norton 1981 the myth of british empirism

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THE MYTH OF ‘BRITISH EMPIRICISM’

D VID F TE

NORTON

It came to pass that the earth was without form, and void, and darknesscovered

the face of the earth. And the creator saw that the darkness was evil, and he spoke

out in the darkness, saying ‘Let there be light’ and there was light, and he called

the light ‘Renaissance’. But still the creator was not pleased, for there remained

darkness, and hence he took from Renaissance a rib. with which to fashion greater

tight. But the strain of his power broke the rib, and there did grow up two false

lights, one Bacon, whose name meaneth ‘Father of the British Empiricists’, and

one Descartes, whose name meaneth ‘Father of the Continental Rationalists’.

And because the creator saw that these were false lights, and that they should

war with one another, he set them apart and divided them by a great gulf, and said

unto them, ‘Thus shall you labor apart until there shall grow up out of the East,

yea, even out of Koenigsberg, a great philosopher who shall be neither of you and

yet like unto both of you, and he shall bring true light and unite you’.

And thus it was that Bacon begat Hobbes, and Hobbes begat Locke, and Locke

begat Berkeley, and Berkeley begat Hume. And thus it was that Descartes begat

Spinoza, and Spinoza begat Leibniz, and Leibniz begat Wolff. And then it was

that there arose the great sage of Koenigsberg, the great ImmanueI, Immanuel

Kant, who, though neither empiricist nor rationalist, was like unto both. He it was

who combined the eye of the scientist with the mind of the mathematician. And

this too the creator saw, and he saw that it was good, and he sent goodly men and

scholars true to tell the story wherever men should henceforth gather to speak of

sages past.

We have nearly all of us heard the history of early modern philosophy

recounted along the lines of this parody, and what is more, a great many among

us continue to believe this account. Such a belief is not, for several reasons,

entirely surprising. Several generations of college students have found the real

philosophica world - as exemplified by the college catalogue - divided ever

so clearly and neatly into the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Continenta

Rationalism, British Empi~cism, and German Idealism. In addition, the belief

that early modem philosophy deveioped along two very disparate lines

(empiricism and rationalism). set apart from one another by the English

channel, is venerable and well-attested. It was given a healthy foundation by

none other than Thomas Reid, Hume’s contemporary and countryman, who

seems to have been the first to suggest that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume

represent nothing more than the three stages by which Descartes’ ‘Way of

Ideas’ reveals its inherent and destructive scepticism. Granted, Reid did

not isolate Descartes from Locke and Co., but he did compose the ‘Locke begat

Berkeley, and Berkeley begat Hume’ part of the refrain, although admitting,

somewhat grudgingly, that the Locke to Berkeley to Hume combination had

been of service to philosophy.’

In Reid’s opinion, Locke’s claim that the mind is originally a mere

tub z msa

put rather a different complexion on the basic proposition in the ‘Way of

*See Notes.

331



332

David Fate Norton

Ideas’, namely, the proposition that all knowledge is obtained through the

medium of ideas. According to Locke, it could no longer be supposed that

there were innate ideas, and without innate ideas, there was not only no built-in

knowledge of

reality,

but also, it seemed, no possibility of gaining such know-

ledge. To know nominal essences was the best that man could hope for.

Berkeley, then, according to Reid, uncovered the fact that Locke’s theory

could produce no proof that a material world existed, though the good Bishop’s

theistic commitments prevented him from seeing a second problem inherent in

the empiricist theory, namely, that there could be no proof of spiritual sub-

stances either. Discovery of this final deficiency was left to flume. Indeed

according to Reid, Hume’s great service to philosophy lay in the fact that he

took up where Berkeley had left off, and quite unwittingly, exposed and

espoused an absurd and dangerous scepticism inherent in the claim that man

perceives and knows by means of ideas.

A hundred years later, when German philosophy had all but conquered the

intellectual world, T.H. Green set about showing both the legitimacy and

inevitability of this victory by editing the first (and only) complete edition of

Hume’s philosophical works. The cunning reason for this otherwise puzzling

step was simple: Green wanted to show that Hume had in fact brought a certain

mode of philosophy - empiricism - to its ultimate and fully negative con-

clusion, and thus to show that such remaining empiricists as John Stuart Mifl

were mere anachronism9. In this way Green added important verses to Reid’s

refrain, while at the same time dropping any suggestion that Locke, Berkeley,

or Hume had ever read or heard of any non-British philosopher. Locke, says

Green, had pretty well ‘gathered up the results of the “empirical” phiIosophy

of his predecessors’, Bacon and Hobbes, and so it is necessary to show only

Hume’s ‘direct filiation’ with Locke. The filiation is a simple one: Hume

adopted Locke’s (and to a lesser extent, Berkeley’s) premises. From Locke, for

example, he took the claims that the mind is merely a blank and passive

observer and that the mind is to be understood only by means of a ‘history of

consciousness, as a series of events, or successive states observed in the

individua1 himself’. In addition, Hume’s idea of substance is said to be ‘simply

Locke’s’ shed of the notion that there is a real something which is the source

and support of the collection of ideas which we have; furthermore, in his

‘speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows precisely the

lines laid down by Locke’D. At the same time, Hume is said to have made a ‘full

acceptance of Berkeley’s doctrine of sense’ and to have written ‘with

Berkeley steadily before his mind’“.

