Abstract
Hume’s NHR was the most significant contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment’s study of religion, a constant provocation to his contemporaries, and a text of enduring importance. Hume’s argument is striking because his naturalistic treatment of religious change was in no way linked to a sense of a providential order. Setting to one side the “minimal theism” known only by a small few since the reformation of letters, Hume charted the development of popular religion as a never-ending cycle between polytheism and theism. This process sprang from the universal properties of human nature, largely without regard to socio-economic and political contexts. But the very existence of this cycle, given that Hume’s disingenuous insistence that God existed, was an “enigma” to be pondered by philosophers of human nature.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The most common names in such a list include Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and Ethics (1677), Fontenelle’s L’origine des fables (written in 1684 but published in 1724); Robert Howard’s The History of Religion (1694); John Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704); John Trenchard’s The Natural History of Superstition (1709), and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. See Beauchamp (2007, p. 219), Robertson (2005, pp. 308–316) and Harris (2015, pp. 290–291).
- 2.
E.g. Stewart (2019, p. 48).
- 3.
- 4.
Levitin (2022, p. 178).
- 5.
NHR 15.13. I think this reading of the conclusion of the NHR, that the enigma to be explained is not whether religion is true but how to explain the flux and reflux of religious forms given that God exists, is more accurate than which treats Hume as maintain that religion per se was an ‘enigma,’ e.g. Schmidt (2003, p. 370). Hume believed he had identified the key features of the relationship between human nature and religion. The insuperable problem was how to tally these findings with the existence of God—scepticism was the only plausible response.
- 6.
But for a reading of the NHR that stresses the importance of socio-historical contexts see Lingier (2022).
- 7.
- 8.
N 0.1.
- 9.
N 0.1.
- 10.
N 0.1.
- 11.
N 15.5.
- 12.
NC 6n2.1.
- 13.
We can describe religion as a ‘natural’ belief, insofar as it is based on the inherent qualities of human nature, but not as an instinctive belief, insofar as it does not result from a single, original principle. Moreover, Hume will go on to argue that we are not actually clear what religious beliefs are and thus they can be classified further, with Donald Livingston, as “virtually natural belief[s].” Livingston (1998, p. 65).
- 14.
Broadie (2008, p. 187).
- 15.
By viewing religion as a secondary characteristic of human nature, Hume implied that atheists could exist (as opposed to just being misguided individuals, nominal atheists, who had turned away from their true natures). In this Hume was in line with Bayle and Locke who, against the commonplace arguments of anti-atheist apologetics, held that an individual could be a genuine believer in atheism. See Numao (2013) on Locke and Levitin (2022, Part II) on Bayle.
- 16.
NHR 15.5.
- 17.
NHR 15.5. Cicero, De natura deorum, I.16.42; Horace, Ars poetica, Stanza 1 Line 9.
- 18.
NHR 1.3.
- 19.
See Schmidt (1987).
- 20.
NHR 1.6. Compare to THN 3.2.2.17–20 and EPM 3.4.
- 21.
NHR 2.3.
- 22.
NHR 6.5.
- 23.
NHR 6.4.
- 24.
NHR 8.3.
- 25.
NHR 8.3.
- 26.
NHR 4.2.
- 27.
NHR 1.5. See also Harris (2015, p. 292).
- 28.
- 29.
Stuart-Buttle (2019, p. 209). It is beyond the scope of this book, but Hume’s NHR warrants an in-depth historical contextualisation, situating the work into the Franco-British debate over the history of religion, though it would primarily involve identifying textual allusions, given that Hume named very few of the authors he was engaging with.
- 30.
NHR 4.1.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
- 35.
See Beauchamp (2007) for a useful discussion.
- 36.
EHU 8.7.
- 37.
David Hume to Andrew Millar 12 June 1755, Klibansky and Mossner (1969).
- 38.
NHR 1.5.
- 39.
NHR 2.2.
- 40.
NHR 1.6.
- 41.
