The Reception of David Hume In Europe

Peter Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441102423
• eBook ISBN: 9781623567613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European 'fortunes'. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which David Hume has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. This is the first collection of essays to consider how and where Hume's works were initially understood throughout Europe. They reflect on how early European responses to Hume relied on available French translations, and concentrated on his Political Discourses and his History, and how later German translations enabled professional philosophers to discuss his more abstract ideas. Also explored is the idea that continental readers were not able to judge the accuracy of the translations they read, nor did many consider the contexts in which Hume was writing: rather, they were intent on using what they read for their own purposes.

1 Hume’s Reception in Ireland

M. A. Stewart

Introduction

There are three distinct cultures in Ireland, their historiographies coloured as much by oral as by written tradition. The Tudor monarchy had imposed a degree of political and economic management on the country, and by the seventeenth century control was divided uneasily between London and Dublin until a parliamentary union was enforced in 1801, to be eventually dissolved in 1922. Within Ireland this control was effectively vested in the Protestants of the Church of Ireland until the nineteenth century. These episcopalian families were mostly of English extraction or had converted for the civil benefits that membership conferred. They held much of the wealth and dominated the literary and cultural life of the southern cities of Dublin and Cork, including the main seat of learning, Trinity College, Dublin, founded by Queen Elizabeth. Elsewhere they formed a minority population. From the seventeenth century, a second minority was created by the immigration of Protestant dissenters, often of English or French origin in the south, overwhelmingly of Scots presbyterian stock in the north. These were prominent throughout the mercantile class. A Toleration Act in 1719 gave Protestant dissenters freedom of assembly for religious and educational purposes but left many civil disadvantages intact. Not all their ministers were narrowly doctrinal in outlook and a small liberal group rejected the authority of human confessions. Only late in the eighteenth century did a significant intellectual life develop in the north as educated persons and merchants sought to improve Belfast’s competitive position by establishing the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge, now the Linen Hall Library (1788), the Belfast Literary Society (1801) and the Belfast Academical Institution (1815).

In looking at Hume’s reception in Ireland we are looking at English-speakers. The Roman Catholic majority were for long predominantly Irish-speaking and relatively few were in the propertied class. Sylvester O’Halloran (1772, 281) claimed that there was significant classical learning even in rural Ireland, but it is generally accepted that most of the Catholic population were both economically and educationally disadvantaged. At times they had no franchise and could improve their lot only by renouncing their religion. Notwithstanding the papacy’s support for William III in 1689 against the French-backed claims of the Stuarts, Irish Catholics suffered and continued to suffer disproportionately for the history of their resistance. Their economic depression continued even after their principal legal disabilities were removed in 1829. There was, however, an English-speaking educated class who lived within the Pale – the coastal tract north and south of Dublin which extended inland for about twenty miles.

Outside the Gaelic belt, Scots-Irish intellectual links go back to the seventeenth-century Protestant settlements. College-trained ministers followed migrant populations from Scotland to Ireland, some on temporary missions. Young people usually returned to Scotland for part of their college education if they sought admission to the professions, but philosophy schools were also etablished in Ireland itself. Francis Hutcheson, the best-known product of this system, maintained his own academy in Dublin from 1720 until his transfer to a vacant chair at Glasgow University in 1730. Little philosophical writing came out of this community and most of that was from Hutcheson’s generation. When Hume’s work first appeared, Hutcheson was long settled in Scotland. He had disagreements with Hume over moral philosophy, some of them theologically grounded, that were a factor in his blocking Hume’s bid for a university chair in 1745. These are glimpsed in Hume’s correspondence (Greig 1932, 1: 32–35, 36–40, 45–48, 58) and belong rather to the Scottish than the Irish reception of his work. The literature on Hume that emanated from Scottish critics in his lifetime and beyond would have been known to those in Ireland with religious or educational links to Scotland, but the evidence has largely disappeared.

