnamed advocates, are simply ridiculous and have equally ridiculous alternatives. It was Hume’s habit to make a serious argument whose very words mocked and ridiculed. In a Letter from a Gentleman to a Friend in Edinburgh (1745), Hume replied to an anonymous critic who claimed a whole list of immoral and atheist implications of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. In one particular, the implications of Hume’s account of causality for the “cosmological argument” dripped down to the Eighteenth Century from Thomas Aquinas: everything has a cause; nothing causes itself; an DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-4

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infinite sequence of prior causes is impossible; a circle of causes is impossible because causation is transitive and asymmetric; so there must be a first cause; call it “God.” Of course, the Treatise also implies that a lot of other arguments for the existence of God are wrongheaded, among them those secondhand a priori arguments found in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. So what was Hume’s reply to the charge that his criticism of the cosmological argument implies atheism? This: … even the metaphysical Arguments for a Deity are not affected by a Denial of the Proposition above-mentioned. It is only Dr. Clark’s Argument which can be supposed to be any way concerned. Many other Arguments of the same Kind still remain; Des Cartes’s for Instance, which has always been esteemed as solid and convincing as the other. (Hume 1967/1745, 23) Mad Hatter: Queen of Hearts: Mad Hatter:

I say arguments A, B and C for the existence of God are no good. So you are an atheist! Rejecting argument C entails that you are an atheist! Not in the least. Arguments A and B imply the existence of a God, and they are just as good as C.

After arguments that testimonies to miracles could (almost) never provide sufficient grounds for believing they occurred, the last paragraph of Hume’s chapter on miracles in his Enquiry presents this puzzling climax: So that, upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience (EHU X.41, 115; SBN 131). Sometimes ignored in commentaries on Hume, what does this paragraph say about Christian belief? I think many modern readers of Hume will read “attended by miracles” as “attended by reports of miracles” or something like that, and take the last sentence to be a lame philosophical joke. No, Hume was careful with his words. Read literally, the passage says that miracles happened in the time of Jesus, that they are the only reason to believe in the Christian story; but there is no reason to believe they occurred, and the determination to believe in them and to have and maintain Christian beliefs is a miracle in itself. On that reading, Hume could be preaching to a modern religious assembly.1 But he is doing something very different in the same words. The last sentence in the passage is another instance of Hume’s artful ridicule. Hume had argued in the essay that there are

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(almost) never grounds for believing testimonies to miracles, but he did not argue that no one can experience a miracle—in the case at hand, the miracle of one’s own faith. It follows from Hume’s arguments in the chapter on miracles that others have no rational grounds for believing those who testify to their own miraculous faith. Hume implies that no one, not even those who believe in Christianity, has reason to believe the profession of others to believe in Christianity. Rationally, everyone should think they live in a world populated only by heretics, liars and unbelievers, except possibly themselves. Christian solipsism. Of course, Hume’s last paragraph in “Of Miracles” implies that his critics had no reason to credit his faith. And they did not. As William Warburton observed at the time in his Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Essay on the natural history of religion: “We see what the man would be at, thro’ all his disguises. And, no doubt, he would be much mortified, if we did not” (Warburton 1757, 44). Hume had mocked more subtly before, but in the Dialogues, finalized near the end of his life, he cut loose, he let’em have it. Whoever they were, and there were plenty of them, they had it coming. In the penultimate section of the Dialogues, Philo gives the most candid, trenchant, and forceful denunciation of religion and religious belief to be found in the philosophical canon, calling faith by its true name, “superstition.” But in the conclusion, having produced difficulty after difficulty with arguments for natural religion, Philo—often thought to speak Hume’s own views—announces he believes that design is manifest in the universe, and has a designer. That conclusion has led to suggestions that in matters of theology, Hume was a faux skeptic, even a closet Christian. I think this is quite wrong. For good reasons,2 Hume customarily offered a twist towards religious and social acceptability in the midst, or at the end, of a demonstration of his infidelity. He omitted draft material on miracles from the Treatise, and we have seen to charges of atheism he gave a response Humpty Dumpty would envy, and we have noted the conclusion to his essay on miracles, disguised as piety. Although Hume was a historian who undoubtedly knew of many authors of arguments from Nature for Christianity or for Deism, he names none of them in the Dialogues except Clarke and Leibniz. The work is not a history; it is not the development of a theory; it is not the public version of Hume’s own vacillations over metaphysical arguments. For Hume, philosophical theology was worthy of comedy,3 fun with fools, but the Dialogues is aimed at something much more important. Comedies can be instructive, and Hume’s seems meant to be. Jantzen (2014) has criticized the Dialogues for their neglect of any number of variations on the argument from design, and even charges Hume with inventing the appeal to analogy to establish the intentional design of the universe. For example, Jantzen (64ff.) cites Richard Bentley, the first Locke Lecturer, who gave the pseudophysical argument that, starting from a chaotic distribution of particles throughout the universe, the present disposition of the planets and stars could never have evolved from known physical forces.4 The Dialogues recounts no such argument, but Hume would have had no difficulty showing it rested on sheer

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speculation, to which he could have readily provided counter speculations. How could Bentley know the initial state of the universe, including not just the locations of “particles” but their several quantities of matter and momenta? How could he know that all the laws of physics had been discovered, or that the laws of the early universe are the same as those now? Hume could have resurrected Margaret Cavendish’s delightful hypothesis of intelligent, communicating atoms. And so on. What Hume could have done, any full-witted reader of the Dialogues could do as well. The cornucopia of speculations and objections in the Dialogues are a model, not a survey. The Dialogues is a recipe book for defeating arguments from Nature for religious superstitions. The Dialogues has two principal strategies for disputing Natural Religion. One is to explain the appearance of design by all sorts of alternative extra-natural causes, the web-spinning spiders and such, all unwelcome to Christians. The other is to let Nature be full of whatever intimations of design are said to be found, and stop there. Philo asks Cleanthes why the search for moving powers of the universe should not stop with the “familiar” material world: If the material world rests [causally] upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divine Being so much the better. When you go one step beyond the mundane system, you only excite an inquisitive humour, which it is impossible ever to satisfy. (DNR IV.9, p. 38) The main epistemological question repeatedly posed in the Dialogues is this: What warrant is there for inferences that escape the gravity of a body of evidence, whatever that body may be? Hume’s answer is: None. His strategy has three parts. First, that the body of evidence is commonsense observations of our patterned, structured world. Second, this principle: If A is an explanation of phenomena and B is an explanation of the same phenomena, and B contradicts A, then the phenomena do not warrant belief in A or in B. And third, he offers demonstrations of how easy it is to give alternative explanations that contradict conventional theistic inferences from features of the empirical world. To the argument that reducing explanations to two, A and B, at least gives some reason to believe A, Hume’s implicit reply is that the number of equally good alternative explanations is limited only by human imagination: the world is generated from a tree; the world is the web of a spider; the world is … . In the century after Hume, in the twentieth, and in ours, solutions have been proposed to Humean global underdetermination in religion and science. Collected under the title of “inference to the best explanation” they include “consilience,” “coherence,” “simplicity.” Philosophical theologians have gripped them as a man falling to Earth might grip a parachute.5 I think Hume would rightly have none of it, both on grounds of the vagueness of the virtues, and, so

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far as the world is concerned, arbitrariness. A single architect of the universe may be administratively efficient, but is it any simpler than a team of architects? We have nowadays the skeptical solemnities of Dawkins and Dennett and Harris and such, but none so insightfully funny as Hume, none so useful for destroying nonsense and imposing humility as Hume. Hume was a skeptic for all seasons. If the theory of evolution should ever falter, disarming the arguments of our contemporary atheists, we would still have the Dialogues, and that is enough, perhaps too much. Are Hume’s recipes just as good for burning science to ridiculous toast? Most obviously, science posits unobserved processes of unobserved entities with unobserved properties and relations. Are they in the same epistemological bag as Christianity and other superstitions? Less obviously, conspiracy theories are something like natural superstitions. Do the strategies of the Dialogues work in reverse, undermining conventional, non-conspiratorial accounts of events such as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers or the emergence and spread of AIDS? For science, Newton had an answer, at least by example. Newton argued for universal gravitation first by positing three very general principles, the first, second, and third laws of motion. They relate forces to “quantities of matter” motions, velocities and accelerations. Newton had no independent way of measuring forces, no “force-ometer.” The first and second laws were essentially codifications of ideas that were “in the air.” Newton justified them by appeal to a variety of examples. Galileo’s experiments argue that acceleration of freely falling bodies is the same, no matter the weight of the body, for all bodies. Newton argued the same using pendulums. Assuming that acceleration requires a cause and that the only acting cause of the accelerations of falling bodies is the Earth, and that cause produces the same acceleration even as the “quantity of matter” varies, that cause should vary with the “quantity of matter.” The force of gravity on a body should therefore equal the acceleration of a body multiplied by the “quantity of matter” in the body, so that acceleration is the value of force applied to a body divided by its quantity of matter, or as we would say, the mass. The third law was evidenced by everyday experience (e.g., stand in a cart and push another cart), by elastic collisions in which the total momentum of colliding balls is the same before and after collision, as in Newton’s cradled steel balls, said to favor the desks of executives, and like phenomena (see Perl 1966).6 The basic strategy was to make one assumption—accelerations but not velocities require causes—common enough in the physics of his time, and appeal to a variety of empirical cases to obtain the second and third laws, and from instances of reciprocal gravitation, which he universalized by what he called “general induction from the phenomena.” Another example, with a similar strategy. The weights of atoms and combinations of atoms (molecules, in our terminology) was a fundamental issue in early and mid-Nineteenth-Century chemistry, tied up logically with determination of the molecular formulas of compounds. The inability of chemists to provide molecular formulas based on a principled measure of atomic weights was one of the most persuasive arguments against the atomic theory. Gay-Lussac had

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established the “law of combining volumes” for reacting gases at the same temperature: At constant temperature and pressure, the ratio between the volumes of the reactant gases and the volume of the gaseous product can be expressed in simple whole numbers. Thus, one volume of nitrogen and three volumes of hydrogen combine to make two volumes of ammonia. This and the law of simple definite proportions (by weight) for chemical reactions was nicely explained by the atomic theory in combination with Avogadro’s law for gases: in our terms, at the same temperature, pressure and volume, all gasses contain the same number of molecules. Methods for measuring the density of gasses at common volumes, pressures, and temperatures developed in the Nineteenth Century. Stanislav Cannizzaro did an historical survey of the vapor density data and using Avogadro’s hypothesis showed that the vapor density of each compound substance equals the sum of simple fractional multiples of the vapor densities of their elemental components. Using ½ of the vapor density of hydrogen as a standard estimate of the atomic weight of hydrogen, he calculated the relative atomic weights of (almost) all of the elements that could be realized at the time as gasses at standard temperature, pressure and volume. It may be observed that when elements enter into multiple compounds, available vapor densities permit multiple tests of Cannizaro’s assignments of relative atomic weights. We see in Cannizzaro’s method much the same strategy that Newton used for universal gravitation. Make a weak assumption warranted by contemporary scientific explanations, combine it with a lot of empirical data, and infer unobserved features of the world. Computerized methods for discovering causal relations provide a third, more contemporary illustration of the same strategy. Consider a very simplified version of inferences to a causal relation between two variables, or to the absence of a causal relation. A sample may be randomly divided into a group that receives one treatment, T = 1, and a group that receives another, T = 2. The outcomes of the experiment are O(T = 1) and O(T = 2). We test statistically whether the probability distributions of O(T = 1) and O(T = 2) are the same or not. If our test decides they are not the same, we infer that T causes O. Probabilistic dependence of the value of O on the value of T implies causal connection, or contrapositively, no causal connection implies independence. If O(T = 1) and O(T = 2) have the same distribution, we infer that T does not cause O. Independence implies no causal connection. Generalizations of these relationships to multiple variables are known as the Causal Markov and Faithfulness conditions, respectively. Using these generalizations of experimental inference standards, Spirtes et al. (2001) proved that without the advantage of experimental controls, causal connections and their directions can sometimes be discovered; and it can sometimes be discovered that two variables share an unobserved common cause, and it can sometimes be discovered that they do not. The method has yielded independently confirmed predictions in space science, genetics, and elsewhere. These examples among many others (I have chosen them only because of their familiarity—to me), including Darwin’s arguments in The Origin of Species, show

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a kind of theory construction very different from the wanton inference from complexity and regularity in the universe to the existence of a designing deity. But they do not provide a neat criterion for separating science that goes beyond experience from natural religion that also attempts an escape. The most famous methodology containing an attempt at such a criterion, Popper’s, is in fact a tool for pseudo-scientists. Popper held that the distinguishing mark of real science is that it provides falsifiable theories. The method of science is to conjecture “bold,” i.e., falsifiable theories, try to falsify them, and when that succeeds, replace the original theory with another “bold” theory. The critical thing is that Popper provides no guide as to what parts of a body of claims should be changed when some observation or experiment contradicts it. Likewise, he provides no guidance for the succeeding theory, other than that it be bold. Conspiracy theories are bold. That the U.S. government planned the collapse of the Twin Towers or the CIA arranged the assassination of Kennedy are bold theories, if anything is. They make claims that, if we knew enough, could be falsified, and that is all Popper requires. The method of some conspiracy theorists is straightforwardly (one step) Popperian. Some feature or features in a complex conventional report of events are challenged on grounds of plausibility or found to be indisputably in error. Presto, reject the conventional report altogether and substitute a bold alternative conspiracy theory. A similar thing often happens with natural religionists whenever some scientists suggest some reformulation of the theory of evolution is required. The Dialogues left philosophical problems neither philosophy nor statistics has since solved. I have described only two of them: Find a feature or function of data, theory, and their logical or mathematical relations to one another that separates those pairings of theory and data that are scientific from those that are pseudo-scientific, and find similarly objective features that localize credit and blame within a theory when something in the data goes right, or wrong. For the most part, philosophy of science has ducked such problems, and where it has not, no satisfactory results have been obtained. I suspect Hume would not be displeased.7 Notes 1 See, for example, Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Miracle of Faith” ( Hinckley 2001). Hinckley was the 15th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Later-day Saints, i.e., The Mormons. 2 Hume lived in a time woven through with superstition aided by the force of government. While the King James Bible was common in Hume’s day, less than two centuries before Hume’s birth William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the New Testament (and just a bit of the Old) into English. John Locke, Hume’s philosophical parent, had urged tolerance of the narrowest kind, which likely would have excluded Hume. Britain conducted its last hanging for blasphemy 16 years before Hume was born, and Hume could not be sure it would be the last. Hume had only to look to France and Switzerland to see the hazards for his sometime friend, Rousseau. British law still bore heavily on non-conformists, Catholics, and Jews. But perhaps the most vivid caution was the case of Thomas Woolston. Woolston wrote a series of essays between 1727 and

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1729, Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour, in the spirit of Hume’s argument against the stories in the Pentateuch. Woolston’s last discourse was an attack on the truth of the Resurrection. Woolston was tried for blasphemy, convicted, and died in prison. Thomas Sherlock, William’s son, kept the episode live to memory for much of Hume’s lifetime through repeated editions of his The Tryal of the Witnesses, a defense of Woolston’s conviction. It is notable that in the Enquiry, Hume ridicules the stories of the Pentateuch, and writes that he would not believe reports of the resurrection of Queen Elizabeth, but carefully avoids mentioning the resurrection of Jesus. At least one writer sort of agrees. See Richard White (1988). Also, see the rather vacuous, W. B. Carnochan (1988). Bentley could have known no such thing. Newton could not prove the stability of the solar system, could not solve gravitational problems of three or more bodies, or explain the darkness of the night sky, a paradox for Newtonian theory commonly attributed to Olber, a Nineteenth-Century astronomer, but articulated by Halley and others in the Seventeenth Century, see Edward Robert Harrison (1987). Notably, Richard Swinburne (ms., “The Existence of God”), whose strategy (at least here) is to refute Hume’s arguments by ignoring them. (But see Swinburne (2004) where Hume is given more consideration.) For a rebuttal, see Fawkes and Smyth (1996). Unfortunately, to appearances, the third law was also contradicted by every collision of snowballs, of skeins of yarn, of rag dolls, of boots, of cats, indeed of all things soft. My thanks to Douglas Stalker, who is illuminating and fun to talk with about this and anything.

References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1967/1745. A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh. E. C. Mossner & J. V. Price (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hume, D. 2007/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. S. Buckle (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.) Hume, D. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. D. Coleman (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Other Primary Literature Warburton, W. 1757. Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Essay on the Natural History of Religion. London: T. Cadell. Secondary and Other Literature Carnochan, W. B. 1988. “The Comic Plot of Hume’s ‘Dialogues’”, Modern Philology, 85, 4, From Restoration to Revision: Essays in Honor of Gwin J. Kolb and Edward W. Rosenheim, 514–522. Fawkes, D. & Smyth, T. 1996. “Simplicity and Theology”, Religious Studies, 32, 259 – 270. Harrison, E. R. 1987. Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hinckley, G. B. 2001. “The Miracle of Faith”, General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 2001, Sunday Morning Session. https://www.lds.org/ general-conference/2001/04/the-miracle-of-faith?lang=eng

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Jantzen, B. C. 2014. An Introduction to Design Arguments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perl, M. R. 1966. “Newton’s Justification of the Laws of Motion”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27, 4, 585–592. Spirtes, P., Glymour, C. & Scheines, R. 2001. Causation, Prediction, and Search (2nd ed.). Cambrdge: MIT Press. Swinburne, R. 2004. The Existence of God (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swinburne, R. ms. “The Existence of God”, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~orie0087/pdf_files/ General%20untechnical%20papers/The%20Existence%20of%20God.pdf. White, R. 1988. “Hume’s Dialogues and the Comedy of Religion” Hume Studies, 14, 2, 390–407.

Part 2

Theistic “Proofs”

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A Bayesian Double Negative A Critique of Hume’s Treatment of the Design Argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and a Critique of the Design Argument Itself Elliott Sober

3.1 Introduction The assessment of Hume’s Dialogues that I develop here draws on a theoretical framework that Hume did not have. Hume’s protagonists treat the design argument as an argument from analogy and as an inductive argument, but they never formulate it by using the conception of probability adumbrated by Hume’s contemporary, Thomas Bayes. Bayes’s “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” was published posthumously in 1763 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, though it was probably written some two decades before. Bayes’s paper helped give rise to the body of ideas now known as “Bayesianism.” Hume was no Bayesian, but he might have been, were it not for an accident of history. After Bayes’s death, his relatives entrusted the publication of the essay to his friend, Richard Price. Price was also a friend of Hume’s. Price (1767) raised some good Bayesian objections to Hume’s (1748) skeptical argument about miracles. Hume responded that Price’s challenge was “new and plausible and ingenious” (in Fieser 2005, 234), but there is no sign that Hume developed a reply to them. As far as we know, Hume and Bayes never met. That is too bad, as the inductive skeptic might have learned something of value from the probabilist. Maybe the Dialogues would have been different as a result. It also is unfortunate that Price never commented in print on Hume’s Dialogues (see Fieser 2005, 460). He surely would have been critical. Section 3.2 of the first of Price’s Four Dissertations is called “Arguments for Providence from the General Laws and Constitution of the World.” Here Price seeks to demonstrate “the wisdom manifested in the structure of every object in inanimate creation” (Price 1990/1767, 54–55). Price also endorses the design argument in his Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of the Deity, saying that “it is impossible to survey the world without being assured, that the contrivance in it has proceeded from some contriver, the design in it from some designing cause, and the art it displays from some artist” (Price 1974/1787, 489–490).1 Although the Dialogues were published in 1779, the final version was substantially in place by 1751; Hume tinkered a bit in two rounds of revisions, but nothing of a Bayesian character emerged. Hume’s interactions with Price began around 1767, but DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-6

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Price’s Bayesianism apparently had no effect on how the Dialogues turned out (see Ferguson 2002, 117–118). Bayes was one of Hume’s missed opportunities and Price another, but there is a third might-have-been. John Arbuthnot’s (1710) essay, “An Argument for Divine Providence, Taken from the Constant Regularity Observ’d in the Births of Both Sexes,” was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the same venue where Bayes’s essay would later appear. Arbuthnot took London christening records to show that slightly more boys than girls were born in each of the 80 years he surveyed. Assuming that the excess of males dwindles as babies grow up, with the result that the sex ratio is even at the age of marriage, Arbuthnot argued that the biased sex ratio at birth favors the hypothesis of intelligent design over the hypothesis of mindless chance (Sober 2011, Ch. 3).2 The argument was probabilistic and it was widely discussed in Hume’s day. Although Hume does not address Arbuthnot’s argument in the Dialogues or anywhere else, Hume could have drawn on his own discussion of probability in the Treatise of Human Nature to mount a criticism (Kemp 2014).3 As mentioned, Hume gives a lot of weight in the Dialogues to the idea that the design argument is an argument from analogy, but Arbuthnot’s design argument is not an analogy argument. Perhaps if Hume had discussed Arbuthnot, the Dialogues would have had a different shape.4 In what follows, I criticize Hume’s understanding of the logic of the design argument, but my goal is not to chide Hume for his shortcomings. Rather, my essay is addressed to philosophers of the present, many of whom think that Hume demolished the argument from design. Not that I think that the argument is now alive and well, nor do I think that the argument was in fine shape until Darwin (1859) published his theory. Hume was right that the design argument is flawed. It is the details of his case for this negative verdict that I wish to challenge. Bayesianism will play a double role in this chapter. It will provide tools for criticizing what the discussants in the Dialogues say about the design argument, and it will also provide tools for criticizing the design argument itself. 3.2 Preliminaries The design argument is the main subject of the Dialogues, but what is that argument? We can address this question by asking what the argument’s premises are and what conclusion those premises are said to establish. Let’s start with the conclusion. The design argument is now standardly taken to be an argument for the existence of God, and this is how Cleanthes understands the design argument in Part II.5 when he says that the argument “proves the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intellect.” Yet, at the start of the Dialogues, the three discussants present a different picture of what the name of the game is. They agree that God exists and say that their task will be to identify the attributes that God possesses. This agreement is made possible by the fact that Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo give “God” a minimal meaning. It simply names the cause (or

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causes) of the universe, whatever they are. God need not have a mind, and he need not be worthy of worship. Later in the Dialogues, Philo discusses three alternatives to the hypothesis of intelligent design ─ the Epicurean hypothesis, the hypothesis that matter possesses a secret principle of order, and the hypothesis that the universe we inhabit is due to the mindless reproduction of a parent universe. He argues that each of these hypotheses is at least as plausible as the hypothesis that our universe was produced by an intelligent designer. Philo’s conclusion sounds to the modern ear like agnosticism, but “agnosticism” is the wrong term, given the definition of “God” that Hume has put in play. Hume could easily have used a less austere concept of God, and then the Dialogues would have been about the existence of God, not just about God’s properties. Prudence may have led Hume to avoid this path, but there was also the fact that he wanted to make room for the views of Demea, who holds that God exists but is so incomprehensible that it is impossible for human beings to describe God’s moral and intellectual properties. Turning now to the premises of the design argument, we need to distinguish three separate bodies of fact about the natural world that Cleanthes, the defender of the design argument, cites as evidence. The first is the one that gets the most air time. Cleanthes repeatedly points to the adaptive features of organisms. In Part II.9, he mentions that legs are well adapted to the task of walking. In Part III.7, he cites the anatomy of the eye, the fitting together of the males and females in each species, and the fact that organisms reproduce.5 This line of argument is familiar to us moderns, thanks to the repeated attacks on evolutionary theory waged by Twentieth-Century creationists and their successors. The second line of argument involves nonliving things that are useful to human beings, but not made by them. In Part VIII.10, Cleanthes says that “if no loadstone had been framed to give that wonderful and useful direction to the needle, would human society and the human kind have been immediately extinguished? Though the maxims of nature be in general very frugal, yet instances of this kind are far from being rare; and any one of them is a sufficient proof of design.” Cleanthes is struck by the fact that nature has furnished us with magnets, even though they are not necessary for our survival. But are magnets evidence of intelligent design? If they are, so are streams and rocks, which people also find useful. Paley (1802), the famous post-Humean popularizer of the design argument, denies that this is so; he says that the watch on the heath is evidence, but that the stone on the heath is not.6 Cleanthes (who mentions watches in Part II.14) went further than Paley. Cleanthes frames his third line of argument in Part III.8 when he says that “whatever cavils may be urged, an orderly world … will still be received as an incontestable proof of design and intention.” He also mentions this fact in Part IV.13: The order and arrangement of nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or author. The heavens and the earth join in the same testimony: The whole chorus of nature raises one hymn to the praises of its creator.

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It isn’t clear in this passage whether Cleanthes means for “the order and arrangement of nature” to be distinct from “the curious adjustment of final causes,” but, in fact, they are distinct. The evidence for the existence of God thus extends beyond physical objects like eyes and loadstones; the law-governed, orderly character of nature as a whole is also a premise on which the design argument builds.7 These three design arguments—one about organisms, the other about magnets and their ilk, and the third about the laws of nature—have fared somewhat differently between Hume’s day and our own. Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution by mindless natural selection provided a concrete alternative to the organismic design argument. In the Dialogues, Philo adumbrates alternatives to the hypothesis of intelligent design, but he doesn’t argue that any of them is true. Rather, his bottom line is that we should suspend judgment as to which of these competing hypotheses is correct. Darwin did something more. He not only presented a possible alternative to intelligent design; he provided evidence for his theory and replied to possible objections. Thanks to Darwin and the biologists who followed in his footsteps, the organismic design argument has faded in importance, the misguided objections of creationists notwithstanding. Darwin’s theory, and its subsequent scientific elaboration, offer no explanation for why magnets exist. That’s the province of the physical sciences, not biology. But what Darwin did for organisms, these other sciences have done for loadstones. These sciences, guided by the principle of methodological naturalism, have found naturalistic explanations that make no appeal to intelligent design of the useful materials found here on Earth. Where there are open questions, scientists now work away at them, again under the guidance of naturalism. What should a methodological naturalist make of the claim that loadstones exist because they help human beings? Magnets existed long before human beings evolved, so how could human utility explain why there are magnets here on Earth? One possibility is that God is the common cause of magnets and of humans, with magnets planted on Earth so that humans would later find them. This suggestion, of course, violates methodological naturalism. A second possibility is that human utility explains the presence of magnets, where the explanation is teleological, non-theological, and non-causal. I think it is fair to say that this conception has no place in current science.8 Facts about the organic and the inorganic world must be brought together in an explanation of adaptedness. This is because adaptedness is a relationship between organism and environment. The design argument in the time that Hume was writing traces the organic and the inorganic worlds back to a common cause—a cause that ensures that they are in harmony. Darwin’s theory replaces that common cause with the physical environment’s having its natural causes and the adaptedness of organisms being caused by the environments in which organisms find themselves. Both models postulate two causal arrows, as shown in Figure 3.1. Darwin’s theory does not entail that there is no intelligent designer; his theory leaves it open that the physical universe may have been produced by one (Sober 2011, Ch. 4). As Darwin (1959/1859, 488) says, his theory is limited to “secondary causes,” meaning that “first causes” go unmentioned. One of Darwin’s arrows

A Bayesian Double Negative Features of organisms

Features of the inorganic environment

Intelligent Designer (Cleanthes)

Features of organisms

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Features of the inorganic environment

Physical causes (Darwin)

Figure 3.1 The relationship of the organic and the inorganic environment, according to Cleanthes, differs from that postulated by Darwin.

involves natural selection, but the other does not. Cleanthes’s two arrows are of the same type; both represent the execution of an intelligent plan.9 The third strand in the design argument—the one based on the fact that the universe is law-governed—has had a different fate. Scientists explain laws by deducing them from other, deeper laws (perhaps when supplemented by assumptions about initial conditions). But if there are fundamental laws—laws that can’t be explained by other laws—science cannot explain why they are true.10 Of course, science can muster plenty of evidence for such laws. But giving evidence for X and explaining why X is true are different tasks, as Cleanthes notes in Part IV.13. Newton had lots of evidence for his theory of gravitation, but no explanation for why the theory is true.11 I have two last preliminary points. First, Philo in Part II.4 maintains that we have no conception of God, because we have no experience of him.12 Here experience presumably means “direct” experience; otherwise, if God exists and is the first cause of everything that exists in the universe, then we do have indirect experience of him. Philo’s comment is odd, in that he earlier agreed that God exists. In any event, direct experience is too strong a criterion for a concept’s being meaningful; scientists talk meaningfully about objects that are too small, or too far away in space, or too far in the future or past for us to directly experience. The second point is that Philo sometimes harps on how different God is from human intelligent designers. God is supposed to be infinitely powerful, knowing, and good (all-PKG); he also is supposed to be simple, eternal, and unchanging. Philo focuses on this conception of God because it is of obvious relevance to the audience that Hume wants to address. Cleanthes endorses that conception in Part XII.24 under the heading of “genuine theism,” but earlier, in Part XI.1, he tries to broaden the question by saying that he is content to say that God is very PKG. I agree with Cleanthes that Philo’s insistence that God is all-PKG is too restrictive. It would be very big news indeed if a sound design argument could show that the universe was produced by a less-than-perfect intelligent designer or that the organisms that now inhabit the Earth are all descended from an original stock of ancestors that were built by a less-thanperfect intelligent designer. The design argument needs to be considered with

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the all-PKG definition of God in mind, but also with the idea that intelligent designers need not be all-PKG.13 3.3 Inductive Sampling Although the discussants in the Dialogues mainly construe the design argument as an argument from analogy, Philo at one point understands it as an argument based on inductive sampling. In Part II.24, he says that to make the design argument secure, “it were requisite, that we had experience of the origin of worlds; and it is not sufficient surely, that we have seen ships and cities arise from human art and contrivance.” Philo’s criticism is that the design argument’s sample size is zero. The problem with this criticism is that it deploys an epistemology that is much too narrow; scientists in the Twentieth Century made progress in understanding the origin of our universe, but not by directly observing the births of multiple universes (Sober 2008, Ch. 2). There is more to scientific reasoning than inductive sampling. 3.4 The Logic of Analogy Arguments In Part II.7, Philo endorses two principles of analogical reasoning; the labels are mine, though the wording is mainly from Hume: (EXACT) When two cases are exactly alike, we have a perfect assurance that they will have a similar event. (DEGREE) When two cases are less than exactly alike, the evidence that they will have a similar event is weaker the less similar they are. Philo’s talk of two cases having a “similar event” is a little obscure, but its import is clear from the illustrative examples he provides. Philo explains EXACT by pointing out that we have observed many stones and have seen that they all fall when released above the earth’s surface, and that we have observed many fires and have seen that they all burn. What should we think of the stones and fires that we have not observed? Philo says that we are entitled to be certain that they fall and burn because they are exactly like the fires and stones we have observed. Philo illustrates DEGREE by discussing the circulation of blood. We observe that blood circulates in human beings, but suppose we have not observed whether the same thing happens in dogs, frogs, fishes, or plants. Since dogs resemble human beings more than frogs and fishes do, we should be more confident that dogs circulate blood than that frogs and fishes do. And since plants resemble human beings even less than frogs and fishes do, we should be less certain that plants circulate blood. Although the examples concerning rocks and fires involve inferring effects from observed causes, the design argument infers causes from observed effects. Even so, it is possible to understand Philo’s ideas about analogical reasoning so that they apply to both types of inference. An analogy argument concludes that one object has trait T based on the fact that a second object is observed to have

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trait T. I’ll call the first object “Target” and the second “Analog.” The inference is stronger the more similar Target and Analog are observed to be. Here is the formalism that Philo’s comments suggest (Sober 1993): The degree of observed similarity between Analog and Target is p. Analog has trait T. (FORM) p[═══════════════] Target has trait T. Notice that the letter “p” occurs twice in FORM. It characterizes how similar Analog and Target are observed to be, and it characterizes the probability that the premises confer on the conclusion. The degree of observed similarity between Target and Analog is ascertained by scoring each of them for each of n traits, and noting how often Target and Analog match. Degree of similarity and probability both get represented by numbers between 0 and 1. An observed similarity of 0 means that the two objects have no observed traits in common; a similarity of 1 means that they are the same in all observed respects. A probability of 1 means that the premises make the conclusion absolutely certain. A probability of 0 means that the premises make it certain that the conclusion is false. Philo’s EXACT and DEGREE principles each find a home in FORM.14 There is an interpretation of EXACT and DEGREE that is more modest than the one provided by FORM. It says that the probability that Target has trait T is a strictly increasing function of the overall similarity observed between Target and Analog. This comports with what Philo says, but it fails to dictate what the probability is that Target has trait T for a given observed degree of similarity. That defect can be removed by embracing a specific function; examples are shown in Figure 3.2. FORM corresponds to the straight line (thus capturing Philo’s remark that reducing the degree of similarity “proportionably” weakens the strength of the inference).

1

Probability that Target has trait T

0 0

n

Number of observed matches of Target and Analog in n traits

Figure 3.2 Four possible functions that describe how the number of observed matches dtetermines the probability that Target has trait T.

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Cleanthes has a neat reply in Part II.9 to Philo’s second principle of analogical inference, the one I’ve called DEGREE. Cleanthes thinks that overall similarity is bunk: But is the whole adjustment of means to ends in a house and in the universe so slight a resemblance? The economy of final causes? The order, proportion, and arrangement of every part? Steps of a stair are plainly contrived, that human legs may use them in mounting; and this inference is certain and infallible. Human legs are also contrived for walking and mounting; and this inference, I allow, is not altogether so certain, because of the dissimilarity which you remark; but does it, therefore, deserve the name only of presumption or conjecture? We know that stairs and legs both have a function. Since we know by observation that stairs are made by intelligent designers, Cleanthes thinks we should be very confident that legs were made by an intelligent designer. This inference is strong, he says, despite the numerous differences that separate legs from stairs. Stairs are made of wood; legs are not. Legs have hair; stairs do not. And so on. These dissimilarities may matter, but they don’t matter much, compared with the one stunning similarity that Cleanthes cites, or so Cleanthes claims. Cleanthes is right. Some similarities count more than others. And some similarities count in favor of intelligent design more than some differences count against it. We can see this last point by returning to the examples that Philo offers on behalf of EXACT. Rocks differ from each other in numerous respects, and so do fires, but that should not destroy our confidence that unobserved rocks always fall and that unobserved fires always burn.15 Philo’s rules for analogical reasoning, as codified by FORM, involve the principle of one trait, one vote.16 For each of n dichotomous traits ±T1, ±T2, … , ±Tn, if there are m matches, then the probability that the Target object has trait T is m/n. One person, one vote is good political philosophy, but one trait, one vote is bad epistemology.17 Notice that Cleanthes’ point applies to all the functions shown in Figure 3.2.18 Philo’s understanding of analogy arguments allows him to assess how strongly the observed similarity between the universe and various human artifacts supports the conclusion that the universe was produced by an intelligent designer. His conclusion, stated several times, is “not very.” The universe is very unlike a human tool, and so the most you can conclude is that the causes of order in the universe bear some “remote analogy” to the minds of human tool makers (Part XII.7). Philo produces a variant of this line of reasoning when he says in Part VII.3 that the universe is more like a mindless animal than it is like a machine, and so the cause that produced our universe must be more like mindless animal reproduction than it is like intelligent design. Until the end of the Dialogues, Philo is happy to calibrate degrees of similarity and to draw negative conclusions about the design argument. Then, in Part XII, everything changes. Philo continues to understand the design argument as an analogical argument, but now he refuses to affirm or deny the first premise in FORM. Degrees of similarity are unknowable—in fact, they are not even well defined—and so the design argument is said to collapse.

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3.5 Philo’s Stake-Through-the-Heart Argument in Part XII Philo says that people are rightly annoyed by merely verbal disputes, and that these are easily resolved by pointing out that the disputants are using the same word with different meanings. He then notes that there is another sort of dispute that cannot be resolved “by any precaution or any definitions.” Here is the key passage (XII.7): These are the controversies concerning the degrees of any quality or circumstance. Men may argue to all eternity, whether Hannibal be a great, or a very great, or a superlatively great man, what degree of beauty Cleopatra possessed, what epithet of praise Livy or Thucydides is entitled to, without bringing the controversy to any determination. According to Philo, it is meaningful to ask how heavy an apple is or how many apples there are in a basket, but greatness, beauty, and praise-worthiness aren’t like this. This is because “the degrees of these qualities are not, like quantity or number, susceptible of any exact mensuration” (XII.7). How do Philo’s points about these evaluative properties apply to the design argument? There are three interpretations to consider. He says that the theist and the atheist are arguing about a question that “admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination” (XII.7). Is Philo thinking that the universe and a house are similar in some respects but different in others, with the result that there is no fact of the matter as to how similar they are to each other overall? If this were correct, the same conclusion would apply to any two objects—and thus to the analogy arguments about rocks and fires that Philo earlier says are straightforward. But that point to one side, there is a distinct problem for Philo’s objection when it is interpreted in this way. The design argument does not require a numerical value that represents how similar the universe and a watch are. There are two reasons for this. First, recall that FORM’s first premise concerns the degree of observed similarity; one needn’t consider all the characteristics (observed and unobserved) that Target and Analog share. The second reason that a number isn’t needed is that the argument between Philo and Cleanthes concerns comparative judgments. As noted above, Philo is happy to argue as follows (VII.3): The world resembles more an animal or a vegetable than it does a watch or a knitting loom. Its cause, therefore, it is more probable, resembles the cause of the former. The cause of the former is generation or vegetation. The cause, therefore, of the world, we may infer to be something similar or analogous to generation or vegetation. This comparative judgment apparently is enough for Philo to conclude that the hypothesis of an intelligent designer is no better than the hypothesis that our universe stems from a parent universe’s mindlessly giving birth to an offspring universe. Symmetrically, if Cleanthes could show that the universe is more

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similar to a watch than it is to a mindless animal, he could claim that intelligent design is the better hypothesis. No numbers are needed here; an inequality suffices. Notice also that FORM does not require that boundaries be drawn between a very strong analogy, a strong analogy, a somewhat weak analogy, and a very weak analogy, Philo’s comment about Hannibal notwithstanding. A second interpretation of Philo’s point is worth considering. I just interpreted it as a challenge to the design argument’s description of what we observe. But perhaps Philo’s point concerns the conclusion of the argument—that the universe was produced by an intelligent designer, just as a watch was. Perhaps Philo’s demand is that we need to calibrate how similar the one designer is to the other. But here again, a number isn’t needed. The design argument can simply assert that the designer of the universe is far more intelligent and powerful than any human being. In any event, FORM does not require even this comparative claim. There is a third possible interpretation of Philo’s point about calibrating how similar the universe and a watch are. The challenge is to say how much similarity between the universe and an artifact is needed for it to be reasonable to believe that the universe has an intelligent designer—51%, 90%, 99%? This problem arises even if you buy Philo’s dubious principle of one trait, one vote. However, the challenge dissolves once you notice that FORM makes no use of the concept of dichotomous belief. An analogy argument allows you to say how probable it is that Target has trait T, but how probable is probable enough for outright belief? This question applies to any argument, analogical or not, theological or not, that moves from the probability that a hypothesis has, given the evidence at hand, to a conclusion about whether the proposition should be believed. Perhaps a probability of at least ½ is necessary for belief, but what is the smallest probability above ½ that suffices for belief? Maybe there is no uniquely correct threshold. If this is Philo’s point, I agree with him, though it doesn’t undermine the design argument. We ought to be suspicious of the dichotomous concept of belief.19 Though it often provides a convenient shorthand, the quantitative concept of degrees of certainty is a better tool in epistemology. Philo’s doubts about the design argument in Part XII do not challenge the correctness of FORM as a rule of inference. Rather, his point is that there is no way to make sense of FORM’s first premise. Of the three interpretations I offered of why this problem is supposed to arise, I prefer the first. Understood in this way, Philo’s challenge concerns the principle of one trait, one vote. His point is that it is unclear how much weight to give to the observed similarities that connect a watch and the universe and how much weight to give to their differences. 3.6 A Bayesian treatment of the Design Argument Bayes’s theorem20 describes what you need to think about if you want to decide how probable it is that our universe was made by an intelligent designer. Let D be the design hypothesis and O be a proposition describing the features that you have observed the universe to have. We want to figure out whether Pr(D|O) is high, low, or middling. Pr(D|O) is the posterior probability that D has; it is the

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probability the design hypothesis has after we take the observations into account. Read “Pr(D|O)” as the probability of D, given O. According to Bayes’s theorem, the value of this probability depends on three other quantities: Pr(D|O) =

Pr(O|D)Pr(D) . Pr(O)

Pr(D) is D’s prior probability, the probability that D has before you take the observations O into account. Pr(O|D) is the probability that D confers on O; it is standard to call this D’s likelihood (a very infelicitous terminology!). And Pr(O) is the unconditional probability of the observations. It may seem that the value of Pr(D|O) depends just on the propositions D and O, since no alternative hypothesis appears to be mentioned in Bayes’s theorem. This appearance is misleading. “Pr(O)” is where the alternative hypotheses are hidden. The theorem on total probability says that Pr(O) = Pr(O|D)Pr(D) + Pr(O|notD)Pr(notD).

More generally, if there are n exclusive and exhaustive alternatives to D (call them A1, A2, … , An), the theorem says that Pr(O) = Pr(O|D)Pr(D) + Pr(O|A1)Pr(A1) + Pr(O|A2)Pr(A2) + … +Pr(O|A n)Pr(A n).

The value of Pr(O) depends on the prior probabilities of alternative hypotheses and on their likelihoods. Thus, Bayes’s theorem involves contrastive considerations in that it says that the value of Pr(D|O) depends on facts about hypotheses that are alternative to D. Both of the expansions just mentioned of Pr(O) pose problems for the design argument. We don’t know all the possible alternatives to intelligent design. Philo mentions three, but he rightly says in Part VIII.1 that there may be more. And it doesn’t help to focus just on the first expansion of Pr(O). The problem here is that Pr(O|notD) represents the likelihood of a “catchall” hypothesis; “notD” covers all possible alternatives to D, even ones that have not yet been formulated. My worry about this catchall is not specific to the design argument. In science, we often can’t enumerate all possible alternatives to a given theory, and there is often no saying what the likelihood (in the technical sense) of a catchall hypothesis is. Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s theory of relativity have this feature; the catchall alternative to each (i.e., their negations) is a quagmire (Sober 2008, Ch. 2). It may seem like a truism that science is in the business of deciding how probable various theories are, but I think this “truism” is false. Fortunately, there is a way to circumvent this difficulty. Instead of asking what the posterior probability of D is, let’s compare D with each of the alternatives

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that Philo mentions. Choose one of these alternatives and call it “A.” Bayes’s theorem allows us to describe a necessary and sufficient condition for Pr(D|O) to be greater than Pr(A|O). Both Philo and Cleanthes want to solve this comparative problem. Here is its Bayesian representation: Pr(D|O) Pr(O|D) Pr(D) = × . Pr(A|O) Pr(O|A) Pr(A)

This equation is called the odds formulation of Bayes’s theorem. It says that the ratio of posterior probabilities equals the likelihood ratio times the ratio of prior probabilities. Notice that Pr(O) has mercifully disappeared. This equation says that if D is going to have a higher posterior probability than A, then D must have the higher likelihood or the higher prior. This helps organize our assessment of the design hypothesis relative to various competitors. For example, if the likelihood ratio is much larger than one (e.g., it’s 1000), the posterior probability of design can be greater than the posterior probability of the alternative even if the ratio of the prior probabilities is considerably less than one (e.g., the ratio of priors is 1/500). Notice finally that there is no mention here of how similar the universe is to a watch, or of how similar God is to a human watchmaker. What matters to the Bayesian comparison of the two hypotheses are just the likelihoods and the priors. Defenders of the design argument, defenders of one of the alternative hypotheses mentioned, and defenders of “mitigated skepticism” all have work to do. Showing that two posterior probabilities are about equal is just as substantive a task as showing that they are very unequal. Although the problem of assigning a value to Pr(O) no longer stands in our way, there is a different problem to consider. Assessing which hypothesis has the higher posterior probability requires assumptions about the values of the prior probabilities. I see no way to defend an assignment of priors in this problem. Before you look at the data, what is the probability of the design hypothesis, the Epicurean hypothesis, and the others that Philo considers? I am not demanding that point values for the prior probabilities be provided. How is one to defend the claim that the priors are approximately equal or the claim that one of them is a lot bigger than the other? This problem is not specific to the argument from design. I have no idea what prior probability should be assigned to general relativity or to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Of course, you can set aside the issue of justification and just describe how confident you happen to be in each of the competing hypotheses before any observations are made. The problem is that the priors you use will have no probative force. A traditional “solution” to the problem of priors is to invoke the principle of indifference. This principle says that if hypotheses H1, H2, … , Hn are exclusive and exhaustive, and you have no reason to think any of them is more probable than the others, then you should assign each a probability of 1/n. Thus, if you have no reason to think that “God exists” and “No God exists” differ in probability, you should assign each a probability of ½. And if you are likewise indifferent among “The Christian God exists,” “A non-Christian God exists,”

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and “No God exists,” you should assign each a probability of ⅓. If both of these applications of the principle of indifference are right, “No God exists” should be assigned a priori probability of ½ and also a prior of ⅓. It remains unclear how one way of slicing up possibilities over the other could be justified. In Part VIII.1, Philo says: “I believe that I could, in an instant, propose other systems of cosmogony, which would have some faint appearance of truth; though it is a thousand, a million to one, if either yours or any one of mine be the true system.” Philo does not say how he comes by these long odds, but I suspect that the principle of indifference may be in the background. Salmon (1978, 151–153) says that Hume was right to think that the hypothesis of intelligent design has a low prior probability. For Salmon, the priors that figure in an assessment of the design argument are grounded in observed frequencies. He says that we have never observed a disembodied intelligence acting to produce things, and for this reason, the prior probability of the design hypothesis should be zero. Sobel (2003, 263) has a similar interpretation of Hume. Since the intelligent designer that Hume is considering is quite extraordinary, and since we have rarely or never observed such a being, Sobel’s Hume concludes that the existence of such a being has a very low prior probability. Although Salmon and Sobel’s Hume need not appeal to the principle of indifference, their Hume has a problem all the same. If our observations were a large random sample drawn from the entire universe, then the failure to ever observe an object with trait T would be a good reason to assign a low prior probability to “there exists an object that has trait T.” But it is obvious that our observations aren’t obtained in this way. We have no chance of sampling objects that are remote from us in space and time, and random sampling can’t result in our observing things that are unobservable. The God discussed in the Dialogues is not like a ball in an urn. This is why observed frequencies don’t ground the assignment of a prior probability in this instance.21 If Bayesians can’t tell you what the posterior probability is of the design hypothesis, and can’t even tell you whether this hypothesis has a higher posterior probability than one of the alternatives that Philo describes, what can a Bayesian analysis accomplish? This brings me to a new question: do the observations that Philo and Cleanthes discuss favor intelligent design over any of the competing hypotheses that they consider? In asking this question, I use “favoring” in the sense described by the law of likelihood (Hacking 1965): The law of likelihood: Observation O favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if and only if Pr(O | H1) > Pr(O | H2). Here’s a simple example that I hope makes the law prima facie plausible. An urn is filled with balls and each ball has a color. Consider the following two hypotheses about the urn’s composition: H1: The urn contains 60% green balls. H2: The urn contains 10% green balls.

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You randomly sample 100 balls from the urn and find that 70 are green. This observation would be less surprising if H1 were true than it would be if H2 were true. The observation therefore favors H1 over H2, though it does not prove that one of them is true and the other is false. For further discussion of the law of likelihood’s justification, see Sober (2008, 32–48) and Sober (2024). Although the law makes no mention of prior or posterior probabilities, it is relevant to how these two are related to each other. As the odds formulation of Bayes’s theorem makes plain, the only way the ratio of posterior probabilities can differ from the ratio of priors is for the likelihood ratio to differ from unity. The Bayesian analysis of the design argument that I have described so far has had little to say about analogy. But now, with the appearance of the law of likelihood, we can understand analogy’s proper role. Suppose that a mindless random process is the alternative to intelligent design that we wish to consider. Friends of the design argument, present and past, can be viewed as advancing the following thesis. They claim that the same logic that leads you to recognize that Pr(the features of a watch | the watch was built by an intelligent designer) > Pr(the features of a watch | the watch was caused to exist by a mindless random process) also justifies the conclusion that Pr(the features of organisms | organisms were built by an intelligent designer) > Pr(the features of organisms | organisms were caused to exist by a mindless random process). The proper analogy claim is that the two likelihood inequalities are analogous; anyone persuaded of the one should see that the other is compelling as well. It doesn’t matter how overall similar watches and organisms are. The role of analogy in the design argument is heuristic (Sober 1993, 2004a). This, of course, doesn’t mean that the two inequalities stand or fall together; I am describing what the design argument says, which is not to claim that what the argument says is true. When Philo talks about the three alternatives to the design hypothesis, he emphasizes that what we observe in our universe could have arisen by each of these processes. He also grants that an intelligent designer could have produced what we observe as well. This may seem to ground Philo’s skepticism, that we should suspend judgment about which of these hypotheses is true, but nothing of the kind follows. The claim that alternative A could produce what we observe (O) can be represented by saying that Pr(O|A) is greater than zero. By the same token, Pr(O|D) is non-zero as well. However, the fact that the two likelihoods are both positive doesn’t show that they are equal in value, or approximately equal. The point about non-zero fails to justify a skeptical conclusion. Can more be said about the values of these likelihoods than just that each is positive? When we consider the design hypothesis we run into a problem. If the vertebrate eye were produced by an intelligent designer, what is the probability that

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it would have the features (F) that we observe? There is no answering this question, even approximately, unless we know something about the designer’s goals and abilities. The assumption that the putative designer is all-PKG is of little help. An all-powerful and all-knowing designer can do anything that is possible, but what’s the probability that this God would have chosen the features for the eye that we observe? This problem is especially acute when we attend to non-adaptive features. The vertebrate eye has a blindspot but the octopus eye does not. What is the probability that an all-PKG God would withhold a favor from us while granting it to octopuses?22 The same question arises if we shift from all-PKG to very. There are two ways that friends of the design argument might seek to address this problem. One involves beefing up the design hypothesis; the other involves slimming down the observations. Instead of trying to assign a value to the following probability Pr(the vertebrate eye has features F | the vertebrate eye was created by an allPKG God), they might choose to focus on (Beef Up) Pr(the vertebrate eye has features F | the eye was created by an allPKG God who wanted above all that the vertebrate eye should have features F) or on (Slim Down) Pr(the vertebrate eye has at least one adaptive characteristic | the vertebrate eye was created by an all-PKG God). Both these likelihoods have values than which none greater can be conceived. The alternative hypotheses that Hume contemplates, and that modern evolutionary theory suggests, cannot have likelihoods that are bigger. The slimming-down strategy involves an important concession—that the design hypothesis is no longer asked to explain the detailed features that organisms have. A scientific theory should be able to do better, and evolutionary biology has achieved that goal.23 The beefing-up strategy can deal with details, but it addresses them ad hoc. The resulting hypotheses (one for the vertebrate eye, another for the bat’s wing, etc.) accommodate each of your observations, but they cannot predict any new observations that you might make.24 The law of likelihood is all about which hypotheses accommodate old data better and which worse. If you instead are interested in assessing which hypotheses will more accurately predict new data, a new epistemology is needed. This is beyond the scope of the present essay.25 Beefing up ensures that the design hypothesis has a likelihood of one, but it is a game that two can play. Beefing up the hypothesis of natural selection likewise yields a hypothesis that has a likelihood of one. If you observe that the vertebrate eye has features F, you can formulate the hypothesis that natural selection caused the eye to have those features. Beefing up is a bad general strategy in science; it has the absurd implication that scientific problems cannot be solved by making observations.

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I have been skeptical that the likelihood inequality asserted by the design argument can be defended. Is the situation just as dire when Philo takes up the problem of evil in Part XI.15? Philo does not think so. He claims that the observations do discriminate among four hypotheses concerning the first causes of order in the universe. These are: “[1] that they are endowed with perfect goodness, [2] that they have perfect malice, [3] that they are opposite and have both goodness and malice; [4] that they have neither goodness nor malice.” Philo argues that the kinds and quantities of evil that we observe favor (4) over (1) and (2), and that the uniformity of nature favors (4) over (3). So the best hypothesis is that the first causes were indifferent to suffering. This isn’t skepticism. Philo’s argument prefigures what now gets called “the evidential argument from evil” (Howard-Snyder 1996), whose conclusion can be stated as a likelihood inequality: Pr(E | an all-PKG God exists) < Pr(E | no all-PKG God exists). Here, E is a proposition that describes the kinds and quantities of evils that exist. Skeptical theists object to the evidential argument from evil by saying that we have no clue as to why an all-PKG God would permit the evils we observe, so we can’t evaluate whether the left-hand likelihood is big or little. What skeptical theists say about evil resembles what I said earlier about the vertebrate eye. It is interesting that Philo’s skepticism does not lead him to a skeptical conclusion concerning the problem of evil (Dougherty 2014). The challenge to say more about likelihoods than that they are nonzero also applies to the hypotheses that Philo considers as alternatives to intelligent design. Consider Philo’s presentation of the Epicurean hypothesis in Part VIII.2. He describes a finite number of particles moving at random over infinite time. They sometimes bump into each other and form combinations that persist, with the eventual result that the world is populated with well-adapted organisms. Philo’s skeptical conclusion is that the observations do not favor intelligent design over this competitor. It is natural to represent this as an approximate equality: Pr(the adaptive features of organisms | intelligent design) ≈ Pr(the adaptive features of organisms | Epicureanism & infinite time). Paley (1802, Ch. 5) advances a separate criticism of Epicureanism. He says that it predicts that there should be centaurs and unicorns.26 Good point, but why does Paley not consider why an all-PKG God would have failed to create those creatures? Philo has an answer to Paley’s point about centaurs & co. In Part VI.11, Cleanthes argues that the universe is young. He says that if the universe were infinitely old, the Romans who first arrived in Gaul would have found wine grapes already growing there, but they did not. Philo replies that the world can be infinitely old if catastrophes periodically wipe out its occupants. If so, what we now observe hasn’t had infinite time to come into existence.27 But what does finite time do to the Epicurean’s ability to explain why the world now contains organisms that exhibit a particular array of adaptive features? If the time since the

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last mass extinction is too short, the existence of these adaptations will be very improbable; if it is too long, there should be centaurs and unicorns. Where is the sweet spot for Epicureanism?28 Likelihoods also throw light on a criticism that Cleanthes makes in Part II.14 of Philo’s hypothesis that matter possesses a “hidden principle of order”: Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch: Stone, and mortar, and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. Experience, therefore, proves, that there is an original principle of order in mind, not in matter. Here’s a likelihood gloss of Cleanthes’s point: Pr(we don’t observe matter spontaneously ordering itself | matter is selforganizing) < Pr(we don’t observe matter spontaneously ordering itself | matter is not selforganizing). Perhaps Philo can reply as follows. Why think, if matter were (sometimes, in some contexts) self-organizing, that we’d observe this happen in the ordinary course of our human lives? Perhaps self-organization occurs only in special circumstances or occurred only long ago.29 This reply to Cleanthes’s objection is worth pondering, but it does not allow the hypothesis of self-organization to get off scot-free. As mentioned, it is hard to see what probability this hypothesis confers on the adaptive traits that organisms now possess. Philo’s alternative hypothesis and Cleanthes’s hypothesis of intelligent design have a common flaw. It is interesting that Philo’s discussion of alternatives to intelligent design sometimes takes place in the context of an analogy argument, but sometimes it does not. Philo appeals to analogy when he says that the universe is more like an organism than it is like a tool. But when he introduces the Epicurean hypothesis, he does not describe how similar the universe is to a roulette wheel. Instead, he leaves analogy behind and merely notes that a mindless monkeys-and-typewriters process can produce order, just as an intelligent designer can.30 Philo also abandons analogical thinking when he discusses the hypothesis that matter has a hidden principle of order, and also when he complains about the small sample size on which the design argument is based. 3.7 Philo’s Part XII Doubts, in Bayesian Garb The universe and a house are similar in some respects and different in others. Cleanthes and Philo agree that similarities strengthen the analogy and differences weaken it, and FORM tells us that the conclusion of an analogy argument gets more probable the larger the ratio is between observed similarities and observed

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dissimilarities. As noted, FORM involves the implausible assumption that all similarities are equally weighty pro and all differences are equally weighty con, but once we allow for different traits to have different weights in analogy arguments, there is a new problem. How should the testimonies of different traits be assembled into an overall assessment of the strength of the analogy? A similar problem arises in a Bayesian reconstruction of the design argument that focuses on likelihoods. A simple version of the problem arises when we observe that the universe has two traits, T1 and T2. For example, let T1 be the many intricate adaptations that organisms have and T2 be the quantity of evil in the world. For concreteness, let the Epicurean hypothesis be the alternative to intelligent design that we want to consider, and let’s suppose for the moment that the universe is young. Call this hypothesis “Chance.” Suppose that T1 favors Design over Chance whereas T2 has the opposite evidential significance. If T1 and T2 are independent of each other, conditional on each of the two hypotheses, we can expand the likelihood ratio of the two hypotheses as follows: Pr(T1 &T2 | Design) Pr (T1 | Design) Pr (T2 | Design) = × . Pr(T1 & T2 | Chance) Pr(T1 | Chance) Pr(T2 | Chance)

If the first likelihood ratio on the right-hand side is greater than one and the second is less than one, is their product greater than one? Something like Hume’s problem of weighting similarities against differences in analogy arguments now arises; the Bayesian problem is to weigh evidence pro against evidence con in a likelihood comparison. If all you know is that the first ratio is greater than one and the second is less, the problem is insoluble. There are no prior or posterior probabilities in this problem. Instead of asking whether the hypothesis of intelligent design is more probable than various alternative hypotheses, we are asking what the direction is in which the total evidence points. This problem, by the way, is not a problem that besets all likelihood assessments. 3.8 Concluding Comments In this chapter, I have used Bayesian ideas to assess Philo’s criticisms of the design argument and to assess the design argument itself. That double undertaking has issued in a double negative. Bayesianism leaves the design argument in tatters, but it has the same impact on Philo’s critique of that argument. The fact remains that there are many types of Bayesianism, and not all of them lead to the conclusions I have drawn. I mentioned that an extreme subjectivist style of Bayesianism will not balk at assigning values to prior probabilities and to the likelihoods of catchall hypotheses. If all you require for rationality is consistency with the axioms of probability, then an argument that shows that the design hypothesis has a high probability and an argument that draws the opposite conclusion from the same observations can be equally rational. It also needs saying that Bayesianism is not the only epistemology on the planet, so it is possible that the design argument will do better when a non-Bayesian framework is adopted.31

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The type of Bayesianism I have used in this chapter leads to a skeptical conclusion about the hypothesis of intelligent design, one that Philo and Hume might find congenial. My conclusion did not derive from calculating the posterior probabilities of competing hypotheses and claiming that they are the same or nearly so. Rather, I considered three Bayesian problems and argued that none of them can be solved. The first involves computing the posterior probability of the design hypothesis. The second involves saying whether the design hypothesis has a higher posterior probability than this or that alternative hypothesis. The third involves comparing the likelihoods of the competing hypotheses. I list these in order, from more ambitious to more modest. The Philo of Part XII was on to something, but the problem with the design argument is not that it is impossible to calibrate similarities and differences in order to gauge the overall strength of an analogy. Many commentators have praised Hume for the innovative ideas he develops in the Dialogues. Gaskin (1993, 328), for example, says that Hume “at the very least … put a massive and permanent question mark against a crucial piece of religious apologetics previously taken as unquestionable.” Hume did effect a daring sea-change, but his opening the door to modern conclusions is not paralleled by his helping develop modern methods for reaching those conclusions. Hume was remarkably untouched by the probability thinking going on around him. A rising tide sometimes fails to raise all boats. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Elizabeth Bell, Frank Cabrera, Ted Davis, Don Garrett, Casey Hart, Catherine Kemp, James Messina, Joshua Mund, Larry Shapiro, Peter Vranas, and Ken Williford for their suggestions. This essay was inspired by Earman’s (2000) splendid Bayesian critique of Hume’s argument about miracles; see Sober (2004b) for discussion. I have learned from Earman on this subject and on many others. This essay is dedicated to him. Notes 1 Price (1990/1767) seems to have been disinclined to apply Bayesian ideas to the argument from design; on the first page he says that belief in God is “the effect of immediate and irresistible perception, and not left to depend on abstruse reasonings and deductions.” However, in his introduction to Bayes’s 1763 paper, Price was more favorably disposed: The purpose I mean is, to shew what reason we have for believing that there are in the constitution of things fixt laws according to which things happen, and that, therefore, the frame of the world must be the effect of the wisdom and power of an intelligent cause; and thus to confirm the argument taken from final causes for the existence of the Deity. It will be easy to see that the converse problem solved in this essay is more directly applicable to this purpose; for it shews us, with distinctness and precision, in every case of any particular order or recurrency of events, what reason there is to think that such recurrency or order is derived from stable causes or regulations in nature, and not from any irregularities of chance.

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Elliott Sober Here, I think Price is formulating the design argument in terms of what is now called the law of likelihood, which I’ll discuss later. Arbuthnot was taking a potshot at Epicureanism; this was a popular pastime in Eighteenth-Century Britain (see, e.g., Mayo 1934 and Wilson 2008). As Kemp (2014) notes, Hume’s discussion in the Treatise (I.iii.11.6; Hume 2000/ 1739–40, 87) of a die that has 4 sides marked with the same number of spots and 2 sides marked with a different number resembles Nicholas Bernoulli’s reply to Arbuthnot, which Montmort published in 1713 ( Sober 2011, 96-98). Bernoulli describes a symmetrical 35-sided die of which 18 sides are white and 17 are black. Bernoulli’s point is that the biased sex ratio could be due to a mindless chance process. Although there is no evidence that Hume read Arbuthnot’s paper on sex ratio, he did read a work of Arbuthnot’s on the weights and values of ancient coins ( Hume 1985/1777, 323). In Part VIII.8, Cleanthes grants for the sake of argument that mindless processes might give an entity “powers and organs, requisite for its subsistence… … till at last some order, which can support and maintain itself, is fallen upon.” Cleanthes then says that it is structures that are advantageous to organisms, but not strictly necessary for their survival, that provide strong evidence for intelligent design. One of his examples is the fact that human beings have two eyes rather than one. Paley (1802) follows suit; he thinks that structures that benefit organisms but aren’t necessary for their survival are evidence for God’s goodness. For example, in Chapter 16, he discusses the fact that the universe abounds in “superadded pleasure.” Most animals experience happiness, even though this isn’t necessary for them to survive. Darwin replaced “necessary for survival” with “advantageous for survival and reproduction”; this makes a difference if two eyes are better than one. Paley (1802) holds that it is objects that are functional and “delicate” (my term) that strongly support the hypothesis of intelligent design. An object is delicate precisely when it would cease to perform its function were its parts changed in any way. Loadstones aren’t delicate. These two properties comprise what Behe (1996), a modern defender of the design argument, means by “irreducible complexity.” Here I agree with Gaskin (1976) and disagree with Swinburne (1968) about how Hume interprets the design argument. This is a point that Nagel (2012) notes, and laments. Lewontin (1983) suggests that the asymmetry in Darwin’s picture is wrong. Organisms modify their environments just as environments cause organisms to evolve adaptive features. See also Laland et al. (2011). Swinburne (1968) defends a design explanation for why the fundamental laws of nature are true. Not only is science unable to explain fundamental laws; it also is unable to explain why the universe is law-governed. Whether philosophy can explain that is a good question. Here Philo seems to reject what Hume says in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU II.6, p.16; SBN 19): “The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.” Modern defenders of the design argument have maintained that the designer whose existence they seek to demonstrate might have been God, but there are other possibilities. See, for example, Behe (2001, 165). It would not matter for present purposes if it were impossible for two objects to have zero traits in common, or if we decline to assign probabilities of zero and one to propositions that are neither tautologies nor contradictions. Hesse (1966, 58) says we need to classify the observed similarities that characterize Target and Analog. When an analogy argument concludes that Target has trait T, Hesse distinguishes positive, negative, and neutral observed analogies in terms of their causal relevance to this conclusion. For Hesse, some similarities matter more than others.

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16 This raises the question of whether every predicate picks out a property and of how traits are individuated. 17 With respect to traits that are not dichotomous, DEGREE says that an exact match between Target and Analog with respect to a multi-state trait is evidence that the two have the same type of cause, and that every mismatch, no matter how slight, is evidence against their having the same type of cause. Even in cases where the former claim is correct, the latter will often be wrong. If a perfect match is evidence for, then at least one mismatch must be evidence against; it doesn’t follow that every mismatch must be evidence against. 18 FORM and the other functions in Figure 3.2 each entail “one trait, one vote” because each assumes a kind of exchangeability. The probability of the conclusion is fixed by the value m/n; it doesn’t matter which traits involve a match and which a mismatch. 19 One reason for caution is Kyburg’s (1961) lottery paradox. 20 For discussion of who first proved what is now called “Bayes’s Theorem,” see Stigler (1983). 21 It’s not just critics of the design argument who need to bear this point in mind, for defenders of the argument often say the following: Given that all the complex adaptive contrivances whose causes we have observed were produced by an intelligent designer, it must be probable that the adaptive contrivances whose causes we have not observed were also produced by an intelligent designer. Behe (2007, 355) views the design argument as an argument from inductive sampling. See Sober (2008, 167–177) for discussion in connection with Cleanthes’ argument about the voice from the clouds. 22 Behe (1996) sometimes says that adaptive structures that are “irreducibly complex” cannot be produced by natural selection (39, 203), but at other times he says that they have a low probability under that process (203). If Behe were right about the “cannot,” and if natural selection were the only evolutionary process, then those adaptive structures would favor intelligent design over evolution if the design hypothesis assigned those structures a positive probability. However, there is more to evolution than natural selection, and selection can produce irreducible complexity ( Sober 2008, Ch. 2; Sober 2019). 23 Even if the design hypothesis has a likelihood of one in connection with the fact that the eye has at least one adaptive feature, the hypothesis runs into trouble if there are structures in organisms that have none; the human tailbone, the groove under our noses (the philtrum), and male nipples are worth considering here. 24 Perhaps Darwin (1959/1859, 435) was thinking of the issue of accommodation versus prediction when he said that “in the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is—that it has so pleased the Creator to construct each animal and plant.” 25 For discussion of model selection criteria that aim to assess a model’s predictive accuracy (including the Akaike Information Criterion), see Sober (2008, 2015). 26 Paley may have obtained this objection from Bentley (1966/1696, 157-158). Lucretius gave a reply to the criticism ( Sedley 2007, 152), which Paley does not discuss. 27 This catastrophism seems to clash with Philo’s claim in Part XI.9 that no species have ever gone extinct. 28 Although the Epicurean hypothesis is a precursor of Darwin’s idea of natural selection, since both involve random variation and selective retention, Darwin’s theory is not embarrassed by the fact that some conceivable organisms fail to be actual. This is because evolution by natural selection is path-dependent. Whether a population can evolve a given adaptive trait depends on the background biology it inherited from its ancestors. Another difference that separates the Epicurean process from natural selection is that the former favors traits that enable organisms to survive, whereas selection favors traits that allow organisms to be more reproductively successful (as noted earlier in footnote 5).

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29 That is, there may be an observation selection effect at work; see Sober (2019) and Roche & Sober (2019) for discussion. 30 Typewriters didn’t exist before the Nineteenth Century, so Jonathan Swift had to use a different mechanical device to mock Epicureanism in Book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels; see Sober (2011, Ch. 3). Cicero does the same in De Natura Deorum (2.37). 31 Swinburne (1968, 205–206) says that the design argument he defends is based on analogy, but then he adds that the God postulate “makes explanation of empirical matters more simple and coherent” and “provides a simple unifying and coherent explanation of natural phenomena.” For discussion of whether simplicity and unification make sense in a Bayesian format, and of non-Bayesian approaches to those topics, see Sober (2015).

References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1954. New Letters of David Hume. R. Klibansky & E. C. Mossner, (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, D. 2000/1739-40. Treatise of Human Nature. D. F. Norton & M. J. Norton (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume. D. 2007/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in S. Buckle (ed.), Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.) Hume, D. 1985/1777. Essays Moral, Political, Literary. E. F. Miller, (ed.) Revised edition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hume, D. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. D. Coleman, (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Other Primary Literature Arbuthnot, J. 1710. “An Argument for Divine Providence, Taken from the Constant Regularity Observ’d in the Births of Both Sexes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 27: 186–190. Reprinted in H. David and A. Edwards (eds.) 2001. Annotated Readings from the History of Statistics, pp. 13–17. Berlin: Springer. Bayes, T. 1763. “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 53: 370–418. Bentley, R. 1966/1696. Sermons Preached at Boyle’s Lecture. Reprinted in A. Dyce (ed.). The Works of Richard Bentley, Vol. 3. New York: AMS Press. Darwin, C. 1959/1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fieser, J. (ed.) 2005. Early Responses to Hume’s Life and Reputation, 2 Volumes, 2nd ed. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Paley, W. 1802. Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. London: J. Faulder. Price, R. 1990/1767. “On Providence,” in Four Dissertations. London. Reprinted with an Introduction by J. Stephens. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press. Price, R. 1974/1787. “A Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of the Deity,” Appendix in A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals. 3rd edition. Reprinted in D. D. Raphael (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Secondary and Other Literature Behe, M. 1996. Darwin’s Black Box. New York: Free Press. Behe, M. 2001. “The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis − Breaking Rules,” Philosophia Christi 3: 165–179. Behe, M. 2007. “Irreducible Complexity - Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution.” In W. Dembski and M. Ruse (eds.), Debating design - from Darwin to DNA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, T. 2014. “Skeptical Theism,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2014/entries/skeptical-theism/ Earman, J. 2000. Hume’s Abject Failure − the Argument Against Miracles. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, S. 2002. “Bayesianism, Analogy, and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” Hume Studies 28: 113–130. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1976. “The Design Argument: Hume’s Critique of Poor Reason,” Religious Studies 12: 331–345. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1993. “Hume on Religion,” in D. F. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume, pp. 313–344. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. 1965. The Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hesse, M. 1966. Models and Analogies in Science. Revised edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press. Howard-Snyder, D. (ed.) 1996. The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Kemp, C. 2014. “The Real ‘Letter to Arbuthnot’? A Motive For Hume’s Probability Theory in an Early Modern Design Argument,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22: 468–491. Kyburg, H. 1961. Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Laland, K., Sterelny, K., Odling-Smee, J., Hoppitt, W., and Uller, T. 2011. “Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited – Is Mayr’s Proximate/Ultimate Dichotomy Still Useful?” Science 334: 1512–1516. Lewontin, R. 1983. “The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution,” Scientia 188: 65–82. Reprinted in R. Levins and R. Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist, pp. 85–108. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mayo, T. 1934. Epicureanism in England. College Station, Texas: The Southwest Press. Nagel, T. 2012. Mind and Cosmos – Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press. Roche, W., and Sober, E. 2019. “Observation Selection Effects and Discrimination Conduciveness.” Philosophical Imprint 19(40), 1–26. Salmon, W. 1978. “Religion and Science – A New Look at Hume’s Dialogues,” Philosophical Studies 33: 143–176. Sedley, D. 2007. Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sobel, J. H. 2003. Logic and Theism − Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sober, E. 1993. Philosophy of Biology. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Sober, E. 2004a. “The Design Argument,” in W. Mann (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Blackwells, pp. 117–147.

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Sober, E. 2004b. “A Modest Proposal – a Review of John Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure – the Miracles Argument,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 118: 487–494. Sober, E. 2008. Evidence and Evolution – the Logic Behind the Science. Cambridge University Press. Sober, E. 2009. “Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence – Evidential Transitivity in Connection with Fossils, Fishing, Fine-Tuning, and Firing Squads,” Philosophical Studies 143: 63–90. Sober, E. 2011. Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Sober, E. 2015. Ockham’s Razors – A User’s Manual. Cambridge University Press. Sober, E. 2019. The Design Argument – An Element. Cambridge University Press. Sober, E. 2024. The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stigler, S. 1983. “Who Proved Bayes’s Theorem?” American Statistician 37: 290- 296. Swinburne, R. 1968. “The Argument from Design,” Philosophy 43: 199–212. Wilson, C. 2008. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford University Press.

4

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design Todd Ryan

4.1 Introduction In Part III of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Cleanthes responds to Philo’s criticism of the analogical version of the design argument by issuing what I shall refer to as Cleanthes’ Challenge: Consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation. (DNR III.7, 154)1 Cleanthes goes on to affirm that some beauties in writing we may meet with, which seem contrary to rules, and which gain the affections, and animate the imagination, in opposition to all the precepts of criticism, and to the authority of the established masters of art. And if the argument for theism be, as you pretend, contradictory to the principles of logic; its universal, its irresistible influence proves clearly, that there may be arguments of a like irregular nature. (D III.8, 155) On the strength of these passages commentators have generally understood Cleanthes to be putting forward a fundamentally different kind of theistic argument from the analogical version of the design argument defended by him in Part II.2 Numerous attempts have been made to explicate the nature of this so-called “irregular” argument. What all of these attempts have in common is the supposition that the discussion in Part III marks a major shift in strategy in Cleanthes’ attempt to defend belief in an intelligent original cause of the universe. In what follows I shall argue that despite near unanimous agreement among commentators, there is no reason to believe that Cleanthes is either abandoning the analogical version of the design argument or introducing some new form of argument alongside it. Properly understood, all of Cleanthes’ efforts in Part III can be seen as an attempt to bolster the design argument as formulated in Part II.3 DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-7

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4.2 Competing Interpretations In issuing his challenge, Cleanthes bids Philo to contemplate the structure of the eye and to observe what Cleanthes takes to be its obvious indications of contrivance—the complex arrangement of parts so ordered as to achieve a definite end. Previously, in presenting the analogical version of the design argument in Part II, Cleanthes based his argument on the claim that the universe is one allencompassing machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines” (DNR II.5, 143). Thus, it is natural to understand Cleanthes’ Challenge as based on an appeal to what he takes to be a particularly striking instance of such a lesser machine, namely the human eye.4 If then the phenomenon to which Cleanthes appeals is evidently of the same kind as that which underlies the analogical version of the design argument, wherein is the difference between the two versions supposed to lie? Here commentators differ widely. For some, such as Beryl Logan, what distinguishes the “irregular” design argument is its appeal to feeling rather than reason. Rather than coming to believe in an intelligent first cause by a process of rational inference, “we are compelled by a feeling to assent immediately and spontaneously to the conclusion” (Logan 1992, 484). Similarly, Stanley Tweyman maintains that, unlike ordinary arguments, irregular arguments are non-rational in so far as they “appeal to the affections and imagination, not to reason” (Tweyman 1986, 56). For Tweyman, as for Nelson Pike, the irregular argument is an inference to an intelligent first cause of the universe that makes no appeal to past experience of constant conjunctions. For David O’Connor, too, Cleanthes’ irregular argument constitutes “a new form of design argument” (O’Connor 2001, 77).5 It is based on a “feeling of designedness” that is both involuntary and passively experienced, coming to us “unbidden, like sensation” (O’Connor 2001, 86). Andrew Pyle also emphasizes the passivity and immediacy of the inference as distinguishing features of Cleanthes’ irregular argument. For Pyle, Cleanthes is now claiming that coming to believe in an intelligent designer of the world “is not something we do … it is something that happens to [us]” (Pyle 2006, 52). Still others argue that Cleanthes’ “irregular” argument constitutes a shift in strategy, not because it is a fundamentally different kind of argument, but because it is not an argument at all. Thus, according to Robert Fogelin, the regular form of the design argument defended in Part II, “has now been replaced by an irregular form of argument, that is, by a non-argument” (Fogelin 2017, 33). J. C. A Gaskin also denies that Cleanthes’ Challenge is an argument of any kind. For Gaskin, what Cleanthes offers is an appeal to a special kind of feeling—a “feeling for design.” As Gaskin makes clear, this feeling is not to be construed as evidence in support of the existence of the deity (Gaskin 1988, 129). Before examining the details of these interpretations, it is worth stressing just how radical a departure from Cleanthes’ earlier position the introduction of such an irregular argument would be. In Part II, Cleanthes announces that the whole of his natural theology rests on an argument from experience—that is, on a causal inference based on the principle that like effects imply like causes. Immediately

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 73 following his initial formulation of the design argument, Cleanthes affirms, “by this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence” (DNR II.5, 143).6 The point is crucial since in response to Philo’s general skeptical challenge in Part I, Cleanthes had pledged himself to pursue natural theology using the same rules of inference and the same empirical data as those employed in the natural and moral sciences. To turn away from the analogical inference would amount to a complete abandonment of the project of experimental theism, the possibility of which had emerged as the central question of the Dialogues. Furthermore, the whole course of the discussion subsequent to Part III proceeds as though the analogical design argument remains the sole argument under consideration.7 This fact has not gone unnoticed, even by those who ascribe a new, irregular argument to Cleanthes. Robert Fogelin, for example, having insisted that Cleanthes’ “irregular” argument constitutes a radical break from his earlier position, observes, “surprisingly, however, in the next (fourth) part, the discussion returns to a critical examination of his regular argument as if nothing had interrupted it” (Fogelin 2017, 36; see also Logan 1992, 491). In fact, I believe this understates the difficulty. For not only does Philo continue to take the analogical version of the argument as his sole target, but he repeatedly characterizes Cleanthes’ approach to natural theology as based entirely on a causal inference from effects to causes. At the beginning of Part V, for example, Philo reminds Cleanthes of the core of his position: “please to take a new survey of your principles. Like effects prove like causes. This is the experimental argument; and this, you say too, is the sole theological argument” (DNR V.1, 165). Nor does Cleanthes balk at this characterization of his position. Against this it might be objected that Philo has merely asserted that Cleanthes takes the analogical design argument to be the sole argument for theism, leaving open the possibility that in addition he might endorse some non-rational or non-inferential basis for theistic belief. However, in Part VI Philo is even more categorical. There he reminds Demea of the “method of reasoning so much insisted on by Cleanthes. That like effects arise from like causes: this principle he supposes the foundation of all religion” (DNR VI.2, 170).8 Once again Cleanthes raises no objection to Philo’s representation of his position. Thus nothing in the course of the discussion immediately following Part III suggests that Cleanthes has either abandoned his earlier commitment to the analogical form of the design argument or introduced some alternate defense of theism in its stead. Why then have virtually all commentators insisted on reading him in this way? In what follows, I shall argue that all of these accounts rest on a common set of misunderstandings concerning the nature of Cleanthes’ Challenge and his subsequent allusion to the possibility of “irregular” arguments. Although perhaps no single commentator has been guilty of all of these misreadings, each has contributed to the near universal misunderstanding of Cleanthes’ argumentative strategy. I shall argue that, understood correctly, none of the evidence commonly cited in favor of a new, “irregular” argument points to anything other than a continued defense of the analogical inference formulated by Cleanthes in Part II.9

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4.3 “From Your Own Feeling” Perhaps the most serious misunderstanding regarding Cleanthes’ Challenge concerns his appeal to feeling. Recall that in issuing his challenge, Cleanthes bids Philo: consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation. (DNR III.7, 154; emphasis added) Cleanthes’ demand that Philo judge the case “from [his] own feeling” has led more than one commentator to claim that what distinguishes Cleanthes’ Challenge from the analogical argument presented in Part II, is its crucial appeal to a distinct kind of feeling that arises in the mind of the observer upon perceiving instances of natural order. This alleged feeling has been variously described. According to Gaskin the “feeling for design” to which Cleanthes appeals is something akin to “the sense of cosmic awe which inspired the Psalmist: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handiwork’” (Gaskin 1988, 129). As such, it is “not a new argument, irregular or otherwise” (Gaskin 1988, 129). Indeed, it is not strictly speaking an argument at all, nor does it alter the evidential basis of belief in a designer. In a similar vein, Fogelin (2017, 35) understands Cleanthes to be invoking a “sense of the holy” or a “sense of something transcendent,” while David O’Connor speaks of Cleanthes’ “change of tack from intellect to feeling” and in particular of his appeal to a feeling of “wonder at the world’s manifest orderliness” (O’Connor 2001, 79; 165). Despite their several differences, what all of these readings have in common is the claim that Cleanthes is attempting to defend theism, not by rational argument, but by calling attention to a special kind of feeling that arises in the observer upon contemplating naturally ordered systems. However, I think we can readily see that Cleanthes’ appeal to feeling involves nothing so mysterious and ineffable as a “sense of cosmic awe,” nor indeed is he invoking any special feeling that is supposed to arise when considering the original cause of natural order. Rather, it is a straightforward consequence of Hume’s theory of belief as enlivened idea. For Hume, as is well known, a belief is an idea with greater liveliness or force than what is involved in mere conception.10 According to Hume an idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us: And this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness. (THN I.iii.7.7; SBN 629 (Appendix); Hume’s emphasis)11 Because this distinctive feeling is a phenomenal characteristic of ideas, it is possible to determine by introspection whether the thought of some particular matter of fact rises to the level of belief or is a mere conception or imagining. Moreover, this feeling admits of sensible degrees, such that the intensity of the

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 75 feeling determines the strength of conviction (EHU 6 ¶3; SBN 57). A firmly held belief feels more forceful and lively than one that enjoys a lesser degree of assurance. Consequently, it is also by introspection that we are able to determine the strength of our belief—that is, the degree to which we assent to a given idea. It follows, Hume thinks, that in order to assess the persuasiveness of an argument, we need only consult our feeling to determine the liveliness or force with which we conceive the conclusion. He writes: all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation … . When I am convinc’d of any principle, ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. (THN I.iii.8.12; SBN 103) It should now be clear that when Cleanthes invites Philo to consult “[his] own feeling” he is not appealing to some mysterious “feeling for design” or sense of cosmic awe on which he would found a new non-analogical, non-empirical consideration in favor of theism. He is simply asking Philo to consider the structure of the eye and to observe by introspection that the idea of a designer does in fact arise in his mind and that the idea is conceived with a sufficient degree of force and liveliness to constitute belief. In short, Cleanthes asks Philo to concede that he does in fact infer the existence of an intelligent cause on the basis of the complex ordering and apparent means-end structure observable in the human eye. Thus, contrary to the readings of Gaskin and others, Cleanthes’ appeal to feeling does not announce a new, non-rational basis for theistic belief. On the contrary, it is exactly in keeping with his Humean understanding of the nature of belief based on causal inference.12 4.4 “Like That of Sensation” A second, closely related misunderstanding concerns Cleanthes’ comparison of belief in a designer with sensation. What Cleanthes asks Philo to judge from his own feeling is whether the idea of a designer arises in his mind “with a force like that of sensation.” Several commentators have seen in this comparison an attempt by Cleanthes to move away from an analogical argument for an intelligent first cause to something more akin to direct perception. Perhaps the most prominent defender of this view is Andrew Pyle.13 On his reading, what Cleanthes’ comparison with sense perception is meant to show is that, like beliefs formed by direct observation, belief in an intelligent designer of the universe is non-inferential. As Pyle characterizes Cleanthes’ position in Part III, “instead of explicitly setting out the basis for the analogical inference in the form of a generalization (Fs resemble Gs in respects XYZ) we simply ‘see’ the F as a G, i.e. … we simply see plants and animals as instances of intelligent design” (Pyle 2006, 52). On Pyle’s reading, Cleanthes is now arguing that belief in an original intelligent designer is characterized by a kind of “passivity and immediacy” (Pyle 2006, 52). It is not the result of an active process of

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reasoning, but simply arises in our mind upon observing instances of apparent means-end order in nature. In this sense, the belief is “more like a sensation than a product of careful reasoning” (Pyle 2006, 113). In support of this reading, Pyle points to an important formulation of the design argument to be found in Hume’s contemporary, Colin Maclaurin. It has long been established that much of Cleanthes’ speech at DNR III.7 (154–155) is modeled on a passage from Maclaurin’s An Account of Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries.14 Maclaurin puts the case as follows: the plain argument for the existence of the Deity, obvious to all and carrying irresistible conviction with it, is from the evident contrivance and fitness of things for one another, which we meet with throughout all parts of the universe. There is no need of nice or subtle reasonings on this matter: a manifest contrivance immediately suggests a contriver. It strikes us like a sensation; and artful reasonings against it may puzzle us, but it is without shaking our belief. (Maclaurin 1748, 381) Maclaurin’s claim that “manifest contrivance immediately suggests a contriver” is not without ambiguity.15 However, his wording strongly suggests that he takes belief in a designer to be formed non-inferentially—upon contemplation of the structure of the eye, the belief “strikes us like a sensation.” Notice, however, that while Hume follows Maclaurin closely in constructing Cleanthes’ speech, he subtly alters Maclaurin’s formulation in a way that eliminates the ambiguity. Whereas Maclaurin had said that the suggestion of a contriver “strikes us like a sensation,” Hume has Cleanthes assert that the idea of a contriver “flows in upon us with a force like that of sensation” (DNR III.7, 154; emphasis added). Hume’s subtle reformulation serves to make clear that for Cleanthes the point of the comparison with sense perception is not that belief in a designer is noninferential or passively formed, but that the force and liveliness of our idea, and consequently the strength of our conviction, is comparable to that of beliefs formed by immediate sense perception. This is extremely important for Cleanthes, who is attempting to show that the inference to a designer of the universe is impervious to Philo’s sceptical challenge. Earlier in Part I, Philo had conceded that radical skepticism cannot be maintained against beliefs formed by direct sense perception (DNR I.6, 132).16 Nevertheless, he insisted that whereas skeptical arguments are of no avail against the beliefs of either ordinary life or the empirical sciences, the case is quite otherwise with regard to natural theology.17 According to Philo it is evident, whenever our arguments … run wide of common life, that the most refined scepticism comes to be upon a footing with them, and is able to oppose and counterbalance them. (DNR I.11, 135) It is only here in Part III that Cleanthes offers his response. Cleanthes argues that belief in an intelligent cause of nature enjoys a degree of force comparable to

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 77 that of sense perception and so is equally immune to skeptical challenge. That this is Cleanthes’ aim in drawing a comparison between theistic belief and sensation is made clear by his characterization of the “reasonable sceptic,” which immediately precedes his challenge: the declared profession of every reasonable sceptic is only to reject abstruse, remote and refined arguments; to adhere to common sense and the plain instincts of nature; and to assent, wherever any reasons strike him with so full a force, that he cannot, without the greatest violence, prevent it. Now the arguments for natural religion are plainly of this kind; and nothing but the most perverse, obstinate metaphysics can reject them. (DNR III.7, 154) It is Cleanthes’ attempt to drive home this point by direct appeal to Philo’s own experience that gives rise to the latter’s momentary embarrassment and confusion. Thus, there is nothing in Cleanthes’ comparison of belief in a divine mind to sensation to suggest that he means to abandon his defense of a rational inference in favor of a designer of the universe. 4.5 “Immediately Flows in upon You” A further piece of evidence commonly cited by those who take Cleanthes to be abandoning his earlier formulation of the Design Argument concerns his contention that the idea of a designer flows in upon us “immediately.” Several commentators, notably Stanley Tweyman and Nelson Pike, have argued on this basis that what distinguishes the “irregular” argument is not that belief in a designer is formed non-inferentially, as Pyle maintains, but that the inference occurs without appeal to—and indeed independent of—past experience of constant conjunctions. On this reading, Cleanthes is now contending that upon perceiving a naturally ordered system, such as the human eye, the mind proceeds directly to belief in an intelligent first cause independent of past experience (Tweyman 1986, 52–3).18 As Tweyman characterizes these inferences such arguments proceed directly from the data to a conclusion, without the need for constant conjunction to link the data and conclusion. The conclusion strikes us as obvious, given the data, and the requirement for causal claims, namely, that the items be observed constantly conjoined, is waived in this case. (Tweyman 1986, 52) Although the inference is not said to be made completely independent of experience, the experience that serves as its basis is simply the observation of a single case of means-end order and coherence of parts in a natural object. In this sense, Cleanthes’ new version of the design argument is not what Philo calls an “argument from experience”—that is, a causal inference based on past observation of constant conjunction. Rather, it is an instinctive inference that can be

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triggered by observation of even a single case of order in nature.19 According to Tweyman what Cleanthes is proposing is “an instinctive account of belief in an intelligent designer of the world” (Tweyman 1986, 64). I agree with Tweyman and Pike that Cleanthes’ characterization of the inference to a designer as immediate is intended in both the temporal—occurring without delay—and the logical sense—the inference to a designer is made without appeal to any mediate premise or idea. However, this does not show that the inference is the result of a peculiar instinct or that it is not based on past experience of constant conjunction. For, on Hume’s view, ordinary causal inferences are immediate in both these senses. Hume portrays the effect of experience of constant conjunctions as follows: suppose again, that [a person] has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed similar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other (EHU 5.I 4; emphasis added) Thus, there is no reason to believe that Cleanthes’ claim that the idea of a designer “immediate[ly] flows in upon” the mind is intended to distinguish the inference from ordinary causal reasoning. For it is in exactly the same manner that ideas are suggested to the mind by virtue of those habits acquired through experience of constant conjunction.20 Against this, it might be objected that while it is true that habit formed by past experience of constant conjunction may immediately suggest the idea of a cause or effect in cases where there is exact resemblance with the present object, the same is not true in analogical reasoning. In the latter case, it might be argued, reflection is required in so far as one must actively consult one’s past experience in search of similar objects upon which to base the inference by analogy. However, we should guard against drawing overly rigid distinctions between ordinary causal reasoning and analogical inference where such distinctions are contrary to ordinary experience. There are many cases in which our first encounter with a new kind of object leads us to make immediate causal judgments without reflection or delay despite their very partial resemblance to objects of past experience. The first time one sees, say, a capybara lounging on the shore of a river, the sight may provoke alarm and the thought of imminent danger, however different such an animal may be from those we have previously encountered. Yet no one would say that such analogical judgments are not based on past experience of different species of animals. Moreover, Hume himself acknowledges that analogical inferences may be immediate even though the resemblance with previously experienced objects is less than perfect. He writes: when we have been accustom’d to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection, and which cannot be prevented by it. Now ’tis the nature of custom not only to operate with its full force, when objects are presented,

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 79 that are exactly the same with those to which we have been accustom’d; but also to operate in an inferior degree, when we discover such as are similar … . From this principle I have accounted for that species of probability, deriv’d from analogy, where we transfer our experience in past instances to objects which are resembling, but are not exactly the same with those concerning which we have had experience. (THN I.iii.13.8; SBN 147)21 In sum, all of those features of Cleanthes’ Challenge commonly said to mark it out as a new, non-standard kind of inference are in fact characteristic of ordinary causal inferences as Hume understands them: Whenever any object is presented to the memory or senses, it immediately, by the force of custom, carries the imagination to conceive that object, which is usually conjoined to it; and this conception is attended with a feeling or sentiment, different from the loose reveries of the fancy. In this consists the whole nature of belief. (EHU 5.II 11; SBN 48) Thus, there is nothing in the way Cleanthes formulates his challenge to suggest that he is promoting anything other than the same kind of analogical inference he had presented in Part II. 4.6 Irregular Arguments Beyond these several misreadings, numerous commentators have pointed to Cleanthes’ talk of “irregular” arguments as confirmation that Cleanthes’ Challenge marks a new strategy for establishing belief in the existence of a designer of the universe.22 On this reading, the analogical design argument of Part II was offered by Cleanthes as a regular form of argument, whereas his present concession that the “argument for theism” may be “irregular” is meant to signal that he takes himself to have introduced a new and fundamentally different kind of argument for an intelligent cause of the universe and that the essence of this new argument is encapsulated in what I have called Cleanthes’ Challenge.23 Here is how Cleanthes introduces the notion: Some beauties in writing we may meet with, which seem contrary to rules, and which gain the affections, and animate the imagination, in opposition to all the precepts of criticism, and to the authority of the established masters of art. And if the argument for theism be, as you pretend, contradictory to the principles of logic; its universal, its irresistible influence proves clearly, that there may be arguments of a like irregular nature. Whatever cavils may be urged; an orderly world, as well as a coherent, articulate speech, will still be received as an incontestable proof of design and intention. (DNR III.8, 155) According to Stanley Tweyman, the point of Cleanthes’ parallel between irregular beauties and irregular arguments is that both are fundamentally non-

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rational. Citing Cleanthes’ claim that irregular beauties “gain the affections and animate the imagination,” Tweyman argues that what is characteristic of irregular arguments is that they “appeal to the affections and the imagination, not to reason” (Tweyman 1986, 56). In this, he is followed closely by Beryl Logan, who maintains that “rather than appealing to reason, [irregular arguments] appeal to the affections and stimulate the imagination … . We are compelled by a ‘feeling’ to assent immediately and spontaneously to the conclusion … No reflection or process of calculation is present” (Logan 1992, 484).24 For Logan, the difference between regular and irregular arguments “lies in the manner in which the ‘inferences’ are made” (Logan 1992, 489). To accept an irregular argument is to make an inference not on the basis of reason and evidence, but on imagination and feeling. I believe this reading is fundamentally mistaken. Perhaps the first thing to be noted is that Cleanthes does not positively commit himself to the existence of irregular arguments, but claims only that if Philo’s criticisms are well founded, then “the argument for theism” may be an example of just such an argument. To understand why Cleanthes raises the possibility of irregular arguments, we need a clearer idea of what an irregular argument is supposed to be and what the analogy with irregular beauties is meant to show. To begin, it is clear from the passage cited above that an irregular argument is one that violates the established norms governing probable inference. It is, in Cleanthes’ words, “contradictory to the principles of logic.” Of course, by itself, this is not sufficient to qualify an argument as irregular. For on that showing, any weak inductive argument would be an irregular one. What else then is necessary? It is here that Cleanthes’ analogy with the aesthetic case can help to shed light.25 Just as irregular arguments violate the principles of probable inference, so irregular beauties violate the established norms that govern artistic creation. Nevertheless, despite flouting the rules of criticism, irregular beauties are beauties—they produce in us real aesthetic pleasure. Correspondingly, irregular arguments are convincing. Despite violating the rules of logic, they produce belief. Furthermore, irregular beauties are genuine beauties. They are not the result of bad taste or individual bias, but are such as give pleasure to all competent critics. Similarly, irregular arguments are not spurious arguments. They do not owe their persuasive force to individual bias or a weak faculty of reasoning. They are possessed of a “universal … irresistible influence” that garners them widespread assent (DNR III.8, 155). For this reason, an irregular argument is a legitimate foundation for belief—“an incontestable proof” as Cleanthes puts it. In sum, an irregular argument—if, indeed, there are such—is an argument that, despite violating the established rules of probabilistic inference, is found to be generally, indeed irresistibly, persuasive and so constitutes a legitimate foundation for belief. We can now see that the reading of Tweyman and Logan according to which what distinguishes irregular arguments is their appeal to sentiment and imagination rather than reason is based on a thorough misunderstanding of the basis of Cleanthes’ comparison. When Cleanthes speaks of gaining the affections, his point is not that irregular arguments, like irregular beauties, appeal to feeling and

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 81 imagination rather than reason. Rather, the point of the comparison is as follows. Just as the effect of beauty is to “gain the affections and animate the imagination” so the effect of argument is to produce belief. Irregular beauties give pleasure despite their violation of the established rules of criticism. Irregular arguments produce belief despite their violation of the established rules of logic (or probable inference). Nevertheless, because irregular beauties are found to produce aesthetic pleasure universally and not simply in biased or incompetent judges, they are genuine beauties. Similarly, because irregular arguments are found to produce belief universally and not merely in biased or incompetent reasoners, they are acceptable arguments. Such is the basis for Cleanthes’ comparison. What should now be clear is that in raising the possibility of irregular arguments, Cleanthes does not mean to be advancing a new kind of argument distinct from the analogical inference of Part II. He is attempting to explain how the “religious argument” might be acceptable even if it violates the established rules of probable inference in the ways that Philo has claimed it does in Part II. Given this understanding of irregular arguments, what are we to make of Cleanthes’ suggestion? The question is complicated, for there is reason to believe that Hume himself will not allow the possibility of irregular beauties of the kind Cleanthes seems to endorse. In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume explicitly raises the question of whether there might be genuine aesthetic beauties that violate the established rules of taste.26 He first observes that the rules that govern aesthetic beauty are not a priori truths, but rather empirical generalizations concerning what has been found to give pleasure to the human mind. Speaking in particular of the rules of literary composition, Hume writes: their foundation is the same with that of all the practical sciences, experience; nor are they any thing but general observations, concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages (ST 9, 231). Hume goes on to consider those works of art that give pleasure despite flouting the established rules of criticism. He first suggests that, as a matter of fact, none of these works offer a genuine example of irregular beauty, since in no case is the aesthetic pleasure they afford owing specifically to their violations of the rules of taste, but rather to some other qualities that fully conform to the established rules. Hume writes: if some negligent or irregular writers have pleased, they have not pleased by their transgressions of rule or order, but in spite of these transgressions: They have possessed other beauties, which were conformable to just criticism. (ST 9, 231–2) Hume then turns to consider precisely the kind of case that Cleanthes has in mind: a genuinely beautiful work of art that owes its beauty to certain characteristics that ought not to give aesthetic pleasure according to the established

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rules of criticism. Hume claims that such a case, if genuine, would prove not that there are irregular beauties, but that the empirical generalizations upon which the established rules of literary composition rest are faulty. Hume argues did our pleasure really arise from those parts of his poem, which we denominate faults, this would be no objection to criticism in general: It would only be an objection to those particular rules of criticism, which would establish such circumstances to be faults, and would represent them as universally blameable. If they are found to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure, which they produce, be ever so unexpected and unaccountable. (ST 9, 232) Thus, for Hume there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an irreducibly irregular beauty. Of course, in saying this, Hume does not mean to deny that there could be works of art that give aesthetic pleasure to even the most refined, unbiased critics in defiance of established aesthetic principles. Rather, his claim is that should such a work be found, the correct response would be to reformulate the laws of criticism themselves, taking into account the existence of such works and thereby establishing their underlying regularity. Although Hume says comparatively little about the possibility of irregular arguments, it is clear that he regards the rules of logic and probable inference, like those of aesthetics, to be based on empirical generalizations about the working of the human mind. According to Hume, the rules governing causal inferences “are form’d on the nature of our understanding, and on our experience of its operations in the judgments we form concerning objects” (THN I.iii.13.11; SBN 149). In other words, they are empirical generalizations concerning which forms of probable inference have generally been found to produce true beliefs.27 While Hume does not explicitly discuss the revisability of the rules of probable inference, he argues that general rules expressing common prejudices (such as, “an Irishman cannot have wit”) are rightly rejected by philosophers in so far as they are based on a mental operation of an “irregular nature” that is “destructive of all the most establish’d principles of reasonings” (THN I.iii.13.12; SBN 150). Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that Hume would be no more open to the existence of irreducibly irregular arguments than of irreducibly irregular beauty. Given this, it is fitting to ask whether Cleanthes genuinely believes that there might be such things as irreducibly irregular arguments and, more to the point, whether he believes that the inference from means-end order in nature to an intelligent original cause is just such an argument. Of course, this will depend in part on whether he believes such inferences violate the rules of analogical reasoning in the first place. Here the issue is complicated. For while most commentators speak as though Cleanthes freely concedes the irregularity of the inference, in fact, his declaration takes the form of a conditional: “if the argument for theism be, as you pretend, contradictory to the principles of logic” (DNR III.8, 155). Moreover, Cleanthes is dismissive, even disdainful, of Philo’s objections, which he consistently treats as “absurd” and mere “cavils.” The

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 83 question, then, is whether Cleanthes thinks that Philo’s “cavils” succeed in showing that the analogical version of the argument violates the rules governing analogical inferences. What is safe to say is that at no point is Cleanthes made to suggest that he takes the analogical argument to have been materially weakened by Philo’s criticisms. Throughout Parts II and III, Cleanthes consistently maintains the persuasiveness and cogency of the inference—that is, that it both does and ought to procure belief. Whether on his view it violates the established rules of analogical reasoning is less clear. To be sure, in the opening paragraph of Part III Cleanthes asserts the self-evident character of the resemblance between human artifacts and the works of nature and reaffirms its adequacy as a basis for an analogical inference to an intelligent creator. Nevertheless, at no point does he seek to deny the dissimilarities to which Philo called attention. However, for the present purposes, the question of whether Cleanthes concedes that the analogical design argument violates the established rules of probable reasoning need not be resolved. What the irregular paragraph contributes to the discussion is not a new form of inference, but a tentative and somewhat underdeveloped suggestion as to how it might be possible for an argument to be acceptable—in both the factual and normative sense—and yet violate the established rules of analogical reasoning in the ways that Philo claims it does. What the suggestion amounts to is that either there might be irreducibly irregular arguments, of which the analogical design argument is one, or the empirical generalizations upon which the received rules of analogical reasoning rest are badly drawn. In either case, the point is not to withdraw or replace his original version of the design argument with some new and fundamentally different kind of inference. On the contrary, it is to offer a suggestion as to how it could be legitimate to accept this case of analogical reasoning even if it violates the prevailing norms that govern probable inference. 4.7 Natural Belief I have argued that there is no reason to believe that in Part III Cleanthes intends to set forth an alternate argument for the existence of a divine mind or that he is doing anything other than defending the analogical version of the design argument from Philo’s skeptical attack. In conclusion, I shall briefly consider the implications of this reading for the much-debated question of whether a theory of natural belief in a divine mind is being advanced in the Dialogues. I shall not be concerned with whether Philo, much less Hume, endorses natural belief in an intelligent cause of the universe. I shall limit myself to the narrower question of whether Cleanthes is being made to advance such a view. Briefly, the term ‘natural belief’, as it is commonly used in the literature, refers to a class of beliefs which we come to hold not on the basis of any process of reasoning, but as the result of an original instinct of the mind.28 Based as they are in our common human nature, such beliefs are universal. Moreover, natural beliefs are immune to skeptical criticism, not because we have unassailable

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evidence for their truth, but because we cannot help but believe them; they are quite literally indubitable. They are, in Philo’s words, beliefs “by which the most determined sceptic must allow himself to be governed” (DNR I.19, 140). In the Treatise, Hume offers several examples of such beliefs including belief in the continued existence of an independent external world and beliefs formed on the basis of inductive reasoning. Might Cleanthes be advancing a theory of natural belief in a cosmic designer? More than a few commentators have been convinced that he is, and indeed, this has been one impetus for attempting to find an alternate “irregular” argument in Part III.29 In fact, we have already seen that, as characterized by Cleanthes, belief in a designer shares at least one important feature in common with those beliefs that are commonly classified as natural: it is immune to skeptical challenge. Additionally, in summarizing his position in Part XII, Cleanthes speaks of the mind’s “natural propensity” to what he calls “the religious hypothesis” (DNR XII.5, 216). This has commonly been understood to mean that, for Cleanthes, belief in design is instinctual in much the same way as natural belief. Furthermore, this reading seems to find support in the oft-cited letter to Gilbert Elliot in which Hume asks Elliott’s assistance in strengthening Cleanthes’ position. Hume writes I cou’d wish that Cleanthes’ Argument could be so analys’d, as to be render’d quite formal & regular. The Propensity of the Mind towards it, unless that Propensity were as strong & universal as that to believe in our Senses and Experience, will still, I am afraid, be esteem’d a suspicious Foundation. Tis here I wish for your Assistance. We must endeavor to prove that this Propensity is somewhat different from our Inclination to find our own Figures in the Clouds, our Face in the Moon, our Passions & Sentiments even in inanimate Matter. Such an Inclination may, & ought to be controul’d, & can never be a legitimate Ground of Assent. (Hume 1932, I, 155) Like Cleanthes, Hume acknowledges a propensity in the human mind which helps to explain belief in an intelligent cause. Moreover, Hume sets forth three criteria that this propensity would have to satisfy if it is to provide a firm foundation—or, as he puts it, a “legitimate ground of assent”—for belief in a designer. First, it must be as strong as our propensity to believe in the senses and experience. Second, it must be as universal as the corresponding propensity to believe in the senses. Finally, it must be irresistible. That is, unlike our propensity to anthropomorphize, it must be such that we cannot consistently check its operation. Returning to the Dialogues, we find that it is these same three characteristics that Cleanthes claims on behalf of our inferred belief in a designer of the universe. As we have already seen, Cleanthes suggests that upon contemplating the coherence of the parts and means-end structure of the human eye, the idea of a designer arises “with a force like that of sensation,” explicitly equating the strength of our belief in a designer with that of our belief in the deliverances of sense perception. Likewise,

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 85 the argument for a designer is, according to Cleanthes, irresistible. It strikes “with so full a force, that [one] cannot, without the greatest violence, prevent it” (DNR III.7, 154).30 The belief is said to be irresistible in that philosophical criticism fails to produce a corresponding diminution in our conviction. Finally, Cleanthes defends the universality of belief in a designer, albeit indirectly. More specifically, he attempts to explain away those cases in which human beings fail to draw the appropriate conclusion: “It sometimes happens, I own, that the religious arguments have not their due influence on an ignorant savage or barbarian” (DNR III.9, 155).31 In attempting to account for the apparent lack of universality, Cleanthes rejects Philo’s earlier suggestion that it is owing to the argument’s being “obscure and difficult.” The true explanation, Cleanthes contends, is simply that the uncultivated person never raises the question of the ultimate origin of the universe.32 In such cases, lack of belief is owing not to any inherent weakness in the argument, but to a failure to attend to the argument at all. In light of this clear attempt to make good on the three criteria articulated in Hume’s letter to Elliott, there can be little doubt that Cleanthes is being made to appeal to a natural propensity of the mind in order to validate theistic belief. Nevertheless, I think there is good reason to reject the suggestion that Cleanthes means to defend an account of theistic belief as natural belief, at least as that concept has generally been understood.33 For a crucial characteristic of such beliefs is that they are non-inferential—they are not arrived at on the basis of reasoning (Gaskin 1988, 117–118). By contrast, Cleanthes consistently speaks of our belief in an intelligent cause of the universe as the consequence of an argument. In addition, natural beliefs are non-rational (Butler 1960, 78). They are not held on the basis of evidence, nor can they be justified by any process of reasoning. However, as we have seen, there is little to suggest that Cleanthes is willing to concede that belief in a designer of the universe is not rationally justified. In the very paragraph in which he concedes that the Design Argument may be irregular, Cleanthes insists that means-end order will always be taken as an “incontestable proof of design and intention” (DNR III.8, 155). Indeed, even in that passage in which he most clearly attributes belief in a designer to a natural propensity, Cleanthes continues to affirm the rationality of theistic belief, referring to the system of theism as “a theory, supported by strong and obvious reason, by natural propensity, and by early education” (DNR XII.5, 216). Far from positing a strict dichotomy between natural instinct and rational argument, Cleanthes portrays sound reason as concurring with natural propensity (and education) to produce belief in a divine intelligence. For Cleanthes, it would seem, the design argument is at once a rational inference and an argument whose immunity to skeptical criticism is owing in part to the mind’s propensity toward it. Thus, unlike the mind’s tendency to believe in the distinct and continued existence of external objects, the natural propensity to which Cleanthes appeals is a propensity to accept a certain argument.34 More particularly, it is a propensity to be persuaded by an analogical inference to an intelligent creator of the universe based on a “comparison of the universe to a machine of human contrivance,” or in other words, by the analogical design argument (DNR XII.5, 216).

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And, in fact, in the letter to Elliott Hume characterizes the propensity as a propensity to “Cleanthes’ Argument.” What exactly does Cleanthes take this propensity to be? Unfortunately, he offers no analysis or description of its nature. Nor does he explain how a natural propensity to find an argument convincing can be expected to bolster what is supposed to be an evidential argument for a divine mind. Nor perhaps should this be surprising, since Hume himself seems to recognize that there is a puzzle here that needs solving. Elsewhere in the same letter Hume sets out what he takes to be the central difficulty surrounding Cleanthes’ argument, namely the tenacity of such beliefs in the face of criticism. Hume frankly acknowledges that he is without an adequate explanation of this fact. Commenting on the early sections of the Dialogues, Hume writes [Cleanthes] allows, indeed, in Part 2, that all our Inference is founded on the Similitude of the Works of Nature to the usual Effects of Mind. Otherwise they must appear a mere Chaos. The only Difficulty is, why the other Dissimilitudes do not weaken the Argument. And indeed it would seem from Experience & Feeling, that they do not weaken it so much as we might naturally expect. A theory to solve this would be very acceptable. (Hume 1932, I, 157) Hume underscores the central difficulty which is to explain why we remain persuaded of the strength of the argument even after it has been subjected to critical evaluation. The argument does not seem to fully conform to the rules governing analogical inference, in so far as there are significant dissimilarities between human artifacts and the works of nature.35 Nevertheless, Hume recognizes the validity of Cleanthes’ claim in Part III that the apparent differences between natural objects and human artifacts do not weaken the analogical argument as much as one would expect, and he expresses puzzlement as to why this should be so. The puzzlement Hume reports appears to be genuine. Three times in his letter Hume expresses diffidence about his ability to account for the phenomenon to which Cleanthes appeals. I think we must take this as a sincere acknowledgment on Hume’s part that, at the time of composing the Dialogues, he did not have what he considered to be a satisfactory account of the phenomenon to which Cleanthes draws Philo’s attention. Nor does such a theory appear in the published version of the Dialogues. Of course, this is not to suggest that Hume himself believes that our propensity to accept the design argument satisfies the three criteria set out in his letter to Elliott. Indeed, Hume’s tone in that letter suggests that he is far from fully convinced.36 Moreover, even if the propensity could be shown to meet Hume’s three requirements, it would hardly follow that Philo, much less Hume himself, thinks that the natural propensity confers anything like the unshakeable conviction that Cleanthes himself portrays belief in a creator as possessing. Indeed, the heavily nuanced endorsement of belief offered by Philo in Part XII suggests that he remains far from Cleanthes on this point.37

Cleanthes’ Challenge and the “Irregular” Argument from Design 87 Notes 1 All page references to the DNR in this paper are to the second Norman Kemp Smith edition (Hume 1948/1779). 2 Wadia (1978) is a notable, perhaps unique, exception. 3 In fact, two distinct formulations of the design argument are endorsed by Cleanthes in Part II: one presented by Cleanthes himself (DNR II.5, 143) and a second introduced by Philo (DNR II.14, 146). However, as the differences between the two formulations are not relevant to the aims of this paper, I shall continue to speak of the analogical design argument presented in Part II. 4 As a further instance, Cleanthes bids Philo consider male and female reproductive systems and more generally their “whole course of life before and after generation” (DNR III.7, 154). 5 O’Connor (2001, 84) maintains that Hume’s intention in using the word ‘irregular’ is fundamentally unclear. Nevertheless, he suggests that the most plausible conjecture is that Cleanthes’ argument is said to be irregular because of its “reliance on feeling” and its use of “illustration” and example to make its case. 6 Later in Part II, Cleanthes accepts Philo’s assertion that means-end order is proof of a designer only in so far as this is borne out by experience: “Now according to this method of reasoning, Demea, it follows (and is, indeed, tacitly allowed by Cleanthes himself) that order, arrangement, or the adjustment of final causes is not, of itself, any proof of design; but only so far as it has been experienced to proceed from that principle” (DNR II.14, 146). 7 In Part VI, for example, Philo argues that inferring vegetation or generation as the cause of the universe is a better analogical argument than the inference to a divine intelligence based on a comparison of the universe to a machine. 8 Similarly, at the beginning of Part VII, Philo characterizes Cleanthes’ position as follows: “since no question of fact can be proved otherwise than by experience, the existence of a Deity admits not of proof from any other medium. The world, says he, resembles the works of human contrivance: Therefore its cause must also resemble that of the other” (DNR VII.3, 176–177). 9 This reading is supported by Hume’s summary of Cleanthes’ position in a well-known letter to Gilbert Elliot. According to Hume, “[Cleanthes] allows, indeed, in Part 2, that all our Inference is founded on the Similitude of the Works of Nature to the usual Effects of Mind. Otherwise, they must appear a mere Chaos. The only Difficulty is, why the other Dissimilitudes do not weaken the Argument” ( Hume 1932, vol. I, 157). There is no suggestion in Hume’s remarks that Cleanthes presents two versions of the argument from design. On the contrary, Hume characterizes Cleanthes as staking the entire argument (“all our Inference”) on the analogy between the works of nature and human artifacts. It is this argument that is said to be impervious to logical criticism. 10 In the Appendix to the Treatise Hume expresses dissatisfaction with his original attempt to account for the distinctive feeling of belief in terms of force and vivacity. Nevertheless, he remains committed to the view that beliefs are “nothing but a peculiar feeling, different from the simple conception” and that beliefs “strike upon us with more force” than a mere conceiving or imagining (T App. 3; Hume’s italics). For an insightful discussion of the evolution of Hume’s views with regard to the feeling of belief, see Bell 2002. 11 Cf. “belief consists not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind” (EHU 5.II 12; SBN 49; Hume’s emphasis). 12 Once again, this reading finds confirmation in Hume’s letter to Gilbert Elliott. There Hume observes that “the only Difficulty is, why the other Dissimilitudes do not weaken the Argument. And indeed it would seem from Experience & Feeling, that they do not weaken it so much as we might naturally expect.” According to Hume, it is by

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Todd Ryan “experience and feeling” that we assess the strength of the argument—that is, the degree of conviction it produces ( Hume 1932, vol. I, 157). Similarly, in an editorial note on the passage in question, J. C. A. Gaskin writes, “this is Cleanthes’ statement of the ‘irregular’ design argument. It no longer invites the discussion of analogy undertaken in Part II, but claims that the ‘idea of a contriver’ is not a result of argument. It is more like a direct perception” (in Hume 1993/1779, 204, n. 56). The importance of Maclaurin as a source for Hume has been convincingly argued by Hurlbutt 1985, 42 and 141–43. The ambiguity arises, in part, from the fact that Maclaurin does not affirm that no reasoning is necessary, only that no “nice or subtle reasonings” are required. Cf. “Education had then a mighty influence over the minds of men, and was almost equal in force to those suggestions of the senses and common understanding, by which the most determined sceptic must allow himself to be governed” (DNR I.19, 139–40). For a discussion of Philo’s attempt to draw a distinction between the beliefs of ordinary life and science, on the one hand, and those of natural religion, on the other, see Ryan 2017. For a related discussion, see Neiman 2006, especially 133–134. One important difference between Pike and Tweyman is that for Pike, Cleanthes’ introduction of the irregular argument amounts to a retraction of his earlier commitment to the analogical version of the design argument. On Tweyman’s view, Cleanthes is committed to both versions at this stage of the discussion. Tweyman argues that Cleanthes introduces this instinctive inference in response to Philo’s objection at the end of Part II that because we have no direct experience of worlds being formed, we lack any adequate basis for drawing conclusions about their cause. According to Tweyman, Cleanthes’ aim in Part III is to formulate a version of the design argument for which the need for past experience of constant conjunction can rightfully be waived on the grounds that the inference is instinctual ( Tweyman 1986, 53). Wadia (1978, 331–334) makes a similar point. Of course, in such cases, the imperfect resemblance between our present impression and the objects of past experience naturally diminishes our assurance in the conclusion of the inference, contrary to Cleanthes’ claim that the idea of a creator strikes us with a force comparable to that of sense perception. I shall return to this point below. Wadia (1978, 339–341) is a rare commentator who denies that the “irregular” argument passage provides support for the claim that Cleanthes is introducing a new type of theistic argument in Part III. However, I find his interpretation of the contrast between regular and irregular arguments unconvincing. Briefly, Wadia argues that, as Hume understands the term, a regular argument is one that would satisfy the demands of the Pyrrhonian skeptic. By contrast, an irregular argument is said to be the kind of causal reasoning endorsed by the mitigated skeptic. On this reading, Cleanthes’ point in calling the design argument “irregular” is simply to point out that even if we have no solution to the objections of the Pyrrhonian skeptic, nevertheless belief in an intelligent first cause enjoys the same kind of support as ordinary causal inferences. As will be made clear in the sequel, my own understanding of irregular arguments is entirely different. The widely held assumption that Cleanthes broaches the topic of an “irregular” argument with specific reference to what I have called Cleanthes’ Challenge is neatly expressed by O’Connor. On his account, “Cleanthes follows up his thought-experiments with a new form of design argument, which he calls an ‘irregular’ form’” ( O’Connor 2001, 77). However, examination of Hume’s manuscript belies this assumption. The “irregular” argument paragraph is an interpolation, which Hume had originally intended to insert between paragraphs III.3 and III.4—that is, after the voice in the clouds instance and before that of the vegetating library—and thus prior to Cleanthes’ Challenge. This fact alone suggests that the allusion to an “irregular” argument was never intended by Hume to be taken with specific reference to Cleanthes’ Challenge.

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Read in this light, Cleanthes’ declaration that “an orderly world … will still be received as an incontestable proof of design and intention” can only have been meant as a reference to the argument under discussion in Part II—that is, to the analogical version of the design argument. For at the point in the discussion at which Hume had originally intended to place the interpolated paragraph, no other appeal to an orderly world had been made by Cleanthes. Similarly, Dorothy Coleman understands Cleanthes to be offering not an argument based on evidence, but rather an appeal to an “instinctive feeling of intelligent design” ( Coleman 2007, xxii). As will soon become clear, my account of the nature of irregular beauties draws on Hume’s discussion in Of the Standard of Taste. In light of this connection, it is interesting to speculate whether the interpolated passage concerning irregular arguments was first conceived by Hume while drafting, or perhaps revising, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). For more on Hume’s account of the rules by which we evaluate causal inferences, see Garrett (2015, 131). One of the most influential accounts of Hume’s theory of natural belief can be found in Gaskin (1988). See, for example, Butler (1960), Pike (1970, 225–235), and Pyle (2006, 50–52). Similarly, Cleanthes speaks of “its universal, its irresistible influence” (DNR III.8, 155). Here Cleanthes appeals to an explanation that Hume himself had offered in the Natural History of Religion (NHR 1.6; 2007, 35–36). Sessions (2002, 81) argues that Cleanthes also recognizes a second class of individuals whom the argument fails to persuade, namely those of a “sifting, inquisitive disposition” such as Philo. Tweyman (1986, 64–5) offers different reasons for questioning whether Cleanthes is being made to defend a theory of natural belief. A similar suggestion is made by Penelhum, although he ascribes this position to Philo rather than Cleanthes. With regard to the latter, Penelhum seems to agree with Nelson Pike that what I have called Cleanthes’ Challenge introduces a new kind of inference to an intelligent creator—one that is immediate and not based on past experience of constant conjunction ( Penelhum 2000, 209–210). Hume typically describes the strength of analogical reasoning in highly general terms, as a function of degrees of resemblance and dissimilarity. He observes, for example, that “in proportion as the resemblance decays, the probability diminishes” (THN I.iii.13.8; SBN 147). Cf. EHU 9 1; SBN 104. Hume acknowledges in that letter that he has not succeeded in casting Cleanthes’ argument in a form that is “quite formal and regular” ( Hume 1932, I, 155). I would like to Kenneth Williford for his helpful comments and suggestions.