Green does not claim that these borrowings Lessen Hume’s contribution to

philosophy. On the contrary, having adopted these premises, Hume is said to

have cleared them, as only a disinterested philosopher could, of any incon-

sistencies due to popular belief, and to have carried them to their full and fully

sceptical conclusions. Empiricism, thus taken to its logical conclusion is found

to be embarrassingly untenable, but not because of any deficiencies in Hume’s

statement of the case. Hume spoke, says Green, engaging rather obviously in

myth-making, like ‘every true philosopher

. . .

as the mouthpiece of a certain

system of thought determined for him by the stage at which he found the

dialectic movement that constitutes the progress of philosophy’, and he did



The M yt h of ‘Brit ish Empiri ci sm’

333

philosophy a service by showing the principles he had adopted made philoso-

phy impossible. Others (J.S. Mill, most notably), anachronistically and beyond

the reach of dialectical progress have persisted in philosophising on principles

which Hume showed to be inconsistent with philosophy. However, this should

never be permitted to obscure the fact that it was Hume who carried the torch

of progress. And, of course, when no English athlete had strength to carry it

further, it was transferred to Kant, the first of a ‘more vigorous line’ which had

sprung up in Germany5.

In our own more sober century a less obviously transcendental version of

Green’s account has dominated Anglo-American views of the history of

philosophy. Certainly no hard-headed twentieth-century historian would care

to rely on vague references to ‘dialectical movements’ or the ‘cunning of

reason’, and these fanciful metaphysical elements have been excised from our

view. In fact, it would now be said that Green’s idealism had stood the past on

its head, for it is the empiricists, not their idealist successors, who put philo-

sophy on the right track. Nevertheless, there has seemed to be little reason to

dispute what could be called the ‘factual’ side of Green’s account, and thus in

the past 60 or so years our favourite, perhaps one could say our standard,

historians of philosophy have taken for granted the claims that Rationalism and

Empiricism were disparate movements, that Locke is to be understood as

opposing the Rationalists, and that Berkeley and Hume can be satisfactorily

understood as developments of the Empiricism established by Locke. In what

is, it seems safe to speculate, the best-selling and most widely-read contem-

porary history of western philosophy, that by Bertrand Russell, we are told that

Locke ‘may be regarded as the founder of empiricism’, that his doctrine that ‘all

our knowledge (with the possible exception of logic and mathematics) is

derived from experience . . . was . . .

a bold innovation’. In contrast, philo-

sophy before Locke, and especially that of Descartes and his followers, Russell

suggests, doggedly overlooked and rejected experience in favor of a trium-

phant, rationalistic, and now thoroughly discredited subjectivism. And, of

course, we now emphasise what Green had only half-noticed: the empiricists

were Brit ish, their opponents ContinentuP’. As another popular historian of

philosophy has put it, the ‘empirical point of view was partly, perhaps, an

inheritance from Bacon, but it was partly a deliberate answer to the Continen-

tal Rationalists. Locke and the other British Empiricists wanted to produce a

practical “common sense” philosophy in contrast to the “speculative theories”

. . * in vogue on the continent”. Green’s ‘facts’, we seem to agree, were

generally correct, but they were badly distorted by his interpretation. Read

them out again, and it will be seen that Locke and Hume are the true philo-

sophical heroes - not only the sources of our tough-minded, contemporary

empiricism, but also spokesmen for a form of philosophical liberalism to which

we are all indebted#.

There is little or no justification for the continued acceptance of these

accounts. Careful and more comprehensive studies, not all of them exactly

recent, have revealed that there are fatal flaws in the very notion of ‘British

Empiricism’ and that the standard account of its development falls well short of

being adequate. That is, if we suppose that the conceptual core of British

Empiricism is made up of doctrines found first in Locke, and then clarified, in



334

David Fate Norton

isolation from positive continental influences, by Berkeley and Hume, we shall

find that British Empiricism has precious little core indeed.

Locke is presumed to have said that the mind is a mere tab a rasa, devoid of

innate ideas; that human knowledge is to be accounted for historically, as the

result of experiences inscribed upon this blank and passive mind; that we know

external objects phenomenalistically, through the medium of ideas in the mind

which are caused by external objects, the real essences of which we cannot

know; that experimental verification is to be preferred over rational analysis;

and that except for matters of logic and mathematics, all knowledge is proba-

bilistic. I shall not quarrel with the claim that these are Locke’s views. The

objections which must be lodged against the standard account of British

Empiricism are nonetheless clear: (1) The empirical aspects of Locke,

Berkeley, and Hume are neither original to Locke, nor simply the effect of

Bacon and Hobbes on Locke. The seminal figure of 17th- and 18th-century

empiricism was not British, but French. (2) Although it would be absurd to

suggest that Locke’s writings had no effect on Berkeley and Hume, it is equally

absurd to suggest that their views are mere clarifications of his. Not only is

there clear evidence (of both an internal and external sort) that Berkeley and

Hume owe much to the ‘Rationalists’, but it is also clear that the views of

Berkeley and Hume diverge, in essential ways, from those of Locke, and that

they do so at least as often as they coincide. (3) These so-called empiricists are

in important ways less empirical and more

a prior istic

than a number of their

16th- and 17th-century predecessors, and Hume, far from being the complete

empiricist, explicitly draws attention to the fact that it is quite impossible to

take a purely empirical approach to any historical or philosophical issue. In the

balance of this paper I will try to give credence to these objections.

