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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2009
Disappointed by the indifferent reception of his 1739 Treatise of Human Nature, particularly in view of his commitment to vividness and convincingness as epistemological criteria, Hume recast crucial arguments from his Treatise in “The Epicurean,” “The Stoic,” “The Platonist,” and “The Sceptic,” four pieces from his 1741–2 Essays Moral and Political. Locating these texts within both the dialogue and essay genres, I demonstrate how Hume continues the project of the Treatise by showing, rather than telling, his views: he blends rhetoric and reasoned argument to show that they are in many cases indistinguishable; he depicts his speakers' conclusions as consequences of their personalities to show his skepticism about human freedom; and he concludes, in a moment strongly reminiscent of the famous end of Book I of the Treatise, by showing the limits of philosophy itself.
1 Quoted in Mossner, E. C., Life of David Hume, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1980), 612Google Scholar. I rely on the Life for biographical details throughout.
2 Although the Treatise received several notices in German and French periodicals, a sneeringly negative review in the History of the Works of the Learned of Nov. and Dec. 1739 and a letter to Commonsense: Or the Englishman's Journal in July 1740 were the only responses in the British press. The Treatise's run of a thousand copies was not supplemented by a second edition until 1817, and as few as three hundred copies may have been sold by the mid-1740s. See Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary J., 2 vols. (Oxford, 2007), 2: 494–519, 583–4Google Scholar (hereafter I will cite the Treatise text by book, part, and section, with the page numbers of this edition in parentheses, while citing the volume of editorial material as “Norton and Norton” followed by page number); and Fieser, James, ed., Early Responses to Hume's Metaphysical and Epistemological Writings, 2 vols. (Bristol, 2000)Google Scholar, which reprints the 1739 review at 1: 1–41. Incidently, Hume's chronology in My Own Life is slightly inaccurate; the first series of Essays Moral and Political actually came out in late 1741, old style (i.e. counting the new year from Lady Day, not 1 January).
3 Mossner makes this point by noting several claims in “The Sceptic” which he identifies as repeated from the Treatise (Mossner, Life of David Hume, 141–3). I will argue that Hume re-presents the arguments of the Treatise through the appropriation of new genres, in addition to repetition per se. I am also extending Timothy H. Engström's argument for the philosophical relevance of Hume's essays by locating them within their literary-historical context and by focusing the Four Philosophers, which he does not discuss. Engström, Timothy H., “Foundational Standards and Conversational Style: The Humean Essay as an Issue of Philosophical Genre,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30/2 (1997), 150–71Google Scholar.
4 Hume, David, Essays Moral and Political, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1741–2), 2: 106–78Google Scholar. Because I wish to locate Hume's essays within the context of his intellectual development in the early 1740s, I quote unless otherwise noted from the first edition of each of the two volumes of Essays Moral and Political, from 1741 and 1742 respectively; unfortunately this means that capitalization and other accidentals are inconsistent with my quotations from a modern edition of the Treatise. In addition to citing subsequent eighteenth-century editions when appropriate I have also consulted Eugene Miller's edition (Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis, 1985)), which is based on the 1777 edition and thus reflects (without fully documenting, vexingly) Hume's further revisions over the course of his life.
5 See letters to Henry Home (the future Lord Kames) and to the prolific London-based French Protestant refugee Pierre Desmaizeaux in Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), 1: 26 ff., 1: 29 ff. The 1739 title page is cited from Norton and Norton, 2: 671.
6 Thus the anonymous reviewer in The History of the Works of the Learned quotes several pages from Hume's introduction, then sneers, “Here the Reader has all that I can find in the Introduction to this Work, which can in the least give him any Idea of the Design of it: How far he will be thereby instructed in it, must be left to his own Judgment.” Fieser, Early Responses to Hume, 1: 6.
