Humean

§ Treatiſe of Human Nature, L. 467. In the P. S. to this letter, a view will be given of the Humian ſyſtem, taken exactly as it appeared to its author at ſix o’clock in the evening.

Burke had planned a confutation of the Berkleian and Humean hypothesis; but the active engagements of politics afterwards prevented the completion of his speculative disquisitions.

I am reading ‘Burnet’s own Times.’ […] He tells his story like an old man past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions, when ‘his old cap was new.’ Full of scandal, which all true history is. […] None of the cursed philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold and unnatural and inhuman!

[H]e who would educate a young man in the principles of Unitarianism will, in all probability, educate him in the principles of infidelity. The reason is obvious. In order to reduce his religious creed to the level of Unitarianism, he must educate him in that “freedom of inquiry,” which teaches him first to dispute and then to reject all the leading features of Christianity, upon the very same grounds, and on the same principles, on which the Deist rejects the probability of a revelation, and upon which, if pushed to their full extent, the Humian will question even the being and the attributes of God. Disputandi pruritus, animi scabies.

Humians see no necessary uniformity in phenomena because they expect some logical law to which uniformity may be referred.

It is quite true that if the criterion of consistency is not absolute, one’s knowledge of psychology and of everything else is logically bankrupt, but no Humean (and the objector may well be a follower of Hume) ever supposed that his knowledge was logically sound.

We materialists, after Engels, term the Kantians and Humeans, agnostics, because they deny the objective reality of the source of our sensations.

This cannot refer to Hume’s actual essay, Of Suicide, which, apparently, did not appear until 1777, but presumably the author had already expressed his views on the subject (the present writer is not sufficient of a Humeian to say where).

Agreement between these two accounts, however, ends here, since for Humeians the one act is preceded in time by the other, whereas for Leibnizians the two are exact contemporaries.