(1) The most likely candidate for the title, Founder of Modern Empiricism, is

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) who was born in Southern France. He distin-

guished himself as a student at Aix-en-Provence, and became Professor of

Philosophy there when he was 25, one year after his ordination as a priest. In

1624 Gassendi published his

Exercitati ones Paradoxae Adversus Ar istoteleos,

and over the next thirty years published, regularly and copiously, a number of

important works, including the fifth set of

Objections

to Descartes’

Meditations

in 1641, a much expanded attack on Descartes in 1644, and a Syntagma

Philosophiae Epicuri in 1649. Three years after his death his Opera Omnia

appeared, and these included his previously unpublished Syntugma Phifo-

sophicum. Unfortunately for Gassendi’s later reputation, he wrote entirely in

Latin, and somewhat turgidly at that. However, in his own century, this was no

barrier to his popularity, and his reputation during the latter half of the 17th

century is said to have equalled that of Descartes and Hobbes. Professor Craig

Brush, who has recently given us the first significant English edition of

Gassendi, suggests that in his own day Gassendi’s ‘influence was second to

none’ and that late 17th-century opponents of the Cartesians ‘almost invariably

found themselves drawn to the Gassendist camp’, while Antoine Adam has

argued that by 1700 the cultivated Frenchman wasmor likely to be a follower of

Gassendi than a Cartesian”.

In general terms, one can describe Gassendi’s philosophy as an attempt to

find a middle position between the dogmatism of the Aristotelians and



The M yt h of ‘Brit ish Empiri cism’

335

Descartes, and the Pyrrhonistic scepticism of Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne,

and others, an attempt which resulted in the formulation of a theory of

knowledge suited to the limited, phenomenalistic interests of the new natural

science, to which Gassendi also made significant minor contributions in the

form of observations and experiments. (He is also said to be the first, by the

way, to publish a statement of the principle of inertia as it was understood in

later, Newtonian dynamics.).

In his first work, the Exercitutiones, Gassendi not only elucidates the mani-

fold errors of the Aristotelians, but also goes on to attack all those who claim to

have indubitable knowledge about the real nature of things. Such knowledge,

he tries to show by a rehearsal of the standard sceptical arguments, is not

possible. In this work, as Richard H. Popkin has put it, Gassendi insisted that

our knowledge of the world ‘comes only from sensory experience. We are

unable to arrive at absolutely true first principles and real or essential defi-

nitions, since inductions from experience can never yield certain universal

propositions. No matter how much evidence is gathered, a negative instance

may still turn up in the future”“. However, in later works, and especially in the

posthumous Syntugmaphilosophicum, Gassendi attempts to mitigate this scep-

ticism and arrive at a more constructive, but nonetheless non-dogmatic,

position. Agreeing that some things seem too obvious to doubt-that it is now

day, e.g. - he suggests that epistemological debates are over what we can

know about matters that are presently concealed. Without giving up his claim

that some things are simply beyond human ken, he suggests that we can

hypothetically and tentatively infer propositions about some things that are

naturally concealed, and that these inferences can be tested experimentally,

either by use of new instruments, or by comparing predicted with actual

consequences. Thus anatomists, he reminds us, had long inferred from certain

‘signs’ that there are tiny holes in the human skin; now, he says, the existence of

such holes, the pores, has been confirmed by microscopic observation.

Gassendi did not claim that analysis of such signs or appearances, no matter

how systematic or careful, would lead us to knowledge of the real nature of

objects or the world, but he did think that we could from our experience arrive

at generalisations of sufficient force and value to explain or control appear-

ances. It seems then, that he not only formulated most of the central tenets of

early modern empiricism but that he also, to cite Popkin again, separated

science and metaphysics and formulated a ‘model for explaining the pheno-

menal world [which] had a great and lasting impact on the development of

modern scientific theory. .

. [and] is closer to twentieth-century conceptions of

the scientific outlook than that of almost any other seventeenth-century

thinker’. Leaving aside the more far-reaching of these claims, it is clear that

many of the most valued aspects of ‘British Empiricism’ must be credited to a

French Catholic priest who never set foot in Britain, and whose decisive

opposition to Cartesian dogmatism has been conveniently, but unfortunately,

overlooked”.

(2) Secondly, I have said that Berkeley and Hume both owe a good deal to

the rationalists, and that the essentials of their philosophy diverge significantly

from Locke’s and from each other’s. It is perfectly compatible with thisclaim to

point out that, as a matter of fact, Locke’s attack on innate ideas was probably



336

David Fate Norton

not directed toward Descartes at all, but toward a group of English divines who

did

hold the kind of innate idea theory which Locke attacks. And though one

may not wish to go so far as Reid and his fellow Scats, and suggest that Locke

was in fact merely another

Cartesian,

there is no gain saying the claim that

Locke’s ‘Way of Ideas’ is a modification of a theory central to Descartes”.

