Hume's critique of religion and religious belief is, as a whole, subtle, profound, and damaging to religion in ways which have no philosophical antecedents and few successors. Some of the damage and a little of the subtlety will, I trust, become evident in Part II of this essay, where Hume's seminal discussions of the design argument for the existence of God, miracles, morality, and natural belief are examined. Before this, however, certain preliminaries need attention. First, there is the difficulty caused by the old-fashioned or unfamiliar terminology used by Hume and his commentators in describing and assessing what he has to say. Second, although the scale of Hume's writing on religion is reasonably obvious (it exceeds his output concerning any other subject except history), the fact that it is dispersed over a number of publications and partly embedded (sometimes none too clearly) in several more, as well as having to be drawn from essays, letters, and minor writings, needs to be understood before any informed discussion is possible. Third, there is the problem of seeing what he wrote not as ad hoc criticisms turned out piecemeal, but as a comprehensive critical strategy. Finally, a problem of interpretation results from Hume's “abundant prudence” in covering his real opinions with ambiguous irony and even, on occasions, with denials of his own apparent conclusions.

Sir

Not being acquainted with this hand-writing, you will probably look to the bottom to find the Subscription, & not finding any, will certainly wonder at this strange method of addressing to you. I must here in the beginning beg you to excuse it, & to perswade you to read what follows with some Attention, [and] must tell you, that this gives you an Opportunity to do a very good-natur'd Action, which I believe is the most powerful Argument I can use. I need not tell you, that I am your Countryman, a Scotchman; for without any such tye, I dare rely upon your Humanity, even to a perfect Stranger, such as I am. The Favour I beg of you is your Advice, & the reason why I address myself in particular to you need not be told. As one must be a skilful Physician, a man of Letters, of Wit, of Good Sense, & of great Humanity, to give me a satisfying Answer, I wish Fame had pointed out to me more Persons, in whom these Qualities are united, in order to have kept me some time in Suspense.

Within Hume's philosophical system and his account of human nature one finds a number of elements that are intimately related to his moral objectives. I refer, widely, to his moral objectives, rather than more restrictedly to his ethical theory, because his whole system has a moral thrust that can be discerned in many places where the immediate subject-matter is not ethical at all.

HUME AND HIS PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM

In 1927, A. E. Taylor concluded his Leslie Stephen Lecture David Hume and the Miraculous with a judgement of Hume's attitude to his philosophical work that has been held by many others:

David Hume (1711-76) may be best understood as the first postsceptical philosopher of the early modern period. Many of Hume's immediate predecessors, particularly the Cartesians, had attempted to refute philosophical scepticism. In contrast to these predecessors, Hume was a self-proclaimed sceptic who consciously developed a philosophical position that is at one and the same time fundamentally sceptical and fundamentally constructive. His position is sceptical in so far as he shows that knowledge has nothing like the firm, reliable foundation the Cartesians or other rationalists had claimed to give it; his position is constructive in so far as he undertook to articulate a new science of human nature that would provide for all the sciences, including morals and politics, a unique and defensible foundation. For nearly two centuries the positive side of Hume's thought was routinely overlooked - in part as a reaction to his thoroughgoing religious scepticism - but in recent decades commentators, even those who emphasize the sceptical aspects of his thought, have recognized and begun to reconstruct Hume's positive philosophical positions.

For Hume, understanding the workings of the mind is the key to understanding everything else. There is a sense, therefore, in which to write about Hume's philosophy of mind is to write about all of his philosophy. With that said, I shall nonetheless focus here on those specific doctrines that belong to what we today call the philosophy of mind, given our somewhat narrower conception of it. It should also be remembered that Hume describes his inquiry into the nature and workings of the mind as a science. This is an important clue to understanding both the goals and the results of that inquiry, as well as the methods Hume uses in pursuing it. As we will see, there is a thread running from Hume's project of founding a science of the mind to that of the so-called cognitive sciences of the late twentieth century. For both, the study of the mind is, in important respects, just like the study of any other natural phenomenon. While it would be an overstatement to say that Hume's entire interest lies in the construction of a science in this sense - he has other, more traditionally “philosophical” concerns, as well - a recognition of the centrality of this scientific conception of his subject is essential for understanding him.

Of “late years” there has been, Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature, a controversy that has “so much excited the curiosity of the publick, whether these moral distinctions be founded on natural and original principles, or arise from interest and education” Those who adopted the second of these views-those who traced the alleged distinction between virtue and vice to self-interest and education - had claimed, as Hume puts it, that morality itself has "no foundation in nature" but is, rather, founded merely on the pain or pleasure that arises from considerations of self-interest. In contrast, those who ranged themselves on the other side of this issue - those who said that moral distinctions are founded on natural and original principles - claimed that "morality is something real, essential, and founded on nature" (T 2.1.7, 295-6).