References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1932. The Letters of David Hume. 2 vols. edited by J.Y.T. Greig. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1948/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2nd ed. edited by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Social Sciences Publishers. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Hume, D. 1993/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Natural History of Religion, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, D. 1987/1741–77. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. Revised edition. edited by E. F. Miller, pp. 226–249. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. (Referred to herein as ST.)

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Hume, D. 2000/1739–40. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Referred to herein as THN.) Hume, D. 2006/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by T. L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.) Hume, D. 2009/1757. A Dissertation on the Passions and A Natural History of Religion, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A Natural History of Religion is referred to herein as NHR.) Other Primary Literature Maclaurin, C. 1748. An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries. London. Secondary Literature Bell, M. 2002. “Belief and Instinct in Hume’s First Inquiry.” In Reading Hume on Human Understanding, edited by P. Millican, 175–185. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press. Butler, R. J. 1960. “Natural Belief and the Enigma of Hume.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 42, No. 1, 73–100. Coleman, D. 2007. “Introduction” In David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fogelin, R. J. 2017. Hume’s Presence in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garrett, D. 2015. Hume. Abington, England and New York: Routledge. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1988. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Hurlbutt, R. H. 1985. Hume, Newton and the Design Argument. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Logan, B. 1992. “The Irregular Argument in Hume’s Dialogues.” Hume Studies 18, No. 2 (November): 483–500. Neiman, P. 2006. “Vivacity and Force as the Source of Hume’s Irregular Arguments.” Philo 9, No. 2 (Fall-Winter): 131–143. O’Connor, David. 2001. Hume on Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Penelhum, T. 2000. Themes in Hume: The Self, The Will, Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Pike, N. 1970. “Hume on the Argument from Design.” In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume, edited by Nelson Pike, 125–238. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Pyle, A. 2006. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: Reader’s Guide. London and New York: Continuum. Ryan, T. 2017. “Academic Scepticism and Mitigated Scepticism in Hume’s Dialogues.” In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by P. J. Smith and S. Charles, 319–343. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sessions, W. L. 2002. Reading Hume’s Dialogues: A Veneration for True Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tweyman, S. 1986. Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Wadia, P. S. 1978. “Professor Pike on Part III of Hume’s Dialogues.” Religious Studies 14, No. 3 (September): 325–342.

5

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence Annemarie Butler

5.1 Introduction In Part IX of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Demea presents “that simple and sublime argument a priori” for the existence of God, a version of the cosmological argument (DNR IX.1, 188). Demea cites the advantages of proving the infinity and the unity of the divine nature from this argument (ibid.). Scholars have generally identified Samuel Clarke’s demonstration as Hume’s likely historical source of this version of the argument. Indeed, Hume provides a rare footnote to Clarke. Nevertheless, Clarke is not a perfect fit. Demea’s argument does not follow the sophisticated moves of Clarke’s argument.1 Clarke is not an empiricist, whereas Demea is a concept empiricist (DNR III.13, 156). The quotation Cleanthes attributes to Clarke is not a direct quotation. Considerations like these have led M. A. Stewart (1985, 266–269) and John O. Nelson (2010, 122–123) to conclude that Demea is likely a representative of Scottish Presbyterianism from Hume’s youth; Stewart offers George Anderson as a possible source. In this paper, I defend the modest claim that in Demea’s argument, we can discern features of John Locke’s views about the demonstrability of God’s existence.2 I do not claim that Locke is the only historical source for Demea’s position. Indeed, there are some respects in which Demea’s differs from Locke’s.3 That said, Locke’s empiricism makes him an especially vulnerable target of the criticisms by Hume, Cleanthes, and Philo.4 In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume cites Locke by name for offering a faulty demonstration of the Causal Maxim, “whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence” (THN I.iii.3.1). The first section focuses primarily on Demea and his metaphysical argument. First I sketch Demea’s philosophical character and identify points of commonality with John Locke’s views. Second, I present Demea’s a priori argument for God’s existence and highlight the points that will be subject to greater examination. In the second section, I examine Locke’s demonstration of God’s existence. I distinguish three causal principles that operate in the demonstration and analyze those in terms of their constituent ideas. This clarifies how Locke connects the ideas of one’s own existence and the existence of an eternal being. Although Hume famously rejected Locke’s idea of causal power, I argue that the problematic features of Locke’s robust idea of power factor much less in his DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-8

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demonstration of God’s eternal existence than in his later argument about God’s power and knowledge. I discuss different possible meanings of “necessary existence,” given Locke’s demonstration and epistemic humility. In the third section, I analyze some of the criticisms by Cleanthes, Hume, and Philo. Of greatest importance is Cleanthes’s “decisive” argument that matters of fact cannot be demonstrated. I explain how this amounts to a direct attack on Locke’s argument, and how Locke’s own formulation of the demonstration prevents him from being able to dodge this criticism. I argue that Hume’s criticism of putative demonstrations of the Causal Maxim (including a demonstration he attributes to Locke) is a variation of Cleanthes’s “decisive” argument. Ultimately, Cleanthes’s “decisive” argument undermines two of the crucial causal principles in Locke’s demonstration, using principles consistent with Locke’s empiricism. Finally, I show that Philo’s additional criticism that a priori arguments fail to produce religious belief in most people is an especially apt argument against Locke, because Locke uses this observation to criticize Descartes’s ontological argument. 5.2 Locke and Demea 5.2.1 Locke and Demea’s Philosophical Character

Cleanthes classifies Demea among the “MYSTICS, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity” (DNR IV.1, 158), a position no doubt included in what Pamphilus describes as Demea’s “rigid inflexible orthodoxy” (DNR PH 6, 128). In setting the terms of the debate, Demea insists that “The question is not concerning the being but the nature of God. This, I affirm, from the infirmities of human understanding, to be altogether incomprehensible and unknown to us. The essence of that supreme mind, his attributes, the manner of his existence, the very nature of his duration; these and every particular, which regards so divine a Being, are mysterious to men” (DNR II.1, 141). We are left to “adore” the incomprehensible “infinite perfections” of the Supreme Being (ibid.). Why does Demea claim that God’s attributes are incomprehensible? Demea is a concept empiricist, holding that ideas of external sense and internal sentiment “compose the whole furniture of human understanding” (DNR III.13, 156).5 These “materials” of human thought are unlike those of the divine mind. Similarly, the “manner” of human thought is “fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting, successive, and compounded; and were we to remove these circumstances, we absolutely annihilate its essence, and it would, in such a case, be an abuse of terms to apply to it the name of thought or reason” (DNR III.13, 156–157). Our ideas and operations of the mind cannot adequately represent the divine nature. Referring to Father Malebranche, Demea thinks the most accurate thing we can say (but not the only thing we can say) is that God is (DNR II.2, 141–142). John Locke’s view bears certain similarities to Demea’s. First, Locke is an empiricist, who is committed to the claim that “all our Knowledge is founded” on and “ultimately derives” from experience, which includes sensation and reflection (Locke 1690, 2.1.2, 104). Second, like Demea, Locke emphasizes God’s incomprehensibility: “the Great GOD, of whom, and from whom are all things, is

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incomprehensibly Infinite” (Locke 1690, 2.17.1, 210). Or, more carefully, infinity does not apply to most of his attributes, “which are properly inexhaustible and incomprehensible” (ibid.). Third, Locke holds that God’s existence and perfection can be demonstrated. Furthermore, from this demonstration, Locke thinks that God’s infinity and unity are demonstrable (letters 2340, 2395, and 2443 to Phillipus von Limborch; Locke 1981, vol. 6, 783–793). 5.2.2 Demea’s A Priori Argument

Demea identifies certain advantages of an a priori argument for God’s existence and nature as opposed to an a posteriori argument. As Philo’s and Demea’s objections to Cleanthes’s a posteriori Design Argument reveal, if we reason from experience, we cannot be certain of God’s infinite attributes (DNR V.5, 166), perfection (DNR V.6, 166–167), unity (DNR V.8–9, 167–168), immortality (DNR V.10, 168), or even whether God is to be worshipped (DNR VI.1, 170). Instead, Demea proposes the “simple and sublime argument a priori, which, by offering to us infallible demonstration, cuts off at once all doubt and difficulty[.] By this argument, too, we may prove the INFINITY of the divine attributes, which I am afraid, can never be ascertained with certainty from any other topic” (DNR IX.1, 188) After prompting from Cleanthes, he offers the following formulation: The argument, replied DEMEA, which I would insist on is the common one. Whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence; it being absolutely impossible for any thing to produce itself, or be the cause of its own existence. In mounting up, therefore, from effects to causes, we must either go on in tracing an infinite succession, without any ultimate cause at all, or must at last have recourse to some ultimate cause, that is necessarily existent: Now that the first supposition is absurd may be thus proved. In the infinite chain or succession of causes and effects, each single effect is determined to exist by the power and efficacy of that cause which immediately preceded; but the whole eternal chain or succession, taken together, is not determined or caused by any thing: And yet it is evident that it requires a cause or reason, as much as any particular object, which begins to exist in time. The question is still reasonable, why this particular succession of causes existed from eternity, and not any other succession, or no succession at all. If there be no necessarily existent Being, any supposition, which can be formed, is equally possible; nor is there any more absurdity in nothing’s having existed from eternity, than there is in that succession of causes, which constitutes the universe. What was it, then, which determined something to exist rather than nothing, and bestowed being on a particular possibility, exclusive of the rest? External causes, there are supposed to be none. Chance is a word without a meaning. Was it nothing? But that can never produce any thing. We must, therefore, have recourse to a necessarily existent Being, who carries the REASON of his existence in himself; and who cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction. There is consequently such a Being, that is, there is a Deity. (DNR IX.3, 188–189)

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In what follows, I will focus on the fact that Demea begins the argument with the Causal Maxim, “whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence.” The argument also depends on the contingent premise that something exists, which rules out the possibility that there might have never been anything at all. In the next section, I examine how Locke purports to demonstrate the Causal Maxim, and how he uses it to connect the idea of one’s own existence to the idea of a perfect, eternal, necessarily existing being. 5.3 Locke on Demonstration, Causal Principles, and Necessary Existence 5.3.1 Locke on Demonstrative Knowledge

For Locke, knowledge consists in “the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas” (Locke 1690, 4.1.2, 525). The certainty of this perception can come in degrees, according to the way the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement (Locke 1690, 4.2.1, 530).6 When “the Mind perceives the Agreement or Disagreement of two Ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other,” we have intuitive knowledge with the greatest degree of certainty (Locke 1690, 4.2.1, 530–531). When the mind does not perceive this agreement or disagreement between ideas immediately, but by means of intermediate chains of intuitive knowledge, we have demonstrative knowledge (Locke 1690, 4.2.2, 531–532). Locke calls these intermediate ideas “Proofs” (Locke 1690, 4.2.3, 532). Once these intervening proofs are discovered and connected in memory, the mind attains certainty of the connection7 between ideas and thereby has knowledge. Because the connection between ideas in a demonstration requires the use of intermediate ideas and all of the chains of ideas must be held in memory (Locke 1690, 4.2.6, 533; 4.17.15, 684), the certainty is not as great as that of intuitive knowledge; there is the possibility of mistake. However, because each of the intermediate ideas is connected intuitively in a chain, the demonstration is ultimately composed of chains of ideas that have the greatest certainty, and therefore counts as knowledge (Locke 1690, 4.2.7, 533). Prior to discovery of the relevant proofs, one may doubt the connection between ideas that are in fact capable of demonstration (Locke 1690, 4.2.5, 532–533). This cannot happen with intuitive knowledge, because the connection between ideas is immediate. However, in demonstrations, it requires special effort to discover, organize, and retain ideas in a chain of reasoning, omitting no steps (Locke 1690, 4.2.7, 534). Once the ideas are so organized, doubt is removed and certainty is achieved. Because the relations so perceived in intuitive knowledge obtain in virtue of the ideas themselves, there is a “necessary dependance” [sic] between ideas that are not “separable”8 (Locke 1690, 4.3.28–29, 559; 4.1.2, 525; 4.3.14, 546); and therefore demonstrations are ultimately composed chains of necessary dependences between ideas. 5.3.2 Locke on Demonstrations of God’s Necessary Existence

Locke holds that God is the only being whose existence can be demonstrated (Locke 1690, 4.3.18, 549; 4.7.7, 594) and only by an argument from cause and effect (Locke 1690, 1.4.10, 90; 2.17.5, 212). What we now call the “ontological

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argument” begins from the idea of a supremely perfect being and deduces from this idea that that being necessarily exists. In the Essay, Locke criticizes the ontological argument for failing to be persuasive, and he criticizes those philosophers who claim that the ontological argument is the only successful proof of God’s existence.9 Locke argues that we have no innate ideas, and therefore no innate idea of God (Locke 1690, 1.4.8–11, 87–90). Instead, as a concept empiricist, Locke holds that we construct the complex idea of God ultimately from simple ideas of sensation and reflection (Locke 1690, 2.17.5, 212; 2.23.33–35, 314–315).10 But, he observes, different people have different ideas of God: “for ’tis evident, some Men have none, and some worse than none, and the most very different” (Locke 1690, 4.10.7, 622).11 For this reason, “to lay the whole stress of so important a Point” on an argument that depends on a person’s idea of God is a bad strategy (ibid.). According to Locke, if one were to stipulate that the idea of God includes necessary existence, God’s existence would be mere supposition, not proof. We would not have certain knowledge that something exists “answering that idea” (Locke 1823, 55). Locke concludes, “Real existence can be proved only by real existence; and, therefore, the real existence of a God can only be proved by the real existence of other things” (Locke 1696, 316). Contrary to Edward Khamara and D. G. C. MacNabb, Locke does not here “reject the notion of a necessary being” (1983, 152 and 154 n. 26; cf. Khamara 1992, 37). Locke attributes necessary existence to God. Instead, Locke’s point is that God’s necessary existence needs to be concluded from causal argument, starting from other real existing things (Locke 1690, 1.4.10, 90; 2.17.5, 212). In the Essay, Locke offers a demonstration of God’s existence. It begins with intuitive knowledge of one’s own existence (Locke 1690, 4.10.2, 619; 4.9.3, 618–619).12 Locke introduces the Causal Maxim, “what had a Beginning, must be produced by something else” (Locke 1690, 4.10.3, 620). Therefore, assuming I had a beginning, there exists something which produced me. Did this cause exist from eternity or not? If it did not exist from eternity, it would stand in need of some other cause, per the Causal Maxim. This leads Locke to the conclusion that because I had a beginning, there must have been something that existed from eternity. Locke takes this to establish a single entity that has existed always. Locke then introduces what I shall refer to as the Causal Synonymy Principle: “All the Powers it has, must be owing to, and received from the same Source” (Locke 1690, 4.10.4, 620). Because I am a sensing, perceiving, and knowing being, this eternal being is knowing and intelligent too (Locke 1690, 4.10.5, 620–621). This knowing eternal being cannot be material (i.e., senseless matter), because it would violate the Causal Synonymy Principle, by introducing a power in the effect that the cause does not possess (ibid.). 5.3.3 Locke’s Causal Principles

Locke’s demonstration of God’s existence depends on a number of causal principles:

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Annemarie Butler The Inefficacy of Nothing Principle: bare nothing cannot out of it self produce any real being (Locke 1690, 4.10.3 & 8, 620 & 622)13 The Causal Maxim: “what had a Beginning, must be produced by something else” (Locke 1690, 4.10.3, 620; Locke 1823, 61)14 The Principle of Causal Synonymy: “what had its Being and Beginning from another, must also have all that which is in, and belongs to its Being from another too” (Locke 1690, 4.10.4 & 10, 620 & 624)15

5.3.3.1 The Inefficacy of Nothing Principle

Locke writes, “… Man knows by an intuitive Certainty, that bare nothing can no more produce any real Being, than it can be equal to two right Angles” (Locke 1690, 4.10.3, 620). According to Locke, one immediately perceives the disagreement between the ideas of nothing and producing real existence. Consider Locke’s empirical account of the idea of “cause”: In the notice, that our Senses take of the constant Vicissitude of Things, we cannot but observe, that several particular [sic], both Qualities, and Substances begin to exist; and that they receive this their Existence, from the due Application and Operation of some other Being. From this Observation, we get our Ideas of Cause and Effect. That which produces any simple or complex Idea, we denote by the general Name Cause; and that which is produced, Effect. (Locke 1690, 2.26.1, 324) Lex Newman (2007, 341) observes that causation is a relation, which relates an existing object (i.e., not nothing) and the thing produced. Thus, a cause must always be something; if there is no object, the relation of causing fails to obtain (Locke 1690, 2.25.5, 321). Accordingly, to have an idea of causing, there must be ideas of objects (i.e., not nothing) standing for cause and effect. Newman (2007, 341) correctly observes that Locke holds that the object that is a cause possesses productive power. To be sure, Locke’s full account involves attributing active power to the object that is the cause, and the cause “exert[s]” this power to produce the effect, which has a passive power to be acted upon in that way (Locke 1690, 2.22.11, 294). However, it is not obvious that Locke needs the idea of power to establish the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle; instead, he needs only the weaker relation between a thing that changes, operates, or acts, and a thing that is changed, operated on, or acted upon. Locke’s scattered comments about cause and effect support this interpretation. There are two known types of action, thinking (and willing) and motion (Locke 1690, 2.21.4, 235; 2.22.11, 294; Locke 1823, 464–465). Particular causes operate in some particular way (a particular kind of thought or motion) to produce their particular effects, which are either new qualities or new substances (Locke 1690, 2.26.1–2, 324–325). Often, we do not have a clear idea of the manner in which causes operate to produce their effects (Locke 1690, 2.22.11, 294; 2.23.28, 311; 2.26.2, 325). The obscurity of the idea of

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the manner creates obscurity in the idea of power (Locke 1690, 2.21.4, 234–245; 2.22.11, 294).16 But that does not make all components of the idea obscure. The idea of the relation between the changer and the thing changed is clear, even though its particular manner of changing is obscure. 5.3.3.2 The Causal Maxim

The Causal Maxim connects beginning of existence with being an effect.17 In his letter to Edward Stillingfleet, Locke sketches how this connection may be perceived:18 But “every thing that has a beginning must have a cause,” is a true principle of reason, or a proposition certainly true; which we come to know by the same way, i.e. by contemplating our ideas, and perceiving that the idea of beginning to be, is necessarily connected with the idea of some operation; and the idea of operation, with the idea of something operating, which we call a cause; and so the beginning to be, is perceived to agree with the idea of a cause, as is expressed in the proposition: and thus it comes to be a certain proposition; and so may be called a principle of reason, as every true proposition is to him that perceives the certainty of it. (Locke 1823, 61–62) As we saw with the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle, Locke holds that the empirically derived idea of cause connects the idea of a beginning of existence (of a quality or substance) with the idea of another already existing substance by means of some operation or particular manner of acting. The former is the effect, and the latter is the cause. The question is why we should think that beginnings-to-be are always effects. When something begins to exist, at the previous moment it did not exist. In other words, change has occurred from the one moment to the next, such that the thing comes into existence. Since the new thing did not exist at the earlier moment, it cannot operate to produce itself. So, at the moment it begins to exist, it is acted upon. Its passivity implies the existence and operation of something else (to which Locke attributes an active power) (Locke 1690, 2.21.2, 234; 2.22.11, 294). “[T]he things thus made to exist, which were not there before, are Effects; and those things, which operated to the Existence, Causes” (Locke 1690, 2.26.2, 325). By connecting the idea of a beginning of existence, the idea of action or operation, and the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle, we thus construct a demonstration of the Causal Maxim. 5.3.3.3 Locke’s Demonstration of God’s Existence Revisited

The next stage is to demonstrate the existence of an eternal being. Locke invokes both the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle and the Causal Maxim in his argument: If therefore we know there is some real Being, and that Non-entity cannot produce any real Being, it is an evident demonstration, that from Eternity there has been something; Since what was not from Eternity, had a Beginning; and what had a Beginning, must be produced by something else. (Locke 1690, 4.10.3, 620)

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As Locke makes clear in his letter to Stillingfleet (Locke 1823, 63; cf. Locke 1690, 4.10.8, 622), this argument does invoke the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle. Suppose that there was a time when there was absolutely nothing. By the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle, there would not be any production of anything. In other words, there would be nothing eternally. But I am intuitively certain that I now exist. So there was no time prior to my existence when there did not exist something; that is, something has existed from eternity (cp. Cudworth 1743/1678, 642).19 To all appearances, this looks to be the end of Locke’s argument for the existence of a single first cause; the remainder of the argument (Locke 1690, 4.10.4–6, 620–621; cf. 4.10.9–19, 622–630) concerns the being’s attributes, especially power and intelligence. If that is right, it is a bad argument. Leibniz (1765, 4.10, 436) accuses Locke of a scope confusion. From “at all times (in the past), something (or other) exists,” Locke seems to move to “there is one being who exists at all times (in the past).”20 Doing so avoids having to consider the possibility that there was an infinite series of caused beginnings.21,22 Marcy Lascano (2016, 472) proposes: “Locke’s seemingly fallacious moves might be partly mitigated by understanding that he is concerned not with an individual being, but with a kind of being. That is, Locke is trying to show that the cause of all individuals must be a certain type of thing—one that is ‘cogitative’ rather than ‘incogitative.’”23 However, Lascano’s reading stands in tension with Locke’s next argument about the source of powers. Locke’s conclusion is that there is an eternal source of all being and power.24 If there were multiple instances of this, it would violate his time-place-kind principle of identity (Locke 1690, 2.27.1, 328): on this assumption, if there are any eternal and ubiquitous most powerful beings, there is only one (Locke 1690, 2.27.2, 329). A second problem is that Locke’s argument, if successful, proves only that a first being has existed from eternity, not that it both has always existed and will always exist. Locke observes that our idea of infinite duration is composed of two ideas: starting from our own existence now, we combine (i) an endless progression à parte ante and (ii) an endless progression à parte post (Locke 1690, 2.17.10, 215).25 5.3.3.4 The Principle of Causal Synonymy

Once Locke has secured the conclusion that an eternal being exists, he aims to prove that it has every active power (of the highest perfection) that operates in the universe. Locke’s argument employs what I am calling “The Principle of Causal Synonymy.” Next, it is evident, that what had its Being and Beginning from another, must also have all that which is in, and belongs to its Being from another too. All the Powers it has, must be owing to, and received from the same Source. This eternal Source then of all being must also be the Source and Original of all Power; and so this eternal Being must be also the most powerful. (Locke 1690, 4.10.4, 620)26

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The Principle of Causal Synonymy is stronger than both the Causal Maxim and the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle. The Principle of Causal Synonymy does not simply posit that there is some thing that causes any new beginning; the cause must also possess the powers possessed by the effect. Locke does not explicitly prove the Principle of Causal Synonymy. We find fuller discussion in the writings of earlier philosophers, such as Ralph Cudworth, who were influential on Locke’s thinking. Cudworth’s argument (Cudworth 1743/1678, 739) proceeds as follows: suppose that an effect begins to exist, possessing a perfection that its cause does not have. Because the cause does not have the perfection, it is unable to give it to the effect; it lacks the relevant kind of active power. By the Causal Maxim, every beginning of existence must have a cause, and the cause must precede it. Therefore, the effect cannot cause its own perfection, nor can the perfection be uncaused. Thus, it is impossible for such a perfection to begin to exist; it must come from a cause that has at least as much perfection as that of the effect. Cudworth also makes the point that two things that are equal in perfection might nevertheless be incapable of producing one another. If matter possesses only passive powers, then despite being equivalent in perfections, it would be incapable of creating new matter, because it lacks active power to do so. I think Cudworth’s distinction between active and passive powers helps us to make sense of Locke’s claims about “higher” and “lower” degrees of perfections. Locke restates the Principle of Causal Synonymy later in the chapter: the first cause cannot “ever give to another any perfection that it hath not, either actually in it self, or at least in a higher degree …” (Locke 1690, 4.10.10, 624). Elsewhere, Locke enumerates perfections, including existence, power, wisdom, knowledge, and pleasure (Locke 1690, 2.23.34, 315; 3.6.11, 445). He acknowledges that there may be degrees of perfections (Locke 1690, 3.6.11, 445; 4.16.12, 666), but Locke does not clarify which perfections count as “higher” or “lower” in the hierarchy of perfections. Following Cudworth, I offer the following conjecture: passive powers are lower degrees of perfections than active powers. For example, with respect to motion, God does not have the passive power of mobility,27 but he does have the active power of “motivity” (a contrast Locke draws between “the Power of being moved” and “the Power of moving”; Locke 1690, 2.21.73, 286).28 Accordingly, God does not have the passive power of sensing (i.e., the capacity to receive ideas; Locke 1690, 2.21.72, 286), but he does have the active power of knowledge. One upside of this conjecture is that once Locke has proven that the eternal being has knowledge, the eternal being is shown to be actively thinking; it does not merely contain thinking “eminently.”29 Locke applies the Principle of Causal Synonymy to the case of knowledge. Because I am a perceiving and knowing being, the eternal cause must be knowing too (Locke 1690, 4.10.5, 620).30 Locke offers a further argument that the first cause must be immaterial. His argument turns on the disagreement between the ideas of senseless matter and thought (Locke 1823, 63). By definition, “senseless matter” does not sense, perceive, or know.31 But there is a question whether it can produce knowledge. Matter cannot put motion into it self (Locke 1690, 4.10.10, 623); indeed, matter is entirely passive (Locke 1690, 2.23.28, 312;

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cf. 2.21.2, 234). So the motion of matter would either be eternal “or else be produced, and added to Matter by some other Being more powerful” (i.e., possessing higher perfections) (Locke 1690, 4.10.10, 623). Matter already in motion can “knock, impell, and resist” other bodies—but that is all it can do (Locke 1690, 4.10.10 & 16, 624 & 627). Locke offers the familiar inconceivability argument about how changes in position and figure cannot sometimes produce thought but other times not. However, I think there is more to his argument.32 Essential to thinking is self-determination (or its “regulat[ing]”; Locke 1690, 4.10.17, 627) of its activities, which requires an active power. But when matter transfers motion to matter, the transfer is “accidental,” “limited,” and “unguided”; there is no freedom or choice (ibid.). In other words, an active power cannot arise from passive powers, just as the Principle of Causal Synonymy requires. 5.3.4 Necessary Existence

At the conclusion of the first round of arguments (Locke 1690, 4.10.3–6, 620–621), Locke writes that we have “Knowledge of this certain and evident Truth, That there is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing Being” (Locke 1690, 4.10.6, 621). The expression “necessary existence” does not occur until he presents his argument in a second round (Locke 1690, 4.10.8–12, 622–625). Again, from the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle and the Causal Maxim, Locke concludes, “There is no Truth more evident, than that something must be from Eternity” (Locke 1690, 4.10.8, 622), where Locke this time emphasizes “must be.” After applying the Principle of Causal Synonymy, Locke writes, “If therefore it be evident, that something necessarily must exist from Eternity, ’tis also as evident, that that Something must necessarily be a cogitative Being” (Locke 1690, 4.10.11, 625). Again, Locke emphasizes “necessarily must.” Locke then observes, “Though this discovery of the necessary Existence of an eternal Mind, does sufficiently lead us into the Knowledge of GOD,” some people may harbor doubts (Locke 1690, 4.10.12, 625). He then goes on to consider some of the materialist objections. Locke does not explicitly tell us what he means by “necessary existence.” J. J. MacIntosh (1997, 48) accuses Locke of confusing “the necessity of the conditional” (as in “it necessarily follows”; Locke 1690, 4.10.10 & 12, 624 & 625) with the necessary truth of the consequent. Locke’s argument, according to MacIntosh, traces necessary connections between ideas, and concludes that God’s existence is necessary. Given how the words “must” and “necessary” move around in Locke’s argument, this is not impossible. It is true that Locke is committed to the necessity of the conditional. In his letter to Stillingfleet, Locke clarifies: “I place certainty where I think every body will find it, and no where else, viz. in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas; so that, in my opinion, it is impossible to be placed in any one single idea, simple or complex …” (Locke 1823, 57). Intuitive certainty (and a fortiori demonstrative certainty) does not attach to a single idea, but to the connection between the ideas. Demonstrative certainty of God’s existence is not manifested in the idea of God alone (even if the perfection of “necessary

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 101 existence” were included, 1823, 55); instead, one perceives “the idea of thinking in ourselves … to have a necessary agreement and connexion with the idea of the existence of an eternal, thinking being” (Locke 1823, 60). Similarly, the component ideas of the proofs of the Causal Maxim are perceived to be “necessarily connected” (Locke 1823, 61–62). On this interpretation, when Locke describes God as having “necessary existence,” he is not pointing out some positive idea we have, distinct from the idea of existence (Locke 1690, 2.7.7, 131). Instead, the “necessity” of God’s “necessary existence” points to the demonstrable, necessary connection between the ideas of my existence (or the existence of anything else) and the existence of an eternal being (cf. Locke 1690, 4.10.13, 625). In perceiving this necessary connection, I discover the truth of the relationship.33 This entails that God’s existence is a precondition of the existence of anything else.34 What’s more, this interpretation helps to make sense of Locke’s attribution of “necessary existence” to void space (Locke 1690, 2.17.4, 211), because motion of a body requires an empty space for it to move into (Locke 1690, 2.13.22, 177).35 The connection between ideas is necessary, and void space is a precondition for motion, but void space itself does not exist necessarily. Nevertheless, Locke may also wish to distinguish the nature of God’s existence from that of other beings that begin to exist. Cudworth distinguishes a negative and positive sense of “existing of itself,” “being the cause of itself,” or having “necessary existence” (see MacIntosh 1997, 39). In the negative sense, this means no more than “having nothing else for its cause.” In the positive sense, “its necessary eternal existence is essential to the perfection of its own nature.” Cudworth affirms both of these senses; Locke seems to affirm only the negative sense. Furthermore, Locke thinks the causal argument establishes an eternal being. As something that has no beginning, the Causal Maxim does not require that it have a cause. Accordingly, Locke can hold that the eternal being has the special status of not having an external cause.36 This interpretation does not attribute confusion to Locke about the necessity of the connection between ideas and the necessary existence attributed only to God. 5.4 Hume on Demonstration, the Causal Maxim, and Cleanthes and Philo on Demea’s A Priori Argument 5.4.1 Hume on Demonstration

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume distinguishes between knowledge and probability, according to the relation between the compared ideas. In knowledge, the relation between the ideas is invariable, so long as the compared ideas remain the same (THN I.iii.1.1).37 These relations include “resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in quantity or number” (THN I.iii.1.2). These relations, three of which are discoverable “at first sight, without any enquiry or reasoning,” yield knowledge that is intuitively (or demonstratively) certain (ibid.). In contrast, in probability, the relations may change without any change to the ideas or objects themselves, such as changes in relations of time and place, identity, or causation (THN I.iii.1.1). Like Locke, Hume holds that intuitive and demonstrative certainty depend on the content of ideas, not the form of propositions (see Owen 1999, 100). (Locke

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casts knowledge in terms of our perception of the agreement of ideas, whereas Hume casts it in terms of the invariability of the relation.) Accordingly, for Hume and Locke, contingent propositions may be intuitively known, such as violet is darker than lavender. For this reason, we should reject interpretations that regard Humean demonstrations as deductively valid arguments with necessarily true premises (e.g., O’Connor 1952, 154; see Owen 1999, 85–91 for further argument). Instead, Humean intuitive certainty requires that a relation invariably obtain between two ideas, regardless of circumstances external to the ideas. To take the above example, regardless of when or where or what other ideas accompany them, violet is always darker than lavender. In contrast, relations of place and time depend on circumstances. Whether this object precedes or follows another depends on which object appears first. This order may be reversed without any change to the compared objects.38 Because the relation is variable, it is not intuitively or demonstratively certain. Temporal priority and spatial contiguity are components of the idea of the causal relation (THN I.iii.2.6–7). Accordingly, particular causal relations cannot be demonstrated. 5.4.2 Cleanthes’s “Decisive” Argument

Hume famously distinguishes between relations of ideas and matters of fact (EHU IV.1–2). Relations of ideas “are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe” (EHU IV.1). In contrast, matters of fact depend crucially on how things exist in the universe. Hume would classify the proposition that God exists as a matter of fact. Matters of fact may be observed or unobserved. Neither Locke nor Demea propose that God is observed. So the question is whether the matter of fact that God exists is established by demonstration or probable (causal) inference beginning ultimately from other observed matters of fact. Cleanthes argues that there can be no demonstration of any matter of fact: … there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no Being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no Being, whose existence is demonstrable. I propose this argument as entirely decisive, and am willing to rest the whole controversy upon it. (DNR IX.5, 189; cf. EHU 4.2) What does “implies a contradiction” mean? David Owen (1999, 109) explains: “the denial of an intuitive or demonstrative truth implies a change in one or both of the ideas so related. So one is holding that an idea both is and is not something: that is the contradiction.” Before fleshing out Cleanthes’s argument, it will be helpful to note some key features of Hume’s accounts of existence and non-existence.39 For Hume,

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 103 existence is not a distinct impression or idea (THN I.ii.6.4).40 There is no change in an idea’s content from merely conceiving an object (its possibility) to believing the object is real (its actuality); what changes is the manner of the idea, that is, the idea is enlivened (THN I.iii.7.2). Further, consider Cleanthes’s comment above: “Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent.” This echoes a claim made by Hume: “no two ideas are in themselves contrary, except those of existence and non-existence, which are plainly resembling, as implying both of them an idea of the object; tho’ the latter excludes the object from all times and places, in which it is suppos’d not to exist” (THN I.i.5.8).41 Accordingly, conceiving that some object x exists or that x does not exist does not change the content of the idea of the object x; thus existence and non-existence are “plainly resembling, as implying both of them an idea of the object.” But something does change: when x is conceived as not-existing, x is represented as excluded from some particular time (or times). For Hume, we conceive of time by means of successive impressions or ideas (THN I.ii.3.6–11), the succession of which supports comparisons of co-existence, precedence, and succession (yielding temporal relations of simultaneous with, earlier than, and later than). Thus object x’s existing at a time is conceived by a complex idea of a particular temporal relation42 between object x and some other object in this succession (or timeline). Object x’s not-existing at a time, or being “excluded” from that particular time, is conceived by a complex idea of object x and that same other object, but without that particular temporal relation obtaining between x and the other object.43 The contradiction between existence and non-existence obtains because it involves conceiving one and the same object both bearing and not bearing the same particular temporal relation to the same object.44 Drawing on this, we can develop the following interpretation of Cleanthes’s “decisive” argument. If, per impossibile, there were a demonstration of the existence of some object x, there would exist an idea of some other object y with which the idea of x would be invariably related. Because the ideas of x and y are distinct, they can be conceived separately. This means that they can be conceived with a particular temporal relation connecting them, but they also can be conceived without such a relation. That is, there is no change to the ideas of x or y, even when the relation between them has changed. Contrary to the assumption, the ideas of the objects are not always related by that particular temporal relation; that is, a change in relation does not force a change to one or more of the related ideas. Thus, the denial of a matter of fact does not imply a contradiction; matters of fact are not demonstrable. 5.4.3 Hume on the Causal Maxim

Hume’s argument against the intuitive or demonstrative certainty of the Causal Maxim (“whatever has a beginning has also a cause of existence,” THN I.iii.3.2) is a version of Cleanthes’s “decisive” argument.45 Hume observes that demonstrating this causal principle requires showing “the impossibility there is, that any thing can ever begin to exist without some productive principle” (THN I.iii.3.3). Hume argues:

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Now that the latter proposition is utterly incapable of a demonstrative proof, we may satisfy ourselves by considering, that as all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, ’twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas; without which ’tis impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause. (THN I.iii.3.3) This argument builds on the principle that whatever is distinct is separable in thought and existence (one of Hume’s Separability Principles). The object under examination has a beginning of existence, meaning that there is a time at which it does not exist and a later time at which it does exist. Any other object is a distinct entity. As distinct entities, it is possible to conceive the one without conceiving the other. Thus it is possible to conceive the first moment of the object’s existence without another object, a fortiori one that produces it. Hume then applies his principle that separability in thought implies that it is possible to exist separately in reality. Therefore, it is possible for something to begin to exist without a cause or productive principle.46 After presenting this general argument, Hume discusses four putative demonstrations of the Causal Maxim, the first three of which he attributes to Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Clarke, and John Locke, respectively. Hume’s summary of Locke’s argument is as follows: By the same intuition, that we perceive nothing not to be equal to two right angles, or not to be something, we perceive, that it can never be a cause; and consequently must perceive, that every object has a real cause of its existence. (THN I.iii.3.6). This resembles Locke’s reasoning in Essay 4.10.4 (1690, 620). Hume complains that this argument fails to exclude all causes, by surreptitiously treating “nothing” as a possible cause. But to have no cause is not to have “nothing” as its cause.47 Hume offers the criticism: If every thing must have a cause, it follows, that upon the exclusion of other causes we must accept of the object itself or of nothing as causes. But ’tis the very point in question, whether every thing must have a cause or not; and therefore, according to all just reasoning, it ought never to be taken for granted. (THN I.iii.3.7) As we saw above, Locke would agree that the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle by itself does not prove that every beginning of existence has a cause. All it shows

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 105 is that causes must be something. Instead, for Locke, what does the heavy lifting of the Causal Maxim is that a beginning of existence is a change, implying something’s operating to bring it into existence. As Hume objects, this presupposes the very issue in question: that every change is an effect. Locke might respond by pointing out that it is possible to doubt demonstrations (Locke 1690, 4.2.5, 532–533). Only after one has connected the ideas through proofs does the demonstration become certain (see Owen 1999, 60). So, Hume’s ability to conceive of his own existence without the existence of an eternal being would show only that Hume has not distinctly perceived the intermediate proofs. The problem with this reply is that Locke assumes the Causal Maxim in postulating the requisite connected ideas, thus, both Locke’s demonstration of the Causal Maxim as well as his potential reply to Hume’s counterargument presuppose the Causal Maxim. 5.4.4 Cleanthes’s Rejection of “Necessary Existence”

Locke disagrees with Hume’s account of existence. For Locke, every perceived object and idea is accompanied by a distinct idea of existence (Locke 1690, 2.7.7, 131). Hume’s full argument against the demonstrative certainty of the Causal Maxim relies on one of his Separability Principles. Specifically, Hume holds that there is no change in the idea of an object when that object is conceived as existing and when it is conceived as not existing. Cleanthes uses this to show that no matter of fact (no existence claim) is demonstrable, because its non-existence does not “imply a contradiction.” That is, it is possible for the object both to coexist or fail to co-exist with other objects. Locke might point out that there is a different complex idea when thinking of an object that exists as opposed to its not existing. When the object exists, there is the additional idea of existence accompanying the object. This works as a reply, however, only if the additional idea of existence alters the idea of the object. But Locke does not make existence part of the nominal essence of substances. So Hume’s point holds: there is no change in the idea from thinking of its co-existing with another object to its not co-existing. Although Locke uses the expression “necessary existence,” we found that at most what he means is that there is no external cause of God’s existence. More often, Locke emphasizes the necessary connection between the ideas of one’s own existence and God’s existence. Knowledge of God’s existence differs from knowledge of other existents insofar as God’s existence is demonstratively certain. Unlike Descartes or Clarke, for Locke, “necessary existence” is not a special idea of existence attributed to God. Nevertheless, one might try to evade Cleanthes’s “decisive” objection by drawing a distinction between the nominal and real essence of God. For Locke, the real essence of a substance (including God; Locke 1690, 2.23.35, 315) is unknowable. Accordingly, given our ideas, we can conceive of God as eternal, most knowing, most powerful. On Locke’s behalf, one might try the following line: if we could know God’s real essence, we would discover that existence is part

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of God’s simple essence and God cannot fail to exist. Even this weak defense (which purports to establish the possibility of an unknown divine real essence) fails. Cleanthes argues: But it is evident, that this can never happen, while our faculties remain the same as at present. It will still be possible for us, at any time, to conceive the non-existence of what we formerly conceived to exist; nor can the mind ever lie under a necessity of supposing any object to remain always in being; in the same manner as we lie under a necessity of always conceiving twice two to be four. The words, therefore, necessary existence, have no meaning; or, which is the same thing, none that is consistent. (DNR IX.6, 189–190) We cannot conceive of existence being inseparable from an object. So when we suppose that the real essence contains existence, we literally have no idea what we are supposing. 5.4.5 Philo’s Further Criticism

Philo concludes the discussion as follows: … the argument a priori has seldom been found very convincing, except to people of a metaphysical head, who have accustomed themselves to abstract reasoning, and who finding from mathematics, that the understanding frequently leads to truth, through obscurity, and contrary to first appearances, have transferred the same habit of thinking to subjects where it ought not to have place. Other people, even of good sense and the best inclined to religion, feel always some deficiency in such arguments, though they are not perhaps able to explain distinctly where it lies. A certain proof, that men ever did, and ever will, derive their religion from other sources than from this species of reasoning. (DNR IX.11, 191–192) This is a criticism to which Locke would be especially sensitive.48 Locke had criticized Descartes’s ontological argument for failing to prove that an immaterial God exists (Locke 1696, 314) as opposed to eternal matter. Locke’s criticism is that the idea of God alone does not prove the real existence of God (1823, 55). Accordingly, philosophers who insist on the ontological argument alone and work to invalidate any other demonstration of God’s existence work against the cause of promoting religious belief and deny themselves certainty of God’s existence—which is to be achieved by the causal demonstration alone (Locke 1690, 4.10.7, 622; 1823, 53–55; 1696, 313–316). This is dangerous because belief in God is important “to preserve in them true sentiments of religion and morality” (1823, 54). Because the argument is flawed, it may produce belief, but it does not produce certainty (1823, 53). But Locke admits that there are not many for whom it produces belief, because not many people have the requisite idea of God. “[F]or

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 107 ’tis evident, some Men have none, and some worse than none, and the most very different” (Locke 1690, 4.10.7, 622). Accordingly, the number of people who achieve religious belief on the basis of the ontological argument is very few. Locke insists that the causal demonstration is the only way to prove God’s existence. “Real existence can be proved only by real existence; and, therefore, the real existence of a God can only be proved by the real existence of other things” (Locke 1696, 316; cf. Locke 1823, 55). But Cleanthes has shown that there is a crucial defect in Locke’s demonstration: existence cannot be demonstrated. Philo adds that the demonstration fails to achieve even religious belief in most people. 5.5 Conclusion From analysis of Locke’s demonstration of God’s existence, we discovered that the argument depends crucially on the Causal Maxim, according to which anything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. Locke thinks that the Causal Maxim is demonstratively certain. Hume argues that the Causal Maxim cannot be demonstrated, because it is not inconceivable that an object begins to exist without a productive principle. An object can be conceived as co-existing with a particular object and as not co-existing with that object, and conceiving of these distinct relations does not involve any change to the two objects. If the Causal Maxim were demonstrable, the relation between the two objects would be invariable. This would mean that in order to conceive of the absence of the relation would require a change to one or the other of the ideas. For example, conceiving of a (planar) triangle whose interior angles are not equal to two right angles would require changing the ideas of (planar) triangle or right angle (or other constituent ideas). But we can clearly conceive the ideas of objects as related or unrelated, without any change to the ideas. We discovered that Hume’s argument against the Causal Maxim is a version of Cleanthes’s “decisive argument” against the metaphysical argument for God’s existence. There is no matter of fact that is necessarily connected to any other matter of fact; we can conceive of each matter of fact as connected or not, without any need to modify the ideas of the matters of fact. Cleanthes’s and Hume’s arguments depend on Hume’s denial that there is a distinct idea of existence. Locke does think that there is a distinct idea of existence. But we found that Locke’s argument does not use this in a way that would enable him to avoid Hume’s objection. Existence is attributed to an eternal being only because the Causal Maxim requires that there is a cause of the beginning of one’s own existence. So the crucial link in Locke’s argument is the supposed connection between beginning to exist and having a cause. Moreover, we found that Locke does not have a positive idea of “necessary existence,” in virtue of which the very idea of God would imply God’s existence. Instead, at most, Locke means to deny that God has an external cause and to affirm that there is a demonstrable connection between the ideas of one’s own existence and the existence of an eternal being.

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One might have expected the nature of the idea of power to play a more significant role in the disagreement between Locke and Hume. Locke holds that both by reflection and sensation, we perceive an idea of power, although the idea from reflection is clearer. For example, when I command my body to move or call up a particular idea, I receive an idea of my own active power to initiate these changes. The objects that produce new qualities or substances are able to do so because they possess an active power to produce this change. Hume denies that we have any impression of power, but he does not deny that we observe successions of changes to objects. Locke’s demonstration of the Causal Maxim does not employ this controversial idea of power but only the weaker conception of change. Accordingly, Locke is vulnerable to Cleanthes’s and Hume’s criticisms. Finally, Locke holds that the priority is securing belief in God in order to promote morality. Although he thinks that there is a fundamental flaw in Descartes’s ontological argument, he suppresses his criticism in order not to undercut the devotion of anyone whose religious belief is grounded on the ontological belief (even if the number of such devotees is small). But his considered position is that only the demonstrative causal argument secures knowledge of God’s existence. Cleanthes’s and Hume’s arguments show that arguments like Locke’s causal demonstration do not work. Philo adds the further punch by turning Locke’s criticism of Descartes back against Locke: the causal demonstration is not a source of religious belief for many people either. Acknowledgments Thanks to Ken Williford for the invitation to contribute to this volume and for extensive feedback on earlier drafts. An earlier version of this paper was presented at 2018 Early Modern-St. Louis Conference. Thanks especially to Zvi Biener, Tim Black, Kevin Busch, Judith Crane, Richard Fry, David Landy, Lewis Powell, Todd Ryan, and Julie Walsh. I have also benefitted from conversations with Donald Ainslie, Helen Beebee, Miren Boehm, Patrick Connolly, Geoffrey Gorham, Phillipe Hamou, Matthew Leisinger, David Owen, Chris Shields, and Edward Slowik. I am deeply grateful to Travis Butler for numerous conversations and encouragement. Notes 1 Stewart (1985, 268–269) points out that neither Demea nor Cleanthes observe Clarke’s distinction between temporal and hierarchical causation. In support of the claim that Hume misrepresents Clarke’s argument, see also Khamara and MacNabb (1977, 152) and Khamara (1992, 46–47). The latter authors observe that Clarke does not begin from the Causal Maxim. Against this, see Williford (2003, especially 122 n.35). 2 In addition to the following points, further commonality is to be found in Demea’s principle that motion cannot begin in matter “without any voluntary agent or first mover” (DNR VIII.3, 182). Compare to Locke (1690, 4.10.10, 623). 3 For example, Locke does not explicitly consider the possibility that there is an infinite series of finite causes and effects. And Demea may hold a stronger view than Locke about the nature of “necessary existence.”

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 109 4 Russell (2008, 343 n.20) observes that “Locke is a prime target of Hume’s criticisms of ‘rationalist’ proofs for the existence of God.” He also observes that, despite important differences, Clarke’s and Locke’s “philosophies were nevertheless closely identified by their own contemporaries, and some even accused Clarke of taking arguments from Locke” (2008, 30). 5 Thanks to Todd Ryan for pointing this out. 6 I set aside discussion of sensitive knowledge. 7 For ease of exposition, hereafter I omit “or repugnancy” and “or disagreement,” though it should be understood that in knowledge one may perceive either an agreement or disagreement between ideas. 8 See also Gibson (1968, 127). 9 This raises doubt about Gaskin’s (1988, 74) claim that it is anachronistic to distinguish for Hume between (what we now call) ontological and cosmological proofs. His philosophical predecessors, including Descartes and Locke, distinguished them. 10 William Molyneux prompts Locke to resolve the apparent tension between his claims that (i) our idea of God is composed of ideas of sensation, but that (ii) our knowledge of God’s existence can be obtained only by demonstration, not sense experience. Locke replies that this highlights the difference between (i) the source of each of the component ideas of the complex idea of God, and (ii) the real existence of a being in whom the qualities that those ideas represent are united (letter 1620, dated 28 March 1693; Locke 1981, 663–666). 11 As Gibson (1968, 168–169) observes, this accords with Locke’s view that different people may include different ideas in the nominal essences of particular substances. 12 Elsewhere, Locke holds that the argument can begin from any existence whatsoever ( Locke 1690, 2.17.5 & 17, 212 & 220); but the only intuitively certain starting point is knowledge of one’s own existence. See von Leyden (1948, 45 n.16 and 47). 13 Some commentators equate this principle with “ex nihilo, nihil fit.” However, following Cudworth, Locke sees a need to disambiguate this principle. (See von Leyden 1948 and MacIntosh 1997 for discussion of Cudworth’s influence.) Locke wishes to distinguish the case, which he rejects, such that there is nothing whatsoever as the cause (“nothing should of it self produce [something]” or “… beyond the Power of nothing, or non-entity to produce,” Locke 1690, 4.10.10, 623; cf. 4.10.3, 8 & 11, 620, 622 & 625 (resp.)) from the case, which he affirms, such that there is an agent who uses nothing (“…making any thing out of nothing,” Locke 1690, 4.10.19, 629 and 4.10.18–19, 628–629 passim; cf. Locke 1690, 2.22.11, 294; 4.3.6, 542; 4.10.15, 626; and Locke 1823, 465) to produce its effect (e.g., creation ex nihilo). Atheist materialists tried to use the principle “ex nihilo, nihil fit” to deny the possibility of such creation. (See Nuovo 2011, 208–212 for discussion.) 14 This is to be distinguished from the Principle of Universal Causation (“every thing must have a cause”), which Locke rejects because God does not have a cause. Locke writes that the Principle of Universal Causation “is not a true principle of reason, nor a true proposition … [because] the ideas of existence from eternity, and of having a cause, do not agree, or are inconsistent within the same thing” ( Locke 1823, 61; cf. Locke 1690, 4.10.18, 629). 15 Following Hankinson (1998, 449), I shall call it the Principle of Causal Synonymy. Thanks to Chris Shields and Travis Butler for discussion of this principle in ancient Greek philosophy. 16 Passages like these have led some scholars to think that Locke adopts Hume’s constant conjunction view of causation with respect to bodies. Against this interpretation, see Coventry (2003). 17 Pace O’Connor (1952, 180) and Khamara (2000, 341), who think that the Inefficacy of Nothing principle is “merely an unusual way of saying” or “merely a negative restatement of” the Causal Maxim. As Geoffrey Gorham (1999, 299) observes in his

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commentary on Descartes, the principle that nothing comes from nothing does not preclude uncaused things. Moreover, for Locke, the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle is intuitively certain, whereas the Causal Maxim is demonstratively certain. The Causal Maxim includes the Inefficacy of Nothing Principle as among its intuitive links. Khamara and MacNabb (1977, 152 and 154 n.28) hold that Locke does not offer a proof of the Causal Maxim, because it is a “principle”; instead Locke offers an “epistemic justification.” One might worry that the obscurity of the idea of an eternal being would corrupt the certainty of any demonstration of its existence ( Locke 1690, 4.12.14, 648; 4.17.10, 682). Locke admits that we do not have a positive idea of an eternal being ( Locke 1690, 2.17.17 & 20, 219–220 & 222) and our idea of infinity, when applied to other ideas, such as space or duration, is obscure ( Locke 1690, 2.17.9 & 15, 215 & 218; 2.29.15, 369). We have clear positive ideas of determinate quantities (of space or duration), and clear comparative ideas of greater quantities ( Locke 1690, 2.17.15, 218). But at most we have a negative idea of what is “so much greater, as cannot be comprehended” (ibid.). The remainder beyond the largest quantity we can (positively) conceive lies in obscurity (ibid.). Locke also points out a mistake in trying to conceive of space or duration as a region that is infinite. Such an idea supposes both an endless progression and termination ( Locke 1690, 2.17.7, 213). But we can conceive of the infinity of space or duration, which is only endless. Thus, when we conceive of an eternal being, it is not the contradictory idea, but the idea of a being whose duration is endless ( Locke 1690, 2.17.5, 212). In reply to this worry, we do not need to distinctly conceive of the endlessness of duration to appreciate the difference between finite beings with a beginning and the endless duration of an uncaused eternal being. See also Bennett (2005, 163–164) and MacIntosh (1997, 46). MacIntosh also claims that Locke does not succeed in showing that there is a single kind either. Von Leyden (1948, 46) thinks Locke assumes that the mundane world is finite in duration (i.e., that there was creation). Other commentators ( Ayers 1981, 242; Ayers 1991, vol. 2, 176, 182; MacIntosh 1997, 42; Nuovo 2011, 222) complain that Locke’s argument rests on a teleological consideration to secure the unity of the cogitative eternal being. Doing so would undermine the demonstrative certainty of Locke’s argument. It is true that Locke offers teleological considerations, but closer inspection of Locke’s argument reveals that he is not aiming to prove unity. Instead, he thinks he has already shown that there exists one eternal cogitative being. The question Locke addresses is whether the eternal cogitative being is also material. Locke argues that this would contradict the unity of the eternal cogitative being, because matter is not actually one thing; it is divisible. Locke continues: “And therefore if Matter were the eternal first cogitative Being, there would not be one eternal infinite cogitative Being, but an infinite number of eternal finite cogitative Beings, independent one of another, of limited force, and distinct thoughts, which could never produce that order, harmony, and beauty which is to be found in Nature. Since therefore whatsoever is the first eternal Being must necessarily be cogitative; And whatsoever is first of all Things, must necessarily contain in it, and actually have, at least, all the Perfections that can ever after exist; nor can it ever give to another any perfection that it hath not, either actually in it self, or at least in a higher degree; It necessarily follows, that the first eternal Being cannot be Matter” ( Locke 1690, 4.10.10, 624). O’Connor (1952, 180) observes that the argument aims to “prov[e] the existence of what he cautiously calls ‘a God.’” This is confirmed by Locke’s repeated use of the indefinite article. For example, the title of 4.10 is “Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a GOD” ( Locke 1690, 619); see also Locke (1690, 4.10.1, 7, 13 & 18: 619, 621, 625 & 628). Bennett (2005, 164) makes a similar observation about the implication that there is a single being in Locke (1690, 4.10.4, 620).

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 111 25 Bennett (2005, 163–164) credits Roger Woolhouse with a similar observation. See also Khamara (1992, 39). 26 Wolterstorff (1994, 188–189) and Nuovo (2011, 217 n.31) observe that in the Essay demonstration of God’s existence, Locke never uses the expression “omnipotence,” just “the most powerful” (Locke 1690, 4.10.4 & 6, 620 & 621). (Contrast the occurrence of “Omnipotent” in the ad hominem argument against materialists in Locke 1690, 4.10.13, 625). This fits with Locke’s view about the limits of our conception of infinity: “’Tis true, that we cannot but be assured, That the Great GOD, of whom, and from whom are all things, is incomprehensibly Infinite: but yet, when we apply to that first and supreme Being, our Idea of Infinite, in our weak and narrow Thoughts, we do it primarily in respect of his Duration and Ubiquity; and, I think, more figuratively to his Power, Wisdom, and Goodness, and other Attributes, which are properly inexhaustible and incomprehensible, etc.” ( Locke 1690, 2.17.1, 210). 27 Locke observes that God does not move, not because he is a spirit, but because he is everywhere ( Locke 1690, 2.23.21, 307). But notice that if God were to move, it would be him moving himself, not being moved by something else. 28 It is open to Locke to distinguish degrees of active powers. Locke describes the obscure idea of active power derived from body’s transfer of motion, “which reaches not the Production of the Action, but the Continuation of the Passion” ( Locke 1690, 2.21.4, 235). This is different from the clearer idea of active power, the “Idea of the beginning of motion,” which we obtain by reflection on willing to move our bodies (ibid.). Mattern (1980, 65) takes this to commit Locke to the view that “motion transfer is only a degenerate kind of active power.” Its degeneracy consists in its failure to be a complete cause of motion (1980, 66–67). In the fourth edition of the Essay (in Locke 1690, 2.21.72, 285–286), as Mattern (1980, 70–72) interprets it, Locke modifies his view, so that he denies that matter has any active powers at all, because active power requires choice. 29 Thanks to Patrick Connolly for helping me think through this issue. 30 Perception is a “Passive Power, or Capacity” ( Locke 1690, 2.21.72, 286; cp. 2.9.1, 143). Passive powers are possessed by things that can be acted upon. God is entirely active ( Locke 1690, 2.21.2, 234; 2.23.28, 312). 31 See also Locke’s letter 1592 to William Molyneux, January 20, 1693: “I suppose matter, in its own natural state, void of thought; a supposition I concluded would not be denied me, or not hard to be proved, if it should; and thence, I inferred, matter could not be the first eternal Being” ( Locke 1981, vol. 4, 623–628). 32 Thanks to Patrick Connolly for helping me interpret these passages. 33 Owen (1999, 47): “In knowledge, there is no distinction between perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas, forming the proposition, and knowing it to be true.” See also Owen (2007, 413–418). Owen (2007, 413) cites Essay 4.6.3 ( Locke 1690, 579–580): “Certainty of Truth is, when Words are so put together in Propositions, as exactly to express the agreement or disagreement of the Ideas they stand for, as really it is. Certainty of Knowledge is, to perceive the agreement or disagreement of Ideas, as expressed in any Proposition. This we usually call knowing, or being certain of the Truth of any Proposition.” 34 Wolterstorff (1994, 189): “The existence of God is a condition of one’s own existence.” 35 I am disinclined to interpret Locke as holding that space necessarily exists. This highlights a difference from Clarke, who holds that absolute space’s necessary existence implies the necessary existence of God. See Russell (2008, 107). 36 The Causal Maxim appears to express a conditional, not a biconditional, sentence (i.e., if a thing has a beginning of existence, then that thing has an external cause). But Locke’s demonstration of the Causal Maxim (connecting the ideas of a beginning of existence, operation of powers, and external cause) seems to be reversible: if something

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has an external cause, then there is another thing that operates in order to produce it. And therefore, by Locke’s intervening proofs, there is a time at which the effect does not exist (i.e., there is a time when it begins to exist). If the Causal Maxim were a biconditional sentence, it would imply that if a being is eternal (i.e., there is no time at which it does not exist), it does not have an external cause. See Owen (1999: chapter 5) and Boehm (2013) for discussions of knowledge and the invariability of relations. Notice that this commits Hume to the claim that an object can have different times or places and still be the same object. See THN I.iv.6.8 (a mass’s parts or the whole moves, and it is still the same mass) and I.ii.3.7 (the same coal changes places). See also Baxter (2008, 30). Hume’s account of the idea of existence is difficult to interpret, as is his account of “existence at a time.” Baxter (2008, 30–47) holds that Hume needs a primitive relation of co-existence in order to develop his account of time. A successive ordering of existing objects, whose order can support relations of “earlier than,” “later than,” and “simultaneous with” (or co-existing) is the basis for developing a timeline. This much is right about the origins of our ideas of time in experience, but it needs to be developed further. The imagination supplies ideas of times when no change is perceived (THN I.ii.5.28–29), and this is the basis for conceiving times when one is unconscious, conceiving the uniformity of time’s passage, and ultimately for coordinating timelines among distinct thinkers (past, present, and future) to conceive one common timeline. More detailed analysis of these matters lies outside the scope of this paper. Although Locke, unlike Hume, thinks that there is a separate idea of existence over and above the idea of objects ( Locke 1690, 2.7.7, 131), Locke does not think that this provides a special basis for demonstration of God’s existence ( Locke 1823, 55). Instead, he holds that the best argument available is the causal demonstration of God’s existence from one’s own existence ( Locke 1696, 316). The language of “exclusion” and “inclusion” may lead one to worry that Hume has introduced another relation, which he does not enumerate in his lists of natural and philosophical relations. (Thanks to Helen Beebee for raising this point against a different paper that I presented at the 2014 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.) However, I think that “inclusion” and “exclusion” from particular times is conceived by a complex idea of the obtaining or the failing to obtain (respectively) of a particular temporal relation between the object x and other objects conceived (or believed) to exist at the particular time. See also notes 39 and 44. This is tricky to state in a non-circular way. The basic relations are co-existence and immediate successor, from which we can develop earlier than and later than. Once units of duration are established (through imaginative supplementation, I.ii.5.28–29), we can distinguish particular magnitudes of duration and distinguish particular temporal relations of priority and succession, such as five minutes earlier or two days later. It lies outside the scope of this paper to explain how Hume can account for a belief that a thing does not exist. Such beliefs tax Hume’s sparse psychological resources. After arguing that Hume does not countenance a distinction between the activities of believing and denying ( Powell 2014, 6–11), Powell distinguishes interpretations that posit intrinsically negative contents from those that posit relationally negative contents (14–15). On the first interpretation (which in conversation Powell has said he prefers), there are simple impressions of non-existents, and one has to accept the shocking consequence that we have many such impressions (which Powell acknowledges [20–21]). Another problem is that the idea of the existent and non-existent do not “perfectly” resemble, but only very closely resemble, in seeming tension with THN I.i.5.8 (compare to THN I.iii.1.1–2). On the second interpretation, the idea of the object remains unchanged, but whether it is believed to exist or not exist depends on

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whether it is included or excluded from other existents. Baxter (ms) defends this interpretive strategy. To conceive of “exclusion,” Baxter proposes a “tacit” comparison of the mere idea of Henri and the enlivened idea of the existing café (in the spirit of Hume’s tacit comparison of ideas in conceiving of distinctions of reason, THN I.i.7.18). This keeps in mind the idea of Henri without locating him in the café. I think Baxter is on the right track, however it’s not a tacit comparison, but an explicit comparison, in order for it to be a negative belief about Henri. I think the trick involves combining an un-enlivened idea of Henri with an enlivened idea of the café, by the comparison of exclusion, to form an enlivened complex idea of Henri-apartfrom-the-café. Including Henri in this complex idea does not thereby enliven the idea of Henri. One might be concerned, along with Powell (2014, 15), that this confuses my failing to observe the object here and now and the object’s not existing here and now. Space constraints prevent me from addressing this concern fully here. Notice that this distinction can be drawn only after one has developed the concept of existing unperceived. Prior to that, we take our failure to observe an object to mean that it does not exist. After we have developed beliefs about identity and continued existence, we can distinguish between our failure to observe something and its not existing. Lorne Falkenstein (1998, 340–343) describes the Humean process of “exact scrutiny” whereby the observer draws this distinction. Notice that the standard for sufficient scrutiny will depend on the expertise of the observer; vulgar observers will not be as exacting as experts. There is considerable scholarly literature that attempts to make sense of the Principle(s) of Separability and Hume’s argument against the necessity of the Causal Maxim. (See Garrett 1997, 58–75; Osborne 2005; Busch 2016.) My purpose in discussing it is to show that Hume thinks that both Demea’s argument and Locke’s argument are subject to the same criticism. Thus Hume rejects any demonstration of the Principle of Causal Synonymy, which both posits a cause for every beginning of existence (i.e., the Causal Maxim) and restricts the nature of the cause (cf. THN I.iv.5.30). Because the Causal Maxim cannot be demonstrated, a fortiori, there can be no demonstration of the Principle of Causal Synonymy. Bennett (2005, 163) thinks Hume is right that Locke reifies nothing. Bennett thinks Locke’s expression “nothing should of itself produce matter” reveals this. However, in that passage, Locke is inartfully contrasting two versions of the ex nihilo principle: one where something comes into existence without anything else whatsoever, and another where the cause uses nothing as the material by which to produce the new creation. Locke denies the first but accepts the second. See note 13 above. In contrast, Clarke could brush this criticism aside.

References Texts by Hume Hume, David. 1935. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Cited in the text as “DNR” followed by part number, paragraph number, and page number.) Hume, David. 2000/1749. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Cited in the text as “EHU” followed by section number and paragraph number.) Hume, David. 2007/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Cited in the text as “THN” followed by Book, part, section, and paragraph numbers.)

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Other Primary Literature Cudworth, Ralph. 1743/1678. The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2nd ed. London: J. Walthoe et al. Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm. 1765. New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Locke, John. 1690. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch. 1975. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Cited in text by book, chapter, and section number and page number.) Locke, John. 1696. “Deus: Descartes’s Proof of a God, from the Idea of Necessary Existence, Examined.” In Peter King, ed. 1858. The Life and Letters of John Locke, 313–316. London: Henry G. Bohn. Locke, John. 1823. The Works of John Locke, new edition, corrected. Vol. IV. Reprinted 1963. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. Locke, John. 1981. The Correspondence of John Locke, vols. 4 and 6, ed. E. S. de Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Secondary Literature Ayers, Michael. 1981. “Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of God’s Existence in Locke’s Essay.” Philosophical Review 90.2: 210–251. Ayers, Michael. 1991. Locke: Volume 1, Epistemology; Volume 2, Ontology. New York: Routledge. Baxter, Donald L. M. 2008. Hume’s Difficulty. London: Routledge. Baxter, Donald L. M. ms. “Hume’s Empiricist Metaphysics.” Presentation at 2021 Hume Society Conference (online), Bogota, Colombia. Bennett, Jonathan. 2005. “God and Matter in Locke: An Exposition of Essay 4.10.” In Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill eds. Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics, 161–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boehm, Miren. 2013. “Certainty, Necessity, and Knowledge in Hume’s Treatise.” In Stanley Tweyman ed. Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 7, 67–84. Ann Arbor: Caravan Books. Busch, Kevin R. 2016. “Hume’s Alleged Lapse on the Causal Maxim.” Hume Studies 42.12: 89–112. Coventry, Angela. 2003. “Locke, Hume, and the Idea of Causal Power.” Locke Studies 3: 93–112. Falkenstein, Lorne. 1998. “Hume’s Answer to Kant.” Noûs 32.3: 331–360. Garrett, Don. 1997. Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1988. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Gibson, James. 1968. Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and its Historical Relations, 2nd reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gorham, Geoffrey. 1999. “Causation and Similarity in Descartes.” In Rocco J. Gennaro and Charles Huenemann eds. New Essays on the Rationalists, 296–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hankinson, R. J. 1998. Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Khamara, Edward J. 1992. “Hume versus Clarke on the Cosmological Argument.” Philosophical Quarterly 42.166: 34–55.

Hume, Locke, and the Demonstrability of God’s Existence 115 Khamara, Edward J. 2000. “Hume against Locke on the causal principle.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8.2:339–343. Khamara, Edward J. and D. G. C. MacNabb. 1977. “Hume and His Predecessors on the Causal Maxim.” In G. P. Morice ed. David Hume: Bicentenary Papers, 146–155. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lascano, Marcy P. 2016. “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion.” In Matthew Stuart ed. A Companion to Locke, 469–485. London: Blackwell. MacIntosh, J. J. 1997. “The Argument from the Need for Similar or ‘Higher’ Qualities: Cudworth, Locke, and Clarke on God’s Existence.” Enlightenment and Dissent 16: 29–59. Mattern, R. M. 1980. “Locke on Active Power and the Obscure Idea of Active Power from Bodies.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 11.1: 39–77. Nelson, John O. 2010. Hume’s “New Scene of Thought” and the Several Faces of David Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Jeff Broome. Lanham, Massachusetts: University Press of America. Newman, Lex. 2007. “Locke on Knowledge.” In Lex Newman ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” 313–351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuovo, Victor. 2011. Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment: Interpretations of Locke. International Archives of the History of Ideas, v. 203. Dordrecht: Springer. O’Connor, D. J. 1952. John Locke. London: Penguin. Osborne, Gregg. 2005. “Hume’s Argument in Treatise 1.3.3.3: An Exposition and Defense.” Hume Studies 31.2: 225–247. Owen, David. 1999. Hume’s Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, David. 2007. “Locke on Judgment.” In Lex Newman ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” 406–435. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powell, Lewis. 2014. “Hume on Denial in the Treatise.” Philosopher’s Imprint 14.26: 1–22. Russell, Paul. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, M. A. 1985. “Hume and the ‘Metaphysical Argument A Priori.’” In A. J. Holland ed. Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, 243–270. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Von Leyden, Wolfgang. 1948. “Locke and Nicole: Their Proofs of the Existence of God and their Attitude towards Descartes.” Sophia 16: 41–55. Williford, Kenneth. 2003. “Demea’s a priori Theistic Proof.” Hume Studies 29.1: 99–123. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1994. “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion.” In Vere Chappell ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke, 172–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part 3

Matters of Interpretation

6

Hume’s “Artful” Masterpiece The Dialogues and the Concealed Case for Atheism Andrew Pyle

6.1 Introduction On revising them [the Dialogues] (which I have not done these 15 years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written. —David Hume to Adam Smith, 15th August 1776 Since its posthumous publication in 1779, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion has continued to delight generations of readers and to frustrate and divide schools of learned commentators. Does the text contain a single authorial message,1 or is everything intentionally left open-ended and inconclusive? If there is a take-home message, is it a sort of weak deism, or agnosticism, or perhaps a religion resting on natural belief rather than philosophical argument? None of these readings are absolutely excluded by the text, and all have been championed in the secondary literature.2 In this article, I explore the case that might be made for an atheistic interpretation of the Dialogues.3 On the face of it, any such interpretation appears doomed from the start. The three central characters in the debate all agree up front that the existence of God is certain; it is only our knowledge of His nature and properties that is problematic. And the Dialogues end with the sceptical Philo’s famous “U-turn”: his confession that “no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature” (DNR XII.2, 116).4 To interpret the Dialogues as implicitly atheistic would appear simply to fly in the face of the plain meaning of the text. The possibility remains, however, that this is a text with layers of meaning and significance, a work that provides hints and clues towards a more radical interpretation than the surface of the text supplies. Paul Russell tells us that Hume belonged to a circle of radical freethinkers and that the members of this circle often found themselves obliged to write in a sort of code.5 Hume himself writes to Adam Smith that the Dialogues were “cautiously” and “artfully” written with a view to potential publication during his lifetime. We therefore have good reasons to look more closely at the text with a view to discerning some of its subtler coded messages. DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-10

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What reasons might lead us to favour an atheistic reading of the Dialogues? Three lines of thought present themselves. There is the suspicion that the various concessions to theism scattered throughout the text might turn out—on close inspection—to be entirely verbal. There is the structure of the dialogue itself, in which Philo skilfully plays Cleanthes off against Demea, implicitly suggesting that the theist finds himself impaled on the horns of a destructive dilemma, unable either to accept or to reject the supposed analogy between the mind of God and the mind of man. And there are certain key lines of argument launched by Philo and never countered by either Cleanthes or Demea, notably the crucial suggestion at the end of Part IV that the Creator-God hypothesis may be objectionably ad hoc. A cumulative and nuanced case can thus be developed for the conclusion that Hume’s “cautiously” and “artfully” written masterpiece contains a subtle and disguised case for atheism. 6.2 The Meaning of the Term, “God” The existence or non-existence of God is never a topic of explicit debate in the Dialogues. Doubts are raised only about our knowledge of God’s attributes and perfections; “His” existence is never questioned even by the sceptical Philo. When reasonable men treat these subjects, he admits, the question can never be concerning the being, but only the nature of the Deity. The former truth, as you well observe, is unquestionable and selfevident. Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection. (DNR II.3, 44) The axiom that “nothing exists without a cause” is a plausible candidate for a “natural belief” in the strong Humean sense that our minds—constituted as they are—cannot help but assent to it. Its supposedly a priori status is challenged—and eventually rejected—in the Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 3, Section 3, “Why a Cause is always necessary?” There, Hume flatly denies that the maxim is either intuitively or demonstrably necessary (THN I.3.iii, 82). He never doubts, however, that we find ourselves firmly committed to it and unable to lend any credence to the thought that things could spring into existence without a proper cause. Let us suppose that we all believe (setting aside for one moment the most extreme sceptics) that the physical universe exists. Most of us also believe that it has come into existence. (If we do not accept this, but believe with Aristotle that the cosmos is eternal, a rather different set of questions comes into play.) So if we believe both that the physical universe has come into existence and that whatever has come into existence has a cause, we find ourselves committed to a prior cause of some kind. Philo is happy to agree to call this cause “God”, and even to “piously ascribe to him every species of perfection”. The theist, it seems, has carried the day without opposition. At this point, however, we must pay proper attention to Philo’s qualifications of this original concession to the theist. To gloss “God exists” as “The universe

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has some original cause or other” is nowhere near enough for the true believer. The theist wants an original cause in the form of a mind or intelligence, a cause with attributes such as wisdom, justice and benevolence. Philo grants that we may use these words, but denies them any significance: Wisdom, thought, design, knowledge; these we justly ascribe to him; because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions, by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware, lest we think, that our ideas any wise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to these qualities among men. He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension; and is more the object of worship in the temple, than of disputation in the schools. (DNR II.3, 44) The theist, it seems, is granted a purely verbal victory, and the language of piety itself (“He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension”) is turned against the theistic philosopher who wants to advance any distinct propositions of theology. Unbelievers would be well advised to assent to the proposition expressed by the words “God exists” every time it is uttered, while adding the mental reservation that they have assented only to “the universe has a cause”, and while reserving the right to doubt the truth—or even the intelligibility—of any claims made by their countrymen concerning the attributes of this remote cause.6 The intelligibility of the (supposed) propositions of theology is explicitly put at stake in Philo’s next move, which invokes Humean meaning-empiricism: “Our ideas reach no farther than our experience: We have no experience of the divine attributes and operations: I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself” (DNR II.4, 44–45). The unvoiced conclusion here is, of course, that “we have no ideas of the divine attributes and operations”, from which we might advance to the further conclusion that the supposed claims of theology are strictly meaningless—or, only slightly more softly, carry no cognitive significance but serve perhaps as mood-music.7 It is in response to this argument from meaning-empiricism that Cleanthes launches his argument to design in the form of an argument from analogy, an argument carefully tailored simultaneously to address worries about meaning and worries about knowledge. So, when Philo concedes that where reasonable men discuss these subjects, “the question can never be concerning the being, but only the nature of the deity”, he is being evasive and disingenuous. The apparent concession here to theism is entirely verbal. Theism has carried the day, but only by widening the extension of the term so as to include every thinker who accepts that the universe has a cause. If that now includes us all, then it will turn out that there are—under this artful and strategic redefinition—no atheists at all.8 What of Philo’s celebrated U-turn in Part XII, and the final tentative conclusion of the Dialogues? At this point, many have thought, Philo makes

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concessions to Cleanthes that cannot be dismissed as merely verbal. Here Philo tells Cleanthes that notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inextricable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it. (DNR XII.2, 116) Philo goes on to cite the evidence of the great Roman anatomist Galen on the “prodigious display of artifice” manifest in the detailed contrivance of the parts of the human body. The inference from the evident marks of design visible in the parts of animals to an intelligent original cause appears irresistible. Further evidence for the same conclusion can be found at the end of Part X, where Philo clearly distinguishes the inference to an intelligent cause from the inference to a benevolent cause. The former he represents as all-but irresistible; the latter as groundless: Here, CLEANTHES, I find myself at ease in my argument. Here I triumph. Formerly, when we argued concerning the natural attributes of intelligence and design, I needed all my sceptical and metaphysical subtilty to elude your grasp. In many views of the universe, and of its parts, particularly the latter, the beauty and fitness of final causes strikes us with such irresistible force, that all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms; nor can we imagine how it was ever possible for us to repose any weight on them. But there is no view of human life, or of the condition of mankind, from which, without the greatest violence, we can infer the moral attributes, or learn that infinite benevolence, conjoined with infinite power and infinite wisdom, which we must discover by the eyes of faith alone. It is your turn now to tug the labouring oar, and to support your philosophical subtilties against the dictates of plain reason and experience. (DNR X.36, 103–104) On the face of it, this pair of passages should settle the interpretation of the Dialogues in favour of John Gaskin.9 On his reading, Philo and Cleanthes eventually converge, as the Dialogues progress, towards what Gaskin calls “attenuated deism”, a shared belief that the evidence of Nature in favour of an intelligent designer is all but irresistible, and that Philo was merely engaging in “cavils and sophisms” when he raised objections and outlined rival scenarios, such as Epicureanism. The clear and sharp distinction that Philo draws between our evidence for “God is intelligent” and “God is benevolent” also counts strongly against the interpretation of the Dialogues recently advanced by Thomas Holden in Spectres of False Divinity. On Holden’s reading, Philo/Hume is arguing that we know no

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more about the intrinsic properties of God (defined as the cause of the existence and/or order of the universe) than we do about any unknown object X.10 If this were Hume’s actual position, there would be no grounds to distinguish the respective strengths of the evidence from experience for “God is intelligent” compared with “God is benevolent” and no grounds to conclude that the former has very much better evidential credentials than the latter. But as we have just seen, Philo emphasizes exactly this distinction.11 How seriously should we take Philo’s concession that the case for “God is intelligent” is very strong, and that he has to “tug the labouring oar”, and resort to “cavils and sophisms” to resist it? If we continue to read the text with due care and attention, we speedily discover that the apparent concession of the U-turn is not all that it seemed. Philo goes on to suggest that the dispute regarding whether we should call God a “mind” or an “intelligence” may be “a mere verbal controversy” (DNR XII.7, 119). Granted that the products of Nature (animals and plants) bear some analogy to those of Art (i.e., human engineering), should we infer a corresponding resemblance in their causes? The theist must, argues Philo, accept that the resemblance between the cases is far from exact: there are disanalogies that counterbalance the force of the analogies. As for the other side of the argument, I next turn to the atheist, who, I assert, is only nominally so, and can never possibly be in earnest; and I ask him, whether, from the coherence and apparent sympathy in all the parts of this world, there be not a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of nature, in every situation and in every age; whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought probably bear some remote analogy to each other: It is impossible he can deny it. (DNR XII.7, 120) But if theist and atheist are arguing only over the degree of resemblance between the cases, and such questions of degree do not admit of any resolution, what, asks Philo, is the point of your entire dispute? The theist allows, that the original intelligence is very different from human reason. The atheist allows, that the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it. Will you quarrel, Gentlemen, about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination? (DNR XII.7, 120) The “rotting turnip” passage needs to be kept firmly in mind when we finally arrive at the tentative conclusion to the Dialogues, namely that “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence” (DNR XII.33, 129). If everything bears some remote analogy to everything else, then a rotting turnip bears some remote analogy to human intelligence. So, if I believed that old worn-out worlds rot and decay like stinking mounds of vegetable waste in a deserted street-market, and that new worlds emerge from “world seeds” scattered among the compost, I would on these

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principles have to accept “some remote analogy” between such a cause and the workings of human intelligence. But would that make me any sort of theist in the received understanding of that word? Surely not. The argumentative purpose of this first section has been entirely defensive. Its objective is to respond to an opponent—real or imaginary—who objects to an “atheistic” reading of the Dialogues on the straightforward grounds that any such reading is flatly contradicted by the text. Such an opponent will insist that all the characters in the Dialogues agree up front that the existence of God is not to be made a subject of dispute. The reply is obvious: this seeming consensus in assenting to “God exists” has been achieved merely by sleight of hand and “artful” redefinition. No point of substance is settled merely by redefining “God” to turn thinkers who are really atheists into nominal theists. As for Philo’s famous U-turn at the conclusion of the Dialogues, it too is more apparent than real: since everything bears “some remote analogy” to everything else, Philo’s admission of some remote analogy between the cause or causes of our universe and human intelligence is in reality no concession at all. No atheist need balk at such an empty concession. 6.3 The Destructive Dilemma Facing the Theist Having established that an atheistic interpretation of the Dialogues is not absolutely ruled out by any of the concessions to theism that Philo makes in the text—which turn out, on closer scrutiny, to be merely verbal—can we now begin to build a positive case for such a reading? Where might we look for evidence in support of such a claim? One key source of such evidence might be the structure of the text itself, and the “artful” way in which the sceptic Philo plays off Demea against Cleanthes, and Cleanthes against Demea. A natural reading of this argumentative strategy is to see Philo attempting to impale the theist on the horns of a destructive dilemma. The theist, Philo thinks, must either accept (Cleanthes) or reject (Demea) the proposed analogy between the familiar mind of man and the supposed mind of God. Philo can then rely on Cleanthes to demolish Demea’s position, and on Demea to demolish Cleanthes’ position, while himself standing back and watching with amused interest as the two committed theists effectively demolish, between them, the entire edifice of theism. Of course, Hume is never going to articulate this destructive dilemma in precisely these terms, nor trumpet it as any sort of refutation of theism. But readers of the Dialogues are clearly intended to discern both (a) that the theist is faced with a monumental choice—to side with Demea or with Cleanthes—and (b) that neither horn of the dilemma offers a comfortable place to rest. The great chasm that divides Cleanthes from Demea runs like an undercurrent throughout the Dialogues, becomes most obvious in their exchange of insults in Part IV, and then resurfaces in their strikingly opposed responses to the problems of evil in Parts X and XI. In Part III, Cleanthes introduces his “irregular” version of the argument to design. He does so with the aid of two striking examples—the voice from the sky and the living library. Such examples, Cleanthes insists, would persuade us of the presence of intelligent design even without the backing of a generalization

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from experience. Of the two examples, it is the living library that most concerns us here. Suppose we came across such a living library, in which books reproduced like organisms. Let us suppose for the sake of simplicity that the reproduction is asexual, like budding or cloning—to admit a role for sex here would only complicate matters and confuse the mind. We could then, explains Cleanthes, trace my copy of Newton’s Principia, or Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, back to a previous copy, and that in turn back to a previous copy, and so on. But if the reproductive process here is unintelligent (like a photocopier), I would have no explanation at all for the wisdom and intelligence of the thoughts being expressed. An intelligent original cause is needed to explain the origin of these books. Exactly the same argument, of course, is going to apply to animals.12 It is at precisely this point that Demea interrupts with a powerful objection against Cleanthes’ working assumption that we humans can read the language of Nature: When I read a volume, I enter into the mind and intention of the author: I become him, in a manner, for the instant; and have an immediate feeling and conception of those ideas, which revolved in his imagination, while employed in that composition. But so near an approach we never surely can make to the Deity. His ways are not our ways. His attributes are perfect, but incomprehensible. And this volume of nature contains a great and inexplicable riddle, more than any intelligible discourse or reasoning. (DNR III.11, 57–58) Human thinking, Demea continues, is “fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting, successive, and compounded; and were we to remove these circumstances, we absolutely annihilate its essence”. But the mind of God can be none of these things. To compare mind and intelligence as it is familiar to us from our own experience with the supposed mind and intelligence of God looks question-begging at best and risks falling into blasphemy at worst. We might think that piety requires us to continue to use words such as “wisdom” and “intelligence” when we speak of God, but if we do so, we ought to acknowledge, that their meaning, in that case, is totally incomprehensible; and that the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas, which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the divine attributes. (DNR III.13, 59)13 It is this speech of Demea that provokes Cleanthes’ reaction, which in turn prompts the exchange of insults between the two theists that constitutes the heart of Part IV—and, arguably, of the Dialogues as a whole. Cleanthes thinks that to deny any analogy between divine and human intelligence is to undermine religion itself: The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes, of which we can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. Is the name, without any meaning, of such

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mighty importance? Or how do you MYSTICS, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from sceptics and atheists, who assert, that the first cause of All is unknown and unintelligible? (DNR IV.1, 60) Demea’s response to this powerful objection is worthy of note. Instead of trying to articulate a positive account of the semantics of religious discourse, he responds to Cleanthes’ abuse and invective with abuse and invective of his own. Who could imagine, he replies, that the calm and philosophical Cleanthes would argue in such a manner—that is, that he would attempt to refute his antagonists, by affixing a nick-name to them; and like the common bigots and inquisitors of the age, have recourse to invective and declamation, instead of reasoning? Or does he not perceive, that these topics are easily retorted, and that anthropomorphite is an appellation as invidious, and implies as dangerous consequences, as the epithetic of mystic, with which he has honoured us? (DNR IV.2, 60) But to respond to one abusive epithet with another is not to answer the fundamental charge that Cleanthes has brought against Demea, which is that his theology is unintelligible. Demea does nothing to refute his charge. All true theists agree, he insists, that the Deity can be characterized by His “perfect immutability and simplicity”, which attributes are, of course, the exact opposite of the attributes of the human mind familiar to us from our own experience. The human mind is complex and ever-changing, the divine mind is simple and immutable: the disanalogy is about as strong as can be imagined. Demea is confident that theological orthodoxy is firmly on his side. Cleanthes, however, shows no sign of backing down and reiterates his accusation of atheism: those who maintain the perfect simplicity of the supreme Being, to the extent in which you have explained it, are complete mystics, and chargeable with all the consequences which I have drawn from their opinion. They are, in a word, atheists, without knowing it. For though it be allowed, that the Deity possesses attributes, of which we have no comprehension; yet ought we never to ascribe to him any attributes, which are absolutely incompatible with that intelligent nature, essential to him. A mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive; one, that is wholly simple, and totally immutable; is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all. It is an abuse of words to give it that appellation; and we may as well speak of limited extension without figure, or of number without composition. (DNR IV.3, 61) Theists, it seems, face a fundamental choice, and a radical parting of the ways. They must side either with Cleanthes or with Demea. If they side with Cleanthes, they face the problems we encounter in Part V: his anthropomorphism positively invites the hypotheses of a finite god, an absentee god, a team of gods, and so on.

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But if they side with Demea, they risk the charge of uttering empty words. Religious teachers tell us that God is benevolent, wise, just and compassionate. If I hear a fellow human being described in these terms, I know what to expect of him or her: I have ideas of these human virtues. But if, as Demea insists, the mind of God (assuming for the moment we can call God a mind at all) is utterly unlike that of a human being, then it seems I can have no ideas of God’s benevolence, wisdom, justice and compassion. The orthodox theologian is using familiar terms for the virtues, flatly denying that these terms have their familiar human meanings, and giving us no hint or clue as to their distinct senses within religious discourse. There is a strong echo here of an argument from John Harris’s Boyle Lectures of 1698. Harris is attacking the ancient sceptic Sextus Empiricus, accusing him of asserting two contradictory theses concerning our idea of God. Sextus tells us, according to Harris, both that we have no idea of God, and that the idea of God is just the idea of man writ large (in Burnet 2000, vol. I, 264, 269). But these two claims are manifestly inconsistent. It is easy to see how a latter-day champion of the great sceptic would have responded. All they need to do is to replace the conjunction with a disjunction. The word “God” might stand for the idea of man writ large (God might be made in man’s image); or the word might have no corresponding idea, and thus be without significance. Rather than articulating this line of argument for himself, Hume’s Philo artfully allows his two opponents to do the work for him. The theologian is faced with a dangerous dilemma, neither fork of which offers any prospect of a secure place to stand. The same dilemma plays out in the discussion of the problems of evil in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues. Commentators on the Dialogues generally distinguish the so-called “consistency” (or “logical”) problem of evil from the “inference” (or “evidential”) problem, and agree that it is the inference problem that is crucial for Cleanthes’ natural theology. So why does Philo raise the older consistency problem at all, when he reminds us that “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered” (DNR X.25, 100)? The answer, I suspect, is that once again Philo is seeking to press the same dilemma, this time transferred from God’s natural attributes (foresight and intelligence) to His supposed moral attributes (justice and benevolence). He wants Demea to say that “God’s ways are not our ways; His justice and benevolence may not resemble those of humans”. And he wants Cleanthes to say, “To preserve the moral attributes of the deity, I am prepared to abandon the orthodox notion of omnipotence”. Cleanthes makes precisely this retraction in Part XI, where he suggests that we should “preserve human analogy” and abandon all talk of infinity when speaking of God’s attributes (DNR XI.1, 105). But Demea, rather than just saying “I shall go on calling God just and benevolent no matter what disasters befall humanity, because His moral perfections are entirely distinct from ours”, instead launches into a different line of defence. His response to the problem of evil is to invoke the so-called “porch” theory: This world is but a point in comparison of the universe: This life but a moment in comparison of eternity. The present evil phenomena, therefore, are rectified in other regions, and in some future period of existence. And the eyes of men,

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being then opened to larger views of things, see the whole connection of general laws, and trace, with adoration, the benevolence and rectitude of the Deity, through all the mazes and intricacies of his providence. (DNR X.29, 101) Cleanthes, of course, good empiricist that he is, dismisses the porch theory as a mere arbitrary supposition, a blatantly ad hoc shift on the part of the orthodox theologian. But it is worth stopping here for a moment to ask what exactly Demea is claiming. Suppose we think—as most of us do—that our human world is the scene of massive and blatant injustices, in which there are untold sums of undeserved suffering. When our eyes are opened to “larger views of things”, will we see either that such suffering is in fact deserved (perhaps as just punishment for sins in previous lives) or that such sufferings are amply compensated in a future state, so that they now appear to be necessary parts of a grand system of justice? If so, we will be continuing to judge by human standards—God’s justice will be our justice, only more fully informed. Or will we see that God’s standards are entirely distinct from ours, in which case we see that the suffering of the innocent remains undeserved in our terms, but we now conclude that our old standards are no longer relevant? Is there a transvaluation of values in the afterlife? The natural reading of Demea’s invocation of the porch theory is the former one: we share standards, but our judgements are partial and ill-informed. But if Demea means what he says elsewhere throughout the Dialogues, he should opt for the latter reading: our standards are not God’s, and what appears unjust in our eyes is just in His. On this reading, there is no need for recompense in an afterlife: everything could already be perfectly just (in God’s sense) in this world. Distributing pains and pleasures in accordance with natural laws alone, independently of merit or desert, might be precisely God’s idea of justice. Demea is confused. His official position, previously agreed with Philo against Cleanthes, is that there is no likeness or analogy between God and man. The mind of man, he has told us, is a confused mass of fleeting passions, thoughts, sentiments, and ideas, somehow or other loosely bundled together to make a single self or person. If we are to call God a “mind” or “intelligence” at all, we must state bluntly that His mind is utterly unlike ours. To carry this line of thought over to God’s moral attributes would be straightforward enough. We would simply continue to call God “just” and “benevolent”, no matter how much undeserved suffering (by our human standards) we observe or experience in human affairs. We simply keep repeating the mantra that “His ways are not our ways”. If we continue to call God “just” and “benevolent”, these terms no longer carry their familiar human senses.14 But Demea is reluctant to go so far, instead invoking the porch hypothesis to suggest that God might—our experience to the contrary notwithstanding—still be operating according to our standards of right and wrong.15 But he has no grounds at all for his flat rejection of the analogy in one domain of its application and this marked reluctance to abandon it in another. He clearly sees that Christian ministers would not want to tell their congregations that, when they tell them “God is just” and “God loves us”, these utterances do not mean what they would mean in human contexts, and indeed may not

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mean anything at all. But having rejected any human analogy in one context, he can’t re-invoke it in another as and when it suits him. Small wonder that, as Pamphilus puts it, “Demea did not at all relish the latter part of the discourse; and he took occasion soon after, on some pretence or other, to leave the company” (DNR XI.21, 115). The obvious explanation for Demea’s exit is that he feels he has been manipulated and tricked by Philo. He stomps off in a huff because he feels he has been taken for a ride. But perhaps it goes a bit deeper than that. I think Demea realizes that if he is to engage further in argument with Cleanthes and Philo, he needs two things he manifestly does not possess. He needs some positive account of the semantics of religious discourse—a mere via negativa is not enough. And he needs to answer the question of whether God and humanity share standards of justice and goodness. On this all-important question, he appears confused and conflicted, unable either to give a clear “yes” or a clear “no”. 6.4 Unanswered Arguments for Naturalism At various places in the Dialogues, Philo advances what we might describe as naturalistic counter-hypotheses to Cleanthes’ creator-god hypothesis. Philo advances these naturalistic counter-hypotheses, of course, under the aegis of his supposedly “careless” scepticism.16 The official conclusion of the sceptic is always that we should suspend judgement in all doubtful cases, which will turn out to encompass the whole of Metaphysics and Theology. But Philo is nevertheless prepared at times to rank the rival hypotheses in play, and to conclude that, on the available evidence e, hypothesis h1 appears better grounded than the rival hypothesis h2. He tells us, for example, that the physical universe resembles an organic body more closely than it does a machine, and that this makes it more reasonable to believe in an immanent and essentially embodied anima mundi than in a transcendent and immaterial creator of the physical universe: And it must be confessed, that as the universe resembles more a human body than it does the works of human art and contrivance; if our limited analogy could ever, with any propriety, be extended to the whole of nature, the inference seems juster in favour of the ancient than the modern theory. (DNR VI.4, 73) Note the care with which Philo balances his official scepticism with his leaning towards naturalism. The position he has officially been arguing for is that we have no data to ground any theological speculations; his naturalistic counter-hypotheses are put forward merely to counterbalance a systematic prejudice on the side of theism. But if obliged to take sides, he makes his own preferences abundantly clear: And were I obliged to defend any particular system of this nature (which I never willingly should do), I esteem none more plausible than that which ascribes an eternal, inherent principle of order to the world; though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations. (DNR VI.12, 76)

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So, Philo doesn’t just propose the anima mundi hypothesis as a mere sceptical scenario: he thinks it has better support in experience and analogy than the rival hypothesis of an immaterial creator distinct from the physical universe.17 One of the great advantages of the anima mundi theory is that it rids us of the notion—alien to all our experience—of a mind without a body. For the ancient theologians, he insists, there was: Nothing more repugnant to all their notions, because nothing more repugnant to common experience, than mind without body; a mere spiritual substance, which fell not under their senses nor comprehension, and of which they had not observed one single instance throughout all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they felt both: An order, arrangement, organization, or internal machinery in both they likewise knew, after the same manner: And it could not but seem reasonable to transfer this experience to the universe, and to suppose the divine mind and body to be also coeval, and to have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in them, and inseparable from them. (DNR VI.5, 73) Philo hardly seems to be telling us here that we should simply suspend judgement regarding all systems of cosmogony: his commitment to a broadly naturalistic agenda is clear. In philosophy, Philo thinks, we must learn to disregard mere “systematic prejudices”, i.e., those that stem from our education in the teachings of some established religion or other.18 But “vulgar prejudices” such as “no mind without a body” must be respected, because these are grounded in the universal experience of humanity. Cleanthes claims to be a good empiricist, extending the methods of experience into the domain of theology, but a fair-minded empiricist will have to accept that the anima mundi hypothesis of the ancients makes lesser demands alike on our comprehension and on our credence than the hypothesis of the transcendent and immaterial creator-god of Christianity. In Part VII, Philo takes this line of argument one crucial step further. Experience testifies to various causes of order in the material universe, which we label Intelligence, Instinct, Vegetation, and Generation. We have no deep insight into either the nature or the ultimate origin of any of these principles of order. It therefore seems arbitrary to insist, with Cleanthes, that Instinct, Vegetation, and Generation must all be effects of Intelligence: Now that vegetation and generation, as well as reason, are experienced to be principles of order in nature, is undeniable. If I rest my system of cosmogony on the former, preferably to the latter, it is at my choice. The matter seems entirely arbitrary. And when CLEANTHES asks me what is the cause of my great vegetative or generative faculty, I am equally entitled to ask him the cause of his great reasoning principle. These questions we have agreed to forbear on both sides; and it is chiefly his interest on the present occasion to stick to this agreement. Judging by our limited and imperfect experience, generation has some privileges above reason: For we see every day the latter arise from the former, never the former from the latter. (DNR VII.14, 81)

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Once again, the testimony of experience is perfectly clear and entirely unequivocal. Establish a class of all the intelligent beings familiar to you from experience—humans, dolphins, chimpanzees, and maybe many other animals. Ask yourself about the origin of these intelligent beings. Every single member of the class (at least indexed to the time of Hume)19 is the product of animal generation—in a word, of sex. It isn’t that we have no data to draw on and hence no reason to prefer one hypothesis to its rival. The actual situation is much more clear-cut. If our minds were not in the grip of a “systematic prejudice” (a Christian education), we would see clearly that the voice of experience is perfectly plain. Animal Generation frequently gives rise to Intelligence, but Intelligence never (in our experience) gives rise to Animal Generation.20 The most important and weighty of Philo’s unanswered arguments in favour of naturalism occurs at the end of Part IV. The passage is frustratingly brief and less than fully transparent in its meaning, but it appears—at least on a charitable interpretation—to anticipate the argument of later atheists that the god-hypothesis is objectionably ad hoc. Theists invoke the god-hypothesis, Philo tells us, in order to account for the order and arrangement we experience in the world around us. But, he objects, any divine mind capable of designing and fashioning our physical universe would itself have to be a highly complex and ordered being, and the question could be raised concerning the cause of this order. When it is asked, he continues, What cause produces order in the ideas of the supreme Being, can any other reason be assigned by you, anthropomorphites, than that it is a rational faculty, and that such is the nature of the Deity? But why a similar answer will not be equally satisfactory in accounting for the order of the world, without having recourse to any such intelligent Creator as you insist on, may be difficult to determine. It is only to say, that such is the nature of material objects, and that they are all originally possessed of a faculty of order and proportion. These are only more learned and elaborate ways of confessing our ignorance; nor has the one hypothesis and real advantage over the other, except in its greater conformity to vulgar prejudices. (DNR IV.12, 65) If the theist asserts that there is no need to explain how the constituent ideas of the divine mind (surely a highly complex thing)21 form a harmonious unity, the atheistic naturalist can make the same claim about the constituent parts of the physical universe—they combine harmoniously because it is their nature to do so. It seems unprincipled (and unargued) to assume that there can be a principle of order inherent in mind but that there could be no such inherent principle of order in matter. Cleanthes thinks that Philo is simply raising the age-old question concerning the cause of the cause, and briskly dismisses Philo’s objection as inapplicable alike in the realms of common sense and of philosophy (i.e., the natural sciences): You have displayed this argument with great emphasis…: You seem not sensible, how easy it is to answer it. Even in common life, if I assign a cause for

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any event; is it any objection, PHILO, that I cannot assign a cause of that cause, and answer every new question, which may incessantly be started? And what philosophers could possibly submit to so rigid a rule? (DNR IV.13, 65) On this point, Cleanthes is clearly in the right. Both in science and in everyday life, it is no objection to a causal hypothesis “C is the cause of E” that no cause for C has been assigned. Isaac Newton could explain both the motions of the planets and the falling of bodies here on Earth in terms of his law of universal gravitation, but he famously refused to speculate on the cause of gravity.22 The symptoms of AIDS can be explained in terms of the HIV virus, even if virologists remain ignorant of the origin of the virus. So, if Philo is only demanding the cause of the cause, Cleanthes’ rebuttal would be perfectly just: You [PHILO] start abstruse doubts, cavils, and objections: You ask me, what is the cause of this cause? I know not; I care not; that concerns not me. I have found a Deity; and here I stop my enquiry. Let those go farther, who are wiser or more enterprising. (DNR IV.13, 65) Philo’s objection, however, is subtler—and goes deeper—than Cleanthes imagines. The textual evidence at this crucial point of the Dialogues is of critical importance. A first draft reply to Cleanthes was deleted, and is replaced in the text with a second version which introduces a new—and better—line of thought. Here is Philo’s first attempt at a reply: Your answer may, perhaps, be good … . upon your principles, that the religious system can be proved by experience, and by experience alone; and that the Deity arose from some external cause. But these opinions, you know, will be adopted by very few. And as to all those, who reason upon other principles, and yet deny the mysterious simplicity of the divine nature, my objection still holds good. An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former. (DNR IV.14, 66, n.1)23 Three options appear to be in play here. One can, with Demea, accept the “mysterious simplicity” of the divine nature, and dismiss the entire question of the cause of God as a combination of theological impertinence and metaphysical category error—as a question that should never even be framed by human enquirers. This option is clearly not available to Cleanthes. He might, of course, say, that the evidence of the natural world testifies to a supreme mind, accept that such a mind is a highly complex organized being, and grant that on his principles it must have some unknown cause or other. On the face of it, this simply launches Cleanthes into a regress of designers. But if Cleanthes digs his heels in and insists—as piety might seem to require—that the question of what caused God’s existence does not even arise, he owes us an explanation for why the same move

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is not available for the naturalist who wants to assert that the material universe, with an immanent principle of order, has always existed. This first draft reply shows Philo exercising his dialectical ingenuity in offering the would-be natural theologian a forced choice between some distinctly unappealing options. His revised reply, however, goes rather deeper, and raises a more searching and profound objection against the god-hypothesis itself. Cleanthes protests that he has found the cause of the physical universe and that he leaves the search for further causes to those who are wiser or more enterprising. Philo’s response goes to the heart of the issue between them. I do not pretend, he tells Cleanthes, to be either wiser or more enterprising than other men: And for that very reason, I should never perhaps have attempted to go so far; especially when I am sensible, that I must at last be contented to sit down with the same answer, which, without farther trouble, might have satisfied me from the beginning. If I am still to remain in utter ignorance of causes, and can absolutely give an explication of nothing, I shall never esteem it any advantage to shove off for a moment a difficulty, which, you acknowledge, must immediately, in its full force, recur upon me. Naturalists indeed very justly explain particular effects by more general causes; though these general causes should remain in the end totally inexplicable. But they never surely thought it satisfactory to explain a particular effect by a particular cause, which was no more to be accounted for than the effect itself. An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former. (DNR IV.14, 65–66) The new line of thought introduced here in the re-drafted version is the key distinction between particular and general causes. In the natural sciences, we subsume particulars under general laws, even if the causes responsible for those general laws remain unknown. In the Eighteenth Century, the shining example of Isaac Newton would always be invoked to teach a methodological lesson. He was able to subsume lots of smaller generalizations (Galileo on falling bodies, Kepler on the orbits of the planets, etc.) under the one great formula of universal gravitation. But when faced with the question of the cause of this cause, he responded with his famous “hypotheses non fingo”.24 The progress of science is an advance from particulars to mid-level generalizations, and then in turn to overarching universal generalizations; and explanation in science is the subsumption of particulars under universal laws. The same methodological lesson is drawn in the Section IV, Part I of Hume’s First Enquiry: It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is, to reduce the principles, productive of natural phaenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery; nor shall we

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ever be able to satisfy ourselves, by any particular explication of them. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse; these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we shall ever discover in nature; and we may esteem ourselves sufficiently happy if, by accurate enquiry and reasoning, we can trace up the particular phaenomena to, or near to, these general principles. (EHU IV.1 12, 112) We are close here to the argumentative heart of the Dialogues, and it is deeply to be regretted that the section ends here so abruptly, and the debate speeds on to the knockabout fun of Part V. I think that Philo is at least groping towards the modern objection that the God-hypothesis is objectionably ad hoc i.e., that it has been carefully tailored to explain exactly the phenomena that we observe.25 The obvious way to press this objection is to demand of any would-be natural theologian that he or she advances falsifiable predictions (or retrodictions) grounded in their theistic hypothesis.26 It’s easy to see how this demand is met in the cases we discussed earlier. Newton and his disciples could derive testable predictions from the law of universal gravitation. The spinning Earth should be flattened at the poles and bulge at the equator; the planets should wobble off their Keplerian elliptical orbits at conjunction; and most spectacularly of all, the return of the comets after long periods beyond the solar system should be as predictable as clockwork. As for the AIDS-HIV example, if the symptoms are caused by a virus (rather than, say, a bacterium), the active factor will pass through certain filters that would screen out bacteria, and antibiotics (which kill bacteria) will prove ineffective against it. The moral is clear. There is nothing methodologically illegitimate about invoking a hypothetical cause C to explain some cluster of familiar effects E1, E2, E3, etc., even if you do not claim to know the cause of C. But if you do so, you should be prepared to go that crucial step further, and to predict that C will also cause further effects E4 and E5.27 I think this is the thought Hume is groping towards when Philo emphasizes the ascent of science towards ever-broader generalizations and dismisses the postulation of a new particular cause as problematic. We have seen in this section that Philo is far from the “careless sceptic” portrayed by Pamphilus. He advances a naturalistic agenda artfully concealed behind the sceptical agenda. The official verdict is always “we have no data” and “we should suspend judgement”, but behind that there is the carefully weighted judgement that naturalistic hypotheses fare better—in terms of closeness of analogy and conformity with experience—than supernaturalistic hypotheses. If the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence,28 the wise reader will arrive—by the end of the Dialogues—at a final verdict that blends three measures of scepticism with one measure of atheistic naturalism. Is this atheism? One thing is clear: it is perfectly compatible with atheism as we understand the term today. Once the purely verbal nature of Philo’s concessions to theism is grasped, readers will be able to see that an atheistic reader of the Dialogues can freely assent to “God exists” every time they are asked, and can

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cheerfully admit “some remote analogy” between the cause(s) of the universe and human intelligence. They merely have to cast their minds back to the rotting turnip passage and chuckle quietly to themselves while they make the verbal concession. The Dialogues might actually serve as a much more effective tool for teaching and promoting atheism than a blockbuster such as Baron d’Holbach’s full-frontal assault in his Système de la Nature. D’Holbach pours scorn and abuse on theism and theists; Hume engages with theists, inviting them to make choices, to probe difficulties, to clarify concepts, to see what might be said on the other side, and to think harder about the possible grounds of religious belief, whether this be rational argument, empirical evidence, natural predisposition, or emotional commitment. His own considered verdict seems to have been that no formulation of theism will withstand such close critical scrutiny. One reader who grasped this point with complete clarity was Joseph Priestley in his Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Priestley was a polemicist by nature and inclination, and polemicists are not, in general, to be trusted as reliable interpreters of the positions of their foes. But here I think he gets it right: he has grasped the “careful” and “artful” nature of Hume’s masterpiece better than many later commentators. I shall leave the final word with him. But although Philo… advances nothing but common-place objections against the belief of a God, and hackneyed declamation against the plan of Providence, his antagonists are seldom represented as making any satisfactory reply. And when, at the last, evidently to save appearances, he relinquishes the argument, on which he had expatiated with so much triumph, it is without alleging any sufficient reason; so that his arguments are left, as no doubt the writer intended, to have their full effect in the mind of the reader. And although the debate seemingly closes in favour of the theist, the victory is clearly on the side of the atheist. (in Tweyman 1996, 81) Notes 1 I shall assume that Dugald Stewart’s “Cleanthes is Hume” interpretation has been thoroughly discredited and that scholarly opinion is now divided between Kemp Smith’s “Philo is Hume” interpretation and the “no single authorial voice” reading of the text. If readers generally feel that Philo has by far the best of the argumentative exchanges, this may turn out to be a distinction without a difference. 2 For the “deist” reading of the Dialogues, see Gaskin 1983; for the “agnostic” interpretation see Noxon (1964); for the “natural belief” interpretation see Butler (1960) and Tweyman (1986, 1995, 1996). 3 Shane Andre addresses the question in a well-known paper of 1993, but ultimately rejects the interpretation of Hume as an atheist. 4 All page references to the Dialogues will be to John Gaskin’s edition for Oxford World’s Classics. 5 See Russell (2008), especially Chapter 7, “Atheism under Cover”, pp. 70–80 for Hume’s contacts with the unbelievers of his age, and for their reliance on “esoteric” communication. Russell makes a strong case for seeing irreligion as the key to Hume’s work.

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6 An obvious parallel would be with the ancient sceptic, Sextus Empiricus’s advice on living in accordance with the customs of one’s country, without giving assent to common beliefs about the gods. The sceptic, it seems, should turn up at the temple of Jupiter on the appropriate feast day, make the approved sacrifices, say the proper words, but believe nothing. 7 See Russell (2008, Chapter 8), “Blind Men before a Fire”, pp. 83–98 for the negative implications of meaning-empiricism for our idea of God. 8 See Berman (1988, Chapter 1), “The Repression of Atheism”, pp. 1–47. 9 See Gaskin (1988, Chapter 12), “The Dispassionate Sceptic”, especially p. 221: “So my contention is that Hume gives some sort of genuine assent to the proposition that there is a god”. 10 Holden (2010), Chapter Two, “Mitigated Scepticism and Hume’s Liminal Natural Theology”, pp. 19–47. 11 My disagreement with Holden concerns only this claim about Philo’s position in the Dialogues. With regard to Holden’s central thesis (that Hume is, in his terms, a “moral atheist”), I am in complete agreement. 12 It is worth noting here that the facts of animal reproduction are cited by Paley in his Natural Theology as strengthening rather than weakening the inference to intelligent design. See Paley (1836, 11). 13 Demea is taking us back, of course, to a major topic of dispute among scholastic philosophers, regarding whether predicates such as “wise” or “just” applied to both God and creatures are used univocally or equivocally. One way of representing the divide between Cleanthes and Demea is to see them as revisiting this medieval debate, with Cleanthes insisting that the intelligibility of theology requires univocal senses and Demea insisting that piety requires equivocal senses for the key terms. 14 A century later, John Stuart Mill would be more forthright in the Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy: “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.” Mill (1965–1991, vol. IX, 103). 15 The central thesis of Holden’s Spectres of False Divinity, that Hume is a “moral atheist”, regarding morality as fundamentally grounded in our human passions and sentiments, and inapplicable for deep reasons of principle to the cause or causes of the universe (whatever it or they might be), strikes me as fundamentally correct. Demea is here being pushed towards precisely this position but is reluctant to draw the inevitable conclusion of his own arguments. 16 The judgement that Philo is a “careless” sceptic is of course Pamphilus’s, but we have no reason to take any of Pamphilus’s judgements seriously and every reason to regard them as generally naïve. When he describes religion as “the surest foundation of morality” and “the firmest support of society” (DNR PH.5, 30), we know that he is not speaking for Hume, who, of course, flatly rejects both of these claims. 17 For insightful discussion of “Hume’s Immanent God”, see Nathan (1966). 18 For an important insight (that education is one of the deep—but unduly neglected—topics of the Dialogues) and a provocative suggestion concerning a possible role of such “systematic prejudice” in Part XII of the Dialogues, see Foley (2006). Since I disagree with him about the extent of Philo’s U-turn, I don’t find his overall argument compelling. 19 It may be, of course, that we now have genuine cases of mind or intelligence that are not the product of animal generation, but that are indeed products of intelligent design. The implications of minds designing more minds take us beyond the scope of this essay. 20 Once again, this would be perfectly clear-cut for Hume; rather less so for us. But even in this age of genetic engineering, we humans are (largely) re-arranging materials provided by Nature. The prospect of an entirely artificial organism—designed and built from scratch by humans—is still a good way in the future.

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21 Cleanthes must accept that the divine mind—because analogous to our human minds—is a highly complex and organized thing. Demea will of course reject this assumption, but the dialectic here is between Philo and Cleanthes. 22 See the famous General Scholium to the Principia, with its celebrated motto “hypotheses non fingo”. 23 Richard Dawkins makes exactly the same objection in The Blind Watchmaker ( Dawkins 1988, 141, 316). 24 Principia, General Scholium. The significance of the famous “hypotheses non fingo” has been much debated among Newton scholars. He clearly didn’t dismiss the question of the cause of gravity as meaningless, because he gave a great deal of thought to it. The right reading, I think, is that he wanted to draw a sharp distinction between what he had established in the Principia (the existence of universal gravitation and the inversesquare law governing its operation) and what remains speculative (the cause of gravity). Whether this latter issue would become in time amenable to the methods of science remained for Newton an open question. 25 For a modern expression of this argument, see Grünbaum (2000). 26 Adolf Grünbaum is clearly correct to say that it is additional empirical content that counts here. We usually express this demand in the form of a challenge to show that the hypothesis under consideration can yield new predictions, but retrodictions will also serve. This is important in the context of defending the Darwinian theory against the accusation that it too is unfalsifiable. See Grünbaum (2000, 22). 27 Could the would-be natural theologian pass this Popperian test? I see no reason why not. Many natural theologians of Hume’s time were firmly committed, for example, to the claim that the balance of Nature is so delicately contrived that no species of plant or animal ever goes extinct in the course of Nature. This is clearly an empirical claim, and one that was firmly and decisively refuted only a generation later by the researches of Georges Cuvier. 28 If the “natural belief” interpretation is correct, then of course this evidentialist verdict may be correct in its own terms, but will be irrelevant to the issue of how we humans are going to form our beliefs. Even if we were utterly convinced that the inductive sceptic wins all the arguments, we are never going to find inductive scepticism credible. If theism were a natural belief, it would be a parallel case. But I think there are powerful reasons both philosophical and textual—notably the well-known letter to Gilbert Elliot—for rejecting the “natural belief” interpretation.

References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1932. The Letters of David Hume. 2 vols. Edited by J. Y. T. Greig. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1978/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. Text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Referred to herein as THN.) Hume, D. 1998. Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Edited and with an introduction and notes by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Hume, D. 1999/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford Philosophical Texts. (Referred to herein as EHU.) Other Primary Literature Burnet, G. ed. 2000. A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion: Being an Abridgement of the Sermons preached at the Lecture founded by Robert Boyle. 2 vols, 1737. Reprinted with a new introduction by Andrew Pyle. Bristol: Thoemmes.

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Mill, J. S. 1965-91. Collected Works. 33 vols. Edited by J. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Newton, I. 1934/1729. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy [Principia Mathematica]. 2 vols. Translated from the Latin by A. Motte, 1729; revised translation F. Cajori. Berkely: University of California Press. Paley, W. 1836. Natural Theology. 2 vols. London: Charles Knight. Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Secondary Literature Andre, S. 1993. Was Hume an Atheist? Hume Studies. XIX, 141–166. Berman, D. 1988. A History of Atheism in Britain. London: Routledge. Butler, R. 1960. Natural Belief and the Enigma of Hume. Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie 42, 73–100. Dawkins, R. 1988. The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin. Foley, R. 2006. Unnatural Religion: Indoctrination and Philo’s Reversal in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume Studies 32, 83–112. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1983. Hume’s Attenuated Deism. Archiv für dir Geschichte der Philosophie 65, 160–173. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1988. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Grünbaum, A. 2000. A New Critique of Theological Interpretations of Physical Cosmology. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51, 1–43. Holden, T. 2010. Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nathan, G. 1966. Hume’s Immanent God. In: V. C. Chappell, ed. Hume, New York: Macmillan. pp. 396–423. Noxon, J. 1964. Hume’s Agnosticism. The Philosophical Review 73, 248–261. Parent, W. A. 1976. Philo’s Confession. The Philosophical Quarterly 26(102), 63–68. Russell, P. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Scepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tweyman, S. 1986. Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Tweyman, S. ed. 1995. David Hume: Critical Assessments. Vol V, Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Tweyman, S. ed. 1996. Hume on Natural Religion. Bristol: Thoemmes.

