one ingredient in Hume’s stance. He pushed into the new territory as aggres-
sively as he could, aiming to reap fame for constructing the new moral sciences.
Hume’s skepticism was a by-product of his empiricist principle, a piece of
cultural capital which he could now exploit without concessions to religiously
based concepts; the demolition of causality and of the self were inadvertent
consequences, which seem to have dismayed Hume himself. What was more
valuable for him was his empiricist logic, his rules for induction, his principles
of habit and custom which govern the human mind; and in his later writings,
once the social sciences had taken off, he downplayed the critical extremes of
his early writings. Hume’s skepticism was not in any of the previous traditions:
not an ancient Pyrrhonism aiming at ataraxeia, the tranquillity of withholding
judgment on everything; certainly not a fideist destruction of rationality; nor
again Bayle’s tolerant skepticism striking a balance among competing fanati-
cisms. Hume was being an empiricist when he declared that no one ever
sincerely follows skepticism, and that reasoning is not so much “cognitive” as
“sensitive.” (Hume, [1739–40] 1969: 179). Hume was not a skeptic but a
psychological imperialist.
With Hume’s empiricism one might expect the age of philosophical crea-
tivity to come to an end. His contemporaries, the Encyclopedists, banished not
just metaphysics but the asking of any questions regarded as futile and insol-
uble. In place of these traditional activities of philosophers were now disciplines
with limited empirical focus: the natural sciences, history, politics, economics,
psychology. Nevertheless, the pure problem space which constitutes philosophy
had been expanded, and Hume’s new puzzle attracted several further stances.
In the provincial Scottish universities, especially centers of Presbyterian tradi-
tionalism such as Aberdeen, Reid, Beattie and Campbell responded with a
philosophy of common sense which confirmed both ordinary experience and
the traditional objects of religion. Working with a richer mixture of ingredients
from the German networks, Kant took up Hume’s challenge as if the natural
sciences had been undermined and needed to be propped up against the
skeptical destruction of causality. Not only epistemology but metaphysics too
was renewed.
Five generations before, the emergence of the rapid-discovery sciences had
transformed intellectual space. Descartes and his contemporaries, attempting
to replace philosophy with the new science, nevertheless made their program-
matic arguments on philosophical terrain. The secularizers, hoping to end
religious strife, banished metaphysics as a residue of theology but wove another
mesh of abstract questions. The pattern repeats; again an effort to kill philoso-
phy creates a higher ground upon which philosophy expands.
Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality • 617