Publication of Hume’s writings

Until late in the eighteenth century, Dublin dominated the Irish book supply, even where much of it was imported. Here liberal presbyterians who had migrated south from the more sectarian north played an important role. John Smith, who ran a bookshop on the Blind Quay from about 1724 to 1759, was advertising the three volumes of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in the Dublin press by January 1741. An Ulsterman trained at Glasgow, he published Hutcheson’s Dublin-period writings and was at one time thought to be the ‘Mr Smith’ mentioned by Hume to Hutcheson in connection with Hume’s Abstract of the Treatise (Greig 1932, 1: 37; Keynes and Sraffa 1938, xviii–xxiii). That was another Ulsterman, William Smith, an early partner of John Smith’s who in 1725 removed to Amsterdam, joined the Wetstein publishing house and established the Bibliothèque raisonnée; in 1741 he published a lengthy notice of Hume’s Treatise that was substantially modelled on the Abstract (Duddy 2004, 310–11). John Smith, on the other hand, did more than import the Treatise into Ireland. Within a year of Gavin Hamilton’s bungled London launch in 1754, Smith began a separate Irish edition of the Stuart volumes of Hume’s History of Great Britain (1755–57) and may even have done it under licence (Greig 1932, 1: 210), but Hume does not appear to have had any personal input into an Irish edition at any point in his life. On Smith’s retirement another bookseller published the Tudor volumes (1759); a third reissued the existing parts and published the latest volumes on early history, to constitute an entire History of England (1762) hard on the heels of its London completion. The full History, based on a new London edition of 1770, was twice republished in Dublin editions towards the end of Hume’s life (1772; 1775–76) and a posthumous edition went through two issues (1780a; 1788). Excerpts from Hume’s History relating to the Irish Rebellion and from the original conclusion to his essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ have been found in the Dublin press (1766; 1784). There may be others.

An edition (1777) of Hume’s posthumous short autobiography with Adam Smith’s encomium was followed by the only Dublin printing of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1779), after which the same trader repackaged his History, Essays and Life as a ten-volume Works (1780b), known now from a single surviving gathering. Two novelties appear to be distinctive to the Irish trade. John Home’s drama Douglas, published in Edinburgh in 1757, was promoted ‘as it is acted at the theatres in Great-Britain and Ireland’ in Dublin editions of 1757, 1761 and 1766, in Belfast editions of 1758 and 1766, and in Cork in 1762. In these Irish editions Home’s text is coupled with both pro-and anti-Home papers – the dedication to Home with which David Hume prefaced his Four Dissertations in 1757 alongside admonitory pronouncements from two Scottish presbyteries. Similar even-handedness appears in the Dublin printing, three years after the first edition, of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1782), with which was included the text of the English theologian Thomas Balguy’s Divine Benevolence Asserted; Balguy’s work, not specifically targeted at Hume, was published in London the previous year. The first issue of a new Town and Country Magazine; or, Irish Miscellany in June 1784 was advertised as including a letter or letters of Hume ‘never before printed’ but no copy has been found.

Early responses on religion and morals

Hume’s Philosophical Essays (the later Enquiry) concerning Human Understanding of 1748 came to the attention of Philip Skelton, an evangelical Church of Ireland curate, while he was carrying the manuscript of Ophiomaches (1749) to London (Burdy [1792] 1914, 99; Duddy 2004, 309–10). He recast the fifth dialogue of this anti-deist work to address Hume’s essay on miracles. His deistic character Dechaine fairly summarizes the case that ‘the quantity of assent must be proportionable to the excess of experience over the credibility of those, who bear witness to the fact’ (2: 20), but his theistic persona Shepherd, who earlier claimed that the deists’ merely ‘practical’ faith will never take root if it has not been grounded in a ‘historical’ faith in revelation, has read further in the Philosophical Essays; he retorts that experience is powerless to show that a fact contrary to the normal course of experience is impossible, ‘for it implies no contradiction to say it will not arise’ (2: 21; cf. 1: 39). Probability and improbability are relative, and the theist cannot set limits to superior power. The debate becomes one of incompatible historical perceptions. The theist sees the Gospel record as secured by the same criteria for the acceptance of testimony as Hume implicitly used to undermine it. Instead of Hume’s fable of the oriental prince who justifiably disbelieved accounts of the existence of ice, Skelton adopts the image of an enlightened African. This man ‘from the repeated, disinterested testimony of northern people, who trade in Guiney, and of whose veracity he makes no question’ will accept the concurring testimony of known ‘men of truth’ who ‘have no temptation to combine, in order to impose on him in a thing of this nature’. If the reporters have much to lose by falsifying their reports and are willing to suffer grievously for them, here is ‘a rational conviction on testimony’ (2: 23–24). Hume himself encouraged Andrew Millar to publish this work (Burdy 1914, 100).

In the fourteenth of his Controversial Discourses (1754, vol. 1), Skelton contests the unascribed but Humean argument that the wonders worked in the name of rival religions undermine the claims of Christianity. The Christian narratives, he is convinced, are in an entirely different league and derive from a time when human learning and philosophy were at a high point. In a late essay on common sense as an antidote to the employment of philosophy in religion, he additionally criticizes those Scottish thinkers (Thomas Reid, James Oswald, James Beattie) whose responses to Hume sidetrack the reader into natural theology instead of standing up for revelation. Of Hume, whom they ‘should have let alone’, he writes:

His Scepticism is the strongest Refutation, and the severest Satire on Philosophy, whether in or out of the Church, that ever was, or ever shall be published. For my own Part, I believe he did not pretend to be a Sceptic. The Man eat, drank, put on and off his Clothes, like other Men; and, as an Historian, was so notorious a matter-of-Fact-man that I cannot take him for any Thing else, than barely an Enemy to all Religion in the Mask of Sceptism. Secretly stung by one Religion, he could find no relief in any other; and therefore wrote himself into a faint Disbelief of all; I say faint, because, as a Sceptic, he even professed a Doubt of religion, and therefore could not have been a firm Disbeliever. The Man has a Sort of Sense, which forces me to think him a Sort of Christian, but his infinite Variety was too strong for his little Faith. His Case, on this Supposition, was far from being singular. (1770–84, 6: 246)

A second respondent, Robert Clayton, was a one-time friend of George Berkeley and now bishop of Clogher (Duddy 2004, 75–77). He was the first in a line of British and Irish critics to portray Hume’s method and message as reflecting the spirit of the maverick English politician Lord Bolingbroke. Clayton’s Vindication (1752, 57) shows knowledge of Hume’s moral essays, but he is mainly concerned, like Skelton, with the debate on miracles. He criticizes Hume’s attack on the biblical record by going back to John Locke’s criteria for the assessment of testimony, which he finds poorly paraphrased in Hume. By these criteria correctly understood, the New Testament evidence is irreproachable (67–86). In a surprising reversal of traditional apologetics, Clayton reduces the number of the purported witnesses to the four evangelists, of whom Mark and Luke were already acknowledged not to have been eyewitnesses, and he considers this entirely adequate. Some Thoughts on Self-Love (1753) includes the earliest Irish response to Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Clayton objects to Hume’s defining virtue as whatever raises in the spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation, because many barbaric acts have generated pleasing sentiments in barbaric spectators; he also claims to find in Hume an exaggerated temporal priority of reasoning to sentiment. Besides the processes of sensation and reflection which precede reasoning, he believes there are innate affections or instincts, such as the love of pleasure and dread of pain, implanted by God in such a way that we take pleasure in some things and feel pain at others because those sensations have been annexed to these objects for their utility in promoting God’s purpose for humankind (8). He accepts nevertheless that ‘the same Objects of Love, Compassion, Friendship, Grief, Benevolence, Justice, Honour, &c. do not strike all Men alike’, and there are degrees of ‘a Sensibility, or Delicacy of Taste, or Sentiment’ (15) that can be trained or extinguished through reward and punishment, custom and habit. There are echoes of Hutcheson here; how far Clayton believed he was engaging with Hume is unclear.

The Dublin dissenting minister John Leland made his name by non-sectarian defences of the Christian religion (Duddy 2004, 192–95). He could write sardonically in 1755 of the ‘admiration and applause’ that Hume’s ‘character as a writer’ was by then attracting, not least from Hume himself (1755, 2: 22). Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers first appeared in 1754, reproducing letters to an English Anglican friend. A second volume accompanying the second edition (1755) included four letters on Hume; two were added in a Supplement (1756), all six converging in the first volume of the third edition (1757). Leland places Hume’s critique of religion in the context of his wider philosophy and finds him ‘a subtil and ingenious writer, but extremely sceptical, and fond of novelty’ (1757, 1: 258). He cannot reconcile Hume’s stress on the importance of the relation of cause and effect in reasoning from experience with his seeming denial that reason or experience can acquaint us with that relation; he thinks Hume is rejecting the probability of causal reasoning and even the existence of causes. This is a self-fulfilling projection on to his subject of the inconsistencies he expects in an infidel writer. It is symptomatic of Leland’s perplexity that he cites the Chevalier Ramsay against Hume for a thesis that on more careful reading he could have derived from Hume himself (1: 264). Just as the first letter looks fairly broadly at Hume’s philosophy, so does the last, which criticizes Hume’s extension of the term ‘virtue’ beyond the moral context and defends some Gospel virtues that are mischievously equated with ‘monkish’ practices in Hume’s moral philosophy (1: 360–67).

The heart of Leland’s critique lies in four letters on Hume’s philosophy of religion. Several writers, Irish and English, all well versed in apologetics, had by now preceded him in criticizing Hume on miracles; they had found Hume’s logic plainly specious and thought they had sufficiently answered him on the facts by reiterating traditional defences. Leland does not appear to add anything new. He faced less competition in criticizing the essay ‘Of a Particular Providence and a Future State’. He anticipates and dismisses a line of thought that Hume will consider in the still unpublished Dialogues, namely that we cannot argue from the analogy of experience that the world originated from intelligent design ‘because neither we nor any of the human race, were present at the making of it, or saw how it was made’. The correct argument, he thinks, is framed not in terms of a unique incident or object but in terms of ‘the admirable marks of wisdom and design which we behold in the course of nature, and order of things’ (1: 274). As for confining the divine attributes to whatever is exactly commensurate with the limited observable effects, Leland shows, in effect, that the cosmological argument for a first cause or necessary being and the design argument are intended as interdependent parts of a single theistic defence.