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Not Hoist with His Own Petard Hume’s Dance with Skepticism in Dialogues, Part I Evan Fales

7.1 Introductory: Philo’s Strategic Maneuvers in Part I Part I of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR), which introduces the dialogue’s personae, centers upon a discussion of the history of skepticism and its role in defenses of theism—a topic that may seem at first blush to be rather tangential to the main burden of the work. But—so I shall argue—it is by no means tangential; it undertakes a crucial task in setting the stage for the debate to come. Though it is perhaps not immediately evident, this opening reconnaissance performs the important work of dialectically positioning the subsequent discussion in such a way as to parry at the outset a tu quoque challenge to which Hume knows he will be vulnerable. That challenge would come in the form of a charge that Hume’s attacks on the chief evidentialist arguments respecting God’s existence and nature are rendered uninteresting by the global skepticism that Hume has notoriously supported with his damaging critiques of both human reason and the senses. After all, if human cognitive faculties are powerless to secure for us knowledge on any such questions, why should we bother to single out, for special attention, religious claims? Both the sciences and ordinary common sense lie under the same curse. Hume’s initial task, then, is to frame the discussion so that some meaningful distinction can be drawn between the potency of the grounds for doubting theistic claims and those for doubting claims of the other two sorts. Hume pursues this aim a bit indirectly, by having his protagonist, Philo, weather, and deflect the charge of radical skepticism, laid against him by his friend, Cleanthes, in the course of a broader discussion of the historical role of skepticism. As throughout the Dialogues, Hume develops his argument by having each of his three interlocutors at various points articulate arguments favoring his own conclusions—a device he may have employed, in part, deliberately to keep at least some of his readers in a state of suspense over his aims in the work. To facilitate the discussion, I will begin by teasing out from the text of Part I the passages that contribute importantly to Hume’s defanging of the charge that his skepticism renders the investigation of the epistemic credentials of natural religion moot. Having distilled Hume’s reply to this sort of challenge, I raise in two steps the question whether Hume’s response successfully achieves its aim, and DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-11

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whether, if it does not, it admits of a re-formulation that improves upon the (very compressed) position articulated in Part I. The first move in Hume’s exoneration of the skeptic is put in the mouth of Cleanthes. Philo indeed provokes the move—and provokes it with a mention of the evidence for skepticism about the powers of human reason, evidence provided, not only by the blunders of reason that common life discovers to us, but as well by the enduring disagreements among the learned over questions both philosophical and scientific. This speech prompts from Cleanthes a defense both of common sense and (presently) of science: of the former, by noting that even the skeptic trusts his senses in his practical navigation of the world, and by appeal to the point, pressed explicitly by Hume himself in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1955/1748, Sec. V), that our “animal nature” exercises dominion over the doubting intellect, and compels us to abandon any whole-hearted adoption of the skeptical attitude the minute practical concerns press in upon us. But this defense of common sense comprises only half of Cleanthes’ response on behalf of human reason. For, making allowance for the proper office of reason in the acquisition of common knowledge, Philo couples this concession with a challenge against scientific reasoning: the inferential capacities of the human mind, operating upon what can be learned by the familiar operation of the senses, is, he proposes, not nearly a sufficient rational basis for inferences that draw out conclusions about matters remote from common experience, as scientific reason purports to teach. Here, Philo seems to echo the limited skepticism of Locke, who, while rejecting Cartesian doubt, denied that the sciences could ever discover knowledge of those operations of nature that lay beyond the purview of observation: not that we should deny the existence of hidden mechanisms that underlie what we can discern with the senses, but that the operations of that hidden world—the world of submicroscopic bits of matter, of imperceptible forces and the like—are beyond what we can hope to uncover. That seems quite congruent with Philo’s position at this juncture. Cleanthes isn’t having it. In his view, a full-fledged epistemic realism is warranted with respect to human cognitive powers, as they apply to both science and religion, which are at least epistemically on a par. As to the power of science, he can point to such accomplishments as Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction which, as he notes, few competent thinkers of the day would challenge. (We cannot know for sure, but I imagine a modern-day Hume might have his Cleanthes express more caution with respect to quantum mechanics and its puzzles. But, I do expect that this Cleanthes would insist that theological inquiry has as legitimate a hope of establishing a secure foundation for theism as modern physics has of sorting out the remaining difficulties in cosmology and fundamental particle physics.) Philo, once again, reacts with a strategic retreat: he concedes the epistemic bona fides of the sciences and accepts that, having refined and sharpened the reasoning tools available to ordinary sense, their conclusions gain a credibility that is, in principle, comparable to that of common wisdom. But in his final

Not Hoist with his own Petard 141 claim, as Philo sees it, Cleanthes has crossed a bridge too far. The claims of theology are in some way different in kind. Their establishment lies beyond the powers of human reason; the most they can support, in the end, will be an attenuated conclusion that the being and structure of the universe suggest an origin in something mind-like in its penchant for design—though not like human minds in its appreciation of good and evil. The state of play, then, at the beginning of Part II of the Dialogues is that Philo and Cleanthes, at least, have agreed upon a playing field that, arguendo, accepts the epistemic bona fides of common sense and science, but diverges on the credentials of attempts to ascertain “the nature of” God. At the same time, Philo has elected strategically to ally himself with Demea’s conviction that the surest path to religion is by way of some sort of fideism. 7.2 The Faculty of Reason It is worth pausing for a moment to ask just what sort of (in)adequacy in human epistemic powers Philo and Cleanthes are disagreeing over. Hume uses the term “reason,” and clearly enough he means at least the power to construct reliable chains of reasoning, both deductive and inductive. But that leaves open the matter of acceptable premises. In agreeing with Philo to restrict the rules of inference to arguments that are rationally acceptable, Cleanthes appears implicitly to have agreed that the premises to which deductive and inductive inferences can relevantly be applied are those admissible on empiricist grounds: namely, the deliverances of sense and comparison of ideas. On this understanding, Cleanthes and Philo are agreed that the inference forms one can legitimately appeal to in natural theology are only those whose cogency is certified by reason for use in science and common sense. It follows, then, that the disputation between these two will concern whether, if one begins with premises that are agreed-upon discoveries of sense and truths of reason, one can provide secure foundations for truths concerning the nature (and existence1) of a God acceptable to traditions of the three major monotheistic religions. It is one thing to agree upon such a general governing principle for a dispute; it is another to give substance to the principle by specifying what the permissible rules of inference (in this case, most particularly the rules of ampliative inference) are. Philo will have a good deal to say about such rules and their application during the course of the Dialogues; here, he invokes already the principle that the strength of reasoning by analogy is constrained by how close the relevant analogies are between the inductive basis and the items for which those analogies license inferred attributions: the more remote from experience the items whose features we are trying to guess are from their experienced analogues, the weaker the inference. Here, a word may be in order concerning the rules of inductive inference that Hume formulates in his Enquiry (1955/1748, Bk. I, Part III, Sec. XV). It is customary to note that these rules are entirely without justification, if Hume’s skeptical attack on induction be allowed. Why, then, bother to offer them? There

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are several (not mutually exclusive) replies one might give on Hume’s behalf, but here I note that the effort to codify such rules of inference makes sense if, inter alia, one considers their dialectical relevance in circumstances, such as the present one, in which the aim of inquiry allows or requires the setting aside of global skeptical concerns. To be sure, it is implausible that obedience to these rules will somehow be of any use in parrying the fundamental objections to inductive reasoning; and if only sheer human instinct or compulsion so to reason constitutes grounds for a kind of practical acquiescence in our belief-forming practices, then it is hard to see how scrupulous following of such rules is supposed to “improve” our performance. Against what higher standard are such scruples to be judged, if truth-conduciveness has been ruled an inaccessible criterion? On the other hand, if Hume is successful in drawing on reasoned grounds a legitimate distinction between some classes of ampliative inference—those that can properly suffice to underwrite scientific and ordinary beliefs—and others to which theists must appeal, then he will have succeeded in flagging the latter beliefs as especially insecure. Seen from this perspective, Hume’s project in the Enquiry of specifying basic rules for correct ampliative inference has a clear motivation: it is an effort to codify a distinction between those inferences that careful reflection within the bounds of a realist epistemology underwrites, and those it casts aside as the product of malfunctions of a capacity for perspicuous belief-formation with which we are endowed. From our present perspective, it might be added that, even if (as I would concede) we have not managed to provide a fully satisfactory objective foundation for ampliative inferences, it remains a legitimate undertaking to see what rules of inference we can formulate such that, if the skeptical difficulties can somehow be overcome, we have reason to expect that those rules would prove to be inductively sound. Setting the stage for the dialogue in this way, then, I take to be the main aim of Part I. An ancillary aim is worth mention as well. The brief allusions to the history of skepticism allow Hume/Philo to observe that skeptical arguments cannot be uniquely tied to atheist views, as they were deployed by the early Christian Fathers themselves in an age when they suited Christian dialectical ends. In making this charge, Philo not only further weakens the force of the accusation against himself but takes opportunity to suggest that (by implied contrast with himself) the theologians are disingenuous in their appeal, at one time to skeptical arguments, and at another to anti-skeptical ones. All this has the effect, inter alia, of enabling Philo to appear intellectually generous in the face of Cleanthes’ challenge (and even sympathetic to it), while not ultimately retracting his skeptical views and also committing Cleanthes to a realist platform regarding scientific theorizing. 7.3 Has Hume Got It Right? I want now to assess the power of Hume’s/Philo’s tactics in Part I, not so much in terms of their dialectical effectiveness in deflecting the charge of skepticism, as to

Not Hoist with his own Petard 143 consider whether Hume really get things right concerning how one should evaluate the relative epistemic credentials of theism, in comparison to common sense and scientific theory. I shall argue that the answer is something of a mixed bag. To begin, let me suggest that Hume sees clearly and correctly that the best way to compare the epistemic credentials of common sense and (especially) scientific claims with theological ones is to bracket off, as it were, those questions that lead to radical doubt, and give empirical data-gathering and ampliative inference a clean bill of health, and then essaying to discover what support theism can gain by employing them. This puts both the theist and the naturalist on a fair footing with respect to the intellectual tools they have at their disposal. In viewing things in this way, I am, of course, declining an alternative path, one that first undertakes to refute radical skepticism and to put our evidential procedures on an independently secure footing, which then can be deployed in an examination of the strength of various theological claims. I do so because I am not up to the task of refuting all the arguments for radical skepticism, and because I am not, in lieu of that, willing simply to sweep that view off the table. The challenge, therefore, is to see what sense can be made of epistemic distinctions between science and theology, even conceding that the foundations of the former have not been secured. The first matter to be settled is this: Are the reasonings that we apply in the pursuit of scientific knowledge fundamentally the same as those by means of which we develop common sense? Now it will hardly be denied that the basic rules of deductive reasoning remain the same. An objection to that claim has arisen, however, in the context of attempts to understand the logical structure of quantum mechanics. While I am not competent to adjudicate the positions that controversy has generated, my understanding is that this program to undertake modifications in the rules of classical logic have not been successful. What is true, however, is that some of the ontological commitments toward which modern physics has pressed are so disturbing to our commonsense conceptions of space, time, causation, a variety of continuities, and more, as to seem paradoxical or nearly unintelligible. Hume, indeed, anticipated this feature of modern science already in the Dialogues, at a time when, among other things, the phenomenon of action at a distance was a nettlesome problem. What is indisputable, however, is that (bracketing Cartesian doubt), modern data-handling techniques are strong enough to provide near-certainty to many scientific findings and theories, and that they are refinements of ordinary ways of reasoning, purified of common fallacies and rendered far more powerful and precise by the application of sophisticated mathematical analytic techniques. Constructive empiricist views notwithstanding, it is clear enough that the last half century’s debate concerning the “observable/theoretical” distinction was misconceived; and that distinction remains untenable, once we make claims about what is public (as opposed to subjective). That, if it is correct, provides license to inquire whether theology, availing itself of the same principles of data evaluation, deductive and statistical reasoning, reasoning to the best explanation,

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and so forth, can provide conclusions that are on a footing comparable to wellestablished science. But does this unfairly load the dice? It had been customary, at least since medieval times, to make a distinction between natural and revealed religion. Natural religion, which is of course Hume’s target in the Dialogues, confined itself to appeal to reason and outer sense for the bases on which to erect an edifice of theistic truths. But, it was thought, this is not enough: there are religiously essential truths, knowledge of which cannot be arrived upon by the exercise of these human faculties; they can only be acquired by way of revelation. Faith is acceptance of these truths, in virtue of their having been revealed by God. Has not this major theological resource been carelessly shunted aside? I think not. There is a passage, albeit brief and in passing, in which Philo remarks that knowledge via revelation was shown by Locke to reduce to what is known through sense and reason, which, if correct, captures it also under the aegis of natural religion.2 If, as I think, that was Hume’s aim here, and if Hume was correct (as I think he was) that testimony, divine or otherwise, is not a source of knowledge apart from sense and reason,3 and if, having in mind both Locke and his own “Of Miracles”, he judged (again correctly, I think) that his arguments will have neutralized also revealed religion,4 then it is fair to say that Hume has undertaken to cover all his bases. 7.4 Metaphysics To return, then, to my main question: Are there truths about the divine that elude our human capacity to deploy sense and reason, to which we have no cognitive access or to which we have access only in some other way? Are there barriers, having to do with limitations of our cognitive faculties or the very nature of the quarry that bar the way? Are there difficulties or impossibilities that, in some principled way, block understanding—difficulties more fundamental than, say, the differences between what it takes to gain knowledge about Quetzals and about quarks, both elusive in their own ways. A good many philosophers, including many who defend naturalism, maintain that, in the very nature of the case, nothing can be determined about the nature of the divine, assuming that God exists, by way of the methods of science. If one then adds a rider invoking empiricist constraints on justification, one arrives at atheism—or, more modestly and precisely—agnosticism. One such argument hinges on the claim that God is not a physical being, is not governed by the laws of nature, and often acts, allegedly, in hidden and unpredictable ways; moreover, He cannot be “captured” and made the subject of controlled, repeatable experiments. Indeed, were He to exist and intervene in natural processes, nature would be subject to unpredictable and uncontrollable irregularities, with the consequence that a scientific understanding of its operations would be intractable. This argument focuses on divine agency; it suggests that God’s acting upon the world would entail that the physical world is not causally closed and, moreover,

Not Hoist with his own Petard 145 that divine action would not—since God is presumably able freely to choose how He will act—be explainable by appeal to laws. Neither of these claims is uncontroversial,5 and the second, even if correct, does not force the desired conclusion. First, as Alvin Plantinga and others have observed, an occasional, even dramatic, intervention in natural processes by God would not prove an intractable barrier to general scientific understanding. And this seems right, at least so long as one does not insist upon a dogmatic adherence to ontological naturalism. After all, scientists regularly confront confounds that invalidate experimental data without retreating to skepticism. Ordinarily, one tries to pin down the nature and operation of the confound, and thus explain the skewed results, even if the confound can’t be eliminated. Moreover, this issue does not confront only controlled experimentation: science regularly asks questions of natural processes that cannot be controlled or produced at all by human efforts. Second, why should divine agency be ruled out as a scientific explanation? Is it that agency itself lies beyond the purview of scientific explanations? But if so, then it seems that all of the human sciences (and some that study non-human animals) would be banished from the halls of respectable scientific research. Or is it that (perhaps in contrast to human beings) God is able to exercise free will (as many, but not all theologians hold)? But free behavior is not the same thing as random activity; and anyhow, randomness itself does not preclude scientific treatment. At stake are positions that have long engaged in debate over the nature of free will and action, and over whether the proper (ideal) form of action-explanations is, in any case, to be sought in efforts to subsume them under causal laws. In the present context, perhaps it will suffice to point out that those who maintain that divine actions, if they exist, cannot be given scientific explanations because they are free are forced either to deny that human actions are ever free, or to place those that are alongside divine actions as beyond the reach of scientific explanation. While it is not outlandish to deny that divine action upon the world exists, it is at least harder to maintain that human beings never freely choose among options. Moreover, we regularly do explain human actions—paradigmatically, ones that result from careful deliberation—in terms of how reasons guide behavior. And not only does that explanatory strategy, sometimes pejoratively dubbed “folk psychology,” provide often sophisticated and flexible explanatory strategies, but also underwrites, often with confidence, predictions. And this is the more noteworthy if (as I think) deliberative action of this kind embodies the paradigmatic exercise of free will, properly understood. For these reasons, I can’t see that the line of thinking just adduced shows that divine action is sacred ground, upon which scientific explanation cannot encroach. Indeed, emphasis on the role of science in discovering the causes of things should lead to the conclusion that if there are special events that owe their occurrence, even if only in part, to divine intervention, then it would be perverse somehow to rule ex ante that scientific investigation must stop here because the territory on the other side is posted with “no trespassing” signs. The sciences are,

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after all, deeply invested in the business of identifying the mysterious causes of observed events, and have amassed what I think everyone can agree is the most sophisticated set of tools for doing so. Nor should one take seriously the claim that those tools can only apply to mundane causes. The most widely effective means for identifying unknown causes is the deployment of reasoning to the best explanation. That is precisely the way in which theists themselves proceed when they offer cosmological and teleological arguments—that is, engage in natural religion. Of course, such arguments might fail: theism might fail to provide the best explanations for the existence and design of the universe. But so far, we have not yet been given any reason for thinking they must fail, just in virtue of invoking supernatural agency. I want now to press further the question whether there might not after all be reasons to think that theistic explanations are bound to fail, either because they are debarred in principle from offering genuine explanations at all, or for the weaker reason, which is essentially Hume’s, that they are in the nature of the case deprived of robustness by the remoteness to experience and imagination of the causal stories they must invoke. First, let’s look at what sort of in-principle reasons can be given for thinking that supernaturalistic explanations must be ruled out from the start. These, as I see it, all depend on the metaphysics of causation. Indeed, they depend upon conceptions of causation that would not have been accepted by Hume himself, as they require that causation be something more than (or other than) constant conjunction. The central idea is that causation being the sort of relation that it is, a being like God is not the sort of thing whose acts could stand in that relation to physical events. A straightforward application of this idea turns upon the common theistic view that God is an a-spatial and a-temporal being. It is claimed that such a being cannot perform acts at all; nor can it be a constituent of events. But since (allegedly) a cause is by necessity an event, God cannot do or cause anything. There are both difficulties and complications in the straightforward case. First, while there is broad agreement among theologians that God is not a being who occupies space, there is a division of opinion on whether He is “in time.” Theologians who deny this have, in this context, a steeper hill to climb. But suppose God is a temporal being. Then attributing to Him acts performed at particular times is not straightforwardly unintelligible.6 But non-spatiality presents, on the face of it, a more serious challenge. It seems fair to infer that Hume himself would have rejected a-temporal causes, since, for him, it is a condition upon the causal relation that the cause precede the effect.7 And simultaneity between a cause and its effect would, at least, raise the question of what makes one the cause and the other the effect. In any event, Hume does seem to allow that a cause need not have a spatial locus, presumably because he has in mind the problem of mind/body causation. So, if the Humean view of causation is accepted, a theist could help herself to this feature of it to allow for action by an a-spatial God. And, indeed, modern libertarians who analyze free actions in terms of agent-causation have a conception of agent-

Not Hoist with his own Petard 147 causation that is not incompatible with the claim that a cause need not have a spatial location if the cause is an agent. In any event, ontologically more robust accounts of causation than Hume’s are now widely recognized, and for many of these, the thought that there might be necessary a posteriori conditions on causal relations or the causal relation is not ruled out. In particular, it will not be out of order to wonder whether it is such a necessary condition on causes (and effects) that they be events locatable in space-time. Indeed, if experience be consulted on the matter, we have abundant grounds for thinking that such a condition obtains. Of course, our experience of mental/bodily interactions will give pause. The pause may not be a long one for the convinced physicalist, but even dualists must concede the temporality of mental events as we know them; and so the causal efficacy of an a-temporal God presents a hurdle. Experience, then, if it teaches anything about the nature of causation, gives uniform testimony to the temporality of causes. Another, and perhaps more empirically accessible, metaphysical constraint on causation derives from the observed conservation laws that appear to govern causal processes generally. Of particular interest are the laws of conservation of energy and of linear and angular momentum, each of them intimately connected to one of the invariants of causal processes under spatial and temporal translations. As an immaterial being, the divine being cannot possess any of these physical attributes; He no more has mass/energy or momentum than a color or shape. But then we are owed an account of how, lacking these, He can govern nature, first by creating the world ex nihilo, and second by manipulating the course of events from time to time, insofar as this involves (re)directing the movements of material portions of the universe.8 To the best of my knowledge, the most interesting attempt to evade the conservation-law objection has been articulated by Robert John Russell.9 Russell notes that, at the quantum level, the initial conditions of a system can produce a range of different final conditions, with the constraints that (a) the conservation laws are not violated and (b) that quantum mechanics determines the members of the set of possible outcomes, and assigns a probability to each of these (whose sum is 1). Which outcome is realized on a particular occasion on which the initial conditions are satisfied is random but occurs with the assigned probability. Various attempts have been made to develop theories that “penetrate” this randomness and explain why the system behaves in one way on one occasion and yields a different outcome on another; in effect, they try to eliminate the randomness by positing hidden variables that, when accounted for, reduce quantum processes to deterministic ones. Russell’s proposal can be thought of as a kind of hidden-variables theory; according to it, God acts as the hidden variable. That is, in each quantum process that can yield a range of observed outcomes (eigenvalues), the hidden hand of God is what decides upon a given outcome. And some outcomes, even if exceedingly unlikely, can be chosen on given occasions by God for providential reasons, without violating the laws of physics, even if they depart dramatically from the usual run of natural phenomena.10 It would not be a trivial matter to show that there is no way that the wave function for a

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macroscopic system could, while preserving energy and momentum conservation, collapse to an eigenstate in which, say, the waters of the Red Sea would part so as to form a path on dry ground bordered by walls of water. On the other hand, it would be far from trivial—perhaps be an impossibly difficult calculational problem—to show that such an eigenvalue exists in the range from which God must choose. Here, we truly do have an example of the kind of inferential difficulty that Hume charges the theist with having to confront. There are, then, some problems that threaten the tenability of theism from considerations involving the metaphysics of space, time, and causation. These are fundamental questions; but it is worth emphasizing also that the potential barriers to divine-world interactions are ones that, if they obtain, do so as a matter of metaphysical necessity. Some theists will be sure to suggest that God’s sovereignty entails that He has the power to establish the ontological features of space, time, and causation and—having set them—has the power to revise or temporarily abrogate them. This, however, is a costly move. It amounts to asserting that God is not constrained by metaphysical necessity—that is, necessity (insofar as it is not simply a matter of logical form) tout court. That would mean, I suppose, that God could change himself into a frog. It would mean that, if He so ordains, such principles as Everything that has a beginning has a cause, Red is a color, and God does what is good may have exceptions. That is a steep price to pay. Absent such a forfeit, we must allow that Hume’s skeptical strictures regarding knowledge of the divine nature are in order. Moreover, if it should be true that theo-mundane interaction is precluded by the metaphysics of space, time, and causation, together with divine immateriality and lack of spatial or temporal properties, then the jig is up for theism. There might yet be something that by some measure qualifies as divine, but absent interaction with the world, that being has no role in the history of the cosmos—and that includes the creation and sustaining in existence of the cosmos. 7.5 Epistemology Let us turn, then, to epistemological problems generated by the alleged otherworldliness of God. We have already noted some, rooted in constraints set by space, time, and causation. There is no lack of others, both conceptual and empirical. The conceptual problems lie in general beyond my purview, although Hume may well have had in mind, beyond questions related to the coherence of theism itself, doctrines more specifically central to Christianity, e.g., of the Trinity and Incarnation. What about empirical evidence for the existence and nature of God? Of course, the main burden of the DNR is to expose the weaknesses of teleological and cosmological arguments (along with a brief section of discourse that seems to target ontological arguments). And here we may note again that, central to Hume’s argumentative strategy is to provide alternative, non-theistic, explanations for the existence of the universe and its observed regularities. Even if these competing hypotheses are not clearly better explanations than theism is, they are viable competitors and, in Bayesian terms, must be

Not Hoist with his own Petard 149 accorded prior probabilities that diminish the value of the prior assigned to the theistic explanations; disjunctively considered, they may confer a greater probability upon there being some naturalistic explanation for the existence and aspects of “design” found in the world than theism does. But, there were other issues that interested Hume and ought to interest us. One is the psychology of religious belief. I am going to take a brief look at one corner of that topic, one that has provoked a good deal of contemporary debate, and which illustrates one core principle of scientific reasoning that Hume deploys several times in DNR, to good effect. The topic is religious experience—more specifically mystical experience—and the evidential role it can play in the justification of religious claims. The topic is instructive for several reasons. For one, it straddles the division between revealed and natural religion. It contributes to natural religion by providing a type of experience that provides prima facie evidence for the existence of arguably supernatural beings and forces and, in some instances, for (mono)theism. Indeed, religious experiences of broadly this kind have become something of a rallying cry, in Evangelical circles, as proof for the claims of Christianity: “I have personally come to know Jesus.” How decisive is empirical experience of this sort as evidence for the existence of God? At the same time and secondly, such experiences provide a putative conduit for divine revelation, and so for religious assertions that go considerably beyond bare theism in their specificity and doctrinal affirmations. Consequently, if they, or some of them, can claim evidential weight, they may provide significant support for a rich theology and religious praxis. So let’s have a quick look. By mystical experience (ME), I mean a range of often powerful experiences in which an individual seems to experience profound aspects of reality that lie beyond ordinary experience, and to experience these things in a particularly intimate fashion that often produces strong conviction of veridicality as well as significant changes in character and behavior. This is, of course, only a vague characterization, nothing that can pretend definitional status. Somewhat more specifically, anthropologists find it useful to characterize one of the features mentioned above—intimate acquaintance—as involving possession or projection: the mystic becomes infused by, or possessed by, some supernatural being or force that may in some way displace or sideline her own individuality; or else some essential part of the mystic’s personhood leaves the “shell” of her body behind and travels to some sacred abode of the gods or other supernatural beings, there to commune with them and receive instruction. There are, of course, many variations upon these themes, but they are commonly found in many of the world’s religious traditions. For ease of exposition, however, we may focus upon Christian traditions in which God Himself, or Christ, or the Virgin appear to or are experienced as entering into the mystic. Now, the evidential value of such experiences is intimately linked to what explains their occurrence. What explains an ME may importantly vary from one experience to another. What one would hope for is an explanatory strategy that can (a) account for typical or universal features of MEs by providing a common

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explanatory framework that accounts for these similarities, but that (b) is flexible enough in its particular realization to explain the ways in which MEs can differ. Because of both the commonalities and the striking particularities of MEs, considered across the global range of religious traditions, this is not an easy challenge to meet. Now, the most straightforward and natural explanation of an ME is that it is caused by, and informs the mystic of, something that is actually happening. If so, then ME falls into place as just another—if unusual—way of acquiring information about the environment by way of sense perception, or something analogous to it. We might even privilege this as the “default position.” Of course, if the mystic reports that while she was asleep, Jesus visited her, opened her chest, and removed her heart, returning some while later to replace it with his own heart,11 then we might well entertain the hypothesis that she was either dreaming, delusional, or confabulating. What other explanatory frameworks are available—especially from the sciences? Contrary to a claim sometimes made by Christian philosophers, to the effect that MEs lie beyond the purview of science to investigate or understand, there has been a great deal of work done to study the phenomenology of MEs and to explain them in naturalistic terms. To my mind, the most penetrating contributions have been made in anthropology and the neurosciences. (Psychology, including evolutionary psychology, has also actively investigated and theorized about MEs, but in my view, has produced only much less promising explanatory theories.) Anthropologists have studied the social contexts of mystical traditions in cultures across the globe and have discovered that certain patterns of incidence and type regularly occur in association with identifiable ways in which social resources and loci of power are distributed. In a classical study, I. M. Lewis (1989) showed that across widely distributed tribal cultures, two types of social structures produce distinctive kinds of mystical traditions, central and peripheral mystical cults. Societies in which social leadership is competitively accorded to individuals who display the right qualities—meritocracies—are prone to produce manifestations of central mysticism among candidates for leadership positions. In many such societies, the reputation of an aspiring leader can be enhanced through suffering possession by a god who is revered in the mainstream religious cult—a “central” god. (Possession, alleged to be a frightening or painful experience, is customarily unwelcome, but this feature protects the social climber against suspicion of fraud.) The biblical book of Judges depicts a social setting in which charisma and leadership are the typical outcome of intimate contact with God. Peripheral possession is ascribed to invasion of a person by a harmful spirit, a condition that requires exorcism. Such possession causes the unwilling victim to engage in disruptive and socially unacceptable behaviors, including behaviors inappropriate for someone who is, as these victims are, members of marginalized and disenfranchised social sub-groups. Demons will vacate a victim, but at a price; and the price usually amounts to better treatment for the victim. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, women, more often than men, suffer from such possession.

Not Hoist with his own Petard 151 The above sketch is a highly abbreviated and simplified synopsis of Lewis’ findings. A rather natural objection is that, however well it might apply to socalled primitive tribal groups, it cannot even remotely do justice to the mystical traditions of the great religions. Perhaps: but that needs to be shown. Indeed, I find that completely natural extensions of Lewis’ theory are able to provide trenchant insights into the careers of such complex mystics as St. Paul and Teresa of Avila—both of whom seem at first blush to transcend Lewis’ categories (both are, in important ways, socially peripheral, but both are possessed by God on high, not demons).12 Another objection is that, while Lewis’ taxonomy may provide insight into the social dimensions of mysticism, it cannot do justice to the experiences of mystics. That, however, has been a subject of work in the neurosciences, which have attempted to discover the neural correlates of MEs. Research using brainscanning techniques on subjects while they are experiencing mystical states have located areas of the brain that are implicated in the production of these experiences. Moreover, what is known about the normal functions of these brain regions provides highly suggestive clues as to why their functioning abnormally would lead to distinctive aspects of various types of MEs, and the results cohere well with explanations at the social-context level. Now, a defensive strategy is fairly close to hand for theists: to accept the results of the scientific work, but to propose that they reveal God’s working. In effect, they add a new layer of explanation to the scientific ones, tracing ultimate causation back to God. But this appropriation of the scientific findings comes at a price: namely less explanatory power, and more complexity than the naturalistic view. The Godcum-science hypothesis is more complicated because it adds ontological commitments without any significant gain in explanatory power: “God did it” doesn’t add much explanation if we are told nothing about exactly how and why God does (or often fails to do) such things. What is worse, the theist is committed to holding that some MEs—ones favored by the “home” religion—are veridical and evidential; others are delusional. For the theist will regularly not want so to privilege the widely differing MEs that other religions take to be evidential, those had by persons with no religious convictions at all, or those triggered by drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, or other such methods. For these mystical episodes, the theist will want to drop the “and God caused that” coda; but the theist is then bound, either to find some distinctive feature of the “genuine” MEs that only God could have produced, or concede that MEs can be given purely natural explanations. We have, then, an example of how naturalistic explanations can outperform their theistic competitors. The same strategy, expropriation of scientific discoveries by theists, has been deployed by theories of “guided evolution,” theistic “Big Bang” cosmology, and other defenses of natural religion. The maneuver in the first is to accept all the explanatory tools of neo-Darwinian approaches except the doctrine of random (genetic) variation. Rather, sometimes God intervenes to introduce specific mutations on purpose to influence the direction of evolutionary history. Such a

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hypothesis is taken to explain the appearance of design in organisms where Darwinians have not yet been able to construct Darwinian histories. As a God-ofthe-gaps maneuver, such proposals come at the cost of needing the construction of “Divine” histories, and are viable only with failure to reconstruct Darwinian histories. 7.6 Conclusion I have tried to situate Hume’s opening conversation and its dialectical role in the larger context of the DNR. He was correct in his defense of the essential insight that the epistemology demanded by justification of theistic claims is not on all fours with the presuppositions required to provide a foundation for common sense and scientific theory. And this illuminates the ironic intent of Philo’s fatuous retreat to fideism at the end of the Dialogues. Although Hume had fewer analytic tools than we now marshal in confirmation theory, and of course wrote when the sciences were much younger, I hope to have shown that Hume saw clearly the challenge of illuminating an evidential divide between scientific theory and theism, and that his insights on that score offer a model of argumentation for those who suspect, rightly, that science and theism will require a great deal more marriage counseling before they can live together in happy matrimony. Notes 1 Ostensibly, it is to the nature of God, not His (indisputable) existence, that the three friends are directing their discussion. But this, we know, is a typical Humean smokescreen. To the extent that it is impossible to discern the nature of God, Hume will have considered himself to have shown that discourse about God’s being is cognitively empty: cp. what he has to say about necessary connections in nature. 2 “Locke seems to have been the first Christian, who ventured openly to assert, that faith was nothing but a species of reason, that religion was only a branch of philosophy, and that a chain of arguments, similar to that which established any truth in morals, politics, or physics, was always employed in discovering all the principles of theology, natural and revealed.” DNR, Part I, 138. 3 For an opposing view, see, e.g., Coady (1992). 4 At least insofar as the revelations are affirmed as genuine on the basis of testimony by others claiming to have witnessed miracles. Critics wasted no time criticizing Hume’s arguments on this head, and such critics remain in full voice today. A notable example is John Earman (2000). But in my view Hume’s reasoning can be revised in the light of those criticisms and subsequent developments in confirmation theory, in such fashion as to parry the objections and stand firm. Thus, e.g., Earman’s (2000) criticism of Hume stumbles at the outset by offering an implausible (and uncharitable) reading of Hume’s definition of what it is to be a miracle. On Earman’s reading, Hume defines miracles in epistemic terms: they are events that seem to us to be inexplicable in terms of the operations of nature. This is implausible. Hume needs miracles actually to be supernaturally caused in order for his criticism of miracle testimony to have bite. After all, his opponent needs the supernatural explanation in order for his appeal to miracles to have bite as evidence for theism. For a much more careful and plausible reading of Hume, see Sobel (1991); for an extended critique of Earman, see Fales (2021, Ch. 2). There is some unintended irony, I think, in Earman’s hyperbolic title.

Not Hoist with his own Petard 153 5 The first has been disputed by Robert John Russell (2002), who proposes that God might be able to direct the collapse of a Schrödinger wave-function to highly improbable eigenvalues, without violating conservation laws. I shall return to this presently. What Russell appears to be suggesting is that divine intervention might take the form of a hidden-variable account of quantum indeterminacy. 6 Even here there is an apparent complication, insofar as (it seems) the time co-ordinate of a divine act will have to be relativized to frames of reference that abide by General Relativistic constraints. But this does not seem to present any insuperable difficulties. 7 He also rules out simultaneity of cause and effect, for reasons that are less than transparent (see Hume 1968/1739–1740, THN Bk. I, Part III, Sec. II, Par. VII). 8 A common response to this difficulty is to maintain that, since the conservation laws are formulated for closed systems, they will not be transgressed by divine actions that, of necessity, entail that the impacted physical items do not form a closed system. But this response rests on a mis-understanding of the conservation laws. Suppose God kicks a can two meters down the road. Clearly, the can and its physical environment do not comprise a closed system—that is, a system so defined that at the relevant time-period, no other forces are causally interacting with it. So the energy of the system will not be time-invariant. But of course, the same is true if I kick the can down the road, if one neglects to count a loss of energy in me in the account-sheet for energy. If no such energy had been available to the can, it would not have moved. Similarly, if God possesses no energy to transfer to the can, thereby diminishing His store of energy by that amount, then the can doesn’t move. An equivalent way to make the point in classical mechanics is to note that an immaterial God’s kicking the can requires, by Newton’s second law of motion, that they can exert an equal reactive force upon God. How is the theist to make sense of that? (These same difficulties be-devil dualist interactionist accounts of the mind and body.) 9 See Russell (2002) and elsewhere. 10 There is a well-confirmed theorem that shows that the introduction of hidden variables requires quantum mechanics to allow for highly non-local forces. While that seems unphysical, it is not obviously impossible for God to achieve, if we grant divine omnipresence, given the common view that omnipresence is a matter of God’s being causally immanent at every location in space at any given time. 11 See Brown (1986) for an actual Medieval case of such an episode. 12 For details, which cannot be given here, see Fales (2005) and Fales (1996).

References Texts by Hume Hume, David. 1947/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Norman Kemp Smith, ed. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Hume, David. 1955/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Charles Hendel, ed. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril. Hume, David. 1968/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Other Literature Brown, Judith C. 1986. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press. Coady, C. A. J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Earman, John. 2000. Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. New York: Oxford University Press. Fales, Evan. 1996. “Scientific Explanations of Mystical Experience, Part I: The Case of St. Teresa,” Religious Studies 32, 143–163. Fales, Evan. 2005. “The Road to Damascus,” Faith and Philosophy 22, 442–459. Fales, Evan. 2021. Reading Sacred Texts: Charity, Structure, Gospel. Denver, CO: GCRR Press. Lewis, I. M. 1989. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Russell, Robert John. 2002. “Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics: A Fresh Assessment,” in Quantum Physics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, eds. Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, and Berkeley, The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Sobel, Jordan Howard. 1991. “Hume’s Theorem on Testimony Sufficient to Establish a Miracle,” The Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163, 229–237.

8

Demea’s Departure Revisited Lorne Falkenstein

Hold! Hold! cried Demea: Whither does your imagination hurry you? I joined in alliance with you, in order to prove the incomprehensible nature of the divine being … But I now find you running into all the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels, and betraying that holy cause, which you seemingly espoused … And are you so late in perceiving it? replied Cleanthes …Philo, from the beginning, has been amusing himself at both our expense … …Demea did not at all relish the latter part of the discourse; and he took occasion soon after, on some pretence or other, to leave the company. —Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion XII.18–19, 21

8.1 Introductory Demea’s departure is the most dramatic event in Hume’s Dialogues. It emphasizes his charges that Philo has betrayed him and has no sincere religious commitments. It also marks a turning point. The discussion does not continue to examine the issues that precipitated his departure. It is as if Hume had reached a line he (as author) dared not cross. As James Dye observed, it is not clear what sets off Demea’s outburst (1992, 467). Philo has not obviously said anything that Demea has not endorsed at earlier points in the Dialogues. This makes his departure puzzling as well as dramatic. Understanding why it happens is the key to understanding why Philo endorses the design argument in Part XII of the Dialogues. It also reveals a subtle and powerful anti-religious argument. 8.2 Three Views of Demea’s Departure There are three positions on Demea’s departure in the secondary literature. Call them the global, the regional, and the local views. On the global view, endorsed by none other than Cleanthes (“Are you so late in perceiving it?”), Demea is just not very quick on the uptake (see also O’Connor 2001, 167 and Kemp Smith 1947, 63–64). The evidence for Philo’s infidelity has been mounting, and it is only at this late point that Demea realizes that Philo has “sprung a trap” on him DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-12

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(O’Connor 2001, 168). Finally realizing how his commitments can be used to draw atheistic conclusions, Demea is confounded. Having no acceptable position to defend, he leaves. On the regional view, Philo’s declamations take on a new, dogmatic tone in the latter third of Dialogues XI, leading the discussion to “break down” (Newlands 2016, 634, 636–638). Rather than modestly suggest that we cannot understand the divine nature, he dogmatically asserts that God is indifferent to human and animal suffering and is the author of sin (Newlands 2016, 638).1 Demea’sinterjection comes at the point where the new attitude has become unbearable. On the local view, Demea’s departure is motivated by a new doctrine, Philo’s suggestion that God is the first cause of evil. According to Dye, this is not an attack on Cleanthes’s attempt to deduce the divine nature from the natural evidence, but on Demea’s cosmological argument, and Demea immediately sees it as such. When Cleanthes and Philo go on to cast aspersions on his intelligence and his motives it is the last straw, and he leaves in disgust.2 8.3 Problems with the Global View The global view treats Demea as Philo’s dupe. This puts a voice to uses that serve no philosophical purpose. Hume disapproved of dialogues that “put nothing but nonsense in the mouth of an adversary,” and lauded those where “a variety of character and genius [is] upheld.”3 In fairness, Hume might have wanted to give Demea a non-philosophical role to play, perhaps that of underscoring the extent to which Philo’s skepticism is consistent with accepted religious views. Coleman (2007, ix n.2) has proposed that Demea’sname comes “from demos, meaning people,” which would imply that Hume intended Demea to convey the unvarnished opinions of common people rather than any philosophically astute position. Various commentators have observed that Demea’s contributions to the discussion are disproportionately few and have charged that they are of inferior quality and questionable consistency. For instance, Gaskin (1993, xxii) and Kemp Smith (1947, 62–63) consider Demea’s endorsement of Samuel Clarke’s a priori argument to be in tension with his views “about the adorable mystery of God and about God’s incomprehensible attributes” (Gaskin 1993, xxii). But Demea is not the character in the Dialogues whose pronouncements have been found to be the most seriously inconsistent. And in Demea’s case, there is a ready reply to the charge of inconsistency. If Demea is indeed a representative of the common people then he will not have been “a religiously inclined excessive sceptic” (as Gaskin (1993, xxii) claims). He will have been a superstitious monotheist,4 as the Hume of the Natural History of Religion thought the common people are, except when (temporarily) gripped by violent enthusiasms or driven by idolatry to relapse into polytheism. Demea’smonotheistic mysterian commitments will have been a consequence of the psychological processes analyzed in the Natural History: a disposition to anthropomorphize the unknown causes of unfortunate events, producing a fear of an invisible power disposed to afflict us in retaliation for

Demea’s Departure Revisited 157 the violation of taboos, and a consequent attempt to appease this agent with flattery and exaggerated claims about its powers (DNR X.1, NHR 7.1, 6.5). While superstitious monotheism is empirically unjustified, it is not absurd or irrational. Hume noted that it is entirely possible that the forces that created human beings would also have created intelligent beings that are vastly more powerful than we are (NHR 11.1). It is further possible that these beings are disposed to make demands of us, and cause us to suffer if those demands are not met, as we are to domestic animals. If such beings do exist, and the disparity between them and us is as great as that between us and animals, wisdom would leave no choice but to attempt to ascertain their demands and comply with them. If such beings do not exist, it is only as a matter of fact, ascertained by the extent to which we can attribute the misfortunes that befall us to natural laws, and the fact is not easily determined. This makes Demea’s version of religion one that merits consideration. Questioning his acuity should be a last resort. The first interpretative option should be to try to find a defensible, interesting, unique perspective in Demea’spronouncements. 8.4 Problems with the Regional View According to the regional view, Philo’s change in tone occurs over XI.13–17. But, what Philo says at XI.13 only repeats what Demea had said at X.13–15, and what Philo had already said at X.26. At XI.14 Philo affirms that the original source of all things is indifferent to good above ill, and at XI.15 that it is most probable that the original causes of the universe have neither goodness nor malice, but he made equally strong assertions at X.24 (that God does not will human or animal happiness and that the course of nature is not established for that purpose). Over XI.16–17, these assertions are qualified, not amplified. Philo does not dogmatically declare that the divine being lacks rectitude or benevolence, but only skeptically proposes that we have no reason to infer that his rectitude and benevolence resemble human rectitude and benevolence (XI.16). We “exclude from him moral sentiments,” but then they are only “such as we feel them” (XI.16). Cleanthes and his ilk, “you anthropomorphites,” who define vice by human sentiments and consider God’s benevolence and rectitude to be like human benevolence and rectitude, must find a way to account for vice that stops short of the First Cause. Demea’s superstitious religious commitments are not impugned by such comments. Demea does not believe that God is gratuitously benevolent. He may not go the length of believing that God is the wrathful and malevolent demon of Natural History 13.6. That would be inconsistent with his view that God is incapable of feeling human passions (DNR III.13). But he does believe that we must earn divine benevolence (or better, mercy). God has expectations of us, and has no compunctions about inflicting suffering on those who defy those expectations. God is a power “whom we find, by experience, … able to afflict and oppress us” (X.1). It is necessary to find “methods of atonement” and “endeavour, by prayers, adoration, and sacrifice, to appease” him (X.1). Happiness is not

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something to which all are generally entitled. Nor is it something to which some are specially elected. It is a reward that must be earned (X.29). For Demea, these are “opinions the most innocent, and the most generally received even amongst the religious and devout themselves” (X.29; see Dye 1992, 471, 473). Though he does not discuss Demea’sdeparture in this context, Holden (2010, 169) makes some claims that might be taken to support a regional view. He maintains that at Dialogues XI.14 Philo suddenly changes tack from arguing that we cannot infer that the creator is morally praiseworthy to positively declaring that the creator is amoral. As Holden reads it, this is not paralleled by the earlier claims at X.24–25, which only charge that evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of a deity who is infinitely perfect (2010, 149–155). For Holden, this is “an academic dust-up of no real consequence,” since Cleanthes has no commitment to the infinity of God’s perfections (2010, 154). It is Demea, who believes that God is infinitely perfect (II.1–2, IX.1), who is impugned. However, Demea has as much reason to take exception to X.24–25 as to XI.14–15. Further, as Holden recognizes, Philo backs off from the assertions of X.24–25 at X.27 and X.34 where he maintains that they pose a problem only for “you anthropomorphites,” who believe that God’s moral qualities are analogous to human moral qualities. Mystics can escape the problem by maintaining that divine goodness is totally incomprehensible (2010, 152). For Holden, this is a “Fig-leaf of traditional pious language,” but it is enough to keep Demea on side throughout Dialogues X, and it is still found in XI.16’s assertion that the moral sentiments we exclude from the divine being are “such as we feel them.” 8.5 Problems with the Local View Philo opens Dialogues XI.16 by announcing a new theme: “What I have said concerning natural evil will apply to moral … we have no more reason to infer, that the rectitude of the supreme being resembles human rectitude than that his benevolence resembles the human.” He continues at XI.17, “so long as there is any vice at all in the universe, it will very much puzzle you anthropomorphites, how to account for it. You must assign a cause for it, without having recourse to the first cause. But as every effect must have a cause, and that cause another; you must either carry on the progression in infinitum, or rest on that original principle, who is the ultimate cause of all things ….” (The ellipses are Hume’s as Demea breaks in at this point.) Dye (1992, 473–474) suggested that the parallels between this argument and Demea’s earlier cosmological argument are what set Demea off. It is Demea who, following Clarke, claims that we cannot rest content with an infinite series of more remote causes but must identify some original principle that is the cause of why the whole series exists. Just as Philo had earlier opposed Cleanthes by claiming that natural evil prevents us from inferring that an intelligent designer has any concern for human or animal happiness, so he now opposes Demea by claiming that the necessarily existent being must be the cause of moral evil. Admittedly, at just the point where Philo is supposed to turn on Demea he begins by saying that it

Demea’s Departure Revisited 159 is “you anthropomorphites” who must account for the cause of moral evil. But on Dye’s reading, this is just a feint, and Demea is not deceived by it. Demea did give up on the cosmological argument in Dialogues IX “without even once offering a word in its defence” (Kreimendahl 2016, xxvii). When Cleanthes attacked it, and Philo declined to defend it, Demea instead retreated to the bedrock, superstitious doctrine that religion is founded on fear and misery. This is to be expected of someone whose views merely happen to “coincide, by chance, with principles of reason and true philosophy” (NHR 6.5). Demea is driven to religion by his passions, and has no real commitment to any philosophical argument. However, Dye proposed that Demea continues to believe that causal reasoning must at least be compatible with religious belief. In Dialogues XI, Philo appeals to the principle that there must be a First Cause to establish that the original cause is responsible for moral evil. For Dye, this “undermines any conception of divine rectitude which could have allowed present evils for the purpose of our moral improvement and eventual happiness” (1992, 475). This reading plausibly identifies divine rectitude, rather than divine benevolence, as the focus of Demea’s concern. Rectitude is the new theme raised in Philo’s pronouncements just before Demea’s outburst. For Demea, rectitude is the core moral quality. It consists in the disposition to make others suffer for wrongs and reward them for services. Demea may think that divine rectitude is nothing like human rectitude in the sense that God’s expectations cannot be determined by comparison to human expectations. But he clearly believes that God has expectations, will make us suffer if we do not satisfy them, and will relent if, having violated his expectations, we do things to appease him (X.1). Accordingly, he acquiesces to, and even participates in Philo’s skepticism about divine benevolence all through Dialogues X and most of XI. But when the scepticism is extended to rectitude, he cries, “Hold! Hold!” If God is the cause of vice, then he causes us to do what he commands us not to do, and then proceeds to punish us for it. If he rewards the virtuous, he rewards them only for what he has caused them to do, not for any freely undertaken service. This may nonetheless be entirely in accord with the most perfect rectitude, since, for Demea, God’s moral qualities are nothing like ours. But it leaves us with no hope of being able to appease God of our own accord, and so makes Demea’s form of religion impossible.5 But, there are still problems with this interpretation. It is widely acknowledged (including by Dye himself, 1992, 470) that Demea draws his cosmological argument from Clarke. For Clarke, there must be a necessarily existent being, which is neither caused by anything else nor by itself nor by nothing (1998, 12, but cf. 17 and 118–119). This being’s creative acts are caused by its will, which itself can have no further cause (1998, 53–54). Clarke took the liberty of choice exercised by the necessarily existent being to establish the logical possibility of liberty, and so of other beings who can freely initiate their own causal chains (1998, 53–54). Following Clarke, Demea could have invoked human free will as the first cause of moral evil. He could have done so, moreover, not by rejecting Philo’s claim that “every effect must have a cause, and that cause another,” but by insisting on

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it, as Clarke had earlier insisted on it. Quoting Hobbes (“the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause, which is itself determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on to infinity”), Clarke had maintained that it is precisely for this reason that some things must have their cause “in the necessity of their own nature,” and had gone on from there to make a case for human liberty (1998, 53–54). It is not so clear that Cleanthes could do the same, having specially taken it upon himself to reject this aspect of Clarke’s argument at Dialogues IX.8–9. Rather than take anything Philo had said as a challenge to his commitments, Demea should have been disposed to sit back and see what Cleanthes would have to say for himself now. 8.6 Authorial Intervention Might Hume have made Demea take exception to Philo’s line of argument at this point, without bothering to give him a motive for doing so? I have not noticed this option in the secondary literature, but it has some merits. Had Demea not taken umbrage at Philo’s remarks, the Dialogues would have taken a different course. Demea might have agreed with Philo or asked him to explain himself, perhaps bringing up the possibility of a free will defence. Either way, Cleantheswould have claimed that it is evident from introspection that we have free choice, which is all that is necessary to avoid Philo’s argument at XI.17. There is little question how the Dialogues would have gone from there. Philo would have devoted the bulk of his efforts to attacking Cleanthes by reiterating empirical evidence from Enquiry 8 to prove that human actions are determined by character, motives, and circumstances. Attempting to conciliate Demea by holding that moral evils are merely apparent and that everything adds to the perfection of the whole would not have been an option for Philo, given what he and Demea had declared at Dialogues X.6–9. He would have had to acknowledge that God permits moral evil. Perhaps he would have attempted to keep Demea onside by arguing that the most “rigid inflexible orthodoxy” (DNR PH 0.6) must fall on the Augustinian rather than the Pelagian side. Appeals to liberty would “render the cross of Christ of none effect,” resulting in a form of Theism that is no longer recognizably Christian. However great the problems with the implicated doctrine of predestination may be, they are difficulties that cannot be evaded by any nominally Christian form of theism and that have so far defied all the efforts of human ingenuity. We, or that portion of humanity who have been elected for salvation, are compelled by that very election to accept that these are consequences that are somehow reconcilable with the infinite perfections of the divine being. The rest are predestined to damnation, and their inability to think along these same lines is clear evidence of that fact. This natural evolution of the Dialogues must have been one that Hume considered at the time of writing. He would have found multiple drawbacks to it. It diverts the discussion from natural religion, introducing topics specific to Christian theology. As entertaining as the discussion of liberty and predestination might have been, it would only repeat points that had already been made in

Demea’s Departure Revisited 161 Enquiry 8, where they could be better supported by the theory of causal inference developed over earlier parts of that work. Perhaps most seriously, the developments paint Philo into a Calvinist corner while wedding Cleanthes to a “fantastical system” of “liberty of volition” (THN 2.3.1.15; EHU 8.23). These developments are balked by Demea’s outburst, Cleanthes’s and Philo’s insults, and Demea’s departure. Demea’s outburst officially unmasks Philo as a religious skeptic, even a “libertine and infidel,” something that has so far only been hinted at by Pamphilus (DNR I.4) and Hermippus (DNR Pamphilus to Hermippus 6). Demea’s departure also marks a conclusion. With the loss of one of the characters, the discussion has figuratively ended, a closure that is witnessed by the fact that the serious insinuations Philo has raised at the end of Dialogues XI are not subsequently taken up. Demea’s departure also gives a very different tone to Philo’s later endorsement of the design argument (Dialogues XII.2–4). Had the rupture not occurred, Philo’s move would not have been surprising. Already at X.28 Cleanthes had realized that Philo’s critique of the design argument was a feint. It has been used to drive Cleanthes to different ground, and Philo had been erecting a “concealed battery” that would allow him to fire at that ground. Occupying the concealed battery means that Philo himself has shifted ground. He now abandons the design argument, but charges, from the concealed battery, that it is inadequate to establish that God’s moral qualities are anything like human moral qualities, a point that Cleanthes declares devastating to all religion (Dialogues X.28). Having no more need to attack the design argument, Philo can declare himself to be as wedded to the argument as Cleanthes for all the difference that it makes. After the rupture, this same course of action appears differently. With no more need to put on a pious front, Philo suddenly makes an unnecessary concession. Brilliantly, Demea’s departure both allows Philo’s mask to be briefly dropped, and then taken up again at the outset of Dialogues XII. Even more brilliantly, it is put back on without altering Philo’s negative message, engendering ongoing controversy about what Philo was up to, while leaving no doubt about the irreligious message that can be taken from his premises. Hume had powerful motives for exercising authorial force majeure to make Demea depart. But to force Demea to do something that is not well motivated, simply because it drives the plot in a certain direction, is inept from a literary perspective. Perhaps this is excusable in a work of philosophy. But, like the global view, it should be a last resort. 8.7 A Prospective View of Demea’s Departure The global, local, and regional views of Dema’s departure are retrospective. They take his departure to be motivated by something Philo has been saying all along, or has just said, or by a recent change in tone. But Demea does not cry, “No! No!” He cries, “Hold! Hold!” And he does not wait until Philo has finished what he is saying to interject. He interrupts Philo in mid-sentence, as if he is afraid of what Philo is about to say. This suggests that the explanation for what sets Demea off is to be found by considering where Philo is going, rather than where he has been.6

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It is unlikely that Philo is about to charge that God is responsible for vice. He has just finished rejecting the hypotheses that the First Cause of the universe has either perfect malice or perfect benevolence in favour of the option that it is indifferent to good and evil. Demea would expect him to draw the parallel conclusion that God is indifferent to virtue and vice. There are two intrinsic reasons in favor of this account of what provokes Demea’s departure. First, without saying why, Demea goes on to accuse Philo of “running into all the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels.” That is an accusation that makes better sense if Demea anticipates that Philo will go on to say that God does not care what we do. Saying that God will first make us vicious and then punish us for it might be blasphemous in the eyes of some. But it is not a very good reason for indulging in viciously self-interested behavior, and it grants that God will preside over an after-life where the vicious will be punished and the virtuous rewarded. It makes more sense for a libertine or an infidel to claim that God is indifferent to virtue and vice. Second, unlike the claim that God is responsible for vice, the claim that God is indifferent to virtue and vice cannot be countered by a free will defence or mollified by Philo’s usual expedient of claiming that God’s rectitude is so far above human rectitude as to be incomprehensible to us. If God really is indifferent to virtue and vice there is nothing we can do to appease him or induce him to treat us favourably, which makes Demea’s superstitious brand of theism impossible. The prospective account also allows Hume to achieve all the positive goals identified in the previous section without having to exercise authorial force majeure. On the prospective account, Demea’s reaction is perfectly in character. It is motivated by something that Philo has not yet said, but that he is clearly about to say and that is, for the first time, clearly irreligious. It allows Demea to not only unmask Philo as a religious skeptic but also to level the charges of libertinage and infidelity. That in turn facilitates the re-masking discussed earlier, and motivates the ensuing discussion of Dialogues XII, which is principally addressed to whether religion is necessary for the practice of virtue and whether an amoral deity is too shocking a prospect to bear. 8.8 Sunt Superis Sua Jura [dei] 7 The prospective account of Demea’s departure upholds a pattern in Hume’s thought in other works. Demea’s intervention does not just prevent Philo from claiming that God is indifferent to virtue and vice. It prevents him from making an even stronger point: that moral distinctions cannot exist for an invincible and imperturbable being.8 Hume thought this. But he persistently retreated from saying so, though he supplied all the premises for the conclusion and understood where they led. In an early letter to Hutcheson, Hume made it clear that he considered divine amorality to be a consequence of the sentimentalist moral theory he shared with Hutcheson.

Demea’s Departure Revisited 163 I wish from my Heart, I could avoid concluding, that since Morality, according to your Opinion as well as mine, is determin’d merely by Sentiment, it regards only human Nature & human Life … If Morality were determined by Reason, that is [i.e., then it is] the same to all rational Beings: But nothing but Experience can assure us, that the Sentiments are the same. What Experience have we with regard to superior Beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all? They have implanted those Sentiments in us for the Conduct of Life like [i.e., as they have implanted] our bodily Sensations, which they possess not themselves.9 This is the “concealed battery” Cleanthes detected at Dialogues X.28. It makes all disputes over an intelligent designer pointless. “For,” as Cleanthes pointed out, “to what purpose establish the natural attributes of the deity, while the moral are still doubtful and uncertain?” If it can be established that moral distinctions do not exist for God, be it because moral evil exists or as a consequence of a sentimentalist theory of moral distinctions, “there is an end at once of all religion” (Dialogues X.28, my stress). A God who draws no moral distinctions does not discriminate the virtuous from the vicious, cannot be disposed to reward the one and punish the other, and will not offer any revelation concerning how we ought to behave. There will be no religious foundation for morality, no distribution of rewards and punishments in an after life, and no notions of sin or atonement or of a possibility of salvation. A religion that consists simply in “knowing” such a god, as Philo proposes at Dialogues XII.32, is no different from a science that acknowledges a Big Bang. It does not matter whether the cause is intelligent if it cannot be established that the intelligence has any concern to communicate with us. Hume carefully refrained from drawing this conclusion in his public work. Though he considered a sentimentalist theory to entail that moral distinctions do not exist for God, he did no more than hint at the fact. It is not just Demea’s outburst that prevents the assertion of divine amorality. The section of the Treatise most directly concerned with establishing that moral judgments are ultimately based on sentiment, THN 3.1.1, contains two paragraphs, THN 3.1.1.4 and 3.1.1.22 that remark that those who base moral judgments on reason impose moral obligations on God, and take his will to be constrained accordingly.10 While artfully written to convey the impression that moral rationalism delimits God’s power, it is implied that moral sentimentalism would place God above all moral constraints—otherwise, there would be no point in observing that the rationalist theory does the opposite. But Hume never said so. Hume’s silence on this matter continued in Enquiry 8. There he raised the question of whether the determinism he had defended has the consequence of making God responsible for vice. He considered two answers: (i) since God is good, whatever he determines must be conducive to the greater good; (ii) since God determines people to act viciously, he cannot be good. Hume quickly dismissed the first option for reasons that are well-known and need not be rehearsed here. However, when the time came to consider the second, he failed to follow

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through. He did not declare that God must be responsible for vice. Neither did he propose a way of avoiding that consequence. Instead, he evaded the issue, claiming that the problem infects all accounts, libertarian as well as determinist, and has so far defied all the efforts of human ingenuity.11 He had something bolder to say. God creates virtue and vice by disposing creatures to feel moral sentiments. In this sense, God is responsible for vice. He is responsible for making us such that actions and characters appear vicious to us. But he is, as the closing motto from Natural History 13.7 declares, not subject to the appearances he causes his creatures to experience. In another sense, therefore, he is not responsible for vice. Because virtue and vice do not exist for him, nothing he does could be done from vicious intent. Hume came closest to drawing these inferences in Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, though the argument is concealed by being dispersed over widely separated sections, one of them an appendix. Morals 1 opens by revisiting the question of whether moral judgments are the same for every rational intelligent being, or are instead based on “the particular fabric and constitution of the human species” (EPM 1.3). Adopting a more conciliatory tone than he had in the Treatise, Hume declared that since good arguments can be given on either side it is likely that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral judgments (EPM 1.9). The concurrence “probably” takes the form of sentiment pronouncing the final judgment based on distinctions, conclusions, comparisons, relations, and general rules uncovered by reasoning (EPM 1.9). This probability is investigated over the remaining eight principal sections of Morals, which argue that moral distinctions arise from a feeling of concern for the well-being of other human beings (EPM 5.43–46; 9.4, Ax1.3 and 10). The probability initially proposed in Morals 1 is thereby confirmed. Moral judgments are ultimately based on sentiment, specifically, on one special sentiment, that of disinterested benevolence, exercised at least to the “slight” extent that it induces us to feel approval of whatever is conducive to the welfare of others. But “much reasoning” can be involved, particularly where what is useful to self or others is concerned, because utilities are not readily discerned (EPM Ax1.2). Sentiment can often be corrected by reasoning about them (EPM 2.17–21). Considerations of justice are bound up with considerations of utility because, as Hume understood it, justice is principally concerned with what is most useful for facilitating a division of labour in conditions of limited abundance and limited generosity (EPM 3.2–12). Recognizing that reason does have a role to play in drawing moral distinctions might be thought to open the door to recognizing that a divine being would also draw moral distinctions. But the reasoning that is involved in moral distinctions is reasoning about utilities and an infinitely powerful being has no utilities to reason about. All ends, and all means to those ends are equally easy for such a being. A divine being of the sort Cleanthes is driven to assert, one that is supreme but limited (XI.1), might find some things easier than others and so would have a ground to distinguish between the useful and the pernicious. But this raises the question of Morals 5.15 and Ax1.3. “But, useful? For what? For some body’s

Demea’s Departure Revisited 165 interest, surely. Whose interest then?” A supreme, but limited being could distinguish between what is useful for or pernicious to its own interests. Whether a supreme being is finite or infinite, it could likewise understand what is useful for or pernicious to its creatures. But it is not clear why it would consider what is useful for its creatures to be good and what is pernicious for them bad. That would require that it feel some degree of concern for its creatures. But over Dialogues X-XI Demea and Philo argue from the “concealed battery” that the evidence indicates that the creator is largely indifferent to the welfare of its creatures beyond what is required for them to play a role in perpetuating the entire system of the world. Moreover, at Dialogues III.13, Demea argues from the high ground that it would be unreasonable to suppose that the divine being feels any human sentiments, presumably including benevolence or a degree of concern for the welfare of its creatures. Philo’s later condemnation of this same supposition is even stronger. At Dialogues XII.31, he declares it to be absurd.12 Justice and rectitude are no different. For Hume, justice is an economic concept. It has to do with what is necessary to facilitate a division of labour. As such, the fundamental concepts of justice are not duty, law, right, and crime, but property, fidelity to contracts, security of possession, and a means of exchange. Justice is, moreover, an artificial virtue. The need for it only arises in conditions of limited abundance and limited generosity. It would never have been thought of and would have no use, in circumstances of perfect abundance, dire scarcity, total rapacity, or unlimited generosity. But, a supremely powerful being has no need to divide its labour with others and lives in conditions of perfect or near-perfect abundance. It can therefore have no use for a concept of justice. Once again, its supreme intelligence would allow it to appreciate how institutions of justice might be useful to its creatures. But then it is the creatures for whom justice exists, not the creator.13 A creator would have the power to enforce adherence to the artificial virtues it causes its creatures to invent. But there is nothing that could give it any concern to do so. It could have no obligation to do so since the institutions of justice do not apply to it. If it feels no benevolence it would not be sentimentally disposed to do so. And the fact of the existence of moral evil does not sit well with the speculation that it is unaccountably disposed to do so. Ascribing rectitude to God is even less of an option. Considered in a morally neutral way rectitude is the disposition to put back in place what has fallen out of place, or prevent it from falling out of place to start with, particularly when the thing in question is oneself. But this presupposes some notion of the place a thing ought to occupy, which is an aesthetic or a moral matter. How aesthetic or moral distinctions could exist for a divine being is precisely what is in question. Considered in a narrower sense, rectitude is the disposition to reward those who have provided benefits and harm those who have given offense. These are dispositions that human beings are forced to act on by being naturally constituted to feel the passions of gratitude and resentment. But a being who needs nothing and cannot be harmed or benefitted can have no occasion to exercise a disposition to rectitude.

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This conclusion is broadly summed up at the close of Morals Ax1, which comes as close to echoing the letter to Hutcheson as anything Hume published. Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. … The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is eternal and inflexible, even by the will of the supreme Being: the standard of the other, arising from the internal frame and constitution of animals, is ultimately derived from that supreme will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence. (EPM Ax1.21) Hume here declared that the supreme being makes creatures feel moral sentiments. He did not go quite so far as to say that a supreme being recognizes no moral distinctions. But he did say that morals do not depend on an eternal and inflexible standard discovered by reason, but on a sentiment of vice and virtue grounded on how a supreme being has chosen to constitute us. The further reasons for thinking that moral distinctions do not exist for a divine being are easily enough gleaned from what Hume/Philo/Demea had to say about the artificiality of justice, the existence of natural and moral evil, and the absurdity of ascribing human sentiments to superior beings. But Hume never dared to go so far as to make them explicit. Demea’s intervention is a perfect example of this prudence. 8.9 Dialogues XII At Dialogues X.28 Cleanthes recognized the concealed battery and declared the end of all religion if it can be established that the designer has no moral qualities. Demea’s outburst prevents Philo from concluding that the creator is indifferent to virtue or vice at just the point where it has become obvious. Demea’s departure marks the real end of the Dialogues. However, his outburst also levels the accusations of libertinage and infidelity. Dialogues XII is an appendix, devoted to rebutting these accusations. It claims that religious skeptics can be as moral and as psychologically stable as believers, if not more so. It also establishes that Philo need not be a total infidel. His skepticism allows him to recognize that it is plausible that the universe was designed by an intelligence in some way like human intelligence, though lacking in moral qualities. This need not mean the end of all religion, as Cleanthes had claimed. A “true” or “philosophical” religion could persist, though it would not be genuinely theistic. True religion according to Philo, following Seneca, consists in nothing more than “knowing” the creator. This falls short of genuine theism, which, according to Cleanthes, consists in belief in a perfectly benevolent being who intends to reward us in an afterlife. 8.10 Holden’s Challenges Philo and Hume stopped short of drawing a conclusion both provided every reason for drawing, that God draws no moral distinctions. Tom Holden has argued for a

Demea’s Departure Revisited 167 reverse thesis, that Hume did not consider a divine being to be a possible object of human moral assessment.14 In the process, he has charged that “Hume’s mitigated scepticism rules out any … knowledge of [the deity’s] distinctive intrinsic character” (Holden 2010, 29). The mitigated skepticism Philo himself propounds at the outset of the Dialogues (I.10–11) and reiterates at XI.5 requires him to refrain from making any claims about the divine nature, those made at XI.14–16 being no exception. Holden also charges that an inference from the experience of evil to the moral indifference of the creator is too “embarrassingly weak” an argument for Hume or Philo to have endorsed (2010, 171–175). Whether the inference from the experience of evil is weak or not, the conclusion that God draws no moral distinctions is based on the claims that a supremely powerful being could feel no sentiments, could not find one thing more useful than another, and could have no use for institutions of justice. While the fact that there is any moral evil at all leads Philo to introduce the theme of divine rectitude and ask about the cause of human vice, Demea’s interjection prevents him from developing his thoughts on either topic. Whether he would have rested a case for God’s moral indifference just on appeal to the existence of moral evil is unclear, and whatever he would have said, Hume’s letter to Hutcheson and its later echoes in the Treatise and Enquiry make it clear that Hume thought that a sentimentalist account of the foundation of moral distinctions implies that God should not draw them. Moreover, as Pamphilus declares (DNR PH 5) and Demea reiterates (II.1), the whole purpose of the Dialogues is to consider the nature of God. If that enterprise were really inimical to Hume’s academic skepticism, he should not have written the Dialogues. Demea and Philo consider God’s nature to be mysterious, but Cleanthes does not. Cleanthes denies the infinity of the divine attributes (XI.1), but he also considers God to be “perfectly powerful” (XII.24). That alone would have put Philo in a position to draw Hume’s own conclusion, that a perfectly powerful being must be immune to affliction and so beyond any experience of what the Greeks called pathé—perturbation or sentiment.15 Notes 1 This switch is also noticed by O’Connor (2001, 186). 2 Dye (1992, 473–474). O’Connor and Newlands also suggest that there is a doctrinal innovation. The global, regional, and local views are positions in logical space. Commentators have combined them in various ways. 3 Letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto of 5 March, 1751. In Letters 2, 120. 4 In this essay, “superstition” is used as a technical term to indicate a form of popular religion that is characterized, not by its doctrines, but by its psychological causes. A detailed account is to be found in S&E and the Natural History of Religion. 5 Dye (1992, 476) claimed that because Demea thinks that divine moral attributes must be incompatible with being the cause of vice he is a “closet anthropomorphite.” But his superstitious monotheism is threatened quite apart from that supposition. 6 Dye (1992, 467) noted that Demea’s departure has more to do “with the implications of what Philo says than with his explicit claims.” The prospective view does not concern implications of what has been said, but what is about to be said.

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7 NHR 13.7. 8 The divine being need not be infinite. It need only be superior to any other power and incapable of being affected for the worse by any power. 9 Letters I: 39 (Letter 16). 10 “Those who affirm that virtue is nothing but conformity to reason … impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the deity himself ” (THN 3.1.1.4). “According to the principles of those who maintain an abstract rational difference betwixt moral good and evil, … [the objects of these relations] have no less, or rather a greater, influence in directing the will of the deity” (THN 3.1.1.22). 11 This was not to say that solutions had not been proposed, just that there were (and are) none winning broad acceptance. 12 Philo does say “absurd,” not just unreasonable or improbable. Passions are responses to disturbance—revenge to harm, gratitude to benefits, and so on. The absurdity Philo has in mind likely arises from supposing that a divine being could not be perturbed by anything its creatures might do. Holden (2010, 34–35) seeks to reduce Philo’s claim about absurdity to Demea’s about unreasonableness, as if it were nothing more than an “analogical argument from experience” of our own sentimental psychology. It is stronger than that. 13 The notorious EPM 3.18–19, where Hume argued that justice does not extend to weaklings, but only to those who have the resources to make us feel the force of their resentment, is further instructive regarding his views on this matter. Hume was far from denying that we feel the strongest moral disapprobation for those who are cruel to weaklings. But our disapproval is grounded on the sentiment of benevolence and not on considerations of justice or utility. The divine being feels no sentiments and so cannot be disposed to treat its creatures well on that account. 14 “[I]f there is a first cause or organizing principle, this being or principle is not a proper object of moral assessment one way or the other” ( Holden 2010, 8). Holden calls this “strong moral atheism.” The “weak” version also deals with human moral assessment of a divine being. “The weaker version is the denial of a morally praiseworthy god” ( Holden 2010, 7). 15 Thanks to Kenneth Williford for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References Texts by Hume “Dialogue” (EPM D): “A Dialogue” in Morals. Dialogues (DNR): Hume, D. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, Dorothy Coleman (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enquiry (EHU): Hume, D. 2000/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Letters (L): Hume, D. 1932. Letters of David Hume J. Y. T. Grieg (ed). 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morals (EPM): Hume, D. 1998/1751. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: A Critical Edition, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Natural History (NHR): The Natural History of Religion in Hume, D. 2007/1757. A Dissertation on the Passions & The Natural History of Religion: A Critical Edition, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press. S&E: “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” in Hume, D. 1987/1741-77. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, Eugene F. Miller (ed). Revised edition. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Treatise (THN): Hume, D. 2007/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Demea’s Departure Revisited 169 Other Primary Literature Clarke, Samuel. 1998/1705. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and other writings, Ezio Vailati (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Secondary Literature Dye, James. 1992. “Demea’s Departure.” Hume Studies 18: 467–482. Gaskin, John. 1993. “Introduction.” In David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, John Gaskin (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holden, Thomas. 2010. Spectres of False Divinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kemp Smith, Norman. 1947. “Introduction.” In David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Norman Kemp Smith (ed). New York: Nelson. Kreimendahl, Lothar (ed.) 2016. Dialoge über natürliche Religion. Hamburg: Meiner. Newlands, Samuel. 2016. “Hume on Evil.” In Paul Russell (ed). The Oxford Handbook of Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 623–645. O’Connor, David. 2001. Hume on Religion. London: Routledge.

9

Hume’s Palimpsest The Four Endings of the Dialogues Emilio Mazza and Gianluca Mori

9.1 The Puzzle of the Dialogues “The Publication will probably make some Noise in the World, and its Tendency be considered in different Lights by different Men”, Hume’s printer, William Strahan, writes in 1777 (Strahan 1777b, Ms. 23158, 263). In the Dialogues, as Hume told him in June 1776 (probably before writing the last addition to the text), the skeptic Philo is “indeed refuted” and “silenced” and “at last gives up the Argument” (Hume 1732, L II, 323). The interpretation of Philo’s declarations in Part XII, the first editor and major interpreter maintains, is “decisive of our interpretation of the Dialogues as a whole” (Smith 1947a, 69); but another scholar replies that Part XII renders the Dialogues “uninterpretable” (Dancy 1995, 55–56).1 In Part XII, Philo ironically declares himself confident that “no one” will ever “mistake” his intentions (DNR XII.2, 214)2; then he makes his first religious declarations, showing his “veneration for true religion”, and (again ironically) celebrates them as his own “unfeigned sentiments” (DNR XII.9, 219). One scholar has called these declarations the “Confessions of a sceptic” (Hendel 1925, 383–399); another reads a “confession of faith” (Smith 1947c, 120; 1947a, 70). This is Philo’s volte-face, which only few readers deny—although from opposite points of view (see Willis 2014, 126 and Lemmens 2012, 293). Faced with this enigma, some readers remain puzzled, others suspicious, and only very few are satisfied: each gives their own interpretation. Just what is going on in Part XII? Norman Kemp Smith first spoke of three different endings to the Dialogues;3 however, by “endings”, he did not mean philosophical endings or conclusions with regard to the attributes of God but literary endings (as we will discuss below). According to our reading of the text, the properly philosophical conclusions are four in number and depend on at least three different stages of the manuscript. Before considering them, let us recall the structure of Part XII: (PAMPHILUS AND CLEANTHES) Philo’s “strange lengths” in religion (1)

PROLOGUE

PHILO’S RELIGIOUS DECLARATIONS PT I

Purpose and design (2) Galen’s muscles and the rules of just reasoning (3–4) DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-13

Hume’s Palimpsest 171 Great analogy and verbal dispute theist/skeptic (6) Verbal dispute dogmatist/skeptic (8n; 1757) Remote analogy and verbal dispute theist/atheist (7; 1776) Natural rather than moral attributes (8) CLEANTHES’S RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS PT I

Strong analogy and theism (5) Influence of religion on morality: the proper office (10, 12) CLEANTHES’S RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS PT II

Comfort and consolation (24) PHILO’S SINCERE SENTIMENTS CONCERNING ACTUAL RELIGION

Absurdity and impiety (11) Little or bad influence on morality (12–23) Gloom and terror (25–30) Absurdity and inconsistency (31) PHILO’S RELIGIOUS DECLARATIONS PT II

Philosophical theists and skeptics (32; 1751–1756) Remote analogy and Christian skeptics (33; 1757) (PAMPHILUS) Cleanthes’s opinions closer to truth than Philo’s (34)

CONCLUSION

Let us also recall the four main additions to Part XII according to M.A. Stewart’s dating of the manuscript. All these additions take place within Philo’s interventions (Hume had obviously nothing to add to what Cleanthes had already said in Part XII after Demea’sdeparture at the end of Part XI) and are in fact quite independent of the main text, if not (as we shall see) potentially conflicting with it.4 “AA (a Note)”, ca. 1757 (ms p. 87; DNR XII.8n, 219 n.1): The note was first added at the bottom of the original last page (ms p. 84), below the word “Finis”, then scored out and rewritten on another sheet (ms p. 87). The place of insertion (in the middle of one of Philo’s speeches) is indicated by the abbreviation “AA” (ms p. 79): It seems evident, that the dispute between the Sceptics and Dogmatists is entirely verbal, or at least regards only the degrees of doubt and assurance, which we ought to indulge with regard to all reasoning: And such disputes are commonly, at the bottom, verbal, and admit not of any precise determination. No philosophical Dogmatist denies, that there are difficulties both with regard to the senses and to all science; and that these difficulties are in a regular, logical method, absolutely insolvable. No Sceptic denies, that we lie under an absolute necessity, notwithstanding these difficulties, of thinking, and believing, and reasoning with regard to all kind of subjects, and even of frequently assenting with confidence and security. The only difference, then, between these sects, if they merit that name, is, that the Sceptic, from habit, caprice, or inclination, insists most on the difficulties; the Dogmatist, for like reasons, on the necessity.

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“BB”, ca. 1776 (ms p. 87–88; DNR XII.7, 217–219) The long paragraph was added on the last two sheets and the place of insertion is indicated by the abbreviation “BB” (ms p. 79): All men of sound reason are disgusted with verbal disputes, which abound so much in philosophical and theological enquiries; and it is found, that the only remedy for this abuse must arise from clear definitions, from the precision of those ideas which enter into any argument, and from the strict and uniform use of those terms which are employed. But there is a species of controversy, which, from the very nature of language and of human ideas, is involved in perpetual ambiguity, and can never, by any precaution or any definitions, be able to reach a reasonable certainty or precision. These are the controversies concerning the degrees of any quality or circumstance. Men may argue to all eternity, whether Hannibal be a great, or a very great, or a superlatively great man, what degree of beauty Cleopatra possessed, what epithet of praise Livy or Thucidydes is intitled to, without bringing the controversy to any determination. The disputants may here agree in their sense, and differ in the terms, or vice versa; yet never be able to define their terms, so as to enter into each other’s meaning: Because the degrees of these qualities are not, like quantity or number, susceptible of any exact mensuration, which may be the standard in the controversy. That the dispute concerning Theism is of this nature, and consequently is merely verbal, or perhaps, if possible, still more incurably ambiguous, will appear upon the slightest enquiry. I ask the Theist, if he does not allow, that there is a great and immeasurable, because incomprehensible, difference between the human and the divine mind: The more pious he is, the more readily will he assent to the affirmative, and the more will he be disposed to magnify the difference: He will even assert, that the difference is of a nature which cannot be too much magnified. I next turn to the Atheist, who, I assert, is only nominally so, and can never possibly be in earnest; and I ask him, whether, from the coherence and apparent sympathy in all the parts of this world, there be not a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of Nature, in every situation and in every age; whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought be not energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other: It is impossible he can deny it: He will readily acknowledge it. Having obtained this concession, I push him still farther in his retreat; and I ask him, if it be not probable, that the principle which first arranged, and still maintains order in this universe, bears not also some remote inconceivable analogy to the other operations of Nature, and among the rest to the œconomy of human mind and thought. However reluctant, he must give his assent. Where then, cry I to both these antagonists, is the subject of your dispute? The Theist allows, that the original intelligence is very different from human reason: The Atheist allows, that the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it. Will you quarrel, Gentlemen, about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination? If you should

Hume’s Palimpsest 173 be so obstinate, I should not be surprised to find you insensibly change sides; while the Theist on the one hand exaggerates the dissimilarity between the Supreme Being, and frail, imperfect, variable, fleeting, and mortal creatures; and the Atheist on the other magnifies the analogy among all the operations of Nature, in every period, every situation, and every position. Consider then, where the real point of controversy lies, and if you cannot lay aside your disputes, endeavour, at least, to cure yourselves of your animosity. XXa, ca. 1751–1756. (ms p. 84; DNR XII.32, 226–227) This first paragraph was initially added on the margin of the original last page (ms p. 84), with indication for insertion between Philo’s last words and Pamphilus’s ending; then it was scored out, together with “AA”, Pamphilus’s ending (“Cleanthes and Philo pursued […] still nearer to the truth”) and the word “Finis”, and rewritten on a new sheet (ms p. 85), followed by a second additional paragraph XXb (pp. 85–86), Pamphilus’s ending and the words “Finis” (ms p. 86): To know God, says Seneca, is to worship him. All other worship is indeed absurd, superstitious, and even impious. It degrades him to the low condition of mankind, who are delighted with intreaty, solicitation, presents, and flattery. Yet is this impiety the smallest of which superstition is guilty. Commonly, it depresses the Deity far below the condition of mankind; and represents him as a capricious dæmon, who exercises his power without reason and without humanity! And were that divine Being disposed to be offended at the vices and follies of silly mortals, who are his own workmanship; ill would it surely fare with the votaries of most popular superstitions. Nor would any of human race merit his favor, but a very few, the philosophical Theists, who entertain, or rather indeed endeavour to entertain, suitable notions of his divine perfections: As the only persons, intitled to his compassion and indulgence, would be the philosophical Sceptics, a sect almost equally rare, who, from a natural diffidence of their own capacity, suspend, or endeavour to suspend all judgement with regard to such sublime and such extraordinary subjects. XXb, ca. 1757 (ms pp. 85–86; DNR XII.33, 227–228) This paragraph was added by Hume when he rewrote the preceding XXa and Pamphilus’s ending, which were written on the original last page (ms p. 84; DNR XII.34, 228), scored out and copied on the new last page (ms p. 85):Š If the whole of Natural Theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it affords no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no farther than to the human

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intelligence; and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections, which lie against it? Some astonishment indeed will naturally arise from the greatness of the object: Some melancholy from its obscurity: Some contempt of human reason, that it can give no solution more satisfactory with regard to so extraordinary and magnificent a question. But believe me, Cleanthes, the most natural sentiment, which a well-disposed mind will feel on this occasion, is a longing desire and expectation, that heaven would be pleased to dissipate, at least alleviate this profound ignorance, by affording some more particular revelation to mankind, and making discoveries of the nature, attributes, and operations of the divine object of our faith. A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity: While the haughty Dogmatist, persuaded, that he can erect a complete system of Theology by the mere help of philosophy, disdains any farther aid, and rejects this adventitious instructor. To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian; a proposition, which I would willingly recommend to the attention of Pamphilus: And I hope Cleanthes will forgive me for interposing so far in the education and instruction of his pupil.

9.2 A Preliminary Digression on the Literary Endings In 1751, Hume almost officially declared that he was making Cleanthes “the Hero of the Dialogue” (L I, 153). In doing so, he probably had in mind Philo’s religious declarations at the beginning of Part XII (DNR XII.2–9, 214–219) and Pamphilus’s final remark (DNR XI.34, 228). However, the latter is no more than a pre-established Ciceronian ending. As in Cicero’s defense of Balbus, Pamphilus declares that Cleanthes’s principles “approach still nearer to the truth” (DNR XII.34, 228).5 As in Cicero’s ending, which was the object of much discussion in Hume’s time, Pamphilus’s declaration is immediately unmasked by one of the first (then anonymous) reviewers, writing in The Monthly Review: “our readers will make their own comment upon this” (Rose 1779/2005, 222). Pamphilus’s pre-established ending excepted (Stewart 2000, 291, 300–301, 307), the Dialogues end in 1751 with Philo’s attack against religion as actually practiced (DNR XII.28–31, 225–226): the “primary” principle of actual religions is “terror”, and this entails “absurdity” (the Deity shows an “appetite for applause”, one of the lowest human passions) and “inconsistency” (the deity, who shows this human appetite, does not show a “disregard” for the opinions of men) (DNR XII.30, 226). Here, the “devils, and torrents of fire and brimstone” (DNR XII.28, 225) of the Dialogues flow into the “devils, or seas of brimstone” of the Natural History of Religion (NHR 12.18; Hume 2007, 73).

Hume’s Palimpsest 175 Between 1751 and 1756, Hume adds a new literary ending (DNR XII.32–33, 226–228), the second, which recalls Philo’s “religious” declarations at the beginning of Part XII and is intended to smooth the transition between his contemptuous attack against religion (DNR XII.11-XII.31, 220–226) and Pamphilus’s pre-established ending. According to this ending, on the one hand, the knowledge of God is the only true worship; on the other, only philosophical theists deserve God’s favor and philosophical skeptics his compassion and indulgence (DNR XII.32, 226–227). Then, in 1757, Hume adds a third new literary ending, according to which, on the one hand, inquisitive religious men must acknowledge a probable remote and imperfect analogy between the cause of order in the universe and the human mind; on the other, philosophical skeptics especially will be sound Christians (DNR XII.32, 227–228). However, the second and third literary endings refer to ancient and contemporary writers. At the beginning of the second ending, Philo appeals to Seneca (“To know God is to worship him”, Seneca, Ad Lucilium, III, ep. 95; 1925, vol. III, 88–89) and also refers (ironically) to John Wilkins’ Principles,6 which he has already (ironically) evoked in his first religious declarations. At the beginning of the third ending, Philo appeals to “some people”—probably Bolingbroke—who resolve “the whole of Natural Theology” into one simple undefined proposition (DNR XII.33, 227), a proposition that had been attacked by Warburton and Leland.7 The conclusion here refers back to Part I and Philo’s early alliance with Demea against Cleanthes: “Let Demea’s principles be improved and cultivated: let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason” (DNR, I.4, 131). In doing so, evoking Bayle’s Dictionary and perhaps Shaftesbury’s Moralists,8 Philo insists on the astonishing “greatness” and “obscurity” of the object, which gives rise to some “contempt of human reason” and to the expectation that “Heaven would be pleased to dissipate, at least alleviate, this profound ignorance, by affording some particular revelation to mankind” (DNR XII.33, 227). Philo’s new religious declarations thus rejoin the first and close the circle of Part XII. 9.3 First Ending: A Consistent Baylean Atheism (1751) The general question of the Dialogues concerns the nature and attributes of God, as Demea puts it, and in particular God’s natural (omnipotence, infinity, intelligence, design) and moral (justice, benevolence, mercy, rectitude) attributes: if we cannot prove them, “there is an end at once of all religion” (DNR X.29, 199). While the decision to talk about the nature of God is drawn from Cicero, who deemed it highly difficult and obscure, the highlighting of the theological question of the divine attributes is a peculiar Baylean point. This suggests a connection between the Dialogues and Hume’s early reading, as attested by the Early Memoranda, where Hume closely follows Bayle’s Continuation des pensées diverses (1705): all contenders—atheists, skeptics, theists, and deists—agree on the existence of a First Cause but they diverge on the question of its attributes.9 Bayle’s discussion of evil is founded on the preeminence of the goodness of God

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over his other attributes. In the Memoranda Hume adopts the same view and seems to agree with Bayle’s final diagnosis: a rational foundation of theology is impossible (“no solution”, Hume, Early Memoranda 2.26 in Mossner 1948, 502) and the philosophers’ attempts to save God’s essential attributes (goodness, wisdom, justice, etc.) against the attacks of the freethinkers must end in failure. This is why Parts X and XI are so important. Part XI concludes the discussions on the nature and attributes of God. At the end of Part XI Demea realizes what Cleanthes—according to Pamphilus—already knows in Part I (DNR I.4, 132), announces in Part X (DNR X.29, 199) and proclaims in Part XI (DNR XI.19, 213), namely that Philo is “secretly […] a more dangerous enemy” than Cleanthes himself: “I joined in alliance with you [Demea protests] in order to […] refute the principles of Cleanthes […]. But I now find you running into all the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels, and betraying that holy cause which you seemingly espoused” (DNR XI.18, 212–213). What has Philo said to provoke this comment? Discussing another question raised by Bayle and already referred to in the Early Memoranda (general laws, accidents and particular volitions), and maintaining that “were the world administered by particular volitions, evil never could have found access into the universe” (DNR XI.12, 210), Philo first serves us this: “Some small touches given to Caligula’s brain in his infancy, might have converted him into a Trajan. […] There may, for aught we know, be good reasons why Providence interposes not in this manner; but they are unknown to us” (DNR XI.8, 207).10 Then he concludes that the mere supposition that such good reasons exist “surely” will “never” be sufficient to “establish” the conclusion concerning the divine attributes, i.e., to prove that God is good, though it can possibly be “sufficient” to “save” it, i.e., to save the goodness of God from the objection founded on the existence of evil in the world (DNR XI.8, 207). Yet, when he comes more explicitly to the question of the goodness of God, Philo’s position is plainly inclined to atheism, on the basis of both experimental and rational arguments. From the former standpoint, he considers the four causes or circumstances on which the greatest part of (natural) evil depends and draws his “true conclusion”: “the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles; and has no more regard to good above ill, than to heat above cold” (DNR XI.14, 211). Then he suggests the “most probable” hypothesis founded on the phenomena: the first causes of the universe have “neither goodness nor malice” (DNR XI.15, 212). With regard to moral evil he even concludes that we have “still greater cause to exclude […] moral sentiments” from the supreme Being (DNR XI.16, 212). He is getting closer to one of the most daring statements of the Dialogues, namely that God is the necessary cause of moral evil. This is no longer an empirical statement but an obvious conclusion from the principle of causality applied to moral choices:11 Yet so long as there is any vice at all in the universe, it will very much puzzle you Anthropomorphites, how to account for it. You must assign a cause for it, without having recourse to the first cause. But as every effect must have a

Hume’s Palimpsest 177 cause, and that cause another; you must either carry on the progression in infinitum, or rest on that original principle, who is the ultimate cause of all things … . (DNR XI.17, 212) This hyper-Baylean statement recalls the demonstration of the nonexistence of God given in the Dictionnaire historique et critique, which is based on God’s responsibility for moral evil: “God is the author of sin, therefore there is no God.”12 Even though Philo’s argument, compared to Bayle’s (and Malebranche’s) occasionalist determinism,13 is founded on a more prudent conception of a causal chain which depends ultimately on the First Cause, its other premise (“so long as there is any vice at all in the universe… …”) and implicit philosophical conclusion are no different from Bayle’s. Bayle had indeed asserted (Bayle 1740, art. “Origène”, rem. E) that God’s goodness is incompatible with the slightest trace of evil, or pain, in the world or even in the afterlife: a single minute of suffering of a human soul is enough to annihilate the goodness of God and, consequently, His existence. In the Dialogues, the latter conclusion, so easy to draw, is prudently evoked by the ellipsis: “you must rest on [...] that original principle, who is the ultimate cause of all things … .” At this point Demea cries out: he has finally discovered atheism, not merely skepticism behind Philo’s view! Philo even ventures to distinguish explicitly his own view from “skepticism”. He certainly admits that he is “skeptic enough” to allow that God’s moral attributes could be “compatible” with the existence of “so many ills” in the world, but only if it could be proved a priori that God is good (DNR XI.12, 210–1;210–211; cf. DNR X.36, 201). However, for Philo (and Hume), the latter condition is impossible: we cannot have any knowledge of God’s (or any other being’s) attributes except “from the phenomena” (or a posteriori), and since phenomena attest the existence of evil, warranted belief in God’s goodness “cannot result from scepticism” (in other words, scepticism is a kind of negative knowledge, which is unable to counterbalance the direct experience of evil and suffering, which implies the inexistence of a good God; see DNR XI.12, 211; cf. DNR X.37, 202). If by “atheism” we mean, as Bayle did, to deny the existence of God by denying one of his essential attributes (and especially God’s “goodness”),14 the “true conclusion” of Part XI (the first causes of the universe have “neither goodness nor malice”) and its rationalist corollary (the “ultimate cause of all things” is the cause of moral evil) are atheistic statements, and also a blatant confirmation that the discussions on the “nature and attributes of God” are in fact, as in Bayle (and even in Cicero), a more or less covert way of discussing and possibly denying God’s existence.15 The Dialogues could end here, where the anonymous reviewer of the Critical Review terminates his account, with Demea’s departure in the last paragraph of Part XI (Anonymous 1779/2005, 204). As a well-known twentiethcentury Berkeley scholar said about Philo’s seeming reversal in Part XII, “The conclusion being disconnected from the argued content of the Dialogues, I shall ignore it” (T. E. Jessop in Taylor et al. 1939, 220).

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9.4 Second Ending: A Feigned Humean Theism (1751) As has been observed, Part XII “might be thought of as a new dialogue altogether” (Harris 2015, 452), since the object of the dispute has changed and Demea has left. The object of contention is no longer the God of Christian theology, the infinitely perfect, powerful, wise and, above all, “good” God. Now the discussion is limited to the attribute of “intelligence”. The other “natural” attributes, omnipotence, infinity (cf. DNR XI.1, 203), and even simplicity (cf. DNR IV.3, 159), have been lost on the way: Cleanthes gave them away (rather cheaply) during the debate (cf. also Philo’s attack against God’s unity at DNR V.8, 167–168). Goodness was constantly evoked in Part XI only to show that it is contradicted by the existence of evil. After Demea’s departure, God is exclusively an “intelligent Author” or a “supreme intelligence” (DNR XII.2–3, 215), and this turning point is something completely new in the Dialogues, as well as in Hume’s thought. It is true that Parts II–VIII often deal with God’s intelligence, but this did not exclude the other attributes. From Part III Cleanthes has considered goodness an integral inalienable part of the definition of God: … [S]uppose, that the words delivered not only contain a just sense and meaning, but convey some instruction altogether worthy of a benevolent Being, superior to mankind: could you possibly hesitate a moment concerning the cause of this voice? and must you not instantly ascribe it to some design or purpose? (DNR III.3, 152; emphasis added) And in Part VIII he repeats himself: any instance is a “… sufficient proof of design, and of a benevolent design, which gave rise to the order and arrangement of the universe” (DNR VIII.10, 186; emphasis added). In Part X, in the midst of the discussion on evil, Cleanthes states again that moral attributes are indispensable for belief in a God: “… to what purpose establish the natural attributes of the Deity, while the moral are still doubtful and uncertain?” (DNR X.29, 199). This was Hume’s position in the Early Memoranda and in the “Fragment on Evil”, where the incipit clearly echoes Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration: “The fourth Objection is not levelled against the Intelligence of the Deity, but against his moral Attributes, which are equally essential to the System of Theism.”16 The issue of the moral attributes (and especially goodness) returns also in the Natural History in different contexts, but always intimately linked to the other divine attributes: theism “supposes one sole deity, the perfection of reason and goodness” (NHR 9.1; Hume 2007, 60). In Part XII of the Dialogues, at the beginning of Philo’s volte-face, God is exclusively defined by His “intelligence”. The volte-face concerns only this attribute and does not affect (nor contradict) the atheist conclusion of Part XI. It rather presupposes it. If we claim—with most Christian theologians—that God is good, it follows—as Bayle had shown—that God does not exist: theists can only change the medium of the dispute and give up the goodness of God or his

Hume’s Palimpsest 179 omnipotence and infinity. “Intelligence”, as the source of world’s order and design, was the new frontier of early-modern theism from Cudworth onwards; and it was interpreted in a deistic sense, as by Voltaire when, probably following Bolingbroke, he excludes all other attributes and designates “intelligence” as the only (ineffable) attribute that men can ascribe to God.17 In the course of the Dialogues, Philo advances many objections against the intelligence of God, which receive no real reply. In Part VI, he explicitly argues that the only “system” which really solves “all” the difficulties is the (atheistic) system which maintains the eternal existence of an uncreated material order, independent of any divine or human intelligence: I esteem no [system] more plausible, than that which ascribes an eternal, inherent principle of order to the world [“Matter” in the first draft]; though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations. This at once solves all difficulties [“answers all questions” in the first draft]; and if the solution, by being so general, is not entirely complete and satisfactory, it is, at least, a theory, that we must, sooner or later, have recourse to, whatever system we embrace. How could things have been as they are, were there not an original, inherent principle of order somewhere, in thought or in matter? (DNR VI.12, 174) Yet, in Part XII, all this seems to be forgotten: “Intelligence” is on stage again, and Philo does not raise any more objections. In Part II he maintained that the predicates usually ascribed to God connoting a form of intelligence—“Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge” (DNR II.3, 142)—do not bear “any analogy or likeness” with those of man. Echoing Hobbes (and Collins), he considered them to be “honourable” (i.e., honorific) terms by which men express their adoration of the First Cause: … [W]e ought never […] to suppose that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creature. Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge; these we justly ascribe to him; because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware, lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to these qualities among men. (DNR II.3, 142) Cleanthes disagreed and advanced the opposite view, based on the Newtonian principle of the causal analogy between the phenomena of the universe and the productions of human art. According to “all the rules of analogy”, Cleanthes argued, since the effects are similar the causes must be similar as well: The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects

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resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. (DNR II.5, 143)18 In Part XII, Philo suddenly starts speaking like Cleanthes and revives his argument based on the cause-effect analogy; he even alludes to the Regulæ philosophandi, so much appreciated by Cleanthes, by calling them “the rules of good reasoning”; finally, instead of claiming that divine perfections do not have “any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creature” (DNR II.3. 142), he argues that there is “a great analogy” between them: That the works of Nature bear a great analogy to the productions of art, is evident; and according to all the rules of good reasoning, we ought to infer, if we argue at all concerning them, that their causes have a proportional analogy. … No man can deny the analogies between the effects: to restrain ourselves from enquiring concerning the causes is scarcely possible. From this enquiry, the legitimate conclusion is, that the causes have also an analogy: and if we are not contented with calling the first and supreme cause a GOD or DEITY, but desire to vary the expression; what can we call him but MIND or THOUGHT, to which he is justly supposed to bear a considerable resemblance? (DNR XII.6, 216–217) There is no philosophical reason for Philo to change his mind: no new thesis, no new answer to the objections that he widely raised in Parts II-XI; unless we should consider the reference to Galen’s view and the appeal to his “above 600 different muscles” as a new argument (DNR XII.3, 215), parodying Wilkins’s Principles.19 Yet, Philo’s sudden volte-face has a possible reason. It is the age of deism and Hume is seeking for allies: a God may exist, but He is not the God of the Christians. He is the God of the deists: intelligent, but without moral attributes. He is still a rational God, knowable by reason. Unlike Bayle’s disussion of evil in the Dictionnaire, and the future 1757 ending, in the first draft of Part XII there is no place for religious “faith” or fideism. Philo “surrenders” to Cleanthes. He renounces the goodness of God and sings a paean to natural finalism, plagiarizing Cleanthes’s and Maclaurin’s position. Reason is not opposed to faith, but everything Philo has said earlier is silenced. As Priestley was to point out, even though now Philo denies or forgets them, his arguments against Cleanthes’s theism are tabled but not overcome: “though the debate seemingly closes in favour of the theist, the victory is clearly on the side of the atheist”; and what Hume says “by way of cover and irony”, Priestley would say “with great seriousness” (Priestley 1780/2005, 264, 272). Philo’s hypocritical conclusion is still a philosophical conclusion: he introduces it as the expression of his “unfeigned sentiments”, but it is obviously the conclusion of a feigned

Hume’s Palimpsest 181 experimental theist who adopts the classical design argument, limited to the demonstration of the existence of a God who is merely intelligent. “Here then the existence of a Deity is plainly ascertained by reason” (DNR XII.7, 217), Philo declares. This second (theistic) conclusion of the Dialogues in the 1751 draft contradicts the first (atheist) one only in appearance20 and agrees with Hume’s official account of the Dialogues in his correspondence: thanks to Philo’s unconditional surrender on the question of God’s intelligence, which is expressed in his rival’s terms, Hume can make of Cleanthes “the hero of the Dialogue” (L I, 153), as he announced in 1751. Having advanced in Parts I-XI things “bold and free”, which are “much out of the Common Road”, Philo “gives up the Argument” (L II, 323), as Hume repeats in 1776.21 It is time now for Philo to attack actually practiced or positive religion, namely religion “as it has commonly been found in the world” (DNR XII.12, 223), and to show, against false friends like Blair,22 that its motives have “no great” influence on the general conduct of men and, where they predominate, their operation is not “favourable” to morality (DNR XII.21, 222–223). By displaying all its “pernicious” consequences, history shows that actual religion is not “so salutary” to society (DNR XII.11, 220). With Locke, Tillotson, and Blair, Cleanthes protests that “the proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, and obedience” (DNR XII.12, 220). This “proper office” argument was to be used by Hume in the History of England to soften his offensive treatment of religious beliefs and their consequences. In 1755 it is planned as a short additional paragraph; in 1755–1756, it is conceived as a Preface, and finally, in 1756, it is published as a long footnote to the second volume (see Mazza 2018, 290–298). Hume thought that what he had said about religion “should have received some more Softenings” (Hume 1983, 172), and that the History contained “so much Satyre against the Absurdity and Barbarities of the several Sects, that such a Sentiment seems very proper to qualify it, and preserve the proper Regard for true Piety” Hume 1970, 37). Since this “operation” of religion is “silent”, Cleanthes argues, it is often “overlooked”; since it “only enforces the motives of morality and justice”, it is often “confounded” with them (DNR XII.12, 220). Pamphilus, Cleanthes’s well instructed “pupil” (DNR I.1, 130; DNR XII.33, 228), rather than being a young Ciceronian “mere auditor” (DNR, PH 6, 128, cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I.17; 1979, 20–21), seems to have learned the lesson (and heard Blair’s sermons): the being of a God is “the ground of all our hopes, the surest foundation of morality, the firmest support of society” (DNR, PH 5, 128; cf. Blair 1750, 26). Yet, as has been remarked, even Cleanthes has his own inconsistencies: in order to avoid running into absurdity, he first supposes the deity to be “finitely perfect” (DNR XI.1, 203), then he illegitimately moves to the view that “genuine” theism represents us as “the workmanship of a Being perfectly good, wise, and powerful” (DNR XII.24, 224; see Rose 1779/2005, 213 and cf. Lemmens 2012, 290). He reduces theism to something supported not only by reason but also by “natural propensity” and “early education” (DNR XII.5, 216) and in order to celebrate the practical role of religion he appeals to an old lullaby. With Barbeyrac (“religion,

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however corrupted, is better than atheism” in Pufendorf 1734, 231b n.), Montesquieu (“religion, even a false one, is the best warrant men can have of the integrity of men” in Montesquieu 1989/1748, 181), and Hutcheson (“the good Influence of this Opinion [of a future state] [… …] probably did more good than what might overballance many Evils flowing from even very corrupt Religions” in Hutcheson 1742/2002, 124), he proclaims: “Religion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all” (DNR XII.10, 219). Cleanthes reasons that since “finite and temporary” rewards and punishments have “so great” an effect, we should expect a “much greater” effect from the “infinite and eternal” (DNR XII.10, 219). Under the implicit authority of Bayle and Mandeville, Philo can answer Cleanthes easily: this inference is “not just” (DNR XII.13, 219), for we show a great “attachment” to “present” things and but “little” concern for “remote” objects (DNR XII.13, 220).23 Once again, in Cleanthes’s words, the “injudicious” reasoning of theology allows Philo’s “zeal” against false religion to undermine his “veneration” for the true (DNR XII.24, 224). The deists must have appreciated the conclusion. 9.5 Third Ending: Reading Bolingbroke (1757) Hume felt dissatisfied with the two philosophical conclusions of the first draft of the Dialogues: Philo’s coherent atheist syllogism in Part XII, founded on the Christian idea of an infinitely good God, and his prudent theist/deist volte-face in Part XII, where “intelligence” is the only surviving attribute of divinity. Surely the latter had no philosophical depth and was nothing but a verbal declaration, which could be (and was) suspected of hypocrisy. Moreover, between 1751 and 1757, something paved the way for a different solution, which was to be the main novelty of Addition XX. This addition is articulated in two distinct steps and occupies two paragraphs. The first (XXa), written originally between 1751 and 1756, is meant to soften the abrupt transition from Philo’s last attack against actual religion—terror, absurdity, and inconsistency—to Pamphilus’s pre-established final remark in favor of Cleanthes. It concerns knowledge of God as being the only possible form of worship, and the rare philosophical theists and skeptics as the only people who deserve God’s favor or compassion and indulgence (DNR XII.32, 226–227). It does not say anything new on the attributes of God. The second paragraph (XXb) is added in 1757, and is a revised version of Philo’s volte-face. What was first the denial of “any analogy” between God’s and man’s perfections (DNR II.3, 142; emphasis added), and had been in Part XII transformed into a “great analogy” between the causes of the works of nature and those of the productions of art (DNR XII.6, 216; emphasis added), has now become a “remote analogy” between “the cause or causes of order in the universe” and “human intelligence” (DNR XII.33, 227; emphasis added). Here, Philo declares: If the whole of Natural Theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some

Hume’s Palimpsest 183 remote analogy to human intelligence: if this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: if it affords no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: and if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no further than to the human intelligence, and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the qualities of the mind; if this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs, and believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it? (DNR XII.33, 227) Philo’s observation seems to point to a precise undetermined source (“some people seem to maintain”) for the resolution of natural theology into one proposition, but he does not give any hints as to its identity. Three points allow us to pinpoint this probable source: first, the acknowledgment of a vague and “remote” analogy between the human and divine minds, and the denial of their equivalence; secondly, the opposition between the natural and moral attributes of God, and the explicit limitation of the vague remote analogy to the former; thirdly, the assertion that the “whole of natural theology” resolves itself into this remote analogical knowledge of the intelligence and wisdom of God. What happened in Britain, between 1751 and 1757, that could explain Philo’s change of strategy about “natural theology”? A possible answer is to be found in Hume’s correspondence. At the end of 1752, as Hume announces, “all the rest of Bolingbroke’s Works went to the Press”, even though, he adds, “my Curiosity is not much rais’d” (L I, 168). In October 1754, he expresses another negative opinion concerning Bolingbroke’s posthumous works, edited by David Mallet and printed in London between 1753 and 1754: Never were seen so many Volumes, containing so little Variety & Instruction: so much Arrogance & Declamation. The Clergy are all enrag’d against him; but they have no Reason. Were they never attack’d by more forcible Weapons than his, they might for ever keep Possession of their Authority. (L I, 208) Bolingbroke’s works, Hume writes in March 1755, are “very free”, but their merit is not “very considerable”: “the Book [… …] has some Eloquence; but no Reasoning: Is tedious; full of Repetitions; and disgusting by its Arrogance” (in Hume 1991, 659–660). Yet, in December 1754, after the publication of the first volume of his History of England, Hume had been accused of being “as great an atheist as Bolingbroke” (L I, 214); and, in February 1757, after the appearance of the Natural History, Warburton concluded: “The design […] is the very same with all Lord Bolingbroke’s, to establish naturalism, a species of atheism, instead of religion: and he employs one of Bolingbroke’s capital arguments for it. All the difference is, it is without Bolingbroke’s abusive language” (Warburton to Strahan (1757) in Mossner 1980, 325–326). The contradictions of this refined

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Bolingbroke unmask his intentions: “He is establishing atheism; and in one single line of a long essay professes to believe Christianity” (in Mossner 1980, 326). Hurd and Warburton publicly attacked the Natural History in almost the same terms as the correspondence (“the purpose of it is to establish Naturalism on the ruins of Religion”, Warburton & Hurd, Remarks I; 1757, 8.), and made fun of its author by reducing him to Bolingbroke: Which makes me the more wonder at the trouble his friends gave him, of refining this natural history from the grosser faces of Atheism, before it was presented to the world. But this public, it seems, was become a little squeamish, having been so lately overdosed by the quackery of Bolingbroke.24 There are textual clues, in the Dialogues, which point to Bolingbroke’s works as the probable hidden source of Addition XXb. First, let us look at the expression “remote analogy”. Although absent in Bolingbroke’s writings, it could be Hume’s interpretation of Bolingbroke’s defense of Hobbes at the beginning of the Philosophical Works. Hobbes, Bolingbroke argues against Cudworth, did not want to argue that in God there is no knowledge or intelligence; he simply meant that God’s cognitive powers differ from human faculties, not only “in degree” but also “in kind”; but there is “something analogous” between divine and human intelligence (Bolingbroke 1754, Philosophical Works I, 1–2). Secondly, Bolingbroke thinks that the vague and remote analogy between man and God legitimately holds only for the “natural” attributes (according to Clarke: omnipotence, wisdom, intelligence), not for the “moral” attributes such as goodness or justice. According to Bolingbroke, to say that God is “good” or “just” in some understandable sense amounts to giving an undue advantage to atheists. Indeed, he asserts, atheists and theologians “amicably” agree on the (anthropomorphic) definition of the moral attributes of God, and on the predominance of evil in the world. Only their conclusions diverge: “a Collins concludes, that there is no God; and a Clarke, that there is a future state of rewards and punishments” (Bolingbroke 1754, Philosophical Works IV, 322). Against both Collins and Clarke, and like Philo in Part XII (DNR XII.8, 219), Bolingbroke maintains that the goodness of God has nothing to do with that of man, and therefore he does not have to explain (from a human point of view) the predominance of evil, nor postulate an afterlife to make that evil compatible with God’s existence. Finally, in order to reduce natural or rational theology to a vague remote analogical knowledge of the power and wisdom of God, Bolingbroke uses the (unusual) expression “the whole of natural theology”,25 which is ascribed by Philo to “some people”. Our next question is: Why Bolingbroke? In 1776, with regard to the publication of the Dialogues, Hume was to argue that David Mallet, Bolingbroke’s editor and Hume’s correspondent, had not been damaged by the publication of

Hume’s Palimpsest 185 Bolingbroke’s works. He sings the same song against the groundless scruples of his friends Smith and Strahan: Was Mallet any wise hurt by his Publication of Lord Bolingbroke? He received an Office afterwards from the present King and Lord Bute, the most prudish Men in the World; and he always justify’d himself by his sacred Regard to the Will of a dead Friend. At the same time, I own, that your Scruples have a specious Appearance. But my Opinion is, that, if, upon my Death, you determine never to publish these papers, you shoud leave them, seal’d up with my Brother and Family, with some Inscription, that you reserve to Yourself the Power of reclaiming them, whenever you think proper (L II, 316). “If I leave them to you by Will”, Hume writes to Strahan, “your executing the Desire of a dead Friend, will render the publication still more excusable. Mallet never sufferd anything by being the Editor of Bolingbroke’s Works” (L II, 324). More generally, the publication of Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works was a paradigmatic case for Hume, allowing him to directly test the barrier of censorship in contemporary British culture. With the 1757 addition, Hume shows himself quite brash: he claims to solve a theological problem by a view, Bolingbroke’s view, that every reader, especially the Warburtonians, would have certainly considered to be atheist (Bolingbroke excepted, who conceived it as a useful third way between theism and atheism). Atheism, which had been chased away by Philo’s volte-face at the beginning of Part XII, returns at the end of the same part in radical deist disguise. From an orthodox theistic point of view, like that of Cudworth or Berkeley, Philo’s “remote analogy” was not enough. A mind “in the proper sense of the word” was needed at the origin of the universe (Berkeley 1732, vol. I, 247–248; 1948, vol. III, 164–165; 1993, 106–107; cf. Cudworth 1678, 195). The “remote analogy” was indeed the favorite trick of those heterodox or libertine authors who wanted to conceal their denial of God under an ambiguous formula. Toland had called his pantheist God “intelligent” only “by a slight resemblance” (levi similitudine) to human intellectual faculties, borrowing this expedient from one of his hidden sources, viz., Claude Bérigard’s Circulus pisanus, where God is plainly identified with the material universe and His “intelligence” is said to be “far different” (longe diversa) from human understanding.26 Philo belongs to the Bérigard-Toland-Bolingbroke lineage. The atheist “system” that he advances in Part VI, which is said “to solve all difficulties” (DNR VI.12, 174–175), is also close to Toland’s view, being based on the essential motion of matter, the eternity of the material universe and, most of all, its intrinsic order, not created nor “designed” by any mind, but essential to the eternal being itself.27 This is the characteristic system of the early-modern atheist since Bayle’s Strato (already referred to in the Early Memoranda),28 and it was to reappear in Toland’s Pantheist philosopher and Fréret’s Thrasybule, and finally (in more confused fashion) in d’Holbach’s Système de la nature.29

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The 1757 addition was meant to be a soft compromise between Philo’s attack against actual religion and Pamphilus’s ending, but it reveals itself to be bolder and more provocative than Philo’s attack. It needed further softening immediately. This is why fideism or Christian skepticism, mentioned in Part I but missing in the 1751 draft of Part XII, returns to the stage at the end, in the form of parody: God, Philo says, is “the divine object of our faith” (DNR XII.33, 227). In general, a skeptical conclusion is not uncommon in Hume; it occurs in the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature, in the last sections of the first Enquiry and of the Natural History. More specifically, as a reflection on faith and the weakness of human reason, Philo’s fideism in the Addition XXb to Part XII recalls Demea’s (and Philo’s own) reflections in Part I of the Dialogues as well as those of the author of the Letter from a Gentleman: “A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity” (DNR XII.33, 227). Alluding to Bayle (“this is a great step toward the Christian religion” in Bayle, 1991/1697, 206), who discusses La Mothe Le Vayer (“the sceptical system […] is the least contrary of all to our belief and the most appropriate for receiving the supernatural light of faith”, (in Bayle 1991/1697, 205), and toying with Shaftesbury (“to be a settled Christian, it is necessary to be first of all a good theist”, “the best Christian in the world […] is at best but a sceptic-Christian” (Shaftesbury 1999/1709, 242–243, 369),30 Philo advances his last proposition: “To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian” in DNR XII.33, 228. By recommending this proposition to Pamphilus and intervening in the education of Cleanthes’s pupil, Philo is closing the circle: he re-establishes his early alliance with Demea—where he (Philo) denounced the “weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason” (DNR I.3, 131)—and recalls Cleanthes’s words, who possibly had Bayle in mind,31 when he said that Philo proposed “to erect religious faith on philosophical scepticism” (DNR I.5, 132). 9.6 Fourth Ending: A Verbal Dispute in Enemy Territory (1776) After the 1757 revision, the next revision seems to have been made at the beginning of the 60s, when Hume probably showed the Dialogues to Smith. In August 1776, Hume tells Smith, who has “certainly forgotten them”, that the last time he revised them was “15 years ago” and finds that “nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written” (L II, 224). In March 1763, not long after the time referred to in the just-cited letter to Smith, Hume writes to Elliot: Is it not hard & tyrannical in you, more tyrannical than any Act of the Stuarts, not to allow me to publish my Dialogues? Pray, do you not think that a proper Dedication may atone for what is exceptional in them? I am become much of my friend, Corbyn Morrice’s Mind, who says, that he writes all his Books for the sake of the Dedications. (L I, 380)

Hume’s Palimpsest 187 Before going to Paris, Hume shows the Dialogues to Blair, and in September 1763, Blair playfully remarks: You are going to a Country where you will want nothing of being worshipped, except bowing the Knee to you: only with one reservation, as I have been well informed that you are considered as being somewhat bigotted in one article. For this indeed they make an excuse that the hypocrisy of the Country may have somewhat enfected even you as a native. But had you but gone one Step farther – I am well informed, in several Poker Clubs in Paris your Statue would have been erected. If you will show them the MSS of certain Dialogues perhaps that honour may still be done you. But for Gods sake let that be a posthumous work, if ever it shall see the light: Tho’ I really think it had better not. (Blair to Hume (1763), Ms. 23153, 157) And Hume, with much more irony than in the letter to Elliot, replies: “I have no present thoughts of publishing the work you mention; but when I do, I hope you have no objection of my dedicating it to you” (L I, 404). In Paris, Hume met d’Holbach, and Diderot wrote his famous account of their dispute on (a)theism.32 In 1770 d’Holbach published his Système de la Nature; Hume possibly became acquainted with it during his stay in Paris in the mid-60s and probably later possessed a copy of the 1771 edition.33 In 1776, Hume decided to give the last stroke to the Dialogues. He had a double opportunity: to include and represent in the Dialogues, alongside the traditional Baylean arguments, also an updated and fashionable atheist position, and to find a compromise between the different solutions hitherto proposed. In 1751, in Parts I–IV, he had opposed a theist and a skeptical atheist, who argues for the “incomprehensibility” of the First Cause. Yet another form of atheism was almost covertly present in the Dialogues, a form evoked in the conclusion of the Stratonic debate of Part IV: An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former. (DNR IV.14, 164) In Part VI, Philo considers this material “system” preferable to others (DNR VI.12, 174). But this “system” is not officially presented as an atheist one and is no longer taken into consideration. Moreover, in Part XII, Cleanthes claims that theism could not be replaced by any other “precise and determinate” system (DNR XII.5, 216). To answer him, far from recalling the Stratonic (or Tolandian) system of Part VI, Philo reduces the controversy between the theist and the sceptic to a dispute “of words” or a “mere verbal” dispute that satisfies the disputant’s desire “to vary the expression” (DNR XII.6, 216–217) and to call the “first and supreme cause” either “God or Deity” or “Mind or Thought”. The adversary of the theist was ready not only to point out the “considerable”

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and “vast” difference, but also to acknowledge the “great” and “considerable” analogy. In 1757, Philo had considered the analogy between the “cause or causes of order in the universe” and the “human intelligence”, and called it an improbable “remote” and “imperfect” analogy. Now, in 1776, the dispute is between the theist and the atheist, and it is a controversy “about the degrees”, “concerning the degrees of any quality or circumstance”, and it is “incurably ambiguous” (DNR XII.7, 217–218). The atheist is now ready to acknowledge “a certain degree of analogy” among “all the operations of nature, in every situation and in every age”, “some remote analogy” among “energies”, “some remote inconceivable analogy”, a probable analogy between “the principle which first arranged, and still maintains, order in this universe” and “human mind and thought”, “some remote analogy” between “the original principle of order” and “human reason”, an “analogy among all the operations of nature, in every period, every situation, and every position” (DNR XII.7, 217–218).34 Since the theist allows that the original intelligence is “very different” from human reason, and the atheist that the original principle of order bears “some remote analogy” to human reason, their dispute is about the degrees and Philo cries out: Where then […] is the subject of your dispute? […] Will you quarrel, gentlemen, about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination? (DNR XII.7, 218) What is allowed by the atheist in 1776 (“the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it [human reason]”) is actually quite close to the 1757 proposition (“the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence”), to which Philo, as the most “inquisitive, contemplative, and religious” man, will give his “plain, philosophical” assent. This is a late confirmation that, notwithstanding its deist appearance, the 1757 addition concealed a typically atheist stance. But in 1776, things have changed: if the theist and atheist are “so obstinate” not to lay aside their controversy about the degrees of analogy and difference, it could even happen that they “insensibly change” their sides. The theist, who is supposed to argue from the analogy, will insist on and exaggerate the difference between “the Supreme Being, and frail, imperfect, variable, fleeting, and mortal creatures”; and the atheist, who is supposed to argue from the difference, will emphasize and magnify the analogy among “all the operations of Nature, in every period, every situation, and every position.” Philo cries out: “Consider then, where the real point of controversy lies; and if you cannot lay aside your disputes, endeavour, at least, to cure yourselves of your animosity” (DNR XII.7, 218). In the Dedication to the Four Dissertations (1757), Hume recalls that in ancient times science was “often the subject of disputation, never of animosity” (Hume 1995b, ii), and in 1753, he had made an exhortation in an almost public letter: “Let us revive the happy times” (L I, 173).

