Table Of ContentHUME'S PHILOSOPHY
OF BELIEF
International Library of Philosophy
and S cienti.ftc Method
EDITOR: TED HONDERICH
ADVISORY EDITOR: BERNARD WILLIAMS
INDUCTIVE PROBABILITY by John Patrick Day.
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION: A History of the Philosophy of Perception
by D. W. Hamlyn.
TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS: Ludwig Wittgenstein's LogiJ,b-
philosophis,he Abhandlung with a new Translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
ness and with the Introduction by Bertrand Russell.
PERCEPTION AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD by D. M. Armstrong.
HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF: A Study of His Fir5t Inquiry by Antony
Flew.
KANT'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: An Outline of One Central Argument
in the Critique of Pure Reason by Graham Bird.
CONDITIONS FOR DESCRIPTION by Peter Zinkemagel, translated from the
Danish by Olaf Lindum.
AN EXAMINATION OF PLATO'S DOCTRINES by I. M. Crombie. Two
volumes. I: Plato on Man and Society. II: Plato on Knowledge and Reality.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION by M. Merleau-Ponty, translated from
the French by Colin Smith.
THE IDEA OF JUSTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF ARGUMENT by Ch.
Perelman, translated from the French by John Petrie.
LECTURES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH by C. D. Broad. Incorporating the
Perrott Lectures given in Cambridge University in 1959 and 1960.
THE VARIETIES OF GOODNESS by Georg Henrik von Wright.
METHOD IN ETHICAL THEORY by Abraham Edel.
METHOD IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES by G. Schlesinger.
SCIENCE, PERCEPTION AND REALITY by Wilfrid Sellars.
NORM AND ACTION: A Logical Enquiry by Georg Henrik von Wright.
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM by J. J.C. Smart.
STUDIES IN METAPHILOSOPHY by Morris Lazerowitz.
REASON, ACTION AND MORALITY by J. Kemp.
THE HIDDEN GOD: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the
Tragedies of Racine by Lucien Goldmann, trans. from the French by P. Thody.
THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR by Charles 'Taylor.
THE STRATIFICATION OF BEHAVIOUR: A System of Definitions Pro-
pounded and Defende'd by D.S. Shwayder.
STUDIES IN PLATO'S META PHYSICS edited by R. E. Allen.
NEW ESSAYS ON PLATO AND ARISTOTLE edited by Renford Bambrough.
POLITICAL ARGUMENT by Brian M. Barry.
BRAIN AND MIND: Modern Concepts of the Nature of Mind edited by J. R.
Smythies.
BRITISH ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY edited by Bernard Williams and Alan
Montefiore.
t_!IUME'S PHILOSOPHY
OF BELIE~
A STUDY OF HIS FIRST INQUIRY
by
Antony r-lew
Professor of Philosophy
University College of Keele
LONDON
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL
NEW YORK : THE HUMANITIES PRESS
First published I96I
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Broadwqy House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London, E.C.4
Second Impression I966
Printed in Great Britain by
Compton Printing Works (London) Ltd.
London, N.I
© Anto,ry Flew I96I
No part of this book mqy be reproduced
in al!J form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism.
CONTENTS
PREFACE page vii
I. THE OBJECTS OF THE EXERCISE l
II. PRIVATE IMAGES AND PUBLIC
LANGUAGE 18
III. THE GREAT DIVIDE 53
IV. ARGUMENTS FROM EXPERIENCE 68
V. THE NATURE AND THE MECHANICS
OF EMPIRICAL BELIEF 93
VI. THE IDEA OF NECESSARY
CONNECTION 108
VII. LIBERTY AND NECESSITY 140
166
VIII. MIRACLES AND METHODOLOGY
IX. THE RELIGIOUS HYPOTHESIS 214
X. SCEPTICISM OR SCIENCE 2.43
BIBLIOGRAPHY 2.74
INDEX OF PERSONS 2.83 ,
V
PREFACE
THE purposes of this book are explained in Chapter I. Neverthe-
less some Preface is needed: first, to give warning of, and to try to
justify, certain conventions followed throughout; and, next, to
make special acknowledgement of some major debts.