However, to come to the main contention, both Berkeley and Hume appear

to be indebted to Malebranche, whose writings were readily available in

English at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Curiously. atthough

Berkeley’s own contempora~es often saw him as a disciple of ~alebranche.

the relationship between the two philosophers - who seem to have met and

discussed philosophical issues - was only studied in detail some 40 years ago

when A.A. Lute prepared his volume, Berkeley and Malebranche’ “. Given our

present historical biases, it may seem strange to think that a philosopher like

Malebranche, who posits a domain of pure mathematical essences, could have

had such an appeal for Berkeley. But the evidence seems ove~helming,

especially in view of Berkeiey’s notes in his (since 1944) properly reconstructed

Philosophicai Commentaries14, and when more is known of Malebranche, the

influence is not strange at all. He was an early writer on scientific optics; he was

also, as was Descartes, an opponent of the abstractionist account of concept

formation; and he seems to have first suggested the distinction between

feelings, which are dependent on the perceiver, and I deas, which have indepen-

dent existence. Berkeley’s first major work was, of course, the 77reor-y of

Vision (1709); in all his writings, but especially in the introduction to the

Principles (1710), he attacks the view that we can form abstract ideas by some

sort of generalising process; and though he is sometimes ambiguous about the

status of ideas, seeming to suggest that they are both dependent entities and

proper objects of knowledge, there is in Berkeley at least a partial analogue to

the feeiings and Zdeas of Malebranche, namely, the distinction between mind-

dependent entities and the real knowledge which is obtained via notions.

In more general terms, Malebranche was a Cartesian, but instead of follow-

ing Descartes, who grounded the objectivity of our knowledge in innate ideas.

Malebranche argued for an eternal domain of Ideas. Rather than having to

multiply the sets of innate ideas by the number of persons, Malebranche

posited a single set, common to all. Hence, he spoke of ‘seeing all things in

God’. What one actually sees in God is the essence of the material world - a

narrowly mathematical domain. Thus, even more sharply than Descartes,

Matebranche separated the essence of things from their existence, and argued

that while we can know various essential truths about matter (e.g. geometrical

truths) we must appeal to Holy Scripture to establish that there is in fact a

material world. Hence, we can properly be said to

know

the essence of the

material world, but not its existence. Conversely, we can know that we are

existent thinkers, but we have no access to the essence of mind. In general

terms again, Berkeley mirrors Malebranche. There can be no proof of the

existence of the muter l world for we are acquainted only with ideas and our

own minds; and ideas persist even though humanly unperceived, because they

are in the mind of God. In short, both philosophers want to retain a common

sense perspective on the existence of objects - to say that objects are continu-

ous and real - but neither thinks that such a perspective is even marginally




337

dependent upon the existence of material substance. Malebranche tells us that

God could have given us exactly the same experiences without a material

creation - the Ideas are in God’s mind eternally, and, as we know from our

dreams, we could have all the experiences we now have even if material things

did not exist. Berkeley, for his part, points out that the Book of Genesis makes

no reference to the creation of material substances.

On the nature of the self, Berkeley is closer to Malebranche than to Locke,

but nearer to Descartes than either of the others. In the Philosophical

Commentaries, the Principles, and the Dialogues Berkeley clearly maintains

that it is perfectly intelligible to speak of a substantial self or spirit, and that

there is such a self. Thus, wi t h Descartes, but against Locke, Berkeley holds

that the mind is always active. Similarly, he tells us that he chose to use the term

‘idea’ because ‘a necessary relation to the mind is understood to be implied by

that term”“. Such a ‘necessary relation’ is good Descartes, but bad Locke.

Locke. it may be recalled, cannot rule out the possibility that matter may think

(and hence that an idea could be related to matter only) except on the grounds

that he has not experienced such a phenomenon, which leaves open, of course,

the possibility that he may yet do so.

In addition, it was not Berkeley, but two continental philosophers, who first

attacked the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The first

articulation of this attack seems to have come from one of the leading critics of

Cartesianism. Simon Foucher (16441696). The Cartesians generally clair :d

that ideas of material things did represent these things. Sensations resuhng

from experience of the same things did not represent them. Foucher was

unconvinced, and asked why it was that sensations, which are modifications of

the mind, could not be as representative of things as ideas, which are also

modifications of the mind. Or, conversely, if sensations cannot represent

things, how can ideas do so’“? Pierre Bayle then popularised this objection by

including it in his famous and influential

Dictionnaire”. The

‘new philosophy’,

says Bayle, tells us that ‘Heat, smells, colors, and the like [secondary qualities],

are not in the objects of our senses. They are [said to be merely] modifications

of the soul [or mind]. .

.‘, and from this it follows that ‘bodies are not all as they

appear to me’. Of course, the new philosophers. he continues, wanted to

exempt extension and motion from this sceptical conclusion, but, unfortun-

ately for them, they could not do so. ‘For if the objects of our senses appear

colored, hot, cold, odiferous, and yet they are not so, why can they not appear

extended and shaped, in rest and in motion, though they are not so?‘Berkeley,

we know from his notebooks, borrowed this objection from Foucher and

Bayle. and furthermore, borrowed it without particular thought to Locke, but

with an eye to overturning the materialist concept of extension’X. All things

considered, then, one can understand why a scholar should have recently

written as follows:

.

it is not at all clear

that

Berkeley was in fact interpreting or attacking Locke on

substance or on the latter’s view of primary and secondary qualities. . . . Berkeley

does not. either in the Principles or in the Three Dialogues, refer to Locke in

connection with substance. reality or material substance. Nor does he quote from,

advert to. paraphrase. mention or even - I believe - allude to Locke’s Essay

when discussing these subjects in his two famous workslY.



338

Davi d Fate Nort on

This will be a propitious point at which to turn to David Hume, the third man

in the Empiricist trilogy, for there is also serious doubt about Hume’s debt to

Berkeley. In fact, some 15 years ago it was asked if there was any reason to

think that Hume had,

contra

the standard account, so much as

read

Berkeley.

