A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Hobbes to Hume

Summary

Hobbes to Hume appeared in 1959 as the fifth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy, a year after his account of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Where that book followed the continental attempt to build knowledge from clear ideas of reason, this one follows the British attempt to build it from experience, and it asks how far that attempt could go before it began to question its own foundations. Thomas Hobbes opens the story. Copleston presents him as a thinker who defined philosophy as knowledge of causes and effects, treated every reality as body in motion, and explained sensation, imagination and passion mechanically. From that picture of man comes the argument of Leviathan: in a condition without common power each person fears violent death, and reason counsels surrender of private judgment to a sovereign. The Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth and More among them, follow as divines who answered Hobbes by defending eternal moral truths and the reasonableness of faith. John Locke receives a full sequence of chapters. Copleston traces the Essay Concerning Human Understanding from its rejection of innate ideas, through simple and complex ideas drawn from sensation and reflection, to Locke's hesitant treatment of substance, his account of personal identity, and his distinction between certain knowledge and probable judgment. A separate chapter turns to the Second Treatise, where natural law, property, consent and the right of resistance limit the government Locke defended after 1688. The middle of the book surveys Newton's influence on ideas of method, the deist controversy and the defenders of revealed religion, and a lively group of moralists, among them Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Butler and the associationists. Copleston gives particular weight to Bishop Butler's analysis of conscience and self-love as an answer to Hobbes's egoism. George Berkeley follows, presented not merely as a stepping-stone between Locke and Hume but as an Anglican bishop who denied unperceived matter in order to show that the world is a continuous language of God addressed to finite spirits. David Hume then occupies the longest single treatment: impressions and ideas, causation as customary expectation, the self as a bundle of perceptions, morality grounded in sentiment, scepticism about miracles and natural theology, and Hume's political essays. A last chapter introduces his early critics, notably Thomas Reid and the Scottish common-sense philosophers. The thread Copleston draws is the progressive testing of an empiricist starting point. Locke assumes we know a world of bodies, a self and God; Berkeley keeps God and minds while dropping matter; Hume finds that experience on these terms cannot guarantee causal necessity or an enduring self. Copleston's closing judgments, written from a realist and Thomist standpoint, argue that these results show the starting point itself needs revision. For students reading Leviathan, Locke or Hume in a classical school, these chapters supply context, vocabulary and a fair statement of each position. The volume remains under copyright, so the library provides this description and a guide rather than a text.

Plot or Argument

• Hobbes: mechanism, man and the commonwealth

  Two chapters set out Hobbes's conception of philosophy, his materialist account of nature and the passions, the war of all against all, the laws of nature and the authority of the sovereign, with attention to his treatment of religion.

• Cambridge Platonists against the new materialism

  Cudworth, More and their circle defend innate moral principles, the spirituality of the soul and the harmony of reason and faith against Hobbes.

• Locke's Essay and Locke's government

  The polemic against innate ideas, the origin of ideas in sensation and reflection, primary and secondary qualities, substance, personal identity, the degrees of knowledge and probability, and finally the political theory of natural rights, property and consent.

• Newton, the deists and the British moralists

  Newton's method and its influence; Toland, Tindal and other deists and their opponents, including Clarke and Butler's Analogy; Shaftesbury and Hutcheson on the moral sense, Mandeville's paradox of private vices and public benefits, Butler on conscience, and the associationist and utilitarian beginnings of the later century.

• Berkeley's immaterialism

  Berkeley's life and aims, the attack on abstract ideas and material substance, esse est percipi, the role of God as cause of our ideas, and the place of spirits and notions in his philosophy.

• Hume and the Scottish reply

  Hume's science of human nature: impressions and ideas, association, causation and belief, the external world and the self, the passions and moral sentiment, religion and politics, followed by Reid and the common-sense school and other contemporaries who answered or extended Hume.

Characters

• Thomas Hobbes, subject

  Mechanist and author of Leviathan, whose egoistic psychology and absolute sovereign set the terms for much of the century's debate.

• Ralph Cudworth, subject

  Cambridge Platonist who wrote against Hobbes in defence of eternal and immutable morality.

• John Locke, subject

  Physician-trained philosopher whose Essay and Second Treatise anchor the empiricist and liberal traditions Copleston traces.

• Joseph Butler, subject

  Bishop of Durham who analysed conscience, benevolence and self-love and defended revealed religion against the deists.

• George Berkeley, subject

  Bishop of Cloyne who held that sensible things exist only in being perceived and that God speaks to us through them.

• David Hume, subject

  Edinburgh philosopher and historian whose analysis of causation, the self and religion forms the climax of the volume.

