¹ Klibansky, R. and Mossner, E. C., New Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 2–3.Google Scholar

² These quotations come from L. A. Selby-Bigge's 1893 Introduction to Hume, D., Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rdedn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), viii and xixCrossRefGoogle Scholar. All later references to the first Enquiry will be given parenthetically, and will be to this publication. Fortunately the pagination has been held stable since the 1st edn of 1893.

³ Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Nidditch, P. H. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 7.Google Scholar

⁴ For examples of previous misunderstandings, as well as for a fuller general treatment of this Part II of Section VIII, compare my Hume's Philosophy of Belief (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 159–165Google Scholar. Since that was the first whole book to be devoted to this Enquiry, and since it seems still to be the most frequently mentioned and the most comprehensive, I am bound to seize every opportunity to indicate the places where my treatment was, I am now persuaded, either inadequate or even downright wrong. This is one of those places. For I failed to notice or to make anything of the fact that, in talking of what ‘by an inevitable necessity, must result’, Hume was employing a far stronger concept of causation than that to which he was officially prepared to lend countenance. See, in particular, my ‘Inconsistency Within “a Reconciling Project”’, in Hume Studies (London, Ontario) iv (1978), 1–6Google Scholar; and, in general, my ‘Another Idea of Necessary Connection,’ in Philosophy (1982), 487–940.Google Scholar

⁵ Here and elsewhere students are recommended to possess, and to be ever ready to consult, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Pan Books, 1984).Google Scholar

⁶ The Latin texts run: Si quis dixerit Deum unum et verum, creatorem et Dominum nostrum, per ea quae facta sunt naturali rationis humanae lumine certo cognosci non posse: anathema sit; and Si quis dixerit, … miracula certo cognosci numquam posse nec iis divinam religionis christianae originem rite probari: anathema sit. In the second of these certo cognosci replaced the draft demonstrari. These canons are Numbers 1806 and 1813 in Denzinger, H. Encheiridion Symbolorum, 29th rev. edn (Freiberg im Breisgau: Herder, 1953)Google Scholar. It is often said to be a truism that everyone knows how impossible it is to prove either the existence or the non-existence of God. This ‘truism’ will not, however, actually become true until there are no longer any instructed and believing Catholics.

⁷ The best secondary source remains Stephen, Leslie, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edn (London: Murray, 1902).Google Scholar

⁸ This is usually known as the Argument from Design. I prefer to call it the Argument to Design. For at its best and strongest it does not move: from the disputatious and question-begging premise that the Universe is an artefact; to the necessary conclusion that it must have been made by a Universe-Maker. Instead it proceeds, from the undisputatious and unprejudicial premise that the Universe manifests the regularities and the integration which it does manifest, to the conclusion that these phenomena, and indeed the very existence of the Universe, can only and must be explained by the postulation of a Designer and Maker of all things.

⁹ II (ix): see, for instance, the Works, edited by Gladstone, W. E. (Oxford: University Press, 1896)Google Scholar. Yes, this editor was indeed the Liberal statesman.

¹⁰ Summa Theologica, I, Q2 A3: Aquinas, of course, believed that he had an adequate answer to this objection. For further discussion compare, for instance, my God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1967Google Scholar. Reissued in 1984 by Open Court of La Salle, Illinois, as God: A Philosophical Critique) or my The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton/Elek, 1967Google Scholar. Reissued in 1984 as God, Freedom and Immortality by Prometheus of Buffalo, New York).

¹¹ Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719, when Hume was eight years old. So he was, presumably, a member of one of the first schoolboy generations to enjoy that splendid story book.

¹² This famous place name is not to be found on modern maps. It has been replaced by ‘Kaliningrad’; in consequence of the fact that in 1945 the wholly German population was driven out, to be replaced by Great Russians.

¹³ See, for instance, Kant, 's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, translated and edited by Lucas, P. G. (Manchester University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Op. cit., II (ix).

