Humphry Clinker Read Free Page B

are believed to have been admitted to celestial citizenship in recent times, by a sort of extension of the franchise! Well, those are the superstitions of the unlearned; but what of you philosophers? How are your dogmas any better?
    Hume, too, considers that to demonstrate that superstition and enthusiasm originate in ignorance, fear, hope, elation, flights of fancy and so on, is not to discredit true religion. The wise, the philosophers, may yet have grounds for a rational belief in asupreme creator and in the world as ordered and governed by divine providence. Are these dogmas any better? Is it possible to construct a rational natural theology, even if men and women are not generally led to religion by reasoning?
    It is this question which is debated between the three characters in the
Dialogues.
Following Cicero’s model, each character represents a different position on the central questions of natural theology. Can reason establish the existence of God? What can be known by reason of the nature and attributes of God? Can there be a reasoned solution to the conflict between divine goodness and divine power, given the existence of moral evil and natural suffering? What answer a philosopher or theologian gives to these questions is determined in part by his or her epistemology. It is necessary now to give an outline of a central aspect of Hume’s own epistemology, as it is found in his earlier writings.
    In the
Treatise
he argues that the fact that one phenomenon, or ‘object’ as he usually says, is the cause or effect of another is never something which is discoverable simply by reflecting on what is contained in our idea of it. 7 In order for us to know that fire burns us or bread nourishes us, we must experience the effect of fire or bread on our bodies. He expresses this by saying that we cannot have
a priori
knowledge of the causes and effects of objects. This contrasts, he thinks, with what holds in, say, mathematics. Here we can know that one object is related to another simply by abstract reflection. We can see that 16 is the square of 4 just by examining our ideas of these numbers. The necessary relations between numbers are thus relations
of ideas;
they are purely conceptual, and can be known
a priori.
One mark of truths which are relations of ideas is that the negations of such truths (e.g. that 16 is not the square of 4) are inconsistent and lead to a contradiction. In contrast, however certain we may be that fire burns us, we can imagine without contradiction a possible state of affairs (different from what actually obtains) in which we are not burned by fire. That fire burns us is thus simply a
matter of fact
, not an
a priori
necessary truth.
    In the
Treatise
Hume therefore distinguishes between twodomains, relations of ideas and matters of fact. Using terms in a technical, philosophical sense, he calls the domain of relations of ideas
knowledge
, and the domain of matters of fact
probability.
8 In this technical sense, it is a matter of probability that fire burns us. This does not mean, for Hume, that we cannot be certain that fire burns. Certainty is a matter of the degree of conviction that we feel about a thing, and we can be certain of something whose negation is still quite conceivable.
    That we have beliefs about the causal properties of objects is itself a matter of fact. The question why fire burns us is a question for natural sciences – physics, chemistry, physiology – to answer. The question why we believe that fire burns us, however, is of a kind which, Hume thinks, has not previously been successfully answered. Evidently, that something is the case is not itself an explanation of why we believe that it is the case. The question of the origin of human beliefs is included in what Hume calls ‘the science of man’. This science, the theory of human nature, is a foundation for all other sciences, both natural and moral. (By moral science or moral philosophy Hume