7 Hume, Treatise, III.advertisement (1: 292).
8 Fieser, Early Responses to Hume, 1: 6.
9 Hume, Treatise, I.2.3 (1: 27).
10 Ibid., 2.1.8 (1: 196).
11 In this respect it is interesting to see how the concept of “pride” changes over the course of the Treatise. In the second book, pride is associated with love and pleasure, and opposed to humility, hatred, and pain (Hume's extended discussion of pride begins in II.1.2 (1: 182); see especially II.1.5 (1: 187)). Pride in one's own possessions and qualities is so fundamental to Hume's account of the passions that there is little suggestion in “Of the Passions” that it might be a vice; Ciceronian complacency totally eclipses Christian self-mortification: “There may, perhaps, be some, who being accustom'd to the style of the schools and pulpit . . . may be surpriz'd to hear me talk of virtue as exacting pride, which they look upon as a vice . . . But not to dispute about words, I observe that by pride I understand that agreeable impression, which arises in the mind, when the view either of our virtue, beauty, riches or power makes us satisfy'd with ourselves.” (2.1.7 (1: 194)). It is only at the end of the third book, “Of Morals”, that Hume acknowledges that pride, while unavoidable and even necessary, is often best kept to oneself: “Thus self-satisfaction and vanity may not only be allowable, but requisite in a character. 'Tis, however, certain, that good-breeding and decency require that we shou'd avoid all signs and expressions, which tend directly to show that passion” (3.3.2 (1: 381)). Over a year elapsed between the publication of Books I and II in Jan. 1739 and Book III in Nov. 1740, and Hume certainly revised the manuscript of Book III during that time; perhaps its final pages were composed or revised in a spirit of greater intellectual humility than previous sections. Cf. Norton and Norton, 2: 477–88.
12 Hume, Letters, 1: 24.
13 Ibid., 1: 28.
14 Hume, Treatise, I.3.8 (1: 72). This point about Hume's concept of belief is made by John Sitter, who traces its implications for other works of Hume, especially An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Sitter, John, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 36–49Google Scholar.
15 The term's ambiguity, commented on by contemporaries, is noted by Jones, Peter, Hume's Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh, 1982), 98Google Scholar.
16 Hume, Treatise, I.advertisement (1: 2). I am indebted, here and below, to Box, M. A.'s The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which locates Hume's ideas about truth within a Scriblerian context that privileged clarity, accessibility, and common sense as intellectual virtues; see especially 3–53.
17 Hume, Letters, 1: 17. It is striking how closely the vividly expressed fear of “delivering” something “maim'd and imperfect” anticipates the description of the Treatise as “dead-born from the press” over forty years later.
18 Norton and Norton reprint the Abstract at 1: 403–17; this quotation is from 1: 412.
19 Pope, Alexander, Complete Poetical Works, ed. David, Herbert with introduction by Pat Rogers (Oxford, 1978), 421–2Google Scholar. G. B. Hill's identification of the allusion is in Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume, 22.
20 Writing to Henry Home immediately after the publication of the first two volumes, Hume had expressed short-term anxiety but long-term confidence about his work's reception: “[I] am apprehensive lest the chief reward I shall have for some time will be the pleasure of studying on such important subjects, and the approbation of a few judges” (13 Feb. 1739; Hume, Letters, 1: 26, emphasis mine.)
21 For Hume's work on the Essays before the third volume of the Treatise had appeared, see his letters of 1 June and 1 July 1739, to Henry Home (Hume, Letters, 1: 30–32.)
22 Jessop, T. E., A Bibliography of David Hume and of Scottish Philosophy (New York, 1983), 15–16Google Scholar.
23 For Hume bibliography see Jessop, Bibliography of David Hume. As Sitter points out (Literary Loneliness, 37), the Enquiry was originally titled Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and it was divided into a dozen essays, “many of which are comparatively self-contained.”
24 Christensen, Jerome, in his postmodern biography, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison, WI, 1987)Google Scholar, discusses at length Hume's career-long repackaging of his material, with particular emphasis on the philosopher's economic savvy; see in particular 120–25 and chap. 5 passim.
