Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/545

KANT HAS yOT ANSWERED HUME. 533 of what is to him superstition. If I bring men to doubt, he thinks, of what foundation is to be assigned to our rea- sonings from causation, or whether indeed any certainty can be assumed for such, surely it will be inevitable that the untenableness of that horrible superstition will immediately suggest itself. That this is his general state of mind, his whole mode of viewing and treating the subject immediately---! demonstrates. Take, for example, his accentuation of this, that " by means of that relation (of cause and effect) alone I / can we go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses "w Here is a consideration at once to dumbfound and alarm us. What we actually feel, or what we remember to have actu- ally felt, that alone we know, and that is all w r e know; for there is no power in existence to carry us beyond our memory and senses except causation alone, and that, with its foundation utterly shaken into perplexity and doubt, is a principle no longer to be depended upon ! No wonder^thjat not Eeid alone, but all men of common sense, rose to the le, and that Hume, in consequence, was treated with considerable violence and injustice in so far, at least, as what w r as honest in his inquiry (the question of necessity) was entirely overlooked and neglected. Hume, that is^as _ we have seen, does not deny causation as~a principle of reasoning in itself or naturally legitimate ; he only holds up tfeatTelement of apodictic necessity that is thus implicitly aSsSned in it, and demands an explicit philosophical account of it. The action of Eeid and the rest was rather a shout of execration and surprise that Hume should at all call in question a principle so momentous and a principle so self- evident. They .refused to draw Hume's own distinction between his admission on the one hand, and his question on liTiiTotEer. To all that he might say in regard to never for a moment denying the legitimate use of the principle, they turned a deaf ear : and by vociferations in respect to the certainty, gravity, sanctity, divinity, of this undenied use, they drowned every word he might try to utter about a philosophical curiosity in reference to the source of the apodictic necessity which was understood in the relation. The sceptical result alone filled their whole souls, and en- tirely blinded them to the fact of the existence of a very rkable and perfectly legitimate scientific problem. The sceptical corollaries apart then, Hume is really to be credited with an honest desire soberly to inquire into the philoso- phical or scientific foundation of the peculiar necessity in ! question. In fact, it was the doubt nascent in this one V/ special case that, in all probability, gave rise in the end to