Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School

I have not been able to locate any critique of Hume on substance by a Schoolman, at least in English, dating from Hume's period or shortly thereafter. I have, therefore, constructed my own critique as an exercise in ‘post facto history’. This is what a late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century Scholastic could, would, and should have said in response to Hume's attack on substance should they have been minded to do so. That no one did is somewhat mysterious. My critique is precisely in the language of the period, using solely the conceptual resources available to a Schoolman at that time. The arguments, however, are as sound now as they were then, and in this sense the paper performs a dual role—contributing to the defence of substance contra Hume, and filling, albeit two hundred years or so too late, a gap in the historical record. ‘And he said: Go, and thou shalt say to this people: Hearing, you will hear, but not understand; and seeing you will see, but not perceive’ (Isaiah 6:9). I would fain ask those philosophers and historians of philosophy, among whom we must number the celebrated Mr. Hume as undoubtedly the most enlightened, whether there be, in the tumult of disputatious volumes, any so voiceless as the Schoolmen. We have it on the highest authority of the genial Scotchman that the men of the School, ‘making use of undefined terms, draw out their disputes to a tedious length, without ever touching the point in question.’ With what alarm do we learn that these purveyors of obscurity have even ensnared the great Mr. Locke, one of the fathers of the experimental philosophy? With so great consternation do we hear it said that the Scholastics lose themselves in ‘abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.’ Nay, we are told in Int Ontology Metaphysics (2012) 13:155–174 DOI 10.1007/s12133-012-0100-3 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings: 2.9 (S. Buckle (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.18, note a.). Enquiry: 1.12, Buckle (2007), p.9. D. S. Oderberg (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AA, UK e-mail: [email protected] the frankest of terms that ‘Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge’. Such vituperation appearing unbecoming to a man famed for his expansive culture and gentle wit, I am compelled to conclude that the threat posed by no less than a ‘torrent of scholastic religion’ must be of a high enough order to have the quills aquiver of even the great and worldly men of letters. Certain it must be that where that instrument of darkness, the Index of Forbidden Books, has failed to reach, so the heresy hunters in those few regions must as we write these words be creating new and ever bolder Indexes, nay even so far as to establish an Index devoted solely to the writings of Mr. Hume himself, the titles of his works inscribed in the blackest of India ink and the thickest and most menacing of lines. When therefore we run over libraries, persuaded of the dangers of the dogmatists, surely we will find this jewel in Scotland's crown subjected to the most merciless of their flagellation? Yet if we take in our hand what volumes we possess, it would seem that Mr. Hume was heard throughout Europe save by the School itself! Was this in virtue of mere ignorance, even wilful blindness, or a simple discourtesy unbefitting men of erudition and standing? Perhaps there be other hypotheses we might feign such as the living under penal laws for nigh on two hundred years in Britain, accompanied by the effacement of the School from the universities, and the many wars of the Continent, retarding as they surely did the growth of true knowledge in those towers of learning. Howsoever we explain the phenomenon, it is evident that Mr. Hume came unto the purveyors of mummeries, and they heard him not. Or, some might suspect, they heard him indeed, but had nothing to say in return and this because the very artfulness of Mr. Hume reduced his dogmatist enemies to silence; as it were from the spouting of mummeries to not saying a mum. Suppose this to be so; we should expect to find the corpses of his bigoted Scholastic enemies prostrate at the foot of every argument brought to bear upon their ‘fruitless efforts of human vanity’. In particular, we should expect the laying waste of that so central an idea of the School, the idea of substance. For there is none so important, none so metaphysical a dogma of abstruse philosophy, so admirably complementing the ‘scholastic religion’, as that of the existence of substance and its correlative accidents. How could it be that without substance there should be transubstantiation, marked by Mr. Hume as a ‘superstitious delusion’? No more than there should be a mechanical philosophy without machines. Let us not say, however, that the light of Caledonia focused his piercing beam upon the idea of substance as a means to take up the sword with ‘[t]he devotees of that strange superstition.’ Rather, I would have it that the dogma of substance and accident must have so offended the pious ears of this most cautious and professedly undogmatic of men that he could only marvel to see how 3 Hume, The History of England, vol. 6, Appendix to the Reign of James I (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767), p.136. 4 Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in his Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), p.71. 5 P. Jones (ed.), The Reception of David Hume in Europe (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005); J. Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume's Metaphysical and Epistemological Writings, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005: 2nd edn.). 6 Enquiry: 1.11, Buckle (2007), p.8. 7 Enquiry: 10.2, Buckle (2007), p.97. 8 Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature: I.iii.8 (L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p.99). 156 D.S. Oderberg