development and 'progressive restatement' of the argument between them according to the admissions of each disputant to his opponent.

The modern reader who has Hume's popular reputation in mind, and who remembers also the absolute scepticism which is the outcome of Hume's philosophy as a whole, will probably be surprised to find that the being of a God' is not disputed by any of the combatants. On the contrary, it is their common assumption. Philo no less than Demea emphasizes the position that surely where reasonable men treat these subjects, the question can never be concerning the Being, but only the Nature of the Deity'. He accepts the former as a 'fundamental truth', as 'unquestionable and selfevident', and recalls with approbation Bacon's scriptural classification of the atheist with the fool. But the reader's natural surprise at the unchallenged admission of so seemingly important a position is soon lessened by finding how little the admission really amounts to-to no more, indeed, than a barely formal acknowledgement. 'Nothing exists without a cause,' says Philo, by way of interpreting this fundamental article of agreement, and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God, and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection.' So formulated, the being of a God involves no more than Locke's jejune proposition Something must be from eternity',1 and it is evident that everything depends on what we are warranted in concluding as to the nature of the so-called divine Being. This is the avowed subject of the Dialogues.

The debate is started by Demea, whose disparagement of human reason, in comparison with the claims of authority and revelation, gives Philo an opening for developing the thesis in a purely sceptical direction by arguments familiar to every reader of the Treatise or the Enquiry. It is a plea

1 Or the 'Being is' of Parmenides and Spinoza. Cf. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 187.

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SCEPTICISM AS A BASIS OF FAITH

7

sure to me', says Philo,' that just reasoning and sound piety here concur in the same conclusion, and both of them establish the adorably mysterious and incomprehensible nature of the Supreme Being.' This attempt to erect religious faith on philosophical scepticism' (so Cleanthes accurately describes it) irresistibly recalls the similar movement in English philosophy a century later, connected with the names of Hamilton and Mansel, which found its natural sequel in the more complete Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer. Demea, like Sir William Hamilton, offers to cite all the divines almost, from the foundation of Christianity' in support of his conclusion that, 'from the infirmities of human understanding,' the nature of God is 'altogether incomprehensible and unknown to us'. And, like Mansel, he adds, that though we piously ascribe to him every species of perfection', 'we ought never to imagine that we comprehend the attributes of this divine Being, or to suppose that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfection of a human creature. Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge: these we justly ascribe to him because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to those qualities among men.' The reply of Cleanthes to this insidious method of argument must be accepted by any serious disputant as conclusive: Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes of which we can have no comprehension; but if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. Is the name without any meaning of such mighty importance? Or how do you Mystics, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who assert that the first cause of

The

all is unknown and unintelligible?' It is not, however, till late in the discussion that Demea suddenly discovers that Philo, his assiduous ally, is secretly a more dangerous enemy than Cleanthes himself', and soon afterwards takes occasion to leave the company.

Before his departure he had made a second attempt to bring the discussion back to that simple and sublime argument a priori, which, by offering to us infallible demonstration, cuts off at once all doubt and difficulty'. By this Demea means the traditional ontological argument

a necessarily existent Being who carries the REASON of his existence in himself, and who cannot be supposed not to exist without an express contradiction'. But however they may differ otherwise, Philo and Cleanthes are at one in peremptorily rejecting this mode of argument as illegitimate. Hume has elsewhere anticipated Kant's famous criticism of the argument, by pointing out that existence is not an addition to the content of any idea. And the argument, at least in its traditional form, has not survived their joint attack. Here Hume is content to rest his case on the distinction, so fundamental in the Enquiry, between matters of fact' and ' relations of ideas'. 'Nothing that is distinctly conceivable implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. . The words, therefore, necessary existence, have no meaning.' Moreover, if they had any meaning, 'why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent Being?'

Hume's rejection of the conception of abstract or absolute necessity has been sustained by subsequent thought. Necessity is essentially relative, and expressible in the form of the hypothetical judgement-If A, then B. One fact may imply another, so that (on the basis of experience at least) we may reason in this logical form from the existence or nature of one set of facts to the existence or nature of another set of

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THE ARGUMENT A PRIORI

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facts. But that the totality of facts which we call the universe should exist at all-or as Demea puts it, that something should exist rather than nothing-that is simply an ultimate fact to be accepted as such. There may be reasoning within this Fact as to the concatenation and mutual dependence of its parts, but with the existence of the Fact itself reasoning has nothing to do. If any one prefers to use the term universe for the sum of created or dependent beings, he may, of course, refund the universe into God as its creative source; but the position of affairs is in nowise altered, save as regards the name of the ultimate Fact. God does not reason Himself into existence; He simply is. Modern logic recognizes the ultimate categorical judgement which underlies all hypothetical judgements or logical necessities; and any attempts that have been made to rehabilitate the ontological mode of proof have really transformed it beyond recognition, and must be dealt with on their own merits.1

The vital discussion in the Dialogues turns from beginning to end round the argument from design or final causes. It is introduced in Part II by Cleanthes with a certain impatience as the only argument worthy of serious consideration. 'Not to lose any time in circumlocutions, said Cleanthes, I shall briefly explain how I conceive this matter. Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which

1 If we speak, as we may intelligibly do in another connexion, of God as necessarily existing, we mean, by the phrase, that the character of the world, as known to us, is such that it can only have its source in a Being defined as we ordinarily define God. God, in other words, is a necessary hypothesis to explain the nature of our experience. This is a logical inference of the ordinary type, and it may or may not be legitimate; but the necessity which we claim refers entirely to the relation of the conclusion to its premisses within our knowledge, and has nothing to do with the extraordinary attempt of the ontological argument to deduce existence from essence, as if God's nature could be made, in some mysterious fashion, the foundation or prius of his existence. 'I am' and 'I am that I am '-the universe exists and its nature is what it is.

again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.' In reply to this confident and somewhat dogmatic statement, Philo, in Hume's own speculative vein, develops a number of objections calculated to weaken the force of the analogy, thereby reducing the conclusion to ‘a guess, a conjecture, a presumption', or even to impugn the validity of the reasoning altogether. Some of these are repeated in his other works, and are of classical importance in the history of theistic controversy. But in Part III Cleanthes, again with a touch of impatience, brushes aside the objections as due to an affectation of scepticism on Philo's part rather than to any real difficulty in the subject-matter. It is not necessary, for example, to prove the similarity of the works of Nature to those of Art, 'because this similarity is self-evident and undeniable.' 'Consider, anatomize the eye; survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.' There is, to his mind, something at once forced and frivolous in the objections by which it is sought to controvert or invalidate