At that time there was no decisive external evidence in favour of the claim that

he had, and the internal evidence of a direct influence is scanty indeed: Hume

mentions Berkeley fewer than a half-dozen times in all his published works; a

Berkelian doctrine is used to establish Hume’s marginally intelligible views on

space and time, and the one Berkelian position which Hume does repeat, that

regarding abstract ideas, is couched not in Berkeley’s terms, but in those of

Chambers’

Cyclopedia

*O. ubsequently, the publication of one of Hume’s early

letters has made it seem likely that he had in fact read Berkeley, but the letter

itself is highly significant in the present context. Writing to his friend Michael

Ramsay in August, 1737, when the manuscript of the Treatise Concerning

Human Nature

was only just completed, Hume says:

I shall submit all my Performances to your Examination, & to make you enter

them the more easily, I desire you, if you have Leizure, to read once over le

Recherche de la Verite of Pere Malebranche, the Principles of Human Knowledge

by Dr. Berkeley, some of the more metaphysical Articles of Bailes Dictionary;

such as those . . on Zeno & Spinoza. Des-Cartes Meditations would also be

useful . . . make you easily comprehend the metaphysical Parts of my

Reasoning. . .21

In other words, Hume did read Berkeley, but, in addition -and this comes as

no surprise to those who understand Hume’s analysis of causation, his ideas on

space and time, and his objections to the primary-secondary quality distinction

- he had also read and been influenced by both Malebranche and Bayle, and

perhaps even by Descartes.

Nor are Malebranche and Bayle the only non-empiricists who seem to have

influenced Hume. Shaftesbury, who was himself indebted to the Cambridge

Platonists, and Hutcheson, who explicitly set out to defend Shaftesbury. are

two others, and the extent of Hume’s debt to these philosophers, especially to

Hutcheson, is beginning to be seen’)‘). Norman Kemp Smith has, in fact, offered a

revolutionary re-assessment of Hume, claiming that he is to be understood as

utihsing Hutcheson’s moral sense realism as the basis of a metaphysical realism

of a common sense sort - or, in other words, that Hume explicitly set out to

show that our beliefs in necessary connection, substance and personal identity

are natural, necessary, and quite beyond doubt, and that he intended to show

that the very kind of scepticism now so often attributed to Hume himself is

quite absurd and untenable”:‘. If this is not enough of a revolution, another

scholar has gone so far as to suggest that Hume’s theory of mental activity is

essentially Kantian - or, not to get the cart before the horse, that Kant’s

philosophy is not so much a reaction to Hume’s as a Germanic expression of the

same general opinion2J.

It seems unlikely that one would want to go so far as to describe Hume as

either another Scottish Common Sense philosopher or a proto-Kantianzs. But

at the same time, it is clear that the empiricism-to-its-sceptical-conclusion

interpretation of Hume will not serve. For one thing, he does clearly echo



The Myth of ‘British Empiricism’ 339

Hutcheson’s view that we are endowed with active minds, that we have a set of

faculties, instincts and propensities which determine how the elements of

moral and non-moral experience will be organised, and which provide us with a

set of natural beliefs which serve to organise and direct our behaviour.

Hutcheson, of course, was a clergyman, and inclined - indeed, much too

inclined, Hume said in his correspondence with Hutcheson himself - to

attribute these propensities and beliefs to the work of a benevolent Designer.

But though Hume himself eschewed reliance on what he called ‘final causes’

there can be no doubt but that he accepted and defended a modified and

non-religious version of Hutcheson’s psychology, which is itself significantly

different from Locke’s, and like to Malebranche’sz6.

Perhaps the surest way to show the inadequacy of the standard account.

which was British Empiricism coming to a logical conclusion in Hume’s per-

vasive scepticism, is to note briefly some of the things that Hume (contrary to

even quite recent repetitions of the myth) did not deny.

(i) Hume did not deny ‘the existence of anything behind impressions’27. On

the contrary, from the opening paragraph of the Treatise, Hume assumes that

there is an external world, and though he clearly and explicitly states that how it

affects us through the senses is not his concern, but that of the anatomist, he

makes no effort to overturn this assumption*“. His own interest is in the

subsidiary elements of our mental processes, and their connections or inter-

relationships. As he himself puts it. it is ‘vain to ask,

Whether there be body or

not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings’2s.

(ii) Hume did not deny that there is ‘any real connection between cause and

effect’“O. Hume’s analysis of causality is empirical insofar as he tries to explain

why we believe in necessary connection even though we experience only

continuity, succession; and constant conjunction. But he is not, nor need he be

to be consistent, a negative dogmatist who claims that that which is not

experienced does not exist. ‘Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communi-

cation of motion by impulse; these (he says) are probably the ultimate causes

and principles which we shall ever discover in nature’ for, so far as we can see,

‘as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their

discovery . . .

These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from

human curiosity and enquiry’31. In short, some causes are experienced, but

there may indeed be others that at least for the present are beyond human

reach.