25 One exception is Immerwahr, John, “Hume's Essay on Happiness,” Hume Studies 15/2 (1989), 307–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which emphasizes the essays' contribution to Hume's moral philosophy—I will be concentrating instead on the epistemology of the Four Philosophers.
26 Hume, Essais Philosophiques sur l'Entendement Humain, par Mr. Hume, Avec les quatre Philosophes du même Auteur, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1758), 2: 163–276—the four essays make up over a third of the second volume.
27 This is not to take a position on the question of whether Hume's collected writings represent a fully coherent philosophical system; rather, I wish to show important continuities between Hume's writings in different genres. Because the titles and style of the four essays under discussion signal to the reader that they are “philosophical” rather than more generally belletristic in theme, I will particularly emphasize their continuities with the Treatise.
28 Spectator 476, written by Addison, cites Montaigne, Seneca, Cicero, and Aristotle as precedents, although it applies the term “essay,” in the more restricted sense of short texts written without “regularity and method,” to the first two only. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 4: 185–6.
29 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 1: iii. The Craftsman was the chief dissenting newspaper during the Walpole administration. Hume's epigraph for the first two volumes of the Treatise (1: 1), Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire, quae velis; & quae sentias, dicere licet (taken from Tacitus, Histories, 1.1), is used as a motto for Craftsman 2, on the freedom of the press (published the following year in book form: “Caleb D'Anvers,” The Craftsman (London, 1727), 12.) For general information on the Craftsman see Bolingbroke, Lord, Contributions to the “Craftsman”, ed. Varey, Simon (Oxford, 1982), xiii–xxxivGoogle Scholar.
30 Well before the end of 1711–12 run of the Spectator, its essays had already begun to be collected into octavo volumes, and complete editions and selections of the paper were frequently republished throughout the eighteenth century. See the Spectator, 1: lxix–lxxiii and 1: xcvi ff.
31 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 1, 4.
32 Spectator, 1: 44. Readers and book buyers examining Hume's Essays Moral and Political would also have thought of seventeenth-century works like Francis Bacon's Essays Moral and Civil; in fact, Hume's London distributor for the Essays, Andrew Millar, also published a four-volume Works of Bacon, including his Essays, in 1740 (Bacon, Francis, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4 vols. (London, 1740)Google Scholar). For Hume and Millar see Mossner, Life of David Hume, 146.
33 Spectator, 1: 432–5.
34 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 1: 4, emphasis mine.
35 Jones, Hume's Sentiments, gives a good account of how Cicero's moral thought influenced Hume, but because he focuses largely on the Treatise for evidence about Hume's ideas, he says relatively little about how Hume might have been influenced by the form of the philosophical dialogue as practiced by Cicero, which I will discuss below.
36 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 1: v. Hume is following Addison's disclaimer in Spectator 542 that “I desire my Reader to consider every particular Paper or Discourse as a distinct Tract by itself, and independent of every thing that goes before or after it” (Spectator, 4: 440)
37 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 102, 115, 129, 133.
38 There was considerable precedent for a generic mixture of this kind. For example, the non-juring bishop Jeremy Collier's Essays upon Several Moral Subjects, as his Miscellanies were renamed after 1697, are in fact a series of dialogues between “Philotimus” and “Philalethes.” Collier, Jeremy, Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (London, 1697)Google Scholar. Hume alludes to the work in “On the Rise of the Arts and Sciences” (Essays Moral and Political, 2: 83)
39 Hume has, however, cited several philosophical dialogues in the essay immediately preceding (Shaftesbury's The Moralists and Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and De Finibus) that would have been well known to his readers. Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 86 ff.
40 The effect of readerly surprise I describe below becomes less striking in the 1748 edition and thereafter, because Hume adds a footnote on the first page of “The Epicurean” explaining his design “to deliver the Sentiments of Sects, that naturally form themselves in the World, and entertain different Ideas of human Life and Happiness”. Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 3rd edn (London, 1748), 193.
