Humphry Clinker Read Free Page A

planets and appreciation of the divine wisdom increased by the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton is not the common state of men’s minds. Although the wise, who are concerned with theoretical explanation, may be led to the idea of a single supreme creator, the vulgar, ordinary men and women, are moved by
    â€¦ the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity. 4
    The contrast is between admiration of regularity and order on the one hand, and fear and anxiety in face of disorder on the other. Where the world appears, as it does to the vulgar, capricious and uncertain it is natural for the imagination to construct a number of deities, whose differing attributes and personalities can be invoked as appropriate. The ideas of the various gods arise from our ignorance by a process in which emotion, mediated by the imagination, leads to beliefs in deities that are constructions of the mind:
    We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These
unknown causes
, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear; and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependance 5
    Thus polytheism rather than monotheism is the first form of natural religion.
    It should be noted that in the
Natural History
, and elsewhere in his writings on religion, Hume is prepared to adopt a distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ religion. The origin of polytheistic beliefs in fears and hopes exemplifies what he calls ‘superstition’, and he is willing to regard this together with another form of religious belief originating in emotion, ‘enthusiasm’, as ‘the corruptions of true religion’, as ‘two species of false religion’. There is thus a similarity here with the deists, who also regarded many forms of devotion and ritual as superstitious. Hume’s list is:
    â€¦ ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or… any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity. 6
    But this similarity should not obscure from us his opposition to deism. The
Natural History
undermines the deist claim that ‘true religion’, in the form of something like Herbert’s ‘common notions’, can be recommended on the grounds that it has always been accepted in all places. There is no argument for true religion based on the ‘universal consent of mankind’.
    A distinction between the true religion of the wise and the superstitions of the vulgar is found already in Cicero’s dialogue on which Hume’s work is modelled. There Cotta, the spokesman for the Academic school, says:
    With the ignorant you get superstitions like the Syrians’ worship of a fish, and the Egyptians’ deification of almost every species of animal; nay, even in Greece they worship a number of deified human beings… and with our own people Romulus and many others, who