Hume’s Palimpsest 189 This new perspective could depend on Hume’s personal experience of real discussions between atheists and theists (or deists, as no mention of the Christian God is made in the 1776 addition). After meeting d’Holbach in Paris and reading the Système de la Nature, Hume possibly realized that early-modern atheism was born on the ruins of rational theology. It was a “Spinozistic” atheism, an atheism made of metaphysics, contemplating the grand tout, positing the existence of an eternal being which is itself determined by an inner order and manifests everywhere the effects of its eternal laws.35 In the same years, early-modern deists like Voltaire were developing a rational theology which was more and more distant from its Christian roots. Voltaire unexpectedly turned Spinozist in his seventies, having abandoned the idea of a “good” and providential God (cf. Vernière, 1954, 507–527). In his 1777 Dialogues d’Evhémère, Callicrate (the Epicurean) tells Evhémère (Voltaire’s spokesman) that he substantially agrees with the atheists (“you always come back, in spite of yourself, to the system of our Epicureans, who attribute everything to an occult force, or necessity”), and Evhémère concedes that he agrees with some of them, with the Spinozists, provided that they admit the existence of a “necessary, eternal, powerful, intelligent being” (1877/1777, 475). As Voltaire’s Dialogues were published in November 1777, Hume could not have read them before making the last addition to his own Dialogues, but he probably did not need to read them in order to know what was happening in the philosophical debates between his deist and atheist friends. All of them seemed to argue that there is a necessary order and symmetry in all of nature, in life as well as in death, and that the human mind is itself part of this order and somehow reflects it, like Philo’s “rotting of a turnip” (DNR XII.7, 217–219) or d’Holbach’s “dissolution of the dead carcass”.36 All are orderly processes, they are parts of the world that find their way on their own—just like God’s ideas in Bayle’s “Stratonic” argument that Hume quotes in his Early Memoranda and refers to in Parts IV–V of the Dialogues.37 The result of all this is the new “verbal dispute” passage in the 1776 addition (XXb) to Part XII, which now involves the entire discussion on natural or rational theology and purports to reduce it to a mere “dispute of degrees”. But this time, compared to the 1751 debate, we are at the opposite extreme of the scale: only an incomprehensible “remote analogy” is allowed as a possible “center of unity” of all contenders on the nature and attributes of God. In short, while the “dispute of words” of 1751 (based on the “great analogy” between God’s and man’s mind—DNR XII.6, 216-217) was a dispute within theism, the “verbal dispute” of 1776 (based on the “remote analogy” between “the original principle of order” and human reason—DNR XII.7, 217-219) is entirely in atheist territory.38 9.7 Conclusion The “intellectual genealogy” of the Dialogues, it was observed in 1962, “has yet to be fully studied” (Price 1992, 127). In light of our reconstruction of Part XII, their purported non-interpretability appears less blatant. Each layer has its internal

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coherence, and the different additions can be explained by their philosophical content, historical context, and rhetorical function. The feigned “unfeigned sentiments” of the second (theist) ending of the 1751 draft can be perfectly explained as a rhetorical device intended to conceal the first (atheist) ending of Part XI; and the reappearance of fideism in 1757, after the third (deist) ending, is the only way to avoid a “radical” interpretation of the “remote analogy” maneuver, which was supposed to soften the abrupt transition from Philo’s conclusive remarks on actual religion and Pamphilus’s pre-established ending. As to the 1776 fourth conclusion, reducing the whole question to a dispute of degrees, it shows itself to be, rather than an expression of skepticism, the proof of Hume’s perfect acquaintance with the continental debate between atheists and deists, which in the second half of the 70s was close to death by consumption. Part XII, it has been said, is the “most puzzling and controversial” of the Dialogues (O’Connor 2001, 193). This apparent puzzle mostly results from the coexistence in its last 1776 version of at least three different stages of the text. From this point of view, Part XII is like an oil painting where radiography shows all its layers at the same time. Hume did not have time to prepare the final manuscript of the Dialogues for the printer. In May 1776, he declared: “If I live a few Years longer, I shall publish them myself” (L II, 316), and one month afterward he wanted “to print a small Edition of 500” (L II, 323). But it was too late, and he probably made the last addition in the “last weeks of his life” (Stewart 2000, 289, 302–303). We do not know whether these different layers would have survived in the final text edited by the author. In any case, they give the Dialogues such a mysterious although not completely inexplicable charm that—as Strahan predicted—they have been and always will be considered “in various Lights by different Readers” (Strahan to Home (1777a), Ms. 23158, 267). Acknowledgments We are grateful to Antony McKenna, James Harris, Emanuele Ronchetti, and Luigi Turco for helpful comments on this essay. In particular, Antony McKenna has shown great generosity in helping us with many suggestions on the language. Notes 1 See also Clark (2013, 66–67) and Malherbe (1994, 201–202, 218). Malherbe argues that, being “philosophical” and “authorless”, the Dialogues “should not be interpreted”. 2 For an ironic interpretation of Philo’s professions of faith see Price (1992, 129, 136–140) and Richetti (2008, 159–160). 3 Smith (1947b, 94–95; 1947c, 122). Smith distinguishes between: (1) Pamphilus’s conclusion: “Cleanthes and Philo …”, DNR XII.34, 228; (2) Philo’s first or original ending: “It is contrary …”, DNR XII.31, 226; (3) Philo’s second ending (in or prior to 1761), written in on the margin, later crossed out and rewritten in 1776, with the addition of the third ending: “To know God …”, DNR XII.32, 226; (4) a note (in or prior to 1761), written below the word “Finis”, later scored out and rewritten in 1776: “It seems evident …”, DNR XII.8, 219; (5) Philo’s third ending (1776), a “lengthy” paragraph added to the rewritten second ending: “If the whole …”, DNR XII.33, 227;

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16

(6) Philo’s “very important, and lengthy paragraph” (1776), written after the note, “in support”, “in connexion” or “in conformity” with the third ending: “All men of sound …”, DNR XII.7, 217–219 ( Smith 1947b, 94–95; 1947c, 122). On the basis of their “-or” spelling (“Favor” and “endeavor”) Stewart ascribed Smith’s note and third ending to 1757 ( Stewart 2000, 301, 307). On the same basis, we think that Smith’s second and third endings were copied in 1757, but the first crossed-out marginal version of the second ending (“Favour”, “endeavour”) was probably written before 1757, rather than in the 60 s or 70 s (the 1776 addition uses the “-our” spelling). Stewart (2000, 288–289, 291, 298–304, 313 nn. 60 and 68, 314 n. 75). “AA” and “BB” are Hume’s abbreviations. “I felt that [the discourse] of Balbus approximated more nearly to a semblance of the truth” (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, III.95; 1979, 382–383). Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1710, 186–187; cf. n. 34). The passage is also quoted by Anthony Collins, who regards Seneca as an early “FreeThinker” (A Discourse of Free-Thinking ( 1713, 148). Bolingbroke, The Philosophical Works (1754, vol. IV, 303; vol. V, 76); Warburton, A View of Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy ( 1754, 48, 70–71); Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers ( 1755, vol. II, 164). Cf. Mori (2018a, 334–335). Bayle, “Pyrrho” ( 1991/1697, 205–206); Shaftesbury, Characteristics (1999/1709, 242–243; cf. nn 58–59). See Hume, Early Memoranda 2.8 (in Mossner 1948, 500); cf. Mazza and Mori (2016, 27–32); Paganini (2013, 226–228). An annotation (taken from Bayle) of the Early Memoranda 2.20 (in Mossner 1948, 501) gives the key to this passage, where the “goodness” of God is not even named: “Those, who solve the Difficultys concerning the Origin of Ill by the Apology of general Laws suppose another Motive beside Goodness in the Creation of the World.” On the Early Memoranda as a source of many of the issues addressed in the Dialogues, see Mori (2018b, 758–769). Philo had himself evoked the causal maxim in Part II (DNR II.3, 142), and Demea had founded on that maxim his so-called a priori proof in Part XI; cf. Williford (2003, 104, 117–118, n. 16). Bayle, “Pauliciens”, (1740/1697, 633): “It is clear to every reasoning man that God is a supremely perfect being and that of all perfections there are none that are more appropriate to Him than goodness, holiness, and justice. As soon as you deprive Him of these perfections and give Him those of a Legislator who forbids crime to man and who nevertheless pushes man into crime and then punishes him eternally, you give Him a nature which cannot be trusted, a deceptive, malignant, unjust, cruel nature; it is no longer an object of religion […] This is the path to Atheism.” (our translation) Cf. Bayle, Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial ( 1727/1704, vol. III, 787–791). Hume annotates the page in the Early Memoranda 2.30 (in Mossner 1948, 502): “Argument against Liberty deriv’d from this that Preservation is a continual Creation, & consequently God must create the Soul with every new Modification. Id. [Bayle]”. For Hume’s critique of Malebranche’s occasionalism, see Ryan (2019, 40–44). Cf. supra, n. 13. See also Cleanthes’s claim in Part X (if the moral attributes of God are not established “there is an end at once of all religion”), which Demea interprets as a charge of “atheism and profaneness” (DNR X.29, 199). “In an inquiry as to the nature of the gods, the first question that we ask is, do the gods exist or do they not” (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I.61;1979, 59–60). Hume, “Fragment on Evil” ( Hume 1995a, 165). Compare Clarke’s claim in A Demonstration: “Justice, goodness and all the other moral attributes of God, are as essential to the divine nature as the natural attributes of eternity, infinity, and the like” ( Clarke 1705, 246–247; 1998, 87). As has been remarked, “Hume had […] a very good grasp of Clarke’s work” ( Williford 2003, 122 n. 35).

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17 See Voltaire, Le Philosophe ignorant, ( 1877/1766, 60): “I want to know whether this divine intelligence is something absolutely distinct from the universe, just as the sculptor is distinct from the statue, or whether that soul of the world is united to the world, and penetrates it […] Miserable mortal, if I cannot probe my own intelligence, if I cannot know what animates me, how will I understand the ineffable intelligence that visibly presides over all matter […]?” (our translation). On Voltaire’s trajectory regarding this and related issues, see Mori (2021, 299–319). 18 On the Cleanthes-Maclaurin and Demea-Baxter relationships, see Turco (1980); on Hutcheson as a target in the Dialogues, see Turco (2011). 19 Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion ( 1710, 81); cf., Rivers (1993, 577–578, 595–597). 20 Since the atheist conclusion of 1751 depends on a specific definition of God, it is not necessarily contradicted by a theist (or deist) conclusion based on a different definition. 21 Philo’s conversion to “the beauty and fitness of final causes”, which “strike us with such irresistible force”, first shows itself at the end of Part X, where he confesses: “all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms” (DNR X.37, 202). As Hume declares in 1776, the skeptic Philo “confesses that he was only amusing himself by all his cavils” (L II, 323). 22 Blair, The Importance of Religious Knowledge (1750, 15–16). Against Cleanthes (DNR XII.24, 224; DNR XII. 27, 225) and Blair (1750, 18, 20, 22–23, 33), Philo also maintains that religion is not “the only great comfort in life” (DNR XII.24–31, 224–226). 23 See Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, ( 1732, 35); Bayle, Continuation § 138; (1727/1705, vol. III, 386b); cf. Locke, Essay, II, xxi; (1985/1689, 44). 24 Warburton and Hurd, Remarks, XX; ( 1757, 71); cf. III, 25; V, 30; Conclusion, 76. Actually, Hume did some (limited) “mutilation and fitting it up for the public” since in February/March 1757 he allowed the Natural History “somewhat amended in point of Prudence” (L I, 245) to appear. 25 Bolingbroke (1754), Philosophical Works, V, 76: “[the Divines] prove the existence of an all-perfect Being, the creator and governor of the universe; and to demonstrate his infinite wisdom and power they appeal to his works. But when they have done this, which includes the whole of natural theology, and serves abundantly all the ends of natural religion, they parcel out a divine moral nature into various attributes like the human, and determine precisely what these attributes require that God should do, to make his will conformable to the eternal ideas of fitness, which are so many independent natures” (emphasis added). Warburton’s discussion of Bolingbroke excepted, we do not know any other occurrences of the expression “the whole of natural theology” before 1757 (as confirmed by ECCO—Eighteenth Century Collections Online). 26 Cf. Toland (1720, 6); Berigardus (1661 174): “the universe itself is God, one in its continuity, infinite in its extension, intelligent in a certain eminent way, far different from our cognition” (our translation). (Bérigard ascribes this view to certain ancient philosophers such as Anaximander, Xenophanes, Democritus, and Epicurus). 27 On Hume and Toland, see Russell (2008, 32–34, 88–91, 109–111). 28 “Strato’s Atheism the most dangerous of the Antient, holding the Origin of the World from Nature, or a Matter endu’d with Activity. Baile thinks there are none but the Cartesians can refute this Atheism” (Hume, Early Memoranda 2.14 in Mossner 1948, 501). 29 See Mori (2021, 181–190 (on Fréret), 191–211 (on Toland), and 284–298 (on d’Holbach)). 30 Cf. Laird (1932, 306 n.1). 31 “There is no Faith better established on Reason than that which is established on the ruins of Reason [… …] Christianity, when established in this sense, on the ruins of

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32 33 34

35 36

37

38

Reason, is true Christianity, and the most reasonable Christianity” (Bayle, Réponse, ch. 161; 1727/1704, 836b; our translation). Cf. Carabelli (1972, 221–224). For more details on Hume’s famous dinner at d’Holbach’s in 1763 see Mazza and Mori (2022). Norton and Norton (1996, 114, 131). Hume probably possessed the 1771 edition of the Système de la Nature (2 vols., London, i.e., Amsterdam) and the 1773 edition the Système Social (3 vols., London, i.e., Amsterdam). In 1751 Philo suspects that the controversy between theists and skeptics is “a mere verbal controversy” (DNR XII.6, 216–217). In 1757 he considers the dispute between the skeptics and the dogmatists as “entirely verbal” or, “at least”, concerning “only the degrees”, which is “commonly at the bottom, verbal, and admit[s] not of any precise determination” (DNR XII.8n., 219 n.). Recalling the 1741–1764 ending of “The First Principles of Government” (see Hume 1987/1741–1777, 606–607), and following the 1757 footnote, in 1776 Philo maintains that the controversies “concerning the degrees” can “never” reach a “reasonable” precision or “any determination” (DNR XII.7, 217). The dispute between the theists and the atheists “is of this nature, and consequently is merely verbal, or perhaps, if possible, still more incurably ambiguous”: they quarrel “about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination” (DNR XII.7, 218). The dispute concerning the degrees is a verbal dispute that cannot be solved by any definition, and “all men of sound reason are disgusted with verbal disputes” (DNR XII.7, 217). On Bayle and verbal disputes, see Paganini (2013, 215–218, 225–231); for different interpretations of Hume on verbal disputes, cf. Yandell (1990, 40–43); Marusic (2019, 15–27). Cf. esp. ch. 5 (“Of order and disorder. Of intelligence. Of chance”) of d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature ( d’Holbach 1770). “To that regulated motion, to that necessary action, which conspired to the production of life, succeeds that determinate motion, that series of actions, which concur to produce the dissolution of the dead carcass, the dispersion of its parts, and the formation of new combinations, from which new beings result: and this […] is the immutable order of ever-active nature.” ( d’Holbach 1770, vol. I, 63) “To say, that the different ideas, which compose the reason of the Supreme Being, fall into order, of themselves, and by their own nature, is really to talk without any precise meaning. If it has a meaning, I would fain know, why it is not as good sense to say, that the parts of the material world fall into order, of themselves, and by their own nature. Can the one opinion be intelligible, while the other is not so?” (DNR IV.10, 162; cf. Early Memoranda 2.15; in Mossner 1948, 501; Bayle, Continuation, § 106; 1727/1705, 334–335). At the end of Part I, against the skeptic Philo, Cleanthes makes appeal to a common topos: I’m certain that “no man is in earnest when he professes” skepticism, and I hope that “there are as few who seriously maintain” atheism (DNR I.17, 139). In the 1776 addition, Philo insincerely appeals to the same topos: I assert that the atheist “can never possibly be in earnest” and is “only nominally so” (DNR XII.7, 218). If the atheist is nominal because he allows “a certain degree of analogy”, then also the theist must be such, since he allows “a great and immeasurable, because incomprehensible difference” (DNR XII.7, 218); if the atheist is nominal because atheism is inconceivable, then Philo is not sincere, since in Part XI he concludes that the “most probable” hypothesis is that the first causes of the universe have “neither goodness nor malice” (DNR XI.15, 212), and in Part VI that Stratonic atheism is the most “plausible” system and “at once solves all difficulties” (DNR VI.12, 174). Evidently, in the course his life, Hume had some not so nominal atheist friends.

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References Texts by Hume Hume, David 1932. The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., edited by J. Y. T. Greig. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Referred to herein as L followed by number of volume, and page.) Hume, David. 19472/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2nd edition, edited by N. K. Smith. London: T. Nelson. (Referred to herein as DNR followed by the numbers of section, paragraph, and page.) Hume, David. 1970/1755. Letter to J.-B. Le Blanc, 26 February 1755. In Jeroom Vercruysse, “Lettre et corrections inédites de David Hume.” Dix-huitième Siècle, 2, 33–37. Hume, David. 1983/1755. Letter to J. Clephane, 18 February 1755. In John C. A. Gaskin, “Hume’s Attenuated Deism.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 65, 160–173. Hume, David. 1987/1741–1777. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Revised edition. E. F. Miller, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hume, David. 1991/1755. Letter to W. Strahan, 22 March 1755, in H. F. Klemme, “‘And Time Does Justice to All The World’: Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29(4), 657–664. Hume, David. 1995a. “Fragment on Evil.” edited by M. A. Stewart. In Hume and Hume’s Connexions, edited by M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright, 160–170. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hume, David. 1995b/1757. “Dedication.” In Four Dissertations. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995, i-vii. Hume, David. 2007/1757. The Natural History of Religion, in A Dissertation on the Passions / The Natural History of Religion, edited by T. L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klemme, H. F. 1991. “‘And Time Does Justice to All The World’: Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 29(4), 657–664. Mossner, E. C. 1948. “Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729-1740: The Complete Text.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 9(4), 492–518. Other Primary Literature Anonymous, “Review of the Dialogues, 1779, The Critical Review 48, 161–172. In Early Responses to Hume’s Writings on Religion, 2 vols., edited by J. Fieser. London: ThoemmesContinuum, 2005.193-204. Bayle, Pierre. 1727/1704. Réponse aux Questions d’un Provincial. In Œuvres Diverses de Mr. Pierre Bayle, vol. III. La Haye: P. Husson et al. Bayle, Pierre. 1727/1705. Continuation des Pensées Diverses. In Œuvres Diverses de Mr. Pierre Bayle, vol. III. La Haye: P. Husson et al. Bayle, Pierre. 1740/1697. “Pauliciens.” Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4(III), 624–636. Amsterdam, Leide, La Haye, Utrecht: P. Brunel et al. Bayle, Pierre. 1991/1697. “Pyrrho.” In Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, edited by R. H. Popkin, pp. 194–209. Indianapolis: Hackett. Bérigard, Claude. 16612. Circulus pisanus […] de veteri et peripatetica philosophia. 2nd edition. Patavii: P. Frambotti. Berkeley, George. 1732. Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher in Seven Dialogues. London: J. Tonson.

Hume’s Palimpsest 195 Blair, Hugh. 1750. The Importance of Religious Knowledge to the Happiness of Mankind. Edinburgh: R. Fleming for A. Kincaid. Blair, Hugh. 1763. Letter to David Hume, 29 September 1763, NLS MS 23153, No. 51. Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John, viscount. 1754. The Philosophical Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. London. Cicero. 1979. De Natura Deorum/Academica. London: LOEB, Harvard University Press. Clarke, Samuel. 1705. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. London: J. Knapton. Collins, Anthony. 1713. A Discourse of Free-Thinking. London. Cudworth, Ralph. 1678. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London: R. Royston. d’Holbach, Paul Thiry. 1770. Système de la Nature, ou Des lois du monde physique et du monde moral, 2 vols. London. Hutcheson, Francis. 1742/2002. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, edited by A. Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Leland, John. 1755. A View Of the Principal Deistical Writers of the Last and Present Century, 2 vols. London: B. Dod. Locke, John. 1985/1689. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mandeville, Bernard. 1732. An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. London: J. Brotheron. Montesquieu. 1989/1748. The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Priestley, Joseph. 1780/2005. Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. London: R. Cruttwell. In Early Responses to Hume’s Writings on Religion, 2 vols., pp. 261–275, edited by J. Fieser. London: Thoemmes-Continuum, 2005. Pufendorf, Samuel. 1734. Le Droit de la nature et des gens [… …] traduit du Latin par Jean Barbeyrac, 2 vols. Amsterdam: Veuve de P. de Coup. Rose, William. 1779. “Review of Dialogues.” The Monthly Review, 61, 343–355. In Early Responses to Hume’s Writings on Religion, 2 vols., edited by J. Fieser, 208–222. London: Thoemmes-Continuum, 2005. Seneca. 1925. Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, vol. 3. London: LOEB, W. Heinemann. Shaftesbury. 1999/1709. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by L. E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strahan, William. 1777a. Letter to John Home of Ninewells, 3 March 1777, NLS, Ms. 23158, No. 44. Strahan, William. 1777b. Letter to Adam Smith, 13 February 1777, NLS, Ms. 23158, No. 46. Toland, John. 1720. Pantheisticon, sive Formula celebrandae sodalitatis socraticae, Cosmopoli [No name of publisher.] Voltaire. 1877/1766. Le Philosophe ignorant, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L. Moland, vol. 26, pp. 47–96. Paris: Garnier. Voltaire. 1877/1777. Dialogues d’Evhémère, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L. Moland, vol. 30, pp. 465–532. Paris: Garnier. Warburton, William. 1754. A View of Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy: In Four Letters to a Friend. London: P. Knapton. Warburton, William. 1757. Letter to William Strahan, 7 February 1757, in Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 325–326.

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Warburton, William, & Hurd, Richard. 1757. Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Essay on the Natural History of Religion: Addressed to The Rev. Dr. Warburton. London: M. Cooper. Wilkins, John. 1710. Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. 6th edition. London: R. Chiswell. Secondary Literature Carabelli, Giancarlo. 1972. Hume e la retorica dell’ideologia. Uno studio dei “Dialoghi sulla religione naturale.” Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Clark, Samuel. 2013. “Hume’s Uses of Dialogue.” Hume Studies, 39(1), 61–76. Dancy, J. 1995. “‘For Here the Author Is Annihilated’: Reflections on Philosophical Aspects of the Use of the Dialogue Form in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 85, 29–60. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1983. “Hume’s Attenuated Deism.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 65(2), 160–173. Harris, James A. 2015. Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hendel, Charles William. 1925. Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laird, John. 1932. Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature. London: Methuen. Lemmens, Wim. 2012. “Hume’s Atheistic Agenda. Philo’s Confession in Dialogues, 12.” Bijdragen, 73(3), 281–303. Malherbe, Michel. 1994. “Hume and the art of Dialogue.” In Hume and Hume’s Connexions, edited by M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright, 201–223. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Marusic, Jennifer Smalligan. 2019. “Hume.” In A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, edited by G. Oppy, 15–27. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Mazza, Emilio. 2018. “The Broken Brake. Hume and the ‘proper Office’ of religion.” Etica & politica / Ethics & Politics, XX(3), 261–317. Mazza, Emilio, & Mori, Gianluca. 2016. “‘Loose Bits of Paper’ and ‘Uncorrect Thoughts’: Hume’s Early Memoranda in Context.” Hume Studies, 42(1-2), 9–60. Mazza, Emilio, & Mori, Gianluca. 2022. “How Many Atheists at D’Holbach’s Table?” In The Great Protector of Wits: Baron D’Holbach and His Time, edited by Laura Nicolì, 173–201. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Mori, Gianluca. 2018a. “Hume, Bolingbroke and Voltaire: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part XII.” Etica & politica / Ethics & Politics, XX(3), 319–340. Mori, Gianluca. 2018b. “Bayle et Hume devant l’athéisme.” Archives de Philosophie, 81, 749–774. Mori, Gianluca. 2021. Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach. Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. Oxford: Liverpool University Press and the Voltaire Foundation. Mossner, E. C. 1980. The Life of David Hume. Oxford University Press. Norton, David Fate, & Norton, Mary Jane. 1996. The David Hume Library. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society. O’Connor, David. 2001. Hume on Religion. London: Routledge. Paganini, Gianni. 2013. “Theism, Atheism, and Scepticism. Bayle’s Background to Hume’s Dialogues.” In Gestalten des Deismus in Europa, edited by Winfried Schrõder, 203–243. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Price, John Valdimir. 1992. The Ironic Hume, 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Richetti, John. 2008. “Hume, Religion, Literary Form: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.” In Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature, edited by A. Dick and C. Lupton, 139–160. London: Pickering & Chatto.

Hume’s Palimpsest 197 Rivers, Isabel. 1993. “‘Galen’s Muscles’: Wilkins, Hume, and the Educational Use of the Argument from Design.” The Historical Journal, 36(3), 577–597. Russell, Paul. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, Todd. 2019. “The French Context of Hume’s Philosophy.” In The Humean Mind, edited by Angela Coventry and A. Sager, 37–49. London: Routledge. Smith, Norman Kemp. 1947a. “Introduction.” In D. Hume, Dialogues concerning natural Religion, edited by N. K. Smith, 1–75. London: T. Nelson. Smith, Norman Kemp. 1947b. “Appendix C. Evidence Bearing on the Times of Composition and Revision of the Dialogues, and in Hume’s Arrangements for Their Posthumous Publication.” In D. Hume, Dialogues concerning natural Religion, edited by N. K. Smith, 87–96. London: T. Nelson. Smith, Norman Kemp. 1947c. “A Critical Analysis of the Main Argument of the Dialogues, with Some Explanatory Notes.” In D. Hume, Dialogues concerning natural Religion, edited by N. K. Smith, 97–123. London: T. Nelson. Stewart, M. A. 2000. “The Dating of Hume’s Manuscripts.” In The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, edited by P. Wood, 267–314. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Taylor, Alfred Edward, Laird, John, Jessop, Thomas Edmund. 1939. “Symposium: The Present-Day Relevance of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 18(1), 179–228. Turco, Luigi. 1980. “Un’ipotesi sull’occasione dei Dialoghi sulla religione naturale di David Hume.” Rivista di filosofia, 81(3), 382–415; www.luigiturco.it Turco, Luigi. 2011. “Hutcheson in Hume’s Dialogues concerning natural religion.” In I filosofi e la società senza religione, edited by M. Geuna and G. Gori, 449–488. Bologna: il Mulino; www.luigiturco.it Vernière, Paul. 1954. Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution. Paris: Puf. Williford, Kenneth. 2003. “Demea’s a priori Theistic Proof.” Hume Studies, 29(1), 99–123. Willis, Andre C. 2014. Toward a Humean True Religion: Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and Practical Morality. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Yandell, Keith E. 1990. Hume’s “Inexplicable Mystery”: His Views on Religion. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Part 4

Religion, Passion, and the Limits of Reason

10

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” David O’Connor

… I argue with Cleanthes in his own way; and by showing him the dangerous consequences of his tenets, hope at last to reduce him to our opinion. —Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, II.11, 22

10.1 Questions and Answers Taking Philo to be the principal voice of the author, I try to give persuasive answers to the following, linked questions about Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: What is Hume’s principal aim in the book? To what extent does he achieve it? Is he consistent in his skepticism about natural religion? I argue for the following answers. Hume’s principal aim in the Dialogues is to show that natural religion prompts a serious threat to theism itself and that, ironically, skepticism is the best antidote, whether as prevention or as defense. In these two objectives, Hume succeeds in good measure. Near the end of the book, Philo mischievously puts the overall point this way: “To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian” (DNR XII.33, p. 102). The key to answering the consistency question is in Philo’s practice of sometimes arguing with the natural religionist, Cleanthes “in his own way.” Doing so means sometimes arguing with him in a non-skeptical way, and this periodic, tactical suspension of skepticism motivates the mistaken idea that Philo is inconsistent. The consistency question provides context for the questions about Hume’s overall aim and achievement, and so I begin with it. 10.2 Parody Theories of Consistency In paragraphs 13 through 16 of Part XI of the Dialogues, Philo presents us with a natural-irreligious1 argument for moral atheism—the thesis that the original source of natural order, even if a deity, has no moral attributes. Taken at face value in its immediate context, the argument reads as Philo’s own. In a recent essay (Newlands 2016), Samuel Newlands argues that the passage should be read in just that way, thus showing Hume to be an inconsistent skeptic. Newlands maintains that Hume’s “Fragment on Evil,” which was written twelve to fifteen years or so before the first draft of the Dialogues, supports the DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-15

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view that, in those paragraphs in Part XI, Hume is not just presenting an argument for moral atheism but is arguing for it in his own right.2 In a discussion of Part VII of the Dialogues, Paul Draper argues that Hume’s thinking on the design hypothesis was mixed and conflicted in the period of original composition of the book—the early 1750s—and perhaps for longer, and so we should not expect full consistency there (Draper 1991, pp. 139–140). An inconsistency reading is also implicit in the interpretations proposed by some readers who are more sympathetic than Newlands to the Hume of the Dialogues—Draper being broadly sympathetic—for instance, J. C. A. Gaskin, who reads the intent in paragraphs 13 through 16 of Part XI as that of making an argument for moral atheism (Gaskin 1988, 57, 68, 73). Among consistency theorists, Klaas Kraay (Kraay 2003) and Thomas Holden (Holden 2010) argue that the four paragraphs in question in Part XI show us Philo arguing with Cleanthes “in his own way” for the purpose of parodying and thereby undercutting Cleanthes’ argument from natural order to (benevolent) design.3 On this interpretation, the parodying argument is intentionally weak in order to show Cleanthes the weakness of his own argument, since the parodying argument’s structure mimics that of Cleanthes’ argument. On this reading, the natural-irreligious argument in Part XI is consistent with Philo’s skepticism about natural religion/irreligion. In his commentary on the Dialogues, Nelson Pike (Pike 1970, 175) proposes another parody reading. The focus of this parody thesis is Philo’s introduction in Part VII of a hypothesis that, contrary to the design hypothesis, would explain natural order as intrinsic to natural processes. In the essay cited earlier (Draper 1991), so does Paul Draper. Draper suggests that Philo’s intent in introducing the naturalistic hypothesis in question is to show the weakness of Cleanthes’ design-explanation of natural order by mimicking it in an obviously weak and “absurd”4 naturalistic explanation (Draper 1991, 135). Parenthetically, despite his earlier-noted point that we ought not to expect full consistency in the Dialogues, Draper’s parody interpretation of the naturalistic hypothesis in Part VII may reasonably be viewed as supporting a consistency reading of that hypothesis (and of those in Parts VI and VIII), without ascribing to him the motive of supporting a consistency reading. Newlands dismisses the Kraay-Holden parody interpretation of paragraphs 13 through 16 of Part XI on two grounds. First, he sees it as an instance of charitable interpreters having “bent over backwards … even going so far as to argue that Philo is actually offering a parody of Cleanthes’ earlier arguments” (Newlands 2016, 637, italics original) in order to support a consistency reading. In Newlands’s view the parody reading is beyond the pale of seriousness: “Talk about the hermeneutics of charity!” (Newlands 2016, 637). Second, he argues that the parody interpretation is implausible because, in the almost 250 years since the book’s publication, no other reader has claimed to detect a parody there. (Newlands does not discuss Pike’s or Draper’s parody readings of the naturalistic hypothesis of Part VII.) Others have written on whether Philo is consistent or inconsistent, but here I shall confine myself to the versions of consistency and inconsistency readings mentioned above.

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 203 As noted, Kraay and Holden support their parody reading of paragraphs 13 through 16 of Part XI by citingPhilo’s declared intention to argue with Cleanthes in his own, natural-religious, way. To that extent, their interpretation does a creditable job of squaring those paragraphs with the skepticism of Part I, and, for the same reason, Pike’s and Draper’s respective parody readings of the naturalistic hypothesis of Part VII do the same for it. However, the Kraay-Holden interpretation insufficiently emphasizes the rest of the sentence from which it draws inspiration, namely, “… I argue with Cleanthes in his own way; and by showing him the dangerous consequences of his tenets, hope at last to reduce him to our opinion” (DNR II.11, p. 22 italics added).5 The opinion in question is skepticism about natural religion. In the quoted sentence, Philo is assuring Demea that he (Philo) has not gone over to the natural-religionist side, any appearance to the contrary notwithstanding. Instead, his assurance continues, he is using Cleanthes’ mode of argumentation tactically, with the motive of showing Cleanthes the unintended “dangerous consequences” of natural religion and the virtues of skepticism about it. The main point in the sentence is about those consequences. The main point is not mimicry of Cleanthes’ mode of argumentation; it is, through that mimicry, to open his eyes to the unintended consequences of his project. Dangerous consequences for what? On the Kraay-Holden reading, Philo’s motive is that of convincing Cleanthes that his design argument is weak. However, with the punchline in Philo’s sentence coming at the end, not at the beginning, the main point in the sentence is not about the design argument but about the threat it poses to something else and that skepticism about natural religion is the theist’s best response to that threat. The something else, I argue, is theism itself. This is the essence of what Hume, with only lightly disguised irony, wants to say “concerning Natural Religion” in the Dialogues. In corroboration of the point that it is for theism itself that natural religion has dangerous consequences, it is worth noting Demea’s protest, five paragraphs earlier in Part II, that natural religion will result in “advantages to atheists” which they would be unable to achieve on the merits of their own arguments (DNR II.6, p. 20). In Parts VI, VII, and VIII, and again in Part XI, Philo will show Demea’s prescience. The key requirement of this dangerous-consequences-for-theism reading of Philo’s tactic of arguing with Cleanthes in his own, non-skeptical, way is that the irreligious hypotheses and arguments that Cleanthes’ mode of argumentation begets and legitimizes must be plausible enough to pose a threat to theism. That is, far from being absurd, weak, or “embarrassingly weak” (Holden 2010, 175), as the parody interpretations require, Philo’s parallel hypotheses and arguments must be at least as strong as Cleanthes’ own. My argument for that conclusion is cumulative, weaving together points from Parts VI, VII, VIII, and XI, and it occupies the next three sections of this chapter. 10.3 Naturalistic Explanations of Natural Order (1) From Cleanthes’ introduction of the design argument in Part II and continuing through Part V, Philo discusses the argument on its own terms, revealing

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weaknesses in the analogies claimed in it between order in nature and in artifacts. Nevertheless, at the end of Part V, Cleanthes maintains that, for all of Philo’s effort in opposition, he has been unable to dislodge the design hypothesis or even to criticize the argument for it without himself having recourse to some form of design as the source of natural order. In terms chosen to goad him, he proclaimsPhilo’s failure; even … by the utmost indulgence of your imagination, you never get rid of the hypothesis of design in the universe; but are obliged, at every turn, to have recourse to it. To this concession I adhere steadily; and this I regard as a sufficient foundation for religion. (DNR V.13, p. 45) At the beginning of Part VI, perhaps in concession to the foregoing triumphalist claim, Philo pivots to a new line of opposition. Now through Part VIII and resumed in Parts X and XI, he opposes the design hypothesis from the outside, at first comparing it to three naturalistic hypotheses aimed at explaining natural order (Parts VI, VII, and VIII, respectively) and then, second (Part XI), comparing it to rival hypotheses aimed at explaining the existence of widespread evil, especially natural evil, in a world supposedly designed by a benevolent deity. Analogy remains central in these rival hypotheses, but the concepts at the core of Cleanthes’ favored analogy—intelligence, intention, design, and benevolence—have no place in the naturalistic, alternative hypotheses of Parts VI through VIII, although those concepts come back into the discussion in Parts X and XI. Over the course of Parts VI, VII, and VIII, Philo, arguing with Cleanthes in his own way, suggests that each of three naturalistic hypotheses provides at least as good an explanation of natural order as the design hypothesis and perhaps even a better one. As he puts it, these naturalistic hypotheses “must acquire an air of probability from the method of reasoning so much insisted on by Cleanthes” (DNR VI.2, p. 46), since the method of reasoning in them is the same as in Cleanthes’ design argument. These rival hypotheses comprise two generationhypotheses—an animation and vegetation hypothesis, respectively—and a version of a hypothesis of Epicurus’. I shall not discuss these hypotheses in their respective individual details concerning plant and animal generation and reproduction, since those details reflect the limitations of the natural sciences of the day. Instead, my focus is on Philo’s overall argument that, on Cleanthes’ own principles and method, naturalism seems able to provide at least as good an explanation of natural order as the supernaturalism of Parts II, III, and VIII. This focus is not a charitable contortion subject to censure by Newlands, but a reasonable and appropriately charitable reading of the points and illustrations thereof that Philo, without a developed naturalistic vocabulary, is trying to make.6 At the start of Part VII, sandwiched between two expressions of skepticism about natural religion (DNR VI.13, p. 51 and DNR VII.8, p. 53), Philo sets out the following, valid, modus ponens argument:

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 205 1 If the universe bears a greater likeness to animal bodies and to vegetables, than to the works of human art, it is more probable, that its cause resembles the cause of the former than that of the latter, and that its origin ought rather to be ascribed to generation or vegetation than to reason or design. (DNR VII.1, p. 52) 2 [T]here are … parts of the universe (besides the machines of human invention) which bear still a greater resemblance to the fabric of the world … These parts are animals and vegetables. (DNR VII.3, p. 52) Therefore: 3 The cause … of the world [and of order in nature], we may infer to be something similar or analogous to generation or vegetation (DNR VII.3, p. 53), [that is, to be inherent in matter]. Immediately challenged by Demea—“What data have you for such extraordinary conclusions?” (DNR VII.7, p. 53, italics original)—Philo, in a triumphalist moment of his own, responds: “Right … This is the topic on which I have all along insisted … that we have no data to establish any system of cosmogony” (DNR VII.8, p. 53, italics original). Putting this skeptical disclaimer together with the modus ponens argument just above, we see that, at this point in the conversation, Philo has begun to engage with Cleanthes on the two following levels. The first level is the skeptical one where he continues to maintain that there is insufficient empirical evidence to warrant any affirmative, substantive conclusion about the origin either of natural order or of the universe itself. On the second level, he suspends his skepticism about natural religion/irreligion for tactical reasons. The tactic is to show Cleanthes that, if he persists in the enterprise of natural religion, then one or both of the following hypotheses is the conclusion to draw; either [a]ll these systems, then, of scepticism, polytheism, and theism you must allow, on your principles, to be on a like footing, and that no one of them has any advantage over the others (DNR VI.13, p. 51) or … if we must needs fix on some hypothesis … [then, on the] rule … of greater similarity … , (DNR VII.8, p. 53) [a naturalistic conclusion is more probable than the supernaturalistic one that Cleanthes draws]. Let us call these the parity hypothesis and the superiority hypothesis, respectively. Neither explanatory parity with naturalism nor explanatory inferiority to naturalism is a welcome prospect for theism. Philo, in his various (voice-over) skeptical disclaimers of analogical reasoning as a mode of investigation capable in principle of success insofar as “the origin of worlds” is concerned (DNR I.3, 8), reminds us that his own commitment is to skepticism regarding natural religion. Here is an example of him operating on both levels—skepticism and its suspension (which, at a minimum, tilts towards the parity hypothesis)—simultaneously:

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And were I obliged to defend any particular system of this nature (which I never willingly should do), I esteem none more plausible, than that which ascribes an eternal, inherent principle of order to the world; though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations. (DNR VI.12, p. 50) Can Philo/Hume make good on the claim that, if skepticism is temporarily suspended, a naturalistic hypothesis about the origin of natural order is at least as probable, on the limited evidence available, as Cleanthes’ design hypothesis or perhaps more probable than it? 10.4 Naturalistic Explanations of Natural Order (2) In the second premise of the modus ponens argument, set out above, Philo maintains that certain processes in nature provide a more convincing model for understanding natural order than the design and manufacture of artifacts. For support, he points especially to our uniform or exception-less experience of matter having precedence over mind, insofar as the very existence of mind is concerned. Let us call this kind of precedence metaphysical precedence. As he puts it: [There is] nothing more repugnant to common experience, than mind without body … (DNR VI.5, p. 47); Judging by our limited and imperfect experience, generation has some privileges above reason: for we see every day the latter arise from the former, never the former from the latter (DNR VII.14, p. 55); In all instances which we have ever seen, ideas are copied from real objects, and are ectypal, not archetypal … You [Cleanthes] reverse this order, and give thought the precedence … . (DNR VIII.11, p. 62) Two points are essential to the design hypothesis and to theism itself. The first is that mind has metaphysical precedence over matter. On theism and on the design hypothesis, both the physical universe and order in it exist because of an original intention of some minded, non-material being that they exist. The second is that mental order is a brute fact requiring no explanation, or at least no naturalistic explanation, whereas both the physical universe and natural order do require explanation. On theism, that explanation cannot in principle be naturalistic, for any such explanation would itself call for a further explanation. However, in the passages just quoted, Philo reminds us that not only do none of those points reflect our exception-less experience, they conflict with it. For Hume, this means that each of those points conflicts with a law of nature: … where the past has been entirely regular and uniform, we expect the [predicted] event with the greatest assurance (EHU, 6.4, 55) … a uniform experience amounts to a … full proof (EHU 10.12, 101 (italics original)) … a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws [of nature] (EHU 10.12, p. 100).7

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 207 Unlike the design hypothesis, each of the three naturalistic hypotheses introduced in Parts VI, VII, and VIII, respectively, aligns with our uniform experience of mind existing only as the mind of some material, specifically biological, thing. This does not mean that any of those particular naturalistic hypotheses is true or plausible in its own right, and Philo never suggests that it does. Instead, his point is conditional: if we engage in Cleanthes’ natural-religion project, then, given our exception-less experience of mind never existing without matter—while having uniform experience of matter existing without mind and of mind emerging from matter—the evidence suggests that the original source of natural order is more likely to be material than mental. That is, “were [we] obliged to defend any particular system of this nature” (DNR VI.12, p. 50), then, using “the method of reasoning so much insisted on by Cleanthes” (DNR VI.2, p.46), our exception-less experience of the origin of mind in matter motivates two conclusions, each of which is a serious danger to theism. The first, the parity hypothesis, is that this uniform experience provides no basis for the hypothesis of a mental first cause of natural order, thus no basis for the hypothesis of a designer deity. On Cleanthes’ natural religion, then, the idea of God as the source of natural order seems to be unmotivated and arbitrary. The second dangerous consequence for theism of our exception-less experience of mind’s emergence from matter is that the project of seeking out the source of natural order seems to bend towards metaphysical naturalism.8 The latter is an irony that those characters’ creator surely enjoyed. As noted, Philo never unconditionally endorses any naturalistic hypothesis as providing a true or plausible explanation of natural order, or a better explanation than design (DNR VI.12, p. 50). His consistent claim is twofold; first, that the evidence available to us is insufficient to warrant believing that any of the four hypotheses in play at this stage in the Dialogues—the design hypothesis and the three naturalistic hypotheses—is probably true;9 and, second, that if we “were obliged to defend any [of these four hypotheses],” then, on the evidence available, a design hypothesis would not be the one. As re-constructed in this and the previous section, Philo’s Cleanthes-like argument that a naturalistic hypothesis is either as plausible an explanation of natural order as Cleanthes’ supernaturalism or more plausible than it is not a weak argument, as the parody theories require. Instead, it is strong enough to be a dangerous consequence for theism of Cleanthes’ project. In Philo’s words, when naturalism is licensed by Cleanthes’ mode of argument, it “affords a plausible, if not a true solution of the difficulty” (DNR VIII.8, p. 61). 10.5 The Four Hypotheses of Dialogues XI In paragraphs 13 through 16 of Part XI, we see Philo presenting and ranking substantive conclusions about the source of natural order and “of all things” (DNR XI.14, p. 86), and seemingly endorsing moral indifference in that source. As noted in Section 2, both the ranking and the apparent endorsement motivate questions about his consistency as a skeptic. However, with the consistency

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question about those paragraphs settled by recognizing that here, as also in Parts VI, VII, and VIII, Philo has tactically suspended his skepticism, the question before us remains whether the argument for moral atheism thatPhilo discusses in these paragraphs in Part XI is weak. If Kraay, Holden, and others are right that it is, then my extension of the “dangerous consequences” interpretation from Parts VI through VIII to those paragraphs in Part XI fails. In paragraph 13 of Part XI, Philo describes in grim terms the same orderly processes that Cleanthes had described so admiringly in Parts II and III. Absent any additional information, the one description is as legitimate as the other. Seen from the perspective of physics or biochemistry, for instance, the uniformity of natural processes is striking. Seen from the perspective of a blameless victim of a natural disaster, say, or of a cancer mutating out of any physician’s control, this uniformity may look like an instance of “a blind nature … without discernment or parental care” (DNR XI.13, p. 86). Philo makes no argument in paragraph 13, but the description he sketches there of harmful effects of natural processes is an important step in his effort to show Cleanthes the dangerous consequences for theism of natural religion. Being no less warranted or backed by experience than Cleanthes’ description, the facts of natural evil described by Philo no less legitimately demand explanation, if the enterprise of trying to explain order in nature is legitimate to begin with. On natural religion itself, then, the existence, vast amount, and seemingly arbitrary distribution of natural evils are important explananda, no less so than the order in nature that Cleanthes ventures to explain in terms of divine power, knowledge, and benevolent intention. Given the two opposing descriptions of the same natural processes—Cleanthes’ in Parts II, III, and VIII, claiming the pervasive, multi-dimensional, benevolent orderliness of those processes, and Philo’s in Part XI, paragraph 13 (and earlier in Part X), claiming the pervasiveness of natural evil occurring through and because of those processes of nature—perhaps the Manichaean hypothesis is a good explanation. But, as Philo points out, if an inference to the Manichaean conclusion is to be warranted, more evidence will be needed than competing descriptions of natural processes in terms of structural and procedural order, on the one hand, and, on the other, in terms of the misery and suffering that often result. In addition, we would need to “… discover … marks of the combat of a malevolent with a benevolent being” (DNR XI.14, p. 86), but we do not discover any.10 Accordingly, not discerning any such marks, we do not have sufficient evidence to infer a Manichaean conclusion. However, given the fact that, sometimes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, our failure to discern any such marks of combat in this instance is not evidence against the Manichaean hypothesis. Although he does not draw a Manichaean conclusion in paragraph 14, Philo does draw a conclusion there: “The true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent … and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold …” (DNR XI.14, p. 86). He reiterates this in the next paragraph, on the basis of a short comparison among the “… four hypotheses [… that may …] be framed concerning the first causes of the universe …” (DNR XI.15, p. 86). The four hypotheses that Philo has in mind here are the theistic

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 209 hypothesis of an all-good, personal being; the hypothesis of an all-evil, personal being; the Manichaean hypothesis; and the moral-atheist hypothesis of a morally indifferent source or sources. A charitable reading of this paragraph will allow that, taken together, the four hypotheses cover all the possibilities for kinds of sources.11 Briefly, the reason is the conjunction of the following four points: each of the first two hypotheses posits a single-agent, personal source; the third proposes multiple agent-sources; the first three cover kinds of agents having intentions that fall within the domain of moral intentions; the fourth hypothesis posits either a single source or multiple sources, either agent or non-agent, either a personal agent or not, while having no moral intentions (or perhaps even a capacity for moral intentions). Philo rightly maintains that the evidence of “mixed phenomena,” that is, the existence in great abundance in nature of both good and evil occurrences, “can never prove” (DNR XI.15, p. 86) a perfectly good or perfectly evil source of order in nature, although those “mixed phenomena” do not disprove the existence of either such source. However, this “can never prove” point is ambiguous, being open to either or both of the following interpretations: (1) that the conclusion in question is under-determined by the evidence used to support it; and (2) that an inference to the conclusion in question is blocked (although not disproved) by evidence against it. In regard to the first option, the under-determination option,12 the mixed phenomena of good and evil occurrences comprise, say, a combined quantity, quality, and distribution G of good occurrences and a combined quantity, quality, and distribution E of evil occurrences. Let us agree that G is some evidence for the first of Philo’s four hypotheses, that of a limitlessly-good personal being as the source of natural order, and let us agree that E is some evidence for the second hypothesis, that of a limitlessly-evil personal source. But while G is some evidence for the first hypothesis, G is insufficient evidence for it, being capable at best of supporting an inference to a source having enough goodness and power to cause G, but not an inference to a perfectly or limitlessly good source; and this is a dangerous consequence of natural religion for theism. After all, in effect-tocause reasoning, it is illicit to attribute more to the cause than is required to causally explain the effect (DNR V.5, p. 42; EHU 11.12, p. 120), and G is not limitless goodness. E likewise can at best support inferring a source evil enough to cause E, but not a perfectly evil source. In this way, the evidence of mixed phenomena falls short of warranting either the first or the second hypothesis. Thus, in the under-determination sense of “can never prove,” the mixed phenomena of good and evil can never prove either a perfectly good or a perfectly evil source. Now, to the second interpretation of “can never prove,” with its more dangerous consequence for theism than the first interpretation. E is some evidence that the first hypothesis—that of a perfectly good source—is false, and so, unless adequately explained on that hypothesis or unless another strategy to cope with E is devised, E suffices to block an inference to that hypothesis. Conversely, the same is true of G, insofar as inferring the hypothesis of a perfectly evil source is concerned. The upshot is that the mixed phenomena

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of good and evil occurrences block inferences to each of the first two hypotheses, the first of which is the core hypothesis of theism.13 In that sense too, then, mixed phenomena can never prove that the source of natural order is perfectly good or that it is perfectly evil. However, this second sense of “can never prove” reflects more than a shortfall of evidence. For, while E may not suffice to prove that the hypothesis of an all-good source of natural order is false, it does provide some reason to think that the hypothesis in question is false, although Philo does not draw this conclusion. How good a reason? There is a great deal of natural evil, much of it seemingly pointless, so as good a reason as there is seemingly pointless natural evil. Consequently, given that Cleanthes’ natural-religion project licenses E as an explanandum, the second interpretation of “can never prove” is a dangerous consequence of natural religion for theism. Until E is either satisfactorily explained on theism or until another theistic strategy to cope with E is devised, E at least blocks an inference to the theistic conclusion.14 Let us agree that the Manichaean hypothesis and the moral-indifference hypothesis are also under-determined by the “mixed phenomena” evidence available to us. That is, let us agree that there is parity among the four hypotheses of paragraph 15 of Part XI in that respect.15 Yet there is not overall parity among them. To see why, let us turn again to the second interpretation—the “blocking” interpretation—of Philo’s “can never prove” claim about the mixed phenomena of good and evil. In the absence of any evidence of combat between the conjectured good and evil sources of natural order, the mixed phenomena of G and E are insufficient evidence for a Manichean conclusion. But, as neither quantity, quality, and distribution E of evil nor quantity, quality, and distribution G of good constitute a good reason to think that Manicheism is false, an inference to the Manichaean conclusion is not blocked by that evidence; and so the Manichaean hypothesis ranks above the all-good and all-evil hypotheses in that respect. However, as do the first two single-agent hypotheses, the Manichaean hypothesis conflicts with our exception-less experience of matter’s metaphysical precedence over mind. In that respect, it fares no better than each of those first two hypotheses. Nonetheless, overall and for the reason given just above, the Manichaean hypothesis ranks above those two hypotheses. This leaves the hypothesis of a morally indifferent source, of which Philo says that it “seems by far the most probable” of the four, together exhaustive, hypotheses (DNR XI.15, p. 86). Here are two reasons that Philo is warranted in this comparative claim. First, unlike its three rivals, the moral-indifference hypothesis does not conflict with what seems to be a law of nature, namely, the metaphysical precedence of matter over mind. The reason is twofold. First, that the indifference hypothesis can be cast in wholly naturalistic terms, thus aligning it with those naturalistic hypotheses discussed in Parts VI, VII, and VIII. Second, if the indifference hypothesis were true, what relevant evidence could we reasonably expect to discover in addition to the mixed evidence of good and evil? Arguably none, since the world as we find it is prima facie a good fit with the idea that

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 211 nature—apart from humans and members of some other animal species—causally proceeds with no concern for anything. When we take stock of the four hypotheses of Part XI, we see that the first three violate what seems to be a law of nature; inferences to the first two are blocked by the mixed phenomena of good and evil; the third is not blocked in that way; the fourth also is not blocked by those mixed phenomena and, in addition, it fits well with our exception-less experience of mindless, indifferent, brute nature having metaphysical precedence over mind. In this way, accepting for the sake of argument that natural religion, thus natural irreligion, is a feasible enterprise, the fourth hypothesis, perhaps integrated with the naturalism of Parts VI, VII, and VIII, comes out ahead of its rivals and is thereby “the most probable” of the four (DNR XI.15, 86). This is the stronger of two dangerous consequences for theism—the first being the under-determination consequence—that Philo has in mind in Part XI, and the argument for it seems quite strong. Putting this argument together with the argument developed through the two previous sections, I suggest that the dangerous-consequences-for-theism reading of Philo’s engagement with natural religion in Parts VI, VII, VIII, and XI of the Dialogues meets its burden of proof. 10.6 Dialogues XII: The Consistency Question Again Early in Part XII, alone with Cleanthes, his close friend of long standing, Philo tells him to not take too seriously his skepticism about the argument for a benevolent source of natural order (DNR XII.2–4, pp. 89–90). In this, his language is fulsome, his meaning seemingly clear, namely, that his role in the three-way conversation just ended was principally that of devil’s advocate. If this is true, then Philo is not a skeptic about natural religion at all. If this is true, then it is Philo’s professed skepticism itself, not his suspension of it from time to time for the sake of argument, that is merely a tactic—the tactic of helping Cleanthes to test the mettle of his argument to design in nature. Cleanthes seems to believe him. Nonetheless, he wants to leave Philo in no doubt that skepticism about the feasibility of empirically investigating the source of natural order is the most untenable of all stances towards such an investigation. He adds, “to what you have so well urged” (DNR XII.5, p. 91), that “… no system at all… [is] … absolutely impossible to maintain or defend” (DNR XII.5, pp. 91–92). To Cleanthes, a consistent skepticism about investigating the source of natural order is as unfeasible in theory and practice as a consistent skepticism about the existence of the external world, a point he first made in Part I. In addition to what he believes are philosophical skepticism’s deficiencies as a theoretical position, he thinks that it is psychologically impossible for human beings. Here then, with the three-way discussion concluded and with the two old friends getting back into the rhythm of their friendship, following the sharp words that occasionally passed between them in that discussion, Cleanthes wants it to be clear that he won their argument. Without question, there is a marked change of tone in the early paragraphs of Part XII. Moreover, with Philo’s concessive remarks, there seems to be a matching

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change in substance. So, the consistency question comes up again: does the Philo whom we encounter here in the early paragraphs of Part XII disavow skepticism about natural religion, not just suspend it as a tactic in argument? The right answer, I think, is that what is sometimes called Philo’s “reversal” in paragraphs 2 through 4 of Part XII is more show than substance and that he is a consistent skeptic about natural religion. At paragraph 5 of Part XII, as his response to Philo’s concession-remarks makes clear, Cleanthes believes that his case for design in nature has been vindicated “by strong and obvious reason… [and] … by natural propensity …” (DNR XII. 5, p. 92), in other words that the arguments of Parts II and III respectively have carried the day. And now, finally, Philo seems to agree. But, if this is the correct reading of these early paragraphs in Part XII, why does the conversation go on for another 28 paragraphs, a length greater than most of the preceding parts? For, if Philo has conceded, a few polite wrap-up remarks (thus paragraphs) would suffice. The answer is that Philo has not conceded or reversed himself at all, appearances in paragraphs 2 through 4 notwithstanding. Instead, he is maneuvering to show that, first, he was right all along that natural religion produces nothing of value for religious belief or practice, and that, second, given the dangerous consequences of natural religion for theism, a skeptical view of natural religion is the best stance for the theist too. In addition, Philo wants to emphasize the vices of actual religion and to recommend “true religion”—which is hardly more than a form of skepticism conjoined with civic mindedness—in its place (at least for “a man of letters” (DNR XII.33, p. 102)).16 In response to Cleanthes’ claim to vindication in paragraph 5 of Part XII, Philo hollows out his seeming concession. If it is granted that there is an original source of natural order, then, Philo maintains, the dispute over whether that source is sufficiently akin to a human mind to be rightly thought of as itself a mind is “a mere verbal controversy” (DNR XII.6, p. 92), a futile discussion with no prospect of resolution. In his view, the best possible outcome of “the [foregoing] dispute concerning theism” (DNR XII.7, p. 93) for the natural religionist is that there is some weak reason to conclude that the source of order in nature has some remote likeness to the human mind, since, after all, there… [is] … a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of nature … [such that] … the rotting of a turnip … and the structure of human thought … probably bear some remote analogy to each other … . (DNR XII.7, p. 93) However, our exception-less experience of the metaphysical precedence of matter over mind is some reason, however weak, to prefer an analogy with a material source to an analogy with a mental source. Overall, though, Philo’s recommendation is to “never willingly” (DNR VI.12, p. 50) engage in this or any mere verbal dispute; furthermore, the proper place to recognize and act on that recommendation was in Part I. Accordingly, by way of the concept of a merely verbal dispute, which is another way of proposing a skeptical stance towards whatever is in dispute, Philo reasserts his original skepticism about the enterprise of natural religion.

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 213 In paragraphs 9 through 32 of Part XII Philo criticizes actual religion. Why? What does actual religion have to do with natural religion, the topic of the book? The reason, I suggest, is this; doing so opens the door to so-called “true religion” (DNR XII.9, p. 94) or “genuine theism” (DNR XII.24, p. 99). But “true religion” is so pared back from actual religion as to be skepticism about the characteristic beliefs and claims of actual religion, and as such is unrecognizable as religion on most definitions of “religion.” Philo’s endorsement of “true religion” as an appropriate replacement for actual religion for “a man of letters” is a tongue-incheek reiteration of the skepticism that he has advocated from the start, thus further testimony to his consistency as a skeptic. The “reversal” is an illusion. Why does Philo make a concession statement if he does not concede or intend to concede? Don Garrett, speaking of one of Hume’s overall aims in the Dialogues, maintains that “Hume clearly wants to demonstrate how […] friendships [of “unreserved intimacy”] can be preserved without being undermined by contention …” (Garrett 2015, 287). While Garrett is on the right track here, he does not go far enough. Hume’s solution for this problem of preserving close friendship despite disagreement on a touchy subject like religion has a darker coloration than Garrett suggests. Philo’s reason to use the language of concession here, without meaning it as he intends Cleanthes to take it, is that, in the religious and moral climate of mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland, a skeptic must ambiguate, dissimulate, mislead, and otherwise mask his or her doubts in order to be acceptable company for the majority of religious believers, even those who are not zealots. A good case in point is Philo’s silence when, in paragraph 5 of Part XII, Cleanthes reiterates his charge from Part I that Philo’s skepticism is tantamount to extreme skepticism, whereas originally he had contested the charge. Furthermore, it is notable that Cleanthes feels no need to soothe Philo, instead being triumphalist in claiming victory. 10.7 Skeptical Defenses of Theism If Cleanthes and the kind of philosophical theist for whom he stands dismiss skepticism about natural religion and push ahead with an argument to design in nature, then Hume has made a plausible case that the following consequences will result. First, the argument will fail and, anyway, its concept of a designer is too weak for any religious or moral purpose. Second, it will legitimize and motivate non-theistic, naturalistic hypotheses about the source of order in nature that are at least as plausible as, and perhaps more plausible than, the design hypothesis that is essential to theism. Third, it will prima facie violate what we have good reason to think is a law of nature—that mind emerges from matter, not vice versa. Fourth, it will legitimize and motivate non-theistic, perhaps naturalistic, hypotheses about the existence in great abundance of natural evil that prima facie fit better with those facts of evil than does the theistic hypothesis. Fifth, it will legitimize and motivate hypotheses and arguments that the existence of seemingly pointless evil is logically inconsistent with the God of theism. Sixth, it will expose theism as at least under-determined by the available empirical

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evidence and perhaps blocked (as a conclusion) by that evidence. Seventh, although not discussed by Philo/Hume, prima facie the existence of such evil is a good reason to judge that the God of theism probably does not exist. What ought a Cleanthes-like theist to do? Hume’s advice would be to adopt a skeptical stance, now in defense of theism against those consequences. Nowadays, natural irreligion is typically found in anti-theistic arguments from evil to the conclusion that probably there is no God. To this kind of probabilistic, anti-theistic argument from evil there are, as noted in Section 10.5, broadly speaking, two kinds of philosophical responses available; theories to explain seemingly-pointless evil and theories to defend the theistic hypothesis without attempting to explain seemingly-pointless evil. Arguably, theories of the latter kind—defenses—have fared better than theories of the former—theodicies—and among philosophical defenses of theism against probabilistic arguments from evil, skeptical defenses have fared better than other kinds. The skeptical component in skeptical defenses of theism against probabilistic arguments from evil is the idea that, contrary to a key premise in such arguments, we have no good reason to believe that what we regard as pointless evil is pointless evil in the eyes of an infinite, all-good deity, should such a being exist. After all, what good reason do we have to think that we understand the infinite nature of God, if God exists, or the reasons or sorts of reasons that such a being might have to permit or not prevent occurrences that seem to us to be pointlessly evil? Hume would agree that we are not in a good epistemic position to have such reasons—“[o]ur line is too short to fathom such immense abysses” (EHU 7.24, p. 67), these matters “… are too large for our grasp” (DNR I.10, p. 11), thus we are not warranted in pressing a probabilistic, evil-based argument that there is no God. Expanding the focus from skeptical defenses of theism against probabilistic, evil-based arguments for the non-existence of God to all of the dangerous consequences of natural religion for theism, Philo/Hume’s overall, skeptical point is that we do not have access to the kind of information that we would need to advance either a viable, probabilistic natural religion or a viable, probabilistic natural irreligion. Accordingly, we should forego both natural religion and natural irreligion, thereby reducing ourselves to Hume’s own skeptical opinion about such matters (DNR II.11, p. 22). Notes 1 I use “natural irreligion” and “natural irreligious” as synonyms for “natural atheology” and “natural atheological,” respectively. 2 Overall, the “Fragment on Evil’ leans towards skepticism about natural religion/ irreligion. In it, Hume puts particular emphasis on the insufficiency of evidence to warrant a conclusion that the first source of order in nature is benevolent (“Fragment” 2007, 112). 3 Initially, benevolence is not part of the conclusion for which Cleanthes argues. He brings it into the design argument in Part VIII (DNR VIII.10, 61). Hence the parentheses.

Natural Religion’s “Dangerous Consequences” 215 4 Aligning with Draper’s characterization of the naturalistic hypothesis of Part VII is Kraay’s characterization of it as “outlandish” ( Kraay 2003, 289). On the other hand, speaking of the third of three naturalistic hypotheses that Philo introduces, Robert J. Fogelin suggests that “[i]t doesn’t seem any more preposterous than doctrines of creation ex nihilo, continuous creation, or creation by the hand of an inaccessible deity” ( Fogelin 2017, 55). Perhaps the same may justly be said of Philo’s other two naturalistic hypotheses. Creation hypotheses may not seem preposterous to many people because of wide familiarity with them. 5 To be fair, Kraay notes, but does not discuss or develop, the point that Cleanthes’ “irregular” argument of Part III opens the door to a similarly irregular argument “[opposing] theism” ( Kraay 2003, 297) and “in service of a wholly incompatible view” ( Kraay 2003, 298). 6 For a less charitable reading, see ( Draper 1991, 135). 7 Since this Enquiry was published shortly before Hume began work on the Dialogues, we may reasonably infer that his understanding of a law of nature was the same in the early 1750s as it was in the late 1740s. 8 For a similar view, see Andrew Pyle, “David Hume and The Argument to Design” ( Pyle 2015, 257–258). See also ( O’Connor 2003, 278). 9 The same holds for the many other naturalistic hypotheses that Philo claims to have ready (DNR VIII.1, 58). This claim strengthens his skepticism, since the greater the number of legitimate hypotheses the greater our motivation to withhold endorsing any of them. 10 True, we could stipulate that the combat between the good and evil forces of the Manichaean hypothesis just is the “mixed phenomena” of good and evil, but that would be ad hoc. 11 Holden inclines to such a reading ( Holden 2010, 173), while Keith Yandell ( Yandell 1990, 268) argues against it; and Kraay seems to agree ( Kraay 2003, 291). The following hypothesis seems to lie beyond the scope of the four hypotheses in question, and if it does, it will support the Kraay-Yandell view; a very good, but not limitlessly or perfectly good, source, along the lines of Cleanthes’ “limited theism” (DNR XI.1, 78). However, on the charitable reading I am proposing, this would be a kind of Manichaean hypothesis, as follows: this non-perfectly good source accounts for much, maybe all, of natural goodness while some other source accounts for natural evil. And so on. Continuing charitably, let us agree that the source of natural order posited in the first hypothesis, in addition to being perfectly good, is all-powerful, all-knowing, and so on. Let us have a parallel agreement regarding the second hypothesis. 12 Essentially, this first interpretation of “can never prove” is what Gaskin calls “the inference problem” of God and evil ( Gaskin 1988, 53–58). I expand the scope of the problem to cover the hypothesis of a perfectly evil source of natural order. 13 The fact that E blocks an inference to the first hypothesis does not entail that the first hypothesis is either false or has been proved false. However, the same facts of E that block an inference to the natural-religionist conclusion supply evidence to both logical and probabilistic arguments for the non-existence of God. Hume prima facie endorses a logical argument from evil in Part X, but seems to withdraw the endorsement in Part XI. There is a lively discussion about whether Hume does endorse a logical argument from evil in Part X and whether he withdraws any endorsement of a logical argument in Part XI, but I have no space here to join the discussion. Holden maintains that Hume does endorse in Part X and does not withdraw in Part XI ( Holden 2010, 154). My own view is that in Part XI Hume does withdraw any endorsement. Hume does not make any probabilistic argument from evil to the non-existence of God, but some who do—Paul Draper, for instance ( Draper 1989)—draw inspiration from the indifference hypothesis that Hume discusses in Part XI. I will return to such probabilistic arguments in the final section of this essay.

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14 This is a stronger point than the under-determination interpretation of “can never prove,” that is, a stronger form of inference problem than the one that Gaskin calls by that name. 15 This may be too big a concession insofar as the moral indifference hypothesis is concerned, but discussing it would make this essay too long. 16 Garrett offers a more robust account of “true religion” ( Garrett 2012, 218–219).

References Texts by Hume Hume, David. 2007. “Fragment on Evil.” In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Dorothy Coleman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, David. 2007/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Stephen Buckle, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (I cite the first Enquiry as follows, EHU section, paragraph, page.) Hume, David. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Dorothy Coleman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (I cite the Dialogues as follows, DNR part, paragraph, page.) Secondary Literature Draper, Paul. 1989. “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists.” Nous, Vol. 23, 3, 331–350. Draper, Paul. 1991. “Hume’s Reproduction Parody of the Design Argument.” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 8, 2, 135–148. Fogelin, Robert J. 2017. Hume’s Presence in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Garrett, Don. 2012. “What’s True about Hume’s ‘True Religion’?” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Vol. 10, 2, 199–220. Garrett, Don. 2015. Hume. London: Routledge, 2015. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1988. Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International. Holden, Thomas. 2010. Spectres of False Divinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraay, Klaas J. 2003. “Philo’s Argument for Divine Amorality Reconsidered.” Hume Studies, Vol. 29, 2, 283–304. Newlands, Samuel. 2016. “Hume on Evil.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hume, Paul Russell, ed., pp. 623–645. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, David. 2003. “Skepticism and Philo’s Atheistic Preference.” Hume Studies, Vol. 29, 2, 267–282. Pike, Nelson. 1970. “Hume on the Argument from Design.” In Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Nelson Pike, ed., pp. 127–238. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Pyle, Andrew. 2015. “Hume and The Argument to Design.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien, eds. pp. 245–264. London: Bloomsbury Yandell Keith, E. 1990. Hume’s “Inexplicable Mystery. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

11

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion John P. Wright

11.1 Introductory In his 1683 Pensées diverses sur la comète …, a book that David Hume may have read about seven years before he published his Treatise of Human Nature, Pierre Bayle argued that if one were to explain to someone from another world that “Christians are creatures endowed with reason and good sense, desirous of happiness, persuaded that there is a paradise for those who obey God’s law, and a hell for those who disobey it, then the alien would expect them to behave in a very different way than they do in fact behave” (vol. 2, §134, II; Bayle 1994/1683, 8–9).1 Bayle went on to explain this wide gap between what Christians believe about the afterlife and its rewards and punishments, and the immoral acts that they perform, by noting that “it is not the general opinions of the mind, which determine them to act, but the passions which are present in their hearts” (ibid. vol. 2, §138; 17). Throughout this work Bayle reminds his readers of the immoral actions committed by those who are completely sincere in their professions of religion, culminating with the Crusaders who (in the words of the 1708 English translation) “committed the horriblest Villanys ever heard of” (ibid. vol. 2, §140; 29).2 He sums up his critique of religion in the following three principles: First, that people may be extremely morally dissolute in their lives, and very firmly persuaded of the truth of religion; secondly, that the true spring of our actions is our passions, not our speculative opinions; and thirdly, that the passions that dominate in religious persons are hatred of those of other faiths; terror of unusual events in nature (e.g., comets) encouraged by superstition; and fervor in the performance of religious practices intended placate the Deity for the immoral actions that they have committed (ibid. vol. 2, §143; 31–32). In his article on “Ovid” in his later Dictionary, Historical and Critical, Bayle was to summarize his own view of the present state of human nature by noting that even pagan philosophers—with the notable exception of the Stoics—recognized that “reason has become the slave of the passions.”3 Hume echoed Bayle’s remark on reason and the passions in Book 2 of the Treatise of Human Nature, in the section entitled “Of the influencing motives of the will.” He wrote that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (THN 2.3.3.4; SBN 415). Yet Bayle’s thought is significantly transformed by Hume, DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-16

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since he adds the claim that reason not only is the slave of the passions, but that this is the way things ought to be. Far from regretting this state of affairs, as Bayle did, Hume appears to embrace it. His normative claim receives some clarification later in the section where he makes a distinction between calm and violent passions. It is the former (the calm passions), or at least some subset of them, that reason ought to serve. These calm passions have been mistaken for reason by those like Bayle,4 who have viewed human nature as a battleground between reason and the passions and claimed that virtue involves the victory of reason. The battle, according to Hume, is really between our calm passions and our violent ones (THN 2.3.8.13; SBN 437).5 Whether a passion is calm or violent depends on a variety of factors including the immediacy or distance of the object, whether it has become customary or not, how it is related to other passions felt at the same time, and so on. Hume’s conclusion at the end of the section is that calm passions can overcome violent ones. He writes of the victory of a calm passion over a violent one as being achieved through “strength of mind” or a strong character (THN 2.3.3.18; SBN 418). The view that “the most perfect Virtue consists in the calm unpassionate Benevolence” was expressed by Francis Hutcheson, who made a clear distinction between what he called “calm Desire or Affection” and the passions.6 Hutcheson regarded our moral sense, which approves of such calm benevolence, as a kind of instinct of human nature. For this reason, morality itself does not require a direct appeal to religion, and indeed, as James Harris has shown, Hutcheson rejected the view that virtue requires any belief in the divine approval of moral actions and argued that the popular Calvinist conception of a cruel and wrathful God distracts us from the calm affections which lie at the root of morality (Harris 2003, 229–253, esp. 234). Nevertheless, as Harris also argues, Hutcheson as well as Hume’s Scottish contemporaries Kames, Reid and Smith held that “a minimal ‘natural’ form of religion, affirming providence and a future state, is essential to ensuring that… … [this] natural orientation to virtue does not decay into despair” (op. cit., 246). Harris suggests that Hume’s own difference from his contemporaries on the effectiveness of natural religion on morality and on human happiness shows clearly the influence of Bayle’s view of the separation of theory and practice (op. cit., 249). While Hume certainly held that abstract thought in general had little or no positive effect on moral practice, he did hold that it had a negative effect on morality when used to buttress popular religion. Hume regarded much of previous philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt to protect “popular superstitions.” He writes at the beginning of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, of the false philosophy and metaphysics that has raised “intangling brambles” to cover over and protect the weakness of religion (EHU 1.11; SBN 11). These only serve encourage the “religious fears and prejudices” which constantly threaten the mind and undermine the calm passions on which virtue is based. In an early essay, he argues that since Christianity arose at the time when “philosophy was widely spread over the world” its teachers “were obliged to form a system of speculative opinions; to divide, with some accuracy, their articles of faith; and to explain, confute and defend [it] with all the subtlety of argument and science.”7

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 219 The result was that, unlike ancient polytheism, which consisted mainly of magical stories of its various gods, Christianity “came to be split into new divisions and heresies” which the priests used to encourage “hatred and antipathy among their deluded followers.” Hume concludes that “in modern times, parties of religion are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and ambition.” An obvious inference is that reason ought not to be subservient to the violent passions that underlie religion. However, it may be argued that the minimal form of natural religion supported by Hume’s Eighteenth-Century contemporaries should have escaped his moral critique of traditional Christian metaphysics. Certainly, when critiquing popular theism in such works as his Natural History of Religion and his essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” he himself contrasts it with what he calls a “genuine Theism and Religion” based on the design argument (NHR “Introduction,” p. 33). He claims that this belief has been established independently of popular religion, and even that this religion of reason only coincides “by chance” with popular theism (NHR 6.5, p. 54).8 In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume has his sceptic Philo admit, in Part XII, that “the existence of a DEITY is plainly ascertained by reason” (DNR XII.6, p. 92). Philo even goes so far as to acknowledge that the first cause of the universe bears “some remote inconceivable analogy” to human intelligence (DNR XII.7, p. 93).9 But Hume never admitted what was most relevant to his moderate contemporaries, who based their refined religion on the moral attributes of the Deity. In Part 11 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, as well as through the words of Philo and Demea in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues, Hume argues that the moral attributes of the Deity can never be based on reason and observation. Indeed, Philo concludes that the most probable conclusion we can draw given the extent of moral and natural evil which we observe in the world around us is that the first principle of the universe is “entirely indifferent” to human ideas of good and evil (DNR XI.14, p. 86). This conclusion leads to the final discussion of the Dialogues, in Part XII, where, as I shall argue in the rest of this paper, Cleanthes represents the view of Hume’s Scottish philosophical peers, and Philo accurately represents Hume’s own arguments against the efficacy of religion—whether popular or philosophical—as providing any kind of support for either human virtue or human happiness. The views of Philo respecting the inability of religion to provide any kind of support for morality are, I argue, in line with those expressed by Hume in his other treatments of religion—where he is clearly writing in his own voice. The discussion of religion and morality in Part XII of the Dialogues begins with Philo’s comment that while he venerates “true religion,” his veneration for it is in proportion to his abhorrence for vulgar superstition—that is, popular religion as generally practiced (DNR XII.9, p. 94). While admitting Philo’s argument that “true religion” is often mixed with “vulgar superstitions,” Cleanthes responds that “religion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all” (DNR XII.10, p. 94). Throughout the rest of the Dialogue Cleanthes defends “true religion” on the grounds that it provides a support for virtue and human happiness. His view directly reflects that of Francis Hutcheson who wrote that “the best state of religion is incomparably happier than the any condition of Atheism” though “the

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corruption of the best things may be most pernicious.”10 According to Hutcheson, we need to “take all the blessings of a true religion … without searching out what motives might remain to some sorts of virtues under the joyless wretched thought that the universe is under no providence” (Hutcheson 1755, vol. 1, 220). Cleanthes presents three related arguments in favour of religion. In the first place, he argues that we need the promise of rewards and threats of punishment after death in order to regulate people’s morals: “the doctrine of a future state is so strong and necessary a security to morals, that we never ought to abandon or neglect it” (DNR XII.10, p. 94). Secondly, while acknowledging Philo’s claim that history shows many examples of the “pernicious consequences of religion on public affairs,” Cleanthes argues that this is only because the “proper office of religion” is “overlooked, and confounded” with the negative motives of those who use it to further their ambition and support their own faction (DNR XII.11–12, p. 95). The correct function of religion is to “regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, [and] infuse the spirit of temperance, order and obedience.” He asserts that this true religion acts silently, and “only enforces the motives of morality and justice.” Finally, Cleanthes argues that when we recognize that our Creator is “perfectly good, wise and powerful” and will therefore satisfy in eternity our “immeasurable desires of good,” this will provide us with “the only great comfort in life amidst all the attacks of adverse fortune” (DNR XII.24, p. 99). Thus, on the view of Cleanthes, we need true religion to provide a security to public morals through threats and rewards of an afterlife, we need it to humanize people, and finally we need it as a source of personal comfort and consolation in the face of adversity. 11.2 Belief in the Afterlife as a Security of Public Morals Philo counters each of these arguments. To Cleanthes’ first argument that religion is necessary for social regulation, Philo argues that the distant rewards and punishments of religion have little influence on human life. Consider, he says to Cleanthes, “the attachment, which we have to present things, and the little concern which we discover for objects so remote and uncertain” (DNR XII.13, pp. 95–96). He points out that this is implicitly acknowledged by theologians who constantly complain that people are only concerned with temporal matters and pay little attention to their eternal souls. It is only when they are arguing with their “speculative antagonists” that divines claim that religious motives are so powerful that “without them, it were impossible for civil society to subsist.” The truth of the matter is that “natural honesty and benevolence” have far more effect on people’s conduct than religious motives. For the latter can only operate “by starts and bounds,” and hence cannot become entirely habitual to the human mind. Drawing on the same analogy that Hume used in the Dialogue with Palamedes appended to his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,11 Philo likens our natural principles of morality to the physical principles of attraction and gravitation. Though producing a much smaller force than “the least impulse,”

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 221 they will always prevail “because no strokes or blows can be repeated with such constancy …” (DNR XII. 13, p. 96). Similarly, Philo stresses, on the one hand, that our natural moral principles are constantly reinforced in society, and, on the other, that religious principles depend on irregular motives and so cannot become habitual. In his Treatise, Hume went so far as to deny that people can genuinely believe in an afterlife—at least one which involves eternal rewards and punishments. He argued that the Christian idea of an afterlife bears so little resemblance to anything we have experienced in this life that it is impossible to develop the force and vivacity required by any genuine belief. He writes that while “the vulgar have no formal principles of infidelity, yet they are really infidels in their hearts, and have nothing like what we can call a belief in the eternal duration of their souls” (THN 1.3.9.13; SBN 114). He cites as evidence the fact that most Catholics condemn the most egregious historical acts where their co-religionists slaughtered Protestants (his example is the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre in Paris in 1572), and yet their religion teaches them that Protestants will burn forever in hell. Hume concluded, perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, that this shows that they couldn’t have held a genuine belief in the eternal damnation of their religious antagonists—and indeed, had no genuine belief in an afterlife at all. To return to Philo’s response to Cleanthes’ claim that the belief in an afterlife with rewards and punishments is needed to regulate people’s moral behavior, his overall stress is laid on the positive claim that our natural moral principles are constantly reinforced in society. In his writings on moral philosophy Hume argued that qualities such as “natural honesty and benevolence” as they exist in society are clearly in a person’s self-interest, as well as the interest of others. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, for example, he claimed that the social approbation that a person feels on exercising honesty reinforces the virtue and makes it “advantageous to the person himself” (EPM 6.13; SBN 238). Of course, Hume was not so naive as to think that everyone would recognize that their own self-interest lay in the life of virtue. But he insisted that threats of temporal punishments meted out by governments could regulate people’s behaviour, while those threats of punishments in a distant and uncertain afterlife could not. In sum, according to Hume, human nature is such that we have no need for belief in an afterlife to regulate human immorality, and religion itself cannot supply such regulation because men are not influenced by distant rewards and punishments. Hume’s views on this matter can be directly contrasted with those of his friend Adam Smith. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote that “the idea that… … we are always acting under the eye, and exposed to the punishment of God, the great avenger of injustice, is a motive capable of restraining the most headstrong passions… …” Smith held that for this reason we generally trust those “who seem greatly impressed with religious sentiments” (Smith 1976/1759, 170).12 Hume’s view was apparently quite the opposite. He is reported by James Boswell to have said that “when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.”13

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11.3 The Supposed Humanizing Effect of Religion It might be claimed that Hume himself accepted Cleanthes’ argument that the harm caused by religion lies in its abuses rather than in its very nature—and that the proper function of religion is to make people more humane. For he had put this argument forward in almost the same terms in a long footnote to the second volume of his History of England published in 1756.14 He wrote that “the proper office of religion is to reform men’s lives, to purify their hearts, to inforce all moral duties, and to secure obedience to the laws and civil magistrate” (Hume 1757, 449–450). He noted that as a historian he had no occasion in his narrative to mention the positive effect of religion on morals, because “while it pursues these salutary purposes, its operations, tho’ infinitely valuable, are secret and silent, and seldom come under the cognisance of history.” He sharply distinguishes this true religion with what he calls an “adulterate” form “which inflames faction, animates sedition, and prompts rebellion … . and is the greatest source of revolutions and public convulsions.” In general, it is a gross “sophism” to argue “from the abuse of anything, to the use of it” (loc. cit.). So, does Hume think there is a pure form of religion, based on reason, which supports morality and social order? The second paragraph of the footnote in the History, makes this problematic. True, he writes of “a species of devotion so pure, noble, and worthy of the Supreme being … which is most spiritual, simple, unadorned … which partakes nothing of the senses or imagination” (loc. cit.). He is clearly referring to forms of Protestantism which arose after the reformation in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain. But he immediately states as a historical fact that experience shows us that “this mode of worship does very naturally, among the vulgar, mount up into extravagance and fanaticism.” Further, just as he argued in his essay on “Superstition and Enthusiasm,” he argues here that this religion eventually becomes calm and that “as soon as the first ferment is abated, men are naturally in such sects left to the free use of their reason and shake off the fetters of custom and authority” (loc. cit.). Is he now thinking of contemporary forms of moderate Presbyterianism, as supported by the philosophy of Hutcheson and others of his own Scottish contemporaries? But why then did he drop the note from the last editions of the History, beginning with that of 1770, six years before his death? In Dialogue XII, Philo argues that religion, by its very nature, far from humanizing a person, weakens her attachment “to the natural motives of justice and humanity” (DNR XII.16, p. 97). It does this because it proposes “a new and frivolous species of merit” that has nothing to do with morality. Religious people consider themselves to be virtuous because they take part in religious rituals and expressions of faith, and they expect to be praised for these actions, rather than acts of justice or benevolence. This, he says, is true even if “superstition or enthusiasm should not put itself in direct opposition to morality” (loc. cit.). While Philo’s remarks at this point in the argument relate most obviously to popular religion, the context of his argument with Cleanthes suggests that Hume means them also to apply to the refined philosophical or natural religion promoted by his Scottish contemporaries.

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 223 Hume’s considered view seems to have been that religion cannot be separated from its actual roots in the passions of hope and fear. In Section 14 of his Natural History of Religion, he raised the question as to why people do not think that worship of the Deity should consist in acting virtuously or honestly—but rather in frivolous observances or those which cause suffering in oneself or others. His answer goes back to his claim at the beginning of that work that the real root of religion lies in fear of the unknown. Instead of seeking “divine favour and protection” by “promoting the happiness of his creatures,” the religious man or woman seeks some more immediate service of the Supreme Being, in order to allay those terrors, with which he is haunted. And any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations; that practice he will the more readily embrace, on account of those very circumstances, which should make him absolutely reject it. (NHR 14.6, p. 83) Hume’s argument is that the deity who causes such arbitrary evils as are encountered in human life is thought of as vindictive and as acting in arbitrary ways. “Our natural terrors present the notion of a devilish and malicious deity” (NHR 13.3, p. 77). Thus, the religious person will not think that he can serve such a deity by performing any moral deed that will make others happy. Any practice which appears particularly difficult and goes against our natural inclinations is considered of religious merit: In restoring a loan, or paying a debt, his divinity is, nowise beholden to him: because these acts of justice are what he was bound to perform, and what many would have performed, were there no god in the universe. But if he fast a day, or give himself a sound whipping; this has a direct reference, in his opinion, to the service of God. (NHR 14.6, p. 83) Such acts of self-abasement, it would appear, are required to worship a being who rouses in us mainly fear and terror. But, religion also has the tendency to make one hypocritical. Since the religious motive operates only by fits and starts a religious person must use great effort to rouse himself up to perform “his devotional task” (DNR XII.17, p. 97). Since no one can constantly feel inwardly what they profess outwardly “a habit of dissimulation is by degrees contacted: and fraud and falsehood become the predominant principle” (loc. cit.). The character of the religious person is formed in such a way that not only does he feel above the courtesies required by common life, but “where the interests of religion are concerned, no morality can be forcible enough to bind the enthusiastic zealot.” Moreover, the religious person’s attention to his own salvation “is apt to extinguish the benevolent affections, and beget a narrow, contracted selfishness” (DNR XII.18–19, p. 97). The point of view adopted here by Philo takes up arguments that Hume had developed in his

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footnote on priests in his “Of National Characters,” (Essays 199-201n3) and in his descriptions of historical religious figures such as Thomas More in his History of England (see Bernard 1994, 224–238). Hume holds that far from making a person more humane, monotheism by its very nature breeds intolerance of those of other faiths and encourages their persecution. The moral inferiority of monotheism over polytheism in this respect is a major theme of his Natural History of Religion. He ascribes a certain logic to the monotheistic reasoner: As each sect is positive that its own faith and worship are entirely acceptable to the Deity, and as no one can conceive, that the same being should be pleased with different and opposite rites and principles; the several sects fall naturally into animosity, and mutually discharge on each other that sacred zeal and rancour, the most furious and implacable of all human passions. (NHR 9.1, p. 60) Since there is only one God, He cannot approve of the practices and beliefs of more than one sect of his followers. Thus, the monotheist draws the conclusion that all other sects than his own, particularly those who also accept a monotheistic God, must be mistaken and need to be corrected. Polytheists, on the other hand, can easily accept that their neighbours worship different gods, and are often willing to incorporate them into their own pantheon and adopt some of their practices. Hume attributed intolerance to “almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God” (NHR 9.3, p. 61). But isn’t the defender of moderate rational religion impervious to such objections? Hume does not seem to think so. In discussing what he calls “Philosophical devotion” in his essay “The Sceptic,” Hume argues that because of the difficulty of maintaining the passion that sustains it “we must find some method of affecting the senses and imagination, and must embrace some historical, as well as philosophical account of the divinity” (Essays, 167). When he goes on to say that “popular superstitions and observances are even found to be of use …,” he surely had in mind the religion of his sophisticated Scottish contemporaries. After all, they were not simply Deists, but members of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and could not be considered wholly without their own Christian partisanship. 11.4 Religion Does Not Provide Consolation in the Face of Suffering and Death Cleanthes’ final argument is that true religion is required for consolation “amidst all the attacks of adverse fortune.” We need religion to console us in times of trouble and attain full satisfaction in life: The most agreeable reflection, which it is possible for human imagination to suggest, is that of genuine theism, which represents us as the workmanship of a being perfectly good and wise, and powerful; who created us for happiness, and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires for good, will prolong our

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 225 existence to all eternity, and will transfer us into an infinite variety of scenes, in order to satisfy those desires, and render our felicity complete and durable. (DNR XII.24, p. 99) For Cleanthes, like Hume’s contemporaries, the belief in a general providence and everlasting happy afterlife is necessary to reach happiness in the present life. Philo denies that human psychology allows any such consolation. When people are “dejected with grief or depressed with sickness” they develop notions of the afterlife that are in accord with their “present gloom and melancholy” (DNR XII.26-27, p. 225). In such a state, it is the terrors of the afterlife that affect them. Even a philosopher must contemplate the prospect of eternity through death, an event which is “so shocking to nature, that it must throw a gloom on all the regions which lie beyond it” (DNR XII.28, p. 100). Philo allows that both “fear and hope enter into religion” and that after one has recovered from a dejected state one might “run into the other extreme of joy and triumph” which will incline one to a feeling of hope for the prospects of a future life (DNR XII.29, p. 100). But such “excessive, enthusiastic joy” will soon exhaust the spirits, and only lead to further “fits of superstitious terror and dejection” (DNR XII.30, p. 100). In sum, “terror is the primary principle of religion” (DNR XII.29, p. 100). Philo’s remarks on hope and fear take us back to Hume’s discussion of what he called “the direct passions” in Book 2 of the Treatise. It is no coincidence that when he restructured his account of the passions in his Dissertation on the Passions—first published in Four Dissertations in 1757 along with the Natural History of Religion—he opened with this discussion.15 It has direct bearing on the central passions that, according to the latter work are at the core of religion, namely hope and fear (NHR 2.4, p. 38). These passions, unlike grief and joy, which result when the pain or pleasure expected from an object is certain or highly probable, are based on uncertainty. He considers various alternatives where grief and joy are fixed on different objects, before considering how they arise from one and the same object and so become mixed and are transformed into fear and joy (THN 2.3.9.16, p. 442; cf. Dissertation on the Passions 1.23, p. 6). He argues that as soon as there is any uncertainty in the existence of the object there is a wavering between those two passions. Yet throughout the next sixteen paragraphs of the Treatise discussion of the direct passions Hume concentrates his discussion only on fear. For example, he notes that we feel fear in thinking about great tortures even though we are not in any danger of suffering them ourselves. He concludes that “all kinds of uncertainty have a strong connexion with fear, even tho’ they do not cause any opposition of passions by the opposite views and considerations they present to us” (THN 2.3.9.27; SBN 446; Dissertation on the Passions 1.19, p. 5).16 Thus, given the natural effect of reasoning about any uncertain outcome, namely that it itself produces the passion of fear, it is not surprising that Hume thought that any consideration of the Christian afterlife would have an unhealthy effect on people. For, given the belief in such an afterlife, the natural uncertainty about where we will end up in an afterlife can only have fear as its

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natural consequence. Hume’s whole argument suggests that fear of hell will, for any religious person, predominate over hope of heaven. In general, according to Philo, the only happy state of mind is a moderate one, where a person is “calm and equable” (DNR XII.30, pp. 100–101).17 This is impossible “where a man thinks, that he lies, in such a profound darkness and uncertainty, between an eternity of happiness and an eternity of misery.” Philo holds it is “gloom and melancholy” which predominates in “devout people” (loc. cit.). But, of course, Hume’s philosophically inclined contemporaries would have denied that their belief in providence and an eternal life was the gloomy belief of superstitious religion. They claimed that it was a rational belief that arises in response to a clear recognition of design in the natural and moral worlds around us. Francis Hutcheson wrote that our natural inclination to see “the Order of Nature [as] good” inspires in us a “trust in divine PROVIDENCE, Hope of everlasting Happiness, and a full Satisfaction and Assurance of Mind, that the whole Series of Events is directed by an unerring Wisdom, for the greatest universal Happiness of the whole” (Hutcheson 2002/1732, 130–131). Hume’s friend Hugh Blair wrote a sermon on “The Influence of Religion on Adversity” which is focused on the theme of hope in everlasting happiness. He makes the remarkable claim that if this belief were maintained “with that full persuasion which Christian faith demands, it would, in truth, not merely alleviate, but totally annihilate all human miseries” and “banish all discontent, extinguish grief, and suspend the very feeling of pain”! (Blair 1777, 25–58, esp. 49). Even Hume, in his discussion of the passions that contribute to human happiness in his essay “The Sceptic,” wrote that “a propensity to hope and joy is real riches, one to fear and sorrow, real poverty” (“The Sceptic”; Essays, 167). Why then can he not accept the optimistic view of the universe and the hope for eternal happiness embraced by the proponents of natural religion? Here his answer takes us back to Bayle and the ineffectiveness of reason to positively affect the passions. Hume writes that “an abstract invisible object, like that which natural religion presents to us, cannot long actuate the mind, or be of any moment to us.” Natural religion alone is the the transitory effect of leisure, “a fine genius, and habit of study and contemplation” (loc. cit.). As we have seen he holds that in order to maintain the belief one needs some “historical account” of the Deity and of the “superstitions and observances” that are part of it. And these, as he argues throughout his writings on religion, can have only a negative effect on human happiness and morals. It would seem then, that false optimism, even about the overall state of the universe itself, cannot bring any consolation to human beings. After a short discussion of the absurdity of the idea that a just God would reward those in the afterlife who praise, entreat, or flatter Him,18 Philo concludes that true rational religion can never have any effect on human actions. What Philo calls “true religion” at the end of the Dialogues is the bare adoption of the speculative principle that “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence” (DNR XII.33, p. 101).19 But he states that it affords “no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forebearance” (p. 102). These remarks of Philo about the lack of

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 227 practical consequences of a religion of pure reason appear to be in accord with Hume’s own early views, expressed in Book 2 of the Treatise, about the impotence of reason alone to affect the will. 11.5 Conclusion: Reason and Philosophy as an Antidote to Religion It seems then that, unlike his philosophical contemporaries, Hume holds that the dominant passions of religion, whether popular or philosophical, must be gloom and melancholy. But we are left with a puzzle concerning Hume’s claim, with which I began, that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” For if reason has no independent role to play, if it cannot have any effect on the passions, what possible use are all Hume’s own critical writings on religion? What use is it to reveal that there is overwhelming evidence against any testimony to a miracle,20 that the belief in an afterlife itself is without any degree of probability,21 and that voluntary suicide when our suffering becomes unbearable does not offend nature and ought not offend any religious beliefs.22 These are rational conclusions that, it would seem, according to Hume’s own principles cannot overcome our passions. How can he write, as he does in his essay “Of Suicide,” that “one considerable advantage that arises from philosophy consists in the sovereign antidote which it offers to superstition and false religion” (Essays, 577)? And how can he go on to claim that “superstition, being founded on false opinion, must immediately vanish when true philosophy has inspired juster sentiments of superior powers” (op. cit., 579)? It would seem that reason is not as impotent against the passions of fear and terror which lie at the root of religion, as was suggested by Hume’s famous remark in the Treatise about the reason being the slave of the passions. I must admit that in introducing that remark at the beginning of the paper, I failed to provide an important bit of context. Reason itself, as Hume defines it in Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, is simply the faculty by which we discover what is the case. He does not, as some have thought, actually reduce reason itself to a calm passion. It is the autonomous faculty by which we discover what is true or false, or at least what is probable. Moreover, Hume distinguished the passions themselves from the judgments or beliefs that accompany them. While the passions do not represent anything in the world, the beliefs to which they are connected do. Beliefs cause passions, as well as result from them;23 and the discovery through reason of the falsity of the relevant beliefs can eliminate the passion. While a coward will believe “every account of danger he meets with,” in specific instances one can to him that there is no danger. Hume writes that “the moment we perceive the falshood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means our passions yield to our reason without any opposition” (THN 2.3.3.7; SBN 416–417).24 Is that not what Hume hoped would happen when, in his writings on religion, he exposed the false beliefs which lie behind it? Consider again the fear of what happens after death. In his essay “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” he provided as close to a proof of the falsity of the doctrine of an afterlife as any reasonable person might expect. He argues, in effect, that reason provides absolutely no evidence that there is either pain or pleasure or after death. He argues that one’s fear of death is an

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indication of the mortality rather than the immortality of the soul. It is a passion that, through most of our lives, serves to keep us alive. Although “death is in the end unavoidable … the human species could not be preserved, had not nature inspired us with an aversion towards it.”25 The truth of any beliefs which arise simply from our passions “are to be suspected.” Just as the cowardly person should not believe in the existence of those dangers which naturally result from his overactive imagination, so the melancholy person should not believe in those “imaginary enemies, the demons of his fancy, who haunt him with superstitious terrors, and blast every enjoyment of his life” (DNR X.11, p. 70). We should not believe those stories about the punishment in an afterlife for our misdeeds in this life. The result of reason and philosophy should be an extinction of the fear of pains in an afterlife that are generated by our religious imaginations. This should be a case in which, to use Hume’s own words, “our passions yield to reason without any opposition.” Notes 1 Hume thanks his friend Michael Ramsay for his “trouble about Baile … a Book will yourself find Diversion & Improvement in” in a letter of 1732 (“Hume to Michael Ramsay, March 1732,” HL, I, 11–12). Greig speculates in a footnote that this is “almost certainly Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire … .” But it is just as likely that Hume was referring to the Pensées diverses … . 2 I am here quoting the 1708 English translation, Miscellaneous reflections, occasion’d by the comet which appeared in December 1680 ( Bayle 1708/1683). 3 Art. Ovide, Note H, Dictionaire Historique et Critique ( Bayle 1730/1697, vol. 3, 561a). See also Jones 1982, 5. Bayle’s English follower, Bernard Mandeville took this idea one step further in his 1732 Enquiry into the Origin of Modern Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War when he wrote that “even those who … strictly follow the Dictates of their Reason, are not less compell’d to do so by some Passion or other … than others … whom we call Slaves to their Passions” ( Mandeville 1732, 31; my emphasis). There is strong evidence that Hume read Mandeville’s book before he (Hume) left for France in 1734. See Wright (2012, 187–209). 4 In Note H of his article on Ovid, Bayle appears to agree with Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac whom he cites as claiming (paraphrasing Socrates) that there is a “war … between [man’s] … soul and his body, between his reason and his senses, between his sensitive and his reasonable soul… …” and that “we are a composition of two enemies who never agree: the sublime part of our soul is always at war with the inferior part” ( Bayle 1730/1697, vol. 3, 560b). 5 However, it is too simplistic to say that for him that virtue merely involves the victory of calm passions over violent ones, since on his view any passion may become calm or violent. See Hume to Hutcheson, 10 January, 1743; HL I, 46. 6 From Francis Hutcheson’s 1742 An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense ( Hutcheson 2002/1742, 174). 7 From “Of Parties in General” in Essays, 54–63; see esp. pp. 62–63. The essay was first published in 1741. 8 Given the unlikelihood that this is true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Hume means it ironically. 9 The paragraph in which Hume makes this claim was added in the last year of his life. He argues that the difference between the atheist and theist is really “merely verbal.” M.A. Stewart (2000, 303) comments that it “takes on special significance as his dying testament to posterity.”

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 229 10 From Francis Hutcheson’s 1755 A System of Moral Philosophy ( Hutcheson 1755, vol. 1, 220). While Hutcheson’s System was published after Hume wrote the Dialogues, it is a fair assumption that it was circulating in manuscript form much earlier. Hume opens his 1742 essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” with the claim that “the corruption of the best things produce the worst, is grown into a maxim.” 11 “A Dialogue,” in EPM ( Hume 1998/1751, p. 116, 26; SBN 333). 12 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.v.12–13. See Harris (2003, 245). 13 James Boswell, “An Account of my Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.” in Hume (1947/1779, 76). 14 It bears the date of 1757 but was in fact published in November of 1756. 15 See Section 1 of A Dissertation on the Passions (in Hume 2007/ 1757, 3–6). And see Immerwahr (1994, esp. 230–233). 16 In summing up his whole discussion in the Treatise, Hume tells his reader that he need not go into details about “terror, consternation, astonishment, anxiety, and other passions of that kind” because they “are nothing but different species and degrees of fear” (THN 2.31.4.10; SBN 447). 17 Compare “The Sceptic” where Hume gives three conditions of the passions necessary for happiness: they must be “neither too violent nor too remiss,” “benign and social, not rough or fierce,” and “cheerful and gay, not gloomy or melancholy” (Essays, 167). 18 DNR XII.31, p. 101. Thus, it would seem that Philo could not approve of the form of worship of the inhabitants of El Dorado as described by Voltaire in Chapter 18 of Candide, which simply involves praise for the Deity. 19 Hume puts the expression “true religion” in Philo’s words only once in the course of the Dialogues, viz., DNR XII.22, p. 98. This principle sums up what Philo calls “the whole of natural theology” at DNR IX.33, p. 101. 20 “Of Miracles” in EHU, Section 10. 21 “Of the Immortality of the Soul” in Essays, 590–598. 22 “Of Suicide” in Essays, 577–589. 23 THN 1.3.10.4; SBN 119–121: “As belief is almost absolutely requisite to the exciting of the passions, so the passions in their turn are very favourable to belief.” 24 For a discussion of Hume’s theory of motivation in Book 2, Part 3, Section 3 of the Treatise, see my 2009, Ch. 7. On Hume’s claim that reason can eliminate a passion see the interesting discussion by Nathan Brett and Katherina Paxman in their 2008. 25 “Of the Immortality of the Soul” in Essays, 598.

References Texts by Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (THN) Hume, D. 1978/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., P. H. Nidditch (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 2002/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature, D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Referred to herein as THN.) THN references are to the book, part, section, and paragraph in the Norton edition, and to the page number in the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch (SBN) edition. The Enquiries (EHU, EPM) Hume, D. 1975/1748-51. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding & Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., P. H. Nidditch (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.)

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Hume, D. 1998/1751. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: A Critical Edition, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Referred to herein as EPM.) Hume, D. 2000/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Referred to herein as EHU.) EHU and EPM references are to the book, part, section, and paragraph in the Beauchamp editions, and to the page number in the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch (SBN) edition. The Essays Hume, D. 1987/1741-77. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, revised edition, E. F. Miller (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. (Referred to herein as Essays.) A Dissertation on the Passions & The Natural History of Religion (NHR). Hume, D. 2007/1757. A Dissertation on the Passions & The Natural History of Religion, T. L. Beauchamp (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The Natural History of Religion is referred to herein by NHR.) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR) Hume, D. 1947/1779. The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, N. K. Smith (ed.). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Hume, D. 2007/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, D. Coleman (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Referred to herein as DNR.) All page references to the DNR are to Coleman’s edition and follow this format: part (Roman numeral). paragraph (Arabic numeral), page (e.g., DNR XI.3, p. 79). The History of Great Britain Hume, D. 1757. The History of Great Britain. Vol. II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II. and James II. London: A. Millar. Letters (HL) Hume, D. 1932. Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., J. Y. T. Grieg (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Referred to herein as HL.) Other Primary Literature Bayle, Pierre. 1708/1683. Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion’d by the Comet Which Appeared in December 1680, 2 vols. London: J. Morphew. Bayle, Pierre. 1730/1697. Dictionaire Historique et Critique par M. Pierre Bayle, 4th ed., 4 vols. Amsterdam: P. Brunel, R. & J. Wetstein, et al. Bayle, Pierre. 1994/1683. Pensées diverses sur la comète II, A. Prat (ed.), revised by R. Rétate, Paris: Société de Textes Française Modernes.

Reason and Passion in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion 231 Blair, Hugh. 1777. Sermons. Edinburgh: William Creech, W. Strahan, and T Cadell. Boswell, James. 1777. “An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.,” in Hume 1947/1779, pp. 76–79. Hutcheson, Francis. 1755. A System of Moral Philosophy, in Three Books. London: A. Millar & T. Longman. Hutcheson, Francis. 2002/1742. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Mandeville, Bernard. 1732. Enquiry into the Origin of Modern Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. London: John Brotherton. Smith, Adam. 1976/1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Secondary Literature Bernard, Christopher. 1994. “Hume and the Madness of Religion,” in M. A. Stewart & John P. Wright (eds.), Hume and Hume’s Connexions, pp. 224–238. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brett, Nathan & Paxman, Katherina. 2008. “Reason in Hume’s Passions.” Hume Studies, 34(1), 43–59. Harris, James. 2003. “Answering Bayle’s Question: Religious Belief in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in D. Garber & S. Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 229–253. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Immerwahr, John. 1994. “Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32(2), 225–240 Jones, Peter. 1982. Hume’s Sentiments. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stewart, M. A. 2000. “The Dating of Hume’s Manuscripts,” in Paul Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, pp. 267–314. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Wright, John P. 2012. “Hume on the Origin of ‘Modern Honour’: A Study in Hume’s Philosophical Development.” in Ruth Savage (ed.), Philosophy & Religion in Enlightenment Britain, pp. 187–209. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Charles Nussbaum

A man may disturb society, no doubt; and thereby incur the displeasure of the almighty: But the government of the world is placed far beyond his reach and violence. And how does it appear, that the almighty is displeased with those actions, that disturb society? By the principles which he has implanted in human nature, and which inspire us with a sense of remorse, if we ourselves have been guilty of such actions, and with blame and disapprobation, if we ever observe them in others. —Hume, “Of Suicide”

12.1 Puzzles and Inconsistencies Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion presents the reader with an obvious puzzle: who, if anyone, speaks for Hume? Equally puzzling is Pamphilus’ final declaration that, by his lights at least, Cleanthes had prevailed in the debate. There are, in addition, apparent inconsistencies in the position of Philo, the speaker whose views are most naturally identified with those of Hume. Throughout the discussion, Philo is hypercritical of the argument from design. Yet in Part X he concedes, “You ascribe, Cleanthes, (and I believe justly), a purpose and intention to nature” (DNR X.26, 74); and in the twelfth and final Part, he grants that “A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems as at all times to reject it” (DNR XII.2, 89). Again, in Part XI Philo asserts that there are available four hypotheses concerning the first causes of the universe: that they are perfectly malicious, that they are perfectly good, that they are malicious and good in opposition, or that they are neither malicious nor good, that is, that they are amoral. The presence of good and evil in the universe, he claims, rules out the first two hypotheses; and the uniformity of law tells against the third. Therefore, he concludes, the fourth is the most probable. Yet in Part XII he argues that because the “natural” attributes of God resemble human intelligence more than God’s moral attributes resemble human virtues, it follows that the “moral qualities of man are more defective in their kind than are his natural abilities” (DNR XII.8, 94). Surely human moral qualities are not defective in their kind when compared with the nonexistent moral qualities of an amoral first cause. DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-17

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 233 All of these conundrums can be resolved if we are clear about two related distinctions. The first is a distinction between intelligent design and moral design, and the second is a distinction between the intelligent designer of natural theology and the perfect deity of the Christian religion. Both distinctions emerge in Philo’s exultant peroration in Part X: Here, Cleanthes, I find myself at ease in my argument. Here I triumph. Formerly, when we argued concerning the natural attributes of intelligence and design, I needed all my skeptical and metaphysical subtlety to elude your grasp … the beauty and fitness of final causes strike us with such irresistible force that all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms… … But there is no view of human life or of the condition of mankind from which, without the greatest violence, we can infer the moral attributes or learn that infinite benevolence, conjoined with infinite power and infinite wisdom, which we must discover by the eyes of faith alone. (DNR X.8, 36) The belief in a version, however attenuated, of the amoral intelligent designer of natural theology can claim some degree of justification: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no further than to human intelligence, and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs, and believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it? (DNR XII.33, 102) The existence of an infinitely benevolent God, on the other hand, whose moral qualities brook no comparison with human virtue, cannot be established through argument at all. This incomparability, moreover, is a double-edged sword, for the more incomparable the divine moral attributes are, the more exalted they may be, but also the more inscrutable they are. Philo’s apparent inconsistencies can, then, be resolved as follows. First, despite serious reservations, Philo is willing to grant some preponderance of evidence in support of the hypothesis of natural design, but none at all in favor of moral design. Second, human virtue does not suffer in comparison with the moral qualities of the source of intelligent design, whatever it may be, for that source is amoral. Human virtue may indeed suffer in comparison with the moral qualities of an omnibenevolent God, but, absent a groundless anthropomorphism, these are so inscrutable as to render the comparison vacuous. Concerning moral design, “a total suspension of judgment is here our only reasonable recourse” (DNR VIII.12, 62). But with this, we seem to have arrived at a solution to our second puzzle, namely Pamphilus’ apparent awarding of the laurel to Cleanthes: “I cannot but think that Philo’s principles are more probable than Demea’s, but that those of Cleanthes approach still nearer to the truth” (DNR XII.34, 102). The hypothesis

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of natural design is, as Philo concedes, justified (“probable”) to some degree.1 The hypothesis of moral design, in contradistinction, may be true (as Pamphilus believes it is), but it is unjustified. It is based solely on faith. And Philo does concede that a “person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity” (DNR XII.33, 102). This “victory” and concession afford Cleanthes scant satisfaction: “For to what purpose establish the natural attributes of the Deity, while the moral are still doubtful and uncertain?” (DNR X.28, 74). The trick would be to extract some version of moral design from the amoral designer of natural theology. Cleanthes attempts no such maneuver, nor does Philo or Demea. But does Hume? I believe that the epigraph shows that he does, or at least suggests that he would be open to it. If this is right, then we will be able to conclude that none of the three main speakers in the Dialogues speaks entirely for Hume, thereby solving our first puzzle. Salmon (1978), by contrast, not only identifies Hume’s position with Philo’s, but he discounts Philo’s grudging support for intelligent design as not seriously intended (171). By means of adroit formalization of some of Philo’s objections by application of Bayes’ Theorem, Salmon is able to demonstrate that the hypothesis of intelligent design is not very probable. The prior probability of the hypothesis is low when compared with the priors of hypotheses concerning other causal “springs” and “principles” we observe at work in our “little corner of the world” (DNR VII.11, 54) such as mechanism, vegetation, generation, and instinct. We regularly observe reason arising from biological generation, but never (with the possible exception of breeding or artificial selection2) do we observe biological generation arising from reason (DNR VII.13–14, 55). And while the likelihood of design (probability of observed order given intelligent design) may be fairly high, it does not necessarily raise the posterior probability of the design hypothesis significantly when compared with the posterior probabilities of the competing hypotheses. The posterior probability of intelligent design, moreover, is significantly lowered when the vague term “order” is precisified as non-entropy, as Salmon thinks it should be, to avoid begging the question by assuming that the order in question is teleological order. Although Hume evinces no acquaintance with Bayes’ Theorem, which was not made public until 1763, Salmon holds that Hume had a firm intuitive grasp of its underlying logic.3 Finally, Salmon interprets Pamphilus’ final judgment as nothing more than an expression of Hume’s less than sanguine expectations concerning the impact his Dialogues would have on theists. Salmon’s application of Bayes’ Theorem may be accepted without accepting the interpretive consequences he draws from it. First, if Hume’s intuitive grasp of the theorem was so sure, and if he intended Philo to be his spokesman, why does Philo refer in Part X to his own earlier objections as “cavils and sophisms”? Salmon is well aware of this anomaly, and, in response, he makes very heavy weather of Cleanthes’ passing analogy (DNR III.2, 29) between a loud and melodious “articulate voice” heard from the heavens and a linguistically articulate human voice. The never-encountered phenomenon of the heavenly voice, Salmon contends, constitutes a decisive negative test case for the existence of an

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 235 intelligent designer, and he registers surprise that the analogy is no sooner presented than it is dropped and ignored. Left standing unopposed as it is, Salmon thinks it is intended by Hume as a “prior refutation” of Philo’s later “declaration of belief” in the design argument (Salmon 1978, 170). This is most implausible. A sound refutation by Cleanthes in Part III of a declaration in Part XII by Philo, allegedly Hume’s spokesperson, would be logically and rhetorically very strange. Language production, in addition, is a rather special case of intelligent “design”, ill-suited to stand in for intelligent design sans phrase. To assume that God would communicate linguistically in a loud and melodious voice is rampant anthropomorphism, and the subsequent critique of anthropomorphism by both Philo and Demea may be taken as the allegedly absent response to Cleanthes’ analogy. And what do we make of the considerable textual evidence outside the Dialogues that Hume himself thought that the hypothesis of natural design enjoyed some, even if comparatively slight, weight of evidence in its favor (see note 1 above)? Second, while overemphasizing the articulate voice analogy, Salmon, in my estimation, underestimates the importance of the distinctions between Philo’s two designers and between intelligent design and moral design. In fact, he not only fails to distinguish them, he holds them to be logically inseparable. Design concerns the adjustment of means to ends, and such adjustment cannot be evaluated, he thinks, without discerning the ends: “… the moral attributes of God are inextricably bound up even in the argument directed toward his natural attributes” (Salmon 1978, 158). Insisting that God’s means be adjusted to God’s ends is unexceptionable. But morality may be an end of intelligent design only to the extent that it is socially adaptive for humans. As we will see in the following section, this turns out to be Hume’s own view of the matter, and it implies nothing regarding any moral attributes belonging to God. Salmon’s logical inseparability claim, therefore, does not threaten the separation between an intelligent designer and a morally perfect deity I have emphasized. Third, identifying order with lack of entropy is scarcely less question begging against the design argument than identifying it with teleology is question begging in favor of it. Our universe contains a vast number of non-living, non-entropic systems, but it was not these that impressed Hume. To all appearances, Hume was particularly interested in a very special class of non-entropic systems, namely living things; and the sort of order that seems to have made the argument from design most plausible to him is the order of the living world, namely the adaptive designs he so appreciated, an order that would not receive an adequate nonteleological explanation for nearly a century after his death, and one that the “natural” and “moral” philosophy of his time were incapable of providing. Hume’s conviction that there had to be some design principle at work other than the “springs” and “principles” then available to him, though he knew not what, impelled him, I believe, to accept, however reluctantly, the argument from intelligent design. In what follows I shall treat the “intelligent design” of the Dialogues as a provisional stand-in for a more adequate principle of amoral natural design, namely natural selection, which Hume sought but did not have.4

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12.2 Deriving Moral Design from Intelligent Design Let us suppose, with Philo (as I have urged we interpret him), that the designer of the universe is intelligent but amoral. An intelligent designer of the world of living things must be concerned with what we would term adaptive biological functions, and Hume is fully aware of the adaptive function of human social organization: “’Tis by society alone [man] is able to supply his defects, and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures, and even acquire a superiority above them” (Hume 1978/1739, 485).5 But morality serves, indeed arguably is necessary for, a well-functioning human society: “everything which contributes to the happiness of society recommends itself directly to our approbation and good will. Here is a principle which accounts, in great part, for the origin of morality” (1957/1751, 47).6 Adaptive biological function in general, moreover, is for Hume a major source of aesthetic appreciation: “It is evident that that one considerable source of beauty in all animals is the advantage which they reap from the particular structure of their limbs and members, suitably to the particular manner of life to which they are by nature destined” (1957/1751, 69). Because it is suitable to the distinctly human manner of life, moral character is, for Hume, an object of aesthetic taste. But Hume radicalizes this fairly tame conclusion: for him, the capacity for moral evaluation just is a mode of taste, a response directed specifically to the suitability of character to the human manner of life. “The approbation of moral qualities most certainly is not deriv’d from reason, or any comparison of ideas; but proceeds entirely from a moral taste” (1978/1739, 581). But, as a mode of taste, it differs from the providential innate dedicated moral sense of Francis Hutcheson that very likely inspired it. “Vice and virtue, therefore,” says Hume, “may be compared to sounds, colours, heat, and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind” (1978/1739, 469). This comparison will not bear too much weight: the perception of colors, as opposed to aesthetic responses to them, tracks, albeit somewhat imperfectly, the reflectance properties of objects. The perception of sounds tracks longitudinal waveform disturbances in the conductive surround and the locations of their sources. Nevertheless, Hume means to emphasize that moral qualities, like the socalled secondary qualities of early modern philosophy, are response-dependent properties: if human beings did not exist, moral qualities would at best be powers or dispositions to produce in us sentiments of moral praise or blame. “Truth is disputable, not taste. What exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgment; what each man feels within himself is the standard of sentiment” (Hume 1957/1751, 5). Hume is quite clear that non-human animals are not capable of moral evaluations (1978/1739, 467–468). However, unlike the wide variety of objects disposed to produce in certain sentient creatures the experiences of secondary qualities and to which objects these qualities are then ascribed, human beings themselves are, in our experience, the sole possessors of the power to produce moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation and, as a result, the sole objects of moral character ascriptions as well as the sole beings

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 237 capable of responding to these productive powers. But, as we shall see, human beings are not the only objects of moral concern. Think now of Philo’s intelligent, but amoral, designer. By designing human beings so as to adapt them to their particular manner of life, it has created morality: it has introduced into the natural world the very distinction between good and evil.7 Perhaps this amoral designer cannot understand morality prescriptively from the standpoint of a participant in a human form of life, but it can cognize morality descriptively as a social adaptation. As a result, this derivation of morality from amoral design does not fail to respect the Humean logical divide between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Compare the following letter from Hume to Hutcheson: What Experience have we with regard to superior beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all? They have implanted those Sentiments in us for the Conduct of life like our bodily Sensations, which they possess not themselves [Hume (1932), I: 40 (Letter 16, March 16, 1740)]. 12.3 Natural Providence For the Humean naturalist, the introduction of morality into the world is a momentous event. Although it does not guarantee anything like divine providence, it makes moral amelioration, whatever its constitution, possible. “Through no fault of our own,” says Stephen Jay Gould, and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We did not ask for such responsibility, but here we are. (Gould 1985, 431) Although Gould’s conception of purposeless evolutionary accident is only anachronistically applied to Hume, the notion of human moral8 exceptionalism is not. To approve a moral agent is to see that agent as virtuous, and that is to be pleased with his or her character traits insofar as the actions they motivate conduce either to the agent’s happiness or to the well-being of society (Hume 1978/1739, 619). Such traits appeal to us as morally praiseworthy. “Sympathy,” Hume says, “is the chief source of moral distinctions” (Hume 1978/1739, 618). ‘Sympathy’ is his term for the source of the positive emotion normally constituted humans are inclined to feel when they witness the happiness of another, and for the source of the discomfort they are inclined to feel at the sight of suffering. Happiness and suffering strike us so because “there is no human, and indeed no sensible, creature whose happiness or misery does not, in some measure, affect us, when brought near to us, and represented in lively colours” (Hume 1978/1739, 481). “This concern,” says Hume, “extends itself beyond our own species” (loc. cit.). But why do we feel this generalized concern?

