Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

in his lifetime he was equally well known as a historian, and he also wrote essays on political (mainly constitutional) questions and on economics. All of this he saw as contributing to a single broad project, the study of human nature. His youthful masterpiece, published in 1739/40, is called A Treatise of Human Nature; in three books it deals with human beliefs, emotions, and moral judgements. What are they, and what produces them?
Hume’s writings on these questions are shaped by a deeply held conviction about what human beings are. Equally important to him was a conviction about what we aren’t, a particular delusion which had to be overcome before anything more positive would have a chance of taking hold of our minds. Remember that most great philosophy doesn’t just add/subtract one or two facts to/from our previous beliefs; it removes a whole way of thinking and replaces it with another. There may be a lot of minute detail within it, but just stand back a bit and you will see that it is large-scale stuff.
4. Hume was smarter than he looked: ‘His face is by no means an index of the ingenuity of his mind, especially of his delicacy and vivacity’, wrote one visitor.
The conception that Hume wanted to root out had its basis in religious belief. Taking very seriously the saying that God created us in his own image, it saw us as hybrid beings, in this world but not entirely of it. Part of us, our bodies, are natural objects, subject to natural laws and processes; but we also have immortal souls, endowed with reason and an understanding of morality—this is what makes us images of God. Animals are quite different. They have no souls, but are just very subtle and complex machines, nothing more. The really significant line comes between us and them, not between us and God. Hume wanted to move it: we are not inferior little gods but somewhat superior middle-sized animals.
God God (?)Humans ——— ⇒ ——— HumansAnimals Animals
Don’t miss the added ‘?’, top-right. The left-hand column invites us to overestimate human reason. Once we get it in proper perspective we shall see both that we have drawn the line in the wrong place, and that our attempts even to think about what might be above the line are doomed to failure: we just aren’t up to it.
Hume therefore has a great deal to say about the role of reason in our lives; he argues that it isn’t nearly as big, or of the same kind, as his opponents thought. It then follows that much of what they took human reason to do must in fact be done by something else: the mechanics of human nature, about which he developed an extensive theory, a piece of early cognitive science as we would call it nowadays. But when Hume writes directly about religious belief (as he does quite a lot, see References) he leaves the grand theory on the shelf and applies common sense and everyday human observation. So in his essay Of Miracles we have another classic piece of philosophical writing that starts on your doorstep, if not actually in your living-room.
However, we mustn’t assume that everything here is completely familiar. Hume is going to argue that if we believe that a miracle has occurred, when our evidence consists in other people’s reports (as it virtually always does), then we hold this belief contrary to reason, since our reasons for believing that the alleged miracle did not occur must be at least as strong as our reasons for supposing that it did; in fact, he thinks, they are always stronger. This was a topic that he needed to approach carefully, for two reasons. Not twenty years before he published Of Miracles one Thomas Woolston had spent the last few years of his life in prison for saying that the biblical reports of Christ’s resurrection were not adequate evidence for belief in so unlikely an event; what Hume was now about to say was by no means unrelated. Second, Hume really wanted to change the way his contemporaries, especially his compatriots, thought about religion. He couldn’t do that if they didn’t read him, so he had to lead them in gently.
Hence the ‘Tillotson connection’ that Hume parades in the opening paragraph. What could be better than to be able to say that your views are just a development of an argument recently proposed by an archbishop? Except perhaps, to be able to add that the archbishop’s argument was a decisive refutation of a specifically Roman Catholic doctrine? Hume’s public, most of them in varying degrees hostile to Catholicism, would feel a comfortable warm glow . . . and read on.
Before we look at the argument itself, one more question: why does Hume find it important to write about the evidence for miracles? It is part of his plan for a systematic treatment of the grounds of religious belief, and it was customary to think of these as being of two kinds. On the one hand there were those which human beings, going on their own experience and using their own reason, could work out for themselves.
On the other, there were those that came from revelation, that is to say from a sacred text or some other authority. But these present a further problem, because you could have fraudulent texts and bogus authorities; so how to tell the genuine ones? The answer was that genuine revelations are connected with the occurrence of miracles; hence their importance, as certificates of religious authority. (Ultimately, they are issued by the highest possible authority; the widely accepted view, which Hume here takes over, had it that miracles were violations of laws of nature, and therefore could only be performed by God or those God had entrusted with divine powers.) That we can never have good reason to believe in a miracle was therefore a pretty subversive claim; it amounted to saying that human reason cannot tell the bona-fide revelation from the bogus.
So now to Hume’s