41 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 101.
42 Ibid., 2: 100.
43 Ibid., 2: 111, 114
44 Graham, Roderick, The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (East Lothian, Scotland, 2004), 129Google Scholar; Engström, “Foundational Standards,” 169.
45 Hume, Treatise, I.3.8, 9 (1: 70, 1: 76, 1: 80)
46 “Reasoned” in this case referring, of course, to the “soft and gentle” sentiment which is pacific enough to resemble reason, and which Hume in the Treatise considers the true moral sense (III.1.2 (1: 302)). Given Hume's position on the relationship between truth and rhetoric, perhaps it is unsurprising that subsequent commentators have seen his own writings as “persuasive rather than conclusive,” more show than substance. Richetti, John J., Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 188CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cites various statements of this position from the philosophers Stuart Hampshire and A. P. Cavendish, as well the poet and writer C. H. Sisson.
47 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 73 ff.
48 The “Sceptic” is a notable omission from the list of discredited ancient schools, a point on which I will expand below. It is also worth noting that this mention of the schools of ancient philosophy ingeniously sets up the reader for the fast but skillful change of tone that I have described above as the driving mechanism of “The Epicurean,” because it leads the reader to believe that the essay will be a disquisition on or about Epicureanism, rather than an Epicurean homily.
49 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 103, 117.
50 Ibid., 2: 139.
51 This tends to be the assumption, often unstated, of Hume's readers. See e.g. Jones, Hume's Sentiments, 85, or, as Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume, 137, points out, Boswell's Life of Johnson for Feb. 1764 (the passage can be found in Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. and rev. Powell, L. F., 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934), 2: 9Google Scholar).
52 Hume, Treatise, II.3.10 (1: 288). The Sceptic also comments on the pleasures of “Gaming and Hunting,” though without explicitly comparing them to philosophy (Essays Moral and Political, 2: 155).
53 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 107, Treatise, III.3.2 (1: 383). Obviously the Epicurean does not theorize the mechanism which relates pleasure to virtue, which is the contribution of Hume's moral system in the Treatise. But his account is not, from the perspective of the latter, wrong.
54 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 135, Treatise, III.3.1 (1: 367).
55 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 148.
56 Ibid., 2: 140. This point is made more explicit by a footnote, added by Hume in the authorial voice in the 1764 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects and reprinted in Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, 177, that argues against the Sceptic's rejection of philosophical consolation.
57 Essays Moral and Political, 2: 129, 168–70. The Sceptic's endorsement of the first of these two “consolations” retains a strong tinge of irony in the 1742 edition that is far more muted from the 1753–4 edition on—I should say, rather, that the irony becomes Hume's, rather than the Sceptic's.
58 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 132, 140.
59 Livingston, Donald, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago, 1998,) 13–15Google Scholar, argues that Treatise, I.4, demands a “bifocal” reading, attentive both to Hume's first-order questions (“How is it possible to perceive physical things?”) and to his more important second-order philosophizing about philosophy (“What can count as an adequate philosophical theory of perception or, indeed, of anything?”) Not coincidentally, this is very much Hume's project in the Four Philosophers essays as well, and the hybrid dialogue–essay form, which makes the reader immediately aware that first-order questions about the good life come from multiple, contingent points of view, is a powerful tool for drawing the reader to second-order questions about the nature and limits of philosophy itself.
60 Potkay, Adam, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 181Google Scholar. Potkay quotes the Treatise to the effect that “'Tis difficult for us to withhold our assent from what is painted out to us in all the colours of eloquence; and the vivacity produc'd by the fancy is in many cases greater than that which arises from custom and experience.” Ibid., 182. The passage is from Treatise, I.3.10 (1: 84).
61 Cf. Engström, “Foundational Standards,” passim, which offers a diachronic, formal account of Hume's relationship with rhetoric, connecting him both to Cicero and to subsequent philosophers such as Rorty.