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The person is a stranger: I am in no way interested in him, nor lie under any obligation to him: His happiness concerns not me, further than the happiness of every human, and indeed of every sensible creature. That is, it affects me only by sympathy. By that principle, whenever I discover his happiness and good, whether in its causes or effects, I enter so deeply into it, that it gives me a sensible emotion. The appearance of qualities, that have a tendency to promote it, have an agreeable effect on my imagination, and command my love and esteem. (Hume 1978/1739, 588–589) This passage poses an interpretive difficulty. Hume had stated that the happiness or misery of all sentient creatures affects and concerns us. Now he says that the happiness of this stranger does not concern him, or concerns him only to the extent that he feels sympathy for all sensible creatures. Sympathy seems to be the disposition to respond emotionally when happiness or suffering is “brought near to us” (481) or “whenever I discover” it (588).9 This emotion then stimulates the imagination so as to engender an agreeable or disagreeable effect. Because the objects eligible for positive moral appraisal are not the actions or action types that maximize pleasure (or preferences) and minimize pain, but the character and character traits conducive to beneficial actions,10 Hume, though a consequentialist, is more a virtue ethicist than he is a utilitarian: “Virtue in rags,” i.e., inefficacious virtue, he says, “is still virtue” (1739/ 1978, 584).11 Such traits appeal to our moral taste: they command our love and esteem. Hume does recommend the greatest happiness for the individual and for society, but he does not explicitly advocate the greatest happiness for the greatest number equally apportioned, nor does he make use of a felicific calculus. If humans did not exist, then Humean sympathy12 would not exist either, and if such sympathy did not exist, then, on Humean principles, the universe would lack moral value. In an amoral universe there can be no moral amelioration of any sort, much less providence. Barring the existence, now or in the future, of non-human sympathetic beings, the dispensation of whatever providence there is to be found in this universe falls to human beings, and to human beings alone. We are, as Gould says, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth, a responsibility that lies considerably heavier in our time than it did in Hume’s. 12.4 The “Escalator of Reason” and the Expanding Circle Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. (Singer 1981, 88) Peter Singer (1981) and, following him, Steven Pinker (2011), have pointed to reason as a, and perhaps the, crucial factor in the transition from the evolved, genetically based coordinating habits (or proclivities to such habituation) we

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 239 share with other social mammals, to the rule-based moral systems so typical of human life. Beyond the capacity for valid and strong inference, the adjustment of means to ends, the avoidance of logical and preferential inconsistency, and respect for fact, the terms ‘reason’ and ‘rational’ are as ubiquitous as they are difficult to pin down. Singer and Pinker emphasize reason’s impartiality. In order to justify a moral claim rationally, a group member must rely on principles that abstract from particularity. “Because I, this particular individual, say so” does not count as a rational moral ground. So, we may at least say what rational moral justification is not. It is not justification by charismatic authority or mere assertion ex cathedra. That way lies ideology. If a group member is to be accorded certain rights and privileges, such conferral must rely on principles that place that member within a category any of whose members are equally eligible. Whatever rationality is, abstraction and categorization lie at its heart. Enlightenment, as Kant famously asserted, is emancipation from intellectual tutelage, the ability, indeed the responsibility, of the individual thinker to harken directly to the voice of reason. Hence the escalator image: once reason is in place, it can take the emancipated thinker to unexpected places, as it took arithmetical calculation from subitized quantities, to the natural numbers, to the negative integers, to the rational numbers, to the irrational numbers, to the imaginary numbers, to the transfinite number of natural numbers, and to the even larger transfinite cardinals (cf. Singer 1981, 88). Each of these extensions resulted from a new act of abstraction, an upward move on the escalator of reason. But here’s the rub. If moral evaluation is, as Hume thought, responsedependent, if moral values are not discovered as part of the furniture of the universe, then the relevant categorizations, including the categorization both of morally eligible and morally responsible beings, are up to us, not up to the world, as it is with the category of natural kinds or with the category of mathematical objects, whatever the latter’s mysterious ontological status. In the case of morally relevant categorization, we decide. But how? “That one’s own interests are one among many sets of interests, no one more important than the similar interests of others,” says Singer (1981, 106), “is a conclusion that, in principle, any rational being can come to see.” But is rationality sufficient? What “others” rationally qualify as objects of moral concern and respect? Here Singer draws back, endorsing psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s claim that rationality is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition “for being on the highest moral level” (1981, 138).13 Something additional is required. Some years ago, the moral philosopher R. M. Hare clarified the important distinction between generality and universality. “Generality,” he said, “is the opposite of specificity, whereas universality is compatible with specificity, and means merely the logical property of being governed by a universal quantifier and not containing individual constants” (Hare 1981, 41), that is, any substitution of constants in the argument positions of a universally quantified expression.14 The abstraction of moral principle does require universality, but it does not preclude specificity. This means that the predicate constants in a moral principle and the categories they pick out can be quite specific (they may pick out quite restricted

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extensions) while still respecting universality. Are there any logical constraints on the choice of morally relevant predicates? A fanciful scenario devised by Bas C. van Fraassen (1995, 79) in a different context would suggest not: A neo-Nazi community which has grown up on a quite inaccessible island considers the reliability of moral judgment or insight. They note a number of examples: ‘X was faced with an execrable situation, e.g., miscegenation, she judged it to be execrable, and we realized she had judged correctly.’ It would be easy to formulate a logically impeccable universal principle such that for any rational agent, engaging in “miscegenation” is morally wrong. The community in question is not Singer’s, but can this choice of moral predicates be rejected on grounds of rationality alone? We might say that any such moral categorization of miscegenation is irrational, since the notion of race itself has no factual basis in human biology. Suppose, though, that the neo-Nazi forgoes the suspect notion of race, and retreats to the more acceptable idea of intraspecific variety or ethnic group. Surely we categorize human beings rationally as members of diverse ethnic groups when we recognize that people of sub-Saharan African descent are susceptible to sickle-cell anemia or Ashkenazi Jews to Tay-Sachs disease. We may argue that this is acceptable because that categorization is dictated by response-independent facts concerning genetic propensities, whereas the categorization of ethnic groups as morally unsuitable for inter-ethnic reproductive relations is dictated by racist ideology, not response-independent fact. But again, no moral categorization is dictated by response-independent facts according to Hume. Historically, Singer points out, the category of morally eligible beings has steadily expanded from the clan or extended family, to the ethnic group, to the city-state, to the nation state, and to the human world. This, he claims, is the result of impartial rationality, and impartial rationality requires further expansion to include all sentient life. But does it? Recall Singer’s concession to Kohlberg. No doubt it was his estimation of the insufficiency of rationality itself to establish substantive moral principle that led Mill to assert of Kant that “when he begins to deduce from this precept [the categorical imperative] any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur” (2001/1861, 4). In fairness to Kant, it should be pointed out that Mill’s criticism cuts more deeply against the first and most familiar formulation of the categorical imperative, the formula of universal law,15 than it does against the second, the formula of the end in itself.16 But, we must ask, does treating a rational being simply as a means and not as an end offend against reason? Or does it offend against the endorsement of a Kantian Enlightenment ideal, the decision to establish the category of morally responsible (and, on Kantian principles, morally eligible) beings as coextensive with reason-consulting

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 241 beings, however reason is to be understood? It is fair to categorize humans as rational beings if we are not too picky about what ‘rational’ means, but one need not be a utilitarian to doubt that the investment of rational beings with moral standing is itself dictated by reason. Anyone sympathetic to Hume’s responsedependence model will be equally skeptical. Compare Hume (1957/1751, 21): Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment, the consequence, I think, is that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property exclusive of such arbitrary lords. (emphasis added) Like all sentient life, such creatures would be morally eligible, but they would not, according to Hume, be morally responsible. One person’s modus ponens, it is so often said, is another’s modus tollens. The Humean view may of course be rejected. Since this is not the place to canvass and evaluate realist or constructivist approaches such as Kant’s, which reject the response-dependence model of moral values, I will put this issue aside here. Suppose we accept, in a Humean spirit, the Singer-Kohlberg view that rationality is not sufficient, but only necessary for “being on the highest moral level,” and that something more is required. I shall argue that Humean sympathy plausibly supplies the additional component.17 We had agreed, I hope, that Humean sympathy is the disposition to respond emotionally to sentient beings. When we so respond, we empathize.18 Here, a distinction I have respected, but to this point not emphasized, becomes important. We are sympathetically disposed, as Hume seems to suggest, with regard to all sentient life. So, in keeping with Singer’s proposals concerning the expansion of the circle, any sentient being may be morally eligible. But, not every sentient being qualifies as a responsible moral agent. What makes the difference? Rationality, yes, but rationality deployed in the service of the “greatest possible good” of the individual and society (Hume 1978/1739, 418). Rationally guided motivations or “passions” Hume terms “calm” as opposed to “violent” (417–418). The former are not actually rational motivations, since for Hume there are none, but they are sometimes mistaken for rational motivations because of their reliance on reasoning and their stability over time.19 Calm passions are clearly virtuous for Hume, since he identifies them with “strength of mind” (1978/1739, 418). They are required for the distinctively human capacity to build or train up a character with integrity. For a virtue ethicist like Hume, beings capable of this feat are not only objects of moral concern, they are objects of moral evaluation, for only such entities can affect the human imagination so as to elicit positive or negative responses of moral taste. Such beings might be said to be capable of self-formation, and therefore morally responsible in a way not all sentient beings are responsible.

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When we empathize with a moral agent, as opposed to a merely sentient being, we take on in imagination or simulate that agent’s axiological Weltanschauung: we make, if we can, her ultimate ends our ends, if only for the moment; another agent’s ends need not, in actuality, be my ends. If that agent’s character traits are suited to further her ends,20 if these traits are also conducive to the flourishing of society, and if these societal values cohere with our own, we hold that individual in esteem. There is every indication that Hume means to include some such stipulations. If he did not, he would have to accept as virtuous character traits conducive to the furtherance of any set of ultimate ends and the flourishing of any society. It is doubtful that he would be willing to do so. He does, after all, refer with contempt to “ignorant and barbarous ancestors” (1957/1748, 80), and he claims that “the uncultivated Nations are not only inferior to civiliz’d in Government, civil, military, and ecclesiastical; but also in Morals”; and that “their whole manner of Life is disagreeable and uneligible to the last Degree” (2011, 198). Although the context of the following passage concerns our responses to literary works that require the reader’s imaginative participation,21 it makes the crucial point: But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever. (Hume 1987/1741–77, 247) The ends must be ends with which we can empathize; and by the “greatest good of society,” Hume certainly meant the greatest good of societies displaying allegiance to his Enlightenment political ideals.22 Only this far, it seems, had his circle of morally responsible agents expanded. Nevertheless, we seem to have arrived at what may be seen as a naturalistic approximation of another Enlightenment ideal, the Kantian ideal of a Kingdom of Ends, naturalistic because it is grounded in human nature, not in disembodied pure practical reason. Kant had argued that because every rational being is an end in itself, all rational agents must share the same end: all are enjoined to strive to bring about the highest good, which is universal happiness justly apportioned to individual virtue, or degree of compliance with the commands of the categorical imperative (Kant 1956/1788, V, 124–125). But the highest good is a version of providence, and Kant argues (in effect) that since ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (or at least ‘is possible’),23 God’s existence must be assumed as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to guarantee the very possibility of bringing it about. Kant’s view is, then, a weak (and epistemically uncommitted24) theodicy, since only the possibility of achieving the highest good, and not success in achieving it, is guaranteed. Humean providence, the “greatest good” for the individual and society, is assured of no guarantees at all. Its universalistic aspirations, moreover, face constant pushback from egoistical impulses, though Hume emphatically denies, against Hobbes and Mandeville, that morality is based on a covert egoism (1957/1751, 44). But, as we

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 243 saw, without human existence (or the existence of other advanced sympathetic social organisms), providence of any sort would, on Humean principles, be absent in a natural universe. Hume understandably does not insist on the perfect apportionment of happiness to virtue, but again, he offers a naturalistic approximation. For he holds that we are disposed to feel concern for the happiness or misery of all sentient beings, and when we judge the characters of responsible agents, we praise and love or blame and hate accordingly, on the basis of that concern.25 12.5 Humean Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone In the end, the only religion Philo is prepared to countenance is a religion of “the rational and philosophical kind” (DNR XII.13, 95). What might this be? One response, unexceptionable as far as it goes and consistent with Hume’s (or Hume’s “friend’s”) Epicurean defense of atheism in Section XI of the first Enquiry, is that it is the religion of our Humean epigraph. Actions that displease the almighty are those that disturb society. All other religion is enthusiasm and “vulgar superstition,” which lead, respectively, to mental disequilibrium and to factionalism, with their “pernicious consequences on public affairs” (DNR XII.11, 95). Any religion other than the “philosophical,” Philo adds, “must have the most pernicious consequences, and weaken extremely men’s attachment to the natural motives of justice and humanity” (DNR XII.16, 97). “The steady attention alone to so important an interest as that of eternal salvation,” he concludes (with a dollop of sarcasm), “is apt to extinguish the benevolent affections, and beget a narrow, contracted selfishness” (DNR XII.19, 97). If this is Hume’s own position, how does the fraught notion of rationality fit into this picture of an acceptable religion, and how is an acceptable religion “philosophical”? As earlier proposed, if moral rules are to be rational and not ideological, they require categorization that abstracts from particularity. In Hume’s terms, they must possess generality.26 Unfortunately, Hume labels two very different types of generalizations “general rules” (cf. Hearn 1970, 410). On the one hand, a general rule is just the result of the propensity to generalize on the basis of observed regularities, the mechanical power we share with animals and very young children. Indeed, when speaking in this vein Hume goes so far as to claim that “beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men” (1978/1739, 178). Presumably, Hume means to say that humans and non-human animals alike act on the basis of habituation. This is Hume’s notorious skeptical solution to his doubts concerning the operations of the understanding in the first Enquiry. The propensity to base expectations regarding the future on uniform past experience, however, is a function of the imagination, or the mental associative tendency, and, as such, is prone to inductive fallacies like hasty generalization, stereotyping, weak analogy, and, especially, the varieties of false cause. Such general rules are those that “we rashly form to ourselves, which are the source of what we properly call prejudice” (1978/ 1739, 146). On the other hand, Hume also calls the regulative principles of “understanding” or “judgment” “general rules.” Non-human animals have very limited, if any, ability to formulate such normative rules.27

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“Everyone knows,” Hume says, “there is an indirect manner of insinuating praise or blame, which is much less shocking than the open flattery or censure of any person … One who lashes me with concealed strokes of satire, moves not my indignation to such a degree, as if he flatly told me I was a fool and a coxcomb; tho’ I equally understand his meaning, as if he did. This difference is to be attributed to general rules” (1978/1739, 150–151). These are the “general rules” of the imagination. The open flattery or censure is more shocking because “the imagination, in running from the present impression to the absent idea, makes the transition with greater facility, and consequently conceives the object with greater force” (151). On these occasions, we associate readily and directly, from long familiarity, pleasure or pain with the expression of unvarnished praise or blame. A “concealed stroke of satire,” by contrast, tends not to be strongly associated and may require “reading between the lines” or the extraction of implicatures, meanings intended but not explicitly said or logically implied, in order to discern the insult. But then Hume seems to reverse himself: “Sometimes scurrility is less displeasing than delicate satire, because it revenges us in a manner for the injury at the very time it is committed, by affording us a just reason to blame and contemn the person, who injures us” (151, my emphasis). Why? Such behavior offends against general “rules of good breeding” (152). These rules are social-behavioral norms, not mere associations of the imagination. The insult “becomes less disagreeable [to me], merely because originally it is more so; and ‘tis more disagreeable [to the antagonist], because it affords an inference by general and common rules, that are palpable and undeniable” (152). Hume seems to be analogizing between norms of good breeding and norms of good inductive inference. Both are reflective and, in this sense, “philosophical.”28 An inquirer, particularly a participant in a scientific practice, will be justly censured for employing flawed methods. Although such a censorious judgment is not, strictly speaking, a judgment of taste, and the relevant norm is a norm of good intellectual training, not of good breeding, good intellectual training is not so far from good breeding, and taste is not entirely alien to assessments of intellectual virtue.29 Like moral censure, intellectual censure will reflect on the self and “personal merit,” for it will cause shame or “humility”, a passion that is indirect because its “object”, though not its cause, is the self (1978/1739, 280).30 Does this make Hume the virtue ethicist some manner of virtue epistemologist as well? This is not implausible.31 Induction may be expectation based on habituation, but there is a world of difference between virtuous and vicious cognitive habits. Be this as it may, norms of good breeding, which are artificial or socially constructed, can arise only in a communal context: “The rules of good-breeding condemn whatever is openly disobliging, and gives a sensible pain, and confusion to those, with whom we converse” (152). Notice the inevitable Humean tie to affect, in this case the socially inflicted pain of contempt.32 In the social setting of human “common life,” something of which Hume is always mindful, coordinating habits tend to be codified and enforced as explicit rules of conduct, rules that don’t merely describe the habituated behaviors of

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 245 participants in the social form of life, but are prescriptively endorsed by them.33 Regularism (Hume’s general rules of the imagination) at the level of the individual gives way to regulism (general rules of reflective judgment) at the social level.34 The rules we endorse constitute canons of comportment inculcated through education, a process of obvious importance for the cultivation of the artificial virtues.35 To the extent moral rules are products of critical reflection, do they qualify as rational;36 and a religion whose moral content accords with them is a rational religion. If rules of good breeding, which include rules of morality, are socially constructed, Humean morality does not dangle from a skyhook. All of its codifications have been erected by cascading cranes37 of capacities for mutual training and habituation, reaching high into the public world of culture, capacities that have lifted humankind to its present position of global preeminence and moral exceptionalism. These capacities comprise the adaptive toolkit that, as Hume explicitly recognized, sets human beings apart from all other sentient life on our planet. It is the toolkit originally provided to humans by Philo’s “intelligent,” if amoral, designer. Notes 1 There is substantial evidence that Hume himself held this view. See, for example, Hume (1957/1757, 21, 74; 1957/1751, 112; 1957/1748, 36). 2 Philo takes no account of this phenomenon, which helped inspire the idea of natural selection. 3 In some cases, posterior probabilities can be calculated directly by comparing relevant relative frequencies, rather than by multiplying conditional probabilities using Bayes’ Theorem (see Gigerenzer 2008, Ch. 12, pp. 172–191, “Children Can Solve Bayesian Problems”). 4 Cf. Hume (1957/1748): “Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the order of our ideas: and though the powers and forces, by which the former is governed, be wholly unknown to us; yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature.” 5 Hume apparently came to view A Treatise of Human Nature as an “unacknowledged juvenile work,” to be superseded by the later Enquiries and the Dissertation on the Passions. I shall in this article align myself with the practice of most contemporary commentators, who take it seriously and even rate it his masterpiece. 6 This emphasis on happiness naturalistically construed, along with the rejection of Hutcheson’s dedicated moral sense, makes Hume, Darwall (1995) argues, a progenitor, if not a proponent, of the utilitarianism that was to come. 7 Cf. Hume (1957/1751, 112): “Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution; the other has a productive faculty; and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colors borrowed from an internal sentiment raises, in a manner, a new creation.” 8 I am assuming that Gould’s use of the term ‘responsibility’ is morally normative: we are morally obligated to steward life’s continuity on earth. 9 See Whelan (1985, 148 n.87): Sympathy “is not itself a passion but a special mental mechanism functional in the generation of certain passions.” Hearn (1976) identifies Hume’s moral motivators with evaluative attitudes, rather than emotions or sentiments themselves. Evaluative attitudes, however, have been identified with emotional

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dispositions (see Lazarus 1991, 47). Prinz (2007, 84), a contemporary descendant of Hume in moral philosophy, identifies sentiments with emotional dispositions. “The distinction of moral good and evil is founded on the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character” (1978/1739, 546–547). J. S. Mill (2001/1861, 18–19 n.2) distinguishes sharply between the moral evaluation of actions or action-types (morality itself) and the moral evaluation of motivations (character). Tomasello (2016, 1) claims that some degree of sympathy for highly selected others affects “basically all mammals.” Kohlberg’s “highest moral level” is a psychological developmental notion that specifies an innate level of human moral responsiveness beyond acting from self-interest or merely in compliance with social convention, a level of responsiveness that accords morality absolute, not merely socially relative, force. Hare seems to ignore the logical legitimacy of universally quantified expressions that contain one or more constants (or even unbound variables), as in this example of a possible principle of moral command theory: For all x and for all y, if x is commanded by God, then x is morally binding on y. Assume here that the bound variable x ranges over commands and the bound variable y over moral agents. ‘God’, as a proper name, is an individual constant. Thanks to Kenneth Williford for pressing this point, though it does not impact Hare’s fundamental distinction between universality and generality. Universality requires universal quantification and bound variables. Generality concerns the extensions of the predicate constants. Kant (1981/1785, 4: 421): “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Kant (1981/1785, 4: 429): “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” I do not claim that Humean sympathy is the only available option. Hume (1978/1739, 317): “This idea [of another person’s passion] is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection.” Whelan (1985, 168): ‘Sympathy’ “is a technical term for a psychological process by which passions are communicated from one person to another with sufficient force that the recipient comes to share, or feel, the passion in question.” Hume (1978/1739, 419): “As repeated custom and its own force have made everything yield to it, it directs the actions and conduct without that opposition and emotion, which so naturally attend every momentary gust of passion.” Since Hume is not a utilitarian, these ends need not be identified with pleasure for or even with the happiness (eudaimonia) of as many individuals as possible. See Hume’s references to the effects of sympathy on audiences in theatrical performances (1957/1751, 49) and on readers of historical works (ibid. 50). “[I]t is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that people enjoy the blessing of a free government” (1987/1742, 115). What Kant actually says is this: “we should seek to further the highest good (which therefore must be at least possible)” (1956/1788, 5:125). The existence of God cannot be asserted with justification, but only assumed as an article of rational faith, rational because it makes compliance with the commands of pure practical reason possible. Gaskin (1993, 333): “This generality of approval for whatever promotes happiness in human society is, according to Hume, the ultimate source of moral discriminations.” (1978/1739, 603): “The intercourse of sentiments, therefore, in society and conversation, makes us form some general inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners.”

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 247 27 Hume (1978/1739, 149): “We shall afterwards take notice of some general rules, by which we ought to regulate our judgment concerning causes and effects.” 28 Cf. Whelan (1985, 246 n.93): “The artificial virtues ‘correct’ the feelings that underlie the natural virtues just as critical reasoning can correct impulsive belief by applying philosophical rules of inference.” 29 Hume (1978/1739, 588): “Here is a man who is not remarkably defective in his social qualities; but what particularly recommends him is his dexterity in business, by which he has extricated himself from the greatest difficulties, and conducted the most delicate affairs with a singular address and prudence. I find an esteem for him immediately to arise in me … I would rather do him a service than another, whose character is in every other respect equal, but is deficient in that particular.” 30 Hume does, notoriously, judge the self to be “but a bundle or collection of different perceptions” (1978/1739, 252); but he also distinguishes “betwixt personal identity as it regards our thought and imagination, and as regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves” (253). The latter “self” may be regarded as the passionate self, in accordance with the original sense of ‘passion’: the “me” who passively undergoes motivating psychological forces. G. C. Lichtenberg is noted for questioning, in a strikingly Humean fashion, Descartes’ allegedly indubitable postulate, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes, Lichtenberg maintained, was entitled to assert no more than “There are thoughts.” But he goes on to allow that postulating the “I” is “a practical requirement,” a remark that also has a definite Humean flavor ( Lichtenberg 1971, 412). 31 Zagzebski (2008, 444) goes so far as to claim that the intellectual virtues “are best treated as a subset of the moral virtues.” 32 Hume (1978/1739, 620): “And who can think of any advantages of fortune a sufficient compensation for the least breach of social virtues, when he considers, that not only his character with regard to others, but also his peace and inward satisfaction entirely depend upon his strict observance of them; and that a mind will never be able to bear its own survey, that has been wanting in its part to mankind and society.” 33 Hume (1978/1739, 490): “Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less deriv’d from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by slow progression, and our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it.” 34 Cf. Brandom (1994, 32): “the challenge [for the naturalist] is to reject intellectualist regulism about norms without falling into nonnormative regularism.” Regulism is prescriptive (rule-governed) regularity, while regularism is merely descriptive regularity. 35 Hume (1978/1739, 500): “As publick praise encrease our esteem for justice; so private education and instruction contribute to the same effect. For as parents easily observe, that a man is the more useful, both to himself and others, the greater degree of probity and honour he is endowed with; and that those principles have greater force, when custom and education assist interest and reflexion.” See also O’Brian (2017). 36 See Hume (1978/1739, 546): “Nor need any one wonder, that tho’ I have all along sought to establish my system on pure reason … I should now appeal to popular authority … For it must be observed that the opinions of men, in this case carry with them a peculiar authority, and are, in great measure infallible. The distinction of moral good and evil is founded on the pleasure and pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character.” Cf. Baier (1991, 278): “Hume’s project all along has been not so much to dethrone reason as to enlarge our conception of it, to make it social and passionate … . ‘Pure reason’ is already socialized and passionate reason.” Notice that Hume, in contrast with utilitarianism, specifies that morally relevant pleasure and pain arise from the contemplation of sentiment and character and are not merely the consequences of actions or action-types. 37 “Cranes and skyhooks” is the leading metaphor of Dennett (1995).

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References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1978/1739. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Second Edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1987/1741-77. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hume, D. 1987/1742. “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.” In Hume 1987/ 1741-77, 111-137. Hume, D. 1957/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. E. Steinberg. Indianpolis: Heckett Publishing Company. Hume, D. 1957/1751. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. C. W. Hendel. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts. Hume. D. 1957/1757. The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hume, D. 1987/1757. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Hume 1987/1741-77, 226-249. Hume, D. 1987/1777. “Of Suicide.” In Hume 1987/1741-77, 577-589. Hume, D. 1980/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. R. Popkin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Hume, D. 1932. Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg. 2 Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 2011. New Letters of David Hume, ed. R. Kilbansky and E. Mossner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Other Primary Literature Kant, I. 1981/1785. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. J. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kant. I. 1956/1788. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts. Mill, J. S. 2001/1861. Utilitarianism, ed. G. Sher (Second Edition). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Lichtenberg, G. C. 1971. Schriften und Briefe, Zweiter Band. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Secondary and Other Literature Baier, A. 1991. A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Darwall, S. 1995. “Hume and the Invention of Utilitarianism.” In Hume and Hume’s Connexions, ed. M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State Press, 58–82. Dennett, D. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Gaskin, J. C. A. 1993. “Hume on Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. D. F. Norton, 313–344. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gigerenzer, G. 2008. Rationality for Mortals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Philo’s Two Designers and Humean Religion 249 Gould, S. J. 1985. The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W, Norton and Company. Hare, R. M. 1981. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hearn, T. 1970. “‘General Rules’ in Hume’s Treatise.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 8, 4. 405–422. Hearn T. 1976. “General Rules and the Moral Sentiments in Hume’s Treatise.” The Review of Metaphysics, 30, 1, 57–72. Lazarus, R. 1991. Emotion as Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brian, D. 2017. “Hume on Education.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1–24. Pinker, S. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin Books. Prinz, J. 2007. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salmon, W. 1978. “Religion and Science: A New Look at the Dialogues.” Philosophical Studies, 33, 143–176. Singer, P. 1981. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tomasello, M. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Fraassen, B. C. 1995. “Against Naturalized Epistemology.” In On Quine: New Essays, ed. P. Leonardi and M. Santambrogio. 68–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whelan, F. 1985. Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zagzebski, L. 2008. “Virtues of the Mind, Selections.” In Epistemology: An Anthology (Second Edition), ed. E. Sosa, J. Kim, J. Fantl, and M. McGrath, 442–453. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Part 5

Epicurus and Darwin, Strato and Spinoza

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Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” John Reiss

13.1 Introduction As a poorly educated American biologist, I knew nothing of Hume as I passed through my undergraduate years. I was only vaguely aware of Paley and the design argument. Instead, I learned of Darwin and how his theory of evolution, based on the mechanism of natural selection, had delivered the death-blow to the theory of independent creation of the species of plants and animals, each embodying God’s design. It was only in graduate school, when I got side-tracked on a project that eventually became my book Not by Design (Reiss 2009), that I became aware of the long debate over design that had preceded Darwin, extending back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. In the process, I met Hume’s masterful Dialogues, and was captivated by the wry and artful takedown of the design argument he placed largely in Philo’s hands. In this chapter, I want to explore the contrast between the common view of biologists, that it took Darwin to eliminate the design argument, and that of many philosophers, who point to Hume (and, secondarily, Kant) as the main culprit in its demise. I do so by focusing on the Epicurean Hypothesis, which descends to us from the ancient Greek atomists. This is certainly familiar ground to philosophers, if not to biologists, and yet I believe this history does not often get presented in a full and sympathetic light. 13.2 Biologists and Paley Let’s look at some of the statements on the subject we find in the work of biologists. The perspective of evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, a former Dominican Priest (Dreifus 1999) who did his graduate work in the lab of the great evolutionary geneticist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, is a good place to start. In “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without Designer,” he argues that (Ayala 2007, 8567): Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a lawful system of matter in motion that human reason can explain without recourse to supernatural agencies. The conundrum faced by Darwin can hardly be overestimated. The strength of the argument from design DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-19

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to demonstrate the role of the Creator had been forcefully set forth by philosophers and theologians. Wherever there is function or design, we look for its author. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptations of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science. And if one turns to a current textbook of evolutionary biology, one finds a similar statement (Futuyma & Kirkpatrick 2017, 56–57): For hundreds of years, it seemed that adaptive design could be explained only by an intelligent designer. In fact, this “argument from design” was considered one of the strongest proofs of the existence of God. The Reverend William Paley wrote in Natural Theology that, just as the intricacy of a watch implies an intelligent, purposeful watchmaker, so every aspect of living nature, such as the human eye, displays “every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which exists in the watch”, and must, likewise, have had a designer. When Darwin offered a purely natural, materialistic alternative to the argument from design, he not only shook the foundations of theology and philosophy, but also brought every aspect of the study of life into the realm of science. These are fairly standard views. Yet note that in both of these examples, two somewhat different theses are comingled. The first is that Darwin made the previously unassailable design argument untenable, by showing that a materialistic process could produce “apparent design” (Gardner 2009). The second is that by doing so, Darwin brought the study of life (and in particular, the “adaptations” of life) into science. It will be good to keep those theses separate in our minds as we proceed. Perhaps the most well-known contrast between Paley and Darwin is drawn by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins proudly proclaims (Dawkins 1987, 5–6): When it comes to feeling awe over living “watches” I yield to nobody. I feel more in common with the Reverend William Paley than I do with the distinguished modern philosopher, a well-known atheist, with whom I once discussed the matter at dinner. I said that I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. “What about Hume?”, replied the philosopher. “How did Hume explain the organized complexity of the living world?”, I asked. “He didn’t”, said the philosopher. “Why does it need any special explanation?” Paley knew that it needed a special explanation; Darwin knew it, and I suspect that in his heart of hearts my philosopher companion knew it too. In any case it will be my business to show it here. As for David Hume himself, it is sometimes said that the great Scottish philosopher disposed of the Argument from Design a century before Darwin. But what Hume did was criticize the

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 255 logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the existence of a God. He did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design … . Dawkins, then, does not completely subscribe to the first thesis above—that the design argument was unassailable pre-Darwin. Why? Because he is aware of Hume’s critique in the Dialogues. However, at the same time, he does seem to support this thesis, because he can’t imagine rejecting the cogency of the design argument without an alternative explanation for apparent design; and according to him, Hume did not supply that. (Of course, Dawkins also subscribes to the second thesis—that Darwin brought the study of the adaptations of life into science.) 13.3 Philosophers and Hume As I turned to the philosophical literature in search of perspectives on the effect of Hume’s Dialogues on philosophy, and in particular on the design argument, it proved more difficult than I had anticipated to find a consensus. From my perspective as a scientist, I expected to find something like the view expressed by Simon Blackburn: “The great thing about the Dialogues is the attack on the argument of design, it’s usually taken to be the decisive destruction of that argument” (Blackburn 2019). And this view is indeed common. For example, so says Dawkins’ “distinguished modern philosopher.” So says Hurlbutt (1985, 135), who notes that “When the philosophical dust has settled, not only the design argument but natural theology in general is completely disarmed.” So, too, say philosophers of biology such as Ruse (2003).1 Interestingly, this also seems to be the view our modern creationists ascribe to their opponents. The more intellectual among the current “Intelligent Design” enthusiasts are well aware of both Hume and Darwin (Behe 1996; Torley 2012): they know who their enemies are. One of the better intelligent design websites, for example, bemoans the “many modern-day skeptics who apparently still subscribe to the myth that the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume soundly refuted Rev. William Paley’s argument from design on philosophical grounds, even before Darwin supposedly refuted it on scientific grounds” (Torley 2012). Yet in the philosophical literature, in book after book, and paper after paper, one also finds caveats and controversies. Some of this may be due to the fact that philosophers simply like to argue. And some too is no doubt due to the fact that the philosophy of religion can be the refuge of religious apologists (Cruz 2014), who are not inclined to accept Hume’s devastating critique of the rational basis for religion as decisive. To this day we still see claims that at some level design is evident and defies explanation, involving some very sophisticated and subtle arguments (see Waller 2019). This has been a long tradition. As noted by Gaskin (2008) in his introduction to one of the recent editions of the Dialogues: … the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in particular were for a long time underestimated by the philosophical and theological establishments in Britain, possibly, one suspects, as a subconscious defense against the harm they were

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capable of inflicting upon conventional religious apologetics. Thus, for example, William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802) had in effect been refuted by Hume in the Dialogues (1779) and elsewhere before they were even written; but Paley, not Hume, was the standard reading on religion for students throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. But also contributing to the lack of complete consensus is the dialogue form itself, so that reasonable arguments can be made about which of the protagonists’ views are those of Hume (Bell 2008; Gaskin 1993; Smith 1947b; Tweyman 1986). And there are the apparent concessions made by Philo in Part 12 of the Dialogues, including the infamous statement that “A purpose, an intention, or design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it” (DNR XII.2, p. 89). When it comes to Hume’s own views, I believe the controversy over which of the protagonists most closely represents his own position was settled rather clearly in favor of Philo by the arguments adduced by Norman Kemp Smith (1947b). Philo is, of course, the sceptic in the Dialogues, and in keeping with Hume’s reputation as a sceptic, there is likewise good reason to believe that Hume’s “mitigated skepticism” did not lead him to endorse any positive conclusion, in spite of the apparent concessions of Part 12 (Bell 2008; Rivers 1993). Yet while it may be true that the Dialogues do not lead to a positive conclusion, there are at least two positive explanatory hypotheses offered in the Dialogues to account for apparent design in nature, pace Dawkins. The first, which appears in Part 7, is the theory of the “generation” of the world, by analogy with the generation of animals and vegetables; it is this theory of generation that was to form part of the basis for Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theory (Burbridge 1998; Kemp 2017; see below). The second, which appears in Part 8, is the “old Epicurean hypothesis,” suitably modified. It is that hypothesis that interests me here, and thus to that hypothesis—often taken to have anticipated Darwin’s concept of natural selection—that I now turn. 13.4 The Epicurean Hypothesis—Ancient Antecedents and Later History It is not surprising that the aspect of the atomist/Epicurean world view that gets the most attention from a scientific standpoint is atomism itself, with its anticipation of modern doctrines (Pullman 1998; Stenger 2013). Nevertheless, the atomists’ cosmogony is also of great interest, as the first attempt to posit an origin of the universe as we know it without any design or pre-existent living principle. The general view of the atomists is that the world originates as a “whirl” within the primitive atoms spread throughout space (Bailey 1964). And, in this context, plants and animals emerge somehow from this primitive whirl, with only random arrangements of parts, with successful combinations surviving and unsuccessful ones dying out.

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 257 This view on the origin of life can be traced back even to pre-atomist times, in the writings of Empedocles. In his Physics, Aristotle contrasts the design view (which he supports) with the ateleological view of Empedocles, and asks rhetorically, Why then should it not be the same with parts in nature … ? Wherever then all the parts came about just as they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did. (Aristotle 1952, Physica, 198b) The atomists and Epicurus took this up. In the present context, it is particularly interesting to look at the views presented in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, which was the model for Hume’s Dialogues, at least in a general way. Cicero’s dialogue has three protagonists, just as Hume’s does, but their roles are not directly comparable to Hume’s characters: they are Balbus the Stoic, Vellieus the Epicurean, and Cotta the Academic/Skeptic, representing the three major philosophical schools of the time. The Stoics, of course, were ancient advocates of the design argument, contrasting with the ateleology of the Epicureans. In the brief section on cosmology, we find Velleius (the Epicurean) telling Balbus that his master, Epicurus, … has also taught us that the world was made by nature, without needing an artificer to construct it, and that the act of creation, which according to you cannot be performed without divine skill, is so easy, that nature will create, is creating and has created worlds without number. You on the contrary cannot see how nature can achieve all this without the aid of some intelligence, and so, like the tragic poets, being unable to bring the plot of your drama to a dénouement, you have recourse to a god; whose intervention you assuredly would not require if you would but contemplate the measureless and boundless extent of space that stretches in every direction, into which, when the mind projects and propels itself, it journeys onward far and wide without ever sighting any margin or ultimate point where it can stop. Well then, in this immensity of length and breadth and height there flits an infinite quantity of atoms innumerable, which though separated by void yet cohere together, and taking hold each of another form unions wherefrom are created those shapes and forms of things which you think cannot be created without the aid of bellows and anvil, and so have saddled us with an eternal master, whom day and night we are to fear: for who would not fear a prying busybody of a god, who foresees and thinks of and notices all things, and deems that everything is his concern? (Cicero 1961, De Natura Deorum, 53–54) Of course the classic expression of the Epicurean cosmogony is found in Lucretius, who was well known to Hume and his Enlightenment contemporaries.

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Lucretius tells the story of the origin of plants and animals as follows (Lucretius 1995, V, 834–56): For the earth, way back then, tried to bring forth many Prodigies, strange of feature, monster-limbed, The halfway not-this not-the-other hermaphrodite, Some orphaned of feet, some widowed of both their hands, Many even lacking a mouth, or blind and eyeless, Or manacled up by the members clung together, Unable to do a thing, go anyplace, Dodge harm, grab hold of anything they’d need. Other such freaks and monsters Earth created— In vain, for Nature frightened off their growth, They couldn’t attain the wished-for flower of adulthood, Or seek out food or join in the act of love. For many things, we see, must coincide, So as to forge the generations; first There must be food; next, ways for the genital seeds To stream through the body from the slack-fallen members, And, so that males and females may unite, A way to exchange the mutual joys of love. And many kinds of creatures must have died, Unable to plant out new sprouts of life. For whatever you see that lives and breathes and thrives Has been, from the very beginning, guarded, saved By its trickery or its swiftness or brute strength. Thus, when he went to write his Dialogues, Hume had ready sources to draw on for ancient Epicurean cosmogony. Before we turn to Hume, however, I would like to take a brief detour through the early evolutionists of the Enlightenment, who derived their “evolutionism” largely straight from Lucretius. Interestingly, after the rediscovery of Lucretius in the Renaissance (Greenblatt 2012), atomism first re-emerged in the seventeenth century with the work of Gassendi, Boyle and Newton, all of whom Christianized the theory by making atoms compatible with a designed universe (Osler 1994; Reiss 2009). Yet their religious atomism paved the way for Enlightenment freethinkers of the midseventeenth century to go further (Spink 1960). The background of Epicureanism, combined with the recent advances in physics ushered in by Newton (in spite of the fact that he himself was an advocate of the design argument), seems to have allowed such thinking to emerge. Hume was in many ways part of the same movement. 13.5 Proto-evolutionists and the Epicurean Hypothesis The mid-eighteenth century saw the rise of a number of proto-evolutionary theories, many of which descended more or less directly from their ancient

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 259 atomist antecedents (Glass, Temkin & Straus 1968). Denis Diderot, the famed Encyclopedist, has some of the clearest expressions of Epicurean sentiments. In his Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who See (1749) he tells the story of a blind mathematician, Saunderson, an avowed atheist, who is on his deathbed. A minister, Mr. Holmes, visits and attempts to convince him of the existence of God, appealing to the design argument. Saunderson replies: I see nothing; I admit, however, an admirable order in everything; but I trust you not to expect anything more of me. I grant it you about the present state of the universe, in order to get from you, in return, the liberty of thinking what I like about its ancient and primitive state, about which you are no less blind than I. You have no evidence to oppose me here, your eyes are of no use to you. You may imagine, if you wish, that that order which impressed you has always existed. But leave me free to think it has done no such thing, and that if we went back to the birth of things and of time, and perceived matter in motion and chaos becoming unraveled, we should encounter a multitude of shapeless beings instead of a few highly organized beings. If I have no objections to offer you about the present condition of things, I can at least question you about their past condition. I can ask you, for example, who told you, Leibnitz, Clarke and Newton, that at the first moment of the formation of animals, some were not without heads, others without feet? I can maintain to you … that all the defective combinations of matter have disappeared, and that here have only survived those in which the organization did not involve any important contradiction, and which could subsist by themselves and perpetuate themselves … And he connects this vision directly to an Epicurean cosmogony: But why should I not believe about worlds what I believe about animals? How many worlds, mutilated and imperfect, were perhaps dispersed, reformed and are dispersing again at every moment in distant space, which I cannot touch and you cannot see, but where motion continues, and will continue, to combine masses of matter until they shall have attained some arrangement in which they can persist. (Diderot 1963, 28–29) Likewise, only the following year (1750) we find the Marquis de Maupertuis proclaiming in his Essay on Cosmology: May we not say that, in the fortuitous combination of the productions of Nature, since only those creatures could survive in whose organization a certain degree of adaptation was present, there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that such adaptation is actually found in all those species which now exist? Chance, one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion of these were organized in such a manner that the animal’s organs could satisfy their needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; these last have all perished … Thus the species which we see today

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are but a small part of all those that a blind destiny has produced (quoted in Glass 1968, 57–58). But this Epicurean vision of the origin of adaptation was just a strain in the many views that were bandied about at the time, and neither Diderot nor Maupertuis developed these brief thoughts to any greater extent. 13.6 Hume and the Dialogues Hume began writing the Dialogues in 1751 (Smith 1947a), only a year after Maupertuis’ work, and there is reason to think that he was well aware of Maupertuis and other proto-evolutionists such as Buffon (Knox-Shaw 2008; Wilson 2016). Hume places the Epicurean hypothesis at the close of Part 8, which is the culmination of Philo’s attack against the design argument: … what if I should revive the old Epicurean hypothesis? This is commonly, and I believe, justly, esteemed the most absurd system, that has yet been proposed; yet, I know not, whether, with a few alterations, it might not be brought to bear a faint appearance of probability. Instead of supposing matter infinite, as Epicurus did; let us suppose it finite. A finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions: and it must happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an infinite number of times. This world, therefore, with all its events, even the most minute, has before been produced and destroyed, and will again be produced and destroyed, without any bounds and limitation. (DNR VIII.2, p. 58) Philo then introduces the idea that motion may be intrinsic to matter, rather than imparted by external causes (a “voluntary agent or mover”), given that “There is not probably, at present, in the whole universe, one particle of matter at absolute rest” (DNR VIII.5, p. 59). And this very consideration too, continued Philo, which we have stumbled on in the course of the argument, suggests a new hypothesis of cosmogony, that is not absolutely absurd and improbable. Is there a system, an order, an œconomy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation, which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms, which it produces? There certainly is such an œconomy: for this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this œconomy or order; and by its very nature, that order, when once established, supports itself, for many ages, if not to eternity. But wherever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted as to continue in perpetual motion, and yet preserve a constancy in the forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present. All the parts of each form must have a relation to each other, and to the whole: and the whole itself must have a relation to the other parts of

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 261 the universe; to the element, in which the form subsists; to the materials, with which it repairs its waste and decay; and to every other form which is hostile or friendly. A defect in any of these particulars destroys the form; and the matter, of which it is composed, is again set loose, and is thrown into irregular motions and fermentations, till it unite itself to some other regular form. If no such form be prepared to receive it, and if there be a great quantity of this corrupted matter in the universe, the universe itself is entirely disordered; whether it be the feeble embryo of a world in its first beginning, that is thus destroyed, or the rotten carcass of one, languishing in old age and infirmity. In either case, a chaos ensues; till finite, though innumerable revolutions produce at last some forms, whose parts and organs are so adjusted as to support the forms amidst a continued succession of matter. (DNR VIII.6, pp. 59–60) And he goes on to reiterate this point of view in two paragraphs later added to the original manuscript (perhaps indicating how much Hume wanted to emphasize this argument). Here, he attempts to “vary the expression” by tracing the history of the universe from a “confused and disorderly” random initial condition, with matter in motion. Thus the universe goes on for many ages in a continued succession of chaos and disorder. But is it not possible that it may settle at last, so as not to lose its motion and active force (for that we have supposed inherent in it), yet so as to preserve a uniformity of appearance, amidst the continual motion and fluctuation of its parts? This we find to be the case with the universe at present. Every individual is perpetually changing, and every part of every individual, and yet the whole remains, in appearance, the same. (DNR VIII.8, p. 60) Philo draws from this the obvious conclusion with respect to inferring design as the cause of “apparent design” in nature: It is in vain, therefore, to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables, and their curious adjustment to each other, I would fain know how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted? Do we not find, that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form? It happens, indeed, that the parts of the world are so well adjusted, that some regular form immediately lays claim to this corrupted matter: and if it were not so, could the world subsist? Must it not dissolve as well as the animal, and pass through new positions and situations; till in a great, but finite succession, it fall at last into the present or some such order? (DNR VIII.9, p. 61) To this, Cleanthes replies: But according to this hypothesis, whence arise the many conveniences and advantages which men and all animals possess? Two eyes, two ears, are not

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absolutely necessary for the subsistence of the species. Human race might have been propagated and preserved, without horses, dogs, cows, sheep, and those innumerable fruits and products which serve to our satisfaction and enjoyment. If no camels and been created for the use of man in the sandy deserts of Africa and Arabia, would the world have been dissolved? If no loadstone had been framed to give that wonderful and useful direction to the needle, would human society and the human kind have been immediately extinguished? Though the maxims of nature be in general very frugal, yet instances of this kind are far from being rare; and any one of them is a sufficient proof of design, and of a benevolent design, which gave rise to the order and arrangement of the universe. (DNR VIII.10, p. 61) This is the crux of Cleanthes’ argument, and really the only bulwark he has against Philo, here playing the Epicurean. The fact that all that is left of the design argument, and thus the most one can say for the existence, wisdom, and benevolence of God, is that we have some “conveniences and advantages”—some extra useful organs, domestic animals and cultivated fruits that make life for us enjoyable, camels that are helpful to cross deserts, and magnets useful in navigation—makes it clear that the design argument has not won the day. Nevertheless, the argument that Cleanthes makes here—the doctrine of “superabundant provision”—is common in the history of natural theology. We find it, for example, in the writings of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who asks I demand first in generall concerning all those Creatures that have Eyes and Eares, whether they might not have had onely one Eye and one Eare a piece … and subsisted though they had been no better provided for than this. (quoted in Patrides 1980, 273) And we find the same example in the writings of Robert Boyle, in his explicit critique of the “Epicurean Hypothesis” in his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things. This was published in 1688, and Hume was likely familiar with it early on, given the popularity of Boyle at the University of Edinburgh at the time Hume attended (Anonymous 1725; Force 1990; Schliesser 2008): there seems to have been care taken, that the body of an animal should be furnished, not only with all things, that are ordinarily necessary and convenient, but with some superabundant provision for casualties. Thus, though a man may live very well, and propagate his kind (as many do,) though he have but one eye; yet nature is wont to furnish men with two eyes, that, if one be destroyed or diseased, the other may suffice for vision. (Boyle 1772, 428) Finally, it is worth noting one source available to Hume that contains all of these examples: the naturalist John Ray’s well-known Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1717; 10th edition, 1735). (Although we don’t know

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 263 that Hume read it, this book did have a prominent place in the “Physiological Library” he belonged to while a student at the University of Edinburgh; see Anonymous 1725). In an explicit discussion of the atheistic theory (ascribed to Lucretius) that “all these Uses of Parts are no more than what is necessary to the very Existence of the Things to whom they belong,” Ray turns to Richard Bentley’s first Boyle Lectures, entitled A Confutation of Atheism (1692). Speaking of the absurd doctrines of the atheists, Ray approvingly quotes “Dr. Bentley”: These things [say the Atheists] are mistaken for Tokens of Skill and Contrivance, whereas they are but necessary Consequences of the present Existence of those Creatures to which they belong; for he that supposeth any Animals to subsist, doth by that very Supposition allow them every Member and Faculty that are necessary to Subsistence; and therefore unless we can prove à priori, and independent on this Usefulness, not that Things are once suppos’d to have existed and propagated, that among almost infinite Trials and Essays at the beginning of Things, among Millions of monstrous Shapes and imperfect Formations, a few such Animals as now exist could not possibly be produc’d, these after-Considerations are of very little moment; because if such Animals could in that way possibly be form’d, as might live and move, and propagate their Beings, all this admir’d and applauded Usefulness of their several Fabricks is but a necessary condition and Consequence of the Existence and Propagation. (Ray 1735, 357–58) And to refute this he brings up the principle of superabundant provision: the atheist’s argument may work for things that are required for life, … but it miserably fails him against other Reasons, from such Members and Powers of the Body as are not necessary absolutely to living and propagating, but only much conduce to our better Subsistence and happier Condition. So the most obvious Contemplation of the Frame of our Bodies, as that we all have double Sensories, two Eyes, two Ears, two Nostrils, is an effectual Confutation of this atheistical Sophism … (Ray 1735, 360) Likewise, Ray, after describing the admirable structure of the camel, fitting it for existence in desert realms, exclaims: That such an Animal as this, so patient of long Thirst, should be bred in such droughty and parch’d Countries, where it is of such eminent Use for travelling over those dry and sandy Desarts, where no Water is to be had sometimes in two or three Days Journey, no candid and considerate Person but must needs acknowledge to be an Effect of Providence and Design. (Ray 1735, 344)

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Finally, Ray even mentions the loadstone, and after describing its wonders, notes the “infinite Advantage it hath been to these two or three last Ages, the great Improvement of Navigation, and Advancement of Trade and Commerce, by rendering the remotest Countries easily accessible …” (Ray 1735, 95). This whole tradition in British Natural Theology is thus well summed up in the words Hume gives to Cleanthes. (Rivers (1993) shows Hume’s indebtedness to contemporary sources, including Wilkins’ Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion; interestingly, the passage of Wilkins’ on “Galen’s muscles” she shows Hume used for Philo’s “retraction” is quoted in full by Ray). At the end of Part 8, Philo admits only that if it can’t account for dual organs, the Epicurean hypothesis is “so far incomplete and imperfect”—as one might expect a scientific hypothesis could be. Still, that Cleanthes’ response appears at the culmination of Philo’s (and hence Hume’s) critique of the design argument is not likely a matter of mere chance. As I have emphasized elsewhere (Reiss 2009), for the Argument to Design, it is not enough to argue that the world works, and that organisms have parts that allow them to exist—because it is precisely this point, constituting by far the bulk of the examples used by design enthusiasts, that is vulnerable to the Epicurean hypothesis. One must instead argue that the world might have existed but worked worse. This is why the doctrine of superabundant provision is so important: it is the only thing that justifies any continued confidence in the inference to design, and the inference not just that God exists, and is a skilled mechanic, but also that He is a caring one. The centrality of this appeal to superabundant provision was not lost on William Paley. It is not always remembered that Paley’s classic Natural Theology (1802) was written directly in response to two then-recent “free-thinking” works: Hume’s Dialogues (1779), and Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theory, published in Zoonomia (E. Darwin 1794); Paley mentions both explicitly (Hodge 1985; for the role of Darwin in inciting Paley, see the interesting paper by Burbridge (1998), written from the Christian perspective). Paley argues directly against the Epicurean/evolutionary hypothesis that the eye, the animal to which it belongs, every other animal, every plant, indeed every organized body which we see, are only so many out of the possible varieties and combinations of beings, which the lapse of infinite ages has brought into existence; that the present world is the relict of that variety; millions of other bodily forms and other species having perished, being by defect of their constitution incapable of preservation, or of continuance by generation. (Paley 1802, 63) Instead, he says, Multitudes of conformations, both of vegetables and animals, may be conceived capable of existence and succession, which yet do not exist. Perhaps almost as many forms of plants might have been found in the fields,

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 265 as figures of plants can be delineated on paper. A countless variety of animals might have existed, which do not exist. Upon the supposition here stated, we should see unicorns and mermaids, sylphs, and centaurs, the fancies of painters, and the fables of poets, realized by examples. Or, if it be alleged that these may transgress the bounds of possible life and propagation, we might, at least, have nations of human beings without nails upon their fingers, with more or fewer fingers or toes than ten, some with one eye, others with one ear, with one nostril, or without the sense of smelling at all. All these, and a thousand other imaginable varieties, might live and propagate. We may modify any one species many different ways, all consistent with life, and with the actions necessary to preservation, although affording different degrees of conveniency and enjoyment to the animal. (Paley 1802, 64–65) Again we see the language of superabundant provision: these examples show care taken for “conveniency and enjoyment” beyond what is merely “consistent with life.” 13.7 Darwin, Epicurus, Paley, and Hume What then is the relation of Charles Darwin to this history? One would think that Darwin would have been aware of Lucretius, at least, and attempt to relate his evolutionary theory to the anti-teleological world-view of the atomists who preceded him. Yet there is little evidence that Darwin was consciously aware of Lucretius or Epicurus, let alone the earlier atomists. In the entire “Darwin Online” website (van Wyhe 2002b), the one document that I have found showing that Darwin knew Lucretius is an undated reading note, apparently prepared as Darwin was working on the manuscript for his “big book” on natural selection, which was interrupted by the arrival of A. R. Wallace’s letter and sketch of a similar evolutionary theory to Darwin’s. The note reads: Translation of Lucretius [Natural selection] Time changes the nature of the whole world, nor does anything remain like itself everything changes. Nature transmutes all things, and forces them to alteration. - - - And we see that a variety of concurrent circumstances is necessary in order that any race may be propagated, as food be therefore it is evident that many races must have perished, unable to leave a posterity behind them. For either craft, or strength or agility preserves every animal which breathes, and many are preserved by us for the sake of their utility, as the dog etc. But as for those to which Nature has granted nothing of all this, so that they can neither live on themselves, nor afford us any help for the sake of which we may protect them, it is evident that these were a prey to others, until at length that species was annihilated by Nature. Lucretius V 847–875 (van Wyhe 2002a)

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This note shows that Darwin did at one point read the critical passage in Lucretius, possibly prior to 1859. Darwin also read Hume’s Dialogues, finishing it on September 29, 1839 (C. Darwin 1839), a year after he first arrived at his theory of natural selection. (As noted above, the Dialogues ran in the family: in his Zoonomia (1794, 509), Erasmus Darwin ascribes the theory of the origin of the universe by generation to “The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works”; for the connection of Charles to Erasmus Darwin see Fara (2016), for that of both Darwins to Hume, see Kemp (2017).) Finally, as we have seen, Paley himself does a fair job of presenting the Epicurean Hypothesis, so it cannot have been unknown to Darwin even as a schoolboy. Yet, in spite of these hints, we find no recognition of the contributions of Lucretius or the earlier atomists by Darwin in the “Historical Sketch” added to later editions of the Origin of Species, in which he treats of “the progress of opinion on the origin of species, previously to the publication of the first edition of this work” (C. Darwin 1872). Here, he simply says he will pass over “allusions to the subject in the classical writers*” with the footnote reading as follows: * Aristotle, in his ‘Physicæ Auscultationes’ (lib. 2, cap. 8, s. 2), after remarking that rain does not fall in order to make the corn grow, any more than it falls to spoil the farmer’s corn when threshed out of doors, applies the same argument to organization: and adds (as translated by Mr. Clair Grece, who first pointed out the passage to me), “So what hinders the different parts [of the body] from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to the other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity, and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished, and still perish.” We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle, is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teeth. What Aristotle is quoted by Darwin as saying of course does not reflect his own views; he is here merely reporting the views of Empedocles (see above, also Gotthelf 1999). And the very fact that Darwin mentions Aristotle and not Lucretius suggests that he did not remember the Lucretian version. The connection to earlier speculations was not lost on some of the reviewers of the Origin of Species, however. For example, Francis Bowen, in an anonymous review of the Origin published in 1860, notes: There is nothing new in this conception of a cosmogony worked out by speculating upon what is possible in an infinite lapse of years. It is at least as

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 267 old as Democritus and Epicurus, and has never been presented with more poetic beauty than by Lucretius. According to their scheme, a chaos of atoms or primary molecules of matter, moving fortuitously from eternity in infinite space, crossing and jostling one another, and forming themselves successively into every imaginable compound and aggregation, happened at last to settle into the present system of earth, sun, moon, and stars,—of plants, animals, and men. For the chance of order and mutual fitness is at least one out of an infinite number of chances of disorder and confusion; and in an infinite series of years, this solitary chance must sooner or later be realized. (Bowen 1860, 486) And the infamous Bishop Wilberforce (who supposedly asked Huxley during their 1860 Oxford evolution debate “was it through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey”?; Lucas 1979), wrote a review of the Origin in which he faithfully reports that according to Darwin “this law, which thus maintains through the struggle of individuals the high type of the family, tends continually, through a similar struggle of species, to lead the stronger species to supplant the weaker.” But for him, “This indeed is no new observation: Lucretius knew and eloquently expatiated on its truth …” (Wilberforce 1860, 233). Nevertheless, it is easy to understand how from Darwin’s perspective Lucretius might not have seemed to be very useful—and thus relevant. We know that Darwin spent the years after the Beagle voyage searching for all sorts of information that might give a clue to evolution’s mechanism, since he had become convinced of its factuality (Hodge 1982, 1983, 1985, 2009; Kohn 1980; Ospovat 1981). So if Darwin’s poor classical education led him to be almost ignorant of the substance of Lucretius or the ancient atomists, his interest in mechanisms—particularly mechanisms of variation—rather than philosophy, also meant that Lucretius had little apparent use to him. Lucretius and the atomists were simply not part of the living intellectual environment Darwin grew up in, aside from negative (though still significant) mentions like the one we see in Paley’s Natural Theology. Given this environment, he would likely have thought that Lucretius had been soundly defeated by Paley—why would he go looking to him for insights? We know that in his studies at Cambridge University Darwin was steeped in both Paley’s Evidences of Christianity and his Natural Theology, not Lucretius. Years later, in his Autobiography, Darwin remembered them both fondly (Barlow 1958, 58–59): With respect to Classics I did nothing except attend a few compulsory college lectures, and the attendance was almost nominal. In my second year I had to work for a month or two to pass the Little Go, which I did easily. Again in my last year I worked with some earnestness for my final degree of B.A., and brushed up my Classics together with a little Algebra and Euclid, which latter gave me much pleasure, as it did whilst at school. In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s Evidences of Christianity,

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and his Moral Philosophy. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation. By answering well the examination questions in Paley, by doing Euclid well, and by not failing miserably in Classics, I gained a good place among the οἱ πολλοί, or crowd of men who do not go in for honours. Starting from this Paleyan background, which permeated the University at this time (the Bridgewater Treatises appeared around then as well), the main problem for Darwin was framed in a Lyellian context: given that slow geological changes are occurring, how are organisms going to remain adapted to a changing environment? (M. J. S. Hodge 1982). The phenomenon of adaptation, which he derived directly from the natural theological works he was schooled in, provided the background for the development of Darwin’s theory (Ospovat 1981; Radick 2009). This is quite clear in the well-known passage from the introduction to the Origin, where Darwin states that: In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. In one very limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, ... the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the misseltoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself. (Darwin 1859, 3)

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 269 For Darwin, the phenomenon of adaptation was primary, and the question was what evolutionary mechanism could account for it. 13.8 What Did Darwin Do? An Epicurean Perspective Darwin’s achievement in the Origin (C. Darwin 1859) is commonly recognized as being twofold: 1 He provided a strong argument that life has a branching, evolutionary history, based on morphological, systematic, embryological, biogeographic, and paleontological evidence. 2 He proposed natural selection as a mechanism that could account for evolutionary change (while also accepting other potential mechanisms, such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics). As I noted, these two accomplishments are usually presented as occurring against a Paleyan, religious background. However, while this may be historically accurate with respect to Darwin and the intellectual environment he inhabited in early nineteenth-century Britain, it is not accurate in a broader intellectual context—it ignores the millennia of debate that preceded him. This contains the solution to the conundrum pointed out above: that many philosophers consider Hume’s refutation of the design argument decisive, while biologists instead point to Darwin. Darwin indeed saw himself as answering Paley, and historically, the Origin played an important role in biology rejecting religious perspectives on life. But intellectually, if “William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802) had in effect been refuted by Hume in the Dialogues (1779) and elsewhere before they were even written” (Gaskin 2008), we might instead ask what Darwin’s contribution looks like from an Epicurean perspective. I believe that from this viewpoint, Darwin’s work is most readily seen as the further development and completion of the ateleological “Epicurean Hypothesis” framed by Philo in Hume’s Dialogues. From an Epicurean perspective, the main thing Darwin did was to replace the Epicurean “fortuitous concourse of atoms” that gave rise to the world as we know it through sheer chance, by an evolutionary, historical process in which a long chain of ancestry connects the earliest, simplest organisms with their modern descendants. This is indeed a very different conception from that of Epicurus and the atomists; it depended critically on the discovery of “deep time” (Rudwick 2005) represented in the geological and paleontological record, as brought to Darwin by Adam Sedgwick and, most critically, Charles Lyell. This concrete and non-speculative update to the Epicurean hypothesis did indeed bring the study of life into science in a way it was not before, because the actual history of life could be studied, and the unity of life explored and explained. Of course it was not unique to Darwin, having been anticipated by Buffon, Maupertuis, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and

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Robert Chambers, among others. Darwin did give by far the most complete and dispassionate exposition, however, and clearly understood its implications for biology. But it is also wrong to think that the Epicurean Hypothesis, as formulated by Lucretius, was purely ahistorical, as one might think from the phrase “a fortuitous concourse of atoms.” In fact, as we have seen, there were two semi-historical processes that were part of the atomist/Epicurean creed. One is the origin of the universe from a “swirl” of atoms in the void, a rough precursor of the “nebular hypothesis” developed by Kant (1755) and Laplace (1796), and broadly anticipatory of the modern theory of the origin of the galaxy and solar system (Johnson & Wilson 2007). This is a truly evolutionary process on a physical level. The second semi-historical process is the origin of life, which is represented as occurring in a burst of activity on the new-formed earth, with first plants and then animals being formed, but many monsters as well: “the earth, way back then, tried to bring forth many Prodigies, strange of feature, monster-limbed …” (Lucretius 1995, V, 834–835). The mechanical winnowing that occurred when some of these creatures could not survive is clearly similar to the process of natural selection envisioned by Darwin—the fit survive, the unfit perish. Yet again, the new feature introduced by Darwin (and his predecessors) is the on-going historical nature of the phenomenon. “Natural selection” is not a one-shot pass at the new forms of life, but a continuing interplay of the variation of existing life and the winnowing of that variation under the demands of survival and reproduction. Lastly, a more subtle aspect of Darwin’s theory needs to be mentioned, and one that really is uniquely his. His theory does not just deal with the ability of organisms to survive and reproduce, but their relative ability to survive and reproduce. It is a “struggle for existence” among individuals in a species, and this plays out in such a way that the features or characters of individuals survive or not in the population as a combined function of their contribution to survival and reproduction, and of the genetic basis needed for these traits to be passed on to offspring. Thus Darwin’s theory is not just about the ecological and physiological requirements for survival of individual organisms, but is also about the genetic physiological requirements for the survival of traits in populations. This was indeed only hinted at in Epicurean formulations. Yet, if Darwin’s theory entailed major changes to the Epicurean narrative, it did not provide any reason to consider the Epicureans mistaken in their failure to see design in nature, because the theory does not involve design. Instead, the historical-evolutionary theory Darwin developed completes the Epicurean Hypothesis, and provides alternative explanations for features that were the lastgasp attempts of religionists to resist its logic. Let’s look at Cleanthes’ examples, and see how they appear from a modern viewpoint: 1 Two eyes, two ears indeed perform better than one eye or one ear, even if it is possible to live with only one. Yet this is not “superabundant provision,” but a

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 271 trait maintained in populations by natural selection, with mutant forms performing less well; Darwin has a ready answer for Cleanthes here. Interestingly, the genetics is not simple, either—for example, there are also clearly pleiotropic effects of genes influencing cyclopia, because typical congenital cyclopia is part of a syndrome called holoprosencephaly in which the forebrain does not divide into two hemispheres, and these individuals are not normal and functional in many other ways; this type of cyclopia is always lethal (Salama et al. 2015). 2 Domestic animals and cultivated fruits and vegetables are the products of a long history of human selection and breeding for traits useful to us (C. Darwin 1868), so it should not be surprising that they are so useful. That an original species was available that could be bred is all that was required. 3 Camels existed before people started using them for transport, but nevertheless they have been quite useful to us. They have also been bred and exchanged for transport for thousands of years, with consequent effects on their genetic structure (Almathen et al. 2016). 4 The tendency of loadstone to align with the earth’s magnetic field is indeed useful; interestingly, recent research reveals that magnetized magnetite (loadstone) is initially charged by lightning strikes, a random physical process (Wasilewski & Kletetschka 1999). In this way, modern science, of which Darwinian evolutionary theory is a part, leaves nothing to design. 13.9 Conclusion In the introduction, I noted that Darwin is commonly held by biologists to have done two things with respect to Paley: 1 He made the previously unassailable design argument untenable, by showing that a materialistic process could produce “apparent design,” and 2 By doing so, he brought the study of life (particularly, the “adaptations” of life) into science. One well-known philosopher, Daniel Dennett, follows this biologists’ view. An interesting section in Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, entitled “Hume’s Close Encounter,” treats not just Hume’s arguments against design in the Dialogues, but notes in particular Hume’s appeal to the Epicurean Hypothesis, and Diderot’s as well. But for him, this is just a poor anticipation of the great Darwin: he wants us to believe that Before Darwin, a “Mind-first” view of the universe reigned unchallenged; an intelligent God was seen as the ultimate source of all Design, the ultimate answer to any chain of “Why” questions.

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Yet in spite of this, he recognizes that Hume had destroyed the design argument; he just does not count the Epicurean Hypothesis as more than a “glimpse” of what Darwin would reveal: Even David Hume, who deftly exposed the insoluble problems with this vision, and had glimpses of the Darwinian alternative, could not see how to take it seriously. (Dennett 1995, 33–34) What I have tried to show here is that the design argument had not just been destroyed by the critique of the atomists, Epicurus, and Hume, long before Darwin, but that they provided a positive, scientific alternative, one which left nothing to design. Thus, achievement (1) is a cultural and historical, rather than an individual intellectual accomplishment (cf. Sober 2018). If Darwin vanquished the design argument, or at least set it back, it was only because the data supporting an evolutionary origin of life were by his time overwhelming, and he provided a scientific explication of this origin that could not be ignored. But achievement (2) is still Darwin’s to claim. By further developing and thereby completing the Epicurean Hypothesis, and showing that an ateleological, historical, evolutionary account of life explains many of the most puzzling features of diversity, classification, biogeography, morphology, and embryology, Darwin indeed provided the basis for all of biology today. Moreover, his theory of the differential survival and reproduction of variants, according to their degree of adaptedness (i.e., what he called “natural selection”), accounts not just for the maintenance of adaptedness, as foreseen by Empedocles and the atomists, but also plays a major role in the process of on-going evolutionary change. Or to put it in terms of the “conditions for existence,” the principle articulated by the famed anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier at the end of the Enlightenment (Reiss 2009), natural selection does not just help us see how the structure and behavior of individual organisms can be understood by their contribution to satisfying the conditions for existence of the organism (which Empedocles, Epicurus, and Hume had realized many years before), it also helps us see how the differential survival and reproduction of individual organisms bearing alternative traits can provide the basis for the continued existence of characters in populations—even such apparently detrimental traits as the long, fancy tails of peacocks. I think that Hume would have been pleased by these developments. He was himself in many ways a disciple of Newton (for the relation of Hume to Newton see Barfoot 1990; Force 1990; Hurlbutt 1985; Sapadin 1997; Schliesser 2008; Smith 1966), and certainly followed him in insisting on the primacy of experiment and induction in obtaining our (limited) knowledge of the world (Smith 1966). If we reframe the standard history, and put the Darwinian evolutionary explanation in its rightful intellectual place as the further development of the atomist/Epicurean, ateleological worldview, then the whole of natural theology leading up to Paley and beyond looks like a strange side path, not a path to

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 273 Darwin. Richard Dawkins may not understand how one could be an “intellectually fulfilled” atheist before Darwin’s Origin of Species (Dawkins 1987, 6), but Hume shows us otherwise. Hume realized that the Epicurean hypothesis undermines the design argument—as did the many other objections he raised. Yet from what we know of him, he was quite satisfied indeed. Note 1 See Sober (2018) and his paper in this volume for a nuanced dissenting opinion.

References Texts by Hume Hume, D. 1947/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Other Primary Literature Anonymous. 1725. The Physiological Library; Begun by Mr. Steuart, and Some of the Students of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, April 2. 1724; and Augmented by Some Gentlemen; and the Students of Natural Philosophy, December 1724. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Aristotle. 1952. Physics (Physica). In M. J. Adler (ed.), & R. P. Hardie & R. K. Gaye trans., Aristotle: I, pp. 259–355. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Barlow, N. 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882. New York: W. W. Norton. Bowen, F. 1860. [Review of] On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. North American Review, 90, 474–506. Boyle, R. 1772. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Vol. 5. London: W. Johnston. Cicero. 1961. De Natura Deorum, Academica. H. Rackham, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Darwin, C. 1839. Darwin C. R. “Books to be read” and “Books Read” notebook. (1838–1851) CUL-DAR119.- Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/). Retrieved December 8, 2019, from http://darwin-online. org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=CUL-DAR119.-&viewtype=side Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. Darwin, C. 1868. The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vols. 1–2. London: John Murray. Darwin, C. 1872. The Origin of Species, 6th ed. London: John Murray. Darwin, E. 1794. Zoonomia or, The Laws of Organic Life. Vol. 1. Diderot, D. 1963. Diderot, Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings. 2nd ed., J. Stewart & J. Kemp, trans. New York: International. Lucretius. 1995. On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura, A. M. Esolen, trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Paley, W. 1802. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. London: R. Faulder.

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Ray, J. 1735. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation: In Two Parts, Viz. the Heavenly Bodies, Elements, Meteors, Fossils, Vegetables, Animals … More Particularly in the Body of the Earth … and in the Admirable Structure of the Bodies of Man and Other Animals; as Also in Their Generation, &c.: with Answers to Some Objections (10th ed.). London: William Innys and Richard Manby. Wilberforce, S. 1860. [Review of] On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By Charles Darwin, M. A., F.R.S. London. Quarterly Review, 108, 225–264. Secondary and Other Literature Almathen, F., Charruau, P., Mohandesan, E., Mwacharo, J. M., Orozco-terWengel, P., Pitt, D., …Burger, P. A. 2016. “Ancient and modern DNA reveal dynamics of domestication and cross-continental dispersal of the dromedary.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 6707–6712. Ayala, F. J. 2007. “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without Designer.” PNAS, 104, 8567–8573. Bailey, C. 1964. The Greek Atomists and Epicurus: A Study. New York: Russell & Russell. Barfoot, M. 1990. “Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century”. In M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 151–190. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Behe, M. J. 1996. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Simon and Schuster. Bell, M. 2008. “Hume on the Nature and Existence of God”. In E. S. Radcliffe (ed.), A Companion to Hume. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Blackburn, S. 2019. The Best Books on David Hume | Five Books Expert Recommendations (N. Warburton, Interviewer). Retrieved from https://fivebooks.com/best-books/davidhume-simon-blackburn/ Burbridge, D. 1998. “William Paley Confronts Erasmus Darwin: Natural Theology and Evolutionism in the Eighteenth Century.” Science & Christian Belief, 10, 49–71. Cruz, H. D. 2014. “The Enduring Appeal of Natural Theological Arguments.” Philosophy Compass, 9, 145–153. Dawkins, R. 1987. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Dennett, D. C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dreifus, C. 1999 [4/27/99]. “A conversation with: Francisco J. Ayala; Ex-Priest Takes the Blasphemy Out of Evolution.” New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/1999/04/27/science/conversation-with-francisco-j-ayala-ex-priest-takes-blasphemyevolution.html Fara, P. 2016. “Questions of inheritance: Erasmus and Charles Darwin.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, #66–67, 1–17. Force, J. E. 1990. “Hume’s Interest in Newton and Science.” In J. E. Force & R. H. Popkin (ed.), Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, pp. 181–206. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Futuyma, D. J., & Kirkpatrick, M. 2017. Evolution, 4th ed. Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates. Gardner, A. 2009. “Adaptation as Organism Design.” Biology Letters, 5, 861–864.

Hume, Darwin, and the “Epicurean Hypothesis” 275 Gaskin, J. C. A. 1993. “Hume on Religion.” In D. F. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume, pp. 313–344. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaskin, J. C. A. 2008. “Introduction.” In David Hume: Principle Writings on Religion, including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, pp. ix–xxvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glass, B. 1968. “Maupertuis, Pioneer of Genetics and Evolution.” In B. Glass, O. Temkin, & W. L. Straus (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin 1745–1859, pp. 51–83. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Glass, B., Temkin, O., & Straus, W. L. 1968. Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Gotthelf, A. 1999. “Darwin on Aristotle.” Journal of the History of Biology, 32, 3–30. Greenblatt, S. 2012. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company. Hodge, J. 2009. “The Notebook Programmes and Projects of Darwin’s London Years.” In J. Hodge & G. Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., pp. 44–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodge, M. J. S. 1982. “Darwin and the Laws of the Animate Part of the Terrestrial System (1835–1837): On the Lyellian Origins of his Zoonomical Explanatory Program.” Studies in the History of Biology, 6, 1–106. Hodge, M. J. S. 1983. “The Development of Darwin’s General Biological Theorizing.” In D. S. Bendall (ed.), Evolution from Molecules to Men, pp. 43–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodge, M. J. S. 1985. “Darwin as a Lifelong Generation Theorist.” In D. Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage, pp. 207–243. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hurlbutt, R. H. 1985. Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument (revised ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Johnson, M., & Wilson, C. 2007. “Lucretius and the History of Science.” In S. Gillespie & P. Hardie (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, pp. 131–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemp, C. 2017. “Dewey’s Darwin and Darwin’s Hume.” The Pluralist, 12, 1–26. Knox-Shaw, P. 2008. “Hume’s “Farther Scenes”: Maupertuis and Buffon in the Dialogues.” Hume Studies, 34, 209–230. Kohn, D. 1980. “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin’s Path to Natural Selection.” Studies in the History of Biology, 4, 67–170. Lucas, J. R. 1979. “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter.” The Historical Journal, 22, 313–330. Osler, M. J. 1994. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ospovat, D. 1981. The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patrides, C. A. 1980. The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pullman, B. 1998. The Atom in the History of Human Thought. Oxford University Press. Radick, G. 2009. “Is the Theory of Natural Selection Independent of its History?” In J. Hodge & G. Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., pp. 147–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reiss, J. O. 2009. Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Rivers, I. 1993. “‘Galen’s Muscles’: Wilkins, Hume, and the Educational use of the Argument from Design.” The Historical Journal, 36, 577–597. Rudwick, M. J. S. 2005. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruse, M. 2003. Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salama, G. S., Kaabneh, M. A., Al-Raqad, M. K., Al-abdallah, I. M., Shakkoury, A. G., & Halaseh, R. A. 2015. “Cyclopia: A Rare Condition with Unusual Presentation – A Case Report.” Clinical Medicine Insights. Pediatrics, 9, 19–23. Sapadin, E. 1997. “A Note on Newton, Boyle, and Hume’s ‘Experimental Method’.” Hume Studies, 23, 337–344. Schliesser, E. 2008. “Hume’s Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Smith, N. K. 1947a. “Evidence Bearing on the Times of Composition and Revision of the Dialogues, and on Hume’s Arrangement for their Posthumous Publication”. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pp. 87–96. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Smith, N. K. 1947b. “Introduction.” In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pp. 1–75. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Smith, N. K. 1966. The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origin and Central Doctrines. London: MacMillan. Sober, E. 2018. Philosophy Of Biology, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Spink, J. S. 1960. French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: The Athlone Press, University of London. Stenger, V. J. 2013. God and the Atom. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Torley, V. J. 2012 [12/30]. “Paley’s Argument from Design: Did Hume Refute it, and is it an Argument from Analogy?” Retrieved November 23, 2019, from Uncommon Descent website: https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/paleys-argument-from-designdid-hume-refute-it-and-is-it-an-argument-from-analogy/ Tweyman, S. 1986. Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. van Wyhe, J. 2002a. CUL-DAR47.77–79. Retrieved December 3, 2019, from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online website: http://darwin-online.org.uk van Wyhe, J. 2002b. Darwin Online. Retrieved December 8, 2019, from http://darwinonline.org.uk/ Waller, J. 2019. Cosmological Fine-Tuning Arguments: What (if Anything) Should We Infer from the Fine-Tuning of Our Universe for Life? New York: Routledge. Wasilewski, P., & Kletetschka, G. 1999. “Lodestone: Nature’s Only Permanent Magnet—What it is and How it Gets Charged.” Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 2275–2278. Wilson, C. 2016. “Hume and Vital Materialism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 24, 1002–1021.

14

Philo’s Trojan Horse The World Soul Hypothesis and the Necessitarianism Inside Pete LeGrant

The doctrine of the soul of the world, which was so common among the Ancients, and made the principal part of the system of the Stoics is, at the bottom, the same with that of Spinoza. —Pierre Bayle, 16971

14.1 Introduction In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (hereafter DNR), there is a generally underappreciated connection between the views of his character, Philo, and those of Benedict Spinoza, as presented in the Ethics.2 Philo offers several explanations that compete with Cleanthes’s view that the source of order in the universe is a transcendent and intelligent God. Below, I will argue that one of Philo’s proposals bears a significant—albeit incomplete—resemblance to Spinoza’s necessitarianism. In section II, I give a summary of Spinoza’s general metaphysics and his necessitarianism. In section III, I turn to an explanation of Philo’s necessitarianism as it is hidden within his “World Soul Hypothesis” (WSH), as I shall call it. I will argue that Philo’s application of the concept of the World Soul involves significant, yet underappreciated, differences from earlier proponents’ use of the concept. By this contrast, I can show that Philo’s concealed necessitarianism is fairly similar to Spinoza’s. In section IV, I present two objections to Philo’s WSH. I conclude that, given only the resources Hume has afforded him, Philo is unable to respond to them directly and substantively; given additional resources, however, he might have a fighting chance. Some brief remarks about my exegetical method are in order before I begin. First, in the secondary literature on the DNR, there are various, well-known interpretive controversies. For starters, there is the familiar issue of which character receives the most philosophical sympathy from Hume himself; I do not intend to rehash this extensive debate. Although I happen to think that there is good textual evidence to regard Philo as Hume’s champion in the DNR, I will treat Philo’s views in isolation from Hume’s. In other words, I will largely treat him as a philosopher in his own right. Second, I am not concerned with showing that there is a historical connection between Spinoza’s and Hume’s views; in other words, I do not attempt to show DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-20

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that Hume read Spinoza and subsequently incorporated the latter’s ideas into his philosophy–although there are solid reasons to think that he did (see, e.g., Russell 2008, 72–73). Along these lines, I do not deny that Philo’s views bear strong resemblances to—and were probably informed by Hume’s own acquaintance with—the ideas of Hume’s other predecessors; I simply think that the connection to Spinoza’s view is too neglected and needs further exploration. That being said, here I will merely focus on the conceptual and argumentative resemblances between the views of the two thinkers. Thus, my approach here is predominantly systematic rather than historical. Third, it is quite safe to say that none of Philo’s views that are relevant to my project rise to the level of detail and technicality that one finds in Spinoza’s necessitarianism, which arises from a unique blend of some pithy metaphysical commitments (such as a substance/mode ontology, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, superessentialism, etc.); and there are some excellent exegetical pieces in the secondary literature that illuminate that mixture.3 Although I do provide a brief sketch of how Spinoza argues for his necessitarianism, I will not enter the considerable exegetical controversy over the best way to understand his argument. At any rate, Philo does not explicitly invoke any of Spinoza’s weighty metaphysical principles. Fourth, as I indicated above, I will examine the similarity of Philo’s WSH to Spinoza’s concept of God/substance, with an eye towards the necessitarian views of each. Peterman (2021) points out that there are prominent commentators, such as Pierre Bayle (1991), who claim that Spinoza himself endorses the concept of a World Soul, so one might think that this would be a fruitful starting point for comparing Philo’s and Spinoza’s views (312). But this is not a line of thought I will pursue, for several reasons. One is that I regard the imputation of Spinoza’s endorsement of the World Soul as having too thin of a textual basis to be exegetically plausible. But a much better reason is that Philo, of course, does not fully and sincerely endorse the WSH in any case. That’s because, over and above his general skepticism about metaphysical hypotheses, he’s only interested in a very small set of the World Soul’s core features, and it turns out that these can be directly compared with those explicitly and undeniably stated in Spinoza’s system.4 14.2 Spinoza’s Necessitarianism 14.2.1 Brief Overview of Spinoza’s Metaphysics

Here I will give a summary of Spinoza’s necessitarianism before I move on to discuss Philo’s version in the DNR. Because I do not wish to get bogged down in the technical details that can accompany an exegesis of Spinoza’s ideas, I only intend to give a barebones summary of his metaphysics with an eye towards the source, strength, and target of his particular version of necessitarianism. In his magnum opus, the Ethics, Spinoza contends that we can, a priori, deduce the fundamental structure of reality from the concept of substance—one he adapts and modifies from both Aristotle and Descartes (Woolhouse 1993). Notoriously, Spinoza also refers to substance as “God” and “Nature.” Although the outcome of

Philo’s Trojan Horse 279 Spinoza’s arguments is that his conception of substance is significantly different from the Abrahamic conception of God, he does build into his idea of substance many of the features that are traditionally associated with God: independent existence, infinite power, and uniqueness. Finite objects are what Spinoza calls finite modes, finite objects that are dependent upon—and properties of—God/ substance. Human minds and their ideas, human bodies, soccer balls, snare drums, and burritos are all finite modes, according to Spinoza. 14.2.2 Spinoza’s Source for the Necessity of the Laws of Nature

Spinoza also thinks that substance/God is not a transcendent and personal being. In his view, the core features that make up God’s essence—the attributes—are present in every finite mode. In other words, substance’s attributes are constituents of all finite beings. Spinoza believes that the attribute of Thought is an essential aspect of all minds and ideas and that the attribute of Extension is an essential aspect of all physical things. God’s core features do not stand apart from the essential features of finite objects; God’s features are partially constitutive of finite objects. Thus, Spinoza writes at IP18, “God is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things.” God’s essence and the universe’s essence are not numerically distinct, in Spinoza’s view; they are one and the same. It is this essence that is the source of the necessity that Spinoza attaches to all objects, events, and states of the universe. The idea of God’s immanence is also a crucial part of Spinoza’s necessitarianism, which, in turn, is one of the most controversial aspects of his metaphysical system. In the Ethics, he writes at IP33: “Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case.” I can briefly summarize the argument he gives for this conclusion in the following way: all things follow from God’s nature (IP15 and IP16). To imagine a different state or order of any and all things is to imagine a different God with a different nature. However, only one God with one nature is possible; it is the actual God whose existence is also necessary. In IP33s2, Spinoza anticipates the possible objection that God could have willed to actualize a different universe. The objection, in other words, is that God could have freely chosen to create another universe than the one in which we find ourselves; this possibility, says the objector, implies that it is false that the actual universe is the necessary one. Spinoza’s response, in a nutshell, is that even if we suppose that “will pertains to the essence of God,” the problem is that we are still trying to imagine a God with a different possible essence; and this is not possible. He writes, “All things depend on the power of God. For things to be otherwise than they are, God’s will, too, would necessarily have to be different. But God’s will cannot be different … therefore, neither can things be different.” Objectors will understandably wonder why they’re supposed to accept the premise that a difference in God’s will implies a difference in God’s essence, but fully addressing the concern would take us too far afield.5 Although there is some debate about the best way to understand the scope and application of Spinzoa’s necessitarianism (see Newlands 2007), a simplified

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version will suffice here, as we’re only interested in one ontological category to which necessitarianism applies. There are passages in the Ethics that suggest an ultra-strong reading, according to which, the necessitarianism blankets everything in reality. Spinoza states at IP15s, “All things, I repeat, are in God, and all things come to pass do so only through the laws of God’s infinite nature and follow through the necessity of his essence.” Passages such as this suggest that Spinoza necessitarianism is as broad as any variation of the view can be since it applies to all items in Spinoza’s ontology. As Michael Della Rocca (2008) succinctly puts it, “God’s nature determines everything, and there seems to be every reason to think that, for Spinoza, ‘everything’ includes the total state of the world” (77). The necessity of God’s existence and essence yields the necessity of everything else. In other words, his necessitarianism is fully comprehensive: he intends it to apply to all physical and psychological laws, states of affairs, events, things, and, most notoriously, human action. For our purposes in comparing his view to Philo’s, it is the necessity of the laws of nature that interests us the most. In the preface to Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza writes: In Nature nothing happens which can be attributed to its defectiveness, for Nature is always the same, and its force and power of acting is everywhere one and the same; that is, the laws and rules of Nature according to which all things happen and change from one form to another are everywhere and always the same. So our approach to the understanding of the nature of things of every kind should likewise be one in the same; namely, through the universal laws and rules of Nature. (278) According to Spinoza, then, the laws of nature are grounded in the essence of God/substance. As I will discuss below, Philo imputes to the nature of the divine World Soul a principle of order that consists of “steady, inviolable laws” (DNR, 43). 14.2.3 The Modal Strength of the Laws of Nature

Not only is Spinoza’s necessitarianism as broad as it can be; it is as strong as it can be. In IP17s, he writes: However, I think I have shown quite clearly (Pr. 16) that from God’s supreme power or infinite nature an infinity of things in infinite ways—that is, everything—has necessarily flowed or is always following from that same necessity, just as from the nature of a triangle it follows from eternity to eternity that its three angles are equal to two right angles. Therefore, God’s omnipotence has from eternity been actual and will remain for eternity in the same actuality.6 Spinoza’s reference to IP16 (“… an infinity of things in infinite ways”) captures what the secondary literature on Ethics refers to as the “principle of plenitude”. In IP17s, the strength of necessity that Spinoza imputes to that principle is the same

Philo’s Trojan Horse 281 as the one he ascribes to God’s nature and existence. That is, the modal status of the one is on par with the other. But what is this modal status? Addressing this question involves importing some modal concepts that Spinoza himself did not use; and the danger of anachronism looms. Nevertheless, I think a basic framework for discussing the modal status of the relevant key concepts can be deployed without too much distortion of Spinoza’s intentions. As I read him, Spinoza thinks that metaphysical necessity is the primary and foundational modal concept. Following Kit Fine (2002), we can understand this as “the sense of necessity that obtains in virtue of the identity of things (broadly conceived). Thus, in this sense, it is necessary not only that anything red is red or that nothing is both red and green, but also that I am a person or that red is not a number” (254). Going back to IP17s above, we can understand Spinoza as saying that it is the identity of the thing, God/Nature/substance, that necessarily gives rise to an infinity of things in infinite ways. Putting it all together, we can read the above passage from the preface to Part III as saying that “the universal laws and rules of Nature” just are built into the identity of God/substance, and thus they are metaphysically necessary. Returning to IP17s, Spinoza makes a comparison with geometry; and he clearly thinks that the mathematical necessity involved in the nature of the triangle elucidates or indicates the strength of the modal status he has in mind regarding the total state of the universe; and that status is metaphysical necessity. In IP17s’s example of the triangle, it is the identity of the thing, “the nature of a triangle,” that necessarily gives rise to the fact that its interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Whether Spinoza thinks that (1) mathematical necessity and metaphysical necessity are equivalent or (2) the former is subsumed under the latter (or (3) something else altogether), what is clear is that, in IP17s, he invokes the former as an epistemic tool to get the reader to grasp the latter. Similarly, as we will see below, Philo also invokes mathematical necessity to illuminate the concept of the metaphysical necessity of the laws of nature in his WSH. 14.2.4 A Key Target of Spinoza’s Necessitarianism

Having discussed the source and strength of Spinoza’s necessitarianism, we can now pivot to one of its key targets: teleological cosmogonies. He rejects any account of the creation of the universe that claims that there are final causes—goals—that are built into objects and direct them to behave in particular ways. With this line of thought, Spinoza shows that he is allied to the early moderns’ general rejection of the Peripatetics’ and Scholastics’ appeals to final causes. The early modern proponents of the new mechanical philosophy are bent on trying to explain the workings of nature primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of material and efficient causes and mathematical descriptions of them (I will return to this below).7 In the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza tries to explain the error of those who think that God created the universe to serve the needs of human beings: … Men act always with an end in view, to wit, the advantage that they

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seek. Hence it happens that they are always looking only for the final causes of things done, and are satisfied when they find them, having, of course, no reason for further doubt. But if they fail to discover them from some external source, they have no recourse but to turn to themselves, and to reflect on what ends would normally determine them to similar actions, and so they necessarily judge other minds by their own. Further, since they find within themselves and outside themselves a considerable number of means very convenient for the pursuit of their own advantage—as, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, cereals and living creatures for food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish—the result is that they look on all the things of Nature as means to their own advantage. And realizing that these were found, not produced by them, they come to believe that there is someone else who produced these means for their use. For looking on things as means, they could not believe them to be self-created, but on the analogy of the means which they are accustomed to produce for themselves, they were bound to conclude that there was some governor or governors of Nature, endowed with human freedom, who have attended to all their needs and made everything for their use. (239) According to Spinoza, humans have a strong tendency to project their own goal-directed behavior onto the workings of the universe. Since we seek our own advantage, we (mistakenly) come to think that everything has an innate propensity to seek our advantage. That’s how we come to imagine that our noses are made for smelling things. But since our noses aren’t self-created, and we didn’t create them, many of us conclude that some transcendent being must have given the nose the final cause of smelling, just as we might assign a tool a specific goal such as hammering nails. Taking himself to have explained how we come to believe in final causes, Spinoza then gives his argument against these teleological cosmogonies. In one way, his argument is fairly simple; Spinoza basically employs a top-down strategy (assuming God is at the top in nature): there are no final causes associated with the well-being of human beings, because there are no final causes in nature, at all; and this is the result of God’s own essence. So, he states: “Nature has no fixed goal and … all final causes are but figments of the human imagination … All things in Nature [Substance/God] proceed from all eternal necessity and with supreme perfection.”8 Although Spinoza’s views on how God causes things to exist and to behave are too complex to detail here, a summary sketch will suffice: God’s nature metaphysically necessitates the laws of nature that partially determine the existence and interactions of ordinary objects. But these specific interactions should also be understood in terms of efficient causation, i.e., ordinary things causing each other to act in determinate ways (IP28). A helpful way to think of it, perhaps, is that God vertically causes the broadest features that are partially constitutive of any generic physical object, while specific objects horizontally cause each other to have features that make them particular individuals.9 This horizontal causation is efficient, through and through, and we should

Philo’s Trojan Horse 283 understand that, in turn, through the concepts of bodies in motion impacting one another (IIP13). We should account for any object’s particular features solely through mechanistic explanation. I would like to flag several key features before we turn to Philo’s version of necessitarianism. First, we saw above that Spinoza identifies the ultimate source of necessity in the universe as God/substance. The essential nature of the universe is just God’s own; God’s nature does not transcend the universe but is a necessary component of the total state of the universe, and that includes its laws of nature, things, events, and states of affairs. Second, regarding the issue of modal strength: Spinoza equates the necessity he imputes to the total state of the universe to the mathematical necessity evident in the fact that the triangle’s three angles are equal to two right angles (IP17s). Third, he not only targets doctrines of human free will with his necessitarianism but also teleological cosmogonies. 14.3 Philo’s World Soul and Its Concealed Necessitarianism 14.3.1 Summary of Cleanthes’s Design Argument and Philo’s General Strategy

Let’s now turn to Hume’s DNR in order to see the general strategy of Philo’s campaign against Cleanthes’s design argument for the existence of God. Cleanthes’s analogy is clearly tailored to appeal to the proponents of the prevalent mechanistic philosophy and science of the day. In Part II of the DNR, Cleanthes says: Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. (DNR II, 15) As I am more concerned here with Philo’s response, I aim to give only the shortest summary of Cleanthes’s argument: machines exhibit the adaptation of means to ends, and thus have designers. The universe exhibits much greater adaptation of means to ends than machines do. Therefore, a fortiori, the universe has a designer (DNR, 15) The teleological aspect of Cleanthes’s argument is

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apparent in the line, “The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance” (DNR, 15). In other words, according to Cleanthes, the order of the universe consists of everything having both final causes and optimized ways of achieving those goals; but the workings of this order are mechanistic through and through. Philo, of course, will not only challenge Cleathes’s characterization of the order itself, he will contest the cause of that order. Philo’s broadest strategy in attacking Cleanthes’s design argument is relatively straightforward; as Cleanthes intends his design argument to be non-deductive, Philo repeatedly tries to show that the argument is uncogent. He uses many different tactics in the DNR that exemplify this strategy, and one of them involves pressing what we can call the “Too Many Suspects Objection.” We can get an idea of this tactic by looking at a rough analogy. One way a defense attorney might try to get a client off the hook is by trotting out for the jury other possible suspects for having committed a crime. As the pool of plausible alternative suspects grows, the likelihood that we’ve charged the correct suspect with the crime is supposed to go down (in the minds of the jurors, anyway). Philo is even willing to push the objection against his own proposals throughout the DNR, saying: “Without any great effort of thought, I believe that I could, in an instant propose other systems of cosmogony which would have some faint appearance of truth; though it is a thousand, a million to one if either yours or any one of mine be the true system” (DNR, VIII, 49). Of any given cosmogonical theory that Philo scrutinizes, there are other factors that impact its probability of being “the true system”—such as the strength of the similarities appealed to in the arguments claimed to support it, for example—but it is clear that Philo regards the sheer number of systems as also affecting each one’s plausibility. Philo applies this strategy when he challenges Cleathes’s characterization of the universe’s order, itself. As I claimed above, Cleanthes’s invocation of the universe’s similarity to a machine clearly appeals to the prevalent mechanical philosophy and science of his own day. But Philo thinks another comparison is better; he thinks the universe should be compared to an ensouled animal. Toward the very end of her excellent study, “The World Soul in Early Modern Philosophy,” Alison Peterman (2021) briefly observes: The contrast between an ensouled universe and the machine analogy … becomes … increasingly dominant in the Early Modern period. The meaning of these analogies, though, again depends on what you think are the relevant features of animals and machines. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume takes these to be the two most compelling analogical ways of modeling the universe. For his part, Hume is focused on the difference in their origins: an organism springs from vegetation or generation, while an artificial machine arises from design (221). I agree with Peterman that a significant portion of DNR is dedicated to whether a machine or an animal is the better basis for comparison with the universe.

Philo’s Trojan Horse 285 However, what I would add is that Philo’s use of the animal analogy subtly conceals its concomitant proposal for the ultimate cause of the order in the universe. Throughout the DNR, Philo produces a bevy of alternatives so as to cast doubt on Cleanthes’s claim to have discovered the primary suspect for the cause of order in the universe: a transcendent intelligent designer. We can find one alternative in Part V, where Philo argues that Cleanthes’s analogy is just as likely to lead to the conclusion that many designers were involved in the production of the world’s order; in the words of the rough legal analogy above, polytheism is a just as much a suspect as monotheism is. Another alternative, and this is the one in which we’re most interested here, is directly connected to Philo’s comparison of the universe to an animal: the World Soul as the immanent, inseparable ground of the metaphysical necessity of the laws of nature. Let’s turn to that concept now. 14.3.2 The Source of the Natural Laws’ Necessity: The World Soul’s Principle of Order

Zooming out to look at the Early Modern period as a whole, Peterman (2021) explains that these thinkers were generally divided into different camps over what the order of the world consists in: One kind of order is nature’s regularity: individuals behave similarly across time and space, and as a result we can predict and control them. This suggests that nature is ordered by, as Descartes puts it, “God’s selfsame action in accordance with the selfsame laws,” and philosophers who emphasize this kind of order emphasize the role of laws of nature in structuring the world and their importance to natural philosophical explanation. But a different kind of order is coordination, or harmony. Individuals in nature seem to respond to each other, often at a distance, as if they could perceive or communicate with one another. They make fine adjustments in their motions as if to adapt to or conspire with others, with a variety and complexity that cannot easily be captured by general laws but is clearly not chaotic. Explaining this kind of particularistic, harmonious adaptation does not strictly require appealing to the unity of the parts of nature in a single individual, but it does vividly suggest an analogy between the world and organic systems. A plant or animal soul regulates its body not by legislative decree, but by a kind of particularistic adaptation, aimed at the stability of the entire system. (208–209) In what follows below, I build on Peterman’s work and show that Philo combines both harmony and regularity into his alternative to Cleanthes’s design hypothesis. In Part VI, Philo proposes that, instead of thinking of the universe as a designed artifact that has God as its transcendent designer (as Cleanthes does), we should endorse the World Soul Hypothesis (WSH). The WSH has two main components: (1) the World, which is the Animal, and (2) the Deity, which is its

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Soul.10 He gives an argument from analogy that he thinks is at least as good as Cleanthes’s: Now, if we survey the universe, so far as it falls under our knowledge, it bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of matter in it produces no disorder: a continual waste in every part is incessantly repaired: the closest sympathy is perceived throughout the entire system: and each part or member, in performing its proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the whole. The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal; and the Deity is the Soul of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it. (DNR VI, 39–40) Several key points are in order. First, the bulk of this particular passage is primarily concerned with the features of the physical universe, the Animal, and not so much with its Soul, yet. All the argument supposedly establishes in the conclusion is that the Soul exists and that there is some sort of causal interaction between them; but Philo does not here expound upon the properties of the Soul in which he is most interested. Second, note that Philo is willing to identify the Soul with the Deity, a move that Early Moderns like Ralph Cudworth and Henry More explicitly rejected as heretical (Peterman 2021, 192). Third, observe that Philo does not dispute the existence of a general kind of order that Cleanthes claims to find in the universe; on the contrary, he embraces it; but he thinks that the order has a character and ground different from that of a machine. It seems clear that, in the passage above, Philo is focusing on the harmony he finds in nature. Again, as Peterman characterizes the historical use of harmony, “Individuals in nature seem to respond to each other, often at a distance, as if they could perceive or communicate with one another” (209). Several key thinkers in the Early Modern period, such as Fludd, Van Helmont, and Conway, regarded the sympathetic action of nature as a phenomenon that they needed to explain in their respective cosmologies (Peterman, 194). This harmony is Philo’s basis for making an analogy with an organism, instead of drawing one with a machine. But, having presented the animal analogy, Philo is quick in the next few paragraphs to put the other kind of order, regularity, on the table, as well. Let’s turn to that now. The WSH already had a long history that was full of a wide variety of proponents by the time Hume wrote the DNR, as Peterman and others show. Philo proceeds to tap into this history and approvingly invokes the cosmological systems of “ancient theologians,” saying: Nothing more repugnant to all their notions, because nothing more repugnant to common experience, than mind without body; a mere spiritual substance, which fell not under their senses nor comprehension, and of which they had not observed one single instance throughout all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they felt both: an order, arrangement, organization, or internal

Philo’s Trojan Horse 287 machinery, in both, they likewise knew, after the same manner: and it could not but seem reasonable to transfer this experience to the universe; and to suppose the divine mind and body to be also coeval, and to have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in them, and inseparable from them. (DNR VI, 40) We can glean two key features of the Soul from what I will call the “Repugnance Passage” above: immanence and inseparability. Philo advances the idea that the Deity’s core features are numerically identical to the organizational features of the world. Another way to put it is that Soul’s essence is just the essence of the Animal.11 However, at this stage in the presentation of the WSH, all that has been established, supposedly, is that its essence is thus built into the world and inseparable from it. We still don’t know how the Soul supposedly brings about the harmony we find in the world, and, once we turn to this issue, the similarity with Spinoza’s necessitarianism will be all the more apparent. Let me remind the reader that we are still in Part VI of the DNR. In response to Philo’s presentation of the WSH (41), Cleanthes begins a salvo of objections (42). His first one is that an analogy with a vegetable would be better than the one with an animal. (Of course, this is partially Hume’s set-up for Part VII, in which Philo picks up the vegetable analogy and runs with it.) Cleanthes claims that the animal analogy is “defective in many circumstances the most material: no organs of sense; no seat of thought or reason; no one precise origin of motion and action” (emphasis added). What is curious is that Philo never addresses the specific part of the objection having to do with the lack of a seat of thought or reason, and I will return to this curiosity later. Next, Cleanthes objects that the WSH implies that the universe is eternal (because if the Soul’s nature is eternal, then the Animal’s is eternal), and then he gives a series of subarguments to try to show that this consequence is false. But this objection need not detain us. Turning to Philo’s direct reply (which I will call the “Water Passage”), we find that he elaborates further upon the key features of the World Soul: Strong and almost incontestable proofs may be traced over the whole earth, that every part of this globe has continued for many ages entirely covered with water. And though order were supposed inseparable from matter, and inherent in it; yet may matter be susceptible of many and great revolutions, through the endless periods of eternal duration. The incessant changes, to which every part of it is subject, seem to intimate some such general transformations; though, at the same time, it is observable, that all the changes and corruptions of which we have ever had experience, are but passages from one state of order to another; nor can matter ever rest in total deformity and confusion. What we see in the parts, we may infer in the whole; at least, that is the method of reasoning on which you rest your whole theory. And were I obliged to defend any particular system of this nature, which I never willingly should do, I esteem none more plausible than that which ascribes an eternal inherent principle of order to the world,

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though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations. This at once solves all difficulties; and if the solution, by being so general, is not entirely compleat [sic] and satisfactory, it is at least a theory that we must sooner or later have recourse to, whatever system we embrace. How could things have been as they are, were there not an original inherent principle of order somewhere, in thought or in matter? And it is very indifferent to which of these we give the preference. Chance has no place, on any hypothesis, sceptical or religious. Everything is surely governed by steady, inviolable laws. And were the inmost essence of things laid open to us, we should then discover a scene, of which, at present, we can have no idea. Instead of admiring the order of natural beings, we should clearly see that it was absolutely impossible for them, in the smallest article, ever to admit of any other disposition. (DNR VI, 43; emphases added) In this Water Passage, Philo reiterates the claims from the earlier Repugnance Passage that the World Soul is present in the universe, as “order … supposed inseparable from matter, and inherent in it” and as “an eternal inherent principle of order” in the world, not standing outside the world in the manner of a transcendent cause. I read all three pieces of text from Part VI—the original animal analogy, the Repugnance Passage, and the Water Passage—as being one continuous elaboration upon the WSH. Recall that Peterman explains that the Moderns generally offered two competing characterizations of order in the world, harmony and regularity. In the first passage from Part VI, Philo focuses on the WSH’s first component, the Animal and the harmony between its parts. In the Water Passage, we find that he is now moving toward an explanation of the cause of that order. He is interested more in the WSH’s second component, the Soul and its order conceived as regularity: “Everything is surely governed by steady, inviolable laws” (emphasis added). I suggest that the two characterizations of the order contained in the WSH are perfectly compatible with one another. That’s because harmony is found in the specific interactions between the parts of the Animal; those parts repair, perceive, and sympathize with each other (and the parts of machines don’t do that). But this harmony of the Animal is underpinned by the regularity of the steady and inviolable laws of the principle of order that it shares with the Soul. To further bolster my exegetical claim, notice that the Water Passage’s first half makes scattered mentions of “revolutions,” “changes,” and “transformations”; but then Philo goes on to say, “I esteem [no system] more plausible than that which ascribes an eternal inherent principle of order to the world, though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations.” Add to that another piece of evidence from Part VII, in which Philo adds and develops the vegetable analogy. The following exchange between Demea and Philo is of interest: But what is this vegetation and generation of which you talk? said Demea. Can you explain their operations, and anatomize that fine internal structure on which they depend?

Philo’s Trojan Horse 289 As much, at least, replied Philo, as Cleanthes can explain the operations of reason, or anatomize that internal structure on which it depends. But without any such elaborate disquisitions, when I see an animal, I infer, that it sprang from generation; and that with as great certainty as you conclude a house to have been reared by design. These words, generation, reason, mark only certain powers and energies in nature, whose effects are known, but whose essence is incomprehensible; and one of these principles, more than the other, has no privilege for being made a standard to the whole of nature. (DNR VII, 45–46) Philo returns to the animal analogy, and he makes several claims that align nicely with the distinction between harmony and regularity. Notice that he speaks of generation as being a power and energy in nature that has “known” effects. He thus thinks of generation as a cause within nature; he presumably thinks that, as a cause, it is also “known.” But what is important is that he thinks that there is an inscrutable essence that underpins these known causal relations. Zooming out to the bigger picture of the DNR, every time that Philo mentions the “steady inviolable laws” (DNR VI, 43), “the economy of the universe (DNR IX, 57), he claims that they are unknowable to us. Philo also asks: “And instead of admiring the order of natural beings, may it not happen, that, could we penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies we should clearly see why it was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition?” ((DNR IX, 57). The admirable—and presumably knowable—order of natural beings is a level up from the more fundamental level of the unknowable intimate natures of physical objects.12 To tie it all together using Peterman’s distinctions, then: on my reading, Philo proposes that the inscrutable regularity common to both Soul and Animal gives rise to the harmony that we observe in the revolutions and alterations of the Animal. I believe my extension of Peterman’s work is consistent with what Don Garrett writes about Philo’s approach in his Hume: Philo agrees that there can be no question among “reasonable men” concerning “the being of a Deity” but only concerning its nature. However, this is because ‘God’, for the purposes of the dialogues, is understood simply to mean “the cause or causes of order and adaptation in the universe.” Because both Hume and Philo treat “the world” or “the universe” as potentially temporary and local arrangements of things that might have outside and antecedent causes, God might be an antecedently existing being, operating in accordance with causal laws. Because Hume holds that regularities in nature may sometimes be causally explained as instances of some more general regularities, however, it is in no way ruled out that God might instead be simply a principle of order inherent in nature and its laws. Philo accepts the existence of a Deity because: (i) he does not dispute the existence of notable harmonious patterns, for example in the structure of the solar system, or the prevalence of adaptations of means to end, especially in biology; and (ii) he does not deny that these features should have some causal explanation, of at least one of

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the two kinds just mentioned. What he questions is only the extent to which this cause or these causes should be understood to be intelligent or mind-like. (Garrett 2015, 287; emphasis added) Adding to Garrett’s observations, I think that Philo’s WSH in Part VI offers a causal explanation for the “harmonious patterns” in the universe: a necessary, immanent, inseparable, and regular principle of order that just is the common essence of the Deity/Soul and the universe/Animal. But a key question remains: what does Philo have in mind with the claim that this principle of order is necessary? 14.3.3 The Modal Strength of Philo’s Proposal

Clues to answering the modal question are in several places in the DNR, and they suggest that Philo is thinking of a very strong notion of necessity. Recall the very end of Part VI’s Water Passage, in which Philo offers the possibility that it is “absolutely impossible” for physical things to have dispositional properties different from those they do; these properties, I suggest, could well be grounded in the “steady and inviolable laws” of the World Soul. Later in the DNR, he uses the same phrase in a passage from Part IX, where the modal status he ascribes to the laws of nature rises to the level of mathematical necessity. Consider what I will call “the Arithmetic Passage”: ‘Tis observed by arithmeticians, that the products of 9 compose always either 9 or some lesser product of 9; if you add together all the characters, of which any of the former products is composed. Thus, of 18, 27, 36, which are products of 9, you make 9 by adding 1 to 8, 2 to 7, 3 to 6. Thus 369 is a product also of 9; and if you add 3, 6, and 9, you make 18, a lesser product of 9. To a superficial observer, so wonderful a regularity may be admired as the effect either of chance or design; but a skillful algebraist immediately concludes it to be the work of necessity, and demonstrates that it must forever result from the nature of these numbers. Is it not probable, I ask, that the whole economy of the universe is conducted by a like necessity, though no human algebra can furnish a key, which solves the difficulty? And instead of admiring the order of natural beings, may it not happen, that, could we penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies, we should clearly see why it was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition? So dangerous is it to introduce this idea of necessity into the present question! and so naturally does it afford an inference directly opposite to the religious hypothesis! (DNR IX, 56–57) The general idea of Philo’s argument seems to be that, just as we observe order in the universe, we observe order in the numbers’ natures and their relations. If we had sufficient knowledge about the numbers, we would understand that it is absolutely impossible for their natures and relations to be any other way. Likewise, if we had sufficient knowledge about the microphysical constitutions of

Philo’s Trojan Horse 291 the building blocks of nature (“the intimate nature of bodies”), we would see that it is absolutely impossible for bodies’ natures and relations to be any other way. But notice that Philo not only imputes this necessity to the natures of ordinary physical objects, he ascribes it to the laws of nature itself: “the whole economy of the universe.” This claim nicely and cleanly dovetails with the WSH from Part VI because Philo can claim that the economy of the universe just is the essence of the World Soul.13 If my reading of these passages is correct, then Philo is a necessitarian (not a contingentist) about the laws of nature; that is, he thinks the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary and are grounded in the divine World Soul. With his discussion of the products of 9, Philo explicitly invokes mathematical necessity, just as Spinoza does, to indicate the modal strength he had in mind about those laws. To sum up Philo’s train of thought: the entire system of nature, including its laws, is metaphysically necessary and could not have been different, just as the laws of arithmetic could not have been different. Some commentators such as Dye (1989) see clearly the ultimate thrust of Philo’s necessitarian attack; Dye writes about the Arithmetic Passage: “Philo’s remarks … weigh heavily against Cleanthes’ design argument. If the order of the world is necessary, it neither requires nor permits the hypothesis of an external cosmic designer” (134). If Philo’s argument is successful, the design argument is uncogent because the order inherent in the economy of nature is ultimately independent of God’s intelligence and will.14 I think, however, that the setup of Philo’s attack has received less attention in the secondary literature than it deserves. Looking at an objection that early moderns often raised to general accounts of the World Soul will help us see better how Philo’s particular use of it (1) significantly differs from its earlier proponents’ and (2) subtly conceals the necessitarianism within. 14.3.4 Is Philo’s WSH a Vacuous Explanation?

Philo’s necessitarianism is nested within his WSH, and, as we saw above, he appears to cite the “ancient theologians” with approval in Part VI’s presentation of it. Many, though not all, of his real contemporaries could reasonably worry that he is backsliding into a philosophical tradition that they were eager to leave behind. As it has been traditionally characterized, the early modern period of philosophy generally exhibits a commitment to endorsing explanations of the natural world that are contentful and informative rather than trivial or vacuous. As the story goes, this commitment was largely driven by the proponents of the new mechanical philosophy and its negative implications for the long-standing Peripatetic and Scholastic doctrines of substantial forms and “occult properties.”15 Alison Peterman’s shows that, while some moderns were comfortable integrating the idea of a World Soul into their cosmologies, many others shunned it: What distinguishes the world soul from other ways of explaining natural animation and order? The word ‘soul’ can be used to refer to whatever is the source of a thing’s animation and organization, so the danger of vacuity or obscurity looms. This was a common criticism of the world soul, and it was

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exacerbated by the fact that it was supposed to explain mysterious phenomena like magnetism and sympathetic cures. Mersenne wrote that the world soul contains “no more satisfaction” than the occult qualities of the schools, and Robert Boyle … that it will “tell us nothing that will satisfy the curiosity of an inquisitive person” (205–206). Suppose Philo tried to define the World Soul as “the immanent and inseparable thing that is the source of order in the universe”; his contemporaries might have raised the understandable complaint that this isn’t any more satisfactory than saying that clocks behave the way that they do because they have a “time-indicative quality”, to borrow a famous phrase from Leibniz (1686 in Leibniz 1998, 61).16 I think Philo can effectively respond to the charges of vacuity and obscurity that Mersenne, Boyle, and others would have been likely to level against the WSH. In what follows, I’ll argue that it is the World Soul’s mathematical grounding of the laws of nature that is supposed to address their concerns; it is not the Soul’s putative chief aspect of possessing thought that does it. What I propose below is that Philo is baiting theists with the concept of a soul in order to move them towards an ontology that is fairly respectable from a Newtonian worldview. For starters, it is important to note that Philo shows in Part IV that he is very much aware of their concerns, and he addresses them in a broader context involving a gesture at the idea of the World Soul (even though he doesn’t call it that in the passage). Because Hume packs so many points into the dialogue format of the DNR, we have to go through some twists and turns in various passages to see this. Let us begin with Philo’s Part IV argument that Cleanthes’s design hypothesis generates a vicious infinite regress and that the prevention of the regress requires positing an inherent and divine order in matter. Philo says: If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better. When you go one step beyond the mundane system, you only excite an inquisitive humour which it is impossible ever to satisfy. (DNR IV, 31) So, the connection between an immanent principle of order and divinity is already present here; it is the same connection that Philo advances later in Part VI’s WSH. Sticking to Part IV, however, what concerns us here is not the debate about the regress but Philo’s implicit acknowledgment of the moderns’ dissatisfaction with the explanatory schemes of the “Peripatetics”: We have also experience of particular systems of thought and of matter which have no order; of the first in madness, of the second in corruption. Why, then,

Philo’s Trojan Horse 293 should we think that order is more essential to one than the other? And if it requires a cause in both, what do we gain by your system, in tracing the universe of objects into a similar universe of ideas? The first step which we make leads us on forever. It were, therefore, wise in us to limit all our inquiries to the present world, without looking further. No satisfaction can ever be attained by these speculations, which so far exceed the narrow bounds of human understanding. It was usual with the Peripatetics, you know, Cleanthes, when the cause of any phenomenon was demanded, to have recourse to their faculties or occult qualities; and to say, for instance, that bread, nourished by its nutritive faculty, and senna purged by its purgative. But it has been discovered that this subterfuge was nothing but the disguise of ignorance, and that these philosophers, though less ingenuous, really said the same thing with the sceptics or the vulgar, who fairly confessed that they knew not the cause of these phenomena. In like manner, when it is asked, what cause produces order in the ideas of the Supreme Being; can any other reason be assigned by you, anthropomorphites, than that it is a rational faculty, and that such is the nature of the Deity? But why a similar answer will not be equally satisfactory in accounting for the order of the world, without having recourse to any such intelligent creator as you insist on, may be difficult to determine. It is only to say that such is the nature of material objects, and that they are all originally possessed of a faculty of order and proportion. These are only more learned and elaborate ways of confessing our ignorance; nor has the one hypothesis any real advantage above the other, except in its greater conformity to vulgar prejudices. (DNR IV, 32) Shortly after his earlier gesture at the WSH, we see here that Philo shows that he is aware of the moderns’ general disapproval of the Peripatetics’ (and presumably Scholastics’) use of vacuous explanations, such as those involving invocations of the nutritive and purgative faculties. In face of the moderns’ demands, we can recast Philo’s response as a dilemma to his audience: accept that Cleanthes’s proposal is just as vacuous as mine (“why a similar answer will not be equally satisfactory”), or accept that mine has an edge over his (“nor has the one hypothesis any real advantage above the other, except in its greater conformity to vulgar prejudices”). On either horn of the dilemma, according to Philo, Cleanthes does not win the debate. I’ll now unpack the details of the two horns. Consider the first horn of the dilemma. Philo’s reply to Cleanthes in the second paragraph is simple: when it comes to weighing the explanatory content of the design hypothesis against the WSH’s, the one is no more vacuous than the other. As Peterman observes about the general history of the idea, “The word ‘soul’ can be used to refer to whatever is the source of a thing’s animation and organization, so the danger of vacuity or obscurity looms” (205). Philo could reply that Cleanthes is simply replacing “soul” with the “essential rational faculty of the Deity” for being the source of order in the universe. Any qualms that Mersenne and Boyle would have with Philo’s WSH are the very same that they

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should have with Cleanthes’s design hypothesis. So, parity of explanatory vacuity obtains, and Cleanthes has failed to win the debate. Let’s turn to the second horn of the dilemma. In the last sentence of the passage from Part IV, Philo thinks he does have a “real advantage,” which is the “greater conformity to vulgar prejudices.” But what are these? Philo notes one of them in the paragraph that follows Part VI’s Repugnance Passage and its presentation of the WSH: You [Cleanthes] are too much superior, surely, to systematical prejudices, to find any more difficulty in supposing an animal body to be, originally, of itself, or from unknown causes, possessed of order and organization, than in supposing a similar order to belong to mind. But the vulgar prejudice, that body and mind ought always to accompany each other, ought not, one should think, to be entirely neglected; since it is founded on vulgar experience, the only guide which you profess to follow in all these theological enquiries. (DNR VI, 40) The discussion of the “animal body” shows that Philo is still discussing the WSH. The WSH’s “real advantage,” then, is that it is more in line with a “vulgar prejudice” that mind and body are inseparable. Thinking about this prejudice’s relation to the WSH, we can ask: why are the Soul and the Animal inseparable? Because the principle of order in the World Animal is numerically identical to the one of the World Soul; there is only one essence that both share. This real advantage gives us a clue as to the best way to understand why Philo invokes the WSH. I contend that Part VI’s talk of the World Soul, itself, is simply Philo’s Trojan horse to entice the theist to open up the gates to the castle. To see this, let’s add up the ways in which Philo dresses up the horse. Consider the observation by O’ Connor (2001) that Philo begins the presentation of the WSH by appealing to “ancient theologians” so that his contemporary theist will think that Philo’s WSH is “not alien or hostile to religion” (122). (This appeal was perhaps also for Hume’s own safety. J.C.A. Gaskin (2009) notes “Neither Hume nor any other writer in eighteenthcentury Britain (or elsewhere in Europe for that matter) was free to express atheistic or antireligious views without the threat of or actual prosecution or social penalties of a very nasty sort” (488).) Then he adds to the horse’s dressing the apparent appeal to Soul’s thought coupled with the invocations of vulgar prejudices and vulgar experience concerning the inseparability of body and mind. The result, then, is that Philo thinks the overall facade should be fairly attractive to the contemporary theist who doesn’t reject inseparability; for any theist who does reject it, Philo is going to have to try another tactic altogether. I agree with O’Connor that the appeal to the ancient theologians is part of Philo’s surprise attack, but, when we turn to the issue of what’s inside Philo’s Trojan Horse, I do not think that O’Connor goes quite far enough. He writes: As described here by Philo, this hypothesis of old, applied to the deity or deities, is a form of pantheism, a theory associated in modern times with the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Briefly, pantheism is a

Philo’s Trojan Horse 295 theory maintaining that body and mind are co-extensive in the deity, in effect, that the Universe and the deity are one and the same. It is the idea that the self-same universe may alternately be described in physical terms or in terms of intelligence, but that this dualism of descriptions reflects no dualism in reality, no dualism of things, in other words. For instance, a human person may be described in purely physical terms or in terms of mind and intelligence, without, on this theory, any suggestion that mind is a separate thing or substance from the body, a separate thing from a properly functioning brain, in particular. A variation on this pantheistic conception of the universe and the deity will come up in part VIII. Philo’s main point here is that this ‘new species of anthropomorphism’ (DNR: 73), the notion of the universe as organism, not as artefact, has the better fit with experience, thus the stronger claim on Cleanthes (DNR: 73–74). We may think of this theory as undermining the notion of spiritual substance in a more positive light as well, that is, as offering us a plausible way of supposing an original principle of order to be in matter itself, namely, matter understood as living matter (DNR: 73). (122–123) Of course, I applaud O’Connor’s reference to Spinoza, and he is correct that inseparability and immanence are necessary parts of Philo’s attack. But O’Connor’s reading is not sufficient for the reason that Philo wants to reject both key components of Cleanthes’s hypothesis: (1) a teleological conception of the universe’s order and (2) divine thought as the transcendent source of that order. Philo’s espousal of inseparability and immanence addresses the second component; but this espousal, by itself, it is still compatible with a teleological cosmology, such as Aristotle’s, which maintains the inseparability of mind and matter but also final causation. Even if Philo went further and reductively framed the analogy between the universe and animals in purely materialistic terms without any reference to thought, he’d still have to disavow the teleological component so as not to run afoul of the mechanical program prevalent in his own time. In my view, inseparability and immanence require another conceptual component for the attack to be effective, once the Trojan horse is opened. What’s hidden inside the horse is the metaphysical necessity, indicated by mathematical necessity, of the laws of nature. The absolutely necessary laws of nature (which are inseparable and immanent) give rise to and govern the harmony of the universe; but their necessity implies that they do so without transcendent divine thought or objects’ having inherent teloi. Another clue that Philo is delivering a Trojan Horse is found in Part VI’s Water Passage, once again: “How could things have been as they are, were there not an original inherent principle of order somewhere, in thought or in matter? And it is very indifferent to which of these we give the preference. Chance has no place, on any hypothesis, sceptical or religious” (emphasis added). Here he reiterates Part IV’s apparent claim of probabilistic parity between the design hypothesis and the WSH. However, the indifference of which Philo speaks here is not merely his own; it’s an indifference he wants Cleathes and his ilk to adopt

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towards their own view, which is that the mental realm is the ultimate source of order in the physical realm. Since, according to Philo, the mental realm requires a cause of its existence and order just as much as the material realm does (30–31), and since the WSH presents a neutral and necessary principle of order that is common to both realms and explains their respective internal harmonies,17 Cleanthes and others have no good reason to prefer their view to the WSH. After all, given all the objections he’s raised elsewhere in DNR, Philo wants to move his audience away from the attendant problems of the hypothesis of thought as being the source of worldly order. Since that’s the case, it is not the World Soul’s supposed faculty of thought per se that interests him in his campaign against Cleanthes, which might initially seem odd. One might expect that, in the post-Cartesian philosophical landscape, a soul’s primary selling point in any explanation is its ability to think. However, Philo’s positive invocation of that characteristic in his own explanation would unwittingly turn him into Cleanthes’s theistic ally (or neutral neighbor), as he’d simply be swapping one divine intellect for another as the explanation of order in the world—with equal explanatory vacuity. Recall what Garrett summarizes for us: “What [Philo] questions is only the extent to which this cause or these causes [of order in the universe] should be understood to be intelligent or mind-like” (Garrett, 287). Also, remember that Cleanthes objects in Part VI that a vegetable analogy is better than Philo’s animal analogy. One of the reasons Cleanthes thinks the animal analogy is defective is because it has “no seat of thought or reason” (41). Earlier I mentioned that it is a curiosity that Philo never responds to this particular part of the objection. Perhaps Hume is just capturing a fact about human conversational debate: we rarely address all the arguments that get thrown into the mix, and that’s because we focus on some arguments and not others. I would add, however, that Philo has good reason not to address it, and that’s because it’s not the Animal’s “thought or reason” that does the philosophical work for him in the WSH. His general tendency in the DNR to push away from the intelligence as the cause of order should make us hesitant to think that’s what he really wants from the WSH. The safest bet, in my view, is to read him as believing that the concept of the immanent, inseparable, and metaphysically necessary ground of the laws of nature is doing the heavy lifting in the campaign against Cleanthes’s design hypothesis; that is one of the “real advantages” of which he speaks in the earlier passage from Part IV. 14.3.5 Further Comparisons of Philo’s WSH with Other Thinkers

As another piece of evidence for my Trojan Horse reading, consider Spinoza once again. Peterman (2021), in her brief discussion of various interpretations that maintain that Spinoza had his own version of the WSH, writes: [For Spinoza] extended substance is explanatorily self-sufficient; he does not think that there must be either an animate or thinking principle to explain the order in nature. This is reflected by the fact that in the Spinozistic system there is not just an infinite mode of thought but also an infinite mode of extension:

Philo’s Trojan Horse 297 the “facies totius universi,” which “though it varies in infinite modes, remains always the same.” (199) I agree with Peterman’s assessment here, although I would offer a friendly amendment with more strength: Spinoza thinks that it is metaphysically impossible for there to be “an animate or thinking principle to explain the order in nature”, and that’s because of his commitment to parallelism, which is the result of what Della Rocca calls the “conceptual barrier” between the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension (Della Rocca 1996). My basic point here is that Spinoza maintains that thought can’t cause anything to happen in the realm of extension, let alone be the cause of its order. Thus, Spinoza has another metaphysical motivation, beyond the necessitarianism, at work in his rejection of teleological cosmogonies. Of course, Philo isn’t invoking Spinoza’s parallelism in his WSH, and this is a key difference between the two thinkers. But for our purposes it is worth noting that both Spinoza and Philo have a general aversion to positing thought as the ultimate source of order in the physical universe. This commonality is one of the key differences between Philo’s particular WSH and other treatments of the World Soul in two broad traditions in the history of philosophy: the Stoics and the early moderns. Regarding the Stoics, Philo would reject both their general teleology and their account of divine providence. Concerning other early moderns such as Ralph Cudworth and Margaret Cavendish: they, too, are friendly to modified conceptions of the World Soul, but they are hesitant to embrace an account of the laws of nature as the source of order, and so they invoke conscious sources, instead. First, let’s examine the Stoics, who are excellent candidates for being the “ancient theologians” to which Philo refers in the Repugnance Passage from Part VI. There are similarities between Philo’s version and the Stoics’. The Stoic account, in general, endorses a concept of (1) the World Soul that explains the harmony and sympathetic interactions of things in the universe and (2) a general commitment to causal necessitarianism. However, there is a striking dissimilarity between the two accounts. We can see it clearly in A. A Long’s 2003 presentation of a key difference between the Stoics and Spinoza that puts these two camps “poles apart”: [One] point has to do with teleology and divine providence. The Stoics take their cosmic divinity to be identical not only to causality or fate but also to providence, and they take the world, as caused and instantiated by God, to be supremely good, beautiful, and designedly conducive to the benefit of its human inhabitants. Spinoza, by contrast, regards it as an egregious error to suppose, as he puts it, ‘that God himself directs all things to some certain end … Nature has no aim set before it … This doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks’ (Pt. I appendix). Spinoza’s target in these remarks was not Stoicism but the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its doctrine of a creator separate from his creation. He does not consider a view like that of the Stoics in which God is both immanent in everything and at the same time

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acting with a view to the good of the whole. There can be no doubt, however, that he would reject such a view both for the reasons I quoted and also because it would conflict with his conception of God’s infinite nature and nonteleological reasoning. (Location No. 8320) The difference between the Stoics and Spinoza that Long highlights is the same as the one between the Stoics and Philo. Since the Stoics believe that their World Soul, the “cosmic divinity,” acts for some end, both Spinoza and Philo will reject this general teleological cosmogony. But, Philo also rejects the specific conception of teleology considered as divine providence; this is the idea that God acts for the end that is the benefit of humans. In Part XI, Philo gives up a lengthy chain of reasoning that culminates in the following passage: There may four hypotheses be framed concerning the first causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness; that they have perfect malice; that they are opposite, and have both goodness and malice; that they have neither goodness nor malice. Mixed phenomena can never prove the two former unmixed principles; and the uniformity and steadiness of general laws seem to oppose the third. The fourth, therefore, seems by far the most probable. (DNR XI, 75, emphasis added) So, the Stoic conception of the World Soul has several significant strikes against it, in relation to commitments that Philo explicitly espouses. Even if the Stoics do maintain a doctrine of causal necessitarianism, it is fused with their providential teleology. If it comes down to Philo’s choosing between the Stoics’ necessitarianism and Spinoza’s version, he is going to choose the latter. Turning to the concept of the World Soul as it appears elsewhere in the early modern tradition, Philo’s version does have affinities with ones that Ralph Cudworth and Margaret Cavendish propose. There are significant disagreements between these parties, however. First, recall Peterman’s observation that Cudworth is loath to identify God with the World Soul (192), whereas Philo is perfectly comfortable making the identity claim in Part VI (40). Second, as David Cunning (2009) points out, Cudworth and Cavendish do not think that the laws of nature are the foundation of order in the workings of the world. He writes: [Cudworth and Cavendish] agree that we do not account for the orderly behavior of bodies by positing laws of nature if we do not know what a law of nature is or how it operates. On Cudworth’s view, the orderly behavior of bodies is secured by immaterial minds (or plastic natures) that attach to bodies and work to keep them on the rails. In something like the way that our (immaterial) minds intelligently guide our bodies, plastic natures intelligently guide the bodies that compose the plant and animal and mineral world. Cavendish agrees with a [highly modified] version of this last statement. She will raise the objection, though, that minds that move and come into contact with and attach to bodies must be material themselves.