One convention consists in giving all references in brackets in
the text, in accordance with principles explained in the Biblio-
graphy at the end. These parentheses may well irritate some
readers. But that irritation must be offset against the compensating
advantage of being able by this means to avoid altogether the un-
tidiness and expense of footnotes. Another such convention is to
print all quotations, even lengthy ones, in the same style as the
rest. The snag about this is that it allows the book to appear as
long as it is. Yet it surely makes for easier and quicker reading;
and perhaps reduces the too familiar temptation to skip what are,
or at any rate ought to be, essential parts of the argument. In
quoting from nineteenth and twentieth century sources the exact
punctuation and spelling of the originals have been retained, even
at the cost of slightly tiresome orthographical and typographical
inconsistencies. With sources from the eighteenth century and
earlier some liberties have been taken in the interests of smoother
reading; though, I hope, none which affect either wording or
sense.
Where the original is in some language other than English and
where a standard translation is available this has been used. Where
none such is available I have either quoted the original or made my
own translation. But that justice might be done and be seen to be
done, all crucial and possibly controversial phrases have either
been left untranslated, or both the original and a translation have
been given.
Some of the material in Chapters VIII and IX has appeared al-
ready in articles in the Philosophical Quarter!J and in the Rationalist
Annual for 1959; under the titles 'Hume's Check' and 'Hume and
vu
PREFACE
"the Religious Hypothesis"', respectively. It is reproduced here
by permission of the Editors of those journals. But, though the
overlap is sufficient to require some acknowledgement, the
chapters are certainly neither simply reproductions nor even
gently revised versions of the articles. For one thing they are both,
regrettably, very much longer.
Two excuses can be offered for this, particularly in the grosser
case of Chapter VIII. The first is that everyone-including, it
must be confessed, the author of 'Hume's Check'-who has
written at any length on Section X of this Inquiry seems to have
misunderstood and misrepresented at least some part of it. There
is thus perhaps room for a sustained attempt to remove these mis-
understandings and to discover exactly what Hume's argument
was. The second is that the methodological questions raised by
Hume surely deserve more attention than in recent years they
have got. Certainly in considering these questions I have felt the
lack of any continuing and probing dialogue in our time between
believers and non-believers, between naturalists and super-
naturalists. The most important exception known to me is the
exchange between Professor H. H. Dubs, Sir Arnold Lunn, and
Professor P. Nowell-Smith in the Hibbert Journal from 1950 to
195 2. Useful though this was I do not see how anyone can without
much more close mutual criticism be entitled to feel any general
confidence in his particular position here. It is indeed in connection
with this Chapter VIII that I myself hope to learn most from
whatever comment this book may be fortunate enough to pro-
voke.
In almost all cases a reference in the text, even where it may
seem to have been made only to disagree, should be taken also as
a recognition of a wider debt. But it is appropriate to make special
mention here of the massive work of Kemp Smith and Mossner,
and of the quite unusually stimulating studies of Price and Pass-
more. It was also, I think, Professor Price who first suggested to
me, in conversation, that this Inquiry deserved to be studied in its
J. J.
own right. Professor C. Smart read the whole book in manu-
script and made a vast number of suggestions. Without this help
the final product would have been much worse. Miss I. M. Dud-
son somehow contrived to type the whole manuscript in the
intervals of meeting the secretarial demands of two diverse and
active departments, remaining always patient with requests to
Vlll
PREFACE
type successive revised versions. Library staff at Keele and at the
Bodleian have been similarly patient and helpful in tracking down
books. Finally, I should like to say that without the peculiar
demands and opportunities of this College, and without the
constant stimulus of colleagues and students here, this book
would never have been written.
A. F.
University College,
Keele,
S tajfordshire.
January 5th, 1961.
lX
