Five-minute digest
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Summary
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason. Cleanthes is an experimental theist who argues from design: the world is one great machine of lesser machines whose adaptation of means to ends resembles human contrivance, so its cause must resemble a human mind. Demea is an orthodox rationalist and mystic who insists that God's nature is incomprehensible and who favours an a priori proof of a necessarily existent being. Philo, a sceptic, joins Demea at first in stressing the weakness of human reason and then turns the full force of Hume's earlier analysis of causation and analogy against Cleanthes. Philo argues in Parts 2 to 8 that the analogy between the world and a machine is weak, since we have no experience of the origin of worlds; that if like effects prove like causes, a finite, imperfect world proves only a finite, perhaps imperfect, perhaps plural, perhaps embodied designer; that the world might have been botched and bungled through many trials by an infant or a superannuated deity; that the world resembles an animal or vegetable more than a watch, and might arise from generation or vegetation, like the Brahmins' infinite spider; and that an Epicurean hypothesis of matter in eternal motion settling into stable order could account for apparent design. In Part 9 Demea gives his a priori argument for a necessary being; Cleanthes rejects it on the ground that whatever we conceive as existing we can conceive as not existing. Parts 10 and 11 turn to evil. Demea, to drive people toward religion, catalogues human misery, quoting Milton's lazar-house of diseases and describing the disorders of the mind; Philo agrees and asks Epicurus's old questions about a God who is willing but unable, or able but unwilling, to prevent evil. Cleanthes denies that misery outweighs happiness. Philo then identifies four circumstances, pain as a motive, government by general laws, frugal endowment of creatures and inaccurate workmanship of nature, that produce most natural evil, and concludes that the original source of things has no more regard to good than to ill. Demea, realising that Philo has been mocking him, leaves. In Part 12 Philo surprises by conceding that design strikes every mind, reduces the dispute between theist and atheist to a verbal one about degrees of resemblance, and attacks popular superstition. Pamphilus, a doubtful judge, concludes that Philo's principles are more probable than Demea's but that Cleanthes comes nearer the truth.
Top Lessons
An analogy is only as strong as the resemblance it rests on
Philo shows that inferring a designer from the world requires a likeness between worlds and machines that we cannot check, and that the same analogy yields stranger designers when pushed. The method applies to any argument from resemblance.
The fact of suffering weighs against confident claims about providence
Parts 10 and 11 argue that even if evil is compatible with a good God, the world as we find it does not support inferring one. Hume moves the problem of evil from logic to evidence.
Where a question is open, let several voices argue it
Hume chose dialogue for a subject where reasonable people disagree and the author's own view is dangerous. Irony, alliances and a doubtful narrator keep the reader from receiving a verdict ready-made.
Verified Quotes
“External objects press in upon him; passions solicit him; his philosophical melancholy dissipates”
“You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines”
“Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out”
“The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom”
“they are nothing in comparison of those which arise within ourselves, from the distempered condition of our mind and body”
“Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads from these tormentors”
“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses”
“We are terrified, not bribed to the continuance of our existence”
“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil”
“But what racking pains, on the other hand, arise from gouts, gravels, megrims, toothaches, rheumatisms, where the injury to the animal machinery is either small or incurable”
“The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children”
“To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian”
“I cannot but think, that PHILO's principles are more probable than DEMEA's; but that those of CLEANTHES approach still nearer to the truth”
Medical Lens
Parts 10 and 11 are a philosophical inventory of suffering, physical and mental. Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (Paradise Lost XI), which names 'demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness' among diseases, and lists remorse, anxiety, dejection and despair as disorders of the mind. Philo asks why pain rather than a diminution of pleasure moves animals, why gout, migraine and rheumatism cause suffering out of proportion to any protective function, and why the anxious fear death more than they love life. These passages are useful for teaching on the meaning of pain, the evolutionary function of distress, and the ethics of consolation. Hume's own revision of the work during his fatal illness, and his tranquil death described by Adam Smith, link the book to the history of the good death, but that is biographical context.
- Part 1
Cleanthes says the sceptic's 'philosophical melancholy' dissipates on contact with external objects and passions.
- Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- Part 10
Gratuitous pains of gout, gravel, migraine, toothache and rheumatism, and spleen, melancholy and superstition as pains of the mind.
- Part 11
Four circumstances behind natural evil: pain as motive, general laws, frugal endowment of animals, inaccurate workmanship of nature (including excess or deficiency of humours and disease).