Philo’s Trojan Horse 299 In addition to their skepticism about laws of nature, both Cudworth and Cavendish invoke an inherent order in matter that is conscious–although they differ on the specific details of how this order is maintained. Cavendish (2020/ 1688 ) writes: “If nature were not Self-knowing, Self-living, and also Perceptive, she would run into Confusion: for there could be neither Order, nor Method, in Ignorant motion” (7). She does not ascribe these features to an immaterial substance or principle; her materialism implies that these are properties of matter, itself. So far, her account appears friendly to Philo’s general description of the workings of the World Animal, which, as I argued above, inherently exhibits harmony. But the key difference between Cudworth and Cavendish, on the one hand, and Philo, on the other, is this: if anything, according to the two earlier thinkers, the laws of nature are rooted in conscious intelligences. To focus on Cavendish: she regards the universe’s regularity as being grounded in its harmony and sympathetic action, not the other way around as Philo would have it. In Philo’s WSH, the absolutely necessary and regular laws of nature ground the harmony of the Animal without possessing consciousness; I think it is safe to import what Philo says in Part VII: “A tree bestows order and organization on that tree which springs from it, without knowing that order: An animal in the same manner on its offspring …” (DNR VII, 46). Let me add one more consideration. The WSH also happens to be in line with chief desiderata of Newtonian physics (itself of course well-established by the time Hume wrote the DNR). My brief overview of the period cannot hope to improve upon the secondary literature here, so I will simply invoke one of the authorities on the issue. Westfall’s 1971 classic presents Newton as reconciling Galileo’s “tradition of mathematical description” with Descartes’ “tradition of mechanical philosophy” (159). Westfall regards Newton as largely remedying the deficiencies in the long-standing mechanical philosophy primarily by infusing the concept of force into those of matter and motion, and geometry and calculus into his mechanics (139, 143, 155). Both infusions, as I shall call them, happen to increase the allure of Philo’s Trojan Horse to intelligent-design theists. First, Phillips, Beretta, and Whitaker (2014) explain: Newton’s gravitational force shattered the mechanical worldview. A force does not occupy space and it moves objects without direct contact. So, the notion of body that stood in clear contrast to mind in the Cartesian formulation of the mind-body problem faced a new challenge with this new physical theory. According to the Cartesian Programme, the mind was of a fundamentally different kind than bodies. Despite the difficulty of reconciling how the mind interacted with the body, it was clear that it did. We could examine and understand mind and body separately; each one existed in a different domain of inquiry. When forces were introduced into physical theories, the hard and fast distinction between mind and matter was lost, and with it, its usefulness. In the new physics, body could

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be res extensa or not, and so, the contrast with mind, which previously was the only thing that was not res extensa, had been consigned to oblivion. Res extensa itself was not possible without the basic forces. (363) With force firmly established in Newtonian ontology and the line between mind and matter blurred, theists in the Eighteenth Century were perhaps less inclined to cling to thought as the sole source of order in the universe and more susceptible to opening the door to the second Newtonian infusion: the mathematization of the laws of nature. Although a desire for it was not an insignificant part of the prevailing early modern and mechanistic worldviews, Newton’s work represents the satisfaction, justification, and promotion of that desideratum. Both infusions—intentionally or not—allow Philo to use the concept of the Soul to lure the intelligent-design theist towards the necessitarianism about the “mathematized” laws of nature. To sum up my exegesis of Philo’s WSH and its necessitarianism: at several points in the DNR, Philo appears to draw upon a concept, the World Soul, that has a long tradition, but he knows that it appears to be vulnerable to a line of counterattack exemplified in Mersenne, Boyle, and other early moderns, as Peterman points out. With Philo’s proposal of the WSH, he is trying to shift the cosmogonical debate away from the unproductive and ultimately explanatorily vacuous comparisons of the world to a machine and God to machine-designers. Instead, other analogies may turn out to be equally or more fruitful. Part VI’s analogy with an animal is intended to move the theist, on the basis of their own endorsement of vulgar prejudices and experiences, to accept the existence of the immanent and inseparable World Soul. Thus Philo uses the Soul as bait to entice this theist to open the gates and to bring in the Trojan Horse. In my view, recent commentators, such as O’ Connor, have focused too much on immanence and inseparability, thinking that these are the primary thrust of Philo’s attack. However, these two concepts, by themselves, are not enough to overcome Cleanthes’s design hypothesis; he needs to attack its general teleological approach while remaining in line with the mechanistic program of his day. The final maneuver of bursting forth from the horse involves pressing the concept of the Soul’s essential and metaphysically-necessary principle of order–the steady and inviolable laws of nature. Philo’s invocation of mathematical necessity not only flags the modal strength he imputes to the laws of nature, but it also appeals to the quantitatively-minded proponents of Newtonian mechanics. 14.4 Conclusion: Evaluating Philo’s WSH and Its Necessitarianism 14.4.1 Placeholder for Future Science or Explanatory Inadequacy?

Above, I argued that the best way to understand Philo’s WSH is that it contains the claim that the regularity of the necessary laws of nature (the Soul) gives rise to the harmony between the universe (the Animal) and its parts (individuals). But Philo doesn’t explain how the former causes or underpins the latter and this would appear to be a problematic explanatory gap at the heart of the WSH. If he

Philo’s Trojan Horse 301 does think that the necessitarianism is justified by an appeal to Newtonian mechanics, then maybe he would think that the explanatory gap between the two could be filled by future science. This task might be, in principle, no different than unifying physics, chemistry, and biology—but it would be difficult nonetheless. After all, the track record of mechanical philosophers and scientists trying to achieve this unity prior to Newton was pretty dismal, according to Westfall 1977.18 But Newton’s immense success might have given new hope for unification of the sciences. Perhaps Philo’s general temperament in DNR would make him open to that hope. (But, then again, what can we say about a fictional character?) At the same time, one might protest that if Philo were to invoke future science as the filler for the explanatory gap, he’d be doing nothing more than writing checks that his Newtonian bank could not cash, so to speak. Philo’s opponents could claim his promise of the unification of future science is really little more than a thinly-veiled appeal to ignorance, and this appearance is magnified by the fact that Philo hedges his bets regularly. We can see this hedging, not only with his proposals in general throughout the DNR, but also with his specific presentation of the WSH in Part VI: “Were I obliged to defend any particular system of this nature, which I never willingly should do, I esteem none more plausible than that which ascribes an eternal inherent principle of order to the world …” (42–43). My added emphasis brings out the point that, although Philo thinks that the WSH is as good as it’s going to get when we reason from parts to whole, he would not endorse it wholeheartedly. Philo’s lack of confidence in his own WSH might reasonably amplify the objector’s lack of confidence in the promise of unification. 14.4.2 But Are the Laws of Nature Necessary?

Our own contemporary contingentists, such as Alan Sidelle (2002), might say, “Don’t bother holding your breath. Philo’s hope for unification would be a nonstarter, because the laws of nature aren’t metaphysically necessary, anyway. They are contingent through and through. So the whole hypothesis is undermined.” Despite Philo’s (and Spinoza’s) appeal to the mathematical necessity of geometry and arithmetic, the laws of nature themselves aren’t metaphysically necessary. Sidelle writes: “To conceive the laws of nature being different, we simply need to imagine the specific values in the equations being different; so long as there are no inconsistencies, we will have a model of a possible situation” (313). According to Sidelle, we could imagine them having different inputs–that is, different physical constants and different relationships between the terms. Regarding the physical constants, we could imagine the masses of the proton, neutron, and electron as being different (313). The laws of nature, considered as applied mathematical formulas, would be contingent. Furthermore, as Sidelle points out (312), Hume himself taught us that we can conceive of causes as not necessitating their effects! If causal relations are contingent, then so are any laws of nature that involve them.19

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In brief response to the contingentists, I think that Philo could commandeer some claims of Hume’s own that Peter Kail (2003) masterfully illuminates. Kail persuasively argues that Hume’s concept of conceivability, as it relates to possibility, has significant epistemic qualifications that the secondary literature has not sufficiently recognized. If our conceivings of alternate physical constants fail to meet those qualifications, then Hume would not regard them as reliable defeaters of necessitarian claims about the metaphysical necessity of the laws of nature. If Kail’s Hume were to lend Philo these arguments, he could live to fight another day with the WSH in hand. However, a full treatment of how that bolstered reply would go is beyond the scope of this paper.20 Notes 1 From Remark A of Bayle’s “Spinoza” article in the Historical and Critical Dictionary (in Bayle 1952/1697, 295). 2 Unless noted otherwise, I will use the following translation of the Ethics: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Samuel Shirley, trans. contained in Spinoza: Complete Works, Michael L Morgan, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002). My system of reference to passages from the Ethics, which is generally in line with the secondary literature, is as follows. The part number is followed by the axiom or proposition number, which is, in turn, followed by an abbreviation designating the “subproposition.” For example, the scholium to proposition 28 in part II is abbreviated as IIP28s. 3 For example, see Della Rocca 2008, Garrett 1991, Koistinen 2003, Lin 2012, and Newlands 2007. 4 When I get to my presentation of Philo’s WSH below, I’m going to refer occasionally to Peterman’s 2021 general discussion. In her piece, she summarizes some interpretations that impute to Spinoza an endorsement of the World Soul. I do not wish to give the impression that I ignored her section on that issue. However, Peterman is largely giving a survey of the various thinkers who make the allegation: Jacques Basnage, Johann George Wachter, Pierre Bayle, and Gottfried Leibniz. I do not have space to tackle even one of these readings. Taking Bayle as the paradigm of that group: my view is that his central mistake is that he fails to understand that, for Spinoza, finite modes are genuine individuals, and, as such, are subjects of predication and bearers of properties. But with greater punch: Vassányi 2011 makes an excellent case against identifying Spinoza’s view with the World Soul of Stoics like Seneca: “the philosophically most momentous argument against BAYLE’s identification thesis [about Spinoza’s God and the World Soul]” is that Seneca is a committed materialist while Spinoza is not (220). 5 As with almost all things Spinoza, a start of a reply on his behalf involves a tumble into the rabbit hole of his system. See Melamed 2017 (124). Spinoza regards God’s will as a mode of the attribute of Thought (and this is the premise the objector will then attack). Whether it is infinite or finite, as a mode, its fundamental nature is determined by the attribute. So, if we’re imagining a different will, then we’re imagining a different attribute and thus a different God. 6 Emphasis added. See also IIP49s and its point about “fortune”. 7 A great resource on this is, of course, Westfall 1971. Robert Boyle 1669 claims in the preface to Certain Physiological Essays that it is characteristic of the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and Gassendi that they “agree in deducing all the Phaenomena of Nature from Matter and local Motion”—despite their disagreement over what matter’s fundamental nature is like (122).

Philo’s Trojan Horse 303 8 Emphasis added. The material I have omitted from the quotation refers to IP16 and IP32’s corollaries. For an excellent discussion of Spinoza’s two official arguments for the complete denial of final causation–as well as a possible reconstruction of a better argument for it–see Della Rocca 2008, 83–86. 9 Spinoza himself doesn’t use “vertical” and “horizontal” to describe the different causal relations at work here. But they have become common in the secondary literature on the Ethics; Nadler 2006, for example, employs these terms in chapter four. 10 Hume does not consistently capitalize these terms, but I will do so. 11 An objector may protest that I have committed a scope fallacy in my reading, which claims that Philo thinks that there is only one essential order that the divine mind and body have in common. The objector, however, might respond that Philo seems to state that there are two essential orders, one for the divine mind and another one for the body. The problematic parts of the Repugnance Passage are “an order, arrangement, organization, or internal machinery, in both” and “to have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in them.” I acknowledge that the letter of the passages is ambiguous when it comes to the logical scope, but the spirit of them would be undermined by the “two orders” reading. If Philo’s goal in Part VI were simply to argue that the physical universe has its own distinct principle of order, then the WSH wouldn’t add anything to the explanation. There would be no need to double a necessary principle of order (one for God, another for the body) when one (the mundane realm’s) would suffice. Now, I agree that Philo is sympathetic to this possibility in another proposal (see Part IV), but the point of bringing in the World Soul in Part VI has to be to get the audience to find it to be plausible that God’s principle of order is numerically identical to the one found in the universe. If it isn’t, then Philo’s position wouldn’t be significantly different from Cleanthes’s! 12 I think that Kail 2003 shows that Hume had something like a distinction between the knowable order of nature and its unknowable essence in the Treatise. Kail writes “[Hume] says in several places that the essences of objects are “unknown” to us, and that external objects are “revealed” to us only by their “external properties” (54). One of the passages Kail cites is the following: “[M]y intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations. For besides that this belongs not to my present purpose, I am afraid, that such an enterprise is beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know body otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses” (T 1.2.5.26; SBN 64). Kail notes that a comparison with Locke on this issue is fruitful (49–50). 13 In the above passage from Part IX, Philo does not connect his main point back to his WSH in Part VI; that’s probably because the former is apparently Philo’s response to Demea’s a priori argument for God’s existence (which, in turn, rivals Cleanthes’s design argument). I’m strongly inclined to agree with Dye (1989, 134) that in Part IX, Philo is really chiming in on the debate simply to renew his attack on Cleanthes. 14 Gaskin 2009 doesn’t explicitly address the WSH or its necessitarianism. In fact, I think his reading falls short when it comes to handling the necessitarian component in Part VI’s Water Passage. He writes “We (but not Hume) might be able to argue, in the light of the Big Bang Theory favored by modern cosmology, that the initial event out of which all subsequent sequences of events emerged could (at least we have no reasons to think that it could not) have set absolutely any sort of universe developing. But having set going this universe, those first developments were continuous with what we subsequently read as the laws of nature. The initial event having set things going in one way (it is, the way it actually did), that one way is what we see as natural order, and indeed no existent things can develop in any other way given the initial event. There is even a hint of this type of thinking in the Dialogues (although it is arrived at in a somewhat different way): ‘And instead of admiring the order of natural beings, may it not happen, that, could we penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies we should

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clearly see why it was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition’” (496–497). The reason that Gaskin’s take on the “hint” doesn’t go far enough is that it mistakes the modal status of Philo’s claim. Gaskin is inadvertently articulating a weaker view: a determinism that is consistent with (1) nomological necessity of the events that result from the initial conditions and the laws of nature but (2) the metaphysical contingency of the laws themselves, which are grounded in God’s design and choice. In other words, a theist could accommodate (1) by saying that God first designs and chooses the laws of nature and then sets up the initial conditions of the universe, only to step back to watch the events unfold in a strictly determined way (after the Big Bang). Now, I think Philo is open to embracing nomological necessity, but he wants to cover all his bases, and that means he can’t concede the modal status of the natural laws themselves to the design theorist. For Philo, design of the laws would still be too much design. So, Philo needs a stronger view: a necessitarianism that claims that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. As with all things historical, the reality is more complicated. Roux 2017 states: “In the 1990s … the category of mechanical philosophy was systematically debunked from a historical point of view. It was pointed out that to regard the mechanical philosophy as the principal alternative to Aristotelian orthodoxy was a significant oversimplification of the historical situation. Learned studies emphasized that the great authors owed more to the Scholastics than they had been willing to admit, and for the lesser authors, that they had at times taken such complex positions that the division between the mechanical and the non-mechanical philosophies became impossible to draw in practice …” (31). While Leibniz acknowledges that substantial forms have no place in physics, he is friendly to incorporating them into his metaphysics. There is an additional and rather technical similarity with Spinoza here. IIP7 of the Ethics presents Spinoza’s parallelism, which involves (1) the idea that the causal order of the mental realm (under the attribute of Thought) mirrors the causal order of the physical realm (under the attribute of Extension) and (2) the claim that there can be no causal interaction between the two realms. What grounds the mirroring itself is an “attribute-neutral” causal structure that is part of the essence of God/substance; see chapters 2 and 7 of Della Rocca 1996. Bennett 1984, in sections 12, 34 and 35, also discusses the “transcategorial” (i.e., trans-attributal, or generic characteristics) features of the attributes. The similarity to Philo’s WSH is that the regular inviolable principle of nature is shared between the Animal and the Soul and grounds the harmonies we find in each; it is thus “neutral” between these two realms. Philo cannot maintain the idea that the Soul has its own distinct principle of order that causes the Harmony in the Animal; otherwise his view would make no advance over Cleanthes’s. This is another way to explain why a “two orders” reading of the DNR’s Repugnance Passage is implausible. See footnote 11 above. See the end of chapter V. Sidelle’s own target is 20th and 21st-Century necessitarianisms, and his arguments against them are far richer than what I’ve presented here. I need to acknowledge the following people and institutions. I’d like to thank Ken Williford, first and foremost, for the opportunity to write for this collection. His trust in my abilities is probably unjustified; I hope I have delivered a worthy thoughtprovoking piece. Greg Stoutenburg read multiple drafts and gave insightful comments on them. Steven Ledesma, Maggie Betz, Nessa Voss, and Jeremy Shipley all provided helpful feedback on drafts. Kristopher Phillips, in particular, offered a comment about Cavendish that helped me get even clearer on what distinguished Philo’s view. Dr. Norman Levan and the Levan Center at Bakersfield College provided a summer grant for travel, which allowed me to go to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh and to hold the manuscript of the DNR in my hands and see it with my own eyes. I’d like to thank Becki LeGrant for tolerating me on our walks as I tried out ideas on her.

Philo’s Trojan Horse 305 References Texts by Hume Hume, David. 1998/1779. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, R. H. Popkin (ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett. (Referred to herein as DNR.) Hume, David. 2000/1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature. D. F. Norton & M. J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Other Primary Literature Bayle, Pierre. 1952/1697. Selections from Bayle’s Dictionary, E. A. Beller & M. duP. Lee (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bayle, Pierre. 1991/1697. Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections. R. H. Popkin (ed. & trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett. Boyle, Robert 1669. Certain Physiological Essays and other Tracts written at Distant Times, and on Several Occasions by the Honourable Robert Boyle; wherein Some of the Tracts are Enlarged by Experiments and the Work is Increased by the Addition of a Discourse about the … 2nd ed. London: H. Herringman. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A28944. 0001.001?view=toc. Cavendish, Margaret 2020/1688. Grounds of Natural Philosophy, A. M. Thell. (ed.), Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Leibniz, G. W. 1998. Philosophical Texts. R. S. Woolhouse & R. Francks (eds. & trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinoza, B. 2002. Spinoza: Complete Works. M. L. Morgan (ed.), S. Shirley (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Secondary and Other Literature Bennett, J. F. 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett. Cunning, David. 2009. “Margaret Lucas Cavendish (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 October 2009, https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/margaret-cavendish/. Accessed 8 June 2022. Della Rocca, Michael. 1996. Representation and the Mind-body Problem in Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Della Rocca, Michael. 2008. Spinoza. London: Routledge. Dye, James. 1989. “A Word on Behalf of Demea.” Hume Studies, 15, 1, 120–140. Fine, Kit 2002. “The Varieties of Necessity.” In Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.) Conceivability and Possibility. Clarendon Press. pp. 253–281. Garrett, D. 1991. “Spinoza’s Necessitarianism.” In Yovel Yirmiyahu (ed.) God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysic. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Garrett, Don. 2015. Hume. London: Routledge. Gaskin, J. C. A. 2009. “Hume on Religion”. In David Fate Norton & Jacqueline Taylor (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Hume, 2nd ed., pp. 480–514. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kail, Peter. 2003. “Conceivability and Modality in Hume: A Lemma in an Argument in Defense of Skeptical Realism.” Hume Studies, 29, 1, 43–61. Koistinen, Olli. 2003. “Spinoza’s Proof of Necessitarianism”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67, 2, 2003, 283–310. Lin, Martin. 2012. “Rationalism and Necessitarianism.” Noûs, 46, 3, 418–448.

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Long, A. A. 2003. “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler”. In B. Inwood (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, pp. 365–392. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2017. “The Causes of Our Belief in Free Will: Spinoza on Necessary, ‘Innate,’ yet False Cognition.” In Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide, pp. 121–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. (ed.) 2017. Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nadler, Steven. 2006. Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newlands, Samuel. 2007. “Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 21 August 2007, https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/spinoza-modal/. Accessed 9 June 2022. O’Connor, David. 2001. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Religion. London: Routledge. Peterman, Alison. 2021. “The World Soul in Early Modern Philosophy.” In James Wilberding (ed.), World Soul: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, Kristopher G., Beretta, A. & Whitaker, H. A. 2014. “Mind and Brain: Toward an Understanding of Dualism.” In Harry Whitaker (ed.), Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience, pp. 355–369. Dordrecht: Springer. Roux, Sophie. 2017. “From the Mechanical Philosophy to Early Modern Mechanisms.” In Phyllis Illari & Stuart Glennan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy, London: Routledge. Russell, Paul. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sidelle, Alan. 2002. “On the Metaphysical Contingency of the Laws of Nature.” In Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vassányi, Miklós. 2011. Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Westfall, Richard S. 1977. The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolhouse, R. S. 1993. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. London: Routledge.

15

Philo, Strato and Spinoza Kenneth Williford

… [I]t is not a proof of one’s non-atheism that one recognizes a first principle and creator of all things … . Strato and other atheist philosophers among the ancients, and Spinoza among the moderns, recognize this first principle. In order to be distinguished from atheism, then, it is necessary to formally recognize that this first principle does not do anything by way of emanation, that the action by which it produces the world is not immanent, that it is not determined by a natural necessity, that it disposes of nature according to its good pleasure, that it listens to our prayers, and that they can induce it to change the natural course of things. —Pierre Bayle, 17041

15.1 Introductory The main claim I defend in this paper is that in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (DNR), Hume’s character, Philo, tentatively defends a naturalistic necessitarianism that Eighteenth-Century readers possessing an adequate knowledge of the relevant intellectual context should have immediately associated, thanks primarily to Ralph Cudworth, Pierre Bayle, and G.W. Leibniz, with the name of Strato of Lampsacus2 and, thereby, with Spinoza. Indeed, this claim ought to have been so obvious to historians of Early Modern Philosophy that no such paper would be needed. However, a number of lingering but dying historiographical shibboleths, particularly about the relation of Hume to Spinoza, and, perhaps more generally, about Spinoza’s impact in the Eighteenth Century,3 have made such a study necessary. Curiously, for more than a century after the publication of the DNR, the fact that Hume’s Philo sympathetically articulates and conditionally defends views that are clearly “Spinozistic” went almost entirely unremarked by Anglophone students of the text.4 Norman Kemp Smith rightly drew attention to the influence of Bayle’s treatment of “Stratonism” on the DNR,5 and Philo’s expression thereof, in his 1935 edition of the text (in Hume 1947/1935, 80); but he failed to mention the fact that from the late 1680s to at least the 1770s, to mention Strato was to conjure the specter of Spinoza, even if some, including Bayle, certainly recognized possible philosophical differences between them (see note 6). One can only speculate, since Kemp Smith surely was in a position to know about this association—a reading of Remark A of Bayle’s article on Spinoza in DOI: 10.4324/9781315110691-21

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the Dictionnaire would have been sufficient for that.6 But perhaps his idea that Hume’s understanding of Spinoza stemmed entirely from that article (see Smith, 1941, 325) led him to think that Hume himself would have regarded this particular association as unimportant. If so, Kemp Smith was mistaken. Indeed, even if he never read Spinoza’s texts himself, the rhetorical power and subversive meaning of the association in the Eighteenth Century could not have been lost on Hume.7 This power and this meaning were certainly in full effect when Hume first began drafting the DNR (in the 1750s) and had certainly not vanished by the time he was making final revisions (in 1776) shortly before his death (see Coleman’s chronology in Hume 2007/1779, xlii-xliii; cf. Stewart 2000).8 Hume surely well knew that in having Philo paint a Stratonist picture, thoughts of Spinoza would enter the minds of his knowledgeable and attentive readers and that in painting it favorably, he was thereby casting Spinozism, or at least, some of its essential elements (e.g., necessitarianism and the identification of God with Nature) in a favorable light—the fact that none of the early reviewers of the DNR mentions Spinoza in this connection notwithstanding.9 One hundred years (or less) after the publication of the DNR, in the Anglophone world, perhaps due in part, ironically, to the very influence of Hume’s own empiricism and also in part to a shift of the main locus of religious controversy from Metaphysics (and indeed Physics) to Biology and Natural History,10 especially after the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, hypersensitivity to Spinozistic intimations had largely subsided, as had the power of the notion that there must be some necessary being whose identity is in question—due perhaps in part, once again ironically, to Hume’s own influential criticism of the traditional view of the modal and epistemic status of the causal maxim (and no doubt to Kant’s influential critique of rational theology as well). The unrepentant stalwarts of Metaphysics in Britain, T. H. Green, co-editor (with T. H. Grose) and critic of Hume, among them, were soon to have their day.11 But the metaphysics espoused by F. H. Bradley and other British Idealists seems to have incorporated, in one way or another, Hegel’s much more favorable attitude towards Spinoza, witness H. H. Joachim’s famous (and controversial) 1901 study.12 In other words, more than one generation of Anglophone readers of the DNR, approaching the text from quite different angles, might have been prone either to miss or to make little of the mediated allusions to Spinoza in Philo’s necessitarian flirtations. And then there is the fact that the very genre of subversive, “free-thinking”, anti-religious writing, with its art of dissimulation and irony, gradually died out with the decline of ecclesiastical power and the softening of state-supported dogmatism, by various paths, in Britain, the United States, and on the Continent (see, e.g., Bailey & O’Brien 2014, ch. 2; Russell 2008, ch. 7; Mori 2021, 21–34; Berman 1987, and many of the papers in Van Bunge & Klever (eds.) 1996 and Paganini, Jacob & Laursen (eds.) 2020; on Bayle’s treatment of Spinoza in this general connection, see Brykman 1988). Indeed, Mori’s Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach is, in a way, organized precisely around this progression, which culminates in the explicit atheism of Baron d’Holbach’s 1770 Système de la

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 309 nature (see Mori 2021, 284ff.). The tendency to forget this gradual, historical shift from dissimulation and self-protective irony to full disclosure has sometimes, unfortunately, made it hard for interpreters of texts like the DNR to read between the lines—the less historically informed their approach to such texts, one might think, the harder.13 What would have been perceived as an obvious nod to Stratonism-Spinozism14 by a Clarke or a Collins, a Voltaire or a Diderot could then be perceived as just another one of Philo’s many counter-speculations, if noticed at all—and one possibility for interpretive unity is thus missed. To be sure, the DNR stands up well, philosophically speaking, even thus de-contextualized, but, arguably, it positively towers once this context is fully restored. Be these speculations what they may, we can point to more definite evidence of a commentarial tradition that probably also militated against espying the specter of Spinoza behind Philo’s words. According to this tradition, Hume never really read Spinoza at all. The tradition goes back at least to T. H. Grose’s 1875 introduction to an edition of Hume’s Essays, as Paul Russell notes (Russell 2008, 72).15 And around three years later we find the idea surfacing, perhaps independently of Grose’s introduction, in T. H. Huxley’s 1878 Hume. Huxley remarks that Spinoza’s Ethics “should have been known” to Hume (apparently using ‘should’ in a normative and not probabilistic sense) and that “if he had been acquainted with that wonderful piece of psychological anatomy, he would have learned that the emotions and passions are all complex states”, adding that “indeed, without going to Spinoza, his own acute discussion of the passions [esp. pride and humility] leads to the same result … .” In a note Huxley observes, “On the whole, it is pleasant to find satisfactory evidence that Hume knew nothing of the works of Spinoza; for the invariably abusive manner in which he refers to that type of the philosophic hero is only to be excused, if it is to be excused, by sheer ignorance of his life and work” (Huxley 1894/1878, 78).16 This view surfaces again in 1932, in John Laird’s Hume’s Philosophy of Nature, here conjoined with the claim that the entirety of Hume’s knowledge of Spinoza stemmed from his reading of Bayle’s article (Laird 1932, 164).17 Less than a decade later, the claim is repeated, as indicated above, by Norman Kemp Smith in his 1941 The Philosophy of David Hume. In 1979, Richard Popkin reinforced the notion, while conceding that without Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus paving the way for the “historical … psychological and sociological evaluation of religion”, Hume’s Natural History of Religion “… could probably not have been written” (Popkin 1979, 70).18 In addition to the influence of this commentarial tradition, we could also mention the lasting influence of the tired pedagogical simplifications that have long pitted the no-nonsense “British Empiricists” against the wooly-headed “Continental Rationalists”—surely only exacerbated by some Twentieth-Century Anglo-Austrian philosophical fads and self-conceptions (cf. Klever 2010b, 1). And we could mention the tendency to paint, in some cases quite wrongly or at least debatably, Spinoza and Hume as philosophical antipodes vis-à-vis a number of central issues in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and philosophical method (e.g., the nature of causation, the concept of substance, the nature of mathematical

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knowledge, deductivism vs. inductivism, the relation between conceivability and possibility).19 Since Popkin’s article, a great deal of evidence has been amassed that casts doubt on this commentarial tradition, most notably by Paul Russell (2008, ch.7, esp. 70–75; cf. Klever 2010b).20 And the presumed absolute philosophical polarity between Hume and Spinoza has been challenged on a number of systematic fronts as well.21 Not everyone will be convinced,22 but, fortunately, for our purposes, these issues, interesting as they are, can be set to the side—though, if the line of argument in this paper is correct, what is offered here could be taken as further evidence that this commentarial tradition, as well as the claim of absolute philosophical polarity in matters metaphysical (save on the application of the more geometrico) is wrong. For the purposes of my argument here, it does not actually matter if Hume slogged through the Ethics or only read Bayle’s article or did, after all, read Spinoza’s Tractatus. What will matter most here is that Philo often represents Stratonism favorably and that Eighteenth-Century readers in the know would have immediately associated Stratonism with Spinozistic necessitarian naturalism (with or without accompaniment by substance monism, “hylozoism”, and the geometrical method).23 Moreover, as is better known, Spinoza was also often associated with the Stoics in the Eighteenth Century, though more controversially.24 So, when we see Philo defending the plausibility of something like the Stoic World Soul hypothesis and then combining it with an arguably un-Stoic non-teleological necessitarianism, we see even more evidence that Philo is indeed intended to be associated with Spinoza.25,26 In fact, it is not implausible to think that one reason Hume was so cautious about publishing the DNR was that he knew readers would take it, among other nefarious things, as a kind of qualified, non-apriorist defense of Spinozistic27 views: Stratonism-Spinozism is at least as plausible as traditional theism, if not more so, as far as the available evidence goes, and it also has parsimony on its side. To summarize: I principally aim to establish the claim that, mostly, though not exclusively, through Philo in the DNR, Hume quite knowingly and sympathetically articulates and conditionally defends views that clearly would have been regarded as Stratonic or Spinozistic, in particular, necessitarianism, “hylozoism”, the rejection of ontological realism about final causes, the “ergodicity”28 of the universe, the superiority of something quite like the “Intellectual Love of God” over vulgar religious superstition, and a semantic expansion and softening of the term ‘God’, according to which anthropomorphism is to be evacuated from our conceptions of God’s attributes, especially the moral ones. In the next section, I cover some of the relevant philosophico-historical context before turning, in the subsequent one, to an exegesis of the DNR using Stratonism-Spinozism as its guiding thread. I then close with some very brief remarks on the way in which Hume, through Philo, offers much more than a nod to Pierre Bayle. Specifically, Hume not only makes recourse to aspects of StratonicSpinozistic philosophy to achieve critical parity with, or dialectical superiority over, theistic orthodoxy, a type of strategy Bayle had pioneered especially in

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 311 the Continuation des pensées diverses; he goes further. Hume’s Philo, were he not a skeptical fideist, would be a Stratonist-Spinozist; and it is, of course, very far from clear how sincere Philo’s avowal of fideism is. Hume thus invites upon Philo the very suspicions that Bayle had invited upon himself by arguing that human reason, unchecked by faith, may well lead to Stratonism (see, esp., Mori 2020/1999, 217–229). And through the DNR as a whole, Hume, surely quite wittingly, brings the same suspicions down upon his own head.29 15.2 Background: Cudworth, Bayle, Malebranche, and Clarke Ralph Cudworth may have been the first to associate, in print, Spinoza with Strato of Lampsacus qua proponent of “hylozoic atheism”, as he called it,30 in his gargantuan 1678 True Intellectual System of the Universe, though he did not mention Spinoza by name in the passages in question. The matter of Cudworth’s intentions is somewhat complicated, but chief among these passages is this: … Hylozoist Atheism hath been very obscure ever since its first emersion and hath found so few fautors and abettors that it hath looked like a forlorn and deserted thing. Neither indeed are there any public monuments at all extant in which it is avowedly maintained, stated, and reduced into any system. Insomuch that we should not have taken any notice of it at this time, as a particular form of Atheism, not have conjured it up out of its grave, had we not understood that Strato’s ghost had began to walk of late; and that among some well-wishers to Atheism, despairing in a manner of the atomic form, this Hylozoic hypothesis began already to be looked upon as the rising sun of Atheism … . (Cudworth, 1845/1678, vol. 1, 215–216)31 Jean Le Clerc, in his 1703 French summary of Cudworth’s tome distributed in the first two volumes of his Bibliothèque choisie, did make the association by name,32 as did (a lesser-known) John Hancock in 1707, surely relying on Cudworth (see Colie 1963, 207).33 But Bayle had made the association of Spinoza with Strato before (though not qua hylozoic atheist nor qua substance monist, rather qua necessitarian and theo-naturalist), and apparently independently of Cudworth and Le Clerc (supposing Bayle derived his knowledge of Cudworth entirely from Le Clerc’s 1703 summary, see Colie 1957, 140), in Remark A of the infamous “Spinoza” article of the first (1697) edition of the Dictionnaire, an association that would survive in its subsequent editions and would be about as influential as the article itself.34 As Paul Vernière put the matter: Bayle favored assimilating Spinoza to the obscure Strato of Lampsacus, successor of Theophrastus … [at the Lyceum], known through some citations of Cicero and Lactantius. Strato indeed seems to have taught, against the Chance of the Atomists, a necessary world produced from all eternity; “he thought that all divine power is situated in Nature”, said Cicero. Such a display of erudition would have its success: all the apologists, Cardinal de

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Polignac, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedia would thenceforth put the names of Spinoza and Strato together. Most curiously, Leibniz repeats the parallel four times in his Theodicy. (Vernière 1979/1954, 336; my translation) The association remained robust in the Francophone intellectual domain for essentially the entire eighteenth century.35 In the Anglophone domain, one finds the association surfacing, most notably, in John Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704), in Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704–05), albeit indirectly, in John Hancock’s 1706 Boyle Lectures (already mentioned)—that is, in the Boyle Lectures given the year after Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, which became the Demonstration; and one finds it in Anthony Collins’ correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1707–08) as well.36 Moreover, it appears, as Vernière notes, in cosmopolitan Leibniz’s 1710 Theodicy repeatedly, which, due to the notoriety of that book in the Eighteenth Century, surely made the association known to a very wide audience (cf. Giglioni 2008b, 485).37 Of course, the Anglophone and Francophone intellectual domains were in interaction, sometimes heavy, throughout the Eighteenth Century, Hume, in particular, mediating such interaction quite famously. Indeed, it is quite safe to say that in the Eighteenth Century, the association was well in place in the English, French, Dutch and German intellectual spheres.38 It would strain credulity to imagine that this association remained lost on Hume, even though he does distinguish Stratonician Atheism from Spinozistic Atheism in the “Early Memoranda” (§2, Mem. 40; in Mossner (ed.) 1948, 503, on which see below). Nor would the not uncommon association of Spinoza with the Stoics—also made by Bayle, Leibniz and many others, have been lost on Hume.39 Nor is it likely that Hume was unaware of the fact that Malebranche had been repeatedly accused of Spinozism or of, at least, clearing the way for it for, among other reasons, his articulation of the concept of God, the relevance of which will become clear very shortly.40 In this section, I present some of this background in more detail; pieces of this background I can then readily refer to in the exegetical sequel. Note that this section will also include some DNR exegesis where this background material has an even more obvious bearing on the interpretation of text—either because the material is explicitly referred to in the DNR or because we have strong extra-textual evidence that it is likely to have had an influence on Hume in this connection. 15.2.1 Cudworth’s “Lemma”

Hume, of course, drew the necessity and a priori status of the causal maxim into question in the Treatise of Human Nature (I.iii.3; Hume 2002/1739–40, 56–8) and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (XII.iii.29; Hume 2007/1748, 143): we cannot know a priori that every existing thing must either have had an antecedent cause or carry the reason of its existence within its very nature (i.e., be a metaphysically or logically necessary being). For all we can know a priori, some uncaused thing (a material universe, for example) just happens to exist but did not

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 313 always exist (and may not exist in the future). However, it is important to understand that, prior to Hume (and, in many quarters, well after him), such a view was regarded as patently absurd, since, if interpreted metaphysically, it seemed, among other things, to imply that absolutely anything could happen at any time and that the nomological regularity of the world was, in fact, just an illusion or at best a lucky run (cf. the discussion of Andrew Baxter on the causal maxim in Russell 2008, 120–110; and see Clarke 1998/1705, 17, quoted below). The “Lemma”, as Cudworth called it, derivable from the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR, which includes the causal maxim),41 or “… preparatory proposition … [that] there must of necessity be something self-existent from eternity, and unmade; because if there had once been nothing, there could never have been anything” (Cudworth, 1845/1678, vol. 1, 296), was generally regarded as irrefragable (see Russell 2008, 110–119). The issue, then, was not the existence of but the nature and character of that Necessary Being. This is as clear in Clarke and Bayle as it is in Cudworth; and it is clear in Spinoza as well.42 After citing Cudworth on this point, Gianluca Mori (2021, 14–15) writes: Cudworth’s position was reproduced verbatim in French by Jean Le Clerc at the turn of the century [in the Bibliotèque choisie (1703)]. Then came Bayle. Hostile to Cudworth and Le Clerc on virtually every other point, Bayle agreed with them on this: “There is nothing easier than to know that there is a God, if you understand by that word only a first and universal cause”; even atheists, he adds, would sign a declaration acknowledging the existence of a God such as that. This was in 1704, and one year later Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God was published, starting with the proposition— similar to that of Cudworth—“that something has existed from all Eternity”. Many other authors were to repeat it in the decades that followed, until Hume’s recapitulation of the whole debate in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the premises of which were undoubtedly influenced by all three, Cudworth, Bayle, and Clarke (but its conclusions by Bayle alone …).43 Clarke’s first proposition is, in fact, just Cudworth’s Lemma. Clarke writes: First, then, it is absolutely and undeniably certain that something has existed from all eternity. This is so evident and undeniable a proposition, that no atheist in any age has ever presumed to assert the contrary, and therefore there is little need of being particular in the proof of it. For, since something now is, it is evident that something always was, otherwise the things that now are must have been produced out of nothing, absolutely and without a cause, which is a plain contradiction in terms. (1998/1705, 8; emphasis original) Of course, in the Treatise Hume pointed out the question-beginning character of the way the ex nihilo nihil fit principle is being deployed here. But Hume does not recapitulate that challenge (at least not directly) in the DNR.44 Instead, we find Philo rattling off a similar “proof” sketch, without being too particular: “… the question can

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never be concerning the being but only the nature of the deity. The former truth … is unquestionable and self-evident. Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call GOD; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection” (DNR, II.3, p. 18). The assumption that, in some sense, there is a God, albeit perhaps a sense entirely unacceptable to traditional theists, presides over the entirety of the DNR. That that “God” might turn out to be Nature itself is, as we will see in detail, Philo’s favored (Stratonic-Spinozistic) hypothesis. 15.2.2 Cudworth’s Taxonomy of Atheisms: Classifying Strato and Spinoza

For Cudworth, the varieties of atheism had everything to do with the different characterizations of this putatively Necessary Being, God or “God” (and, of course, the host of philosophical matters with which each characterization was intertwined, see Yolton 1983, 3–13). If one identified that being with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenelovent, incorporeal mind that designed and created the world by its free choice and had a plan for that world, then one was a genuine, orthodox theist. If one maintained that this being was corporeal, then one might or one might not be classified as a confused theist, depending—most of the Stoics fell into this category for Cudworth (1845/1678, vol. 2, 97: “… though these Stoics were such sottish Corporealists, yet were they not for all that Atheists … .”). But if one either thought that this being was merely the eternal stochastic play of “atoms and void” or, in some other way, denied that a guiding mind, immanent or transcendent, was necessary for the production of all the forms in Nature, then one was indeed an atheist by Cudworth’s lights. Cudworth distinguished four forms of atheism: Atomic (“Democritic”), Hylopathic (“Anaximandrian”), Hylozoic (“Stratonical”), and Cosmoplastic (“Pseudo-Stoical”). Confusingly, sometimes Cudworth uses the term ‘hylozoic’ generically so as to include both Stratonical and Pseudo-Stoical atheisms (cf. Sellars 2011). Both atomic and hylopathic atheisms regard the material world as essentially lifeless and “… derive things from dead and stupid matter, fortuitously moved”. But the former “… philosophize in the way of atoms” while the latter “… resolve … all things whatsoever in the universe into … matter and the passions or affections, qualities and forms of matter …” (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 179). The distinction is, in a way, about just how reductive one’s materialism is: Are all entities and qualities to be reduced, ultimately, to atomic configurations (configurations of configurations, etc.)? Or are there specific qualities of matter that cannot be so reduced and play an independent explanatory role? But this need not worry us further (see, e.g., Sellars 2011 and Mori 2021, 87–89). Hylozoic and cosmoplastic (aka pseudo-Stoical) atheisms, by contrast, both regard matter as, in some sense, alive (cf. Wilson 2016a), hence Cudworth’s occasional generic usage of ‘hylozoic’. Cudworth spells out the difference between the two as follows: [Cosmoplastic] … atheism … supposes the whole world (there being nothing but one body in it) not to be an animal, but only a great plant or vegetable,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 315 having one spermatic form, or plastic nature, which without any conscious reason or understanding orders the whole … . [It has] … some nearer correspondence with … hylozoic … . atheism … in that it does not suppose nature to be a mere fortuitous, but a kind of artificial thing; yet it differs from it in this, that the hylozoic supposing all matter, as such, to have life essentially belonging to it, must therefore needs attribute to every part or matter (or at least every particular totum that is one by continuity) a distinct plastic life of its own, but acknowledge no one common life as ruling over the whole corporeal universe; and consequently impute the original of all things … to a certain mixture of chance and plastic or methodical nature both together. Whereas the cosmoplastic atheism quite excludes fortune or chance, subjecting all things to the regular and orderly fate of one plastic or plantal nature, ruling over the whole. (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 194) There are two lines of distinction to note here. First, the hylozoic atheist, according to Cudworth attributes a distinct “plastic” life to each properly individuated part (each “particular totum”) of matter—that is, each has its own inherent principle of organization. The cosmoplastic atheist, on the other hand, regarding the entire universe as being something like a single “Great Vegetable”, posits only one overarching “plastic nature” or organizing principle that presides over the integral Totality.45 Second, and following from this, Cudworth regards the hylozoic atheist as having to accord a certain role to chance. And, indeed, his discussion of Strato bears that out.46 By contrast, the cosmoplastic atheist “excludes fortune or chance” from the Cosmos. The idea is that insofar as something is organized by a “plastic nature”, its behavior (growth, etc.) is precisely not subject to chance but governed by a kind of inherent organizing principle that operates by an internal necessity. Thus, if the entire universe is governed by such an overarching plastic nature, chance has no place in it. But the interactions of many different things, each with their own proprietary plastic natures, could involve chance and, in the absence of either a theistic God guiding those interactions or a “plastic nature” determining the Totality (as in cosmoplastic atheism), would have to involve chance (there being no other option). Hylozoic atheism, then, sensu stricto, involves chance, according to Cudworth. Cosmoplastic atheism does not. Now, Cudworth, as noted, associates hylozoic atheism with Strato (and probably Spinoza and Francis Glisson, see the next note). We do not know whether Cudworth read some manuscript version of Spinoza’s Ethics; he may well have.47 Spinoza’s view that all individuals “… though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate” (Ethics IIp13sch; Spinoza 1985, 458) and his thoroughgoing psycho-physical parallelism or panpsychism could easily get one to see him as advocating some form of hylozoism or cosmoplasticism (again, Cudworth’s generic use of ‘hylozoic’ encompasses both). And the conatus doctrine might give one the idea that Spinoza would regard each individual as having its own special plastic nature, which theses, together, would tend place him at least in the hylozoic ballpark (but see Giglioni 1995). However, it is quite clear that chance has

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no place in his system and that he regards the entire universe as being governed by God’s immutable essence—the Laws of Nature. This is something Cudworth could have known simply by reading Spinoza’s discussion of miracles in the Tractatus, to which Cudworth refers directly (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol 3, 4).48 This suggests that Spinoza should indeed be placed in the cosmoplastic (pseudoStoic) camp (again “pseudo-Stoic” because the ultimate plastic nature presiding over the Whole is non-teleological, is not an agency that executes some literal plan). Perhaps Cudworth thought that Spinoza had gratuitously and inconsistently grafted necessitarianism onto a hylozoic, Stratonic ontology that, in Cudworth’s view, entailed a role for chance.49 Or perhaps, after all, Cudworth had Francis Glisson primarily in mind as his contemporary representative of hylozoic atheism, and it was Henry More and later Bayle and Leibniz who secured the association with Spinoza and Strato in this case (see, again, note 47). For our purposes, the issue of the depth and accuracy of Cudworth’s own understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics or whether he was even primarily thinking of Spinoza when characterizing hylozoic or Stratonic atheism does not really matter.50 The association, one way or the other, was forged at the end of the Seventeenth Century. It is simply a curious fact that Cudworth’s (and Le Clerc’s (and Buddeus’ (1740, 112))) Strato seems not to be a complete necessitarian, while Bayle’s surely is. It is curious that Bayle’s Strato does not seem to regard nature as animate (and thus seems not to be a hylozoist, see note 6), while Cudworth’s Strato does (and is). Supposing Cudworth was well aware of Spinoza’s thoroughgoing necessitarianism and intended the association, he was associating Strato with Spinoza because of their supposedly common views that the material world (animate and with plastic natures in part or in the whole, according to his understanding of the two philosophers) is self-standing and not organized via some overarching, transcendent God with a teleological Great Plan. Bayle, on the other hand, was associating them for the view that the world is self-standing and for their necessitarianism and dissociating them on the issue of substance monism (which goes better with Cudworth’s conception of cosmplastic atheism), while attributing some form of hylozoism (though not by that name) to Spinoza and not to Strato. Indeed, Spinoza, one could have argued with Cudworth, is really best classified, using the latter’s terms, as a pseudo-Stoic atheist (see Giglioni 2008a and cf. Kors 2016a, 107), but then perhaps Cudworth was simply using ‘hylozoist’ in the more generic sense when alluding to Spinoza—if he was alluding to him. Bayle, once again apparently independently of Cudworth and Le Clerc51 had, of course, attributed something like the doctrine of the World Soul to Spinoza in the Dictionnaire, though with an important difference. Bayle writes: The doctrine of the soul of the world, which was so common among the Ancients, and made the principal part of the system of the Stoics is, at bottom, the same with that of Spinoza. … [W]e find several material differences between his system and that of the soul of the world. If anyone should maintain that Spinozism is more coherent, he should also maintain that it is

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 317 not so orthodox; for the Stoics did not deprive God of his providence; they reunited in him the knowledge of all things; whereas Spinoza ascribes to him only separated and very limited knowledge. (Bayle 1952/1697, 295) Bayle was well aware, in other words, that in whatever sense Spinoza attributed a “soul” to the world, it was not a “soul” with an overarching plan in the literal sense of that word; and that even if, in some sense, God/Nature has a mind (or “soul”) because the attribute of thought is ubiquitous, the universe has no “control room” in which this “soul” hatches schemes and makes decisions (to punish the wicked, and so on). The unfolding of all things according to the infinite essence of God is not to be equated with the operations of theistic Stoic Providence; in the latter case, mind and intelligence are in the driver’s seat in the form of a conscious driver (even if its body is the world and its soul is ubiquitous); in the former, mind is just one attribute of God among infinitely many; and the familiar, finite manifestations of mind are driven by a divine/natural essence that cannot be simply reduced to this one familiar attribute, which is but one aspect of the Whole.52 In a certain respect, then, Bayle’s characterization of Spinozism here is not so different from Cudworth’s own characterization of pseudo-Stoical atheism: … [T]hough this [doctrine that the World Soul is a teleological, rational, benevolent providence—and hence not an atheism] seems to have been the genuine doctrine, both of Heraclitus and Zeno [of Citium]; yet others of their followers afterwards divided these two things [the intellectual nature of the World Soul and the “spermatic reasons and forms”] from one another, and taking only the latter of them, made the plastic or spermatic nature devoid of all animality or conscious intellectuality, to be the highest principle in the universe. Thus Laertius tells us that Boethus [of Sidon], an eminent and famous Stoical doctor, did plainly deny the world to be an animal, that is, to have any sentient, conscious, or intellectual nature presiding over it; and consequently must needs make it to be but … “a body governed by plastic or vegetative nature, as trees, plants and herbs”. … Seneca himself was not without a doubtful tincture of this atheism … . Wherefore this form of atheism, which supposes one plastic or spermatic nature, one plantal or vegetative life in the whole world, as the highest principle, may, for distinction sake, be called the Pseudo-Stoical, or Stoical atheism. (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 197–198)53 If we equate this one “plastic”, “spermatic”, “vegetative” nature or life governing the whole world with the infinite essence of God, which contains thought and intelligence but is, in a sense, beyond thought and intelligence and not to be equated with anthropomorphic “providential” planning, then we see the connection with Spinoza clearly enough. The infinite essence of God then becomes a kind of automatic regulatory and “reproductive” system for the World Vegetable, which has “sprouts” (modes) that think, plan and ponder as we do; but it does not

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plan or design as a whole—it does not need to in order to be the perfect, eternal Cosmic “Turnip”. It remains to say a further word about what Cudworth meant by “plastic nature” (and related notions, e.g., “spermatic nature”, “vegetative nature”). First, it is important to note that Cudworth is, of course, using the word ‘plastic’ in a now archaic sense. As the OED puts it, that sense is this: “Causing the growth or production of natural forms, esp. of living things; formative, procreative; creative.” Thus, his plastic natures are supposed to be the incorporeal but living, quasi-mental (but not conscious) organizing principles inherent in organisms (and presumably other natural entities) by which, for example, the embryo develops as it “should”, the heart carries out its “proper function” of pumping blood even if we never think about it, plants come to maturity and bear seed-containing fruit, animals do what they “ought” to do to survive and reproduce even if they have no idea why, etc. They were designed and implemented by God, according to Cudworth, to act teleologically, sympathetically, holistically, and artfully, but they know not what they do.54 Cudworth’s plastic natures, of course, sound a lot like Aristotelian forms or entelechies or Scholastic “occult qualities” under a new label. Cudworth, while he can’t deny their quasi-Aristotelian character, is at pains to deny the that they are occult qualities. The notion of a plastic nature is not a notional cover for our ignorance; rather, they are, so to speak, just so many little arguments for God’s design in nature. It is the mechanists, Cudworth says, who are embracing an occult quality, since they have no idea how order, regularity, and the appearance of teleology could possibly be derived from the mechanically governed movements of inert matter (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 234). Cudworth posited plastic natures in animals, plants, the human body, and other natural entities in order to avoid thoroughgoing mechanism (with or without a role for chance) on the one hand, and, though he does not use the term, Occasionalism, on the other (see Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 217f.). At first one might think that the real theological difference between God instituting a handful of general laws and configuring matter so that, via those laws alone, acorns would regularly become oaks, etc., and God instituting manifold plastic natures that, once instituted, run autonomously, is negligible. From the theological point of view, it may seem to be a matter of how much love of parsimony one attributes to God. But Cudworth sees in the mechanical world of the Cartesians something both unbecoming of the Good Lord and empirically implausible to boot. The theists among them “… make God to be nothing else in the world but an idle spectator of the various results of the fortuitous and necessary motions of bodies; and render his wisdom altogether useless and insignificant, as being a thing wholly inclosed and shut up within his own breast …” (Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 220). And all such mechanists, theist or atheist, turn us into puppets of God via Nature and make “… a kind of dead and wooden world … a carved statue that hath nothing neither vital nor magical at all in it. Whereas to those who are considerative, it will plainly appear that there is a mixture of life or plastic nature, together with mechanism, which runs through the whole corporeal universe” (220–221).

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 319 Cudworth clarifies that he does not condemn “… the Cosmoplastic or Stoical, nor the Hylozoic or Stratonical Atheists … because they suppose such a thing as a plastic nature of life distinct from the animal …” (1845/1678, vol. 1, 217). He couldn’t consistently do so, of course. But what he does condemn is “… how extremely the notion of it [plastic nature] hath been mistaken, perverted and abused by those Atheists who would make it to be the only God Almighty or first principle of all things” (235) … “thereby excluding the true Omnipotent Deity, which is a perfect mind, or consciously understanding nature, presiding over the universe; they substituting this stupid plastic nature in the room of it” (272). What it would mean for a plastic nature to be the “first principle of all things”, given Cudworth’s understanding of the concept, is that Nature would be, to use a much more recent term, self-organizing—in a way that is somewhat analogous to autonomic biological processes, the maintenance of homeostasis, metabolism, etc. All the regularities, processes, and entities (including living and thinking ones) would derive from this ultimate plastic nature—the life of Nature itself—in an “automatic” and unthinking way, without the intervention of intelligent design. In fact, what intelligence there is in the world would itself be but one of the many transient products of this ultimate plastic nature. Unsurprisingly, Cudworth finds this completely unacceptable. He articulates four objections (272–273). First, as we might expect from a Platonist, he objects that such a hypothesis would make a lower, less perfect sort of entity into the highest in the universe. Plastic natures, for Cudworth, are unconscious, unthinking entities that operate apparently teleologically but automatically. Not only does he think there could be no such things absent an intelligent designer to make them in the first place, he thinks they are lower on the Chain of Being. They are, rather, to be explained from on high, so to speak (272). Secondly, this inversion of explanatory order on the part of the pseudo-Stoic and Stratonic atheists has the consequence that higher things (esp. thought, intelligence, consciousness) are to be accounted for in terms of the lower “senseless life of nature”, with the further consequence that there is no Perfect Mind tending the light at the end of the Platonic Tunnel (272). Thirdly, he claims that the hylozoists are in bald self-contradiction, since “… they attribute perfect wisdom and understanding to a stupid and inconscious nature” (273)—of course, the contradiction vanishes once we loosen the meanings of terms like ‘wisdom’ and ‘understanding’, a strategy we see in Spinoza and Philo and will discuss below. Fourthly and finally, Cudworth objects that “… these Atheists err in … that they make this plastic life of nature to be a mere material or corporeal thing; whereas matter or body cannot move itself, much less therefore can it artificially order and dispose its own motion” (273). Cudworth reasserts that plastic natures cannot be corporeal since they are, even if lower on the Chain of Being, nevertheless “… life, or internal energy, and self-activity, distinct from local motion” (273). “But”, he concludes (with another possible reference to Spinoza (or Glisson)): ... the Hylozoists conceive grossly both of life and understanding, spreading them all over upon matter, just as butter is spread upon bread … and, accordingly, slicing them out in different quantities and bulks together with it

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[matter]; they contending that they are but inadequate conceptions of body, as the only substance; and consequently concluding that the vulgarly received notion of God is nothing else but such an inadequate conception of the matter of the whole corporeal universe, mistaken [by them] for a complete and entire substance by itself, that is supposed to be the cause of all things … . (273–274) Anyone familiar with the DNR cannot fail to be struck by how this “Cudworthian dialectic” is reflected in Philo’s discussions of the World Animal and World Vegetable hypotheses and of the different conceivable ordering principles: Intelligence, Vegetation, Generation. In particular, recall Philo’s remark on the empirical superiority of Generation over Intelligence—all instances of the latter that we observe come from the former; we never observe the reverse (DNR VI.5, p. 47). Why make this “little agitation of the brain” into the model for the whole (DNR II.19, p. 24)? Philo, like the hylozoic and cosmoplastic atheists, again, both, in this historical context, associated with Spinoza, is arguing for the very inversion of the Great Chain of Being that so scandalized Cudworth. Now, Bayle accused Cudworth of unwittingly playing into hands of the atheists in defending his notion of plastic natures.55 If God could make plastic natures, which, once made, act on their own and do not need constant divine upkeep, like little quasi-substances, then it is possible for there to genuine orderbestowal in the absence of conscious intelligence. Cudworth is clear enough that his plastic natures, once put into place by God, operate on their own and do not need constant divine maintenance. If that is possible, however, then we can no longer argue that the only logically possible explanation of the organization of nature is in terms of intelligent design. Cudworth, of course, assumes that plastic natures themselves could only be explained by the operations and activities of the divine mind. But if it is logically possible for there to be substantial orderbestowal without design, one needs a new, and now inductive, argument that shows design to be the most probable unexplained explainer of all other order. It would then become a matter of probabilities: Which type of ultimate organizing principle, a conscious, intelligent teleological God or an unconscious, unintelligent and merely “as-if” teleological plastic nature of sorts (e.g., Spinoza’s naturalized “God”), is more probable, given the available evidence? But Bayle’s Strato will make matters even worse: Since any Ultimate Intelligence could not itself have been made by an Intelligence, this means that even the usual sort of orthodox theist must accept that there is something exactly like an ultimate plastic nature, even if that nature is just to be identified with the uncreated internal structure of the Divine Intelligence. This uncreated internal structure of the Divine Intelligence would then constitute its order-bestowal powers without itself knowing (in the relevant sense) what it does. In other words, God, on pain of regress or incoherence, did not first need to know “Himself” in order to bestow order on “Himself”. Even if God knows everything about God’s nature, “He” did not need to know it (or design it) in order for it to be organized. Indeed, “He” could not have, since that would require “Him” existing prior to “His” existence. So, even on the theistic hypothesis, thus construed, there would have to be some eternal,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 321 order-bestowing reality that was not itself designed and made by God, namely, that nature or structure in virtue of which God has “His” powers. But that would be to posit a principle of organization “behind” God’s Intelligence, so to speak, one that is not itself explained by the operations of Intelligence. This not only means that God would be bound or constrained by a reality “He” did not create (viz., “His” own nature and structure), a problem only the (radical) Cartesians, as Bayle says, and Hume repeats in the “Early Memoranda”, have a (highly costly) way out of (see note 56); it also means that there is, ultimately, no unqualified explanatory gain to be had by postulating an intelligent designer, since, in any case, one must postulate an ordering principle, structure, or ground that was not itself made by intelligence and must thus admit, in any case, that not all order-bestowal capacity comes from that Intelligence, even if that Intelligence is the First Cause or a Necessary Being.56 This line of argument assumes, of course, that Intelligence, has a kind of internal structure and a set of interlinked motivations, capacities, and sensitivities. The Mystic could always deny that and insist upon the absolute simplicity of the First Cause, but then it becomes clear that we are not talking about a literal thinking, reasoning, planning Mind (see DNR IV.1, p. 35); and then we cannot coherently say that the universe was literally designed, contrary to the operative hypothesis. If the design hypothesis takes us to this sort of mysticism, then it entails its own falsehood and is therefore false. 15.2.3 Bayle’s Stratonism: Bestowing Order without Knowing It

As noted, Bayle’s Strato is not necessarily Cudworth’s Strato (cf. Mori 2020/1999, 222). It is not clear that Bayle’s Strato is a hylozoist; arguably, he isn’t (cf. Mori 2021, 123–125; Bayle 1952/1697, 293: “[Strato]… thought … [Nature] to be inanimate”). And it seems that Cudworth’s Strato is not a complete necessitarian, while Bayle’s surely is.57 Via Cudworth (and More), Spinoza and Strato get associated, but this is for Spinoza’s supposed (generic) hylozoism (of which, at least in the generic sense, panpsychism seems to have been a version for Cudworth; again see Giglioni 1995 for some caution here). Bayle, at least in the Dictionnaire, regards Spinoza as a hylozoist or panpsychist of the “cosmoplastic” sort, to use Cudworth’s jargon (which Bayle did not), and a necessitarian. And, again, Bayle was quick to cast doubt on the idea that Strato was a substance monist. Substance monism, for which Spinoza was associated with the Eleatics, drops out of Bayle’s characterization of the essence of Stratonism (see Mori 2021, 125). What is left is a naturalistic necessitarianism in which, in some sense, the universe as a whole, with its inherent laws (regardless of how many non-ultimate (composite or non-composite) substances it may contain) is the Necessary Being. If Cudworth had understood Spinoza to be a substance monist, one might have expected him to associate Spinoza clearly with cosmoplastic or pseudo-Stoic atheism. Such an association would have also incorporated necessitarianism, since, if there is one overarching plastic nature (World Soul) that operates automatically and universally, and is the highest principle in the Cosmos, then everything indeed would happen by a nonteleological (or merely “as-if” teleological), non-providential fatum, since the issue

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of chance interactions between independent substances or quasi-substances would not then arise. Hume’s Philo is sympathetic to some version of Stratonic atheism. Insofar as it involves a thoroughgoing necessitarianism, his Stratonism falls under Bayle’s characterization of Stratonism; insofar as it involves hylozoism (generically understood), his Stratonism falls under Cudworth’s characterization of Stratonism. The issue of substance monism does not seem to arise for Philo. Philo’s Stratonism thus seems to fit both categorizations (Cudworth’s, at least in the generic sense of ‘hylozoic’, and Bayle’s). Moreover, insofar as it seems to posit a psychophysical parallelism that is ultimately grounded in one necessitarian organizing principle, it looks Spinozistic indeed (see LeGrant, this volume; cf. Baier 1993, 238 and Klever 2010b, 104–112). Here, however, the more important matter is to recapitulate, and elaborate a bit on, Philo’s Baylean “retorsion” in the context of the Design Argument. I say ‘recapitulate’ because there is nothing new in the idea that Hume borrows heavily from Bayle in this connection: Kemp Smith, as noted, pointed it out in 1935 in his edition of the DNR and included a translation of a relevant section (§CVI) of Bayle’s 1704 Continuation des pensées diverses; Coleman’s edition includes the section as well, retranslated by James Dye; Antony Flew picked up the idea of Philo’s “Stratonician Atheism” from Kemp Smith; and, very recently, Gianluca Mori (2021, 237ff.) and Gianni Paganini (2023, chs. XII, XIII) have described and contextualized this borrowing in detail. But I want to elaborate a bit further on certain key points. Bayle, as we saw, regarded Cudworth’s appeal to plastic natures (and Nehemiah Grew’s similar appeal (in Grew 1701, 31–36); Grew, the “father of plant anatomy”, speaks of “Vegetable Life” in this connection; see Andrault 2014) as not only a step backwards from the clarity of Cartesian mechanism towards the obscurity of Aristotelian and Scholastic substantial forms and occult powers but as also dangerous to orthodox theism. Cudworth accepts the mechanical, corpuscularian concept of matter but believes that matter, so conceived, cum mechanism could not account for biological (and, generally, natural nomological) data; something else explanatory was needed, something that, so to say, infused life and activity into an otherwise dead matter (see Mori 2021, 90). But the idea that God would animate the world like a Cosmic Puppet Master was abhorrent to Cudworth. So as noted, Cudworth’s doctrine was designed to get between Occasionalism, on the one hand, and blind mechanism on the other (see Mori 2021, 91–92). Given the choice between Occasionalism and Cudworth’s ontology, Bayle is clearly on the side of the former (see Mori 2020/ 1999, 141). Moreover, the idea that the material world could contain or be “ensouled” by little animating, mentalistic but otherwise unknowing “puppet masters” had two unsavory consequences. One the one hand, it asked us to imagine a God fond of a drolly baroque (and almost occultist or animistic) ontology full of quasi-spirits and quasi-agencies of all degrees of “perfection”, most quite mindlessly carrying out the “programs” the Good Lord instilled in them. Did it not seem more reasonable to imagine a parsimonious Cartesio-Malebranchist God who did almost everything by the

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 323 institution of a few general laws (nearly) constantly upheld—the Occasionalism residing simply in their near-constant upholding? As far as God’s ultimate responsibility goes, there is no real difference here: Getting things done redundantly by secondary and tertiary (etc.) plastic natures you’ve designed and implemented is not, at the end of the day, so different from getting things done by a handful of general laws you uphold and a matter that obeys them. And on the other, as we saw, an ontology of plastic natures indirectly threatens the idea that nothing can (ultimately) bestow order without consciously knowing how to bestow the order it bestows and knowing that it does (a principle articulated by Arnold Geulincx and embraced, in his own way, by Malebranche: quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis—loosely, what you don’t know how to do, you do not do).58 One can readily see that the quod nescis prinicple would turn the Design Argument into a deductive proof. If the natural world’s order and regularity, as well as that of its organisms, could not have come about without Someone Who Knows how to bring them about (i.e., how to make them), then, since they indisputably exist, there must be (or at least, must have been) a Great Someone Who Knows (or Knew) how to make them. True, all of Philo’s points about our inability to infer much about the designer (its unity, its moral character, its age, its originality) would remain, but a designer one would indeed get. In a rare moment of almost trying to help Cleanthes, Demea objects that an eternal vegetative or generative (we can hear Cudworth saying “spermatic”) principle would no doubt be of a sort of complexity and ingeniousness that would cry out for a design explanation (DNR VII.12, pp. 54–55). But Philo’s threefold retort cuts to the quick (DNR VII.13–17, pp. 55–56). First, as far as observation goes, we do seem to see order bestowed by things that know not what they do. Indeed, here we can reiterate the pull of the Cudworthian data in favor of autonomous plastic natures. The quod nescis principle certainly does not hold of every proximal, observable instance of order bestowal: the tree begets the acorn which begets the tree, but they are none the wiser. Second, when we move from the proximal domain from which we draw our analogies to the domain of final explanations, the very is question is about the ultimate organizing principle; and intelligence is just one of the candidates, one among several of the empirically notable options. Absent some a priori proof of the quod nescis principle, it is question-begging to privilege intelligence over its competitors. But third, and here is the deepest part that Hume owes to Bayle, a Divine Intelligence would itself have an order and regularity that it does not create. It would, therefore, by the very principles of the Design Argument, call out for the very same sort of explanation (that is, a Design explanation) as would a vegetative (hylozoic) or generative (“spermatic”) capacity. The traditional (not overly mystical) theist, then, must simply accept that something has a sophisticated (perhaps infinite) order to it, and (somehow) thereby a capacity to bestow order on other things, a something that is ultimate, uncreated, and unexplained. Its nature itself, however, cannot fall under the scope of the quod nescis principle, since God is not literally self-creating. This is something traditional theists must simply

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accept; but in doing so, their Design Argument loses its bite because it is less parsimonious than some form of Stratonism-Spinozism, since we might as well attribute such a nature to the observable universe itself. The Baylean Stratonic “retorsion” then is this: Since everyone must embrace some unexplained ordering principle somewhere, and a principle that cannot, on pain of regress, satisfy the quod nescis dictum, the naturalist cannot, a priori, be faulted for locating it in Nature—whether it be a hylozoic Nature or some other. Further, to the extent that parsimony should guide our ontological commitments, we have a reason for betting that the fundamental ordering principle is immanent in the material world; anything else would be to multiply entities beyond necessity and open things up to arbitrariness. Perhaps the designer of this world has a designer, but that second-order designer does not? Perhaps it stops at the 25th-order designer? Or is it designers all the way up? Rather than build castles in the sky, reason, at least as guided by parsimony, suggests betting on the one universe for the existence of which we actually have indisputable evidence. If we conclude that parsimony should be chucked in such matters metaphysical, the agnostic or skeptic wins entirely—which would not help the traditional theist at all. Either way, the position of the design theorist is exploded: either an immanentist naturalism—a Stratonism or Spinozism—is more probable, or we simply cannot assess the epistemic probability of the design hypothesis (or that of its competitors, those thought of and those not yet formulated). And, either way, it would be irrational to base belief in a Deity on the Design Argument. The only way out of this tangle for the traditional theist, Bayle saw, is to embrace a completely radical view of God’s omnipotence, suggested by Descartes and taken up by some radical Cartesians. God must be completely unconstrained—internally and externally—constrained not even by logic. God must be able to do absolutely anything: make round squares, make six be nine, make it be the case that there are only 73 prime numbers, go out of existence and still save us, make valid inferences be invalid and vice versa, completely alter “His” own nature, in some quasi-Vedantic way deceive “Himself” about all differentiation in the universe, make evil to be good and good to be evil. Bayle also realized that this voluntaristic and absolutistic conception of God’s power completely undermined everything—both reason and morality (see, e.g., Mori 2020/1999, 255ff.). While it may help us to understand how, say, it could be good for God to plan and implement the Fall and the consequent eternal damnation of most of humanity, or good to unleash suffering on innocent animals, or good to ask us to believe doctrines that seem absurd to the very reason he endowed us with (the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Creation ex nihilo), we could never be sure that this might not all change tomorrow. And we could never be sure that this very inference about such a doctrine helping us to understand God’s ways is even reasonable. It seems to entail the complete destruction of rationality, but we can’t be sure even of that. It seems to be a kind of Pyrrhonism by other means, but again how could we know? Philo’s fideistic pronouncement at the very end of the DNR may been seen as a nod to this Baylean impasse (DNR XII.33, p. 102). Otherwise, the radical Cartesian escape from the Stratonic retorsion (or “Stratonic Slide” as I will sometimes call it) is not broached

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 325 in the DNR. Another Baylean theme, derived from his Malebranchian sympathies, however, is broached: the matter of general laws. To that and other issues drawn from the “Malebranchesphere” we now turn 15.2.4 Malebranche Accused of Spinozism

As influenced by Malebranche’s philosophy as Hume was (see, e.g., Ryan 2018), it would be astonishing if he were unaware that that philosophy had been accused of inadvertent or concealed Spinozism, by name or insinuation, by a rather large number of critics, Arnauld and Leibniz being only the most famous. As Nadler puts it, “No one in the period was accused of Spinozism more often and for a greater variety of reasons than Malebranche” (Nadler 2008, 236). Moreover, it would not be surprising if Hume, speaking with learned Jesuits at La Flèche during his first stay in France, discussed exactly this issue, given that the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux was a leading venue for publishing just such accusations (see note 40). Notably, it was not just Malebranche’s doctrine of material extension and its relation to God that got him into trouble, nor was it just that his Occasionalism seemed to turn us into the Good Lord’s puppets and to make God directly responsible for all evils, moral and natural. Nor was it just that a God running the world via general laws instead of particular, situation-specific volitions seems to be a God whose passion for parsimony and nomological elegance has trumped “His” goodness (see Mori 2020/1999, 139).59 Sometimes these difficulties were themselves regarded as direct consequences of Malebranche’s very definition of ‘God’ as “… Being without restriction, All Being, the Being infinite and universal” and the closely related notion that, as Malebranche put in a passage quoted by Demea, God “… comprehends the perfections of matter without being material … and the perfections of created spirits, without being a spirit …” (Malebranche 1997/ 1674–1712, 251; Bk. 3, Pt. 2, Ch. 9; cited by Demea in DNR II.2, p. 18). In his influential 1684 polemic against both Spinoza and Malebranche, L’Impie convaincu, the alleged Socinian Noël Aubert de Versé wrote: This is why Father Malebranche, who defines God the way Spinoza does as Absolute Being, the One Being, Universal Being, Abstract Being, etc., cannot avoid falling into a precipice that is but two fingers distant from that of the impious Spinoza, namely that the universe is just an emanation of God and can only be an emanation of God; that all we see and perceive is God alone, that God alone brings about everything that happens; that he is himself all the activity and operativity that there is in all of nature, in a word, that God is All Being and the One Being. (Aubert de Versé 1684, 142–143) Spinoza defined God as follows (Ethics, Id6; Spinoza 1985, 409): “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Aubert de Versé argues that the very definition of God given by Malebranche, which is

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what is cited by Demea, is essentially equivalent to Spinoza’s definition and thus leads to Spinozism, which Aubert de Versé regarded as clearly a version of atheism.60 It seems unlikely that Demea’s quotation of Malebranche’s definition of God is entirely coincidental in this connection. Even if Hume never read L’Impie convaincu, the book was not unknown. It was known to Locke and discussed by the Puritan theologian and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, John Howe, who regarded it as actually a crypto-Spinozistic work, and it was “… certainly used later by freethinkers” (Thomson 2008, 53–54); it was also discussed critically by Bayle in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres.61 But, more generally, the idea that Malebranche’s philosophy was, if not a doomed attempt to prevent Cartesianism from sliding into Spinozism, itself a form of crypto-Spinozism was common.62 In fact, that sentiment is strongly insinuated by Hume himself in the one place in which he does discuss Spinoza’s philosophy by name, that is, in the chapter “Of the Immateriality of the Soul” in the Treatise of Human Nature: … [S]upposing that the deity were the great and efficacious principle, which supplies the deficiency of all causes, this leads us into the grossest impieties and absurdities. For upon the same account, that we have recourse to him in natural operations, and assert that matter cannot of itself communicate motion, or produce thought, viz. because there is no apparent connexion betwixt these objects; I say, upon the very same account, we must acknowledge that the deity is the author of all our volitions and perceptions; since they have no more apparent connexion either with one another, or with the supposed but unknown substance of the soul. This agency of the supreme Being we know to have been asserted by several philosophers [Hume’s note: “As father Malebranche and other Cartesians”] with relation to all the actions of the mind, except volition, or rather an inconsiderable part of volition; though it is easy to perceive, that this exception is a mere pretext, to avoid the dangerous consequences of that doctrine. If nothing be active but what has an apparent power, thought is in no case any more active than matter; and if this inactivity must make us have recourse to a deity, the supreme being is the real cause of all our actions, bad as well as good, vicious as well as virtuous. (THN, I.iv.5; Hume 2002/1739–40, 163) Note that the very point Hume raises here, which had been raised by so many others before,63 that Malebranche’s Occasionalism (like Spinozism) forces one to attribute the origin of moral evil to the First Cause, is the very point that, I would argue, leads Demea to make an exit after asking if Philo is “… secretly … a more dangerous enemy that Cleanthes himself?” (DNR XI.18, p. 87; for a different account of Demea’s exit, see Falkenstein, this volume). Importantly, this occurs immediately after Philo concludes that the most probable of the four hypotheses concerning the First Cause’s moral character is the hypothesis of moral indifference (DNR XI.15, p. 86). Philo concludes this, after ruling out omnibenevolence and omnimalevolence due to “mixed phenomena”,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 327 precisely because the fact that the world seems to be governed by general laws seems better explained by moral indifference than by the Manichean hypothesis (DNR XI.14, p. 86). And earlier in Part XI, Philo had noted that the governance of the world by general laws, rather than particular volitions, is one of the four circumstances upon which so many evils, natural and moral, depend (DNR XI.7–8, pp. 81–82). It should be emphasized that this very point—that the world seems to be governed by general, natural laws and not situation-specific volitions—was also major cause of grief for Malebranche, and another point at which his Occasionalism seemed close to the Spinozistic “precipice” (as Bayle insinuated, see note 64). Spinoza’s view that God or Nature develops by ironclad laws with no regard for what humans consider good or evil is certainly more parsimonious than the view that God, for mysterious reasons, governs the world via (almost) exceptionless laws, when particular volitions (even quite undetectable ones like “some small touches, given to Caligula’s brain in infancy” (DNR XI.8, p. 82)) might well seem to be expected by an omnibenevolent being.64 Note further that Demea’s shock has everything to do with the attributes of God and the rejection of anthropomorphism common to him and Philo—and this, again, relates directly to the passage of Malebranche that Demea cited and that Philo did not object to. Demea did not mean for his anti-anthropomorphism to end in the denial of God’s omnibenevolence or the denial of individual human responsibility for moral evil, but that is where things go. Demea says “I joined in an alliance with you, in order to prove the incomprehensible nature of the divine being, and refute the principles of Cleanthes, who would measure everything by human rule and standard. But now I find you running into all the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels …” (DNR XI.18, p. 87). In Part III (DNR III.11–13, pp. 33–34), Demea himself delivers an anti-anthropomorphic discourse that compares to the Scholium to Part I, Proposition 17 and the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics (Spinoza 1985, 421–428, 439–446; see below).65 And this will be recapitulated by Philo at the end (DNR XII.7–8; 32–33, pp. 92–94; 101–102). One of Philo’s strategies is adumbrated in the beginning of Part III, right after Demea’s Malebranche citation: Anti-Anthropomorphism (on which Philo is in basic agreement with Demea) can easily lead to Stratonism-Spinozism—in the sense that the Necessary Being is (1) not literally a person with plans, hence (2) not literally providential (“Providence” here simply reducing to the laws of nature), (3) not concerned at all about the distribution of suffering in the world, yet (4), qua organizing principle, trivially analogous to thought and design (as Philo will say, there is “… a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of nature … ” (DNR XII.7, p. 93)). Clearly, the “greatest libertines and infidels”, among whom Cleanthes includes Bayle (DNR I.17, p. 15), could heartily agree. 15.2.5 Samuel Clarke’s “Refutation” of Spinoza

Samuel Clarke says, at his first mention of him in the 1705 Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, that Spinoza is “… the most celebrated patron of atheism in our time …” (Clarke 1998/1705, 20); he might have said one of the

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“greatest libertines and infidels”. Moreover, Spinoza’s name is in the very title of Clarke’s book, which title goes on: More particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza, and their followers. That Hume read this book is not in serious doubt (see, esp. Russell 2008, chs. 4–5). He quotes from it in DNR Part IX (and there are other clear lines of evidence, see, e.g., Williford 2003). In Part IX, Demea puts forward a reasonably accurate but very compressed summary of Clarke’s argumentation.66 Demea calls the argument “the common one”, and Philo, as noted, endorses an enthymematic version of it in Part II (indeed, right after Demea’s Malebranche citation). It is a “common” argument because, as noted in the section on Cudworth above, at least in the Early Modern period, prior to Hume’s argument against the demonstrability of the causal maxim (and PSR), the argument to the existence of some necessary being was regarded as irrefragable and its conclusion as a “Lemma”, as Cudworth labeled it. And one finds versions of the argument in many writers in addition to Cudworth and Clarke (including Spinoza, Raphson, Leibniz, and Locke (see Butler, this volume)). The debate, as Philo noted, was not about the existence of a necessary being but its nature (DNR II.3, p. 18).67 On this very issue, Spinoza plays a much greater role as a foil in the Demonstration than does its other named representative of infidelity, Hobbes (cf. Yenter 2014, Schliesser 2012). In fact, much of the discussion of Hobbes in the Demonstation is on the denial of human liberty, and on that issue, Spinoza is mentioned in the same breath and for the same reasons (Clarke 1998/1705, 63). Clarke is at pains to argue, explicitly contra Spinoza, that the Necessary Being cannot be the whole of Nature or the material world. And his argument is quite simple: The Necessary Being cannot be (and could not have been) otherwise than it is (or was). The material world can be (or could have been) otherwise than it is (or was). Therefore, the Necessary Being is not the material world. And how do we know that the material world can be otherwise than it is (etc.)? We know this because we can easily imagine or conceive of its being otherwise; and conceivability in the case implies logico-metaphysical possibility, or so Clarke assumes. Here is Clarke: Whatever is the true reason, why the first cause can never possibly cease to exist, the same is, and originally and always was, the true reason why it always did and cannot but exist: that is, it is the true ground and reason of its existence. … From hence it follows, that the material world cannot possibly be the first and original being, uncreated, independent, and of itself eternal. For since it hath been already demonstrated, that whatever being hath existed from eternity, independent, and without any external cause of its existence, must be self-existent; and that whatever is self-existent, must exist necessarily by an absolute necessity in the nature of the thing itself. It follows evidently, that unless the material world exists necessarily by an absolute necessity in its own nature, so as that it must be an express contradiction to suppose it not to exist,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 329 it cannot be independent, and of itself eternal. Now that the material world does not exist thus necessarily, is very evident. For absolute necessity of existing, and a possibility of not existing, being contradictory ideas, it is manifest the material world cannot exist necessarily, if without a contradiction we can conceive it either not to be, or to be in any respect otherwise than it now is; than which, nothing is more easy. For whether we consider the form of the world, with the disposition and motion of its parts, or whether we consider the matter of it, as such, without respect to its present form, everything in it,—both the whole and every one of its parts, their situation and motion, the form and also the matter, are the most arbitrary and dependent things, and the farthest removed from necessity, that can possibly be imagined. A necessity indeed of fitness, that is, a necessity that things should be as they are, in order to the well-being of the whole, there may be in all these things: but an absolute necessity of nature in any of them, (which is what the atheist must maintain) there is not the least appearance of. If any man will say in this sense, (as every atheist must do) either that the form of the world, or at least the matter and motion of it, is necessary, nothing can possibly be invented more absurd. (Clarke 1998/1705, 17–18; emphasis added)68 Of course, the liberal conceivability-to-possibility assumption operative here is something Spinoza (and, much more contentiously, possibly Hume himself (see Kail 2007)) would challenge. Clarke offers no defense of it. Later in the same section (§III), Clarke makes no secret of which “patron of atheism” he has in mind: … [T]he opinion of Spinoza, when expressed plainly and consistently, comes evidently to this; that the material world, and every part of it, with the order and manner of being of each part, is the only self-existent, or necessarilyexisting being. And now, consequently, he must of necessity affirm all the conclusions which I have before shown to follow demonstrably from that opinion. He cannot possibly avoid affirming, that it is a contradiction … ... for anything to be, or to be imagined, in any respect otherwise than it now is. He must say it is a contradiction, to suppose the number, or figure, or order of the several parts of the world, could possibly have been different from what they now are … .which, with other the like consequences touching the necessity of the existence of things … do … unavoidably follow from the fore-mentioned opinion of Spinoza. And consequently, that opinion, viz. that the universe, or whole world, is the self-existent or necessarily-existing being, is demonstrated to be false. (Clarke 1998/1705, 22; emphasis added) Spinoza’s necessitarianism, according the Clarke, extends not only to the laws or nature (or the “form of the world” as Clarke puts it) but to its matter as well, “every part, with the order and manner of being of each part”. Now, this is a somewhat controversial matter in Spinoza interpretation, but it is certainly not

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implausible to read Spinoza as making a distinction between, in effect, typeconceivability-as-otherwise and token-conceivability-as-otherwise.69 The former, more or less, has to do with the general features or essences of finite modes qua types, and it grounds our sense of what sorts of things can be done with what sorts of things. (One can start a fire with flints and steel but not with a wet noodle and a cold beer.) The latter has to do with finite modes qua specific individual tokens of a type. And here my sense that I can conceive of something as being otherwise (or perhaps better, as having been otherwise) is illusory. If I understood the entirety of the extraordinarily complex causal chain that led to a given pencil being just so on my current desk, I would see that it had to be just where it is, with no other possibility, even though I can easily imagine its having been elsewhere. Clarke’s “refutation” of Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature depends on simply ignoring this distinction and, more generally, embracing an “irrational exuberance” vis-à-vis the conceivability-to-possibility inference, something not uncommon to metaphysicians, since without it, metaphysics becomes much harder (though not impossible) and perhaps less intellectually satisfying. The naïve principle is, of course, intuitive and commonsensical.70 But there is a retorsion lurking in Clarke’s own position. And Hume spots it and uses it to put nails in the coffin holding Clarke’s argument; or, less dramatically, to put Clarke into a serious dilemma. Throughout the Demonstration Clarke maintains that the essence of God, in virtue of which God “carries the reason of his existence in himself” (as Demea puts it, DNR IX.3, p. 64) and is a logically (and therefore metaphysically) necessary being, is impenetrable or opaque to us (see Williford 2003, 106–109). This means that though we can recognize that there must be such a being, we cannot transparently derive its existence from some clear definition (or “idea”) of its essence—in the manner of the Ontological Argument, which Clarke rejects (Clarke 1998/1705, 16). Clarke writes (§IV): What the substance or essence of that being, which is self-existent, or necessarilyexisting, is, we have no idea; neither is it at all possible for us to comprehend it. That there is such a being actually existing without us, we are sure (as I have already shown) by strict and undeniable demonstration. Also what it is not, that is, that the material world is not it, as modern atheists would have it, has been already demonstrated. But what it is, I mean as to its substance and essence, this we are infinitely unable to comprehend. Yet this does not in the least diminish the certainty of the demonstration of its existence. For it is one thing to know certainly that a being exists; and another, to know what the essence of that being is. And the one may be capable of the strictest demonstration, when the other is absolutely beyond the reach of all our faculties to understand. (Clarke 1998/1705, 29; emphasis original; this occurs at the very beginning) Clarke’s predicament, then, is this: The opacity of our idea of the Necessary Being (or of its essence) implies precisely that one cannot assume that the conceivability-to-possibility principle applies to it, at least if we are talking about de facto human, prima facie conceivability. In other words, we can easily imagine

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 331 that many things are true or false of the Necessary Being. In fact, any open question about the Necessary Being (and there are many) represents a locus of such opacity. Even were we to grant what Clarke implausibly claims to demonstrate, namely that God freely arranges the world out of his providential benevolence, there remain untold numbers of such loci. For every child who dies in infancy, for every sweet puppy smashed by a car, for every faun burned to death in a forest fire, we can ask: Why this way, O Lord, and not some other? Or we can wonder with Hume’s Philo (and with Bayle)71 why God, even within the bounds of the general, natural laws, displayed such “great frugality” in distributing “powers and faculties … to every particular being” (DNR XI.9, pp. 82–83). Clearly, we can easily imagine God to have done otherwise and thus to have been otherwise in each such case. But if we accept the conceivability-to-possibility principle in those instances, it will follow that God is not necessarily the way God in fact is. The only recourse we have is to what, following Spinoza, we may call the “Sanctuary of Ignorance”: In spite of appearances to the contrary, God’s infinite wisdom demanded that those children, puppies, and fauns (etc.) had to die in exactly the way they did, or, at least, that such eventualities could not be excluded; and it also demanded that humans have only two eyes, do not have skin capable of photosynthesis or the ability to breath underwater, etc.—it was all part of the Glorious Plan.72 Now, one might be tempted to say that this is all well and good, provided that Clarke is able to prove that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and free God fashioned the world. But he is only able to “prove” that the Necessary Being is not Nature itself by relying on the conceivability-to-possibility principle. That very principle is then effectively thrown out when it comes to understanding the nature and ways of the very God whose existence he has purported to prove by relying on the principle. If it can be thrown out in the case of the theistic God, plain dealing demands that it can be thrown out in the case of Nature as well. The very principle the classical theodicy (and skeptical theist “defense”) relies on—again, that, epistemic appearances to the contrary, we cannot infer the metaphysical possibility of a much better world from its prima facie conceivability73—can be used, mutatis mutandis, to defend Stratonism-Spinozism from Clarke’s objection. In Part IX, the point is not explicitly related to the denial of conceivabilityto-possibility with respect to the Problem of Evil; I am extrapolating a bit (though see DNR X). It is put in a much more general way by Cleanthes, namely that for anything, if it is conceivable that it exists, then it is conceivable that it does not exist (DNR IX.5, p. 64).74 Given the conceivabilityto-possibility principle, which Cleanthes also seems to assume, this will mean that the conceivability of the existence or non-existence of God is on a par with that of Nature. And if we consider that property ascriptions can be transformed into existential claims, we get the same theses regarding nontrivial property attributions (i.e., those that are not merely definitional, analytic, or otherwise matters of “relations of ideas”, to put it in Hume’s language). Cleanthes’ claim can be thought of as a conditional one: If we

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accept the conceivability-to-possibility principle and the claim that we can conceive of the non-existence (or existence) of any individual (and noninstantiation (or instantiation) of any (non-contradictory) property), then there is no individual whose existence is necessary (or state of affairs the obtaining of which is necessary). The absolute (i.e., not relative to some assumed antecedent conditions and laws) contingency of every individual and state of affairs follows from this naïve conceivability-to-possibility principle. Thus, once we reject the Ontological Argument as sophistry, we are forced either to deny that any individual (or state of affairs) is necessary (because one can always imagine it not existing) or deny the conceivability-topossibility principle. Cleanthes favors the former option in DNR IX.6 (pp. 64–65) but (in IX.7) notes, in effect, that the latter option undermines Clarke’s anti-Spinozistic argument. If we deny that principle, we cannot, with any confidence, rule out some candidate description of the Necessary Being we do not like simply because we can imagine or conceive of the relevant Being being otherwise. Therefore, we cannot use the principle, as Clarke does, to deny that the Necessary Being is Nature. Note that Clarke arrives at the existence of a Necessary Being via an application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As Demea says, “Whatever exists must either have a cause or reason for its existence” (DNR IX.3, p. 63; emphasis added). Once we rule out the possibility of infinite causal chains, we arrive at some being, the First Cause, that cannot itself be caused but, to satisfy the PSR, must exist by nature—“… a necessarily existent being, who carries the reason of his existence in himself; and who cannot be supposed to exist without an express contradiction” (DNR, IX.3, 64). This differs from the Ontological Argument in that one does not start with a definition or concept of a maximal being and, so to speak, simply build existence or possible necessity (and therefore necessity modulo S5) in. But one does arrive at a logically Necessary Being once one has ruled out the possibility of an infinite causal chain of individually contingent events—that is the only option left that will satisfy the PSR. If the First Cause is not itself caused to exist by something else, its existence must be a matter of its nature as such, must be internal to it. It must exist by its very nature. It is precisely because Clarke regards its nature as conceptually opaque or recalcitrant to any further articulation that he must accept that the conceivability-to-possibility principle breaks down with respect to the identity of the Necessary Being (not its existence). And if its nature is opaque to us, then we cannot rule out various possibilities with respect to its identity simply because we can conceive otherwise.75 Our lack of knowledge or genuine modal insight here leaves many possibilities epistemically open. Perhaps, Nature, in spite of first appearances, must be exactly the way it is at any given time. If we cannot infer possibility from conceivability in the case of the First Cause’s nature, which it has by necessity, we cannot rule out the identification of the First Cause with Nature, as Clarke tries to do. Philo buttresses Cleanthes’ point with a mathematical example drawn from an article written by Fontenelle and published in Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres.76 The specific example is immaterial; its point, however, requires

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 333 emphasis. Take the pattern Philo notes (that the digits of any (positive integral) product of 9 sum to 9 or to some product of 9) or any other non-illusory mathematical patterns, Philo says: To a superficial observer, so wonderful a regularity may be admired as the effect either of chance or design: but a skillful algebraist immediately concludes it to be the work of necessity, and demonstrates, that it must forever result from the nature of these numbers. Is it not probable, I ask, that the whole economy of the universe is conducted by a like necessity, though no human algebra can furnish a key which solves the difficulty? And instead of admiring the order of natural beings, may it not happen, that, could we penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies, we should clearly see why it was absolutely impossible they could ever admit of any other disposition? So dangerous is it to introduce this idea of necessity into the present question! and so naturally does it afford an inference directly opposite to the religious hypothesis! (DNR IX.10, p. 66; emphasis added) This is, of course, precisely Spinoza’s view of the “whole economy of the universe” and of our epistemic limitations with respect to it (see, e.g., Särman 2022 for one plausible interpretation). Spinoza could not be clearer about taking mathematics to be the model for the proper understanding of the physical world.77 And it is in mathematics where one sees precisely that prima facie conceivability and inconceivability are not, respectively, guides to possibility and impossibility.78 Philo continues: But dropping all these abstractions … and confining ourselves to more familiar topics, I shall venture to add an observation, that the argument a priori has seldom been found very convincing, except to people of a metaphysical head, who have accustomed themselves to abstract reasoning, and who, finding from mathematics, that the understanding frequently leads to truth through obscurity, and, contrary to first appearances, have transferred the same habit of thinking to subjects where it ought not to have place. Other people, even of good sense and the best inclined to religion, feel always some deficiency in such arguments, though they are not perhaps able to explain distinctly where it lies; a certain proof that men ever did, and ever will derive their religion from other sources than from this species of reasoning. (DNR IX.11, 66; emphasis added) I submit that the italicized portion of this passage is a reference to both Clarke and Spinoza.79 Spinoza’s relation to mathematics we just mentioned; and Spinoza clearly would disagree vehemently that this “habit of thinking” does not “have place” in metaphysics—his Ethics being a prime example of it. Clarke deliberately arranges the Demonstration in a quasi-mathematical manner.80 To be sure, though

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Clarke does not go as far in this regard as Spinoza does in the Ethics, his reputation in physics and the relevant mathematics, as well as his attempt to assimilate as much as possible moral philosophy to mathematics, makes him fit this description well (not that there was any serious doubt; see, e.g., Russell 2008, 28–31). But Hume has made a point beautifully here: Clarke and Spinoza, both “of a metaphysical head” and enamored of mathematics as applied to this subject matter, arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions.81 Both, at some point, must deny the conceivability-to-possibility principle, and, as such, Clarke’s attempt to disprove Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature fails miserably.82 One final issue requires our attention here, viz., the issue of infinite causal chains. Clarke (and presumably Demea) would like to rule out the possibility of satisfying the PSR via an infinite causal chain (or cycle for that matter) wherein each term in the chain is, in itself, contingent. Clarke’s way of blocking this possibility involves arguing that any such infinite (or cyclic) causal chain would itself require some explanation (by the PSR). He argues that if no individual part (event, state of affairs, etc.) of such a causal chain is necessary, then it cannot be the case that the whole chain is necessary. Thus, such a chain would require a causal explanation as well; and we are either off on another regress or will have to have recourse, finally, to a necessary First Cause that offers the ultimate explanation of the chain (cycle, or chain of chains). It is worth quoting Clarke on this matter in full: To suppose an infinite succession of changeable and dependent beings produced one from another in an endless progression, without any original cause at all, is only a driving back from one step to another, and (as it were) removing out of sight, the question concerning the ground or reason of the existence of things. It is in reality, and in point of argument, the very same supposition, as it would be to suppose one continued being, of beginningless and endless duration, neither self-existent and necessary in itself, nor having its existence founded in any self-existent cause; which is directly absurd and contradictory. Otherwise, thus: Either there has always existed some one unchangeable and independent being, from which all other beings have received their original; or else there has been an infinite succession of changeable and dependent beings, produced one from another, in an endless progression, without any original cause at all. (Clarke 1998/1705, 11; §II)83 It becomes clear in the very next section (§III) of the Demonstration that (no surprise) Spinoza is chief among the modern infidels targeted by Clarke’s attack on the possibility of an infinite causal chain. Moreover, this is deeply connected to Clarke’s use of the conceivability-to-possibility principle to argue against Spinoza’s identification of Nature with the Necessary Being, which we just discussed.

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 335 In the that discussion I removed some of the following lines from the second Clarke quotation: He [Spinoza] must say it is a contradiction, to suppose the number, or figure, or order of the several parts of the world, could possibly have been different from what they now are. He must say, motion is necessarily of itself, and consequently that it is a contradiction in terms to suppose any matter to be at rest; or else he must affirm, (which is rather the more absurd of the two, as may appear from what has been already said in proof of the second general head of this discourse; and yet he has chosen to affirm it) that motion, as a dependent being, has been eternally communicated from one piece of matter to another, without having at all any original cause of its being, either within itself or from without … . (Clarke 1998/1704, 22–23; emphasis added) And Clarke cites Spinoza’s Ethics IIp13l3 in evidence that Spinoza holds the “rather more absurd” claim: “A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest by another body, which has also been determined to motion or rest by another, and that again by another, and so on, to infinity” (Spinoza 1985, 459). The “less absurd” claim had been defended by John Toland, as a kind of improvement of Spinozism, in the Fifth Letter of the Letters to Serena (see Leask 2012, Ellenzweig 2016, 261–264), which text Clarke explicitly mentions (Clarke 1998/1704, 19). This possibility of motion being inherent in or essential to matter is, of course, defended by Philo in Part VIII in which a version of the “Old Epicurean Hypothesis” is articulated as a viable cosmological possibility (DNR VII.2–5, pp. 58–59). But the “rather more absurd” Spinozistic possibility is actually defended by Cleanthes in Part IX. Immediately after noting Demea’s/ Clarke’s “great partiality” in using the conceivability-to-possibility principle against Spinoza’s identification of the Necessary Being with Nature, Cleanthes says: Add to this, that in tracing an eternal succession of objects, it seems absurd to inquire for a general cause or first author. How can any thing, that exists from eternity, have a cause, since that relation implies a priority in time, and a beginning of existence? (DNR IX.8, p. 65) A similar objection is explicitly raised and addressed by Clarke; however, note well, the point is applied to the First Cause, not to an “eternal succession of objects” as such. Clarke writes: Some writers have contended [Clarke’s note: “See the Answer to a Seventh Letter at the end of this book”] that it is preposterous to inquire … at all into the ground or reason of the existence of the first cause: because evidently the first cause can have nothing prior to it, and consequently must needs (they

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think) exist absolutely without any cause at all. That the first cause can have no other being prior to it, to be the cause of its existence, is indeed selfevident. But if originally, absolutely, and antecedently to all supposition of existence, there be no necessary ground or reason why the first cause does exist, rather than not exist; if the first cause can rightly and truly be affirmed to exist, absolutely without any ground or reason of existence at all, it will unavoidably follow, by the same argument, that it may as well cease likewise to exist, without any ground or reason of ceasing to exist: which is absurd. The truth therefore plainly is: Whatever is the true reason, why the first cause can never possibly cease to exist, the same is, and originally and always was, the true reason why it always did and cannot but exist: that is, it is the true ground and reason of its existence. (Clarke 1998/1705, 17) A look at the referenced “Seventh Letter” in answer to the theologian, Daniel Waterland, one of Clarke’s targets here, is further instructive. Clarke says: For though it is indeed most evident, that no thing, no being, can be prior to that being which is the first cause and original of all things, yet there must be in nature a ground or reason, a permanent ground or reason of the existence of the first cause: Otherwise its existence would be owing to, and depend upon mere chance. And all that could be said upon this head would amount to this only; that it exists, because it exists; that it therefore does and always did exist, because it does and always did exist: Whichhich the followers of Spinoza will, with equal strength of reason, affirm concerning every substance that exists at all. (Clarke 1998/1705, 118) In other words, Clarke sees Spinoza’s supposed endless succesion of material in motion as entailing, in spite of Spinoza’s claims to the contrary, the contingency of the univerise or Nature. But once Clarke’s objection to identifying God and the material univerise is rebuffed, there is no a priori barrier to taking the “eternal succession of objects” to itself be the Necessary Being (or its temporal/causal manifestation). It is true that Cleanthes addendum here is ambiguous. Given that Cleanthes first argues that the notion of a Necessary Being is either meaningless or contradictory (because of the conceivability-to-possibility principle), Cleanthes could be taken to be saying that even an eternal being would be contingent. If that is so, the theistic hypothesis has no a priori advantage over that of an eternal but contingent causal succession. However, given that Cleanthes has also just said that “the material universe [may] be the necessarily existent being, according to this [Demea’s/Clarke’s] pretended explication of necessity” (again, an idea that will soon be buttressed by Philo’s mathematical example), we could also take Cleanthes to be asserting precisely the intelligibility of the Spinozistic idea that the eternal causal succession is the Necessary Being or, rather, its manifestation, and thus that the succession carries “reason of its existence” within itself—immanently, as Spinoza would put it (Ip18; Spinoza 1985, 428).84

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 337 It should also be noted that both Philo’s version of the “Old Epicurean Hypothesis” and his versions of the World Animal/Vegetable Hypothesis presuppose the intelligibility of an eternal causal succession (linear or cyclic). When we add to this Philo’s explicitly stated preference for necessitarianism (DNR VI.12, p. 50), the result is a preference for a position that looks rather Spinozistic indeed. In fact, it is unclear from Philo’s version of the Epicurean Hypothesis that it involves contingency at all, since the eternal motion posited, like Toland’s, may not be random like the Epicurean clinamen.85 Moreover, since the Epicurean universe is supposed to be combinatorially “ergodic”, it also satisfies the Cartesian and Spinozistic (and quasi-Diodoran) notion that all possibilities for the universe are realized at some “time” or other;86 though in Philo’s Epicurean universe, in contrast to Spinoza’s, there are only finitely many such possibilities (DNR VIII.2, p. 58), which presumably get repeated endlessly.87 A necessitarian version of the World Animal/Vegetable Hypothesis, whether pseudo-Stoic or Stratonic, whereby every universe without exception has a “parent” universe, would ential that the eternal succession of universes is the Necessary Being and that the “First Cause”, if we are to use that ordinal terminology, is an immanent or “vertical” cause (“first” in the sense of fundamental and not in the temporal sense)—and that cosmology, again, looks pretty Spinozistic. In concluding this sub-section, it is worth pointing out that Clarke does not mention Strato or Stratonism (he does, as noted, use Cudworth’s word ‘hylozoism’ once). Clarke explicitly names and explicitly targets Spinoza and quotes directly from the Ethics. Hume quotes a brief passage of the Demonstration in which Clarke is explicitly arguing against Spinoza’s contention that the Necessary Being is Nature (or the material universe, as Clarke and Cleanthes put it). There can be no reasonable doubt that Hume was well aware of this and knew that in having Cleanthes and Philo defend the coherence of naturalistic necessitarianism against Demea, he was having them defend Spinoza or Spinozism against Clarke. It is sort of baffling that this has not been better noted in the literature, but then there are those historiographical “priors” discussed in the Introduction. It is true that in the “Early Memoranda” Hume seems to make a distinction between Stratonic atheism à la Bayle and Spinozistic atheism, which Hume calls there “metaphysical atheism”.88 And it is true, as we have seen, that Bayle’s Strato shares necessitarianism and naturalism with Spinoza but not necessarily hylozoism or substance monism (again, Cudworth’s Strato seems to share those with Spinoza but not necessarily the complete necessitarianism). But I believe that Part IX makes it reasonably clear that what Hume probably meant by “Metaphysical Atheism” is simply the a priori more geometrico applied to such metaphysical questions, so that the difference between Bayle’s Strato and Spinoza in this context has to do with a difference of philosophical method and not with ontology. Spinoza was often faulted for his method, even by those, like Diderot, in some sympathy with his naturalism.89 That quasi-mathematical method is, again, also adopted by Clarke; and Hume’s point is that that method can just as well be made to lead to Stratonism-Spinozism as it can to traditional theism. But rejecting Spinoza’s method does not at all mean rejecting (all of) Spinoza’s

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conclusions, naturalistic necessitarianism in particular. And Philo suggests another, less (subjectively) certain, a posteriori route to them, one based on parsimony and bolstered by a keen awareness of relevant, if sometimes unsettling, biological phenomena and the apparent indifference of natural law with respect to particular living beings (see DNR IV.9–11 & 14, pp. 38–40; VI.12, p. 50; XI.13–14, p. 85).90 15.3 Philo’s Stratonism-Spinozism: A Promenade through the DNR With this background in hand, we are now in a position to sketch, the Stratonic-Spinozistic threads that run all the way through the DNR.91 It should be emphasized that the claim is not that Hume himself, through Philo, defends some fully articulated interpretation of the metaphysics of the Ethics. It is rather that Philo is defending the claims that (1) Stratonic-Spinozistic views are at least epistemically on a par with other metaphysical views about the nature of the First Cause(s) and that (2) those views arguably have some advantages from an a posteriori, parsimony perspective (especially vis-à-vis the Problem of Evil and the potential “regress of designers” problem). In the sequel, we’ll very briefly see that this is quite consistent with the “Philo-as-Bayle” interpretation of the DNR. Do bear in mind in this section that we have isolated four different (but overlapping) strands relevant to the “Philo as Stratonist-Spinozist friendly” interpretation of the DNR: (1) Cudworth (or More) associates Strato with Spinoza vis-à-vis “hylozoic” atheism, but is less clear on the necessitarianism issue; and Spinoza, depending on some thorny interpretive matters, could seem more like a “cosmoplastic” or “pseudo-Stoic” atheist, which sort of view seems more in line with substance monism. (2) Bayle associates Strato with Spinoza visà-vis necessitarianism and theo-naturalism but suggests that Strato is neither a hylozoist nor a substance monist—at least in the way Bayle understands Spinoza on the latter matter; but, in the Dictionnaire anyway, Bayle, like many others, also associates Spinoza with the Stoic doctrine of the World Soul (and surely a nonteleological version thereof, thus associating him (in effect) with “pseudo-Stoic” atheism, to use Cudworth’s term). (3) Malebranche’s articulation of the concept of God, which Demea cites, was often taken to lead to Spinozism; this relates directly to the anti-anthropomorphism common to Philo and Demea; on this point, Demea is like Malebranche, and Philo is like Spinoza—Philo has boldly jumped into the precipice where rigidly orthodox Demea refuses to go (cf. Bergont 2018). Finally, (4) even though Philo abjures Spinoza’s (and Clarke’s) efforts to make metaphysics mathematical, Philo, with help from Cleanthes, in effect defends the Spinozistic and necessitarian identification of God and Nature from Clarke’s attack; and there can be absolutely no reasonable doubt that it is Spinoza they have in mind Part IX, since Hume cites Clarke, and Cleanthes and Philo jointly defend views Clarke attacks and clearly attributes to Spinoza in the very locus of the text cited. We shall now follow these and some other StratonicSpinozistic threads through the DNR.

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 339 15.3.1 Parts I–V

In Part I, Philo adumbrates the theme of anti-anthropomorphism in relation to his official skepticism about (or epistemic humility with respect to) Metaphysics and Theology: When we carry our speculations into the two eternities, before and after the present state of things; into the creation and formation of the universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operations of one universal spirit existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: We must be far removed from the smallest tendency to scepticism not to be apprehensive, that we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties. (DNR I.10, p. 11; emphasis added) In Part II, as we have seen, Philo, in response to Demea’s citation of Malebranche, agrees that the question is about the nature (not existence) of the deity, rehearses his compressed version of the Cosmological Argument, and says: … [T]he original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call GOD; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection. … But as all perfection is entirely relative, we ought never to imagine that we comprehend the attributes of this divine Being, or to suppose that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creature. Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge; these we justly ascribe to him; because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware, lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to these qualities among men. He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension … . In reality … there is no need of having recourse to that affected scepticism so displeasing to you [Cleanthes], in order to come at this determination. Our ideas reach no further than our experience. We have no experience of divine attributes and operations. I need not conclude my syllogism. You can draw the inference yourself. And it is a pleasure to me (and I hope to you too) that just reasoning and sound piety here concur in the same conclusion, and both of them establish the adorably mysterious and incomprehensible nature of the Supreme Being. (DNR II.3&4, p. 19; emphasis added)92 It is worth citing in this context a well-known passage from the Ethics: Further—to say something here also about the intellect and will which we commonly attribute to God—if will and intellect do pertain to the eternal essence of God, we must of course understand by each of these attributes something different from what men commonly understand. For the intellect and

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will which would constitute God’s essence would have to differ entirely from our intellect and will, and could not agree with them in anything except the name. They would not agree with one another any more than do the dog that is a heavenly constellation and the dog that is a barking animal. (Ethics, Ip17sch; Spinoza 1985, 427; emphasis added) Spinoza’s nominalistic position on the matter of ascribing intelligence and volition to God (or Nature) is quite in line with Philo’s anti-anthropomorphic stance, since a trivial or infinitesimally weak analogy is, after all, not so different from no real analogy: the analogy simply carries no significant information. And note, again, that these paragraphs from Philo occur immediately after Demea’s quotation of Father Malebranche. The first taste of Philo’s central Stratonic move (à la Bayle) occurs in Part II just after Cleanthes’ presentation of his version of the Design Argument. Philo’s point is that a priori we cannot privilege thought or mind as an ordering principle, and the a posteriori basis for privileging mind, implicit in Cleanthes’ argument, is much weaker than it at first seems, since we do find other principles of order operative in nature (DNR II.14–18, pp. 22–24). Importantly, in presenting the a priori status of the issue, Philo says, “… there is no more difficulty in conceiving, that the several elements, from an internal unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas, in the great, universal mind, from a like internal, unknown cause, fall into that arrangement” (DNR II.14, p. 23; emphasis added). Philo is already framing the matter in a Baylean-Stratonic-Spinozistic way: Behind the “order and connection of ideas” is something even more fundamental, something internal to Mind but also unknown in the sense that it cannot be conceived of either in terms of materialcausal connections or rational-representational connections. It grounds both (cf. LeGrant, this volume). At this point, Cleanthes might have argued that Philo has stacked the deck in the very formulation of the problem and claimed that the “order and connection” of God’s ideas is the fundamental and unexplained explainer of everything else. But we know what Philo’s response would have been. Note that Philo (at DNR II.15, p. 23) frames his response to Cleanthes in terms of defending the “adorable mysteriousness of the divine nature” and refuting “such a degradation of the supreme being as no sound theist could endure”. The key here, I suggest, lies precisely in the notion that there is a deeper divine essence, which, while incomprehensible or opaque to human beings, is what truly explains or grounds God’s existence93 and the “order and connection of [God’s] ideas”. This is the lynchpin of the Stratonic-Spinozistic move or “Slide”, for it entails that God’s mind is under constraints that God has no power over—at which point “the Mind of God” becomes explanatorily secondary and ultimately superfluous, something parsimony might suggest we jettison. Bayle spotted the only real option, incoherent as it may be, available to the traditional theist: deny that God’s Mind is under any constraint whatsoever—metaphysical, moral, mathematical, logical; affirm that it is the absolutely free (arbitrary?) origin of all such constraints.