Cf. Broadie (2008, p. 187).
- 42.
NHR 4.1.
- 43.
Livingston (1998, p. 65).
- 44.
See Levitin (2022).
- 45.
- 46.
See also Wheeler-Barclay (2010, pp. 24–25).
- 47.
Robertson (2005, pp. 280–283); Stuart-Buttle (2019, p. 209). On the topic more generally see Assmann (1997) and Serjeantson (2012). Byrne suggests that Hume might have had Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) in view, given the similar assessment that most of mankind were polytheists aside from, for Locke, the Jews and a few philosophical theists. See Byrne (1989, p. 125).
- 48.
NHR 1.3, 12.7n58.1.
- 49.
- 50.
Robertson (2015, p. 31).
- 51.
NHR 1.8.
- 52.
NHR 1.8.
- 53.
NHR 1.8.
- 54.
NHR 5.6.
- 55.
NHR 5.7.
- 56.
NHR 10.2.
- 57.
- 58.
The publication of the Four Dissertations, including the NHR, is often read as a riposte to those orthodox Calvinists within the Kirk who had tried to censure Hume and Kames in the mid-1750s. See, for example, Harris (2015, pp. 354–359).
- 59.
NHR 15.13.
- 60.
NHR 5.9, 111.
References
Ahnert, Thomas. 2015. The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. London: Yale University Press.
Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beauchamp, Tom. 2007. Introduction: A History of Two Dissertations. In David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom Beauchamp, xi–cxxxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Broadie, Alexander. 2008. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Brooke, Cristopher. 2012. Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Byrne, Peter. 1989. Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism. Abingdon: Routledge.
Cabrera, Miguel A. Badia. 2001. Hume’s Reflection on Religion. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Falkenstein, Lorne. 2003. Hume’s Project in ‘The Natural History of Religion.’ Religious Studies 39: 1–21.
———. 2009. Hume on ‘Genuine’, ‘True’ and ‘Rational’ Religion. Eighteenth Century Thought 4: 171–201.
Fosl, Peter S. 2019. Hume’s Scepticism: Pyrrhonian and Academic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Foster, Stephen Paul. 1997. Melancholy Duty: the Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Harris, James. 2015. David Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klibansky, Raymond, and Ernest C. Mossner. 1969. New Letters of David Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Levitin, Dmitri. 2022. The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lingier, Hannah. 2022. Religion in Context: History and Policy in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20: 41–54.
Livingston, Donald W. 1998. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Malherbe, Michel. 1995. Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Hume Studies 21: 255–274.
Merivale, Amyas. 2018. Hume on Art, Emotion, and Superstition: A Critical Study of the Four Dissertations. Abingdon: Routledge.
Numao, J.K. 2013. Locke on Atheism. History of Political Thought 34: 252–272.
Robertson, John. 2005. The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2015. The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmidt, Claudia M. 2003. David Hume: Reason in History. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Schmidt, Francis. 1987. Polytheisms: Degeneration or Progress? In The Inconceivable Polytheism: Studies in Religious Historiography, ed. Francis Schmidt, 9–60. London: Harwood Academic.
Serjeantson, Richard W. 2012. Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) and the Demise of Modern Eusebianism. In The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750, ed. John Robertson and Sarah Mortimer, 267–295. Leiden: Brill.
Stewart, Dugald. 1854–1860. The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 11 vols., ed. William Hamilton. Edinburgh.
Stewart, M.A. 2019. Religion and Rational Theology. In The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 2nd ed., ed. Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith, 33–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stuart-Buttle, Tim. 2019. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Webb, Mark. 1991. The Argument of the Natural History. Hume Studies 17: 141–160.
Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie. 2010. The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915. London: University of Virginia Press.
Yandell, Keith. 1990. Hume’s Inexplicable Mystery: His Views on Religion. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mills, R.J.W. (2023). David Hume’s “Natural History of Religion” (1757). In: Religion and the Science of Human Nature in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49031-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49031-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49030-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49031-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)