“We are all jingoes now,” the New YorkSun wrote immediately after the 1898 war, “and the head jingo is the Hon. William McKinley.” The term “jingo” came from an 1878 British music hall song about “jingo” Englishmen who were aching to fight Russia. The term also came from the Japanese empress, Jingo, who sometime before the fourth century A.D. invaded Korea in an uproar of nationalism, war, and all-out expansionism. By the late 1890s it was a household term. Given the lineage, however, McKinley was no “jingo.” He disdained seizing parts of the Spanish empire and approached Cuba, Puerto Rico, and – above all – the Philippines incrementally and with a superb politicians sensitivity to the need for consensus. His objective was not a colonial empire but the minimum territory needed to obtain his conquest of world markets, along with the taking of strategic points necessary to protect that conquest. To achieve such a conquest, however, McKinley was willing to endure disorder and bear upheavals, even full-scale insurrection in the Philippines, or the threat of becoming involved in war on the Asian mainland.

Destroying Order for Opportunity: Annexing the Philippines

On May 4, 1898, even before he received official word of Admiral George Dewey’s conquest of Manila, the president ordered 5,000 troops to embark for the occupation of the Philippines “and such service as may be ordered hereafter.” These troops quickly encountered the forces of Emilio Aguinaldo, who had led the Filipino independence fight in 1896–7 against Spain.

The 1865–1912 era in U.S.–Latin American relations began with Secretary of State William Seward forswearing landed conquest in Mexico and the Congress rejecting footholds in the Caribbean– Central American region, even when tempted by the centuries-old dream of exclusive rights to an isthmian canal. The era ended with the United States exclusively owning and fortifying the canal, militarily and economically dominating the Caribbean through a network of bases, occupying Nicaragua with U.S. Marines, and verging on an invasion of Mexico. Clearly these years are pivotal in understanding how the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which ruled out foreign interference in Latin American affairs, became the Monroe Doctrine of 1912, which justified unilateral U.S. intervention in those affairs.

It is equally clear, given the prominence of U.S. military forces in the region after the 1880s, that the nation’s foreign policies did not primarily seek order and stability in Latin America. They instead placed the greatest emphasis on obtaining economic opportunity and strategic footholds from which they could move to obtain further opportunities. These policies, even by the early 1890s, led to disorder and clashes that, in turn, helped pressure U.S. officials to build the naval forces necessary to maintain their new interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine.

The end of the killing brought enormous relief to peoples all over the world – and a new set of problems. For the Germans and the Japanese, the years ahead promised to be grim, their well-being, their very survival, dependent on the whims of the victors, including those who not long before had suffered, sometimes terribly, at the hands of German and Japanese troops. For most of the allies, a daunting task of reconstruction awaited. The Soviet Union had lost at least twenty million, perhaps as many as forty million of its citizens before the Nazi onslaught. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Great Britain had to rebuild severely damaged industrial infrastructures and recover the means to feed and clothe their people. In China, civil war loomed and the task of regaining even the marginal living standards of the prewar era was gravely threatened. And in the colonial world, millions stood poised to end the age of imperialism, violently if necessary.

By comparison, conditions in the United States were glorious. Relatively few Americans had died in the fighting. Only an occasional shell from a submarine or hostile balloon reached the shores of the continental United States. American industry was intact, prosperous on war contracts. American agriculture was ready to feed the world’s starving masses. Across the country, the call was to “bring the boys home” and return to what an earlier president, Warren Harding, had called “normalcy.”

The historiography of 1865–1913 has been heavily influenced by the belief that Americans sought order and stability, acted as an antirevolutionary force, and – notably for some who were undergoing supposed “psychic crises” – searched for a return to supposedly more settled, precorporate times. The influential work of Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and biographers of Theodore Roosevelt (especially John Morton Blum and Howard K. Beale) have made the argument for writing the history with some, if not all, of these characteristics.

Such themes may have characterized important parts of the domestic society and policy in the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era. They had little to do with foreign affairs. Nor do they characterize the officials who made overseas policy. The central theme of post-1865 U.S. history is that the nation developed into a great world power, one of the four greatest militarily and the greatest of all economically. These years ushered in the American Century. At the same time, however, major revolts occurred across much of the globe – in Russia, China, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Panama, El Salvador, and Hawaii, among other places. The rise of the United States to the status of great world power was not dissociated from the causes of these revolutions. American policy played some role in all of these outbreaks, and in most it was a determinative force.