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 341 Moreover, Philo’s a posteriori counter-case against Mind being the fundamental principle of order is important to reflect upon in this connection. Not only are design and intelligence “… no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe” (DNR II.18, p. 24); not only do we find “even from our limited experience” that “Nature … possesses an infinite number of springs and principles … (DNR II.21, p. 25), but “the reason and design of animals” is “...so minute, so weak, so bounded”. It is but “a little agitation of the brain”, and it is highly questionable to make it “… the model of the whole universe” (DNR II.19, p. 24)—this is echoed almost verbatim by Demea’s “Spinozistic contribution”, as Baier called it (1993, 238) in Part III (DNR III.12, p. 33). The limitations of the human mind, the fact that it cannot penetrate into the whole of its own essence, and the fact that it seems correlated with or is, in some sense, dependent upon the body and brain—these were, in my view anyway, ideas common to Hume and Spinoza (see, e.g., DNR IV.8, pp. 37–38; cf. Wilson 2016, 1010–1011; Ethics IIpp13&14, Vp21; Spinoza 1985, 457–463, 607; cf. Scribano 2020).94 Not only in his framing of the issue but also in his a posteriori counter to Cleanthes, Philo is angling at the denial of the coherence of the “Mind-First” metaphysics the Design Argument leads to—if it is to avoid regress. We’ll return to this. Demea closes Part III (DNR III.11–13, pp. 33–34) with a lucid case for the anti-anthropomorphic position. Demea’s remarks are somewhat comparable to some of those in Peter Browne’s 1728 Procedure, Extent, and Limits of the Human Understanding, as Colmeman’s note 10 (on p. 34) indicates. However, Browne holds that “… there are incomprehensible perfections in the Divine Nature answerable to what power, wisdom, and goodness are in us; and where of these things in us are but the distant only and faint, though true resemblances … ..” (Browne 1976/1728, 84; emphasis added). Thus, Demea, I submit, seems much further in the direction of “divine attribute nominalism”, à la Spinoza, than Browne’s own “analogical predication” position. As Demea says, “… when we mention the supreme being, we ought to acknowledge, that … [the] meaning [of the terms ‘thought’ and ‘reason’], in that case, is totally incomprehensible; and that the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas, which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the divine attributes” (DNR III.13, p. 34). Canis familiaris and Canis Major, indeed! And, again, a vanishingly weak analogy is not incompatible with this, as Philo’s “irenic” conclusion (DNR XII.6–8 & 33; pp. 92–94 & pp. 101–102) will make clear. Part IV opens with Cleanthes accusing Philo and Demea of being “mystics” and asking them how they differ from “sceptics or atheists, who assert that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible” (DNR IV.1, p. 35). In reply, Demea contrasts the compounded and fleeting human mind with divine simplicity and immutability. He also echoes Hume’s discussion of substance in the “Immateriality of the Soul” chapter (I.iv.5) of the Treatise of Human Nature: “He is entire in every point of space; and complete in every instant of duration. No succession, no change, no acquisition, no diminution. What he is implies not in it any shadow of distinction or diversity” (DNR IV.2, p. 36).95 Note well: Hume has Demea, who knows his Malebranche chapter and verse, float the very notion

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of substance typically attributed to Spinoza! Cleanthes responds by submitting that a simple, immutable mind is no mind at all, and that such expressions involve a contradictio in adjecto. And he says that all who hold such opinions are “atheists, without knowing it” (IV.3, p. 36). Recall again that his chapter on the “Immateriality of the Soul” in the THN (written while Hume was hanging out with the Jesuits, many of whom accused Malebranche of sliding in to Spinozism) is the one place where Hume discusses Spinoza explicitly, albeit entirely tendentiously; and that at the end of it he mentions (albeit in a note, and quoted above) Father Malebranche. Philo’s response to Cleanthes is that he is “… . honouring with the appellation of atheist all the sound, orthodox divines almost, who have treated of this subject” (IV.4, p. 37). This refers us back to the anti-anthropomorphic passage from Malebranche, and his “definition of God”, that Demea used to initiate this very thread in the DNR. At this point in the DNR, Demea (inadvertently) and Philo (quite advertently) have jointly made the case that, at the end of the day, there is not so much daylight between “the sound, orthodox divines” and the “greatest libertines and infidels” on the question of the essence and attributes of the First Cause (as Demea comes to realize with shock in Part XI). That Malebranche was cited by Demea in Part II as one “equally celebrated for piety and philosophy” and chosen from “all the divines almost, from the foundation of Christianity” (DNR II.2, p. 18) and called “so great an authority” by Philo (II.3, p. 18) is quite significant in this sequence, since, as detailed at some length, Malebranche was so often accused of falling into Spinozism. It seems clear that on the antianthropomorphism issue, Demea represents the orthodox divines and Philo the Stratonists and Spinozists; like Malebranche, Demea approaches the precipice but can’t bring himself to go over the edge. Philo has no such qualms. Noting that Cleanthes is “… not much swayed by names and authorities”, Philo brings out the full Baylean-Stratonic argument against the anthropomorphism inherent in Cleanthes’ design theory. Whichever way we look at the problem, from the point of view of reason or from that of experience, ending the causal regress requires accepting that some organizing principle is fundamental, the unexplained explainer, and that there is nothing obviously special about Mind that would make it the superior candidate for that role. From the a priori point of view, “… a mental world or universe of ideas requires a cause as much as does a material world or universe of objects” (DNR IV.7, p. 37). From the point of view of experience, the minds we have any knowledge of delicately depend on just as many causes as the bodies (vegetable and animal) we know to depend on a “curious adjustment of springs and principles” (IV.8, p. 38). Philo then hits hard: How, therefore, shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being whom you suppose the Author of Nature, or, according to your system of Anthropomorphism, the ideal world, into which you trace the material? Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop, and go no further; why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 343 in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? … … . If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better. (DNR, IV.9, p. 38; emphasis added) The First Cause, Philo is telling us, that being which contains the “reason of its existence” within itself, could well just be the natural world; and parsimony would suggest that that is the most reasonable thing to think on the matter. In Part IX, this possibility, as we have seen, is broached by Cleanthes, who dismantles Clarke’s argument against it, buttressed by Philo’s mathematical example—though with his distancing remark about those with “metaphysical heads”. But the StratonicSpinozistic flavor of Philo’s conclusion (emphasized in the above passage) is unmistakable. And given that Philo will soon be talking about an eternal progressive universe—one in which there is an infinite “horizontal” causal chain—here he could only be talking about what Spinoza called “immanent” causation, which is related to what some commentators call the “vertical” causation of infinite modes leading “up” ultimately to Substance (see, e.g., Nadler 2006, 79–80, 88–89, 100–101). We can thus take Philo’s claim to be this: The most parsimonious solution to this causal regress problem is the immanentist solution that locates the fundamental ordering principle in the world itself and not in a transcendent deity (where, barring the acceptance of unparsimonious arbitrariness, the same question would simply recur, threatening regress). But this immanentist solution suggests precisely a Stratonic-Spinozistic cosmology: Nature is the Necessary Being, and its “horizontal” causal progression, cyclic or not, is without beginning or end. Philo goes on (in IV.12) to claim that everyone in this debate, at the end of the day, must postulate ordering principles that are comparable to Peripatetic “faculties” or the “occult qualities” of the much-maligned “Schoolmen”. He says: … [W]hen it is asked, what cause produces order in the ideas of the Supreme Being; can any other reason be assigned by you, Anthropomorphites, than that it is a rational faculty, and that such is the nature of the Deity? But why a similar answer will not be equally satisfactory in accounting for the order of the world, without having recourse to any such intelligent creator as you insist on, may be difficult to determine. It is only to say, that such is the nature of material objects, and that they are all originally possessed of a faculty of order and proportion. These are only more learned and elaborate ways of confessing our ignorance … . (DNR IV.12, p. 39) Recall, now, our discussion of “plastic natures” and Bayle’s objection that Cudworth’s suspiciously Schoolman-smelling posits, designed to get between

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Occasionalism and mechanism, play into the hands of the atheist, since they seem to entail the metaphysical contingency of the quod nescis principle. And recall, further, the Baylean-Stratonic point that the very Mind of God, if not conceived of in the radical Cartesian fashion, must be under constraints it does not create—even if they are just the constraints grounded in “His” own necessary nature. Cleanthes’ response here is pathetic and intellectually hypocritical. It is pathetic because, in a manner reminiscent of the more historically recent “Intelligent Design” theorists,96 he simply brushes aside the obvious regress issue that design theory raises—the very issue Philo has been driving home—apparently not realizing that that matter cannot be dissociated from assessment of the inductive strength of the design argument, insofar as parsimony considerations apply. “You ask me, what is the cause of this cause?”, Cleanthes asks, “I know not; I care not; that concerns me not. I have found a deity; and here I stop my enquiry. Let those go farther, who are wiser or more enterprising” (DNR IV.13, p. 40). And this response is intellectually hypocritical, since Cleanthes had just denounced as “stupidity” (in DNR III.9, p. 32) the tendency of “ignorant savage[s] and barbarian[s]” to rest satisfied with tracing biological lineages only a few generations back without driving the question to the issue of ultimate origins.97 Philo’s riposte is spot on: It is evidently either regressive or purely arbitrary to explain a particular effect (the order of this world) in terms of a particular cause (the order of the Designer’s mind) that itself seems to require (from both a priori and a posteriori points of view) some further explanation of the very same type. With that, the a priori part of the Baylean-Stratonic retorsion is complete: “An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former” (DNR IV.14, p. 40). Part V is devoted to illustrating some further inconveniences of Cleanthes’s anthropomorphism. Even were the Design Argument completely compelling, it does not allow us to conclude that that the designer is infinite, omniscient or omnipotent, incorporeal, immortal, ungenerated, or unique (DNR V.5–11, pp. 41–44). Philo makes three important foreshadowing remarks. First: “An intelligent being of such vast power and capacity as is necessary to produce the universe, or, to speak in the language of ancient philosophy, so prodigious an animal, exceeds all analogy, and even comprehension” (DNR V.9, p. 44; emphasis added). This remark recapitulates the anti-anthropomorphism of Demea and Philo and indicates where Philo is about to go: the World Soul hypothesis and hylozoic and cosmoplastic atheisms. Second: “… [One] who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance” (DNR V.12, p. 45). This foreshadows Philo’s “irenic” conclusion in Part XII; we have seen already that an unexplained immanent principle grounding the “order and connection” of a

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 345 system ideas (in the putative designer’s mind) is (a priori) completely on a par with an unexplained immanent principle grounding the “order and connection” of a material world, in terms of explanatory status and conceptual scrutability or intelligibility. In this sense, any ordering principle is, quite trivially, “something like design” and something no atheist need have any qualms about accepting (cf. Mori 2018b), even on Spinoza’s “Dog and Dogstar” model. Third: “From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these [strange suppositions, e.g., that the designer is an infant, senile, dependent, dead] have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all” (DNR V.12, p. 45). This has a certain bearing on the issue of the proper role of religion and its typology, which will come up in Part XII, and the issue of whether atheism is actually preferable to a “vulgar” and absurd set of religious beliefs. The connection to Spinoza here is, once again, mediated through Bayle, who, mentioining Spinoza, along with Epicurus and Vanini, as examples of a virtuous atheists, had argued at length not only that a republic of atheists could subsist without descending into complete moral chaos but also that vulgar religion was worse than no religion at all (Bayle 2000/1683, 221–228 (§§178–182); cf. Bayle 1991/1697, 294–295).98 We’ll return to this shortly. 15.3.2 Parts VI–IX

In Part VI, Philo shifts to a sequence (extending through Part VIII) in which he considers other, non-design cosmological possibilities—specifically, and to use Cudworth’s terms, pseudo-Stoic (World Soul) or cosmoplastic atheism, hylozoic atheism, and Democritic atheism (Epicureanism). It is notable that each one, arguably including even the version of Epicureanism depicted by Philo, has a connection to Spinozism (see below). The connection of pseudo-Stoic (or cosmoplastic) and hylozoic atheisms to Spinozism has been amply detailed above. ButPhilo drops certain lines that make the connections indisputable and that indicate that he is, in effect, combining Bayle’s version of Stratonism with Cudworth’s. More generally, there is a way of reading Hume’s formulation of Stratonism in the DNR so that it is a generic alternative to theism. This is so because every type of atheism he considers, even Epicureanism, supposes that (1) the universe is the Uncreated or Necessary Being or “First Cause” and that (2) the universe is governed by inviolable laws that constitute its nature or essence (in principle even in the sort of Epicurean case in which the universe allows for random fluctuations at the atomic level, though this does not seem to be on Philo’s menu). The forms of atheismPhilo considers are, roughly, those Cudworth outlined with the arguable addition of a Spinozism qua “Metaphysical Atheism” in Part IX, where, again, I take that label to refer to the a priori or quasi-mathematical manner of proceeding common to Clarke, Spinoza, and Raphson. Since we have already discussed that at some length, Part IX will not occupy us much in the section. Simply recall that Philo, in bolstering Cleanthes case against Clarke’s modalepistemic double-dealing, does not object to the necessitarianism of Spinoza’s “Metaphysical Atheism”, only to the a priori way of proceeding; his

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remarks about the “danger” of considering necessity in this context I take to be ironic (DNR IX.10, p. 66), especially since Philo has already expressed his epistemic preference for necessitarianism (DNR VI.12, p. 50). In Parts VI and VII, Philo floats and defends a version of the World Soul hypothesis. The universe, Philo says, … bears a great resemblance to an animal or organised body, and seems actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of matter in it produces no disorder: a continual waste in every part is incessantly repaired: the closest sympathy is perceived throughout the entire system: and each part or member, in performing its proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the whole. The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal; and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it. (DNR VI.3, pp. 46–47; emphasis added) There are many other advantages, too, in … [this] theory, which recommended it to the ancient theologians. Nothing more repugnant to all their notions, because nothing more repugnant to common experience, than mind without body; a mere spiritual substance, which fell not under their senses nor comprehension, and of which they had not observed one single instance throughout all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they felt both: an order, arrangement, organisation, or internal machinery, in both, they likewise knew, after the same manner: and it could not but seem reasonable to transfer this experience to the universe; and to suppose the divine mind and body to be also coeval, and to have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in them, and inseparable from them. (DNR VI.5, p. 47; emphasis added) You [Cleanthes] are too much superior, surely, to systematical prejudices, to find any more difficulty in supposing an animal body to be, originally, of itself, or from unknown causes, possessed of order and organisation, than in supposing a similar order to belong to mind. But the vulgar prejudice, that body and mind ought always to accompany each other, ought not, one should think, to be entirely neglected; since it is founded on vulgar experience, the only guide which you profess to follow in all these theological inquiries. (DNR VI.6, pp. 47–48; some emphases added) Note that this hylozoic or cosmoplastic cosmology (whichever it is intended to be) involves the assertion that mind and body are co-eternal and co-eval; the resemblance to Spinozistic cosmology, with its two known attributes (thought and extension) and Spinoza’s rejection of the intelligibility of the notion of a pure, disembodied spirit, is evident. Note that Philo is already suggesting that matter may have an inherent principle of “life and motion”. As noted, Clarke had argued that something like this must be postulated for the intelligibility of the Spinozistic

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 347 system; and Toland, cited by Clarke on this matter, took himself to be correcting and “perfecting” Spinozism by postulating a principle of motion inherent in matter—thus obviating the Cartesian and Newtonian problem of the origination of motion in matter, solved by Cartesians and Newtonians alike by simply postulating that God has the mysterious power to move matter (be it only initially or constantly or as needed). Note finally that Philo suggests, on a plausible reading of these passages (see LeGrant, this volume), that the “order and arrangement naturally inherent in” mind and body does not stem from two independent ultimate principles but from the common, inscrutable essence of both. Cleanthes responds by noting that the world seems to resemble a vegetable more than an animal (which is an echo of a claim that Cudworth made about pseudo-Stoic, cosmoplastic cosmology, and which seems to make little difference to Philo) and then by arguing against an implication of the theory: the eternity of the world. Cleanthes argument against the eternity of the world, drawn from the late arrival of cherry trees to Europe from Asia, need not detain us (DNR VI.10, p. 49). Philo’s response, however, contains both an empirical defense of eternity and dynamicity of the world99 and his most explicit endorsement of a naturalistic necessitarian, Stratonic-Spinozistic cosmology in the DNR: Strong and almost incontestable proofs100 may be traced over the whole earth, that every part of this globe has continued for many ages entirely covered with water. And though order were supposed inseparable from matter, and inherent in it; yet may matter be susceptible of many and great revolutions, through the endless periods of eternal duration. The incessant changes, to which every part of it is subject, seem to intimate some such general transformations; though, at the same time, it is observable, that all the changes and corruptions of which we have ever had experience, are but passages from one state of order to another; nor can matter ever rest in total deformity and confusion. What we see in the parts, we may infer in the whole; at least, that is the method of reasoning on which you rest your whole theory. And were I obliged to defend any particular system of this nature, which I never willingly should do, I esteem none more plausible than that which ascribes an eternal inherent principle of order to the world, though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations. This at once solves all difficulties; and if the solution, by being so general, is not entirely complete and satisfactory, it is at least a theory that we must sooner or later have recourse to, whatever system we embrace. How could things have been as they are, were there not an original inherent principle of order somewhere, in thought or in matter? And it is very indifferent to which of these we give the preference. Chance has no place, on any hypothesis, sceptical or religious. Everything is surely governed by steady, inviolable laws. And were the inmost essence of things laid open to us, we should then discover a scene, of which, at present, we can have no idea. Instead of admiring the order of natural beings, we should clearly see that it was absolutely impossible for them, in the smallest article, ever to admit of any other disposition. (DNR, VI.12, p. 50; emphasis added)101

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Qua official skeptic, Philo is not going to claim that he knows some version of Stratonic-Spinozistic necessitarianism to be true. But here he quite clearly says that, if he had to wager, he would bet on that sort of cosmology. Note finally that the (qualified) endorsement of necessitarianism expressed in the last sentences of the paragraph should be kept in mind when reading Philo’s presentation of the mathematical example he discusses in Part IX. In Part VII, Philo defends more particularly the notions of “vegetation” or “generation” as possible fundamental ordering-originating principles. Perhaps this universe came from a parent universe via a “spermatic” principle (as Cudworth might have put it). Importantly, these ordering principles (intelligence, vegetation, generation) are all equally inscrutable when it comes to their internal constitution. They are thus all, a priori, on a par when it comes to hypothesizing that one or the other is fundamental. And just as Philo had earlier said that the most Cleanthes could claim, from the Design Argument, is that the world was produced by “something like design”, here he claims that it could have arisen from something “similar or analogous to generation or vegetation” (DNR VII.3; emphasis added). Recall further that Philo had just argued that all such fundamental principles are epistemically and conceptually on a par with the “faculties” and “occult qualities” of Scholastic metaphysics (DNR IV.12, p. 39).102 In Part VII, he emphasizes that: … reason, in its internal fabric and structure, is really as little known to us as instinct or vegetation; and, perhaps, even that vague, indeterminate word, Nature, to which the vulgar refer every thing, is not at the bottom more inexplicable. The effects of these principles are all known to us from experience; but the principles themselves, and their manner of operation, are totally unknown; nor is it less intelligible, or less conformable to experience, to say, that the world arose by vegetation, from a seed shed by another world, than to say that it arose from a divine reason or contrivance … . (DNR VII.11, p. 54; emphasis added) In Philo’s “irenic” conclusion in Part XII, this point will be fully articulated and deployed: all fundamental ordering principles are trivially similar and equally opaque to further conceptual articulation. Note the not completely unsympathetic reference to “Nature” here. It was not only the vulgar who referred everything to it! Strato and Spinoza did too! As noted, perhaps in a moment of lapse, Demea floats a version of the quod nescis intuition: “… [H]ow can order spring from anything which perceives not that order which is bestows?” (DNR, VII.12, p. 55). Philo notes that absent an a priori proof that order must be “… inseparably attached to thought” and can “never, of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter”, the quod nescis principle, which would turn the Design Argument into a deductive proof, is simply question begging. Again, all putative fundamental ordering principles are a priori on a par. A priori theoretical parity aside, Philo is not averse to pointing to a

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 349 posteriori considerations to bolster the case in favor of principles other than design, however evidentially uncertain those considerations may be; after all, that is the game he is playing with Cleanthes (DNR II.11, p. 2). He has already mentioned the co-presence of mind and body as telling empirically against the notion of a completely disembodied “designer” spirit. Here, he points out both many instances of apparent order-bestowal in violation of the quod nescis principle (e.g., reproduction among plants and animals, birds building nests) and that generation has an empirical advantage over intelligence, since we only see the latter come from the former, never the reverse (DNR VII, 13–14, pp. 55–56).103 The connection here to Bayle’s criticism of Cudworth’s “plastic natures” doctrine should be clear. The doctrine is a threat precisely because it draws the quod nescis principle into doubt; moreover, absent a radical Cartesian conception of God, the traditional theist must admit that the principle cannot hold with respect to God’s own nature. One final matter in connection to Part VII: The picture Philo paints in Parts VI and VII is of a universe that is like an organism in the sense that its body and co-eval mind involve a complex process of homeostasis maintenance even while it undergoes constant change and development. Moreover, this process of change is governed by inviolable laws in terms of which the whole evolution of the cosmos could be explained without remainder—we are simply unable to know and understand enough to do so. The observable universe may have come from a parent universe, and its parent from yet another parent, and so on ad infinitum. What would then properly be called the First Cause or Necessary Being is only the entire infinite, eternal procession of universes and these laws—whether its progression is literally cyclic, as Philo will suggest in Part VIII’s revamping of the Old Epicurean Hypotheses, or infinite and open-ended, as in the Spinozistic cosmology. Importantly, there is an acceptance here of an infinite “horizontal” causal chain, with the “vertical” causal necessity immanent in the (hidden) nature of the eternal chain itself—this latter is what grounds the metaphysical necessity of the horizontal chain and is that in virtue of which the laws of nature hold; together they entail both “horizontal” causal (or logico-causal) determinism and “vertical” logical necessitarianism. It should be evident that this is a Spinozistic picture, and it should be borne in mind when Cleanthes, without Philo’s objection, defends the conceptual possibility of an infinite horizontal causal chain Part IX. In Part VIII, Philo floats a modified version of the “Old Epicurean Hypothesis”. One might think “What could be less Stratonic-Spinozistic than the Epicurean hypothesis?”,104 since it classically involves both atomism, which Spinoza rejected, and radical contingency in the form of the clinamen doctrine, as well as a primordial state of chaos out of which order emerges. Spinoza was, of course, sometimes associated with Epicureanism, but this was not because of the details of his metaphysics. It was, rather, when not simply as an insult, primarily because of his denial of teleology.105 It would thus be too much to suggest that Part VIII is another, more or less direct nod to Spinoza. However, it is possible that Part VIII contains a nod to John Toland,106 parts of whose Letters to Serena Toland seems to have conceived of

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as an amelioration of Spinozism, particularly on the question of motion, and which, again, Clarke mentions explicitly in the Demonstration. Like Toland, Philo highlights the explanatory power, in a materialist combinatorial framework, a combinatorial framework that is at least structurally similar to the Epicurean one in certain respects,107 of the postulate that matter simply has an inherent motile quality. Clarke (and others, including Toland himself) regarded Spinoza’s account of motion as unsatisfactory or at best too inchoate to be useful (see Leask 2012; Mori 2021, 199ff.). Instead of imagining a completed infinite chain of prior motions as fully explaining present motions, the idea is to posit a kind of inherent and fundamental motility to matter as such. This is, of course, no more and no less problematic than any other such fundamental explanatory posit (intelligence, spermatic nature, etc.), conforms to many empirical observations, and can be developed into a Lucretian account of apparent bioteleology and other “anthropic” and “cosmo-homeostatic” matters (see esp. Reiss, this volume).108 Two further matters. First, this account, even if one were to allow a certain indeterminism in the fundamental motile tendency of atoms and regard atomic “collisions” as fortuitous (in the sense of “blind and unguided”, DNR VIII.7, p. 60), is fully deterministic at the “macro-scale” and really at every scale above that of the atom itself—that is, at the scale of the laws governing atomic, molecular (and so on up the scale) connections and interactions. It is for good reason that Hobbes and other Early Modern atomists (and quasi-atomists) were regarded as necessitarians and hard determinists, whatever they might have thought about the exact nature of atomic motility (see, e.g., Sarasohn 1985). Second, and finally, the account of natural modality that arises from the picture Philo paints, has a certain affinity with Spinoza’s Cartesian-Diodoran modal picture, as noted. In fact, there is an obvious similarity between the ancient atomist modal theory and the Cartesian-Spinozist model, in spite of differences in the underlying ontology.109 All real possibilities are realized at some time, on this picture. And when they are realized, on the Cartesian-Spinozist model, it is a matter of necessity—in the sense of the horizontal causal chain. The difference, of course, is that on Philo’s model, there is only a finite (but vast) number of possibilities; whereas on Spinoza’s (and Toland’s) it is an infinite number.110 As noted, we leave Part IX out of further account here, since we have discussed it at length above. 15.3.3 Parts X–XI

We’ve already seen that Philo relies upon the idea that the “business” of the universe is conducted by general laws (instead of particular volitions), a view common to Malebranche, Spinoza, and Bayle’s Strato, to rule out Manicheanism as the best hypothesis about the moral nature of the First Cause(s) in Part XI. The stage is set for this in Part X, with its enumeration of the evils, natural and moral, psychological and social, that humans and other animals must face. But in Part X, Philo also begins to bring the anti-antrhopomorphism theme back to

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 351 forefront, now focusing on the “moral” attributes of the Necessary Being. “… [I]s it possible,” Philo asks Cleanthes after his and Demea’s enumerations of horrors and inconveniences, “… that after all these reflections, and infinitely more, which might be suggested, you can still persevere in your anthropomorphism, and assert the moral attributes of the deity, his justice, benevolence, mercy, and rectitude, to be of the same nature with these virtues in human creatures?” (DNR X.24, p. 73). And a bit later, after enumerating a few more sources of misery and noting nature’s frugality and curious algedonic imbalances, Philo says, “How then does the divine benevolence display itself, in the sense of you anthropomorphites? None but we mystics, as you were pleased to call us, can account for this strange mixture of phenomena, by deriving it from attributes, infinitely perfect, but incomprehensible” (DNR X.27, p. 74; emphasis added). It is in Part XI, that Philo drives the anti-anthropomorphic theme, vis-à-vis the Problem of Evil, all the way home and ties it back to the Stratonic-Spinizostic views articulated earlier (cf. Paganini 2023, 571–572). Cleanthes begins the section by arguing that the problem stems from the traditional theological idea that the Necessary Being is “infinite”, and he argues that a designer, vastly powerful but limited, is less objectionable and mysterious. “… [B]enevolence, regulated by wisdom,” he says, “and limited by necessity, may produce just such a world as the present” (DNR XI.1, p. 78). It is notable that this conception of the deity is, arguably, not really so different from the Leibnizian one on which God is limited by metaphysical and logical necessities, which, as we’ve seen, Bayle found still subject to the “Stratonic Slide”, something Leibniz was not particularly perturbed by.111 Philo points out that while this conception of the deity may make Cleanthes’ theism consistent with the existence of apparently gratuitous evil, as well as apparently bad design (cf. note 71), and neglected but apparently easy ameliorations to the environment or supplements to the equipment of animals, etc. (modulo the postulation of necessities and constraints that remain completely opaque to us), one cannot reasonably infer this sort of theism from the data available to us (DNR XI.4, p. 80). And, of course, naturalism is more parsimonious on this score. After his recitation of the four circumstances upon which most of the evils that afflict humans and animals depend (the conducting of the world by general laws among them), Philo, prefiguring Schopenhauer, declares: Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children! (DNR XI.13, p. 86; emphasis added)

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“Blind Nature impregnated with a great vivifying principle”—sounds like hylozoic atheism indeed! In the next paragraph, after arguing against the Manichean hypothesis on the basis of the “uniformity and agreement of the parts of the universe” (i.e., the fact that it is regulated by general laws), Philo says, “The true conclusion is, that the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles; and has no more regard to good above ill, than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy” (DNR XI.14, p. 86; emphasis added). This passage, which follows Philo’s naturalistic undermining of the cosmologico-moral significance of algedonic oppositions (a significance the Manichean takes for granted) by classing them with all other oppositions in nature, should be compared with these passages, from the Appendix to Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics: After men persuaded themselves that everything which happens, happens on their account, they had to judge that what is most important in each thing is what is most useful to them, and to rate as most excellent all those things by which they were most pleased. Hence, they had to form these notions, by which they explained natural things: good, evil, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness. … . … [T]he ignorant consider them [i.e., notions like those listed] the chief attributes of things, because … they believe all things have been made for their sake, and call the nature of a thing good or evil, sound or rotten and corrupt, as they are affected by it. … Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony. … . … . [A]ll the arguments in which people try to use such notions against us can easily be warded off. For many are accustomed to arguing in this way: if all things have followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature, why are there so many imperfections in Nature? Why are things corrupt to the point where they stink? So ugly that they produce nausea? Why is there confusion, evil, sin? … [T]hose who argue in this way are easily answered. For the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are of use to, or are incompatible with, human nature. (Ethics, Iap; Spinoza 1985, 444–446) It is almost certainly the case that Bayle’s Dictionnaire articles on “Manicheanism” and the “Paulicians” (among other Bayle texts, see, e.g., Bahr 1999, 32–37 and Paganini 2013, and esp. 2023, ch. XII) were in Hume’s mind when he was writing this section of the DNR; and this is quite consonant with

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 353 the fact that the conclusion Philo arrives at is a thoroughly Stratonic-Spinozistic one (cf. Klever 2010b, 42–43); indeed, it is what we should expect.112 Good and evil, as we commonly understand them, are anthropomorphic evaluative notions. And while pleasure and pain, and the other oppositions, do correspond to real differences in Nature, our evaluative-normative relation to them stems entirely from the particular way “blind Nature” has (unintentionally) built us. Nature itself literally does not care one bit about what is convenient or inconvenient, pleasurable or painful, Good or Evil, or rational or irrational from our point of view.113 Note that Spinoza also mentions “sin” in the passages above—human moral evil. Philo, after arguing that mixed phenomena modulo general laws make the hypothesis of moral indifference on the part of the First Cause the most probable, continues: What I have said concerning natural evil will apply to moral, with little or no variation; and we have no more reason to infer, that the rectitude of the Supreme Being resembles human rectitude, than that his benevolence resembles the human. Nay, it will be thought, that we have still greater cause to exclude from him moral sentiments, such as we feel them; since moral evil, in the opinion of many, is much more predominant above moral good than natural evil above natural good. But even though this should not be allowed, and though the virtue which is in mankind should be acknowledged much superior to the vice, yet so long as there is any vice at all in the universe, it will very much puzzle you Anthropomorphites, how to account for it. You must assign a cause for it, without having recourse to the first cause. But as every effect must have a cause, and that cause another, you must either carry on the progression in infinitum, or rest on that original principle, who is the ultimate cause of all things … (DNR XI.16–17, p. 87; emphasis added) This is the statement that makes Demea realize that Philo is “… a more dangerous enemy than Cleanthes”, “who would measure everything by human rule and standard” and that Philo’s alliance with Demea, which aimed at proving “the incomprehensible nature of the divine being”, has, in fact, served as a platform for Philo to run “into all the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels” (DNR XI.18, p. 87), Spinoza undoubtedly among them. Again, Demea, like Malebranche, has remained on the edge of the precipice; Philo has jumped right over. 15.3.4 Part XII: True Religion and Philo’s Ironic Irenic Conclusion

In a recent paper, Paul Russell (2021), quite rightly, locates Philo’s discussion of “true religion” and “vulgar superstition” in the Spinozistic context.114 As he says, “When we turn to Hume’s various arguments [in the DNR] and the way in which

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he presents the issue of ‘true religion’, the essential features of Spinoza’s account all appear” (Russell 2021, 353). It is indeed astonishing that, prior to Russell, with few scarcely noticed exceptions (e.g., Reich 1998 (see note 26), Bijlsma 2015b, ch. 4, and Graham 2014, 7–9; cf. Nong 2019, 32–33), this connection has not generally been made in the voluminous and interminably contentious literature on Hume’s conception of “true religion”.115 Spinoza, after all, talks about universal or true religion (vera religio) throughout the Tractatus, was a penetrating diagnostician and implacable opponent of superstition, and develops a version of what we could quite rightly call “philosophical religion” in the Ethics.116 Even if Hume never read the Ethics, he could not have failed to know about these facts and more likely had a reasonable understanding of them.117 As noted, even Popkin (1979, 70) agreed that we can’t fully account for the historical possibility of the Natural History of Religion without making reference to the Tractatus Theologico-Politcus (cf. Beauchamp in Hume 2007/1757, 224–225). (Likewise, I am arguing that we can’t fully understand the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion without appreciating the specter of Spinoza prevailing in the Eighteenth Century.) Russell emphasizes the view that on Spinoza’s conception, “true religion” is fundamentally (and well-nigh exclusively) ethical in content. It consists, at the end of the day, in just the normative proposition that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves—do unto others as we would have them do unto us.118 All of the traditional and apparently metaphysically loaded trappings of religion (prophecy, revelation, theological doctrines, rituals, etc.) are just means whereby this proposition can be communicated to the common person and inculcated, means that rely on the imagination and are necessary given that most people are more effectively moved by imagination than by reason. Spinoza is optimistic that this sort of religion, and not superstition and “enthusiasm” or fanaticism, can eventually gain the upper hand in the public sphere and that, in so far as it does, this will be socially beneficial (Russell 2021, 344–347). Russell argues that Hume is much more pessimistic than Spinoza on this score (ibid., 355). At the same time, he argues, Hume does not agree with Baron d’Holbach’s militantly anti-religious view, reminiscent (I add) of Bolshevik “Bezbozhniki”, the League of the Militant Godless (see, e.g., Perlis 1998) and, in rhetoric and attitude, to our own “New Atheists” (esp. Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens; see ibid., 370–377 on this connection). D’Holbach’s view is, in short, that we ought to try to eradicate religious belief in all its forms (though d’Holbach did not see how this could be done within his own temporal horizon—perhaps prospects are only slightly better now). Where d’Holbach sees one homogenous mass of irrational and socially dangerous epistemic and moral beliefs and practices, Hume sees a great deal more variation and polyvalence. In brief, though Hume may agree that a world without religion would be desirable, he did not think that eventuality was particularly likely, nor did he think that it was particularly likely that benign or even beneficent forms of religiosity, like the purely moral component of Spinoza’s “true religion”, which he, unlike the Baron, could recognize, would gain ascendency and replace superstition and enthusiasm (ibid., 357–363).

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 355 This makes sense, of course, given Hume’s theory of the psycho-social genesis of religiosity in the Natural History of Religion. If religion is rooted in fear of the unknown and uncertain, on the one hand, and exultation, power-affirmation and manipulation, on the other, all mediated through the anthropomorphic causal imagination and driven by human passions, it is indeed hard to imagine it either going away or being reduced to a de-dogmatized ethical core. One might well wonder, indeed, how Spinoza could have been more confident, given the similarity between his own account of the psychological origins of superstition and Hume’s;119 perhaps it was his (arguably) un-Humean estimation of the motivational powers of reason, on the one hand, and, on the other, a somewhat higher estimation of the powers of a socio-religious “imaginary” (purified of sectarianism, superstition, and fanaticism and properly guided by people of reason) to help curb our fears, jealousies, and other unwholesome passions closely associated with vulgar religion. Philo’s “wiser policy”—that the state should tolerate multiple religious sects and publicly exhibit a “philosophical indifference to all of them” (DNR XII.21, p. 98)—does seem more pessimistic. While I agree with the basic thrust of Russell’s assessment, I want to highlight an aspect of Spinoza’s concept of “true religion” that Russell de-emphasizes. In fact, the Tractatus first emphasizes an epistemic component of “true religion” that soon gives way to the moral component; and certain comments that Philo makes, in addition to his claim that our conception of the First Cause, if adequate, cannot provide a basis for morality, indicate that that is what “true religion” or religion of the “philosophical and rational kind” (DNR XII.13, p. 95) amounts to for him. In other words, I believe that Philo has a conception of “true religion” that is much more in line with the valorization of the amor Dei intellectualis found in the Ethics than with the purely ethical and (presumably) widely accessible moral core emphasized in the Tractatus. It remains true, of course, that Hume (and Philo) would agree that it is highly unlikely that this sort of religion will ever gain popular ascendency—but Spinoza did not think so either (see, e.g., Ethics Vp41sch; Spinoza 1985, 615–616).120 Moreover, Hume’s Philo (and Hume himself for that matter) would indeed probably agree with Adam Smith and Spinoza that “… true religion [whether arrived at philosophically and intellectually or only via the imagination, as in the best of popular cases] shows itself in moral conduct”, as Gordon Graham (2014, 9) asserts, but consider the relation indirect (see below). Suffice it to say that the allusions to Bayle’s view (echoed by Philo at DNR XII.11, p. 95; see note 98) that so many forms of popular religion are morally or socially worse than no religion at all make one suspect that Russell is right in distancing Hume from Spinoza on this particular score (cf. Mazza 2018). At the very beginning of Part XII, Cleanthes tells Philo that his abhorrence of “vulgar superstition” carries him to “strange lengths”. Philo replies that he is not worried that his intentions will be mistaken (i.e., as being ultimately impious) and says: You, in particular, Cleanthes, with whom I live in unreserved intimacy; you are sensible, that, notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my

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love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. (DNR XII.2, p. 89; emphasis added) This context is one of the main ones where readers of the DNR come away with the impression that Hume (via Philo) is expressing sympathy for the Design Argument and for some form of theism (or deism) based on that argument. In one sense, I think this is true, but it is a “deism” so attenuated as to be compatible with Spinozism (to which point we return momentarily). Note that the italicized words foreshadow what Philo will say later in Part XII about the central role of knowledge in the proper “worship” of the Necessary Being. Immediately after the just-quoted passage Philo says, “A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it” (DNR XII.2, p. 8; emphasis added). I take this passage to mean two things: First, the more careless and stupid a person is, the more prone they are to see designs, intentions, and purposes, understood on the model of themselves as desiring, intentional beings, everywhere in the operations of nature. Second, Philo concedes that the Design Argument does have a strong psychological pull that even the most stubborn atheist, who has become “hardened” in some non-teleological system of thought, given its highly counterintuitive nature, can still sometimes feel. This is what we would expect if the intuitions undergirding the argument have deep psychological roots while alternative hypotheses or “systems” force us to think in a way that is contrary to them.121 This is all quite reminiscent of Spinoza’s Appendix to Part I of the Ethics and of Hume’s Natural History of Religion.122 Such systems, like the Epicurean one or the Stratonic-Spinozistic one, seem absurd from the point of view of common sense—but this is the very same common sense that slides all too frequently into vulgar superstition and wonders about the meaning of every falling stone (see Spinoza 1985, 443) or the flight of every raven or path of every black cat, the same common sense that leads to the conclusion that “… nature and the Gods are as made as men” (ibid., 441). A similar irony occurs right after Philo recounts the Galenic evidence for the design of the human body. Philo says, Now according to all rules of just reasoning, every fact must pass for undisputed, when it is supported by all the arguments, which its nature admits of; even though these arguments be not, in themselves, very numerous or forcible: How much more, in the present case, where no human imagination can compute their number, and no understanding estimate their cogency? (DNR XII.4, p. 91; emphasis added) I submit that Philo’s support for the Design Argument is merely apparent in this passage; there is no genuine “reversal” and no real inconsistency.123 Of course, one can read “no human imagination can compute their number” as

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 357 meaning that there is such a vast number of specific design arguments, one for each body part, for each animal, etc. But it can also mean that we cannot really be sure, for any such specific argument, if we have a case of intention and design in front of us or not, as opposed to something that could be explained in an ultimately non-teleological, Epicurean way (as sketched in DNR VIII; cf. Reiss, this volume). And “where … no understanding [can] estimate their cogency” makes this ironic interpretation even clearer: we can’t say how cogent these arguments are, since we cannot estimate all the relevant probabilities involved; or, if ‘estimate’ is being used in one possible sense (sense 1b in the OED, still current at least as late as 1751), it could mean “no understanding can ascribe value to or esteem their cogency”—that is, they are not actually cogent arguments. The number of these arguments does not matter if the strength of each one is completely inestimable. Philo then launches into the “verbal dispute” thesis according to which atheists and theists are often just talking past one another. It is important to recall that here Philo (Hume) takes it for granted that all parties involved would accept that there is some Necessary Being or (for Cleanthes, contingent but) fundamental ordering principle in the cosmos—a “First Cause”. The question then becomes just how much that First Cause or Necessary Being resembles a human mind. The atheist agrees there is some remote analogy; the theist who has abandoned crass anthropomorphism agrees that there is a vast difference. “Will you quarrel, Gentlemen,” Philo asks, “about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination?”124 He continues: If you should be so obstinate, I should not be surprised to find you insensibly change sides; while the theist on the one hand exaggerates the dissimilarity between the supreme being and frail, imperfect, variable, fleeting, and mortal creatures; and the atheist on the other magnifies the analogy among all the operations of nature, in every period, every situation, and every position. Consider then, where the real point of controversy lies, and if you cannot lay aside your disputes, endeavour, at least, to cure yourselves of your animosity. (DNR XII.7, pp. 93–94; emphasis added) Note well that Philo does not seem to be talking here about Cleanthes quasianthropomorphic theism that denies omnipotence and infinitude to the Designer (DNR XI.1, p. 78). Philo is talking about the very kind of consciously antianthropomorphic theism that Demea attempted to defend—the kind expressed by the Malebranche passage he cited. I need not now remind the reader that Malebranche was quite frequently accused of having “insensibly change[d] sides”, of having ended up in Spinozism, specifically. And Spinoza’s magnification of “the analogy among all the operations of nature” is enshrined in one of his key mantras: “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (Ethics, IIP7; Spinoza 1985, 451). And I need not remind the reader that the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics is about “God”. The conciliatory and

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irenic rhetoric of this passage is belied by an analysis of what it actually asserts. It is not the sort of thing that would make Cleanthes or the traditional theist very happy. It says, on my reading, that properly anti-anthropomorphic theism and Stratonism-Spinozism are really terminological variants of one another. That the fundamental principle of order is remotely and trivially analogous to mind or design should give the traditional theist no comfort, for it is also remotely analogous to the processes operative in the rotting of a turnip (DNR XII.7, p. 93). In the very next paragraph, Philo makes again the Spinozistic move he (and Demea in DNR III.11–13, pp. 33–34) had essentially made before (in DNR II.3, pp. 18–19): he redefines ‘perfection’ and ‘rectitude’ in a way that evacuates from the words their anthropomorphic content: And here I must also acknowledge, Cleanthes, that, as the works of nature have a much greater analogy to the effects of our art and contrivance, than to those of our benevolence and justice; we have reason to infer that the natural attributes of the deity have a greater resemblance to those of man, than his moral have to human virtues. But what is the consequence? Nothing but this, that the moral qualities of man are more defective in their kind than his natural abilities. For as the supreme being is allowed to be absolutely and entirely perfect, whatever differs most from him departs the farthest from the supreme standard of rectitude and perfection. (DNR XII.8, p. 94; latter emphasis added) Recall that for Spinoza, our usage of common evaluative notions (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’) is tied to our naïve anthropocentric and teleological conception of the world. God needs nothing, plans nothing, lacks nothing, does not have purposes or desires—all of which would suggest an imperfection or incompleteness.125 The supreme standard of rectitude or perfection is just such completeness, aseity, impassability, and self-possession; clearly, given the theonaturalistic things Philo has said, it is the Spinozistic variation of this Stoic, Medieval, and Cartesian idea that he is here floating.126 Becoming more like this God or letting the eternal part of one’s mind be in control, so to speak, is what true beatitude consists in and what some humans—those of a more philosophical bent anyway—will aspire to (no doubt as outlined in Part V of the Ethics; see esp. Vp40cor and Vp42sch; Spinoza 1985, 615, 616–617). It is at this point that Philo asserts his “veneration for true religion” and his “abhorrence of vulgar superstition” (DNR XII.9, p. 94). Cleanthes says that any religion, no matter how vulgar and corrupted, is better than no religion at all (XII.10, p. 94). And Philo, siding with Bayle on the question (see note 98), will go on at some length (XII.11–31, pp. 95–101) about the deleterious effects of vulgar religion and argue that those tendencies predominate over those engendered by what Spinoza calls “true religion” in the Tractatus. But, again, what does Philo mean by “true religion”? Note that I equate his “true religion” with his “philosophical and rational kind” of religion (DNR XII.13, p. 95) and, like Russell, would distinguish it from Cleanthes’ “genuine theism” (DNR XII.24,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 359 p. 99), since the latter (as Russell (and I) would understand it) is far even from any “attenuated deism” let alone Stratonism-Spinozism.127 This means that the sense in which the First Cause or principle can be said, according to Philo, to be like an intelligence does not entail that it literally has an anthropomorphic mind, or is, specifically, a personal God who literally designs and creates things or executes plans. The latter is entailed by “genuine theism”; it is not entailed by “true religion” in Spinoza’s sense and, I submit, Philo’s (cf. Boss 1985, vol. 2, 886; Klever 2010b, 94–97). Further, I maintain that Philo has much more in mind the gnoseological component of Spinoza’s “true religion”, which is notable in the first parts of the Tractatus and fully developed Part V of the Ethics.128 In Chapter 4 of the Tractatus, entitled “On Divine Law”, Spinoza says: Since love of God is the highest felicity and happiness of man, his final end and the aim of all his actions, it follows that he alone observes the divine law who is concerned to love God not from fear of punishment nor love of something else, such as pleasure, fame, etc., but from the single fact that he knows God … . The carnal man however cannot understand this; it seems foolish to him because he has too meagre a knowledge of God, and he finds nothing in this highest good that he can touch or eat or that makes any impression on his flesh in which he takes so much pleasure, for knowledge of God consists in philosophical reasoning alone and pure thought. (Spinoza 2007/1670, 60; emphasis added) To this we may add Ethics IVp28 (Spinoza 1985, 559): “Knowledge of God is the Mind’s greatest good; its greatest virtue is to know God”. In much the same vein, Philo says: To know God, says Seneca, is to worship him.129 All other worship is indeed absurd, superstitious, and even impious. It degrades him to the low condition of mankind, who are delighted with entreaty, solicitation, presents, and flattery. Yet is this impiety the smallest of which superstition is guilty. Commonly, it depresses the deity far below the condition of mankind, and represents him as a capricious demon, who exercises his power without reason and without humanity! And were that divine being disposed to be offended at the vices and follies of silly mortals, who are his own workmanship; ill would it surely fare with the votaries of most popular superstitions. Nor would any of human race merit his favour, but a very few, the philosophical theists, who entertain, or rather indeed endeavour to entertain, suitable notions of his divine perfections … . (DNR XII.32, p. 101) And what is it to “entertain suitable notions of … [the] divine perfections”? We have already seen that first and foremost, one must remove the taint of anthropomorphism from one’s conceptions of them.130 When one does so, one loses any strictly moral or normative content, since human moral attributes and norms

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depend crucially on human imperfection, on human lack. As Philo will say in the next paragraph, such a proper conception of the attributes of the “cause or causes of order in the universe” (i.e., of God or Nature) “… affords no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance …” (DNR XII.33, pp. 101–102). When it comes to the non-moral attributes of God or Nature, such knowledge, which the proper worship consists in, leaves us with the “simple … somewhat ambiguous … [and] undefined proposition” that the Necessary Being qua ground of order in the universe “probably bear[s] some remote analogy to human intelligence”, where this claim is not “capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication” and “… can be carried no further than to the human intelligence; and cannot be transferred … to other qualities of the mind” (DNR XII.33, pp. 101–102).131 (Of course, once again, it also bears “some remote analogy” to the rotting of a turnip (cf. Bailey & O’Brien 2014, 225)). It would seem, then, that Philo’s religion of the “philosophical and rational kind” (DNR XII.13, p. 95) contributes to “proper office of religion”, as Cleanthes describes it (DNR XII.12, p. 95) only in a negative way: it does not contribute to “faction and ambition” as do all other forms of religion (according to Philo).132 It yields no prescriptions at all, but “… philosophers, who cultivate reason and reflection, stand less in need of such motives [e.g., divine punishment or reward] to keep them under the restraint of morals133 … [while] the vulgar, who alone may need them, are utterly incapable of so pure a religion, as represents the deity to be pleased with nothing but virtue in human behaviour” (DNR XII.15, p. 96). Russell (2021, 355; cf. Lemmens 2005) would surely agree that this last clause does seem to indicate Philo’s (and presumably Hume’s) pessimism about the prospects that the purely practical and moral version of Spinoza’s vera religio could ever gain popular ascendency. But the very fact that Philo identifies “true religion” or the “philosophical and rational kind” of religion with knowing God (or Nature) is sufficient to indicate that he (Philo) is singling out the epistemic side of Spinoza’s vera religio, and that Philo intends to valorize the amor Dei intellectualis, not a de-fanged religion-as-virtue-ethics for popular consumption. This, I suggest, is what Philo means by paying “profound adoration to the divine being, as he discovers himself to reason” (DNR XII.2, p. 89; emphasis added). 15.4 Conclusion: Philo and Bayle As established in detail in this study, throughout the DNR Philo develops, often in an indirect and subtle way, a Stratonic-Spinozist position. He is like Bayle’s Athenians who, without recourse to divine revelation, find themselves eventually agreeing with Strato.134 Thus, Philo’s closing Baylean fideistic flourish about flying “to revealed truth with the greatest avidity” (DNR XII.33, p. 102) is, in the light of this Stratonic conclusion, entirely à propos. It is not only a nod or homage to that “libertine” Bayle, as Cleanthes calls him (DNR I.17, p. 15), though it is that. Hume could not have failed to know that his educated readers would regard this sudden endorsement of fideism, which can, especially in its Calvinist variety, lend itself much more easily to the worst excesses of vulgar superstition and

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 361 unmoored enthusiasm than to a more benign form of religiosity, as being quite disingenuous on Philo’s part—as disingenuous as many regarded Bayle’s similar fideistic refrain to be.135 There is nothing new in thinking that Philo was substantially modelled on Bayle (the idea goes back at least to Kemp Smith’s “Introduction” to his edition of the DNR, see, e.g., Hume 1947/1935, 41; and see Paganini 2004, 2013, esp. 208n30, and 2023, chs. XII and XIII for a critical literature review and important, thorough discussions).136 But it has not often been noted that, like Bayle in the Dictionnaire and more clearly in the Continuation, Philo in effect defends the position that reason, from parsimony considerations relating both to general metaphysics and specifically to the existence of evil, leads to Stratonism—and, if so, only flight from reason can save us (see Mori 2021, 253f.). Hume is not only having Philo engage in Baylean irony (on the (highly plausible) view that that is indeed what Bayle was doing), Hume is himself engaging in a kind of hyper-irony, since by the 1770s, if not before, almost no educated reader of the “Great Infidel” would likely be taken in by such moves; and it would preposterous to suggest that Hume was unaware of this. The effect, then, is something like this: How ironic it is that I (Hume) have Philo engage in this obvious sort of Baylean irony! In doing this, Hume, ironically, makes his irony so obvious that it might as well not be irony. It is, as Paganini (2013, 241) puts it, “… [r]ather like saying, this time in the reassuring language of faith, what Bayle, and Philo with him, had already declared in the disquieting language of philosophy: the impossibility of a consistent philosophical theism.” Acknowledgments I would like to thank Charles Nussbaum for many relevant discussions and for commenting on the entire manuscript. I would like to thank Pete Legrant and Martin Gallagher for recent discussions related to this paper and, more distally, Michael Shaffer, Roomet Jakapi, Wim Klever, and an audience at the Annual Conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy in 2007 in Rotterdam, where I presented an embryonic version of this paper. More distally still, I would like to thank Phillip Cummins, Bertil Belfrage, Evan Fales, Lorne Falkenstein, Annemarie Butler, Todd Ryan, and Benjamin Hill. I should add that I was recently aided immensely in writing this paper by the work of Gianluca Mori, Emilio Mazza, and Gianni Paganini; I wish I had known about their work much earlier. (Emilio, if you are reading this, you are not hallucinating: the book really did (finally finally finally) come out!) Notes 1 From Bayle’s Continuation des pensées diverses (CPD, §LXXXV; Bayle 1737, vol. 3, 312; my translation). 2 Strato of Lampsacus (c. 335-c. 269 BC) was the third director of the Lyceum (successor of Theophrastus). His works are lost but fragments and descriptions survive (see Desclos & Fortenbaugh 2011). He was known for his naturalism and

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concentration on the physical sciences. “Another figure unworthy of attention,” Cicero’s Velleius says in De natura deorum (I.35), “… is Strato, the one they call the Physicist, for he proposes that all divine power lies in nature, which bears within it the causes of birth [causas gigendi], growth, and diminution, but which lacks all sensation and shape” ( Cicero 2008, 16). Presumably because his works have been lost, we do not find a mention of Strato in important recent works on atheism in Classical Antiquity (e.g., Sedley 2007, Bremmer 2007, and Whitmarsh 2015). He does get a mention in J.M. Robertson’s compendious 1936 A History of Freethought. Robertson (201) writes “… Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290) taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world … .” Robertson refers to the following passage from Cicero’s Academica (Ac. 2.121; Cicero 2006, 70–71): “… Strato of Lampsacus … says that he does not need the gods’ labour to construct the world. He explains that everything that exists has been produced by nature—though his explanation is not like Democritus’ … . Strato … goes through the various parts of the world explaining that anything that exists or comes into being is or has been produced by natural weights and motions. Doesn’t he free god from a considerable task and liberate me from fear in addition?” As with Spinoza, whether Strato can rightly be called a pantheist, as Robertson called him, is a matter of some debate. See Long 1986, 152: “Instead of identifying God and nature [like the Stoics] Strato took the opposite step of denying any function to God in the explanation of the universe. In Strato nature becomes the ultimate cause of all phenomena, and it is conceived in mechanistic terms..: nature is the interaction of opposing powers, fundamentally ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. The Stoics are at the opposite end of this spectrum but only in one sense. They agreed with Strato in looking for the ultimate cause of the change within the world and the Stoic concept of pneuma was very probably influenced by Strato’s hot and cold.” This proximity between (and the ambiguities of) Stratonic and Stoic views should be kept in mind. What is clear is that both locate all ulitmate explanatory power in nature but differ over whether that power should be conceived of teleologically. See below. 3 I will not pursue the issue of the extent of Spinoza’s influence in the Eighteenth Century directly, though what I present does have a bearing on that question. Suffice it to say that Spinoza’s impact has sometimes been quite underestimated. Even if Jonathan Israel may somewhat overestimate Spinoza’s role in the Enlightenment, his work surely demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Spinoza’s role was immense. See Israel 2001, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2019. I will refer to Israel’s work occasionally below, but, beyond what I have just said, I take no stand in this paper on the status of his overall project, nor will I address further what I regard as his partial misclassification of Hume. See, e.g., La Vopa 2009 and esp. Vink 2013 for correctives to Israel’s account—Hume may have been conservative, relatively speaking, on certain political and economic matters, but on the issue of religious belief he was radical enough. According to Wim Klever (2010b, 133n193), Israel has communicated to him that in calling Hume a partisan of the “Moderate [vs. Radical] Enlightenment”, he has in mind not Hume’s own philosophical views but rather “… Hume as … [he was] perceived in … [his] time and as … [he] worked on [sic] … [his] posterity, especially in England and the USA. He [Israel] is focused on the conservative role … [Hume] actually played, not in the least also while … [he] succeeded in effectively hiding the radical elements … [he] borrowed from Spinoza.” On many aspects of the question of Hume’s political and economic conservatism, see, e.g., the papers in Haakonssen & Whatmore (eds.) 2013 (especially those by Livingston and Stewart); see also Stewart 1992 and Livingston 1995; on Hume as one of the intellectual founders of the pernicious “Austerity” doctrine, dear (at least when their own class interests are not at stake) to fiscal conservatives the world over, see Blyth 2013,

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 363 107–115. If there is a grain of truth in the idea that Hume had some, in some sense, conservative ideas about religion, it is that he was perhaps more pessimistic about the prospects of significant numbers of humans freeing themselves from superstition and enthusiasm and adopting more rational and philosophical ideas about religion, in possible contrast to Spinoza and d’Holbach (see Russell 2021, Lemmens 2005 and below). 4 In the two volumes of early responses to Hume on religion edited by James Fieser (2005), one only finds Spinoza mentioned by Bishop Warburton (in 1757) in connection with Hume on miracles (in Fieser 2005, vol. 1 (5), 325 (Remark V)); in the nine pieces on the DNR, both Strato and Spinoza go unmentioned. I cannot confidently say anything about the early Dutch and French reception of the DNR, in this particular regard, between 1779 and 1935. Christoph Meiners’ 1779 review of the DNR (translated from the German and included in Fieser, 2005 vol. 2 (6), 223–229) does mention Philo’s flirtation with materialistic necessitarianism (226) but does not connect it to Spinoza or Strato. The closest thing I have found to a clear association of Philo with Spinoza in the Anglophone literature in this time period is from John Hunt writing in The Contemporary Review of 1869 (in Tweyman (ed.) 1996, 115): “[Philo showed that the design argument] … might prove a Creator, but it did not prove an Infinite. It might prove that there was some analogy between the mind of God and the mind of man, but it could not annihilate the manifest interval between the Divine and the human. Yet the things suggested by Philo have been taken into account by all philosophical Theists. They are to be found in Plato and Plotinus, in John Scotus Erigena and Benedict Spinoza. The acknowledgement of them has caused all philosophy of religion to be charged with what is called Pantheism.” It is notable that this same John Hunt, theologian, historian, and vicar, published an 1866 Essay on Pantheism, in which Spinoza looms large, and an 1884 revision of that work entitled Pantheism and Christianity, in which he attempts to reconcile the two. Note that in associating Spinozism and Pantheism (something that has been common since the latter term was coined by (probably) Joseph Raphson at the end of the 17th century, see note 79), here and elsewhere in this text, I am not taking a stand on the complicated issue of whether the label is, strictly speaking, an appropriate one for Spinoza’s philosophy; see Nadler 2009, 2006, 118–121 and Carlisle 2021, 62–70. 5 M.A. Stewart (2000) exhibits an unwarranted skepticism about Kemp Smith’s linking of Bayle’s Strato with some of Philo’s argumentation in the DNR. He writes (278), “Kemp Smith was interested in a possible link between the summary references to Strato in Bayle’s [Continuation des] Pensées diverses identified in the memoranda and some of the argument in the Dialogues—although the first Enquiry (1748) may be a more immediately relevant comparison.” In Stewart’s note (311n26) to this sentence he says: “In section XI of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume ascribes to his Epicurean alter ego the stance of the Stratonicians disputing the Design argument before the Athenian public. Kemp Smith found his parallels with the Dialogues in Bayle’s original rather than in any particular items in the memoranda.” While the literary trope of a disputation before the Athenian public is indeed common to Bayle’s Stratonicians (see Bayle CPD §§103ff.; 1737, vol. 3, 327ff.) and Hume’s Epicurean alter ego in the Enquiry, this is a somewhat superficial analysis. The connections between Bayle’s Strato, Hume’s “Early Memoranda”, and the DNR run, on the contrary, quite deep, as Kemp Smith perceived. See, e.g., Belgrado 1988; Mori 2018a and 2021, 237ff.; Paganini 2013; Bahr 1999 and 2021; and Mazza & Mori 2016. 6 In that remark, which Richard Popkin did not include in his edition of selections from the Dictionnaire but which is included in the earlier set of selections in English edited by Beller and Lee, Bayle lists various philosophers who equated God with the universe in an effort to show that Spinoza’s originality lies only in his systematic presentation of this doctrine in the more geometrico. Of Strato he writes, “I wouldn’t

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dare say that Strato, the Peripatetic philosopher, was of the same opinion [i.e., that Strato would agree with Spinoza on substance monism], for I do not know whether he taught that the universe or nature was a simple being and a unique substance. I only know that he thought it to be inanimate and that he did not recognize any other God but nature. … . As he mocked the atoms and void of the Epicureans, one could imagine that he admitted no distinction between the parts of the universe, but this inference is not necessary. One can only conclude that his opinion approached infinitely closer to Spinozism than to the atomist system. … There is even reason to believe that he did not teach, as the Atomists did, that the world was a new work and produced by chance; but that he taught, as the Spinozists do, that nature has produced it necessarily and from all eternity. The words of Plutarch that I am going to indicate, it seems to me, if rightly understood, imply that [according to Strato] nature has made all things of itself and without knowledge [or consciousness, cf. Mori 2020/1999, 219] and not that its works began through chance” (see Bayle 1983, 30–31; Bayle 1952/ 1697, 293–294; translation revised; emphasis added). Bayle argues that the notion that Strato held that the universe began by, or in some way incorporates, chance, suggested by a Latin translation of the relevant passage from Plutarch, does not “… answer to the idea one must make of the sentiments of this famous philosopher, the greatest of the Peripatetics: the words temerarii fortunae impetus [in the translation, “the fortuitous impulses of fortune”] ruin the symmetry of his system; and we see that Lactantius distinguishes it from that of the Epicureans and denies that it involves chance” ( Bayle 1983, 32; Bayle 1952, 294; my translation). Note that Bayle suggests that Strato’s system does not contain even a kernel of indeterministic randomness (contrary to the interpretation of Cudworth and Le Clerc, see below); and he distinguishes it (implicitly and not by name) from hylozoism, since he denies that Strato held nature to be animate (alive), even though the Lactantius passage, apparently a paraphrase of Cicero’s Velleius (see note 2), is somewhat ambiguous on this point (Natura … (uta it Straton) habere in se vim gigendi et vivendi; “Nature … has in itself the power of generation and life”); in the Plutarch passage cited, it is straightforwardly denied that Strato thought the universe to be an animal, and Bayle does not object to that but only to Plutarch’s (or his translators’) apparent imputation of a kernel of chance to Strato’s system (see Bayle, loc. cit.). Toland, on the other hand, thought that Strato held matter to be in some sense animate but lacking in any sort of understanding, while Spinoza, he maintained, attributed the latter to matter as well ( Toland 2013/1704, 148). More of this below. About forty years later, we find Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinth in his Recherches philosophiques, writing, “Nature, being the God of Strato, is just a God composed of an assemblage of all beings that make up what we call the Universe. … But this Divine Nature, this God composed of so many parts, has been simplified since by Spinoza, who, like Strato, recognizes as God only a Nature natured and naturing; these are the terms of Spinoza, Natura naturans, Natura naturata …” (1743, 57; my translation). Saint-Hyacinth goes on (60) to claim (somewhat predictably) that Spinoza’s monism appears to him contradictory and to assert that Strato’s non-monistic “Pantheisme”, in which each being is “non une modification mais réllement un être” seems more probable to him. On SaintHyacinth, see Thomson 2008, 153–55. 7 As Paul Russell says (2021, 341–342), “[i]n the context in which Hume was writing … , there can be little doubt that the dominant atheistic thinker of this period was Benedict Spinoza. Samuel Clarke … singles Spinoza out as ‘the most celebrated patron of atheism in our time’. This was a view that was widely shared by Hume’s contemporaries, as well as by most contemporary scholars.” Russell cites Colie 1959, 1963; Jacob 1976, 169–171; 1981, 49–53 and Israel 2001, 159, 603; to which should add Hazard 2013/1961, 139–148, Shepperd, 2015, 31ff. and throughout, and Bijlsma 2015b, ch. 1. On interest in (and reaction to) Spinoza (and Hobbes) in Scotland

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specifically in the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries, see Russell 2008, 37–40. It is true that in the early English reception of Spinoza his philosophy was often badly understood, understandably associated with Hobbes’ philosophy (for its determinism and its view that God literally is or has a material body and in spite of other differences), rightly associated with Republicanism, and oddly associated with “enthusiasm” (see Thomson 2008, 52–55 and Brown 1993). On the corporealization of God, Anne Conway, in her 1692 Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (ch. 9, §3), writes, “Hobbes affirms God himself to be material and corporeal … and so confounds God and the creatures in their essences … . These worst consequences and many more are the dictates of Hobbes’s philosophy, to which may be added that of Spinoza. For this Spinoza also confounds God and creatures together, and makes but one being of both …” ( Conway 1996/1692, 64). Indeed, in the German-speaking intellectual world, controversy over Spinoza was just then about to enter a new phase—the Pantheismusstreit or Spinozismusstreit of the 1780s (see, e.g., Beiser 1987, chs. 2–3). That they did not pick up on the association means, in my view, either that they had not read (or did not remember at the end of the Eighteenth Century) the context formed by the work of Cudworth, Clarke, and Bayle or simply thought it more important to focus on other issues raised by the DNR. Of course, that shift is adumbrated, in a certain way, in Parts VI and VIII of the DNR itself (cf. Dennett 1995, 28–34 and esp. Reiss, this volume). Interestingly, Philo appears to contradict himself in that in Part VI he suggests (VI.12, p. 50) a cosmology that entails “convulsions” of nature that would entail mass extinctions, yet in Part XI he says that “…as far as history or tradition reaches, there appears not to be any single species, which has yet been extinguished in the universe” (XI.9, p. 82, emphasis added); cf. Sober, this volume. The resolution of the apparent contradiction lies in the italicized words. It was not until 1796 that Cuvier provided sufficient evidence to the learned world of the extinction of the mammoth and mastodon, confirming Fontenelle’s speculations about “lost” species and later Buffon’s, Maupertuis’s, Diderot’s and d’Holbach’s more empirically supported arguments (on Cuvier see Rudwick 2008, ch. 1, Reiss 2009, ch. 5, and Lindqvist 1996, 97ff. and notes; Lindqvist’s discussion occurs in an important and unusual context; on the others see Gregory, 2007, 1–8 and throughout, Roger 1997/1963, and Callot 1965). On T. H. Green’s long-lasting, long-forgotten and somewhat ironic influence on Hume scholarship, see MacEwan 2013. Joachim’s A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza is a classic articulation of the “Idealist” reading of Spinoza. On F.H. Bradley and Spinoza, see, e.g., Muirhead 1931, 262–263. Cf. Colie 1963, 183 & 183n5. One of Russell’s epigrams to Part I of his 2008 (on page 1) is worth repeating here; in Human, All too Human, Nietzsche says “A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers.” This is all the more disturbing when it, paradoxically, affects historians of philosophy and odder still when it comes to students of Hume who ought to know about the professional troubles Hume had due to his reputation as an “infidel” and the reasons that led Hume to have the DNR published posthumously (see, e.g., the discussion in Hume 2007/1779, xiv; cf. Klever 2010b, 5–7). While there may be legitimate debates about whether Hume was being ironic in certain specific cases, one is tempted to think that it can only be a certain historical naïveté (in spite of some efforts to the contrary) that can allow one to first lay out the hermeneutic principles of irony detection only to end up ascribing sincere belief in “genuine theism” to Hume (see Yoder 2008; that Cleanthes’ “genuine theism” is not Philo’s “true religion”, see Russell 2021, and below; cf. Falkenstein 2009). I am, of course, in the “ironic Hume” camp when it comes to Hume’s apparent professions of belief in (esp. Christian) theism or in his apparent denials of the existence of real

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Kenneth Williford atheists. See Price 1965 and Berman 1988, 101–105; cf. Lemmens 2012a; see Hartl 2020 for recent criticism of this position. It is simply hard for me to understand how one can seriously consider taking the closing remarks of Hume’s “Of Miracles” (EHU X, §41; Hume 2007/1748, 115–116: “… the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even to this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one” etc.) as anything other than the most withering and masterful irony (but see Graham 2020). I will sometimes use the unusual and admittedly somewhat inelegant ‘StratonismSpinozism’ locution on a merely terminological and partial analogy with ‘MarxismLeninism’. All Leninists are Marxists but not all Marxists are Leninists. At least on Bayle’s understanding, in terms of the identification of Nature with the Necessary Being, denial of final causes, and adherence to necessitarianism, all Spinozists are Stratonists; but, in terms of a commitment to substance monism and panpsychism or hylozoism, not all Stratonists are Spinozists (see below). In attributing StratonismSpinozism to Philo, I do not mean that he unambiguously embraces some version of Spinoza’s metaphysics; I mean only that he clearly supports something in the ballpark of Stratonism and Spinozism; so, for example, it is clear he speaks of necessitarianism favorably but it is far from clear that he would accept substance monism. This is why the terminological analogy with ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is imperfect, since every ML unambiguously accepts all of the central propositions of Leninism. Grose’s remark occurs in a context in which he is dismissing the idea that Hume’s first sojourn in France (1734–1737) introduced any “foreign” influence into his philosophy. He writes ( Grose 1875, 39–40), “It might, perhaps, have been expected that Hume’s residence in France would have exercised a perceptible influence upon the reasonings of the Treatise. Yet it is not too much to say that, with a few unimportant exceptions, there is no trace of it. The writer was little acquainted with, and is little interested in, any foreign school of philosophy. His knowledge of Spinoza was derived from Bayle’s dictionary. Twice he gives a direct reference to ‘Malbranch’. He refers in one paragraph to the Port Royal Logic. There is no trace of a direct knowledge of Des Cartes. … In short, the Treatise from beginning to end is the work of a solitary Scotchman, who has devoted himself to the critical study of Locke and Berkeley. That he lived for three years in France was an accident which has left no trace either in the tone or in the matter of his book.” No true Scotsman indeed! As Capaldi (1975, 19) remarked on Grose’s comment: “We now know this to be an extreme distortion”. For a more recent corrective that draws on Hume’s correspondence, see Ryan 2018; see also Kors 1995 and Perinetti 2018. Nevertheless, one wonders if this sort of prejudice does not still exert a considerable influence on many Anglophone Hume scholars, who have much to learn from some of their—in this case—less blinkered counterparts on the Continent (as can be gleaned from many of the references in this paper). Huxley was no doubt referring to Hume’s standard anti-Spinoza verbiage (cf. Russell 2008, 73, point 6) in I.iv.5 of the Treatise (THN, 152–164), which Huxley discusses later in the book ( Huxley 1894/1878, 194, 210–211). As Russell points out ( Russell 2008, 72), Laird’s evidence (or, really, absence of evidence taken as evidence of absence), reasonably applies only to the Ethics and not the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Passmore (1951, 5n2) explicitly accepts Laird’s judgment without further ado. Popkin (1979, 66) writes, “My suspicion, or hypothesis, is that Hume first became interested in Spinoza through [Chevalier Andrew] Ramsay, and then learned what he knew about Spinoza from Bayle’s article”. As John Randall (1962, 630) put it, “Hume stands for all time as the antithesis of Spinoza in his thought” (cited in Popkin 1979, 66 and again in Klever 2010b, 5). Russell (2008, 72–73) argues on the basis of six well-substantiated points that “… it is most unlikely that Hume was not familiar with Spinoza’s writings.” “More

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 367 specifically,” he continues, “in the absence of any concrete evidence to the contrary, we have every reason to conclude that at the very least, Hume would have been familiar with the central doctrines of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (and would, therefore, have been well aware of the significance of his epigram).” The epigram Russell is referring to is the epigram to Hume’s Treatise, which is a quotation from Tacitus’ Histories (Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet) that is also the descriptor Spinoza chose for chapter 20 of the TheologicalPolitical Treatise ( Spinoza 2007/1669–70, 250; “Chapter 20 Where it is shown that in a free state everyone is allowed to think what they wish and to say what they think”; it also occurs in Spinoza’s preface, p. 11 (para. 14), cf. Harris 2015, 53, 118, 484n73 and Paganini 2023, 615–616). Wim Klever (1990, 92) has also argued that “[In the 1730s, including Hume’s time at La Flèche] Spinoza’s work was nothing less than an obsession, hotly debated, secretly followed but never openly acknowledged by the leading philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment. It is hardly possible to maintain that Hume’s acquaintance with Spinoza’s work was only indirect, via Bayle … .” (cf. Garrett (1997, 71) who also softly suggests the possibility that Hume did not derive his knowledge of Spinoza entirely from Bayle’s article). Klever further argues, contrary to the received wisdom, that Hume’s discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy in the Treatise “… stresses several elements which are not present in Bayle” (102), also pointing out, significantly, that “… Spinoza is the only figure from the history of philosophy to be explicitly and extensively discussed by Hume [in the first book of the Treatise]” (89; this is also cited in Harris 2015, 484n73). In the subsequent debate opened by Klever’s paper, Klever may have overestimated the impact of Spinoza’s philosophy on Hume’s, but not by much, I would argue (cf. Russell 2008, 331n13). See Leavitt 1991, Klever 1991 and 1993. See also Baier 1993, 2008, 124, 167–168, 188, 244n19; and see Maxwell 2002 for a critique (from an unusual, Doullian point of view) of Klever and Baier on their narrowing of the supposed gap between Spinoza and Hume. Most importantly, Klever has expanded his comparative work on Spinoza and Hume into a monograph ( Klever 2010a, 2010b); to date, it is the most comprehensive and detailed comparison of the two philosophers and is more useful and on-point than Boss’s monumental, two-volume comparative study ( Boss 1985; I generally agree with Klever’s (2010b, 6) assessment of this work as “a precious failure”); Boss’s study is premised on an assumption that is the polar opposite of Klever’s. See also Bijlsma 2014, 2015a, 2015b for thorough comparisons (finding considerable similarities) between Spinoza and Hume on matters of political theory and political, social and religious psychology. See also Lemmens 2005 for a comparative/contrastive study of Hume and Spinoza on the psycho-modulatory powers of philosophy. Note that in the very year Popkin published “Hume and Spinoza”, John Cassidy (1979) published a paper in which, confirming Huxley’s intuition, he detailed “… striking, and far-reaching, similarities between Hume’s ethical theories and… Spinoza[’s] … [such that] … we may need to revise our theories regarding his [Hume’s] reading habits [vis-à-vis Spinoza’s works]” (187); cf. also an earlier comparative/contrastive study on Hume and Spinoza on superstition by Boss (1975). Finally, the more general association of Hume with both Hobbes and Spinoza vis-àvis the issue of a “study of man” that does not rely on teleology or final causes should be noted. In 1923 Wilhelm Dilthey claimed that, in this regard, “David Hume … continued Spinoza’s work more than two generations after him … [and] stands in exactly the same relationship to Newton as Spinoza did to Galileo and Descartes” ( Dilthey 1988/1923, 303). This claim is taken as a point of departure for an important comparative study of Hume and Spinoza on individuals, noting many similarities, by Den Uyl and Rice (1990). Harris (2015, 53) claims that “It is conceivable that already in the early 1730s, Hume had arrived at the view that final causes needed to be expunged just as completely from the study of man as they had

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been from the study of nature. This was a view with a provenance in philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza, and it seems safe to assume that by this time Hume was familiar with the ideas of both. … [But if] … Hume was looking for a guide as to how to develop a rigorously non-teleological study of human nature, the most obvious place to look, in Britain at this time, was not to Hobbes or Spinoza, but to Bernard Mandeville.” It may indeed be the case that Mandeville was a “proximate source” for Hume in this regard. It should be recalled however that Mandeville’s philosophy was itself heavily influenced by Spinoza (see, e.g., Den Uyl 1987, Wagener 1994, Klever 2000, Prendergast 2014). In fact, Klever (2010b, 8) suggests that reading Mandeville may have been one of several of Hume’s early points of access to the work of Spinoza. 21 Though not always under this description. Klever 1990, 1993, 2010b and Baier 1993 are relevant in this connection as well. See Strawson’s 1989 revisionist account of Hume on causation; Strawson does not mention Spinoza, but consider that in his 2011, Strawson cites two of Philo’s (Spinozistic-sounding) necessitarian pronouncements in the DNR and says “These aren’t the views of a regularity theorist. They’re Hume’s views, dramatically presented and too little known” (28). In Kail’s 2007 work on Hume on modality (inter alia), Spinoza does get a mention (94); and Kail attributes to Hume a more conservative view on the move from conceivability to metaphysical possibility than has been traditional in Hume interpretation; the view Kail attributes to Hume is not too far removed from Spinoza’s (in marked departure from Garrett (1997, 36, 70–72) who supports the usual contrast; cf. Kail 2003 and 2008, 451; cf. LeGrant, this volume). Note that, in a roundabout way, Holden’s (2014) “expressivist” interpretation of Hume’s modal epistemology also yields a certain skepticism about realistically interpreted inferences from conceivability to metaphysical possibility (if not rendering such inferences simply illusory). We should also mention two important papers by Emanuela Scribano. One is on the debt Hume’s theory of causal inference owes to Spinoza’s theory of imaginative association; as Scribano says, “Once we clarify that the human mind, according to Spinoza, can be structured in accordance with either the laws of reason or the associations of the imagination, we will no longer need to turn Hume into a rationalist in order to acknowledge his debt to Spinoza, nor will Hume’s empiricism constitute a reason for denying such debt” ( Scribano 2008, 242–243). In the other, Scribano (2020) further confirms Huxley’s observation about the similarity of Hume and Spinoza on pride and argues that Hume and Spinoza both rejected the Cartesian version of the doctrine of privileged access. 22 An anonymous reviewer of a proposal for this volume at another press wrote this about an earlier abstract of the current paper: “If the echoes between Philo and Spinoza ‘are so clear as to be unmistakeable’ then why haven’t they been ‘heard’ before and why is it that only a minority of scholars believe that there is a substantive influence of Spinoza on Hume? … The suggestion in Part IV that the world itself might be God could be a reference to a Spinozan doctrine, but there’s nothing in this, for this suggestion is not uncommon in Eighteenth-Century natural theology: it implies nothing about any affinity Hume may have had with Spinoza’s philosophy.” As we’ll see, the echoes had been heard before, and the point is not (and never was) to establish that Spinoza had a substantive influence on Hume’s own philosophy, though he probably did (see the previous two notes and the subsequent five; above all, see Klever 2010b). And if the suggestion was not completely unheard of in Eighteenth-Century natural theology (e.g., in Toland), that is mainly because of Spinoza’s influence (see, e.g., Thomson 2003). Reflection on the hasty and superficial dismissal expressed in this remark, which surely issued from an established Hume scholar or historian of Early Modern Philosophy, may help the reader understand why I have decided to go to all this trouble and include such a burdensome scholarly apparatus (cf. Klever 2010b, 114–115).

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 369 23 On the strong association of Strato with Spinoza during the eighteenth century, see Israel 2006, 444–457. As Israel puts it (457), “No other classical writer was cited as often or insistently as Strato in the role of chief ancient precursor of Spinoza, though all sorts of other ancient writers besides Xenophanes, Strato, and Epicurus were adduced in this capacity.” See also Russell 2008, 52–53: “Clearly … Bayle (like Clarke) regarded Spinoza as the chief representative of modern atheism and argued his doctrine should be viewed as a variant of ‘Stratonic atheism’”. Mori (2020/1999, 220–222) argues that Stratonism as presented by Bayle in the 1704 Continuation des pensées diverses, which we have known, since Kemp Smith, to have had an enormous impact on the DNR, is, strictly speaking, distinct from Spinozism. This has to do with how we understand “hylozoism”, a view Cudworth (or More) seems to have attributed to both Strato and Spinoza (with Toland following him) but which Bayle seems to have attributed only to Spinoza, though not under that label (see below). For the moment, all that matters is that both Stratonism and Spinozism are committed, as Bayle characterizes the former, to the “… general dogma that nature is the cause of all things, that it exists eternally and of itself, that it acts according to the full extent of its powers and according to immutable laws that it does not know [or of which it is not conscious]. It follows from this that nothing is possible except what it actually does; that it brings about everything that is possible; that no human effort is capable of changing anything or disrupting anything in the chain of its effects; that everything happens by a fatal and inevitable necessity; that nothing is more natural than any other, nor less suitable to the perfection of the Universe; that whatever the state of the world, it is always what it must be and can be … .” (CPD, §CXLIX; Bayle 1737, vol. 3, 400b; my translation). As Mori comments on this passage, which he quotes, “One recognizes here certain Cartesian and Spinozistic theses … but no allusion is made … to the dogma of substance monism [l’unité de la substance]” ( Mori 2020/1999, 220; my translation). We might also add that the ambiguities surrounding Spinoza’s notion of God’s “knowledge” could, depending on the interpretation, mark another distinction between Bayle’s characterization of Stratonism and Spinozism proper. See also Wilson 2016, 1006. These fine-grained differences do not threaten the overall thesis defended in this study. 24 See Israel 2006, 457–470. As Israel remarks (457), “… the most usual parallel [to Spinoza’s philosophy], and liveliest controversy, next to those pertaining to the Eleatics and Stratonians, involved Stoicism.” Sometime between 1677 and 1680, a few years before Bayle and others (see Israel op. cit. for details) were making this connection in print, Leibniz was (privately) writing this: “The sect of the new Stoics believes … that God is the soul of the world, or … the primary power of the world, that he is the cause of matter itself … but that blind necessity determines him to act; for this reason, he will be to the world what the spring or the weight is to the clock. They further believe that there is a mechanical necessity in all things, that things really act because of his power and not due to a rational choice of this divinity, since, properly speaking, God has neither understanding nor will, which are attributes of men. They believe that all possible things happen one after the other, following all the variations of which matter is capable; that we must not seek final causes … . … In fact, these are Spinoza’s views, and there are many people to whom Descartes appears to be of the same opinion” ( Leibniz 1989, 282); cf. Kulstad 2008. On Leibniz’s complex, critical but partly sympathetic, relation to Stoicism see Rutherford 2003: “Leibniz’s confrontation with Stoicism begins not with the Stoics themselves but with Descartes and Spinoza” (63). 25 See Peterman 2021 and LeGrant, this volume. The World Soul hypothesis was sometimes associated with Strato as well. For example, we find Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens writing the following in 1737: “They [philosophers who support the World Soul hypothesis] say that the Universe is a Whole in the same way

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as a plant or an animal: that is to say, that there is a certain force spread out in world that vivifies its parts and maintains their interconnection. … the way the different parts of an animal constitute the animal in their organization. Cicero, speaking of philosophers who support this opinion, cites Strato … . Strato, he says, … maintains that all divine power resides in matter to which he attributes all the faculties appropriate to generation and conservation; but he removes reason and knowledge [conoissance] from this Spirit which vivifies it [matter]. Virgil often describes this World Soul dogma in his works. This system had many partisans among the Romans … and Spinoza has recently revived it and brought it out into the open” ( de Boyer 1737, 231–232; my translation). 26 Hume’s probable intentions have not gone completely unregistered. In two astute popular treatments of the DNR, Philo’s Spinozistic turns have been duly noted as such ( Pyle 2006, 71, 86, 89, 132; O’Connor 2001, 122–123). Of course, this very “Spinozism” is what Kemp Smith showcased under the name of “Stratonism” alone. Earlier Flew had picked this up from Kemp Smith, see Flew, e.g., 1984/1966, 63; 1972, 44; 1986, 67; and Miethe & Flew 1991, 25, where Flew writes, “… I believe but cannot prove that Hume himself eventually drew … [the conclusion] that we should take the Universe itself and whatever our scientists discover to be its most fundamental laws as the ultimates in explanation. This is a version of what Pierre Bayle taught Hume to call … Stratonician atheism”. (Incidentally, even if Yoder (2008, 10ff.) is right that Flew overestimates the evidence in favor of Hume’s own early commitment to Stratonism, he betrays his lack of appreciation of Kemp Smith’s edition of the DNR (which he cites) and of Hume’s “Early Memoranda” (which he does not) when he naïvely takes the fact that no one in the DNR mentions Strato by name or overtly claims atheism as a starting point as evidence against Flew). Stamos (1997) picked up the Philo-as-Strato thread and defended it well, though without making the connection to Spinoza. In Gianluca Mori’s superb Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach, Philo’s Stratonism-Spinozism is given a certain pride of place in understanding the DNR (again, rightly so); see Mori 2021, 237–253; Mori 2018a; cf. Mori 2020/1999, 234–235. This “intention” (Philo-to-StratonismSpinozism) was properly discerned earlier by Gianni Paganini (2004, 2013), to whose papers I shall refer on many occasions in this study, and by Jean Cléro (1990) who notes that Philo and Demea on occasion are both used to voice Spinozistic views (210); cf. Baier 1993, 238: “Demea of course is definitely not Spinoza, nor Hume Demea. But Hume is the author of the Dialogues where the supposedly most orthodox participant holds this [Spinozistic, anti-anthropomorphic] view [about God, derivable from his Malebranche quote], as if in fulfillment of his Treatise contention that the Clarkian theologians’ and the Spinozists’ views collapsed into each other.” And it is worth mentioning that George Nathan (1966, 1976) well understood and well articulated Philo’s immanentist necessitarianism, in which the First Cause is impersonal but might in some sense be said to be analogous to an intelligence, though without mentioning either Strato or Spinoza. Nathan (1966, 421) writes, “By ‘Nature’ we mean not the sum total of things in the world but rather the dynamic, internal structuring principle in the universe. Since Philo’s God or ‘Mind’ is such a force, the identification of God with Nature is certainly intended by Hume.” (For criticism of Nathan’s position, see Tweyman 1986, 68ff. and the back and forth between Tweyman and Nathan in Tweyman (ed.) 1991.) A rather unusual but very perceptive study by Lou Reich (1998), entitled Hume’s Religious Naturalism, misses Nathan’s close encounter (and the history recounted in this paper) but explicitly (and rightly, in my view) argues that “The religious element in Hume’s writings, which some commentators see as a transcendentalist [i.e., deist] position, is [here] interpreted as an immanentist religiosity akin to that of Spinoza and Einstein” (v); that “… Hume’s ‘true religion’ is immanentist: closer to Einstein’s ‘true religiosity’ or

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Spinoza’s ‘God or Nature’ than any form of a two-world hypothesis” (65); and that “… [b]ut for the fact that Hume is skeptical of all metaphysical postulates, even his own, we might think that his view that ‘nature’ is itself the eternal or ‘divine’ reality coincides with that of Spinoza” (71n49). Finally, I myself made the Philo-to-Spinoza connection in my 2003 120–121n25, 121–122n32; that 20-year-old study is what led to the current one. Cf. Israel, 2006, 43–51; Vernière 1979/1954, 333–413, 528–611; Spink 1947. It is important to stress (again) that I am not claiming that Philo’s Stratonism-Spinozism ought to be identified with the exact philosophy of Spinoza’s Ethics (however interpreted). In fact, I shall argue, more specifically, that Philo distances himself from the methodology followed in the Ethics but defends the necessitarianism, the denial of final causes, the identification of God and Nature, the intellectual love of God, and other clearly Spinozistic positions. The issue of substance monism is largely bracketed in the DNR; so that is not the aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy that looms large in it. Moreover, that Philo floats several different metaphysical hypotheses about the character of God or Nature (cosmic animal, cosmic vegetable, etc.) is in line with the many different understandings of the precise content of Stratonism-Spinozism in the air at the time. The point is that Philo defends views in the Stratonism-Spinozism ballpark, and readers in the know would have discerned that rather easily. Note that my use of ‘ergodicity’ and ‘ergodic’ is somewhat looser than standard mathematical usage, and neither usage implies randomness understood in metaphysically indeterministic terms. I mean here only that such a universe will “eventually” realize all of its possible states; the state transitions can be completely deterministic, metaphysically speaking. I believe that all three main characters of the DNR “speak for Hume” at some point or another in the DNR but Philo above all. Generally, I regard the “Who speaks for Hume?” debate as largely misguided and unhelpful, and so I will say no more about it. It appears from the OED entry on ‘hylozoism’ that Cudworth coined this anglicized Greek compound; one cannot find an original equivalent in Liddell, Scott & Jones nor a Latin version in Lewis & Short. (Thanks to Martin Gallagher for helpful discussions on this question.) As Cudworth (1845/1678, vol. 1, 144) defined it, hylozoism (which did not by itself exclude theism), is the view that “… all body, as such, and therefore every smallest atom of it … [has] life essentially belonging to it (natural perception and appetite), though without any animal sense or reflexive knowledge, as if life and matter or extended bulk were but two incomplete and inadequate conceptions of one and the same substance, called body”. As Kors notes (2016b, 83–84), this term came to be standard for such a doctrine, including extensions of it that incorporated cognition or other forms of mentality (i.e., panpsychism). Note as well that the opening sentence of the “Hylozoïsme” entry in Volume VIII of the Encycolpédie, appearing in 1765, is an only slightly modified translation of this sentence of Cudworth’s. It goes on to say “On attribue à Straton de Lampsaque l’origine de ce sentiment” but it does not mention Spinoza; it does, however, refer the reader to Volume II of Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque choisie, which does mention “today’s Spinozists” (consult Diderot & d’Alembert (eds.) 2022/1751–66; Le Clerc 1703, 27; on Le Clerc in this connection, see note 32). Leask (in Toland 2013/1704, 148 n42) sums the matter up in this way: “Cudworth … would coin the term ‘Hylozoism’ to depict Strato’s proto-Spinozistic system; in turn, Pierre Bayle would style much of his own thought ‘Stratonism’.” There is no doubt that either Spinoza is intended in these passages (see, e.g., Passmore 1951, 5–6; Colie 1957, 117ff., Israel 2006, 445–446; Allen 2013, 339–340) or came very shortly after the publication of the True Intellectual System to be understood as their target (or one of them). Cudworth may have had his Cambridge colleague, the physician Francis Glisson, also in mind in this and related passages (or perhaps

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Kenneth Williford Glisson alone). But about a year after publication, thanks to Henry More, these passages (and Strato) came to be associated with Spinoza (something then reinforced by Bayle, Leibniz and many others). See note 47 for a thorough discussion. Another relevant passage is this: “And here do we first of all make a discovery of a certain form of atheism, never before taken notice of, by any modern writers, which we call the Hylozoic: which notwithstanding, though it were long since started by Strato, in way of opposition to the Democritic and Epicurean hypothesis; yet because it afterwards slept in perfect silence and oblivion, should have been here by us passed by silently; had we not had certain knowledge of its being of late awakened and revived, by some, who were so sagacious, as plainly to perceive, that the atomic form could never do their business, nor prove defensible: and therefore would attempt to carry on this cause of atheism, in quite a different way, by the life and perception of matter: as also that this in all probability, would ere long publicly appear upon the stage, though not bare-faced, but under a disguise” ( Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, xl-xli). And there are other passages that appear to make reference to Spinoza without naming him (e.g., vol. 3, 394); in at least one case, such a passage is explicitly related to Spinoza in one of Johann Mosheim notes (first published in 1733), conveniently translated and inserted into the 1845 English edition (which is referenced here; see, vol. 3, p. 4 where Cudworth writes of “… .that late theological politician … writing against miracles … .”). Cudworth’s tendency to refrain from naming his intended targets can lead to confusion (see, e.g., Shepperd, 2015, 171, where he incorrectly identifies the referent of Cudworth’s ‘this writer’ with Spinoza instead of Hobbes; Mosheim’s note ( Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 126n6) gets it right). After a summary of Cudworth’s general characterization of hylozoic atheism in the second volume of the Bibliothèque choisie ( Le Clerc 1703, 20ff.), Le Clerc adds an ad hominem remark of his own. He says that the ancient atheists propounded absurd and incomprehensible systems more to distinguish themselves than because of any inherent difficulty in notion of intelligent design and creation. He then adds “What I have just said of ancient atheists, one can say of today’s Spinozists. But let’s listen to our Author [i.e., Cudworth].” In the subsequent sentence (which is also the beginning of the next section), he writes, “The first and principal defender of hylozoic atheism was, as Mr. Cudworth believes, Strato of Lampsacus … .” ( Le Clerc 1703, 27; my translation; Colie (1957, 127) accidentally has ‘ancient Atomists’ in her translation of this passage). On Le Clerc’s relation to Cambridge Platonism and Cudworth in particular, see, e.g., Bianchi 2020. In his 1706 Boyle Lectures, published in 1707 as Arguments to prove the Being of God, with Objections against it Answer’d John Hancock writes: “Indeed Spinoza makes it plainly appear that Matter is his God. He tells us that existence is included in the very nature and notion of substance … that there is but one substance … that the essential properties of substance are extension and cognition. … So that it’s plain Old Strato’s ghost, though he hath been dead so long ago, begins to walk again. This is but the old Hylozoick hypothesis (with some absurd additions) that life, sense, and understanding is [sic] essential to matter … .” ( Hancock 1707, 94–95). This is further evidence that “Strato’s Ghost” came very quickly to be associated with Spinoza (rather than Glisson). An interesting case in point is the article on Spinoza in Volume XV of the Encyclopédie appearing in 1765 (which Vernière (1979/1954, 591) attributes to Diderot; see Diderot & d’Alembert (eds.) 2022/1751–66). It does associate Strato and Spinoza in its opening paragraph but only by way of “plagiaphrasing” Bayle; the article goes on to rehash precisely Bayle’s objections. Here is Voltaire writing in Le Philosophe ignorant (in 1766): “But at the bottom, Spinoza does not acknowledge any God; he has probably made use of this expression [‘God’] … only that he might not startle mankind. He appears to be an atheist

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 373 according to the full extent of the epithet; … he is such, because he acknowledges no providence whatever, because he admits only of eternity, immensity, and the necessity of things; like Stratonius, like Diagoras; … he affirms … [that] there is only a single substance, that there cannot be two, that this substance is extended and thinking …” ( Voltaire 1922/1766, 33; translation corrected). In the Encyclopédie, Spinoza and Strato are mentioned together a number of times. Notably, Spinoza and Strato are also associated in the article, “Soul” (“Ame”) in Volume I, co-written by Diderot and published in 1751: “Spinoza …, as well as Strato, remove and deprive knowledge and reason from this force diffused throughout the world that, according to him [Spinoza], vivifies its parts and maintains their interconnection, whereas the theistic philosophers attribute reason and intelligence to this World Soul” (my translation). And they are associated in the article, “Chaos” in Volume III, written by Diderot and published in 1753: “To attribute the formation of all particular beings and the perfect harmony that keeps them functionally independent of each other to the impetuous shock of a blind movement is to rob God of the greatest glory that can redound upon Him from the fabric of the Universe in favor of a cause that, without knowing itself and without having an idea of what it does, nevertheless produces the most beautiful and regular works. This is, in a way, to fall back into the absurdities of a Strato or a Spinoza” (my translation; for both articles, see Diderot & d’Alembert (eds.) 2022/1751–66). We know, of course, that Hume enjoyed conversing with Diderot and d’Alembert (see Mossner 1980, 475). Diderot’s relation to Stratonism/ Spinozism, “neo-Spinozism”, and hylozoism is complex and well worth noting in this context. See, e.g., Hermand 1915; Wartofsky 1952; Vernière 1979/1954, 528–611; Smith 1959; Roger 1997/1963, 373–374; Callot 1965, 245–316; Vartanian 1984; Wolfe 2007, 2009, 2010, 2014; Lyssy 2015; Mori 2021, 268–284. Mori (2021, 275) points out that Diderot’s character, “… the Spinozist Oribaze argues in the Promenade [du sceptique], following the same anti-theistic and anti-deistic line of reasoning pursued by Hume’s Philo … : ‘if it can be shown that matter and perhaps even its arrangement are eternal, what becomes of Philoxene’s declamation [in favor a Designer]’”. (See Diderot 2021/1747, 100; The Skeptic’s Walk was completed in 1747 but not published until 1830.) Paganini (2021) has persuasively argued that it is highly likely that Hume and Diderot discussed portions (or at least the themes) of the DNR during Hume’s second three-year stay in France (1763–66) and that the dominant themes of common interest were likely “... neither skepticism nor deism, but rather the cosmological naturalism represented by Saunderson (Diderot) [in Lettre sur les aveugles, published in 1749] and by Philo’s ‘new hypothesis of cosmogony’ in Hume’s case [and] … not simply the question of atheism … ..., but rather an overall vision of the universe, of which biological themes, a dynamic and historical perspective, and the autonomous organization of nature were integral parts” ( Paganini 2021, 191; my translation). Mori 2021, ch. 6 should also be consulted on Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Holbach on Stratonism-Spinozism and hylozoism in France up to the 1770s (see also Roger 1997/1963; Buckley 1987, ch.4; Hankins 1985, ch. 5). On specifically Hume’s connection to the “vital materialist” (“hylozoic”) strand of Enlightenment biological thought, see Wilson 2016a. On Spinoza’s influence on Diderot, d’Holbach and others in the French Enlightenment, see Blom 2010, 85ff.; cf. Russell 2021, 347f. 36 Toland writes, “… Strato of Lampsacus, and the modern hylozoics, taught that the particles of matter had life, and also a degree of thought, or direct perception without any reflection; to which Heraclitus of old, and lately Spinoza, added understanding, or reflex acts, without ever removing the difficulties apparently offering themselves against such a precarious hypothesis …” ( Toland 2013/1704, 148). Clarke does not mention Strato by name in the Demonstration, but, speaking of “Spinoza and his followers”, he says, “… when they speak of the intelligence and knowledge of God,

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they mean to attribute these powers to him in no other sense than the ancient hylozoicks attributed them to all matter …” ( Clarke 1998/1705, 46–47); to relate Spinoza to the hylozoics was ipso facto to relate him to Strato for anyone aware of Cudworth’s work, as Clarke surely was (on the probable reasons why Clarke did not refer to Cudworth directly in the Demonstration, see Passmore 1951, 100f.; Clarke also cites Toland’s Letters to Serena, Clarke 1998/1705, 19). The other John Hancock (1707, 94–95) was explicit in relating Strato and Spinoza and labeling both hylozoists; see note 33. Collins writes, “As far as I can judge of the opinions of Strato, Xenophanes, and some other ancient atheists … and of the opinions of that sect called the Literati in China … they seem all to me to agree with Spinoza (who in his Opera Posthuma has endeavoured to reduce Atheism into a system) that there is no other substance in the universe but matter, which Spinoza calls God, and Strato, Nature” (in Uzgalis (ed.) 2011, 245). It is quite likely that Hume had read the ClarkeCollins correspondence first published in 1707–08 (and going into many editions, see Yolton 1983, 10); see, e.g., Uzgalis (ed.) 2011, 319; Attfield 1977, 47–48; the Nortons’ annotations to the THN in Hume 2002/1739–40, 487 n15; and Russell 2008, 108. On the influence of Spinoza on Toland, Collins and other “deists” and “free thinkers”, see, e.g., Colie 1959; Hazard 2013/1961, 148–151; Israel 2001, 599–627; Leask 2012, 2016, 2017, and Leask’s introduction to Toland 2013/1704; in his 2016, Leask argues that “… Toland’s intellectual debt to Spinoza is far deeper than most scholarship (even Israel’s) has hitherto suggested” (63). 37 As Vernière also notes, Leibniz explicitly makes the association several times in the Theodicy, a text largely prompted by Leibniz’s reading of Bayle and with which Hume was probably familiar enough (it is alluded to at DNR X.6, p. 69, where Hume inserts one of his few notes). Leibniz (1985/1710) writes, “… Spinoza more or less insists (like an ancient Peripatetic philosopher named Strato) that all has come from the first cause or from primitive Nature by a blind and geometrical necessity, with complete absence of capacity for choice, for goodness and for understanding in this first source of things” (67, translation modified); and “… [t]he dominion of God is with Spinoza nothing but the dominion of necessity, and of a blind necessity (as with Strato), whereby everything emanates from the divine nature, while no choice is left to God, and man’s choice does not exempt him from necessity” (349); and “… [n]othing more appropriate could have been chosen to show the difference there is between the moral necessity that accounts for the choice of wisdom and the brute necessity of Strato and the adherents of Spinoza, who deny to God understanding and will, than a consideration of the difference existing between the reason for the laws of motion and the reason for the ternary number of the dimensions: for the first lies in the choice of the best and the second in a geometrical and blind necessity” (336). 38 See, again, Israel 2006, 449–457. See also Kors 2016b, esp. 83–85; but the entirety of his ch. 2 is important (inter alia for his mild qualifications of the work of Vernière and Israel (none which affects the thesis of this paper)). As Kors says (2016b, 83–84), “In its dictionaries and accounts of ancient philosophy, early-modern learned culture would come to have a term for the view that nature was animate, intelligent, or in any sense divine, or, put another way, that matter and life were inseparable: ‘hylozoism’. It attributed hylozoism diversely to many ancient philosophers, not only to many Stoics but also, most commonly, to the Peripatetic Strato. It attributed this doctrine to Spinoza, too, who was seen as a continuation of such hylozoistic thought.” The association of Spinoza with Strato did not go completely unchallenged. Kors (2016b, 84–85) discusses Friedrich Schlosser who published a Latin work on Strato in Wittenberg in 1728 that argued that Strato was not a necessitarian atheist who identified God with Nature; as Kors points out, “Schlosser presented himself … as arguing against a very broad consensus among the learned.”

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 375 39 The association of Spinoza with the Stoics was also robust but was also subject to more criticism. See note 24. In particular, Israel (2006, 462) claims that “All the affinities between Spinoza and the Stoics, in the end, Bayle [who had himself associated Spinoza and the Stoics in the Dictionnaire and elsewhere] came to see, are more apparent than real. For the Stoic cosmos is ruled, as well as permeated, by the living force of a divine intelligence which not only plans but actively directs all that happens down to the smallest detail.” That is to say, the Stoic God may be an immanent one, but, unlike Spinoza’s, it is definitely a teleological one, a God with a “Plan”. Israel also notes (463) that, according to Cudworth, some of the later Stoics, unlike Zeno and Chrysippus, ought to be classed as genuine atheists (more on this below). On the more general issue of Spinoza’s relation (historical and systematic) to Stoicism, see, e.g., Kristeller 1984; Long 2003; DeBrabander 2007; Klessinger 2008; Miller 2015; Collette 2016. 40 This accusation was well in place long before the (eventually) famous correspondence between Malebranche and Dortous de Mairan (which took place between 1713 and 1714 but was not published until 1841, see Moreau (ed.) 1947, Watson & Grene (eds.) 1995). Malebranche was accused of (presumably inadvertent) Spinozism (sometimes by name, sometimes by insinuation) by Arnauld, Leibniz, Régis, Bayle, Fénelon, Tournemine, and others (see, e.g., Vernière 1979/1954, 260–270; Mori 2020/1999, 122–13; Nadler 2021; Kors 2016b, ch. 4; 1990, 366–369, 378; and esp. Ferraro 2014). Kors notes (2016b, 189) that “… [i]n a lengthy review, in January 1719, of [Jesuit savant and critic Réne-Joseph de] Tournemine’s preface [to the works of Fénelon in which Tournemine indicated that Malebranchism leads to Spinozism], the [Jesuit] Journal de Trévoux [of which Tournemine was one of the editors] repeated and explicated all these inherently anti-Malebranchist arguments. The more complex an atheistic system was, the reviewer maintained, the more objections could be formulated against it. The heart of subtle atheism, then, was to keep the system simple, and that was the essence of Spinozism: All beings followed from the nature of a universal being. By this principle one could recognize the Spinozist elimination of God: ‘There can be no other God but universal Being, the universe.’ If that were true, then, the Journal was insisting, Malebranchism was nothing but the assignment of the name ‘God’ to the being of the universe in its material and mental acts.” Recall that Hume spent some time conversing with learned Jesuits at the Jesuit college at La Flèche during his first sojourn in France (1734–37; see Mossner 1980, 100–104). While he probably did not meet Tournemine, it is not unlikely that he learned about the general Jesuit animosity towards Malebranche, expressed often in the pages of the Journal de Trévoux, and the charge of Spinozism in particular; this makes good sense of the reference to Malebranche in his chapter on the “Immateriality of the Soul” in the THN (I.iv.5; Hume 2002/1739–1740, 152–164), a chapter that is, famously, framed around Spinoza’s concept of substance. See below. As Dario Parinetti (2018, 52–53 & n40) notes, “The Journal de Trévoux was an important part of the intellectual world in which Hume was immersed while in France. Being the organ of the Jesuits, its journalists had strong ties with La Flèche’s Royal College. Hume might have been interested, at least, in an article that Chevalier Ramsay, who hosted him in Paris, published in the March 1735 issue. In that article, Ramsay attempted to depict different kinds of ‘philosophical characters’. Philosophers like Descartes, Newton, Bayle, Shaftesbury, Malebranche, or Spinoza exemplify the ideal types he described”. In the note to this passage, Parinetti continues: “Ramsay’s article “… ‘Le psychometre’ … contains too a brief presentation of Spinoza’s views, where Ramsay claims that, ‘those that see Spinozism as a kind of vulgar materialism misunderstand it. It is the purest form of idealism, a consummate Malebranchianism, a kind of extravagant or demented Jansenism’”. The idea that Hume was unaware of the association of Mablebranche and Spinoza is quite hard to sustain.

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41 As I am going to understand it, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is the axiom that everything (event, entity, state of affairs) either has a cause outside of itself (an external or transcendent) cause or contains the ground of (or reason for) its existence within itself (an internal or immanent cause). Cf. DNR IX.3, p. 63; Williford 2003. Anything that satisfies the second disjunct exists by its very nature or with logical or metaphysical necessity. Cudworth, Clarke, Spinoza, and others who accept some version or other of this axiom do not use the name ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’, which seems to have originated with Leibniz (see, e.g., Leibniz 1985/1710, 418–419) who, of course, allowed for divine moral reasons in the explanation of contingent truths. When it came to demonstrating the existence of God, Leibniz’s argues in much the way Cudworth, Clarke, Raphson, and many others did; see, e.g., paragraph 8 of “The Principles of Nature and Grace” (written in 1714 but unpublished in Leibniz’s lifetime; in Leibniz 1998, 262): “Now, the sufficient reason for the existence of the universe can never be found in the series of contingent things … . Therefore, the sufficient reason, which has no need of any further reason, must lie outside the series of contingent things, and must be found in a substance which is the cause of the series: it must be a necessary being, which carries the reason for its existence within itself, otherwise we still would not have a sufficient reason at which we can stop. And that final reason for things is what we call God.” Sometimes I will call the PSR the ex nihilo, nihil fit principle, though, strictly speaking, the PSR includes more; it should be understood that even though the claim that nothing comes from nothing is compatible with the view that something (or other) has always existed but only contingently, apart from Hume, it was generally assumed that any contigently existing thing had to have an external cause and that there could be no infinite (or cyclic) series of contingent causes. 42 Here is Voltaire (in 1922/1766, 30) on this very point: “He [Spinoza] at first establishes a clear and incontestable fact. There is something, consequently, there has eternally existed a necessary Being. This principle is so true, that the profound Samuel Clarke has availed himself of it to prove the existence of God.” See, e.g., the second alternative proof of God’s necessary existence in Ethics, Ip11 ( Spinoza 1985, 417–419). 43 In the passage cited, Bayle continues as follows: “The atheists, without a single exception, will sincerely endorse, with all the orthodox, this thesis: There is a first cause, universal, eternal, which necessarily exists and which should be called God. So far so good; no one will cause a scene over words, and there are no philosophers who insert the word ‘God’ into their systems more often than the Spinozists. But from that, you must conclude that it is not at all in this thesis, so evident, that the true state of the question resides. … It thus does not suffice to know that there is a God; it is also necessary to determine the sense of the word and attach an idea to it; it is necessary, I say, to seek to know what the nature of God is; and this is where the difficulty begins” (CPD, §XX; Bayle 1737, vol. 3, 214a; emphasis original; my translation). 44 Cleanthes’ “decisive” response to Demea’s Cosmological Argument (in DNR Part IX) is an indirect challenge to the principle, since, according to it, nothing can be necessarily existent. If, then, the PSR (conjoined with the evident premise that something exists and the more controversial premises barring infinite and circular causal chains) entails that something necessarily exists, it entails a known falsehood and must thus be false (see Williford 2003, 119–120 n32). 45 One can understand why this is called a “pseudo-Stoical” position. If the overarching cosmoplastic nature is the rational, conscious, beneficent and providential Logos of the theistic Stoics, then, even though its immanence would set Stoic theism at odds with Christian theism, this would be still be a proper form of theism, by Cudworth’s lights. But if this cosmoplastic nature is merely like the immanent organizing principle of some “Great Vegetable” (its “generation” or “vegetation”, as Philo might put it), then, while

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 377 chance is similarly excluded and life similarly included, it is a proper atheism, since the Great Vegetable knows not what it does and does it non-teleologically. 46 As did Le Clerc’s French reproduction (see Le Clerc 1703, 71). Note, again, that this is different from Bayle’s Strato (see below). There was, in fact, some debate about Strato’s view, understandably given that his actual works were lost and one had to rely on scattered comments often by hostile critics like Lactantius. 47 See note 31. After noting that Cudworth may have seen some version of the Ethics in manuscript, Passmore writes (1951, 6), “One must admit that the details of his criticism have little relevance to Spinozism. Characteristically, Cudworth prefers to criticize hylozoism in it is classical form, but when he rejects as hylozoistic the doctrine that ‘extension and life, or cogitation, are two inadequate conceptions of one and the self-same substance, considered brokenly and by piecemeal … and, consequently, all souls and minds, and even the Deity itself [is] either extended life and cogitation, or living and thinking extension’ [ Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 3, 394] we can have little doubt about whose teaching he is rejecting.” However, it is quite possible that Cudworth did not in fact have Spinoza principally in mind in the passage referred to by Passmore but rather the less well-known Cambridge physician, anatomist and natural philosopher, Francis Glisson whose 1672 work De natura substantiae energetica, seu, De vita naturae defended (evidently independently of Spinoza) a form of hylozoism (Glisson’s name for substance is “biousia”—a hybrid of ‘bio’ and ‘ousia’ (sometimes spelled ‘biusia’)). In fact, Henry (1987, 28) goes so far as to say that in this passage Cudworth “… had no one else in mind but the Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge, Francis Glisson. It was only Glisson who argued in print for the natural perception and natural appetite of matter and who regarded life and matter as two conceptus inadequati of substance.” And Arrigo Pacchi, spending several pages on Glisson as Cudworth’s target without mentioning Spinoza, writes, “Cudworth … disguises his criticisms of Glisson by transferring the discussion to the hylozoism of Strato of Lampsacus, just as he never names Hobbes directly, preferring to attack him in the guise of Democritus and Epicurus; since he did not behave in this way towards Descartes, whom he mentions explicitly several times, we must think that he used such precautions with English and living interlocutors (Glisson died when the System was already practically completed) …” ( Pacchi 1973, 152n165 and 150–155; Pacchi is cited in Giglioni 1996, 135); Hobbes died the year after its publication. That Glisson is the probable target is further supported by the fact that Joseph Raphson, also a Cambridge man (and close associate of Newton) in ch. I, §10 of his 1697 De spatio reali classifies Strato’s hylozoism as a species of “panhylism” (vs. pantheism), summarizes (without attribution) the Cudworth passage in question and then mentions Francis Glisson as a contemporary proponent of the view ( Raphson, 1697, 7–8). Spinoza is discussed in ch. I, §11 (p. 20f.) as a pantheist (vs. panhylist). If this is right, then immediately seeing Spinoza in this Cudworth passage is a retrospective projection partly enabled by the near oblivion into which Glisson has fallen. Nevertheless, in 1679 (only the year after True Intellectual System was published) Henry More succeeded in bringing about an association between Glisson’s hylozoism (a term More uses with explicit reference to Cudworth) and Spinozism in §51 of the Scholia (and annotations to the Scholia) appended to his Ad V. C. epistola altera and published in the Opera omnia (see More 1675–79, Vol. 2, 604ff. and More 2023 for an online English translation). More (2023) writes: “… the biusians [sic] (who are termed ‘hylozoists’ by the learned author of the True Intellectual System of the Universe) only state in general that matter is αὐτόζωος and is capable of perception, appetite and motion from itself, thus everywhere arranging itself into all the different kinds of things as it sees fit.”; and “Like Spinoza who holds that all substance, insofar as it is substance, exists from itself because it subsists through itself, he [Glisson] contends in that [1672] work that substance, insofar as it is substance, is necessarily

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alive by the force of its nature, i.e., it perceives, strives and moves by itself. He therefore assumes that the perceptive, appetitive and motive faculties are all intrinsic parts of matter itself”; and “… bolstered by the Spinozist view of the necessary existence of every substance as substance, the Glissonian way is such that it clearly supposes that there is no need of a creator God at all”; and, finally, in the annotations to §51, “‘That there is nothing in the nature of things but this living nature alone’, etc. The passages from Spinoza’s Posthumous Works quoted above make it abundantly clear that Spinoza holds this very view and conviction as well. In fact, there would not have been any difficulty in understanding his writings if only he had been sincere, everywhere replacing ‘God’ with matter and indicating at least once that he believed that matter was αὐτόζωον or [of] itself alive, and that there was only this one substance and no other in the universe of things.” With this association established, it became rather unimportant whether Cudworth also had Spinoza in mind or only Glisson (cf. Giglioni 2006). See also Thomson 2008, 75–79 and Hartbecke, 2012, 178. Hengstermann (2020, 159) claims that Cudworth was deliberately targeting Spinoza and “one of his most gifted followers, … Francis Glisson”; but Giglioni (2008b, 485) argues that in the Theodicy Leibniz misinterpreted Cudworth’s references to Strato as being oblique references to Spinoza while in fact they were references to Glisson and that “[b]ecause of Leibniz’s authoritative voice and the popularity of his Theodicy, Glisson’s vital materialism became assimilated to the more notorious category of Spinozan vital monism”, which helped Glisson pass into oblivion. As we have just seen, though, about thirty years before the Theodicy was published (1710), the fix was already in, thanks to Henry More; and Pierre Bayle provided another, apparently independent route for the association of Strato and Spinoza. Giglioni (1995, 43n65) notes that Cudworth clearly refers to Glisson in the context of attacking hylozoic atheism (he calls Glisson “the writer of The Life of Nature” ( Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 3, 405)); this paper is especially helpful because it shows how Glisson and Spinoza arrived at similar (though also importantly different) accounts of “animate” nature and of substance starting from very different assumptions (Renaissance vitalism in Glisson’s case and Cartesianism in Spinoza’s), the very similarity pounced upon by More. See also Giglioni’s excellent 1996 which makes a very good case that Cudworth originally had Glisson in mind and suspected him of either unwitting or crypto-atheism as well as some important background on how More came to associate Glisson and Spinoza (perhaps via van Helmont). Cf. also Hall 1990, 198–201 and Ellenzweig 2016, 260–261 for accounts of More’s attack on Glisson. On Renaissance and Early Modern vitalism, see, e.g., Sloan 1977, Chang 2011, and Banchetti-Robino 2020, ch1.; for the vitalisms of Glisson, Cavendish, and Conway, see Wolfe 2022; and for Diderot’s later, Eighteenth-Century “vital antimathematicism” which attempts to get beyond the failures of previous vitalisms as well as purely mechanistic account of life, see Wolfe 2019. 48 “As for that late theological politician, who, writing against miracles, … contending that a miracle is nothing but a name which the ignorant vulgar gives to opus naturae insolitum, ‘any unwonted work of nature, or to what they themselves can assign no cause of’; as also, that if there were any such thing done contrary to nature, or above it, it would rather weaken than confirm our belief of the divine existence; we find his discourse every way so weak, groundless, and inconsiderable, that we could not think it here to deserve a confutation.” Cudworth’s embedded quote is a rough translation of some of the opening lines of ch. 6 (“On Miracles”) of Spinoza’s Tractatus ( Spinoza 2007/1669–70, 81). 49 The Lutheran pastor and theologian, Johann Franz Buddeus noticed this possible incongruity between Strato and Spinoza in his 1717 Latin work Theses theologicae de atheismo et superstitione variis. Buddeus died in 1729 but this work was translated into French and published in Amsterdam in 1740 as Traité de l’athéisme et de la superstition.

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 379 “Strato of Lampsacus,” Buddeus writes, “is in agreement with Spinoza on some points of his doctrine and with Epicurus on others”. He continues, “I noted in my [1706] dissertation, De Spinozismo ante Spinozam, the passages of Cicero and Plutarch by which one can come to know his [Strato’s] view, namely, that the system of the world can exist [on its own]; anyway, he does not suppose any sort of Divinity. For according to the testimony of Cicero, he imagines a world that can be produced without the action of God, which suffices for numbering him among the atheists. Thus, it is not doing him an injustice to add him to the predecessors of Spinoza, since he taught that the matter of which the world is composed is God himself, or to put it in Cicero’s terms, he believed that all Divine power resides in Nature … . He differed, nevertheless, from Spinoza in that he divided matter, with Epicurus, into numerous atoms or particles, whereas Spinoza establishes one single substance of which the Universe is composed. He differs, on the other hand, from Epicurus in that instead of a stupid matter deprived of all understanding [connoissance], he replaces it with another, endowed with a natural and plastic life, but, all the same, devoid of all feeling and understanding” ( Buddeus 1740, 24; my translation). Later in the work (115) he says, “The foundation of the atheism of Epicurus and of Strato is that the world has been formed by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. The foundation of Spinoza’s atheism is that there is but one single substance.” Above all, Buddeus associates Spinoza, as was also quite common, with the Eleatics (112). On Buddeus, see Kors 2014, 231–244. 50 Nor will it concern us that Cudworth (1845/1678, vol. 1, 213) took hylozoic (Stratonical) and cosmoplastic (pseudo-Stoical) atheisms to “undo and confute each other”, essentially because the former, as conceived by Cudworth, can’t give an account of why all the particles of matter, endowed with life or mentality, don’t “conspire and confederate” into one single World Soul making the whole world into “an animal or God”; and the latter, inter alia, can’t explain how “… the sensitive souls of brute animals and the rational souls of men could … possibly emerge out of one single, plastic and vegetative soul in the whole universe … .” (Those familiar with contemporary debates about panpsychism and its “combination problem” should be experiencing déjà vu (all over again)). Accurate or not, there is no doubt that the characterization of a Spinoza as a hylozoist enjoyed enormous currency in the eighteenth century. Vernière, after noting the currency of comparisons between Spinoza and Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and, of course, Strato, writes (1979/ 1954, 338; my translation), “[The worst mistake of] … this ‘comparative’ mode, initiated by Bayle and to which the editors of the the Encyclopédie would still yield … was to abusively simplify a complex doctrine and to put the Ethics on the same level as some obscure verses of an Ionian philosopher. The general error of all these scholars was to reduce Spinozism to hylozoism; between Epicurean atomism and dualism [spiritualisme], Spinoza seemed to them to defend a strange doctrine in which every living thing is material and all matter is animated. This immanent life, diffused throughout the universe, would be conceptually distinct from the latter but in fact inseparable from it. Insensitive to Spinoza’s parallelism, of Cartesian origin, to the mechanistic explanation of life and movement in the Ethics, and to the theory of knowledge it includes, they preferred the romantic vision of a world that would be a monstrous animal in perpetual gestation … .” One correction and a qualification: This “mode” was not actually initiated by Bayle; and Bayle’s Strato was not unambiguously a hylozoist. Vernière entitled the chapter from which this passage comes “The Era of Confusions (1715–1750)”; he was certainly right that Spinoza caused a good deal of it; he still does. 51 As Mori (2020/1999, 160–161 and notes) points out, the claim that Spinoza embraced some version of the World Soul doctrine goes back at least to the 1673 La Religion des Hollandois by Giovanni Battista Stoppa (see Stoppa 1673, 63–66), that is, a few years prior to Spinoza’s death and the publication of the Opera posthuma. Mori

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Kenneth Williford notes that this assimilation was taken up by Aubert de Versé, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Benoît de Maillet, among others. In fact, he says (161), “the identification of Spinozism and the doctrine of the World Soul will, in any case, become a topos in the Eighteenth Century.” It is hard to imagine that this was lost on Hume. Cudworth may have had some understanding of this Spinozistic position; then again, perhaps he had Glisson in mind whose position resembles Spinoza’s in certain key ways. To give more of the passage cited by Passmore (1951, 6; see note 47 above), Cudworth writes: “… [T]hat extension and life, or cogitation, are not two inadequate conceptions … of one and the self-same substance, considered brokenly and by piecemeal … will appear from hence, because … we cannot conceive a life, or mind, or thought, nor anything at all belonging to a cogitative being, as such (as wisdom, folly, virtue, vice, &c.), to be extended into length, breadth, and thickness, and to be mensurable by inches, feet, and yards. From whence it may be concluded that extension, and life or cogitation, are no inadequate conceptions of one and the selfsame thing, since they cannot be complicated together into one, but that they are distinct substances” ( Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 395). Notice the metion of Seneca. Later in the work (1874/1678, vol. 2, 131–132) Cudworth will assert Seneca’s commitment to genuine theism, though of the Stoic sort. Hume cites Seneca in the DNR (XII.32, p. 101; this is discussed below). Given Bayle’s admiration for Seneca, his assimilation of Seneca and Spinoza on the psychology of religion, and the role Seneca plays in the Continuation des pensées divers, I cannot help but wonder if Hume’s choice is not accidental in this connection (see Mori 2020/1999, 195, 200–201). A “plastic nature”, Cudworth says, “… though it be a thing that acts for ends artificially [i.e., artfully], and which may also be called the divine art, and the fate of the corporeal world; yet for all that it is neither god nor goddess, but a low and imperfect creature. Forasmuch as it is not master of that reason and wisdom, according to which it acts, nor does it properly intend those ends which it acts for; nor indeed is it expressly conscious of what it doth, it not knowing but only doing according to the commands and laws impressed upon it … ” ( Cudworth 1845/1678, vol. 1, 250). This led to a debate between Bayle and Le Clerc in which Bayle ended up infuriating Lady Damaris Masham, Cudworth’s daughter, but which also brought a great deal more attention to Cudworth’s tome, especially on the Continent, than it might otherwise have attracted. The episode is entertainingly covered in Colie 1957, ch. 8. More recent, important discussions, historical and philosophical, include: Roger 1997/1963, Simonutti 1993, Rosa 1994, Ryan 2009, 149f., Hutton 2020, Bahr 2021, and Mori 2021, 91f. Malebranche and Leibniz also weighed in against “plastic natures”. Here is Leibniz (1985/1710, 245) on Bayle in this regard: “M. Bayle is in difficulties over this: he will not admit plastic natures devoid of cognition, which Mr. Cudworth and others had introduced, for fear that the modern Stratonists, that is, the Spinozists, take advantage of it.” Hume was surely well aware of this debate; knowledge of Cudworth’s tome likely reached Hume through more than one route (see, e.g., Russell 2008, 27, 113–114; Hutton 2012; Mori 2021, 83). Hume writes, “Strato’s Atheism the most dangerous of the Antient, holding the Origin of the World from Nature, or a Matter endu’d with Activity. Baile [sic] thinks there are none but the Cartesians can refute this Atheism” (in Mossner (ed.) 1948, 501; §2 Mem. 14). On Bayle on this see, esp., Mori 2020/1999, 148–149; 2021, 120–127. The idea is that any theology according to which God is under a constraint that “He” has no power over (even “His” own nature) entails an order and principle of organization that was not created by a conscious being, one that, moreover, necessitates the ideas and decisions God makes. If the theist must have recourse to such an order, parsimony would recommend simply making this uncreated principle of organization that in virtue of which the world is arranged without God as

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intermediary. In the very next memo (loc. cit.) Hume writes, “A Stratonician cou’d retort the Arguments of all the Sects of Philosophy. Of the Stoics, who maintain’d their God to be fiery & compound & of the Platonicians who asserted the Ideas to be distinct from the Deity. The same Question, Why the Parts or Ideas of God had that particular Arrangement? is as difficult as why the World had.” The radical Cartesian position that God has power over all constraints, even those of “eternal truths” would be a way out of this problem; but its cost is immense, since it undermines reason and morality altogether (on some varieties of radical Cartesianism and relevant background, see Schmaltz 2002). Cf. Leibniz (1985/1710, 246), “Now to come to M. Bayle’s apprehensions concerning the Stratonists, in case one should admit truths that are not dependent upon the will of God: he seems to fear lest they may take advantage against us of the perfect regularity of the eternal verities. Since this regularity springs only from the nature and necessity of things, without being directed by any cognition, M. Bayle fears that one might with Strato thence infer that the world also could have become regular through a blind necessity”. Leibniz (e.g., op. cit., 268–269) is rather too sanguine about and almost cavalier in his response to this problem. See also Paganini 2023, 334–342. The denial of complete necessitarianism here would have to do with the possibility that atomic movements are not fully determined and, in Cudworth’s context, that there is no overarching “plan” that teleologically specifies the interactions of either atoms or their larger-scale aggregates. However, one could still be called a “determinist” or “necessitarian” when it came to the issue of free will, since, above the level of atomic movements, one could hold that all is determined by the (non-teleological) “laws” that govern the interactions of atoms and their aggregates—this would, of course, be contrary to the intentions of Epicurus in introducing the parénklisis (clinamen) doctrine.. See Radner 2003, Sangiacamo 2019, Nadler 1999, and the discussions of the quod nescis principle/argument in Mori 2020/1999, 2021, Ryan 2009, and Platt 2020, esp. 185–198 and ch 8. See, e.g., Malebranche 1997/1674–1712, 669. In the Occasionalist context, the principle was often invoked to argue from our ignorance of how our own minds are able to move our bodies to the conclusion that God must be the real cause behind the typical correlations between our volitions and bodily movements and the modulation of our sensory organs and perceptual states. An analogous problem arises out of William King’s 1702 De origine mali (mentioned by Hume explicitly in DNR X.6, p.69, in Hume’s note). As A. O. Lovejoy (1936/ 1964, 221) put it, “Though King would, of course, have said that his God was a God of love, the term must necessarily have had for him an unusual sense. The God of the De origine mali loved abundance and variety of life more than he loved peace and concord among his creatures and more than he desired their exemption from pain. He loved lions, in short, as well as lambs; and loving lions, he wished them to behave in accordance with the ‘nature’, or Platonic Idea, of a lion, which implied devouring lambs and not lying down with them. … . [Divine] ‘goodness’ thus … [here means] chiefly a delight in fullness and diversity of finite being, rather than in harmony and happiness.” On King’s relation to the DNR, see Belgrado 1988, 84–88. See, e.g., Kors (2016b, 200): “In Aubert de Versé’s analysis, what defined Spinoza’s atheism was not his denial of creation … but, rather, his definition of God as ‘absolute infinity, the sole being, the universal being, the abstract being.’ This conception of God as ‘universal being’, as ‘everything’, could only be an equation of God with all that existed, and thus, a categorical equation of God and nature … . This, he argued, was precisely Malebranche’s atheism, too.” Aubert de Versé’s book was reviewed by Bayle in the October 1684 issue of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, in which Bayle says the book represents “… a heap of difficulties for Spinoza, for the Cartesians in general, and for Father

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Malebranche in particular” (in Bayle 1983, 143). Mori (2020/1999, 122–123) writes that “L’Impie convaincu made an even more damaging accusation against Malebranche: that of clearing the way for Spinozism. Aubert de Versé’s book, in fact, is not only the first text in which the Cartesian ancestry of Spinozism is showcased in a solid and convincing manner, it is also the first detailed denunciation—after the critiques of Arnauld and Abraham Gaultier—of the analogies between the systems of Malebranche and Spinoza. The specter of Spinozism would follow Malebranche for the rest of his life, up to the well-known letters of Dortous de Mairan. Leibniz himself saw in Spinoza one who ‘most drove home the consequences of the doctrine of occasional causes’. As for Bayle, during the period of the Nouvelles, he limited himself to noting prudently the affinity between Occasionalism and the doctrine of the World Soul, of which Spinozism constituted, according to the common opinion, only a refined version. He will be much more explicit in a remark in the article, ‘Paulicians’, where he insinuates that Occasionalism, in making ‘God enter into all things’, insensibly approaches Spinozism, whose conception of divine causality it shares” (my translation). Cf. Paganini 2004 for a deep discussion of the ways in which Bayle’s treatment, inter alia, of Malebranche and Arnauld on the anthropomorphism vs. mysticism issue is clearly in evidence in the DNR. The notion that Malebranche’s philosophy has an inherent tendency towards Spinozism, and even the “precipice” metaphor (that occurs in the passage from Aubert de Versé quoted), persisted well into the Eighteenth Century. In 1759, for example, one finds d’Alembert (a “life-long intimate” of Hume, as Mossner—or Mossner’s indexer—puts it (1980, 454, 669)) writing: “The imagination of this Philosopher [Malebranche] sometimes carried him well beyond the point to which he wanted to go. The principles of Religion with which he was imbued held him on the edge of the precipice: his philosophy bordered on Pyrrhonism, on the one hand, and Spinozism, on the other” ( d’Alembert 1986/ 1759, 44–45; cited and discussed in Ferraro 2014). Cf. also Moreau 2018. 62 It is worth noting that the very passage from Malebranche that Demea cites is also cited favorably by Joseph Raphson in chapter VI of De spatio reale ( Raphson 1697, 84). I have a vague or perhaps false memory that some Hume scholar proposed Raphson as a possible real-life model for Demea, but I cannot at present find this claim anywhere. It would make some sense, given Raphson’s theology, his endorsement of this passage, his general views on the application of mathematics in matters of metaphysics, and his articulation of the a priori theistic proof. See note 79. 63 Mori (2020/1999, 115) notes that, among others, “… Arnauld, Aubert de Versé, Papin, Villemandy point out in unison that Occasionalism destroys human liberty of indifference and renders God the author of sin.” 64 This issue of general laws plays a major role in Bayle’s own evolution vis-à-vis Malebranche, Stratonism, and radical Cartensian divine voluntarism as the only way out. As Mori says (in a section of his Bayle philosophe entitled “From Malebrache to Strato”), in the Continuation des pensées diverses, Bayle “… makes his ‘Stratonician’ affirm that, in order to place the wisdom of God ‘at the highest point of perfection’, one must suppose ‘that the world never requires God to remedy the inconveniences of natural laws’. Here we see the Malebranchian axiom finally pushed to its limit, in spite of the clarifications that Malebranche did not fail to furnish Bayle on this point. In reality, Bayle simply fully spelled out here the interpretation that he had already insinuated … in the Pensées diverses sur la comète: understood in its most rigorously coherent form, the principle of general volitions reduces God to being nothing but the impersonal executor of natural laws; and this makes him little different from the ‘Nature’ of the Stratonicians. The most coherent Christian philosophy, that of Malebranche, thus ends at the same conclusion that one finds in the atheists’ system: in order to safeguard divine wisdom and the universality of the laws of physics, this philosophy submits God to the yoke of ‘eternal laws’, effectively denying his

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providence” ( Mori 2020/1999, 137–138; my translation; see also p. 139 and note 222 on Bayle on Malebranche attributing to God, in effect, a preference for a display of divine wisdom over divine benevolence, when they are in conflict). There is every reason to believe that Hume read the sections of the Continuation in question here (§110 and surrounding). See Mori 2018a, Paganini 2013 and (esp.) Bahr 1999. On Philo’s/Hume’s possible misinterpretation of Malebranche on the general laws theodicy, see Ryan 2020. Annette Baier ( 1993, 238) rightly called this “Demea’s Spinozistic contribution in Dialogues, Part III.” Against M.A. Stewart’s (1985) implausibe claim that Hume failed to understand Clarke’s argument, see Williford 2003, 121–122 n32 and 122–123 n35. Note the apparent contrast in Philo’s endorsement of the Cosmological Argument in DNR II with Cleanthes’ objections to the very intelligibility of the concept of a necessary being in DNR IX.5–6, p. 64. In saying that the “truth [of the being of the deity] is unquestionable and self-evident” (DNR II.3, p. 18), Philo is suggesting that the argument is a sound demonstration of the existence of the First Cause and thus that the negation of that conclusion would entail the negation of some self-evident proposition, viz., either the PSR (and is supposed corollaries) or the self-evident truth of fact that something exists. On Cleanthes’ understanding of necessity, Philo is here implicitly embracing the coherence of the notion of necessary existence. Note that, in this connection, Clarke faces essentially the same dilemma Leibniz faced about Divine liberty: on the one hand, if God is free (in their incompatibilist, libertarian sense) it ought to be as metaphysically possible for God to do evil, as it is for us (in which case, it is metaphysically possible that God is not omnibenevolent); on the other hand, as a supposedly necessarily omnibenevolent being, it ought to be metaphysically impossible for God to do evil (which, according to Bayle, leads one, inexorably, to Stratonism). In the space of two paragraphs, Clarke essentially contradicts himself on this matter. He writes, “… God is both perfectly free and also infinitely powerful, yet he cannot possibly do anything that is evil”; and in the very next paragraph he writes that liberty “… is in the highest and most complete degree in God himself, every act wherein he exercises any moral attribute … proceeding from the most perfect liberty and freest choice …, these things, in the very idea and formal notion of them, excluding all necessity” ( Clarke 1998/1705, 88–89). If creating a world according to a “necessity of fitness” follows from God’s goodness, an attribute God possesses with metaphysical necessity, then it would seem that such a world is necessary too. On the issue of the necessity (vs. contingency) of the particularities of finite modes in Spinoza see, e.g., Curley & Walski 1999, Huenemann 1999, Garrett 2018, Särman 2022, Newlands 2022. A fact Bayle uses to criticize Spinoza (in Remark R of the “Chrysippus” article in the Dictionnaire; in Bayle 1983, 122): “It is a great embarrassment today for the Spinozists to see that according to their hypothesis it has been for all eternity as impossible for, say, Spinoza not to die at The Hague as it is impossible for two and two to make six. They know well that this is a necessary consequence of their doctrine and a consequence that repels, frightens, and troubles people’s minds by the absurdity it entails in diametric opposition to common sense. They are uneasy that everyone knows that they overturn a maxim as universal and evident as this one: anything that entails a contradiction is impossible, and anything that does not entail a contradiction is possible. Now, what contradiction would there be in Spinoza’s having died in Leiden? Would nature have been less perfect, less wise, less powerful?” See Mori 2020/1999, 137 esp. n213. The reference is to Remark R of Bayle’s article on Anaxagoras in the Dictionnaire in which he, following G. Lamy according to Mori, notes that there seems to be no good reason (drawn from physics or anatomy) for God

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Kenneth Williford not to have given us six eyes instead of two. Lamy had said that God’s reason for giving us two eyes could not have been to reduce the number of those suffering from blindness, since, if it were, we’d expect “Him” to give us six or eight. In the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics Spinoza (1985, 443) says, “… [T]hey [i.e., people who conceive of God as having plans to obtain what “He” lacks and think of these plans as explaining particular events that affect humans (e.g., having a brick fall on your head)] will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance.” As Leibniz (1985/1710, 276) puts it: “… [O]ne must believe that even sufferings and monstrosities are part of order; and it is well to bear in mind not only that it was better to admit these defects and these monstrosities than to violate general laws, as Father Malebranche sometimes argues, but also that these very monstrosities are in the rules, and are in conformity with general acts of will, though we be not capable of discerning this conformity.” It is most convenient and intuitive to formalize this in a Free Logic with an existence predicate, as suggested here, otherwise this first-order schema will also do: Where Φ is any (non-tautological) predicate, if it is conceivable that ∃xΦx, then it is conceivable that ~∃xΦx. To make an analogy, suppose one is a realist necessitarian about the existence and nature of sets, and suppose one does not think any of the axioms that decide the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) are obviously true (or are such that their falsehood is inconceivable)—which, by the way, is the case for most mathematicians, I believe it is still safe to say. On these assumptions, axioms that decide the CH differently will seem plenty conceivable, but not all such axioms could be true. Some of them, in fact, will be necessarily false, though one may remain none the wiser without “a change in our faculties” (as Clarke says—something Cleanthes and Philo use against Demea in Part IX of the DNR; see Clarke 1998/1705, 38, DNR IX.6, p. 65). The example (that the digits of products of 9 always sum to 9 or to some product of 9) appeared as the second article in the September 1685 issue of the Nouvelles and was discussed further in several subsequent issues. The necessity involved here is a function of the chosen base: “[G]enerally, if numbers are represented with base b, then the divisors of b - 1 will have this property” ( Borg 2000). Curiously, and apparently in complete independence of Hume’s discussion in the DNR (or Fontenelle’s), the same problem was presented in a letter (by one Mario Pace) entitled “Any Maths Wizards?” in The Times of Malta (Jan. 28, 1999), reprinted (p. 13) in Sciriha (ed.) 2000; which includes Borg 2000, as a response to this letter. Mori (2021, 251 n229) reminds us of this remark in Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts ( Spinoza 1985, 332): “… if men understood clearly the whole order of Nature, they would find all things just as necessary as are all those treated in Mathematics. Yet because this is beyond human knowledge, we judge certain things to be possible, but not necessary.” One can’t help but think that Spinoza would have been gratified by subsequent developments in mathematics. For example, for centuries mathematicians thought that Euclid’s parallel postulate was necessarily true because of the prima facie inconceivability of its denial, and many (e.g., Saccheri) tried to prove it, until the work of Bolyai, Lobachevsky. Moreover, for any open Yes-No question in mathematics (e.g., Goldbach’s Conjecture), an affirmative and a negative answer will be equally prima facie conceivable; but on realistic assumptions, only one answer is correct and necessarily so. Indeed, on realistic assumptions, we can say that we know there will always be (undecidable) cases like this, given the impossibility of finitely axiomatizing mathematics. Indeed, in that sense, secunda facie conceivability (etc.) is of no real help: if one is a realist about mathematics and mathematical necessity and one thinks that demonstrability from axioms (or some equivalent) is our only way of

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 385 achieving secunda facie (in)conceivability (i.e., proofs—which rest ultimately on intuitively grasping (or at least accepting) some axioms and inference rules), then there will always be necessities that are opaque to us (opaque to any mind, in fact, incapable of grasping as “self-evident” infinitely many axioms; but if one could, like a God, simply grasp all mathematical truths as being as intuitive as, say, the Peano Postulates, then one would not need proofs). 79 It is not impossible that Hume was also targeting the mathematician Joseph Raphson whose 1710 Demonstratio de Deo presents his version of the argument a priori in a much more rigorously mathematical form than Clarke’s Demonstration. Indeed, there is an unmistakable Spinozistic flavor to Raphson’s entire presentation; and Raphson’s explicit attempted refutation of Spinoza is subtler than Clarke’s because it derives the conceivability-to-possibility of the alteration of matter from its finitude and limitation vis-à-vis space (and even cites Spinoza against himself); see Raphson 1712/1710, 20. Moreover, Raphson’s 1697 De spatio reali seu ente infinito, which aimed to, in a way, unify the two contemporary Cambridge philosophies (Platonic and Newtonian) and “divinize space”, as Koyré (1957, ch. 8) put it, is just as important here. Chapter II of De spatio is an articulation and defense of the application of mathematics to certain metaphysical questions, and chapters IV and V adopt the EuclideanSpinozistic mode of presentation. Koyré notes that “There is an unmistakable Spinozistic flavor to Raphson’s terminology and manner of speaking” but Raphson “… though deeply influenced by Spinoza, … is no by no means Spinozist” (191). Koyré draws attention to the fact that the theological aspect of Newton’s conception of space, defended by Clarke, as God’s “sensorium”, was expressed, more or less, by Henry More before both Raphson and Newton (220), who first publicly avows the expression in the 1706 Latin version of the Opticks (see Henry 2020 on Newton’s use of the expression; see Hengstermann 2020 on More; and see Copenhaver 1980 on, inter alia, the complex relationships between More, Raphson and Newton; Copenhaver (542) argues that similarity of views about God’s relation to space and the Cabbalistic sources they were interested in does not necessarily reflect the direct influence of More and Raphson on Newton but rather a shared intellectual milieu). Koyré also points out that in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, first published by Clarke in 1717, Leibniz objects to the Newtonian world-picture as flirting with Spinozism on two counts: first, its explanatory reliance on mathematical necessity instead of divine wisdom (op. cit. 238–239; see Leibniz’s Second Letter, §§ 1–7; Leibniz concludes, “The bare production of everything would indeed show the power of God, but it would not sufficiently show his wisdom. They who maintain the contrary will fall exactly into the error of the materialists and of Spinoza, from whom they profess to differ”, Leibniz & Clarke 2000/1717, 9); second, in its suggestion that space is, in a way, a property (attribute) of God (Koyré op. cit. 247, 302n15: “… Clarke uses the term ‘property’ in his own ‘replies’ as well as in the translation of Leibniz’s ‘papers’—and one understands full well why he does not use the more correct one, ‘attribute’: just because Leibniz has mentioned Spinoza”; cf. Vailati 1997, 38–39). Further, Leibniz (in the Second (§§3, 10, 12), Fourth (§§27, 29, 34), and Fifth (§§82, 86, 111) Letters) accuses Clarke and the Newtonians of embracing, with their “sensorium-of-God” account of space, a version of the World Soul doctrine, which, as we have seen, was also closely associate with Spinozism at the time (see Leibniz & Clarke 2000/1717, 11, 25, 26, 55, 56, 62; at the last cited page (Letter V, §111), Leibniz writes, “Will not this doctrine, moreover, tend to make God the soul of the world, if all his operations are natural like those of our souls on our bodies? And so God will be a part of nature”). Hume was surely aware of these matters. Given this context, we can see Hume’s point as not only a general one about the compatibility of Spinozism with the argument a priori and the application of mathematics to metaphysics, we can also see him as reminding the readers that Clarke’s (and Newton’s)

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own metaphysics may itself slide into something like Spinozism (“So dangerous is it to introduce this idea of necessity into the present question!”), even granting Raphson’s subtler response to Spinoza. For more on Raphson in this connection, see Mori 2021, 196–201; among other things Mori notes (196) that it was Raphson, not Toland, who coined the term ‘pantheismus’ in De spatio reali ( Raphson 1697, 8) and that Toland recognized (in Letter V of the Letters to Serena ( Toland 2013/1704, 152)) that “… Newton’s and Raphson’s [sensorium of God] doctrine is entirely consistent with that of the atheist … For Toland, an immaterial space is also a ‘mere Nothing’, an abstraction with no real existence, which leaves the universe as the only existing being, so that whether we like it or not, it ends up being the same as God himself” ( Mori 2021, 201; see also Thomson 2008, 119, 133–134). 80 As Clarke says in his Preface (which is unaccountably missing from Vailati’s edition; it appears in all the others, so far as I have been able to verify), “There being already published many and good books to prove the Being and Attributes of God, I have chosen to contract what was requisite for me to say upon this subject, into as narrow a compass, and to express what I had to offer, in as few words as I could with perspicuity. For which reason I have also confined myself to one only method or continued thread of arguing, which I have endeavoured should be as near to mathematical as the nature of such a discourse would allow; omitting some other arguments which I could not discern to be so evidently conclusive …” (emphasis added). Cf. Russell 2008, 28–29. And see Kenny 1996, 233–243 for a good discussion of the fractious context of Clarke’s embrace of a “mathematical” approach to theological matters. 81 Cf. Hurlbutt 1985, 32: “In … [Clarke’s] preface [to the Demonstration] he states … that his method is to be as close the mathematical as possible; hence it is no surprise to discover that his criterion of truth is a priori—the principle of noncontradiction. When Whiston criticized him for holding a rigid and nonscientific view, Clarke replied that he was only using in favor of religion the method that Hobbes and Spinoza has used against it.” In the passage in question, Whiston (1730, 10–11) doesn’t exactly accuse Clarke of holding a “rigid and unscientific view” but rather says that a “… contemptible weed … contain[s] better arguments for the being and attributes of God than all his metaphysics”. 82 Leibniz (1985/1710, 332) at least makes a more interesting argument: “I discovered … that the laws of motion actually existing in Nature, and confirmed by experiments, are not in reality absolutely demonstrable, as a geometrical proposition would be; but neither is it necessary that they be so. They do not spring entirely from the principle of necessity, but rather from the principle of perfection and order; they are an effect of the choice and the wisdom of God. I can demonstrate these laws in divers ways but must always assume something that is not of an absolutely geometrical necessity. Thus, these admirable laws are wonderful evidence of an intelligent and free being, as opposed to the system of absolute and brute necessity, advocated by Strato or Spinoza.” If we could know that the laws of nature (and not merely particular arrangements of matter) are not absolutely demonstrable (because one must always assume some apparently contingent, material, non-mathematical axiom to derive them), then, modulo some further (though now much more contentious) assumptions about the relationship between mathematical necessity and conceivability (or apparent contingency), one could conclude that the laws are contingent. Here again, the Stratonist-Spinozist could claim that it is simply question begging to move from the apparent contingency of the “material” axiom in question, to its actual contingency; though, this would move the debate to a new plane and might prove much more costly (intuitively speaking) to the Stratonist-Spinozist. On the other hand, the latter might then simply adopt some sort of multiverse option and hold that different “universes”

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with different laws all follow from the one Ultimate Universe (or Mother of Universes), which then looks, once again, like Spinoza’s God. Clarke (1998/1704, 11–12) continues: “According to this latter supposition, there is nothing in the universe self-existent or necessarily-existing: and, if so, then it was originally equally possible, that from eternity there should never have existed anything at all, as that there should from eternity have existed a succession of changeable and dependent beings: which being supposed, then, what is it that has from eternity determined such a succession of beings to exist, rather than that from eternity there should never have existed anything at all? Necessity it was not; because it was equally possible, in this supposition, that they should not have existed at all. Chance is nothing but a mere word, without any signification: And other being it is supposed there was none, to determine the existence of these. Their existence, therefore, was determined by nothing; neither by any necessity in the nature of the things themselves, because it is supposed that none of them are self-existent; nor by any other being, because no other is supposed to exist. That is to say; of two equally possible things, (viz. whether anything or nothing should from eternity have existed,) the one is determined, rather than the other, absolutely by nothing; which is an express contradiction. And, consequently, as before, there must on the contrary, of necessity, have existed, from eternity, some one immutable and independent being, which, what it is, remains in the next place to be inquired.” One will note that Demea recites some of this text almost verbatim in DNR IX. Cleanthes’ proffering of what has come to be called the Hume-Edwards Principle ( Cain 1995), especially given the mereological nominalism his formulation of it seems to include (i.e., that the “whole” causal chain as such depends merely on a “arbitrary act of the mind”), seems rather less open to the Spinozistic interpretation, since Spinoza certainly did not think the universe qua integrated totality was a mere construct or conventional reality; and Cleanthes’ possibility does not seem to leave room for the “immanent causation” that would correspond to Clarke’s (and Spinoza’s) notion of something “carrying the reason for its existence in itself”. Instead, one would only get a relative necessity: necessarily, given that there is something and that everything comes from a prior cause (and that there are no causal cycles), at any point in the infinite past (supposing it is infinite), there is/was something; hence, there has always been something (and not necessarily the same thing (cf. Mackie (1982, 120) on Leibniz on Locke’s confusion over this)), even if those “somethings” are themselves intrinsically contingent entities. If one accepts the necessity of ex nihilo nihil fit, then, modulo parsimony, one would be inclined to identify the entire infinite causal sequence with the Necessary Being rather than accepting a regress of causal chains. If one does not accept the necessity of that principle, then one could accept the relative necessity claim and simply hold that the whole infinite sequence exists only contingently. The indeterministic nature of the clinamen or “swerve” was supposed to be an advance over the deterministic atomism of Democritus in relation to human free-will (see, e.g., Morel 2009, 76–78). See Descartes’ Principia Part III, §47 ( Descartes 1985, 285): “For by the operation of these laws [of nature] matter must successively assume all the forms of which it is capable; and, if we consider these forms in order, we will eventually be able to arrive at the form which characterizes the universe in its present state.” See Spinoza’s Ethics, Ip16 and Ip17sch ( Spinoza 1985, 424–426). Cf. Mori 2021, 164 and Mori 2020/1999, 221. On the “Diodoran” conception of modality, see Prior 1955. On Spinoza’s necessitarianism and conceptions of modality, epistemic and metaphysical, see Nadler 2006, 104–108, Huenemann 2018, and Newlands 2022. Toland himself (2013/1704, 150–151; Letter V) defended the infinity of matter. Hume writes, “Four kinds of Atheists according to Cudworth, the Democritic or

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Atomical, the Anaximandrian or Hylopathian, the Stratonic or Hylozoic, the Stoic or Cosmoplastic. To which he might have added the Pyrrhonian or Sceptic. And the Spinozist or Metaphysical”; in Mossner (ed.) 1948, 503 (§2, Mem. 40); reproduced in Hume 2007/1779, 108. At the time of the writing of the “Early Memoranda”, Hume surely knew or, at least, was in a good position to know, of the association of Strato and Spinoza (since it is in Cudworth (at least as understood after More’s association of Glisson and Spinoza) and Bayle, whom Hume seems to have read, and many other writers (e.g., Leibniz), as we have seen. The distinction he makes, then, between Stratonic Atheism and Spinoza’s “metaphysical atheism” most likely has to do either with substance monism (if he is thinking of Bayle’s Strato ) or with the mathematical method. Philo’s remarks about those math-loving philosophers with a “metaphysical head” is some evidence in favor of the latter interpretation, since no attack on the notion of substance as such is to be found in Part IX or anywhere else in the DNR (in contrast to the THN). Russell (2008, 57) writes, “I have identified two forms of atheism that were particularly important in the context in which the Treatise was written. These two forms correspond to Hume’s own suggestions in his ‘Early Memoranda’, where he comments on Cudworth’s classification … . The first of these is ‘the Pyrrhonian or Sceptic’. In contrast with this form of skeptical atheism, the second form of atheism is closely associated with naturalism and is more constructive in its commitments. Hume refers to this form of atheism as ‘Spinozism’, although it resembles what Bayle calls ‘Stratonic atheism’.” Russell is right, of course, about the fundamental similarity of Spinozism and Bayle’s Stratonism in terms of their naturalism, and he does recognize that Hume is making some distinction between them and suggests (324n47) that it may have to do with Toland’s “correction” of Spinoza’s account of motion; but I am suggesting that Hume may be distinguishing Spinozism from Stratonism in terms of methodology. Since the a priori approach can, it seems, go wherever the metaphysician wants it to go (to, e.g., Clarke’s traditional theism or Spinoza’s theo-naturalism or atheism), a different, more principled approach to the question is needed; and in this case we have only parsimony considerations, as inconclusive as they are, to guide us—but those, too, lead us in the direction of some form of naturalism (be it Epicurean or Stratonic). 89 The matter is complicated in Diderot’s case and underwent considerable development, but for the Encyclopédie, Spinoza symbolized “… précisément l’esprit de système, le triomphe de l’abstraction” versus “le culte de l’expérience” ( Vernière 1979/1954, 576). 90 Cf. Wilson 2016a, 1016–1017: “Materialism, as it is presented in Cudworth and Bayle, and the doctrine of active matter, as it appears in Toland, is formulaic and abstract. This made it an easy subject for attack in the Treatise as yet another metaphysics. The same can be said of Spinoza’s system, with its convoluted metaphysical language detached from the observation of nature. By contrast, the rich experimental and observational data of the texts of Buffon, Maupertuis and Robinet (who assisted in the translation of Hume’s works) on natural history, the history of the earth, generation, spontaneous generation, and regeneration (Trembley’s polyp) and comparative anatomy, lent a concreteness to materialism that could not be shrugged off with indifference to metaphysics and scepticism about invisibilia. Though widely attacked as ‘speculative’, and still beaten with the stick of the old a priori arguments about what ‘inert, passive’ matter could and could not do, the research programmes of vital materialism now presented a real and promising alternative to both the scepticism that attached to the earlier corpuscularian philosophy and to traditional metaphysics.” (One is reminded of Diderot’s remark in the “Conversation between D’Alembert and Diderot” (which F. Jacob (1982/1973, v) used as his epigram): “Look at this egg: with it you can overthrow all the schools of theology and all the churches in the world” (in Diderot 1966, 158; the “Conversation” was written in

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 389 1769 but not published until 1839)). Mori (2018a) presents convincing evidence that this a posteriori route to Stratonism (vs. Spinoza’s a priori route) was laid out clearly by Bayle in the Continuation des pensées diverses and the Réponse aux questions d’un provincal and taken up by Hume’s Philo in the DNR. 91 In so doing, I am carrying out a project suggested by David Stamos (1997, 75): “This is a thesis [viz., that Philo’s position is a version of Stratonism] which, to my knowledge, has yet to be systematically defended, particularly with a Part-by-Part examination of the Dialogues. To do so would require a separate (and somewhat long) paper. (I myself have completed this in manuscript form)”. To date, to my knowledge, Stamos has not published the mentioned manuscript. My “promenade” should be compared to Klever 2010b, 104–112. On page 104n180, Klever cites a talk I gave in 2007 (“Philo’s Stealthy Spinozism”) at which he was in attendance and mentions that he “… could not find a publication of this lecture”. This current work is the much-expanded publication he was seeking. 92 In a note on DNR II.3 Coleman cites Peter Browne’s 1728 The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of the Human Understanding. Browne had defended an analogical theory of theological predication. A few years later, in his 1733 Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human, Browne further articulated and defended this theory and attacked Berkeley who, in Aliciphron, had himself attacked Browne’s theory and defended, in its place, a quite different and arguably anticognitivist account of much theological language (see Williford & Jakapi 2009). In the present context, a couple of passages from The Minute Philosopher are worth reproducing; Lysicles says (IV.16; Berman 1993, 105): “You must know then that at bottom the being of God is a point in itself of small consequence, and a man may make this concession without yielding much. The great point is what sense the word God is to be taken in. The very Epicureans allowed the being of gods; but then they were indolent gods, unconcerned with human affairs. Hobbes allowed a corporeal God: and Spinosa held the universe to be God.” Lysicles contninues (IV.17; Berman 1993, 105–106): “You must know, Diagoras, a man of much reading and inquiry, had discovered that once upon a time the most profound and speculative divines [David Berman argues that this is meant as a reference to Peter Browne, among others], finding it impossible to reconcile the attributes of God, taken in the common sense, or in any known sense, with human reason, and the appearances of things, taught that the words knowledge, wisdom, goodness, and such like, when spoken of the Deity, must be understood in a quite different sense from what they signify in the vulgar acceptation, or from anything we can form a notion of or conceive. Hence, whatever objections might be made against the attributes of God they easily solved, by denying those attributes belonged to God, in this, or that, or any known particular sense or notion; which was the same thing as to deny they belonged to Him at all. And thus denying the attributes of God, they in effect denied His being, though perhaps they were not aware of it.” And finally, Lysicles says (IV.18; Berman 1993, 107): “Nor will it avail to say there is something in this unknown being [i.e., God] analogous to knowledge and goodness; that is to say, which produceth those effects which we could not conceive to be produced by men, in any degree, without knowledge and goodness. For, this is in fact to give up the point in dispute between theists and atheists, the question having always been, not whether there was a [first] principle (which point was allowed by all philosophers, as well before and since Anaxagoras), but whether this principle was a νοῦς, a thinking intelligent being; that is to say, whether that order, and beauty, and use, visible in natural effects, could be produced by anything but a Mind or Intelligence, in the proper sense of the word? And whether there must not be true, real, proper knowledge, in the First Cause? We will, therefore, acknowledge that all those natural effects which are vulgarly ascribed to knowledge and wisdom, proceed from a being in which there is, properly speaking,

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Kenneth Williford no knowledge or wisdom at all, but only something else, which in reality is the cause of those things which men, for want of knowing better, ascribe to what they all knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.” See also Paganini 2013, 220–225 on the extent to which this portion of Alciphron may have had an influence on Hume’s framing of the anti-anthropomorphism issue in the DNR; Paganini argues (225–231) that Bayle’s Continuation §§XX-XXI may be the common source for Berkeley and Hume here. We quote Berkeley’s Lysicles once more in note 131 vis-à-vis Philo’s “irenic” conclusion, which is clearly adumbrated in this passage. Recall that this is a move that Clarke found himself having to make, since he had to grant that the essence of God is incomprehensible to us, though he tried to forestall its consequences, viz., that it opened the possibility that the material world may be the Necessary Being (as well as that God creates the world by necessity). These are, of course, contentious matters in both Hume and Spinoza scholarship, and we cannot go into them here. Compare Demea’s formulation with Hume’s own discussion of Spinoza on substance monism in the THN (I.iv.5; 2002/1739–40, 157–158): “The fundamental principle of the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists everywhere, without any local presence. … The same substratum … supports the most different modifications, without any difference in itself; and varies them, without any variation. Neither time, nor place, nor all the diversity of nature are able to produce any composition or change in its perfect simplicity and identity.” This is anecdotal, but on two occasions in the early 2000s when I heard talks by prominent ID (Intelligent Design theory) advocates, I asked them both some version of this question: Well, is the designer inferred from your design argument (based, if memory serves, in one case on the bacterial flagellum and, on the other, on the fact that the earth is an especially good planet to do astronomy on) “irreducibly complex” or not (hence itself requiring a design explanation by their own criteria and thus threatening a regress)? In both cases, the official reply was to the effect that that is not part of ID theory qua contribution to science—essentially answering the question the way Cleanthes does here. But, off the record, one said that the traditional reply is that the Designer is “simple”. This dilemma rightly does most of the heavy lifting in Dawkins’ (2006) The God Delusion. Dawkins does (157) in fact attribute an awareness of the problem to Hume (via citing Dennett 1995). Dawkins shows more historical awareness than Mori (2021, 324), who mentions Claude Bérigard (1578–1663), Bayle, Jean Meslier (1664–1729) and Hume in this connection, gives him credit for. It would not be completely surprising to find some philosopher from Classical Antiquity making the same argument, though I am unaware of it. (But see Sedley’s (2007, 221–222) discussion of certain anonymous Stoic writers who argued that the divine intelligence must itself be extraordinarily complex since human intelligence (its supposed product) is complex.) One does find the objection raised (and resolved in favor of what Dawkins and Dennett would regard as a divine “skyhook”) in Vācaspati Miśra’s c. Ninth-Century commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra 4.1.21 (see Guha, Dasti & Phillips (eds.) 2021, 50). Cf. Hume’ remark in Section 1 of The Natural History of Religion ( Hume 2007/1757, 35–36) that “Ask him, whence that animal arose; he will tell you, from the copulation of its parents. And these, whence? From the copulation of theirs. A few removes satisfy his curiosity, and set the objects at such a distance, that he entirely loses sight of them. Imagine not, that he will so much as start the question, whence the first animal; much less, whence the whole system or united fabric of the universe arose. Or, if you start such a question to him, expect not, that he will employ his mind with

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 391 any anxiety about a subject, so remote, so uninteresting, and which so much exceeds the bounds of his capacity.” 98 In the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Letters of the Pensées diverses, Bayle argues, among other things, that (using the section titles) “Demons Prefer Idolatry to Atheism” (§113), that “Atheism is not a Greater Evil than Idolatry” (§114), that “Idolatry Makes Men More Difficult to Convert than Does Atheism” (§119), that “Neither the Mind nor the Heart is in a Better Condition in Idolaters than in Atheists” (§122) that the “Very Vicious among the Pagans were not Atheists” (§130), that “Idolaters have Surpassed Atheists in the Crime of Divine Lese-Majesty” (§132), that “Atheism does not Necessarily lead to the Corruption of Morals” (§133), and that “Atheists are not Distinguished by Impurity of Morals” (§174). See Bayle 2000/1683 and Mori 2021, 127–137 for an important discussion. 99 In this connection, it is important to note that Hume knew and corresponded with Buffon, who sent Hume several volumes of his Histoire Naturelle (see Norton & Norton 1996, 27). See also Knox-Shaw 2008. Buffon had worked on various estimates of the age of the earth, arriving a figures between 75,000 and three million years (see Albritton, 2002, ch. 7), still, of course, orders of magnitude from the true figure but, by the standards of the biblical chronology, then still taken seriously, quite heterodox. Buffon was not alone in pushing the traditional geohistorical boundaries. This process of geological boundary pushing had started in earnest with the 1681 publication of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth. Paolo Rossi (1984, 85–86) summarizes the situation well: “In the years during which Hume was writing his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion …, the great geological and cosmogonic discussion that [Thomas Burnet] … had set off in the 1680s had not completely died down. In 1748 the Telliamed of Benoît de Maillet was published; the year after saw the publication of Leibniz’s Protogaea and of the first volume, almost completely devoted to the history and theory of the earth, of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, and in 1752 Jean-Étienne Guettard published his notes entitled Quelques montagnes de la France qui ont été des volcans. Between 1750 and 1752 Nicolas Antione Boulanger wrote the manuscript of his Anecdotes physiques de l’histoire de la nature, in which he considered, as the original title indicates, ‘the origins of the valleys, the mountains, and the other external and internal irregularities of the terrestrial globe, with physical observations on all the vicissitudes that seem to have befallen it’. In 1755 Boulanger wrote the article ‘Déluge’ for the Encyclopédie and, in 1766, his Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages was published. These problems are also reflected in the articles ‘Fossiles’ (1757) and ‘Terre’ (1765) by d’Holbach and in various of Diderot’s and Voltaire’s passages and comments. All the ingredients of a typically ‘Burnetian’ vision of the history of the earth are present in the Telliamed of Benoît de Maillet: Cartesian mechanics, the rejection of final causes and anthropomorphism, the thesis of the eternity of matter, the affirmation that the entire surface of the globe was for immemorial ages covered with water, the doctrine of the formation of the continents and the mountains after the water receded, and, finally, the ‘Lucretian’ thesis of the origin of animal and human life from ‘seeds’ and from marine creatures.” See also Belgrado 1988, 59–62. Note, finally, that naturalistic geology was sometimes explicitly associated with Spinozism (via a “common cause” in Cartesian physics (in Domenico d’Aulisio) or via an explicit rejection of miracles (in Charles Blount)); see Rossi 1984, 74. And while we do not know if the “father” of modern geology, James Hutton, who was friends with Adam Smith and Joseph Black, ever met Hume (see Baxter 2003, 90–91; Repcheck 2003, 129–130), we do know that his work proceeded, in a way, in the shadow of Hume. Dennis Dean (1992, 18) explains: “… [D]eists like Hutton were probably outnumbered in the [Royal] Society [of Edinburgh where Hutton publicly presented his work in 1785] by well-placed Presbyterians … . They and other auditors had learned to suspect certain geological theories, and perhaps the

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Kenneth Williford genre as a whole, of outright infidelity. Ominously, the one Scottish philosopher who had displayed real interest in geological theorizing was the recently deceased (1776) David Hume; his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) advocated uniform natural processes disturbingly like Hutton’s. But, unlike Hutton, Hume also disparaged any attempt to find God’s attributes in nature.” On the history of geology in this period (and more), see also Haber 1959, Jacob 1982/1973, ch. 3, Oldroyd 1996, Rudwick 2005, and Richet 2007. Commenting on this passage, Rossi (1984, 75) writes, “The ‘incontestable proofs’ taken from the [fossil] ‘shells’ had much reinforced the picture of the world in mutation, which appeared to many as radically different from the image that insisted on finalism and on the perfection of nature. In the later Seventeenth Century, the debate about these shells had gradually broadened until it was transformed into a [debate about] cosmology and a cosmogony.” Bailey and O’Brien (2014, 226) cite part of this passage (beginning with ‘were I obliged’ and ending with ‘alterations’) and point out that if taken to be expressive of Hume’s own views, then Hume is a naturalist. In a note (n24, loc. cit.) they relate this passage to a statement of Cotta’s in Cicero’s De natura deorum. Replying to the Stoic Balbus, Cotta says, “… I liked that part of your discourse in which you spoke of the concord and harmony of nature … but I disapproved of your claim that this could have come to pass only through the cohesion achieved by the unique divine breath [the Stoic providential ‘Pneuma’]. That coherence and permanence is achieved by the forces not of the gods, but of nature; and within nature lies a sort of fellow-feeling which the Greeks call sumpatheia. But the greater the spontaneity of the process, the less must we regard it as the operation of divine reason” ( Cicero 2008, 117; III.28). I cite the passage in a different translation and give a few more lines. In my view, Bailey and O’Brien are not at all wrong to make this association; and it is perfectly compatible with the Stratonic-Spinozistic association as well. “It was usual with the Peripatetics … when the cause of any phenomenon was demanded, to have recourse to their faculties or occult qualities, and to say, for instance; that bread nourished by its nutritive faculty, and senna purged by its purgative: But it has been discovered, that this subterfuge was nothing but the disguise of ignorance; and that these philosophers, though less ingenuous, really said the same thing with the sceptics or the vulgar, who fairly confessed, that they knew not the cause of these phenomena. In like manner, when it is asked, what cause produces order in the ideas of the supreme being, can any other reason be assigned by you, anthropomorphites, than that it is a rational faculty, and that such is the nature of the deity? But why a similar answer will not be equally satisfactory in accounting for the order of the world, without having recourse to any such intelligent creator, as you insist on, may be difficult to determine. It is only to say, that such is the nature of material objects, and that they are all originally possessed of a faculty of order and proportion. These are only more learned and elaborate ways of confessing our ignorance; nor has the one hypothesis any real advantage above the other, except in its greater conformity to vulgar prejudices.” In DNR VII.17, 56, Philo says “The Brahmins assert, that the world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again, and resolving it into his own essence. Here is a species of cosmogony, which appears to us ridiculous; because a spider is a little contemptible animal, whose operations we are never likely to take for a model of the whole universe. But still here is a new species of analogy, even in our globe. And were there a planet, wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible), this inference would there appear as natural and irrefragable as that which in our planet ascribes the origin of all things to design and intelligence, as explained by Cleanthes. Why an orderly system may not be

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 393 spun from the belly as well as from the brain, it will be difficult for him to give a satisfactory reason.” This reference to the “Brahmins” and their “spider” metaphor occurs in Remark A of Bayle’s “Spinoza” article ( Bayle 1983, 35; 1952/1697, 297) in Bayle’s lengthy quotation of the illustrious François Bernier (physician, translator, friend of Gassendi and progenitor of “scientific” racism), via which quotation Bayle compares Spinoza’s metaphysics to “… a doctrine which very much prevails in the East Indies [esp. India]” (essentially Advaita Vedanta and Sufi adaptations thereof). Discussion of the metaphor also occurs in Raphson’s De spatio reali (1697, 21—NB: the official publication year of the first edition of Bayle’s Dictionnaire (which was first printed in October of 1696; see Mori 2020/1999, 350)) in the very paragraph (of ch. I, §11) in which he discusses Spinoza’s “pantheismus”. So, Hume’s reference to the spider metaphor, provided this context, is, arguably, yet another nod to Spinozism. The spider metaphor traces back, ultimately, to the Mundaka Upanishad (1.1); see Adamson and Ganeri (2020, 27, 336–337) who mention Bayle, Bernier and this passage of Hume’s DNR, however, quite missing the main point of Hume’s reference (which was emphatically not simply to dismiss the metaphor). 104 But see two important papers that map aspects of the dialectic between the Stratonic and Epicruean elements in Bayle and in Hume’s Philo, Paganini 1978 and Belgrado 1988, respectively. 105 There was, of course, a general association of Spinoza and Epicurus (and neoEpicurean Atomists like Hobbes and Gassendi) in the Early Modern period due to the perception of a shared atheism, anti-teleology, shared diagnosis of the origins and functions of superstition, and even sometimes their metaphysics of the soul or mind (see Leibniz 1998, 255 (in a draft letter to Bayle written in 1702)). But this did not, of course, extend to other aspects of their metaphysics; see, e.g., Kors 2016, 288. As Bayle put it, “… there have never been two systems more opposite than his [Spinoza’s] and that of the Atomists. He is in agreement with Epicurus in what concerns the rejection of Providence, but in all the rest of their systems they are like fire and water” (Bayle 1991/1697, 305). On various aspects of the complex relation of Spinoza to Epicureanism, see, e.g., Wilson 2008, 125–135, and Vardoulakis 2020. Wilson (2016b, 73) is, of course, right that the “… thesis of ‘mechanical’ man in La Mettrie, and the claim that man is helplessly subject to the laws of nature in Holbach, have no Epicurean pedigree; Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff are their direct progenitors. The spontaneous emergence of order from disorder in Hobbes and in Mandeville is, by contrast, genuinely Epicurean.” See also Fytakis 2019 for a discussion of the ways in which Spinoza (esp. in terms of metaphysics and physics) is clearly not an Epicurean. For discussions of the early association (esp. on the part of Fénelon and Jacquelot) of Spinoza and Epicurus see Lagrée 1994 and, again, Fytakis 2019. For further discussion of La Mettrie in this context, see Wolfe 2009: “La Mettrie is indeed a self-made epicuro-Spinozist rather than a scholar of Epicureanism or Spinozism; but the Epicurean context had to be in place first, from the libertin, freethinking tradition onwards, for his materialist reading of Spinoza to be possible” (75). See also Hoslett 1941, Moreau 1994, and Bove 1994. For an important re-evaluation of Spinoza’s relation to (neo-)Atomism, see the unpublished but freely available study by Buyse (ms.). 106 Mori (2021, 250) writes: “… far from coincidentally, Philo alludes to the most famous of Toland’s theories, namely the self-motion of matter: ‘There is not probably, at present, in the whole universe, one particle of matter at absolute rest’, suggesting that this eternal agitation seems ‘essential to it’ [DNR VIII.5–6, p. 59]. Unsatisfied, however, Philo even comes (first in Part VI and then again in Part IX) to posit a necessitarian conception of being which is strongly reminiscent of Spinoza.” Mori (2018a, 766) also cites Remark G of Bayle’s article on Ovid (“Ovide”) in the

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Dictionnare as of influence on Hume’s framing of the Old Epicurean Hypothesis. Cf. Belgrado 1988, 63–65. 107 While Toland is, strictly speaking, no more an Epicurean than Spinoza (see Mori 2021, 207), he was, as well, sometimes associated with Epicureanism (e.g., by Leibniz), and his conception of a material world (whether atomistically conceived of or not) in perpetual flux giving rise to ever new forms (and unguided by the hand of a designer) has a clear similarity to the Epicurean cosmology. Lurbe (1994, 573; my translation) sums it up well: “Toland’s physics is Epicurean only if one gives this term the restricted and polemical meaning Leibniz gives it: being Epicurean consists in explaining everything by the play of figures and movements and in not recognizing any creator god at the origin of the world. But this would be to discount the powerful Stoic element that informs Toland’s thought with his continuous and homogeneous conception of matter. At the most, one can say that, in the [1720] Pantheisticon, Toland strongly modifies this conception by introducing a corpuscular theory of matter, which puts him … on the path of a rapprochement with the Epicureanism.” 108 Philo says (DNR VIII.9, p. 61), “It is in vain, therefore, to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain know how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted? Do we not find, that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form?” This line of argument, of course, goes all the way back to the Epicureans (and even to Empedocles) and was well preserved in Lucretius (see Wilson 2008, 97–98 and Sedley 2007, 150–155). But though Hume need not have been relying on him, it is still instructive (as noted in Glass 1959, 57–58) to compare this passage (and Philo’s presentation of the Old Epicurean Hypothesis generally) with the following from Maupertuis’s 1750 Essay [Essai] de cosmologie: “But couldn’t one say that in the chance combination of Nature’s productions, since only those maintaining certain adaptive relations can subsist, it is not astonishing that these adaptive relations are found in all the species that currently exist? Chance, one will say, has produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number of them are constructed in such a way that the parts of the animal can satisfy its needs; in an infinitely larger number of cases, there are no such conveniences, and no order—all of these latter perish. An animal without a mouth cannot live; those that lack reproductive organs cannot be perpetuated. The only ones remaining are those exhibiting order and adjustment. And these species that we see today are but the smallest part of those that a blind fate has produced” ( de Maupertuis, 1750, 15–17; my (somewhat free) translation). The Essai de cosmologie is the first work in volume I of the 1756 edition of Maupertuis’s works, which Hume may well have owned (see Norton & Norton 1996, 113, item 840). On the influence of Maupertuis and Buffon on the DNR, see Knox-Shaw 2008. 109 See note 86. As Sedley (2007, 159) notes, citing Lucretius (De rerum natura, V, 526–533), on the Classical Atomist modal picture,“… anything that is possible is also actual in at least some of the infinitely many existing worlds … [, and] every possible world is, somewhere in the universe, an actual world”. Note, then, that, on this conception, a world is just a part of the one actual universe or totality; ‘world’ is not being used in the contemporary sense, though one could easily translate. It is clear that Spinoza thinks there is only one universe or Totality and that every possible state of the universe (every possible arrangement of finite modes) is as it is, contrary to Epicurean metaphysics, by logico-metaphysical necessity (which is not distinct from causal necessity for Spinoza). Now, we may well wonder if someone who fits Don Quixote’s description, for example, really does ride somewhere out there, since it is surely an epistemically possible state of affairs. On Spinoza’s view we don’t actually know if this is metaphysically possible (and mere epistemic possibility is no sure guide). If it is metaphysically possible, then, indeed, somewhere and sometime in the

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history of the one universe, this Quixote-ish being does indeed ride, and necessarily so (at just those times and places); if not, then necessarily not. Instead of different “possible worlds” in the contemporary sense, we are dealing with different spatiotemporal locales in the one actual and necessary world—hence the appropriateness of calling this conception of modality “Diodoran” (which one could equally well apply to Epicurean modality). In any case, this was clearly Leibniz’s interpretation of Spinoza’s conception of modalities. And, importantly, he also connected this to the Epicurean (à la Hobbes) conception. In a fragment written between 1685 and 1689, Leibniz (1989, 100) writes, “If everything that exits were necessary, then it would follow that only things which existed at some time would be possible (as Hobbes and Spinoza hold) and that matter would receive all possible forms (as Descartes held). And so, one could not imagine a novel that did not actually take place at some time and in some place, which is absurd”. (Cf. Leibniz 1989, 282.) Of course, Leibniz’s reductio here depends on a naïve conceivability-to-possibility principle, one Spinoza rejected. Bayle’s arguments in Remarks Q and T of the “Spinoza” article in the Dictionnaire (Bayle 1991/1697, 317–318; 320–323) arguing, respectively, that Spinoza has no right to rule out the possibility of spirits (angels, demons, etc.) and eternal torments, are more effective in this regard, since they aim not to show that some epistemic possibility is in fact realized somewhere/sometime but only that, by Spinoza’s own principles, one cannot know them to be impossible and so should not dismiss them as Spinoza does. See Sedley 2007, 136–139, 144–145, 155–166 and Taub 2009, 115f. for discussions of the role of infinity in Democritic-Epicurean cosmology. This issue is complicated somewhat by the fact that even though Epicurus allowed for infinitely many token worlds, he thought that there were only finitely many world types, because (he thought) there are only finitely many basic atomic types; moreover, his clinamen doctrine ruled out complete horizontal determinism, since token atomic-level, typeidentical, finite world-sequences need not have token atomic-level type identical histories or futures; see Sedley 2007, 160f. In the Theodicy, Leibniz maintains that God’s being constrained by “moral necessity”, as opposed to physical and mathematical forms, obviates the objection. For example, after citing a passage from Bayle in which Bayle claims, in effect, that the appeal to God’s supreme wisdom in explaining why God made a world with so much suffering when “He” could have done otherwise entails that God is subject to metaphysical necessity (which then would push in the direction of the Stratonic Slide), Leibniz says, “[t]his objection has been sufficiently overthrown: it is only a moral necessity; and it is always a happy necessity to be bound to act in accordance with the rules of perfect wisdom” ( Leibniz 1985/1710, 332). The issue is not whether it is a happy necessity; that there are “rules of perfect wisdom” or any necessities at all, even moral ones, to which God is beholden, is sufficient to put us on the path to the Stratonic Slide and end in a position in which God is either explanatorily superfluous or “Himself” just part of the great cosmic “machine”. In fact, in Remark I of the “Paulicians” article ( Bayle 1737/1697, vol. 4, 523b-524a), Bayle, speaking of Calvinism (and, by implication in the context, Occasionalism), says, “To represent God as a Being who makes laws against sin, which he induces men to transgress that he may have a pretense to punish them … is to expose religion to the raillery of libertines. That Being will not be deprived of its existence whilst it is supposed to be the author of sin; which is evident, for a cause must needs exist when it acts: but it will prove at last to be nothing else but the world itself, or the God of the Spinozists, a Being which exists and acts necessarily, without knowing what it does, and is intelligent only because the thoughts of creatures are its modifications.” Cf. Mori 2020/1999, 123. Cf. Spinoza (Ethics, Iap; Spinoza 1985, 446): “But to those who ask ‘why God did not

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create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason?’ I answer only ‘because he did not lack material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest’ … .” The general naturalistic point is related to, and easily explains, the fact that the biological world is subject to Philo’s “four circumstances on which depend all or the greatest part of the ills that molest sensible creatures … ” (DNR XI.4, p.80), notably, “… the great frugality with which all powers and faculties are distributed to every particular being” (DNR XI.9, p, 82) and the algedonic regulation system modulo the “inaccurate workmanship” that allows, for example, for hyperpathic pain on the one hand and congenital insensitivity to pain, on the other. 114 To repeat: “In the context in which Hume was writing … ”, Russell (2021, 341–342) says, “there can be little doubt that dominant atheistic thinker … was Benedict Spinoza.” 115 See, e.g., Kemp Smith in Hume 1947/1935, 9–24; Gaskin 1978, 146–149; Penelhum 1983; Livingston 1986; Janz 1988; Coleman 1989; Immerwahr 1996; Harvey 1999; Phillips 1999; O’Connor 2001, ch. 10; Sessions 2001, 2002; Falkenstein 2003, 2009; Baier 2008, chs. 3 & 5; Yoder 2008; Cordry 2011; Hardy 2012; Garrett 2012, 2015, 9.5; Lemmens 2012a, 2012b; Fergusson 2013; Willis, 2015; Graham 2016, 2020; Black & Gressis 2017; Fogelin 2017, II.4; Mazza 2018; O’Connor, this volume; Nussbaum, this volume; Wright, this volume. Somewhat ironically, even De Dijn 2012 does not exactly make this connection. By contrast, Stamos (1997, 82) gets very close and echoes Reich’s interpretation (though Stamos does not make the StratoSpinoza connection): “… [T]he ‘true system of theism’ that Philo elaborates in Part XII, a theism, or atheism—call it what you will— [is] born out of wonder and awe at both the immense and intricate workings of the universe, a wonder and awe that has inspired scientists from Strato to Einstein. As Philo says, ‘To know God … ... is to worship him. All other worship is indeed absurd, superstitious, and even impious’”. Note that one must be very careful about how ‘wonder’ is understood here—see note 130. Gordon Graham (2014, 6), though speaking of the Natural History of Religion, writes, “Hume’s main purpose lies in determining where superstition ends and true religion begins (if anywhere). In pursuing this purpose, he is, perhaps unwittingly, following in Spinoza’s footsteps. Spinoza [in the Tractatus] also wants to find (so to speak) the inner pulse of religion that will enable him to differentiate it from dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical politics, and empty ritual.” Curiously, William Brenner (1999, 18–19) seems, in a way, to associate Philo’s anti-anthropomorphic “natural piety” (as he calls it) with Spinoza’s but immediately speculates that Hume himself found necessitarian metaphysics to be a threat to the “… the wonder that stimulates creative scientific investigation”—hardly a reasonable worry from the Spinozistic point of view, of course, since all one needs to experience this type of wonder is for there to be a mismatch between our prima facie modal intuitions and real necessities (that might then only be discoverable empirically but can in some instances be eventually shown to be (relatively or perhaps even absolutely) necessary—on analogy with Philo’s “skillful algebraist”). Moreover, the eventual appreciation of relative or absolute necessity adds to the sense of wonder—the “joy of understanding”! Brenner refers to Donald Livingston’s (1984, 174–175) discussion in which the latter argues that the “passion of wonder” that animates the philosophical theist is “… possible only because philosophers are able to view empirical regularities [as well as the very existence of the world] … as, in some way, ‘unexpected’ or ‘astonishing’”. Livingston relates this capacity for surprise to what he regards as “Hume’s principle of the radical contingency of the world …”, which, he thinks, Hume derives from his modal epistemology with its (naïve) conceivability-to-possibility principle. He further claims that Hume owes a conceptual debt here “… to the Christian tradition and specifically to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo”. And he cites (but completely misses the irony in) this passage from the EHU (2007/1748, 143; XII.29nd): “That impious

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maxim of the ancient philosophy, Ex nihilo, nihil fit, by which the creation of matter was excluded, ceases to be a maxim, according to this philosophy. Not only the will of the Supreme Being may create matter; but for aught we know a priori, the will of any other being might create it, or any other cause that the most whimsical imagination can assign.” The irony here is this: some version of the ex nihilo, nihil fit principle was routinely called upon (by Clarke and other traditional theists) in the attempt to demonstrate the existence of God; thus while rejecting it does eliminate ancient (as well as the Spinozistic) arguments for the eternity of matter, it equally threatens traditional theism. The traditional theist faces a terrible dilemma: accept the principle and concede that the material universe may, for all we know, be the Necessary Being; or reject the principle and lose any particular reason for thinking that the God of traditional theism is required to account for the existence of matter. The interminable debate on what Hume meant by ‘true religion’, ‘philosophical religion’, and ‘genuine theism’ is understandable given the fact that he says very little about what exactly he means in any text and says the most about the terms in the DNR, the dialogic form of which creates multiple ambiguities. Contextual information, like that provided here, can, however, surely help. I agree with Bijlsma (2017, 516–517) that “[w]hen we look at Spinoza from the perspective of the tradition of philosophical religions, his philosophy can very well be thought of as constituting such a religion—although he does not explicitly use the term ‘philosophical religion’ himself. He does use ‘true religion’ (vera religio), a related term but with a broader meaning: it refers to philosophical religion as well as purified popular religion, and contrasts with superstition” (emphasis added). As Russell (2021, 353) says, “… Hume’s entire philosophy is structured and oriented around an irreligious program in which Spinoza (along with Hobbes) was a pivotal figure in the various debates that Hume was primarily focused on. In light of all this, it is not credible that Hume would not have considered Spinoza a key figure in this context. At the very least, the burden of proof rests (heavily) with those who would deny this.” Cf. Nadler (2011, 156): “True religion [in Spinoza], then—as opposed to sectarian religion—is about nothing more than moral behavior. It is not what you believe but what you do that matters.” See also James 2012, esp. ch. 8 and Balibar 2008, 6–11. For comparisons of Spinoza and Hume on superstition, fear and the psychological roots of religion (inter alia) see Boss 1975, Popkin 1979, Klever 2010b, 99–104, De Dijn 2012, and Bijlsma 2015b. Compare: “If men were always able to regulate their affairs with sure judgment, or if fortune always smiled upon them, they would not get caught up in any superstition. But since people are often reduced to such desperate straits that they cannot arrive at any sold judgment and as the good things of fortune for which they have a boundless desire are quite uncertain, they fluctuate wretchedly between hope and fear. This is why most people are quite ready to believe anything. … [W]e see at once that it is especially those who have a boundless desire for things that are uncertain who are the most prone to superstition of every kind … . … [F]ear is the root from which superstition is born, maintained and nourished” ( Spinoza 2007/1669–70, 3–4; from the first paragraphs of the Preface to the Tractatus). “In proportion as any man’s course of life is governed by accident, we always find, that he increases in superstition; as may particularly be observed of gamesters and sailors, who, though, of all mankind, the least capable of serious reflection, abound most in frivolous and superstitious apprehensions” ( Hume 2007/1757, 41; NHR §3.20); and “Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of Superstition” (from “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm”; Hume 1987/1741–77, 74). Cf. Graham 2014, 9: “True religion, for Spinoza, is an intellectual love of God, but since not everyone is capable of purely intellectual love, Scripture comes in narrative and symbolic form that can more readily inspire ordinary people.” Cf. Russell 2021, 346–347.

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121 Cf. de Cruz & de Smedt 2015, esp. ch. 4; McCauley 2011; and Guthrie, 1993. 122 See Hume (2007/1757, 40–41; Natural History of Religion, §3.2): “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. … Nor is a river-god or hamadryad always taken for a mere poetical or imaginary personage; but may sometimes enter into the real creed of the ignorant vulgar … . Nay, philosophers cannot entirely exempt themselves from this natural frailty; but have oft ascribed to inanimate matter the horror of a vacuum, sympathies, antipathies, and other affections of human nature. The absurdity is not less, while we cast our eyes upwards; and transferring, as is too usual, human passions and infirmities to the deity, represent him as jealous and revengeful, capricious and partial, and, in short, a wicked and foolish man, in every respect but his superior power and authority. No wonder, then, that mankind, being placed in such an absolute ignorance of causes, and being at the same time so anxious concerning their future fortune, should immediately acknowledge a dependence on invisible powers, possessed of sentiment and intelligence. The unknown causes, which continually employ their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought and reason and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves.” Compare this with the following statement from Spinoza’s Appendix to Part I of the Ethics ( Spinoza 1985, 441): “And since they had never heard anything about the temperament of these [supernatural] rulers, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained that the Gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honor. So it has happened that each of them has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshiping God, so that God might love them above all the rest, and direct the whole of Nature according to the needs of their blind and insatiable greed. Thus this prejudice was changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in their minds.” It is notable that, in this regard, Spinoza and Hume were key influences on the anthropologist, Stewart Guthrie’s theory of religion developed in his Faces in the Clouds; see the many references to both in Guthrie 1993 (on p. 63 he notes their similarity of outlook). 123 See, e.g., Austin 1985; see Foley 2006 for criticisms of the “ironic” interpretation of the “reversal” that I am supporting. At the least, we cannot reasonably think that Hume was unaware of the ambiguities and interpretive underdetermination he was building into the DNR. When we consider that Part XII, coming after Philo’s championing of StratonismSpinozism and Epicureanism, his Baylean presentation of the Problem of Evil, and his periodic endorsements of an official skepticism about metaphysical matters, contains this “reversal”, in which he appears to support the Design Argument, the “irenic” softening of the concept of God so as to make the difference between atheism and theism trifling, and, finally, a Baylean endorsement of Christian fideism (cf. Mazza & Mori, this volume), we are left with the interpretive choice of attributing to Philo complete psychologicoepistemic instability, or one of the (mutually incompatible) positions he has seemed to endorse over the course of the DNR. If we rely on that principle of hermeneutics that tells us to use the preponderant message to interpret seeming discrepancies, it would seem that our choice over Philo’s “real view” is only between skepticism and some form of naturalism (reminiscent of the Problematik of Hume’s Treatise, on which in this very connection see Russell 2008). As in Bayle, Philo’s overall message seems to be that if one is not a skeptic, then one ought rationally to be a naturalist of some sort (e.g., Stratonic or Epicurean), and that if one does not want to be remain agnostic but rather be a “sound, believing Christian” (DNR XII.33, p. 102), then one’s skepticism will have to issue in the

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rejection not only of natural religion but of human reason itself. This latter is a kind of position few will find attractive, though, some, like Hamann, surely did (see, e.g., Popkin 1951, Redmond 1987), and, no doubt, there will always be those who find irrationalist fideism somehow religiously profound. On the hermeneutic score, it must be admitted that the “Philo as sincere fideist” does have at least one advantage: rather than attributing Philo’s inconsistencies to non-rational factors (a “natural belief” born of youthful indoctrination, etc.) as Foley does, irrationalist fideism, with its rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, should lead us not to expect any consistency whatsoever from Philo; we should not be surprised, then, by anything he says. For another take on the consistency issue, see O’Connor, this volume. See Ryan, this volume, on this passage. “… [T]his doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something that he lacks” ( Spinoza 1985, 442; Ethics, Appendix to Part I). Cf. Klever 2010b 92–93. Cf. Donagan 1996, 355–356: “God, as absolutely infinite being, is likewise absolutely perfect, not as satisfying some a priori human standard, but as providing the only ultimate standard by which human beings can judge anything as imperfect. As Spinoza puts it, ‘[t]he perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they delight or offend men’s senses, or because they agree with human nature or are repugnant to it’ (E Iap)”. In De natura deorum (II.21; Cicero 2008, 55) Cicero’s Balbus articulates the Stoic version of this view: “By a similar argument it can be established that the universe is wise, and blessed, and eternal, for all the embodiments of these attributes are superior to those without them, and nothing is superior to the universe. This will lead to the conclusion that the universe is God.” Russell (2021, 341n2): “… [W]hat Hume refers to as ‘genuine theism’ … involves the minimal notion of an intelligent, immaterial being that explains the origin of the world (qua its creator and governor) … .” Russell refers to §4.1–2 of the Natural History ( Hume 2007/1757, 44). One might also mention the second sentence of its Introduction (“The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.”, ibid., 34) and the usage of ‘genuine theists’ in Hume’s discussion of the Getes in §7.3 (“The Getes, commonly called immortal, from their steady belief of the soul’s immortality, were genuine theists and unitarians. They affirmed Zamolxis, their deity, to be the only true god … .” ibid., 57). Falkenstein’s 2009 study of Hume’s of ‘true religion’, ‘genuine theism’, etc., remains, in my opinion, unsurpassed (cf. Falkenstein, this volume). On ‘genuine theism’ Falkenstein (2009, 190) writes, “We need … to be circumspect about Hume’s references to ‘genuine theism’. Sometimes he meant to refer to genuine or pure monotheism, and so intended a contrast with polytheism. At other times he meant to refer to the belief in a being who is not merely invisible, intelligent, and powerful, but also concerned for our happiness, and so intended a contrast, not only with polytheism, but with any religious system that represents the deity as either immoral or indifferent.” It is clear than in DNR XII.24, p. 99 Cleanthes has the latter, richer conception of genuine theism in mind. Again, following Russell, I do not take it for granted that this is also what Philo means by ‘true religion’ (apart, of course, from the shared rejection of polytheism). Cf. Leven 2004, 16: “Spinoza uses the term true or universal religion, vera religio, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to distinguish between … religion and superstition … between the divine light that produces equanimity and fellowship and the ‘arrogant ravings’ that produce strife and persecution … . In this sense, the Tractatus goes further than the Ethics, which reserves the term religion only for what Spinoza directly approves, namely, … the idea and knowledge of God.” Compare this with

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Carlisle (2021, 134), who, after citing the passage from the Tractatus that follows this note in the main text, writes, “In the Ethics Spinoza offers a fuller and more philosophical account of this religious ideal [i.e., “that knowledge and love of God is the highest good”], bringing to full maturity a view he had expressed in his earliest works.” For a detailed discussion of the development of Spinoza’s thought on this matter, see Fraenkel 2012, ch 4. And see, esp. Nadler 2011, ch. 7 for a full account of the two dimensions of Spinoza’s conception of true religion; as he notes (47): “The command to know and love God is an ambiguous one for Spinoza. Its meaning depends on whether it is addressed to someone who is philosophically sophisticated and intellectually superior to the masses or to someone who, belonging to the multitude (vulgus), is unlikely to achieve cognition of higher speculative truths.” 129 On the controversy about whether Seneca actually said this (see Coleman’s note 15 on page 101 of her edition of the DNR, for example), see Falkenstein 2012. Falkenstein is surely right on this matter (102): “Seneca said exactly what Hume claimed he did. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 95.47 reads ‘Deum colit qui novit’: The one who worships God is the one who is acquainted with him. At this point in the text, Seneca was engaged in denouncing superstitious attempts to serve the gods by means of practices such as lighting lamps, offering morning salutations, thronging the doors of temples, or offering presents. These actions are done in the belief that serving the gods in whatever ways are imagined to be pleasing to them will avoid their wrath and punishment. But, Seneca declared, these forms of worship arise from an incorrect understanding of the nature of the gods. It is rather the gods who serve us, which they do out of their own good will. This will is so good that it is wrong to say that the Gods are unwilling to do harm. In fact, they cannot do harm. Those who understand this about the gods are the ones who will know how to worship them properly. Presumably, such worship consists in simply admiring them for what they are—in effect, knowing them to be what they are—rather than by attempting to serve them, solicit their favours, or avoid their wrath. Deum colit qui novit.” Cf. Mazza & Mori, this volume. See note 53 on the possible significance of mentioning Seneca in the context. 130 Bailey and O’Brien remark that “Philo’s pronouncements concerning ‘true religion’ are ironic” (2014, 225). If I am right, they are not ironic at all and actually comport very well with what they say about Hume’s naturalism. On page 226 they say that “… perhaps appreciation of these revolutions and alterations [of the Cosmos noted by Philo in the passage cited] could lead to the kind of revelation … acceptable to naturalists such as Dennett.” And they cite Dennett (1995, 520): “… I could not pray to it [the universe], but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. The world is sacred.” This is not far removed from Spinoza’s intellectual love of God, at least as often interpreted. Note that I am on the side of the long tradition of seeing in Spinoza’s intellectual love of God a kind of repurposing and intellectualist filtering of religious awe and joy. Of course, I fully agree that Spinoza rejects superstitious awe and fear as well as the sort of unstable joy or euphoria characteristic of flights of religious fanaticism or “enthusiasm”; nonetheless I believe that the intellectual love of God in Spinoza incorporates rational or intellectualist versions of these religious attitudes (joy and awe). Intellectual awe, in the sense of a certain wonder, amazement or fascination, accompanied by a certain calm elation, precisely at understanding some deep metaphysical truth about Nature (or “God”) is, in my view, part and parcel of the amor Dei intellectualis. (This would be “the passion of surprise and wonder” that Hume speaks of in “Of Miracles” but fully intellectualized and divorced from “the spirit of religion”, since with that conjunction, “… there is an end of common sense” ( Hume 2007/1748, 102–103; EHU X.ii.16–17)). See Nadler 2006, 121, 256–259 and 2018 for what seems to be a more deflationary reading of Spinoza’s doctrine; though this may simply be an issue of semantics (particularly about how one understands ‘awe’ or ‘wonder’ in the religious sense; if all one means is “… the greatest satisfaction of Mind

Philo, Strato and Spinoza 401 there can be …, i.e., Joy [arising from] … the third kind of knowledge [from which] there necessarily arises an intellectual Love of God” (Ethics Vp32d; Spinoza 1985, 611), then there is no real disagreement). For an account that seems just right to me, see Carlisle 2021. For a discussion of the broader history of Spinoza interpretation on this issue, see Clayton 2012. 131 Here it is worth reflecting on what Berkeley’s Lysicles says in this connection (in Alciphron IV.16; in Berman 1993, 105): “… [N]obody doubts they [the Epicureans, Hobbes, and Spinoza] were staunch free-thinkers [even though they used the word ‘God’]. I could wish indeed the word God were quite omitted; because in most minds it is coupled with a sort of superstitious awe, the very root of all religion. I shall not, nevertheless, be much disturbed, though the name be retained, and the being of a God allowed in any sense but in that of a Mind which knows all things, and beholds human actions, like some judge or magistrate, with infinite observation and intelligence. The belief of a God in this sense fills a man’s mind with scruples, lays him under constraints, and embitters his very being: but in another sense it may be attended with no great ill consequence. This I know was the opinion of our great Diagoras, who told me he would never have been at the pains to find out a demonstration that there was no God, if the received notion of God had been the same with that of some Fathers and Schoolmen.” In the ensuing discussion (some of which is quoted in note 92), Lysicles argues that the anti-anthropomorphic, apophatic or nominalistic theology advocated by some orthodox divines in the history of Christianity might as well be an atheism, since, on such a view, the First Cause is not literally intelligent or wise (and here Lysicles would presumably agree with Philo’s point that Cleanthes’ rejection of “mysticism” as atheistic essentially honours “… with the appellation of atheist all the sound, orthodox divines almost, who have treated of this subject” (DNR IV.4, p. 37)). Our discussion of the MalebrancheSpinoza “precipice” related to this issue should come readily to mind. In response, Crito, Berkeley’s spokesman for a more traditional approach to theology than Berkeley’s own (see Williford & Jakapi 2009), defends a version of the analogical predication theory that preserves the literal, though proportional, ascription of wisdom, intelligence, etc., to God. We can, as it were, read Philo as accepting Lysicles’ points (esp. on the moral attributes) with one slight modification: perhaps the First Cause qua organizing principle is indeed analogous, though trivially and remotely so, to intelligence—i.e., it is literally structurally similar, since both are organizing principles. Extreme nominalism or apophatic mysticism on the issue is avoided, but this offers no serious comfort to the traditional theist; there is but a distinction without a significant difference here. 132 DNR XII.12–13, p. 95: “[12] The reason of this observation, replied Cleanthes, is obvious. The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, and obedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives. When it distinguishes itself, and acts as a separate principle over men, it has departed from its proper sphere, and has become only a cover to faction and ambition. [13] And so will all religion, said Philo, except the philosophical and rational kind.” Note that Cleanthes’ statement corresponds to what Hume says in the unpublished preface to the second volume of the 1756 edition of the History of England (in Mossner 1980, 306): “The proper Office of Religion is to reform Men’s Lives, to purify their Hearts, to inforce all moral Duties, & to secure Obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate.” For the purposes of my argument here, it is an important fact that these words are put into Cleanthes’ mouth, not Philo’s. See Mazza 2018 for an argument that Hume himself did not really agree with Cleanthes’ words or other, similar statements Hume makes in some texts during 1755–56. Note as well that Philo’s take on “true religion” seems to correspond with that of Hume’s imaginary Epicurus in “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State”: “All the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which

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Kenneth Williford is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypothesis; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation” ( Hume 2007/1748, 128; EHU XI.27). Importantly, one should take the relative clause in ‘all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy’ to be circumscribing (i.e., what we would express with ‘that’) and not incidental. In other words, Hume’s Epicurus is not asserting that all forms of religion are species of philosophy but rather that among the forms of religion, some count as species of philosophy (and it is those that share the relevant predicate with philosophy). The point is that philosophy and philosophical religion have nothing special and positive to contribute to morality. The best one can hope for is that one’s religion does not corrupt or interfere with morality, which vulgar religion certainly does. Cf. Spinoza (Ethics, Vp42 & Dem, interpolated into the proposition; Spinoza 1985, 616): “Blessedness [(which) consists in Love of God … , a Love which arises from the third kind of knowledge] is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them.” As Mori (2020/1999, 52) summarizes it: “The only philosophy that could be defended till the end against the assaults of adversaries is Stratonician atheism: if two twentysix-year-old Athenians engaged themselves in a purely philosophical discussion of the existence of God, they would end by embracing Strato’s atheism at the age of thirty, says Bayle, after having completed their own examination of religion.” See CPD, §CIII; Bayle 1737, vol. 3, 328a. At the end of his article “Paulicians”, for example, Bayle says “… [the orthodox Christian view on God’s omnibenevolence and the existence of evil] ought to be considered by the orthodox as a truth of fact, clearly revealed: since it must be admitted that the causes and reasons for it cannot be understood, it would be better to say this from the outset, and stop there, and allow the objections of the philosophers to be considered vain quibblings, and to oppose nothing to them but silence along with the shield of faith” (Bayle 1991/1697, 193). Statements like these, coming as they do at the end of usually devastating lines of argument—Bayle himself clearly not keeping silent—of course led Le Clerc and many others to suspect the sincerity of Bayle’s professions of faith. For what it is worth, I myself (probably unsurprisingly) lean towards the (not so) crypto-atheist interpretation of Bayle. See, e.g., Mori 2020/1999, 2021; see, e.g., Ryan 2009, 158f. and Bost 2012 for criticism of this interpretation. At the time of this writing (April, 2023), Paganini’s monumental 2023 De Bayle à Hume has just come into my hands; and given the need to send the collection to which this study belongs to the press, I am unable to adequately pepper it with the references a careful reading of the book would most likely necessitate. Suffice to say that the 80 or so pages on Bayle and the DNR seem to be one of the most important and thorough studies of the topic yet written.

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Index

Page numbers followed by “n” indicate notes. Advaita Vedanta 393n103 An Account of Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (Maclaurin) 76 age of the Earth 2, 62–63, 347, 391n99 agnosticism 3, 11, 49, 119, 144 Alciphron (Berkeley) 1, 390n92, 401n131 Alston, William xv analogical predication 341, 389n92, 401n131 analogy 183, 184, 188, 284 analogy arguments (analogical reasoning) 52–54, 78–79, 83, 89n35, 205 Anaximander 192n26, 379n50 Andre, Shane 135n3 anima mundi 19, 129, 130. See also World Soul Hypothesis anthropomorphism 3, 7, 23, 30, 126, 233, 235, 295, 310, 327, 338, 339, 342, 344, 351, 357, 359, 382n61, 390n92, 391n99 apophatic theology 4, 401n131. See also mysticism Arbuthnot, John 48, 66n2, 66n3 Aristotle 120, 257, 266, 278 Arnauld, Antoine 325, 375n40, 382n61, 382n63 atheism(s) 3; in antiquity 17, 361–362n2; Anaximandrian See hylopathic atheism; atomic See Epicurean atheism; Baylean 175–177; Bolingbroke accused of 184, 185; Clandestine 308; cosmoplastic 19, 20, 21, 314–316, 319–321, 338, 344–347, 376n45, 379n50, 387n88; Cudworth’s Taxonomy of 19, 314–321, 345; Democritic See Epicurean atheism; d’Holbach’s 135, 185, 187, 189, 308, 354;

Epicurean 19, 62–63, 66n2, 68n30, 122, 243, 256–260, 314, 345, 349–350, 372n31; Hume’s classification of 380n56, 387–388n88; Hume’s/Philo’s possible 4, 10–14, 36, 37, 119ff.; hylozoic (Stratonic) 311, 352, 372n31, 373–374n76, 377–378n47; hylopathic (Hylopathian) 19, 314, 387n88; metaphysical 337, 345; moral (Holden) 168n14, 201, 202, 208; New Atheists 2, 354; “patron of” 327, 329, 364n7, 396n114; pseudo-Stoic See cosmoplastic atheism; Pyrrhonian (Skeptical) 187, 388n88; semantic 3, 12, 120–126, 189, 339–340, 401n131; Spinozistic 189, 312, 326, 377, 381n60, 395n95; Stratonic (Strato’s, Stratonician) 192n28, 193n38, 312, 321–325, 369n23, 370n26, 377–378n47, 402n134; varieties of 19–21, 144, 183, 345; whether vulgar religion morally/ socially better than 182, 219, 345, 391n98 atomism 18–19, 256, 258, 314, 349, 379n50, 387n85, 393n105, 395n110 attributes of God/Designer/First Cause (cf. Divine Benevolence, Intelligence, Omnipotence) 12, 48, 92, 111n26, 120, 121, 125, 126, 147, 156, 175, 182–184, 189, 232, 233, 310, 339–341, 389n92, 392n99; moral attributes 121, 122, 127, 128, 163, 167n5, 176–178, 180, 191n14,

Index 419 191n16, 192n25, 201, 219, 233, 235, 327, 351, 358, 359, 401n131; natural (non-moral) attributes 15, 93, 98, 122, 147, 163, 167, 178, 179, 234, 345, 360, 369n24 Atum 7 Aubert de Versé, Noël 325, 326, 380n51, 381n60, 381–382n61, 382n63 Avogadro’s Law for Gases 40 Baier, Annette 247n36, 341, 367n20, 368n21, 370n26, 383n65 Bailey, Alan 392n101, 400n130 Balbus the Stoic 1, 24, 174, 191n5, 257, 392n101, 399n126 Bayes, Thomas 47, 48 Bayes’ theorem 56–65, 234, 245n3; odds formulation of 58–60 Bayesian confirmation theory 2, 8, 24n4 Bayesianism 8, 47, 48, 64, 65 Bayle, Pierre 1, 313, 326, 327; and fideism 5, 11, 180, 186, 360–361; Influence on Hume and Hume’s Dialogues 2, 11, 187, 189, 191n10, 191n13, 193n34, 217, 218, 226, 228n1, 321, 323; on Cudworth 320, 343, 344, 349; on Malebranche 327; on Manicheanism 352; Philo and 5, 11, 14, 175–178, 182, 186, 310, 311, 331, 332, 337, 338, 340, 342, 345, 355, 358, 360–361; on Spinoza 20, 278, 302n4, 307–311, 316, 317; on Stratonism 13, 20, 21, 185, 189, 307, 311, 316, 320–325, 344, 351 Beattie, James 31–32 Behe, Michael 66n6, 67n21, 67n22, 255 Belfrage, Bertil xv, 361 Bennett, Jonathan 110n24, 113n47, 304n17 Bentley, Richard 37, 38, 42n4, 67n26, 263 Bérigard, Claude 185, 192n26, 390n96 Berkeley, George 177, 185, 366n15, 389n92, 390n92 Berman, David 389n92 Bernier, François 393n103 Bernoulli, Nicholas 66n3 Bibliothèque choisie (Le Clerc) 311, 371n30, 372n32 Big Bang Theory 23n2, 151, 163, 303n14 Blackburn, Simon xiii, 6–7, 255 Blair, Hugh 14, 29, 181, 187, 226 The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins) 137n23, 254

Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John (Lord) 13, 175, 179, 182–186, 192n25 Boswell, James 221 Boyle Lectures 127, 263, 312, 372n33 Boyle, Robert 258, 262, 263, 292, 300, 302n7 Bradley, F.H. 308 Bridgewater Treatises 268 Browne, Peter 341, 389n92 Buddeus, J.F. 316, 378n49, 379n49 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte) 22, 24n6, 260, 269, 388n90, 391n99 Burnet, Thomas 22, 391n99 Butler, Annemarie xv, 10 Cannizzaro, Stanislav 40 Carlisle, Claire 399n128, 401n130 categorical imperative 240, 242 causal closure 144, 145, 153n8 causal inference 7, 40, 72, 73, 75, 77, 102, 161, 368n21 Causal Markov Condition 40 causal maxim 10, 91–113, 191n11, 308, 312, 313, 328 Cavendish, Margaret Lucas (Lady) 297–299, 378n47 Chambers, Robert 270 Cambridge Platonism 262, 373n32 Cambridge University 20, 267, 371n31, 377n47, 385n79 Characteristics (Shaftesbury) 186 Cicero 17, 19, 22, 24n5, 33n1, 68n30, 174, 175, 177, 181, 191n5, 191n15, 257, 311, 362n2, 370n25, 379n49, 392n101, 399n126 Circulus pisanus (Bérigard) 185 Clapp, C.W. xv, 23n3, 24n3 Clarke, Samuel 24n6, 37, 91, 104, 105, 108n1, 109n4, 111n35, 158–160, 184, 191n16, 259, 309, 327–338 Clarke-Collins Correspondence 312, 374n36 Clarke-Leibniz Correspondence 385n79 Cleanthes’ “decisive” argument 10, 92, 102–103, 105, 107, 376n44 Coleman, Dorothy 22, 89n24, 156, 309, 312, 389n92 Collins, Anthony 179, 184, 191n6, 374n36 comparison(s) 75–81, 85, 127, 233, 284; Bayesian 58; likelihood 64; tacit 113n43 conceivability and possibility 21, 302, 310, 328–336, 368n21, 384n78, 385n79, 386n82, 395n109, 396n115

420

Index

A Confutation of Atheism (Bentley) 263 conservation laws 147, 148, 153n5, 153n8 conspiracy theory 39, 41 Continuation des pensées diverses (Bayle) 175, 311, 322, 363n5, 369n23, 382n64, 389n90 Conway, Anne (Lady) 286, 365n7, 378n47 Cosmic Vegetable (Rotting Turnip) 8, 123, 135, 172, 189, 212, 318, 358, 360, 371n27 Cosmological Argument 2, 4, 7, 10, 21, 23n2, 35, 36, 91ff., 148, 156, 158, 159, 327–339 Cotta 257, 392n101 Creation ex nihilo 5, 109n13, 147, 215n4, 324, 396n115 Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (Sedley) 67n26, 362n2, 394n109, 395n110 Cudworth, Ralph 10, 19, 20, 21, 98, 99, 101, 109n13, 179, 184, 185, 286, 297–299, 307, 311–323, 328, 338, 345, 348, 364n6, 369n23, 371n30, 371n31, 372n31, 372n32, 375n39, 376n41, 377n47, 378n47, 379n50, 380nn52–55, 388n88 Cudworth’s “Lemma” 312–314 Cummins, Phillip xiv, xv, 361 Cunning, David xv, 298 Cuvier, Georges 17–18, 24n6, 137n27, 272, 365n10 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 382n61, 388n90 Darwall, Stephen 245n6 Darwin, Charles 253–255, 265–273 Darwin, Erasmus 18, 256, 266, 269 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett) 19, 271 Dawkins, Richard xiv, 2, 39, 137n23, 254–256, 273, 354, 390n96 De Maillet, Benoît 22, 380n51, 391n99 De Mairan, Dortius 375n40, 382 De Natura Deorum (Cicero) 1, 17, 19, 25n5, 33n1, 68n30, 181, 191n5, 191n15, 257, 362n2, 377n47, 392n101, 399n126 De Origine Mali (King) 381n59 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius) 16, 394n109 Deism (Attenuated Deism) 11, 13–15, 37, 119, 122, 180, 356, 359, 373n3 Della Rocca, M. 280, 297, 304n17 Demea’s a priori argument. See cosmological argument Demea’s Departure (Exit) 4, 12, 13, 129, 155ff., 171, 177, 178, 326

Democritus 2, 192n26, 267, 362n2, 377n47, 387n85 Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (Clarke) 10, 21, 24n6, 91, 178, 312, 313, 327–337, 385n79 Dennett, Daniel 15, 19, 39, 247n37, 271, 272, 354, 390n96, 400n130 Descartes (Cartesian) 2, 36, 105, 108, 109n9, 110n17, 140, 247n30, 278, 285, 299, 302n7, 324, 337, 347, 349, 350, 358, 367n20, 368n21, 369n23, 369n24, 375n40, 382n61, 387n86, 391n99, 393n105, 395n109 Design Argument: analogical version of 9, 52–56, 71–79, 83, 85, 87n3, 89n23; Bayesian construal of 56–63; FineTuning version of 1, 23n2, 23n3; inductive sampling version of 52, 67n21; as “irregular” argument 8, 9, 71, 124, 215n5; “likelihood” comparison version of 57–62; Paley’s version of 23n3, 49, 66n6, 136n12, 253–256, 264, 265; Philo’s criticisms of 52–56; Stoic version of 24n5 design: amoral 15, 16, 158, 162, 232, 233, 234–238, 245; flawed (Bad) 24n3, 383n71; intelligent See divine intelligence; unintelligent 16, 125, 320 determinism 163, 177, 304, 349, 350, 365n7, 395n110 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) 13, 135, 185, 187, 189, 193n36, 308, 354, 363n3, 365n10, 373n35, 391n99 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume): circumstances of publication 29–30; compared to other philosophical dialogues 1; editions of 5, 6, 22, 23, 307, 322, 361, 370n26, 400n129; overall style/intent 4–5, 31ff., 35–38, 119ff.; philosophical significance 2–4; times of composition and revision 170ff., 190 Dialogues d’Evhémère (Voltaire) 189 Dictionnaire historique et critique/Historical and Critical Dictionary (Bayle) 175, 177, 217, 228n1, 302n1, 308, 311, 316, 321, 338, 352, 361, 363n6, 366n15, 375n39, 383n70, 383n71, 393n103, 395n109

Index 421 Diderot, Denis 1, 13, 187, 259, 309, 337, 371n30, 372n34, 373n35, 388n90 Diodoran Modality 337, 350, 387n86, 395n109 Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (Thomas Woolston) 42n2 Dissertation on the Passions (Hume) 225, 245n5 Divine Benevolence (Goodness) 62, 66n5, 66n12, 111n26, 121, 122, 127–129, 157–159, 162, 165, 175–178, 180, 184, 191n10, 191n12, 191n16, 193n38, 204, 209, 214n3, 233, 262, 298, 325, 331, 351, 353, 358, 374n37, 381n59, 383n64, 383n68, 389 Divine Intelligence (Wisdom, Providence) 12, 19, 24n5, 24n6, 47, 48, 65n1, 66n12, 73, 85, 87n7, 98, 99, 111n26, 121–125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 135, 156, 163, 165, 166, 172–175, 176, 178–185, 188, 192n17, 192n25, 204, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226, 232, 233, 237, 238, 242, 257, 262, 263, 283, 291, 295, 296–298, 317, 318, 320, 321, 323, 331, 340, 341, 349, 351, 359, 360, 373n35, 373n36, 375n39, 389n92, 390n96 divine omnipotence (Power) 19, 65n1, 92, 98–100, 111n26, 122, 127, 148, 162, 163, 165, 168n8, 173, 175, 178, 179, 184, 192n25, 208, 209, 233, 279, 280, 311, 324, 340, 341, 344, 347, 357, 359, 362n2, 369n24, 370n25, 379n49, 380n56, 381n56, 385n79, 398n122 Draper, Paul 202, 215n13 Dye, James 155–159, 167n2, n5, n6, 291, 303n13, 322 Early Memoranda (Hume) 175, 176, 178, 185, 189, 191n10, 191n13, 192n28, 312, 321, 337, 363n5, 370n26, 388n88 Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to D’Holbach (Mori) 6, 308, 370n26 Earman, John 8, 24n4, 65, 152n4 Elliott, Gilbert (of Minto) 32, 84, 87n9, 137n28 Empedocles 16, 257, 266, 272, 394n108 Encyclopédie (Diderot, d’Alembert (eds.)) 372n34, 373n35, 379n50, 388n89, 391n99 Enlightenment xiv, 239, 240, 242, 257, 258, 272, 362n3, 367n20, 373n35

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume) 29, 30, 32, 66n12, 140, 218, 219, 312, 363n5 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume) 164, 220, 221 Enthusiasm (Religious Fanaticism) 2–4, 13, 222, 243, 354, 361, 363n3, 365n7, 400n130 Epicurean Hypothesis (Epicureanism) 3, 17–19, 49, 58, 62–64, 66n2, 67n28, 68n30, 122, 204, 253ff., 258, 335, 337, 345, 349, 372n31, 393n105, 394n106, 394n107, 394n108, 398n123 Epicurus 16, 192n26, 204, 257, 260, 265, 267, 269, 272, 345, 369n23, 377n47, 379n49, 381n57, 393n105, 395n110, 401n132 An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Hutcheson) 218, 228n6 Escalator of Reason 238–239 Essai de cosmologie (Maupertuis) 394n108 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 10, 125, 94–102 Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Hume) 309 Ethics (Spinoza) 277ff., 309, 310, 315, 325, 327, 333f., 352f., 365n12, 366n17, 371n27, 376n42, 377n47, 379n50, 384n72, 395n113, 398n122, 399n125, 399n128, 401n130, 402n133 Evidences of Christianity (Paley) 256, 267–269 Evolution (Theory of Evolution, Evolutionary Theory, Evolutionism) 2, 16–18, 39, 41, 49, 50, 57, 58, 61, 253, 256, 258, 264, 265, 270, 271 ex nihilo, nihil fit 109n13, 113n47, 313 Extinction of Species 63, 365n10, 376n41, 387n84, 397 Faithfulness condition 40 Fales, Evan xiii, xv, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 24n24, 361 Falkenstein, Lorne xiii, xv, 12, 15, 113n44, 361 falsifiability (falsifiable) 41, 134 fideism 5, 7, 11, 141, 152, 180, 186, 190, 311, 360, 398n123, 399n123

422

Index

Fine, Kit 281 Flew, Antony 322, 370n26 Fludd, Robert 286 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 332, 365n10, 384n76 Fogelin, Robert 8, 24n4, 72–74, 215n4 Foley, Richard 13, 136n18, 398n123, 399n123 Four Dissertations (Hume) 188, 225 Four Dissertations (Price) 47 “Fragment on Evil” (Hume) 178, 191n16, 201, 214n2 Galen 23n3, 122, 170, 180, 264, 356 Galileo Galilei 1, 39, 133, 299, 367n20 Gallagher, Martin xv, 361, 371n30 Garrett, Don 89n27, 213, 216n16, 289, 296, 367n20, 368n21 Gaskin, J.C.A. 22, 65, 66n7, 72, 74, 75, 85, 88n13, 89n28, 122, 135n2, 136n9, 156, 202, 215n12, 216n14, 246n25, 255, 269, 294, 303n14, 304n13 Gassendi, Pierre 258, 302n7, 393n103, 393n105 Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis 39 Geulincx, Arnold 323 Giglioni, G. 321, 378n47 Glisson, Francis 20, 315, 316, 319, 371n31, 372n31, 372n33, 377n47, 378n47, 380n52, 388n88 Glymour, Clark xiii, xv, 7, 12 God: All-PKG 51, 52, 61, 62; attributes of see Attributes of God/Designer/First Cause; definition (idea) of 21, 52, 106, 178, 192n20, 325, 326, 342, 381n60; existence (being) of 36, 42n5, 49, 106, 109, 111n34, 111n35, 119, 120, 124, 149, 177, 214, 215n13, 246n24, 259, 331, 376n41, 376n42, 389n92, 397n115, 402n134; term ‘God’ 120f., 389n92 The God Delusion (Dawkins) 2, 390n96 Gould, Stephen Jay 237, 238 Green, T.H. 308 Grew, Nehemiah 322 Grose, T.H. 308, 309, 366n15 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 68n30 Grünbaum, Adolf 137n25, 137n26 Guthrie, Stewart 398n122 Halper, Phil xv, 2, 23n2 Hancock, John 311, 372n33, 374n36 Hare, R.M. 239, 246n14

Harris, James 178, 190, 218, 367n20, 368n20 Harris, John 127 Harris, Sam 39 Hegel, G.W.F. 308 Held, Lewis 24n3 Hesse, Mary 66n15 Hinckley, Gordon B. (President) 41n1 Histoire Naturelle (Buffon) 391n99 History of England (Hume) xv, 181, 183, 222, 224, 401n132 Hitchens, Christopher 354 Hobbes, Thomas 33n3, 104, 160, 179, 184, 242, 328, 350, 364n7, 365n7, 367n20, 368n20, 372n31, 377n47, 386n81, 389n92, 393n105, 395n109, 397n117, 401n131 Holden, Thomas 33n3, 122, 136n11, 158, 166, 167, 168n12, 168n14, 202, 203, 208, 215n11, 215n13 Holt, Andreas 32 Home, Henry (Lord Kames) 30 Horne, George 32 Humean Moral Theory 12, 162f., 220ff., 236ff. Hume-Edwards Principle 387n84 Hume’s Abject Failure (Earman) 8, 24n4, 65, 152n4 Hume’s Religious Naturalism (Reich) 354, 370n26 Hurlbutt, R.H. 88n14, 255, 386n81 Hutcheson, Francis 14, 162, 166, 167, 182, 192n18, 218–220, 222, 226, 228n5, 228n6, 229n10, 236, 237 Hutton, James 22, 391n99, 392n99 Huxley, T.H. 267, 309, 366n16 Hylozoism 19, 20, 310, 315, 316, 321, 322, 337, 364n6, 366n14, 369n23, 371n29, 371n30, 373n35, 374n38, 377n47, 379n50 The Ignorant Philosopher (Voltaire) 192n17, 372n35 imagination 7, 38, 71, 72, 78–81, 104, 112n39, 146, 222, 228, 238, 241–244, 247n30, 282, 354, 355, 356, 368n21 Intelligent Design Theory 2, 24n3, 390n96 Irony 7, 152n4, 180, 187, 203, 207, 308, 309, 356, 361, 365n13, 366n13, 396n115, 397n115 Irreducible Complexity 66n6, 67n22 Irregular Argument 8–9, 71 Israel, Jonathan 362n3, 369n23, 369n24, 374n38, 375n39

Index 423 Jessop, T.E. 177 Jesuit(s) 30, 325, 375n40 Journal de Trévoux 325, 375n40 Kail, P.J.E. 21, 302, 303n12, 329, 368n21 Kant, Immanuel xiv, 2, 14–16, 239, 240–242, 246n23, 253, 270, 308 Kepler, Johannes 133 Khamara, E.J. 95, 108n1, 109n17, 110n18 King, William 381n59 Klever, Wim xiv, 361, 362n3, 367n20, 368n21, 368n22, 389n91 Kohlberg, Lawrence 239–241, 246n13 Kors, A.C. 371n30, 374n38, 375n40, 381n60 Kraay, Klaas 202, 203, 208, 215n4, 215n5, 215n11 Krauss, Lawrence xiv L’impie convaincu (Aubert de Versé) 325, 326, 382n61 La Flèche 325, 367n20, 375n40 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 393n105 La Mothe Le Vayer, François de 186 Lactantius 311, 364n6, 377n46 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 269 Lamy, G. 383n71 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 270, 362n2 Law of Likelihood 59–61, 66n1 Laws of Nature 19, 21, 50, 66n10, 144, 279ff., 316, 327, 349, 386n82 Le Clerc, Jean 311, 313, 364n6, 372n32, 377n46, 380n55, 402n135 Leask, I. 371n30, 374n36 LeGrant, Pete xiii, xv, 20–21, 361 Leibniz, G.W. 1, 10, 20, 37, 98, 292, 302n4, 304n16, 307, 312, 316, 325, 328, 351, 369n24, 371n31, 374n37, 375n40, 376n41, 378n47, 380n51, 380n55, 381n56, 382n61, 383n68, 384n73, 385n79, 386n82, 387n84, 388n88, 393n105, 394n107, 395n109, 395n111 Leland, John 175 Lem, Stanislaw 24n3 Lemmens, W. 367n20 Letter from a Gentleman to a Friend in Edinburgh (Hume) 35, 186 Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who See (Diderot) 259, 373n35 Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (Priestley) 135 Letters to Serena (Toland) 312, 335, 349, 374n36, 386n79

Lewis, I.M. 150–151 Lewontin, Richard 66n9 Lichtenberg, G.C. 237n30 Lindqvist, S. 365n10 Locke, John 10, 41n2, 91ff., 140, 144, 152n2, 181, 303n12, 326, 328 Logan, Beryl 72, 73, 80 Lucretius 16, 24n6, 67n26, 257, 258, 263, 265–267, 270, 394n108, 394n109 Mackie, J.L. 387n84 Maclaurin, Colin 76, 88n14, 88n15, 192n18 Malebranche, Nicholas 21, 92, 311, 312, 323, 325–328, 338–342, 350, 353, 357, 370n26, 375n40, 381n58, 382n61, 382n62, 382n64, 383n64, 384n73, 401n131 Mallett, David 183–185 Mandeville, Bernard 182, 228n3, 242, 368n20, 393n105 Manicheanism 210, 327, 350, 352 Masham, Damaris (Lady) 380n55 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy [Principia Mathematica] (Newton) 125, 137n22, 137n24 mathematics 21, 106, 333, 334, 382n62, 384n77, 384n78, 385n79 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis (Marquis) 16, 17, 259, 260, 269, 388n90, 394n108 Mazza, Emilio xv, 13, 361, 401n132 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 2, 36 Mersenne, Marin 292, 293, 300 Mill, J.S. 136n14, 240, 246n11 miracles 8, 24n4, 30, 33n5, 36, 37, 42m2, 47, 65, 144, 152n4, 316, 363n4, 366n13, 378n48, 391n99, 400n130 modal epistemology 368n21, 396n115 Molyneux, William 109n10, 111n31 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron) 182 More, Henry 20, 262, 286, 316, 372n31, 377n47, 378n47, 385n79 Mori, Gianluca xiii, xv, 13, 308, 309, 311, 313, 321, 322, 361, 369n23, 370n26, 373n35, 379n51, 380n56, 382n61, 382n64, 383n71, 384n77, 386n79, 388n90, 391n98, 393n106, 402n134 Mossner, E.C. 6, 382n61 multiverse 17 Mundaka Upanishad 393n103

424

Index

Mystical Experience 149–151 mysticism (mystics) 3, 92, 126, 150, 151, 158, 321, 341, 351, 382n61, 401n131 Nadler, Stephen 303n9, 325, 397n118, 400n128, 400n130 Nagel, Thomas 66n8 Nathan, George 136n17, 229n24, 370n26 natural belief 9, 83–89, 119, 120, 137n28, 399n123 Natural History of Religion (Hume) xv, 9, 37, 89n31, 156, 167n4, 174, 219, 223–225, 309, 354–356, 390n97, 396n115, 398n122 natural irreligion 14, 211, 214 natural providence 237–238 natural selection 16–18, 50, 51, 61, 67n22, 67n28, 235, 245n2, 253, 254, 256, 265, 266, 269–272 natural theology See religion, natural Natural Theology (Paley) 18, 136n12, 254, 256, 264, 267–269 naturalism 3, 4, 19, 50, 129–135, 144, 145, 183, 184, 204, 205, 207, 211, 310, 324, 337, 338, 351, 361n2, 373n35, 388n88, 398n123, 400n130 naturalistic explanation(s) 11, 18, 50, 149, 151, 202–207 necessary existence 10, 31, 92, 94, 95, 100, 101, 105–107, 108n3, 111n35, 376n42, 378n47, 383n67 necessitarianism 19–21, 277ff., 307, 308, 310, 316, 321, 322, 329, 337, 338, 345, 346, 348, 349, 363n4, 366n14, 370n26, 371n27, 381n57 necessity: causal 349, 394n109; logical 20, 351; mathematical 20, 281, 283, 290, 291, 295, 300, 301, 384n78, 385n79, 386n82; metaphysical 148, 281, 285, 295, 302, 349, 376n41, 383n68, 394n109, 395n111; nomological 304n14, 313 negative theology. See apophatic theology Newlands, Samuel 156, 167n2, 201–204, 279 Newton, Isaac (Newtonian, Newtonianism) 9, 17, 24n6, 39, 40, 42n4, 51, 76, 125, 132–134, 137n24, 140, 153n8, 179, 258, 259, 272, 292, 299–301, 347, 375n40, 377n47, 385n79, 386n79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 365n13

Norton, David Fate 193n33, 374n36 Norton, Mary J. 193n33, 374n36 Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker (Reiss) xiii, 17–18, 253 Nussbaum, Charles xiii, xiv, xv, 15, 16, 361 Nyāya-sūtra 390n96 O’Brien, Dan 6, 392n101, 400n130 O’Connor, David xiii, xv, 5, 13–14, 72, 74, 87n5, 88n23, 109n17, 110n23, 167n2, 190, 294, 295, 370n26, 399n123 occasionalism 191n13, 318, 322–327, 344, 382n61, 382n63, 395n112 “Of Miracles” (Hume) 37, 144, 366n13, 400n130 “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State” (Hume) 401 “Of Suicide” (Hume) 227, 232 “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” (Hume) 167n4, 219, 229n10, 397n119 Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (Wilkins) 191n6, 264 “Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume) 81–82, 89n25, 89n26 Ontological Argument 92, 95, 106–108, 330–332 The Origin of Species (Darwin) 40, 254, 266, 268, 273, 308 Paganini, Gianni xv, 322, 352, 361, 370n26, 373n35, 382n61, 390n92, 402n136 Paley, William 1, 17, 18, 23n3, 49, 62, 66n5, 67n26, 136n12, 253, 254, 256, 264–269, 271, 272 Pamphilus 32, 33, 92, 129, 134, 136n16, 161, 167, 170, 171, 173–176, 182, 181, 186, 190, 190n3, 232–234 Panpsychism 20, 315, 321, 366n14, 371n30, 379n50 Pantheism. See theism parsimony 3, 4, 11, 310, 318, 324, 325, 338, 340, 343, 344, 361, 380n56, 387n84, 388n88 Pascal, Blaise 31, 33n2 passions 3, 14, 15, 32, 84, 128, 136n15, 157, 159, 165, 168n12, 174, 217ff., 241, 245n5, 245n9, 246n18, 247n30, 309, 314, 355, 398n122 Passmore, John 366n17, 377n47, 380n52 Penelhum, Terrence 89n34 Pensées diverses sur la comète (Bayle) 217, 228n1, 382n64, 391n98

Index 425 Peterman, Alison 278, 284f. Phaedo (Plato) 32 Philo: and conclusion(s) of the Dialogues 170ff., 353–361; Consistency of 13, 156, 170ff., 201–203, 207, 211–213, 399n123; fideism 5, 7, 141, 152, 180, 186, 190, 311, 360, 398n123, 399n123; and irony 7, 152, 170, 175, 180, 203, 207, 308, 309, 311, 356, 360, 361, 365n13; Stratonism (Stratonism-Spinozosm) 307ff.; U-turn (reversal, Volte-Face) 7, 32, 119, 121, 123, 124, 136n18, 170, 177, 178, 180, 182, 185, 212, 213, 356, 398n123 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 33 Pike, Nelson 72, 77, 78, 88n18, 89n34, 202 Pinker, Steven 238, 239 Plantinga, Alvin 9, 145 plastic natures 19, 315–321, 380n54 Plato 1 Plutarch 364n6, 379n49 polytheism See theism, polytheism Popkin, Richard xv, 22, 309, 354, 363n6, 366n18 Popper, Karl (Popperian) 41, 137n27 Price, John Valdimir 29, 189, 190n2, 366n13 Price, Richard 47, 48, 65n1, 66n1 Priestley, Joseph 135, 180 Principle of Indifference 58–59 Principle of Sufficient Reason 278, 313, 332, 376n41 The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Conway) 365n7 Prinz, Jesse 246n9 Problem(s) of Evil (logical, evidential) 2, 12, 14, 62, 64, 124, 127, 141, 156, 158–160, 163f., 175–178, 180, 184, 191n16, 201ff., 219, 223, 232, 237, 325–327, 331, 338, 350–353, 361, 383n68, 398n123, 402n135 The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (Browne) 341, 389n92 proto-evolutionary theory 258–260 providence See divine intelligence Pyle, Andrew xiii, xv, 5, 10, 11, 72, 75–77, 370n26 Quod nescis principle 323, 324, 344, 348, 349, 381n58

radical Cartesianism 324, 344, 349, 381n56 Ramsay, Andrew (Chevalier) 366n18, 375n40 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, John 33n4 Ramsay, Michael 228n1 Raphson, Joseph 10, 328, 345, 363n4, 376n41, 377n47, 382n62, 385n79 Ray, John 263–264 reason 5, 14, 36, 133, 139–141, 172, 175, 186–189, 217ff., 232ff., 311, 399n123 Reformed Epistemology 9 regress 3, 132, 292, 320, 324, 334, 338, 341–344, 387n84, 390n96 Reich, L. 354, 370n26, 396n115 Reiss, John xiii, xv, 17–19 religion: and consolation in the face of suffering and death 224–227; natural (natural theology) 3, 11–14, 30, 37, 38, 41, 72, 73, 76, 77, 88n17, 127, 139, 141, 144, 146, 149, 151, 160, 173, 175, 182–184, 192n25, 201ff., 218, 219, 222, 226, 229n19, 233, 234, 255, 262, 264, 272, 368n22, 399n123; Pagan 391n98; Popular 3, 14, 167n4, 218, 219, 22, 355, 397n116; philosophical 12, 166, 354, 397n115, 397n116, 402n132; philosophy as antidote to 227–228; and public morals 220–222; revealed xiv, 3, 144; rational (rational theology) 3, 14, 15, 21, 224, 226, 245, 184, 189, 308; supposed humanizing effects of 222–224; true (See also theism, genuine) 3, 12, 14, 21, 166, 170, 181, 212, 213, 219, 220, 222, 224, 226, 229n19, 353–360, 365n13, 370n26, 396n115, 397n116, 397n118, 397n120, 399n127, 400n128, 400n130, 401n132; vulgar (see also superstition, enthusiasm) 3, 13, 219, 221, 222, 243, 310, 320, 345, 353, 355, 356, 358, 360, 398n122, 402n132 religious experience xv, 11, 12, 149f. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Russell) 6 Rossi, Paolo 391n99 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41n2 Ruse, Michael 255

426

Index

Russell, Paul 119, 309, 310, 353–355, 358–360, 364n7, 365n13, 366n17, 366n20, 369n23, 388n88, 397n117, 399n127 Russell, Robert John 147, 153n5 Ryan, Todd xiii, xv, 8–9, 108, 361, 366n15, 383n64 Sacred Theory of the Earth (Burnet) 391n99 Salmon, Wesley 2, 8, 59, 234, 235 Saunderson 259, 373n35 Schopenhauer, Arthur 8, 351 Science 38, 39, 41, 50, 51, 57, 61, 66n11, 88n17, 132–134, 140ff., 163, 188, 254, 255, 269, 271, 283, 284, 300, 301, 390n96 Sedley, David 362n2, 394n109, 395n110 Seneca 166, 173, 175, 191n6, 302n4, 317, 359, 380n53, 400n129 Sessions, W.L. 89n32 Sex Ratio 48, 66n3, 66n4 Sextus Empiricus 127 Shaftesbury (Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of) 186, 375n40 Sherlock, Thomas 42n2 Sidelle, Alan 301 Singer, Peter 238–241 Skeptical Theism (Skeptical Defense of Theism) 14, 15, 24n3, 62, 177, 213–214, 331 skepticism 129, 134, 137n28, 159, 140, 177, 186, 205, 339, 388n90; academic 33n1, 167, 257; mitigated 58, 88n22, 167, 256; Pyrrhonian 88n22, 324, 382n61, 387n88, 388n88; religious 161, 162, 211 The Skeptic’s Walk (Diderot) 1, 35n373 Smith, Adam 6, 14, 29, 33n4, 119, 221, 355, 391n99 Smith, Norman Kemp 5, 6, 22, 135n1, 170, 256, 307–309, 322, 361, 363n5, 369n23, 370n26 Sobel, J.H. 59, 152n4 Sober, Elliott xiii, xv, 2, 8, 273n1, 365n10 Socrates 32, 228n4 Spectres of False Divinity (Thomas Holden) 122, 136n15, 166–167 spider analogy 7, 35, 38, 392n103, 393n103 Spinoza, Benedict de xiv, xv, 4, 10, 16, 20, 21, 277ff., 307ff. Spinozism xiv, 3, 20, 21, 277ff., 307ff. St. Hilaire, Geoffroy 269 Stewart, Dugald 135n1

Stewart, M.A. 5, 6, 91, 108n1, 171, 190n3, 228n9, 363n5, 383n66 Stoicism (Stoics) 1, 19, 20, 24n5, 257, 297, 298, 310, 316, 317, 319, 321, 337, 338, 345, 347, 358, 362n2, 369n24, 375n39, 376n45, 380n53, 387n88, 390n96, 392n101, 394n107, 399n126 Strahan, William 6, 29, 32, 170, 183, 185, 190 Strato of Lampsacus 16, 307, 311, 361n2, 372n32, 373n36, 377n47, 379n49 Stratonism 3, 13, 21, 307ff. Strawson, Galen 368n21 substance monism 20, 310, 311, 316, 321, 322, 337, 338, 364n6, 366n14, 369n23, 372n33, 371n27, 378n47, 388n88, 390n95 superstition 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 15, 33, 37, 41n2, 167n4, 173, 217, 219, 222, 227, 229n10, 243, 310, 353, 354f., 363n3, 367n20, 393n105, 396n115, 397n116, 397n119, 398n122, 399n128 Swift, Jonathan 68n30 Swinburne, Richard 42n5, 66n7, 66n10, 68n31 sympathy 16, 237, 238, 241, 245n9, 246n18, 246n21 Système de la Nature (d’Holbach) 135, 185, 187, 189, 193n33 Tacitus 367n20 Teleological Argument 146, 148. See also Design Argument teleology (Teleological, Telos) 16, 17, 21, 50, 110n22, 234, 235, 265, 281ff., 310, 316–321, 349, 356–358, 362n2, 367n20, 368n20, 375n39, 377n45, 381n57, 393n105 Telliamed (de Maillet) 22, 391n99 Teresa of Avila (Saint) 151 theism: genuine 3, 4, 12, 51, 166, 181, 213, 219, 224, 358, 359, 365n13, 380n53, 397n115, 399n127; monotheism 3, 9, 157, 167n5, 224, 285, 399n127; pantheism 294, 362n2, 363n4, 365n8, 377n47, 393n103, 386n79; polytheism 9, 156, 205, 219, 224, 285, 399n127; traditional 3, 4, 14, 310, 337, 388n88, 397n115 Theodicy 242, 331

Index 427 Theodicy (Leibniz) 20, 312, 374n37, 378n47, 395n111 Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (Berkeley) 1, 2 Tillotson, John (Archbishop) 181 Toland, John 185, 187, 192n26, 312, 335, 337, 347, 349, 350, 364n6, 368n22, 369n23, 373n36, 374n36, 386n79, 387n87, 388n88, 388n90, 393n106, 394n107 Tomasello, Michael 246n12 Tournemine, René-Joseph de 375n40 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza) 22, 309, 310, 316, 354, 355, 358, 359, 366n17, 367n20, 378n48, 396n115, 397n119, 399n128, 400n128 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 6, 22, 30, 35–37, 48, 66n3, 84, 87n10, 91, 101, 112n43, 120, 163, 164, 167, 186, 217, 221, 225, 227, 229n16, 245n5, 303n12, 312, 313, 326, 341, 366n15, 367n20, 370n26, 388n88, 388n90, 398n123 True Intellectual System of the Universe (Cudworth) 19, 20, 311f., 371n31, 377n47 Tryal of the Witnesses (Sherlock) 42n2 Turnip (Turnip, Rotting of) 123, 135, 172, 189, 212, 318, 358, 360 Tweyman, Stanley 72, 77–80, 88n18, 88n19, 89n33, 370n26 Tyndale, William 41n2

Vassányi, Miklós 302n4 Velleius 1, 257, 362n2, 364n6 Vernière, Paul 189, 311, 312, 371n27, 372n34, 374n37, 374n38, 379n50, 388n89 vitalism (vital materialism) 378n47, 388n90 Voltaire 13, 179, 189, 192n17, 229n18, 309, 312, 372n35, 373n35, 376n42

utilitarianism 15, 245n6, 247n36

Yandell, Keith 215n11 Yoder, Timothy 365n13, 370n26

Vācaspati Miśra 390n96 van Fraassen, Bas 240 van Helmont, Jan Baptist 286, 378n47

Wadia, P.S. 87n2, 88n22 Warburton, William (Bishop) 37, 175, 183, 184, 363n4 Westfall, Richard 299, 301, 302n7 Whelan, F. 245n9, 246n18, 247n28 Wilberforce, Samuel (Bishop) 267 Wilkins, John 175, 191n6, 264 Wilson, Catherine 66n2, 260, 314, 388n90, 393n105 Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (Ray) 262–263 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 33 Wolfe, C.T. 393n105 Woolston, Thomas 41n2, 42n2 World Soul Hypothesis 19–21, 277ff., 310, 316, 317, 321, 338, 344–346, 369n25, 370n25, 373n35, 379n50, 379n51, 382n61, 385n79 Wright, John P. xiii, 14 Xenophanes 192n26, 369n23, 374n36, 379n50

Zagzebski, L. 247n31 Zoonomia (E. Darwin) 18, 264, 266