Leland’s interest in the psychology of unbelief makes him wary of Hume’s motives. In 1757 Hume wrote to a friend visiting Dublin: ‘My Compliments to Dr Leland, & tell him he has certainly mistaken my Character’ (Klibansky and Mossner 1954, 43).

Hugh Hamilton, FRS, a future bishop of Ossory, was perhaps the most eminent Irish churchman to criticize Hume and the first to respond to his Dialogues, ‘a complete promptuary of scepticism and atheism’ (Duddy 2004, 148–50). In An Attempt to Prove (1784) he recasts the cosmological argument after reviewing the disagreements between the partisans of the English theologians Samuel Clarke and Edmund Law. Hume is discussed in a lengthy Introduction. Hamilton does not consider atheism a serious danger: it is inherently ‘absurd’. But scepticism is a real threat to faith and morals, and he feels bound to answer Hume’s insinuation that we can attribute only limited attributes to the deity, commending Leland’s writing on the same subject. Hamilton believes Hume confused the admitted non-demonstrativity of a posteriori reasoning with a mistaken requirement to minimize all probabilistic conclusions. Hume travestied the cosmological argument through the mouth of a ‘silly character’, Demea. He treated natural religion generally with indignity, but his objections are stale; they have long since been answered in the anti-deist literature.

In the character of Philo he intended to exhibit to us a learned and acute sceptical philosopher; but his harangues are so inconsistent with each other that he gives us only the idea of a careless young student, with a lively imagination, and an elegant flow of language, declaiming in a College-hall on the wrong side of the question. (Hamilton 1784, 35–36)

Hamilton derives his view of Hume as an unmitigated sceptic from Hume’s Common Sense critics. Unaware that the Dialogues were virtually complete by 1751, he wrongly guesses that the admission of the legitimacy of causal reasoning that he detects in that work alone was a concession to the ‘masterly manner’ in which Beattie had ‘demolished’ Hume’s ‘system of scepticism’ (14–15).

Controversy over Hume’s ‘History’

In ‘My Own Life’ Hume commented on the early reception of the first volumes of his History:

I was assailed by one Cry of Reproach, Disapprobation, and even Detestation: English, Scotch, and Irish; Whig and Tory; Churchman and Sectary, Free-thinker and Religionist; Patriot and Courtier united in their Rage against the Man, who had presumed to shed a generous Tear for the Fate of Charles I, and the Earl of Strafford: … I must only except the primate of England, Dr Herring, and the primate of Ireland, Dr Stone; which seem two odd Exceptions. These dignifyed Prelates separately sent me messages not to be discouraged. (Greig 1932, 1: 4; cf. 2: 258)

To call George Stone ‘dignifyed’ is loading the die: more politician than churchman, he had been an aggressive agent of the English ascendancy. Hume’s first edition contained inflammatory accounts of ‘fanatical’ (Reformed) and ‘superstitious’ (Popish) religions and a less well-known attack on the English mismanagement of Ireland prior to the Stuarts and of the character of the native people. He glosses over the fact that significant passages were prudentially excised from subsequent editions, although a diligent reader would find similar sentiments less ostentatiously presented elsewhere. A disinterested one would probably think Hume had successfully captured the atmosphere of violence on all sides in the seventeenth century, but a comparison of the History with Hume’s Essays and correspondence would also reveal a steady degree of patronizing stereotyping of the Irish at an unconscious level.

By the time the concluding volumes appeared in London and a Dublin edition was imminent, a Dublin reviewer, ‘C. R.’, hailed Hume as the only British historian whose work at last superseded Rapin’s.

Mr Hume is one of those few writers, whose fame will encrease in the same proportion that the human understanding is cultivated; his abilities have already contributed eminently to wipe off the repro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Timeline: European Reception of David Hume
• Introduction
• 1 Hume’s Reception in Ireland
• 2 The Early British Reception of Hume’s Writings on Religion
• 3 Hume’s Reception in France
• 4 The Reception of Hume in Germany
• 5 David Hume and Sir James Steuart
• 6 Italian Responses to David Hume
• 7 Translations of Hume’s Works in Italy
• 8 Hume in Russia
• 9 The Reception of David Hume’s Philosophy in Sweden
• 10 David Hume and Polish Philosophical and Social Thought
• 11 ‘Ignoramus’: David Hume’s Ideas in the Hungarian Enlightenment
• 12 The Reception of David Hume in Czech Thought
• 13 The Reception of David Hume in Romania
• 14 Canonization and Critique: Hume’s Reputation as a Historian
• 15 The Reception of Hume in Nineteenth-Century British Philosophy
• 16 The Scientific Reception of Hume’s Theory of Causation: Establishing the Positivist Interpretation in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes