A Treatise of Human Nature / Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

by David Hume

[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1.

The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal.

150. The value, then, of Locke’s demonstration of the existence of God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal being from which the real existence that we know ‘has all which is in and belongs to it,’ depends on our converting it into the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi,’ stated as above. In other words, it depends on our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the real that we have found in him, [1] but which is inconsistent with his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction of it to ‘particular existence,’ as well as with his ordinary view that ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ can represent only a ‘progressus ad indefinitum.’ If by ‘real existence corresponding to an idea’ is meant its presentation in a particular ‘here and now,’ an attempt to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another. If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination of our ideas by an order of nature—if it means ideas ‘in ordine ad universum’ (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from ‘in ordine ad nos’—then the argument from a present to an eternal real existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is already real, and ‘has all that is in and belongs to it,’ only in virtue of the relation to the eternal.

[1] See above, paragraphs 49 and 91.

But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?

151. This, it may be said, is to vindicate Locke’s ‘proof’ only by making it Pantheistic. It gives us an eternity of nature, but not God. Our present concern, however, is not with the distinction between Pantheism and true Theism, but with the exposition of Locke’s doctrine according to the only development by which it can be made to show the real existence of an eternal being at all. It is only by making the most of certain Cartesian elements that appear in his doctrine, irreconcileable with its general purport, that we can find fair room in it for such a being, even as the system of nature. Any attempt to exhibit (in Hegelian phrase) ‘Spirit as the truth of nature,’ would be to go wholly beyond our record; yet without this the ‘ens realissimum’ cannot be the God whose existence Locke believes himself to prove—a thinking being from whom matter and motion are derived, but in whom they are not. It is true that, according to the context, it is the real existence of the self from which that of the eternal being is proved. This is because, in the Fourth Book, where the ‘proof’ occurs, following the new train of enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas are types of reality, and is writing as if ‘my own real existence’ were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however, makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated expressly as both ‘material and cogitative:’ nor, since according to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the ‘thinking thing’ takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too, like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong.

Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter.

152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (e.g. death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system—a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object. From the point of view thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to this self-consciousness?—a question to which the answer must vary according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract opposite of thought—that which is supposed void of all determination that comes of thinking—we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness, or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken.

Locke’s antinomies—Hume takes one side of them as true.

153. We have now sufficiently explored the system which it was Hume’s mission to try to make consistent with itself. We have found that it is governed throughout by the antithesis between what is given to consciousness—that in regard to which the mind is passive—as the supposed real on the one side, and what is ‘invented,’ ‘created,’ ‘superinduced’ by the mind on the other: while yet this ‘real’ in all its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by such ideas as, according to him, are not given but invented. Stripped of these superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it but that of which nothing can be said—a chaos of unrelated, and therefore unmeaning, individua. Turning to the theory of the mind itself, the source of the superinduction, we have found this to be a reduplication of the prolonged inconsistency which forms the theory of the ‘real.’ It impresses itself with that which, according to the other theory, is the impress of matter, and it really exists as that which it itself invents. The value of Hume’s philosophy lies in its being an attempt to carry out the antithesis more rigorously—to clear the real, whether under the designation of mind or of its object, of all that could not be reckoned as given in feelings which occur to us ‘whether we will or no.’ The consequence is a splendid failure, a failure which it might have been hoped would have been taken as a sufficient proof that a theory, which starts from that antithesis, cannot even be stated without implicitly contradicting itself.