and rushed in to ground it and justify it: activities which took place on the
territory of general philosophical argument.
In the intellectual network in Figure 11.1, Hume is connected early in life
with the Deists. His relative Henry Home (Lord Kames) had been working on
principles of natural religion, and Hume hoped to get from him an introduction
to Butler, who had just published his famous Religion Natural and Revealed
(1736). In addition, Hume is in the network of Newton’s scientific followers,
his teachers at Edinburgh; in this respect he is in a similar network position
with Berkeley, which suggests why there are parallels between their positions.
Creativity is not simply discipleship. Hume broke with his predecessors in
important respects; his radical empiricism and skepticism destroyed Deism,
and he critiqued Newtonian concepts and reduced natural science to an off-
shoot of the laws of the mind which were for Hume the true equivalent to
Newton’s laws of motion. The young Hume apparently knew that there was
a fundamental philosophical transformation at stake. He went for three years
to study and write at La Flèche, site of Descartes’s old college, where he
deliberately informed himself about the Cartesians, Malebranche, Spinoza, and
Bayle—in short, all the prominent positions on the Continent. These too he
critiqued in his effort to clear the ground of all philosophical rivals to his
empiricism.^26
Consider now the dynamics of the intellectual world which underlay the
various strands of Hume’s position. The intellectuals of the Scottish Enlight-
enment were religious moderates, who pushed increasingly in the direction of
naturalism.^27 The religious situation was propitious for this stance. Scottish
politics had been a scene of strife between extreme factions: Catholic Loyalists
and royal legitimists in the Highlands, where feudal relationships remained
strong, and Calvinists in the commercial Lowland cities, who had obtained
control of the state church. It had been the Scottish dynasty, the Stuarts, who
had attempted to bring back Catholicism in England and precipitated the
Revolution in 1688; and Scotland was the main center of Jacobite plots to put
them back on the throne—plots which boiled over into rebellion in 1708 and
1715–16. There were riots in Edinburgh in 1736–37, leading up to the at-
tempted invasion of England in 1745–46. Jacobitism attracted those who were
dissatisfied with the conditions of the Union with England, which had been
established in 1707: opponents of English tax and customs policies and those
who were excluded from patronage for church and government positions
dispensed from London. In this situation the Episcopalian Church—the official
Church of England—was one of the dissatisfied outsiders; under the political
compromise which formed the Union, the church was merely tolerated under
the official establishment of the Presbyterians. Thus Scottish Episcopalians too
were suspect as Jacobite sympathizers and activists.
The faction to which Hume, Kames, Adam Smith, and the other intellec-
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