• Thomas Reid, subject

  Aberdeen and Glasgow professor who answered Hume by appealing to principles of common sense.

Lessons

• Fear, consent and the purpose of government

  Hobbes and Locke both imagine people without government, yet Hobbes builds an absolute sovereign on fear while Locke builds limited government on rights held under the law of nature. Copleston's chapters make clear that their politics follows from their accounts of human nature, so students learn to ask what a political theory assumes about man before judging its conclusions.

  • Why does Hobbes think the state of nature is a state of war?
  • What does Locke mean by the law of nature, and who enforces it before government exists?
  • Which view of fallen human nature, Hobbes's or Locke's, better fits the biblical account, and why?

• Conscience and the selfish hypothesis

  Butler's sermons, as Copleston presents them, answer the claim that every motive is self-interest by showing that particular passions aim at their objects, that benevolence is as natural as self-love, and that conscience has authority over both. This is a model of patient moral analysis that refutes an opponent by attending to experience rather than by denunciation.

  • How does Butler distinguish self-love from particular passions such as hunger or resentment?
  • Why does Butler say conscience has authority and not merely strength?
  • Can you think of an act you did that seemed selfless; how would Hobbes and Butler each explain it?

• How far can experience reach?

  Copleston follows the empiricist principle from Locke through Berkeley to Hume and shows each step removing something the previous thinker took for granted: material substance, then necessary connection and the enduring self. Students can learn from this how a premise that sounds modest may carry large consequences.

  • What does Berkeley keep and what does he reject from Locke's theory of ideas?
  • Why does Hume say that causation rests on custom rather than reason?
  • Does Hume's conclusion show that experience is the wrong starting point, or that Hume used it badly?

• Miracles, deists and the defence of revelation

  The religious debates of the period set reason-only religion against Christianity as a revealed faith. Copleston places the deists, Butler's Analogy, Berkeley's apologetics and Hume's essay on miracles in one conversation, so students can weigh each argument as its own age heard it.

  • What did the deists keep of Christianity and what did they reject?
  • How does Butler's argument from analogy try to show that difficulties in revelation are like difficulties in nature?
  • What assumptions does Hume make about evidence when he argues against believing reports of miracles?

Context

By the late 1950s Oxford and Cambridge philosophy was dominated by analytic and linguistic methods whose practitioners often read Locke, Berkeley and Hume as early contributors to their own problems. Copleston, then teaching at Heythrop and lecturing each year at the Gregorian University in Rome, wrote about the same figures as men of their own century, engaged with the Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the new science and the quarrels over revealed religion.

Composition

The volume was published in 1959 by Burns and Oates in London and the Newman Press in the United States, completing the story of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy outside Germany that Volume IV had begun with the rationalists. Image paperbacks later issued it in two parts, and Continuum reissued it in 2003 under the subtitle British Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume.

Reception

The book was received as a clear and fair introduction and was widely set for students; specialists have since revised several of its emphases, particularly on Hume's naturalism and on Locke's political context, through archival and textual work published after 1960.

Comparisons

• Leviathan

  Copleston's two Hobbes chapters summarize Parts I and II of Leviathan; set chapters 13-17 of Leviathan beside his account of the state of nature and the covenant.

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  Most of the Locke chapters follow the Essay book by book, from innate ideas in Book I to knowledge and probability in Book IV.

• Second Treatise of Government

  The chapter on Locke's political theory treats property, consent and resistance from the Second Treatise and contrasts them with Hobbes.

• Principia

  Newton enters the book less as a scientist than as the model of method that Hume and others hoped to carry into the study of human nature.

• A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

  The Principles is the main source for Copleston's Berkeley chapters, especially its introduction on abstract ideas and its sections on the existence of God.

• A Treatise of Human Nature

  Copleston relies on the Treatise for Hume's account of the self as a bundle of perceptions and of morality grounded in sentiment.

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

  The Enquiry supplies Hume's more popular treatment of causation and his essay on miracles, both central to Copleston's estimate of him.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Wolff to Kant

  The following volume shows Kant waking from what he called his dogmatic slumber after reading Hume, so the two books should be read in sequence.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Hobbes's mechanical view of man leads straight to his politics.
• Where Locke admits that substance is something he cannot clearly know.
• How Butler uses careful observation of motives to answer egoism.
• Why Berkeley thought denying matter would defend religion.
• Which of Hume's conclusions Copleston thinks follow from his premises and which he thinks can be resisted.

Key terms and names

Empiricism

The position that the materials of knowledge come from sensation and reflection rather than from innate ideas.

