湖の彼岸　－向こう岸の街、水面に映った社会、二重写しの自分－

Bertrand Russell History of Western Philosophy


'that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of natures.'(A Treatise of Human Nature)

Hume's philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of eighteenth-century reasonableness. He starts out, like Lock, with the inteniton of being sensible and empirical, taking nothing on trust, but seeking whatever instruction is to be obtained from experience and observation. But having a better intellect than Lock's, a greater acuteness in analysis, and a smaller capacity for accepting comfortable inconsistencies, he arrived at the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing is to be learnt. There is no such thing as a rational belief.

It was inevitable that such a self-refutation of rationality should be followed by a great outburst of irrational faith. The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad but influential, Hume was sane but had no followers. Subsequent British empiricists rejected his scepticism without refuting it; Rousseau and his follwers agreed with Hume that no belief is based on reason, but thought the heart superior to reason, and allowed it to lead them to convictions very different from those that Hume retained in practice. German philosophers, from Kant to Hegel, had not assimilated Hume's arguments. I say this deliberately, in spite of the belief which many philosophers share with Kant, that his Critique of Pure Reason answered Hume. In fact, these philosophers---at least Kant and Hegel---represent a pre-Humian type of rationalism, and can be refuted by Humian arguments. The philosophers who cannot be refuted in this way are those who do not pretend to be rational, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzche. The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century and what has passed of the twentieth is a natural sequel to Hume's destrauction of empiricism.