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In Defence of Hume on Miracles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

If, as we are told, Hume's essay on Miracles was an irrelevant insertion in his Enquiry to gain it the notoriety which the Treatise had missed, the artifice has certainly been successful. Hume's thesis has been hotly debated from that day to this. Neither side it seems can claim complete victory, for both make important concessions. Green, his mostly adverse critic, agrees with Mill and L. Stephen that the argument against miracles is “irrefragable” in itself, though not consonant, he thinks, with Hume's own principles: on the other hand, Huxley whilst declaring it on the historical side “irrefragable,” demurs at least to the presentation of the formal side.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939

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References

page 423 note 1 Stephen, L., English Thought in Eighteenth Century, I, p. 271.Google Scholar

page 423 note 2 Laing, , David Hume, p. 184Google Scholar, shows that this use of “miracle” was that common in Hume's day.

page 423 note 3 Green, and Grose, ; Hume's Philosophical Works, IV, p. 105.Google Scholar

page 424 note 1 Green, and Grose, , Hume's Philosophical Works, IV, 105.Google Scholar

page 424 note 2 On like grounds Laird, , Hume's Philosophy, p. 122Google Scholar, declares Hume guilty on an outrageous petitio principii.

page 424 note 3 Enquiry, IV, 94.Google Scholar

page 425 note 1 Enquiry, IV, 105.

page 425 note 2 Ibid., IV, 92 n.

page 425 note 3 Ibid.

page 425 note 4 Cf. Laird, , Hume's Philosophy, p. 107.Google Scholar

page 426 note 1 Enquiry, IV, 93 n.

page 426 note 2 Ibid.

page 426 note 3 Ibid., IV, 107; Taylor David Hume and the Miraculous p.49.

page 427 note 1 Hume admits that there are only degrees of probability. Miracles are the most improbable of things. He does not say that miracles are impossible, but that some are absurd.

page 427 note 1 Treatise, I, p. 405.Google Scholar

page 427 note 3 Ibid., I, p. 466.

page 427 note 4 Ibid., I, p. 405.

page 427 note 5 Ibid., I, 429.

page 427 note 6 Ibid., I, 430.

page 427 note 7 Enquiry, IV, 92 n.

page 427 note 8 Treatise, I, 423.

page 427 note 9 Cf. Laing, , David Hume, p. 132.Google Scholar

page 428 note 1 Treatise, I, 471.

page 428 note 2 Ibid., I, 321.

page 428 note 3 Enquiry, IV, 133. “Philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life methodized and corrected.” Cf. Dialogues, II, 384, and Laird, , Hume's Philosophy, p. 297Google Scholar; Laing, , David Hume, p. 145.Google Scholar

page 428 note 4 Enquiry, IV., 135.

page 428 note 5 Treatise, I, 319. “Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone could join them.” In a letter he protests that he never defended the absurdity that a thing could come into being without a cause: only that our certainty of the contrary arises neither from intuition nor demonstration, but from another source.

page 428 note 6 Enquiry, IV, 61.

page 429 note 1 Smith, Kemp, Hume's Dialogues, p. 34Google Scholar, remarks that critics fail to observe that the impressions through which Hume's philosophy is developed, being impressions not of sensation but of reflection, instincts, passions, propensities, sentiments, are not to be called detached.

page 429 note 2 Enquiry, IV, 31.

page 429 note 3 Treatise, I, 409.

page 429 note 4 Ibid., I, 542.

page 429 note 5 Ibid., I, 545.

page 429 note 6 Ibid., I, 511.

page 429 note 8 Treatise, I, p. 475.Google Scholar

page 429 note 7 Hist. Eng. Thought, I, p. 49.Google Scholar

page 430 note 1 On a particular Providence.

page 430 note 2 Hist. Eng. Thought, I, p. 310.Google Scholar

page 430 note 3 Ibid., I, p. 340.

page 430 note 4 Ibid., I, p. 410.

page 430 note 5 Laird, Hume's Philosophy, 95,282. “The original draft probably belonged to the first design of the Treatise. It was cancelled not to give offence.”

page 431 note 1 This would not exclude the suggested alternative of “organization": that in nature as in animals or plants there is “a great vivifying principle” Dialogues, II, p. (452), “an original inherent principle of order” (p. 419).

page 431 note 2 Kant had read and approved the criticisms of the Dialogues and incorporated them in his final revision of the Critique (Kemp Smith).

page 432 note 1 Professor Laird points to the parallel close of Cicero de natura deorum. There Cicero, an eclectic of the Academy, who held speculatively with the sceptical Carneades, and practically with the mitigated scepticism of his teacher Philo, leans to the view of Stoics like Cleanthes who pressed the argument from design. Hume is speculatively a Pyrrhonian sceptic, practically a mitigated Academic sceptic (Enquiry, IV, 132), a Philo deferring on like grounds to Cleanthes.

page 432 note 2 Stephen, , Hist Eng. Thought, I, p. 342.Google Scholar

page 432 note 3 Ibid., I, p. 105.

page 432 note 4 Ibid., I, p. 146.

page 432 note 5 Ibid., I, p. 105.

page 433 note 1 His tombstone bore only name and dates “leaving it to posterity to add the rest.”