(iii) Hume did not deny that there is a unified self, nor did he unequivocally

deny that we can have an impression of the self. Much has been made of

Hume‘s remarks in ‘Of Personal Identity’ (Tr eatise, I , IV, VI), but even

assuming that Hume there does deny that we have an impression or direct

experience of the self, it does not appear, on careful reading, that he isclaiming

that each of us is in fact only a ‘bundle of perceptions’. Throughout Book I of

the Treatise. Hume is concerned with the elements of our mental processes, and

how such elements arise and combine. This concern does not, as we have seen,

require him to deny the existence of other aspects of reality even if we fail to

have direct experience of these aspects. It should be added also that Hume was

the first to suggest (in the Appendix to the Treatise) that the Book I account of

personal identity is inadequate. Likewise, the conclusions of Books II and III



340 Dav i d Fate Nor t on

of the Treatise, which are concerned with the passions and with morals, clearly

rest upon the assumption of a unified and enduring self, while frequent

reference is there made to our impressions of our selves3*.

(iv j Hume does not deny the value of metaphysics. It is not metaphysics

per

se, but false and falsely based metaphysics which he suggests we bum. Hume is

certainly of the opinion that metaphysics at its best is often ineffectual and

subject to the control of seemingly unavoidable natural beliefs, and that at its

worst, which is all too often, metaphysics is rash, precipitate, dogmatical and

containing ‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’ and fit only to be committed to

the flames%. Nevertheless, he also insisted that we ‘must cultivate true meta-

physics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate . . .

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons

and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and

metaphysical jargon, which [has]. . . the air of science and wisdom’:S4.

(3) My third claim was that ‘these so-called empiricists are in important ways

less empirical than a number of their 16th- and 17th-century predecessors’.

There is a vast and very significant difference between the empiricism of

Bacon, which proceeds on the base of pure and uncritical collection and

induction, or that of Renaissance and 17th-century writers who compiled

‘centuries’ or syntagma on a wide variety of topics, and that of Hume. In fact,

once we are able to free ourselves of the dominating myth of British

Empiricism, it is not difficult to see that Hume, at least, not only draws our

attention to the fact that it is impossible to take a purely empirical approach to

any historical or philosophical issue, but that he also manifests some decidedly

a prioristic tendencies.

Hume clearly, I grant, set out to give the world, along the lines of Gassendi’s

constructive scepticism, a science of man, an

observationally

based science of

man. Reflection and meditation are not adequate, he says, and ‘We must

therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation

of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world

. .

Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we

may hope to establish on them a science. . .‘35. Hume realised, however, that

he would require a means of determining which statements about human life

are veridical -he realised that a pure and unselective empiricism would be of

very little value. Even a phenomenalistic science needs a criterion of truth, a

means of separating genuine phenomena from merely apparent phenomena.

Providing such a criterion, Hume realised from the outset of his work, would be

no simple matter, and as he continued his philosophical and historical efforts,

he seems to have come to the conclusion that providing the needed criterion

was an impossible task. Observation, to be of value, he saw, must be ‘cautious’,

but such cautious observation, he also concluded, is faced with the almost

certain knowledge that custom and education, one’s personal experience, play

an over-riding, but logically indefensible part in the formation of our

‘empirical’ judgements. A very real element of personal bias, he concludes,

determines not only what we will accept as a fact, but where we will look for

facts. ‘Does a man of sense’, he says,

‘run after every silly tale of witches or

hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence?‘The question may

be rhetorical. but Hume made certain he was not misunderstood: ‘I never knew




341

anyone’.

he goes on, ‘that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did

not believe it before the end of his inquiries’%.

Recent work has also revealed how aptly and unfortunately Hume illustrates

the kind of bias of which he spoke, and which undermines the very notion of

‘empiricism’. Hume quite directly tells us, for example, that no amount of

positive evidence could ever establish the credibility of a miracle. Why?

Because it is always more likely that the purported miracle is only a fake, the

result of fraud and credulous ignorance, or, in more general terms, because LZ

prior i

considerations outweigh the putative evidence or appearances. It is not a

question of evidence, but of prior belief:“.

And Hume provides other illustra-

tions of his own critique of empiricism when he is unable to believe anything

which redounds to the credit of the Irish or Black?‘. It is more likely, he

suggests, that Cromwell and his lieutenants were honorable and humane, than

that any Irishman should behave in a civilised fashion. And when he hears,

contrary to his white supremacist view, that no Black ‘ever discovered any

symptoms of ingenuity’,

when he hears, contrary to this view, that there is in

Jamaica a Black man of intelligence and accomplishment, he is able - one

could be kind and say compelled -

to dismiss this alleged fact with the callous

remark that ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a

parrot, who speaks a few words plainly’3Y. A strange, but not, if Hume’s

analysis is correct, unusual empiricism.

To conclude: I do not insist that there are no philosophical differences

between, say, Leibniz and Hume, or that these differences are without signifi-

cance. Leibniz was clearly, for example, a superior mathematician, and he does

seem in his metaphysical writings to posit a greater role for reason than for

observation, and thus, in the best of all possible worlds, it might be acceptable

to call Leibniz a Continental Rationalist and Hume a British Empiricist. This is

not, however, that Utopian world, for we have a century or more of encrusted

myth to break down. Contrary to that myth, we know that the British did not

discover empiricism, that Locke, Berkeley and Hume borrowed significantly

from continental philosophers, and that much of what Berkeley and Hume did

was done without a copy of Locke’s Essay (or, in Hume’s case, Berkeley’s

Principles)

open before them. We also know that Hume was an early critic -

i.e. conscious and explicit critic -

of empiricism, and that he himself was by no

means the heroic empiricist-of-the-world that some picture. We would be

well-advised, then

-providing our registrars or recorders will allow us to do so

-

to drop entirely the ‘empiricism-British Empiricism’, ‘rationalism-

Continental Rationalism’ tags. For, though it be impossible to be totally

unbiased, we could in this way rid ourselves of one of our cruder philosophical

myths.

