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.

Top 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

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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.

• Locke chapters, biographical opening

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

• 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.

• 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.