Peoples who emerge from colonialism usually find their triumph exhilarating, but almost all soon discover that independence is only the beginning of a process of nation building. Despite advantages – relative prosperity, experience in self-government – the Americans learned this lesson in the 1780s. Historians still debate the truth of the matter – was or was not the decade a time of economic growth? a period of political maturation? – but contemporaries had little doubt they were in a “critical period,” critical not only for their country but for the fate of republican government as well. John Quincy Adams, indeed, used the phrase in a commencement oration in 1787. Several years later, his father wrote, “I suspect that our posterity will view the history of our last few years with regret.” When the elder Adams wrote these words, he was vice-president under the new Constitution, an instrument of government produced both by the political philosophy undergirding the Revolution and by the frustrations of the 1780s.

The Articles of Confederation

The Continental Congress, legitimized only by the willingness of states to send delegates, had no power of coercion over them. Seeking to improve things. Congress proposed, and in 1781 the states approved. Articles of Confederation, but the remedy failed to create an effective national government. The approved text failed to capitalize “united states,” thus emphasizing the continued sovereignty of the parts. Almost all decisions, even in areas where Congress nominally had power, required the concurrence of nine of the thirteen states.

Totalitarianism and war

The statement by Walter Lippmann quoted earlier suggests that even in the United States influential commentators were recognizing the need for a fundamental reorientation, even restructuring, of politics and society if the severe economic crisis were to be overcome. Lippmann was so much concerned with the crisis that at one point he went so far as to admit that only a dictatorship might save the nation. That even someone as committed to democracy and liberalism as Lippmann had been should feel this way reveals the profound despair felt in America about the ability of the existing institutions to cope with the crisis.

If some Americans responded in such fashion, it is not surprising that in other countries, less rooted in democracy, forces would develop that would transform their political systems into dictatorships.

The rise of modern totalitarianism should not, it is true, all be attributed to the Depression. Both the totaliarianism of the right (fascism) and of the left (communism) had existed before 1929. Even if we confine our discussion to the twentieth century, it is to be noted that fascism (which may be defined as a dictatorship of the state) had developed in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere in the wake of the Great War, where movements emerged that would challenge party politics, parliamentary democracy, and pluralistic ideologies and substitute for them a centralized system of political, economic, and social control under the state. Discontent with the results of the war, postwar inflation and unemployment, dissatisfaction with the mood of internationalism – all these played a role.

Simply by manipulating tariff schedules, the United States triggered two revolutions in the 1890s and accelerated a third (in the Philippines). The first, forced by the 1890 tariff, occurred in Hawaii during 1893 and led to American annexation in 1898. The second, caused by the sugar provisions of the 1894 Wilson-Gorman Tariff, created chaos in Cuba. Between 1894 and 1896, Cuba’s exports to its best customer, the United States, fell 50 percent. The results were revolt, then war, then a new United States empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific and – as an integral part of these developments – a new U.S. executive that evolved precisely to try to create a modicum of efficiency and stability out of a foreign policy that gave priority to commercial opportunity, domestic politics, and strategic power and only then to a concern for order.

Cuba: The Grave Danger of “Revolution Within Revolution”

Since the outbreak of the 1868–78 revolt and the growing integration of U.S. capital with the island’s rich sugar plantations, which found a huge U.S. market, Cuba’s society and economy had been transformed – and made highly vulnerable. The rich Creole planters and the growing number of North American investors in sugar mills and mines found their interests at one with the U.S. market. In 1892 alone, U.S. investors put in $1.2 million. When the 1894 tariff act threatened to paralyze both the sugar and cigar-making industries, unemployment spread and revolution reerupted. The rebellion was led by José Martí, who became the most beloved and important figure in Cuban history. Born in 1853 as the son of a Spanish military officer stationed in Cuba, he was arrested as a danger to the state at the age of seventeen during the first revolt.

The world economy in disarray

One would never know if the collapse of the American economy and, as a consequence, of the world economic order in the years following 1929 was more or less preordained by the very structure of economic affairs during the 1920s, or whether the prosperity and peace of the postwar decade could somehow have been maintained if the United States and other nations had taken more forceful measures to cope with the economic crisis at its inception. One thing is certain, however. The world economy of the 1920s had been so intertwined with American economic resources and performance that whether the relative stability and prosperity of the postwar decade could have been perpetuated hinged to a considerable extent on action taken by American officials, bankers, and others. Their inaction or passivity, by the same token, would have profound implications for world affairs of the 1930s.

As of 1929, the United States still accounted for 40 percent of the world’s industrial production, 50 percent of the world gold reserve, and 16 percent of international trade. Should something happen to the American economy, therefore, it would have a severe impact on other countries. And, indeed, something drastic did take place; after the stock market crash of October 1929, production was cut by 50 percent by 1932, export trade fell by 60 percent, and unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 12 million in the same period. Industrial and agricultural prices fell, wages for those still employed declined, personal and business bankruptcies were legion, and the cult of productivity and efficiency as the prevailing ethos of the first postwar decade was replaced by severe attacks on capitalism.