McGil l University, Mon~euL

David Fate Norton

*A slightly different version of this paper was presented to the American Society for

Eighteenth-Century Studies. I wish to thank Dr. David Brunner and Professor Harry M.

Bracken for valuable assistance in preparing it.



1. For an account of what is called the ‘Reid-Beattie Interpretation’ of Hume, see

Norman Kemp Smith, 7%~F~~l~o~~~ ~~~~v~~ &me (London:

Macrnii~~~ Co..

Mtf, pp. 3-8. Reid’s own extensive account of the history of early modern

philosophy is found in both his Inqui ry int o the Human M ind on the Pri ncipl es o

Common Sense 1764)

and his

Essays on the I nt el l ectual Pow ers of M an 1785). See

The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. Sir. Wm. Hamilton (2 vofs.; 7th ed.; Edinburgh:

Macfachian & Stewart, 1872), I. 99-103; 262-310.

2.

Thomas HfI Green, ‘Introduction’, Dav id Hume: The Ph~~osop~i~~~Works, ed.

T.H. Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (4 vofs.; Reprint of the new edition.

London, 18&6; Darmstadt: Scientia Verfag Aafen, 1964), Sections 1-5. Green’s

‘Introduction’ is now available as

Thomas H i l l Green’s Hume and Locke,

ed. R.M.

Lemos (New York: Thomas Y. Croweff Co.,

1968).

Subsequent references are to

this edition.

J. Ikd., pp_ 3,&l&, 177,302.

4.

Ibid.,

p. 174.

5. Ibid., pp. ‘F-5.

6.

Bertrand Russell,

A Hi st ory ofw estern PhiI osophy New York:

Simon & Schuster,

1945), pp. 605, 609. See also pp. 491-92, 564, and throughout Bk. III, Chaps.

XII-XVII.

7.

W.T. Jones, A Hi stor y of West ern Phil osophy New York: Harcourt, Brace &

World, 1952), p. 702. Russeft, op. cir.,

sketches the differences between Conti-

nental and British philosophers on pp. 6K -44.

8.

Russell remarks. p. 605, that Locke’s ‘influence on the philosophy of politics was so

great and so lasting that he must be treated as the founder of philosophical

liberalism as much as of empiricism in theory of knowledge.’

9,

Craig B. Brush, ‘fntroduction”, The Sei eft ed Work s of Pierr e Gt i sendi , ed. and

trans.. C.B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation. 1972). pp. x-xi.

Adam’s remark is cited by Brush, p. xi.

IO.

Richard H. Popkin, ‘Gassendi, Pierre’,

The Encyclopedia

ofPhilosophy, ed. Paul

Edwards (8 vols.; New York: The Macmillan Co. &The Free Press, Inc.. 1%7), III,

269-73.

Xl.

Further items of interest with regard toGassendi and empiricism in Britain in&de:

Bernard Rochot, ‘Gassendi et fe Syntagma Philosoph~cum’~

Revue de syntht’se.

XLVIf (1950). 67-79; Richard I. Aaron, John Locke (3rd. ed.; Oxford: The

Cfarendon Press, 1971) esp. pp. 31-35, where Gassendi’s probable influence on

Locke, via Francois Bemier, is mentioned. The reader of Gassendi’s Syntugma

Philosophicum will be surprised at the ‘measure of Locke’s debt to Gassendi’, says

Aaron, p. 34. Relatively recent work on Locke can be easify surveyed through the

work of Roland Hall and Roger Woodhouse, ‘Forty Years of Work on John Locke

(1929-1969): A Bibi~ography’ and ‘Addenda to “Forty Years of Work on John

Locke”,’

Philosophical Quarterly, 20, No. W)

and No. Xf , pp. 2SR68 and 394-96

(July and October, 1970). In addition, Professor Hall has, since 1970, edited and

published the Locke Newsl et t er, a valuable clearinghouse of Locke studies.

12.

See John W. Yofton.John Locke and t he Way 0fI deu.s (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1956) esp. pp. 26-58.

13.

A.A. tuce, Berkel ey and M ~~e~r~~he: A Srudy i n t i re O ri gins of Berk ei eyS

Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). tuce writes that the ‘extent of

Berkeley’s debt to Malebranche’s Recherche de la Veri t e came to me as an unantici-

pated discovery’, and that the book he has written subsequent to this discovery

represents an attempt ‘to show that Berkeley, when he was preparing to write his

early books, made a thorough study of the Recherche, that the Berkefian phito-

342

NOT S

avid Fate Norton



The M yt h of ‘Bri t i sh Empiri ci sm’ 343

sophy

still bears the specific imprint of that study, and, in particular, that

Malebranche’s conception of seeing all things in God is at the back of the Berkelian

idea’. (p. v) For the reaction of Berkeley’s contemporaries to his philosophy, see

Harry M. Bracken,

The Earl y Reception of Berkeley’ s Immateri ali sm

(2nd. ed.,

rev. ; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1%5).

