The Natural History of Religion (The library of liberal arts) - Softcover

The Natural History of Religion David Hume With an introduction by John M. Robertson David Hume (7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) (born David Home) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. “The Natural History of Religion” was published by Hume at the beginning of 1757, after his reputation had been established by his earlier “Essays” and the first two volumes of his “History of England”. It is the one of his works which most explicitly asserts his Deism; but on account of its rationalistic treatment of concrete religion in general, which only nominally spared Christianity, it was that which first brought upon him much theological odium in England. The pugnacious Warburton saw a copy before publication, and wrote to Millar, who was Hume’s publisher as well as his own, urging its suppression. “Sir”, he characteristically begins, “I suppose you would be glad to know what sort of book it is which you are to publish with Hume’s name and yours to it. . . . He is establishing Atheism; and in one single line of a long essay professes to believe Christianity. . . . You have often told me of this man’s moral virtues. He may have many, for aught I know; but let me observe to you there are vices of the mind as well as of the body; and I think a wickeder mind, and more obstinately bent on public mischief, I never knew.”1 The “establishing Atheism” was perhaps truer in a way than the Christian critic supposed; though nothing could be more distinct than Hume’s preliminary and repeated profession of Theism, and nothing more unscrupulous than Warburton’s statement.