62 Prince, Michael B., Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge, 1996), 12–14, 138Google Scholar.
63 Ibid., 38. Mossner dates the composition of the Dialogues to Hume's two-year sojourn at the family estate in Scotland from 1749 to 1751 (Life, 232).
64 Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd edn, ed. Popkin, Richard H. (Indianapolis, 1998), 19Google Scholar.
65 Ibid., 89.
66 For a summary of Cicero's positions and their influence on Hume see Jones, Hume's Sentiments, especially 29–43. My description of the didactic purpose of Ciceronian dialogue is derived from the introduction to the Loeb Tusculan Disputations, ed. and with introduction by J. E. King (Cambridge, MA, 1971), especially xxvi ff.
67 In making this point, Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 176, draws a contrast with the “zero-sum” approach to disputation embodied by William Warburton. Hume's approach instead resembles a Smithian model where trade (in this case, of philosophical arguments) benefits both participants and the economy as a whole. The 1740 Abstract to the Treatise expresses clearly Hume's high regard for controversial arguments which “shake off the yoke of authority, accustom men to think for themselves, give new hints, which men of genius may carry further, and by the very opposition, illustrate points, wherein no one before suspected any difficulty” (Hume, Abstract, 3) Cf. Cicero to Brutus in King's translation of the Tusculan Disputations, 2.6: “We, however, whose guide is probability and who are unable to advance further than the point at which the likelihood of truth has presented itself, are prepared both to refute without obstinacy and be refuted without anger.”
68 Hume, Letters, 1: 173. He goes on to reproach his opponent, part of whose critique was directed towards the Dialogue which concludes the 1751 Enquiry, for attributing to Hume himself the positions of the “Sceptic” (i.e. Palamedes) in the piece: “I have surely endeavoured to refute the Sceptic with all the force of which I am master; and my refutation must be allowed sincere, because drawn from the capital principles of my system . . . In every Dialogue, no more than one person can be supposed to represent the author.” It is indeed the case that the “I” of the Dialogue reasons very much as Hume in propria persona does elsewhere: his central account of moral excellence as that which is “useful, or agreeable to a man himself or to others” is a nearly verbatim repetition of Hume, Treatise, III.3.2 (1: 383) (Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. and rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 337Google Scholar). Any attempt to reconcile Hume's epistolary statement with the rhetorical complexity of the Four Philosophers essays or the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion would be, no doubt, best predicated on the fact that “no more than one person” may be taken as a litotes for “no one.”
69 See notes 12 and 13 above.
70 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 101, 115. The footnote Hume gives to the title of “The Epicurean” in his 1748 edition (see note 39 above) makes this point explicit, albeit at the expense of the element of generic surprise in the 1742 original: “The Intention of this and the three following Essays is not so much, to explain accurately the Sentiments of the ancient Sects of Philosophy, as to deliver the Sentiments of Sects, that naturally form themselves in the World, and entertain different Ideas of human Life and Happiness.” Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 3rd edn, 193.
71 “Everyone reasons according to his fancies.” Herder, Johann Gottfried, Auch Eine Geschichte der Philosophie zur Bildung der Menschheit (Frankfurt, 1967), 13Google Scholar; Hume, Treatise, I.3.8 (1: 72). Dialogue is the generic vehicle best suited to Hume's valorization of “vividness” and “convincingness” in his epistemology, as the reader is presented with multiple viewpoints and expected to choose the most compelling.
72 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 146–7.
73 Hume, Treatise, I.4.2 (1: 143–4).
74 Ibid., I.4.7 (1: 175). Sitter, Literary Loneliness, 26, points out that Hume is performing a philosophical version of Richardson's writing “to the Moment.”
75 Hume, Letters 1: 13–14.
76 Hume, Treatise, I.4.1 (1: 123). Cf. Potkay's evocation of “the assembled capacities of the mind.” Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence, 189.
77 Hume, Treatise, II.2.9 passim (1: 245–50).
78 Ibid., I.3.8 (1: 72).
79 Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 2: 174.
