Abstract

Just two hundred years ago David Hume, concluding his Natural History of Religion, wrote: ‘The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.’ Nevertheless, he went on, ‘such is the frailty of human reason and such the irresistible contagion of opinion’ that the sceptical attitude which reason calls for could scarcely be upheld unless we set the various species of superstition a–quarrelling among one another, ‘while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm though obscure regions of philosophy’. Hume’s fault was to have accepted the rationalists’ narrow interpretation of reason; to have conceded their identification of philosophy with Cartesian clarity and geometric rigour. Hume’s merit was to have appealed from this inhuman reason to human nature, from this arid rationalism to humanism. But much of what he says in the name of human nature and against rationalistic ‘reason’ should have been said in the name of human reason adequately considered. The dilemma which haunted him—philosophy or life, reason or belief—originated in his failure to criticise radically enough the rationalist conceptions of reason and of philosophy. This failure is reflected in the opposition he sets up between the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of religion and the ‘calm though obscure regions of philosophy’. The calling in question of this opposition is one of the features of much contemporary philosophy.