¹⁵ The initial letter of the word ‘Universe’ is here printed in upper case, as it was not by Hume; for reasons indicated in the following paragraph.

¹⁶ What more Hume had to say is to be found in his posthumously published masterpiece, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The standard edition, by Norman Kemp Smith, was originally published in 1935 by the Clarendon Press. At the time of writing this was available only in paperback and as an item in the Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, no date given).

¹⁷ Mainly because the Dialogues are a work of art, scholars disagree about what Hume's personal position was.

¹⁸ The eponymous Strato of Lampsacus was next but one after Aristotle as Head of the Lyceum. He seems to have been an Aristotelian, but without any of Aristotle's Platonic hang-ups.

¹⁹ See Penelhum, Terence ‘Divine Necessity’ in Mind (1960)Google Scholar. Or see, perhaps more accessibly, either my An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 202–203, 265, and 386–387Google Scholar; or my Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 107 and 135–138.Google Scholar

²⁰ The carefully situated stilted phrasing allows for the tiresome fact that this most cited sentence is not to be found in Ockham's extant works, although there are others saying much the same thing.

²¹ ‘Parapsychology’ is the new name for what used to be called psychical research. For the relevance of Hume's argument to this see, for instance, Flew, Antony (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Parapsychology (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), Part III.Google Scholar

²² This nineteenth-century work is reprinted as Chapter I of Volume I of his Collected Essays (Oxford University Press, 1935).Google Scholar

²³ See his The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946).Google Scholar

²⁴ It is, for instance, only upon assumptions of this sort that documents can be identified as documents, and read as asserting what their writers intended them to assert. Compare A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, Selby-Bigge, L. A. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 404–405.Google Scholar

²⁵ Compare Hume's Philosophy of Belief, Chapter VIII.

²⁶ What is logically necessary is what it involves self-contradiction to deny; what is logically impossible is what it involves self-contradiction to assert. Thus p.∼p is logically impossible, whereas If p then p is logically necessary.

²⁷ This sentence comes from the Abstract, a pamphlet published anonymously by Hume in order to promote what he was later to disown as ‘that juvenile work’, the Treatise. The Abstract can now be found most conveniently in the edition of the Treatise mentioned in note 24, above. The sentence quoted is at p. 661.

²⁸ Selby-Bigge, at p. xviii of his Introduction, seems to have been the first to remark that and how, in what Hume calls a definition of ‘a cause’ at p. 76, he illicitly helps himself to an entailment which no definition on Humean lines could carry. (Since at pp. 129–130 of Hume's Philosophy of Belief I acknowledged Selby-Bigge's priority on this count, I should not have been faulted in Hume Studies (II, No. 2, 96–97) for failing to concede that priority to C. J. Ducasse; who was in fact writing over thirty years later.)

²⁹ The contrast here is between physical causes, which do necessitate, and personal or motivating or (as Hume would have said) moral causes, which do not. If someone specifies the causes of an explosion, then they tell us what brought it about; thus making that occurrence physically necessary and its non-occurrence physically impossible. But if I gave you cause to celebrate—perhaps by bringing you the news that you have earned a Grade A in A-level Philosophy—then I do not by any means ensure that you have no choice but, willy-nilly, to make whoopee. Compare, for instance, my A Rational Animal (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), Ch. III.

³⁰ Commenting on one of the best of the early responses to Section X Hume wrote: ‘If a miracle proves a doctrine to be revealed from God, and consequently true, a miracle can never be wrought for a contrary doctrine. The facts are therefore as incompatible as the doctrines.’ See The Letters of Hume, David, Greig, J. Y. T. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1932), 350–351.Google Scholar

³¹ See, for instance, either ‘Another Idea of Necessary Connection’, in Philosophy for 1982, or Chapter II-III of A RationalAnimal, or my Darwinian Evolution (London: Granada Paladin, 1984), 80–83.

³² This quotation is borrowed from Jastrow, J., Wish and Wisdom (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935), 25.Google Scholar