14. George Berkeley,

Philosophical Commentaries,

ed. A.A. Lute (London: Thomas

Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1944). Lute reordered Berkeley’s entries in what has

generally been called Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, and was thus able to trace

Berkeley’s philosophical development in the years when his views were most

significantly formed.

15. George Berkeley,

The Works of George Berkeley,

ed. A.A. Lute and T.E. Jessop

(9 vols.

;

London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.. 1948-57), II, 235-36. Vol. I of

this edition contains the

Philosophical Commentaries.

16.

On Foucher, see Richard A. Watson, ‘Foucher, Simon’,

Encyclopedia of

Philosophy,

III, 21-3-14;

The Downf all of Cartesianism, 1673-1712 (The

Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 39-70, 123--15; and ‘Introduction’, Simon Foucher,

Cri tique de la recherche de la v it .4 (New

York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1970).

17. Pierre Bayle. ‘Pyrrhon’,

Dictionnair e H istori que et Cri tique

(1697;2nd. ed., 1704); a

convenient modern selection is the H istorical and Critical D ictionary, ed. and trans.

Richard H. Popkin, with the assistance of Craig Brush (Indianapolis and New York:

The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965).

18. Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, passim, pp. 71 ff.

19. David Berman, ‘On Missing the Wrong Target, a Criticism of some Chapters in

Jonathan Bennett’s

Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes’ , Hermathena 113

55-56, (1972).

20. R.H. Popkin, ‘Did Hume Ever Read Berkeley?‘. Journal of Phil osophy, 56,

535-45 (1959).

Popkin’s article was written in response to one of the same title by

Philip P. Wiener, Jour nal of Phi losophy, 56,532-35 (1959), and must be counted as

central in the reassessment of the history of 18th-century British philosophy.

21. This letter may be found in T. Kozanecki,

‘Dawida Hume’s a nieznany listy w

zbiorach Muzeum Czartorykych-Polska’,

Archiwum H istorii fi lozofii i MySri

Spolecznej, 9. 12741 (1963). See also R.H. Popkin, ‘So, Hume Did Read

Berkeley’,

Jour nal of Phi losophy, 61.773-78

(1964).

22. The similarity of Hume’s view of skepticism to that of Shaftesbury is discussed in

D.F. Norton, ‘Shaftesbury and Two Skepticisms’, Filosofia, 19 (Supplement0 al

fascicolo, 4. 1968), 713-24.

23. Norman Kemp Smith,

op. cit.,

pp. 2-7.

24. Robert Paul Wolff, ‘Hume’s Theory of Mental Activity’.

The Phi losophical Review,

69.289-310 (1960).

25.

A more balanced view than those of Smith and Wolff, in my opinion, is that of

Charles W. Hendel, as found in his Supplement, ‘On Atomism: A Critique of

Hume’s First Principles and Method’ in

Studies in the Phi losophy of David Hume,

(2nd. ed. : Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1962) pp. 379480.

My criticisms of Smith’s efforts to make Hume another Scottish Common Sense

philosopher were given in ‘Hume’s Defense of Rational Metaphysics’, a paper read

at the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, March, 1973.

26. For Hume’s criticism of Hutcheson on ‘final causes’ see The Lettersof David H ume,

ed. J.Y.T. Greig (2 ~01s: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), I, 33. In my

opinion. a fully adequate account of Hume’s dependence on Hutcheson is not yet

available.

27. D.W. Hamlyn makes this claim in his article ‘Empiricism’, Encyclopedia of

Philosophy,

II.

502.



344

David Fate Nor ton

28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: The

Clarendon Press, 1888, reprinted, 1960). pp. 8,275-76.

29.

Ibid.,

p. 187.

30. Hamlyn, op.

cit.,

p. 503.

3 1. David Hume,

Enqui ri es concern ing the Human Understanding and concern ing the

Principfes ofMorals,

ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (2nd ed.; Oxford: The Clarendon Press,

1902, reprinted l%l), p. 30. A useful discussion of Hume’s views on this topic is that

of Donald W. Livingston, ‘Hume on Ultimate Causation’,

American Philosophicat

Quar terl y, 8, 63-70 (January, 1971).

32. See especially Bk. II, I, II-IV; Bk. III, I, II.

33.

Hume,

Enquiries,

p. 165.

34.

Ibid.,

pp. 12-13.

35. Hume,

Treatise,

p. xxiii.

36.

The Letters of David Hume, op. cit.,

p. 350. For a more detailed discussion of Hume

and the problem of weighing evidence, see ‘History and Philosophy in Hume’s

Thought’, in

David Hume: Phil osophical H istori an,

ed. D.F. Norton and R.H.

Popkin (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), pp. xxxii-I.

James Noxon,

Hume’s Phil osophical Development

(Oxford: The Clarendon Press,

1973) provides additional information on the sources and development of some of

Hume’s central views.

37. See ‘Of Miracles’ in Hume’s Enquir ies, op. cit., pp. 109-131. On p. 127 Hume says:

‘Upon the whole, then, it appears that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever

amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it

amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very

nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish .

and therefore we may

establish’it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a

miracle. . . .’

38. Discussions of Hume’s racism can be found in R.H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical

Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 3:

Racism in the Eighteenth Centuty,

ed. Harold E. Pagliano (Cleveland & London:

The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973) 245-62; and Harry M.

Bracken, ‘Essence, Accident, and Race,’

Hermathena, 114 (1973).

39. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, The Phil osophical Works, op. cit., I I I , 252n.

norton 1981 the myth of british empirism

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