Social contract

The agreement by which, in Hobbes and Locke, individuals leave the state of nature and establish political authority.

Primary and secondary qualities

Locke's distinction between features such as shape and motion that belong to bodies and features such as colour and taste that exist as our sensations.

Esse est percipi

Berkeley's principle that for sensible things to be is to be perceived.

Deism

Eighteenth-century religion of reason that accepted a creator but rejected special revelation and miracles.

Custom

In Hume, the habit of expecting one event after another, which he offers as the source of our belief in causal connection.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What reasons does Locke give for rejecting innate ideas?
2. Comprehension What does Hobbes mean by calling life in the state of nature a war of every man against every man?
3. Comprehension According to Hume, what do we actually observe when one billiard ball strikes another?
4. Interpretation Why does Copleston consider Berkeley a religious thinker rather than only a link between Locke and Hume?
5. Interpretation How does Butler's account of conscience differ from Hutcheson's moral sense?
6. Interpretation Why did Reid think Hume's scepticism came from the theory of ideas he inherited?
7. Big Question If no one can see a cause, are we still reasonable to believe that every event has one?

Faith Connections

• Romans 1:19–20 (Scripture)

  Paul says God's invisible attributes are clearly seen through creation; the deists, Butler, Berkeley and Hume in this volume dispute how much of God reason can read from nature.

• Romans 2:14–15 (Scripture)

  The law written on the heart bears on the debate between Hobbes, who grounds obligation in the sovereign's command, and Cudworth and Butler, who ground it in conscience.

• Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (Great Conversation)

  Butler's reply to the deists argues that objections to revelation apply equally to the course of nature, which the deists themselves accepted as God's work.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: British philosophy between the Civil War and the Scottish Enlightenment pursued the project of grounding knowledge, morals and politics in experience, and the course from Locke through Berkeley to Hume shows that this project, consistently carried out, unsettles causation, substance and the self.

Rhetorical device: reductio through historical sequence. By ordering Locke, Berkeley and Hume as successive applications of one principle, Copleston lets Hume's sceptical results serve as an argument against the principle itself.

Debate: Resolved: Hume's account of causation shows that the empiricist starting point cannot support knowledge of the world.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Drawing on Copleston's Hobbes and Butler chapters, explain the selfish hypothesis and evaluate whether Butler refutes it.

Comparison with A Treatise of Human Nature: Compare Copleston's exposition of Hume on personal identity with Treatise Book I, Part IV, section 6, and note what Hume's own voice adds to the summary.

Medical Lens

The volume touches the history of medicine and psychology at several points. Locke studied and practised medicine, worked alongside Thomas Sydenham and served as physician in the household of the first Earl of Shaftesbury; his empiricism has been connected by historians with that clinical training. Hobbes offered a fully mechanical account of sensation, imagination and passion. The associationist tradition that Copleston touches in the moralists' chapter, especially David Hartley, a physician, became one root of later psychology, and Hume's science of human nature treats belief and the passions as natural processes. Connections drawn between these theories and later psychiatry are interpretive.

• Hobbes chapters, on sensation and the passions

  Mechanical explanation of perception, imagination and emotion as motions in the body, the basis of Hobbes's moral psychology.

  Mind Body
• Locke chapters, biographical opening

  Locke's medical studies and practice in the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury before his philosophical writing.

  Physicians Doctors
• Chapter on problems in ethics, section on Hartley and the associationists

  Association of ideas proposed as the mechanism of mental and moral development, linked by Hartley to vibrations in the nerves.

  Mind Body Psychiatry History
• Hume chapters, on belief, the self and the passions

  Belief as a lively idea produced by custom and the self as a bundle of perceptions, both later discussed in the philosophy of psychology.

  Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a dinner-table exchange in 1740s Edinburgh in which Hume explains why he cannot find his self by introspection and Thomas Reid replies that every sane person trusts his own continuing identity.

• Classroom

  Hold a mock constitutional convention: half the class argues from Copleston's account of Hobbes, half from his account of Locke, over whether citizens may ever resist their ruler.

• Essay

  Using Copleston's chapters on Butler, write an essay testing Hobbes's claim that all human action is self-interested against three examples from history or literature.

• Fiction

  Write a short story in which a character who has just read Berkeley tries for one day to live as if nothing exists unperceived, and discover what keeps the world steady.

Further Reading

• Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

• Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Joseph Butler

• An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Thomas Reid

• The Philosophy of David Hume, Norman Kemp Smith

• The Seventeenth Century Background, Basil Willey

• History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Leslie Stephen