Naturalists[32] indeed very justly explain particular effects by
more general causes, though these general causes should remain in
the end totally inexplicable; but they never surely thought it
satisfactory to explain a particular effect by a particular cause,
which was no more to be accounted for than the effect itself. An
ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is
not a whit more explicable than a material one, which attains its
order in a like manner; nor is there any more difficulty in the
latter supposition than in the former."--(II. p. 466.)
It is obvious that, if Hume had been pushed, he must have admitted that
his opinion concerning the existence of a God, and of a certain remote
resemblance of his intellectual nature to that of man, was an hypothesis
which might possess more or less probability, but was incapable on his
own principles of any approach to demonstration. And to all attempts to
make any practical use of his theism; or to prove the existence of the
attributes of infinite wisdom, benevolence, justice, and the like, which
are usually ascribed to the Deity, by reason, he opposes a searching
critical negation.[33]
The object of the speech of the imaginary Epicurean in the eleventh
section of the _Inquiry_, entitled _Of a Particular Providence and of a
Future State_, is to invert the argument of Bishop Butler's _Analogy_.
That famous defence of theology against the _a priori_ scepticism of
Freethinkers of the eighteenth century, who based their arguments on the
inconsistency of the revealed scheme of salvation with the attributes of
the Deity, consists, essentially, in conclusively proving that, from a
moral point of view, Nature is at least as reprehensible as orthodoxy.
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