In this chapter we focus our attention on the role of the imagination in Hume’s approach to history. Hume is rare among philosophers for being also a practising historian, and in his own lifetime and for a century thereafter he was better known for his seven-volume History of England than for the Treatise, Enquiries and Essays, for which he is now principally famous. As David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin document, the History had a long and illustrious career: it remained in print until the last decade of the nineteenth century, going through six editions while Hume was alive and (on their estimate, writing in 1965) ‘about 175’ posthumously. It remained the standard work on the subject until eclipsed by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1848), a work considerably narrower in historical scope.1 As an active philosopher and practising historian, it is not surprising that Hume was sensitive both to matters of historiography – the methodological issues pertaining to the practice of isolating sources, selecting evidence and crafting a narrative – and to issues that fall (anachronistically) under ‘philosophy of history’, concerning historical understanding, historical knowledge and literary representation. The line between Hume’s historiographical and philosophical concerns is rarely, if ever, clearly demarcated, but the complex issues they raise come together in what he refers to as ‘philosophical history’.2
In order to appreciate what Hume means by this term, and to elucidate more generally how he understands the relationship between imagination, history and historical practice, I propose to frame the discussion in terms of aesthetics, extending some of the insights from the previous chapter. This approach might at first appear arbitrary or unwarranted, but we may put such worries to rest by noting how Hume himself provides impetus for pursuing this line of inquiry. In numerous remarks, he explicitly juxtaposes the craft of the historian against the art of the poet in order to highlight the strong connection of the former to the faculty of memory rather than imagination, emphasising how it is beholden to fact rather than fiction: unlike the poet who creates a poetic reality by subverting experience, the historian aims to depict it by reiterating the sequence of past events as accurately as possible, and when historians depart from matter of fact their narrative becomes false. At the same time, Hume emphasises how historians also rely on the imagination, for two reasons. First, the subject matter of history is available only indirectly, through the existence of written record, itself based largely on the testimony of others, which has to be made available through reconstructing the past; a historical depiction is thus a recreation, a tensed representation of experience, direct access to which is by definition impossible. Second, historians are obliged to represent historical events in a way that enlivens the imagination of the audience and procures a smooth and easy transition among the ideas they create in order to inspire true belief in the narrative they construct.
For these reasons, historians find themselves in a position that is both different from and compatible with that of the poet. On the one hand, they must embrace the principles of memory to copy the world with accuracy and truth, and reject the tendency of the imagination to lead them into fictions that depart from matter of fact and real existence. On the other hand, they depend upon the imagination both to bring past events into a vivid present and portray them in such a way that carries conviction for the reader. In so doing, they transform ordinary experience, create agreeable ideas, and do so deliberately, requirements that can be framed as rules of historical art comparable to the rules of criticism, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, govern what counts as good literature. In the final analysis, Hume acknowledges, historical facts are qualitatively indistinguishable from poetic fictions, but they can be differentiated from them in the same way as ideas of memory differ from fictions of the imagination, namely by the amount of force and vivacity they contain, and, due to their source in impressions of sense and memory, the degree of belief and conviction they ultimately inspire.
Testimony and Historical Testimony
Before considering Hume’s approach to history, it is important to understand clearly what he means by a concept central to it, namely that of ‘testimony’ and, more specifically, ‘historical testimony’, upon which the practice of the historian depends. That Hume has a ‘theory’ of testimony, as some have proposed, seems doubtful, but he does clearly indicate what he means by the term. Considered from the point of view of his theory of ideas, testimony consists (to paraphrase Tony Pitson’s characterisation) of words (written or spoken) that are connected causally as effects with ideas, which in turn represent facts in the world, and of which the testimony is intended as a report. The ideas also resemble the facts – a point Hume exploits to explain the human tendency to credulity – which is a singular feature of testimony:
Other effects only point to their causes in an oblique manner; but the testimony of men does it directly, and is to be consider’d as an image as well as an effect. No wonder, therefore, we are so rash in drawing our inferences from it, and are less guided by experience in our judgments concerning it, than in those upon any other subject. (T 1.3.9.12/SBN 113)
Historians rely on testimony and for that reason must take pains not to be so rash in drawing their conclusions as their evidence might tempt them to be.3
Hume’s view of testimony has been seen to involve two questions. The first speaks to the ‘epistemology of testimony’, to employ a phrase from Alvin Goldman, which ‘. . . concerns the conditions or circumstances in which a hearer is justified or warranted in accepting a speaker’s testimony that p’.4 Responses to this question among contemporary epistemologists resolve largely into one of two camps, either the ‘non-reductionist’ whose proponents (to quote Jennifer Lackey’s characterisation) hold that ‘testimony is just as basic a source of justification (warrant, entitlement, knowledge, etc.) as sense perception, memory, inference, and the like’, or the ‘reductionist’, whose members hold that ‘hearers must have sufficiently good positive reasons for accepting a given report, reasons that are themselves ineliminably based on the testimony of others’, which means that the ‘justification of testimony is reduced to the justification we have for sense perception, memory, and inductive inference’.5 Largely as a result of the influential treatment by C. A. J. Coady, Hume has been placed among the reductionists and his view thus interpreted criticised as incoherent.6
In the present context, this debate is relevant insofar as Hume’s defenders have often emphasised that not only is he not a reductionist and thus immune from the criticisms levelled by Coady, but that he is also interested in quite a different question – the second one mentioned above – concerning how we acquire beliefs through testimony.7 This elision of the justification and acquisition of beliefs, and the misreading of Hume that follows upon it, is well illustrated in debate over the interpretation of an important passage from the Treatise where Hume describes the ‘chains’ of cause and effect that give rise to belief in historical narratives. He writes:
[W]e may choose any point in history, and consider for what reason we either believe or reject it. Thus we believe that CAESAR was kill’d in the senate-house on the ides of March; and that because this fact is establish’d on the unanimous testimony of historians, who agree to assign this precise time and place to that event. Here are certain characters and letters present either to our memory or senses; which characters we likewise remember to have been us’d as the signs of certain ideas; and these ideas were either in the minds of such as were immediately present at that action, and receiv’d the ideas directly from its existence; or they were deriv’d from the testimony of others, and that again from another testimony, by a visible gradation, till we arrive at those who were eye-witnesses and spectators of the event. ’Tis obvious all this chain of argument or connexion of causes and effects, is at first founded on those characters or letters, which are seen or remember’d, and that without the authority either of the memory or senses our whole reasoning wou’d be chimerical and without foundation. Every link of the chain wou’d in that case hang upon another; but there wou’d not be any thing fix’d to one end of it, capable of sustaining the whole; and consequently there wou’d be no belief nor evidence. And this actually is the case with all hypothetical arguments, or reasoning upon a supposition; there being in them, neither any present impression, nor belief of a real existence. (T 1.3.4.2/SBN 83)
Debate over this passage is due in large part to G. E. M Anscombe’s claim that in it Hume is arguing that our belief ‘that Caesar was killed in the senate-house on the ides of March’ requires inferring the existence of a chain of testimony: ‘Hume is arguing not merely that we must have a starting-point’, she writes, ‘but that we must reach a starting point in the justification of these inferences’. Even effecting the ‘revision’ required to render Hume’s writing ‘coherent’, Anscombe contends, only serves to reveal the ‘position as incredible’.8 We are more certain that the event took place than we are certain about the chain of cause and effect that constitutes the testimony, and since the belief depends on justification of the latter, we are forced to doubt the original belief such that, as Donald Livingston puts it in the course of responding to Anscombe, the ‘existence of Caesar’ becomes ‘an hypothesis that can be freely doubted’.9
Anscombe is surely correct that the view she takes Hume to be defending is ‘incredible’, but her objection only has force if Hume is attempting to justify historical beliefs when he is actually describing how we acquire them through testimony. Hume is thus offering an ‘analysis of the structure of historical beliefs’, to quote Livingston again, or, as Pitson has put it more recently, an explanation of how such beliefs arise ‘by relating them to impressions of sense or memory construed as the effects of ideas in the minds of historians whose testimony contributes links to a chain of such testimony’.10 Hume is emphasising that at bottom there is some present impression or real existence that anchors a chain of historical narrative in the bed of lived experience and which guides the historian in writing a true narrative; the testimony established in the record is one link in the chain, and the judgements of historians more again. In principle, there is an original scene (the chain is ‘fix’d to one end of it’) ‘beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry’ (T 1.3.4.1/SBN 83) and the historian aims to reach it. The idea of Rome, for example, is painted out from ‘conversation and books of travellers and historians’, links in the causal chain that make the idea acquire the requisite force and vivacity that make it feel different from ideas of the mimetic imagination. As such, Rome is an object of true belief because it refers ultimately to memory, even though the imagination is required to represent historical time and past events. At the same time, the original cannot be displayed by cutting the past at its joints; the past is not an open book to be read but a scene of interpretation to be reconstructed, and this is precisely what historians do and how they are read (and expect to be read) by others. The documents, written and oral, are thus transformed into historical knowledge because, as Livingston puts it, ‘they express “the unanimous testimony of historians”’ [(T 1.3.4.2/SBN 83)] about the facts of Caesar’s death, that is, they are understood to express propositions within the body of what we believe to be historical knowledge’.11 There is a chain, to follow Hume’s metaphor, which leads from the present into remote regions of the past, but the links are images of events and the natural connections between them shadows to be illuminated by historical reason regarding testimony in a certain manner, namely by weighing or evaluating evidence. In broaching this subject, Hume speaks directly to the nature of historical inquiry.
One way to appreciate Hume’s approach is by way of a distinction drawn by Michael Welbourne between a ‘default’ and (though not his term exactly) ‘critical’ response to testimony. The default response presupposes that testimony is accepted, and only when faced with reports of extraordinary or miraculous events will that be overridden with a more critical view: we then ‘begin to treat [testimony] differently’, Welbourne observes, applying a ‘calculus of probabilities’, such as whether the speaker is trustworthy or the likelihood that we are being deceived.12 This puts Hume in the unlikely company of his contemporary and critic Thomas Reid and his ‘principle of credulity’, an ‘original principle implanted in us by the Supreme Being’ in the form of a ‘disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us’.13
The default response is evident in a passage from the first Enquiry, one that has become the locus classicus and starting point for the debates over Hume’s view. It is worth quoting in full:
there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators. This species of reasoning, perhaps, one may deny to be found on the relation of cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word. It will be sufficient to observe, that our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses. It being a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction; it is evident, that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other. (EHU 10.5/SBN 111)
In this passage Hume understands belief in the testimony of others to be based on the principle of cause and effect, which in this instance involves our experience of the constant conjunction between testimony (‘reports of witnesses’) and things testified (‘facts’). We do this, moreover, because there is a default tendency to accept testimony, given that we expect people, on the basis of our experience of the regular principles of human nature, to tell the truth.14 Hume observes in this spirit:
When we receive any matter of fact upon human testimony, our faith arises from the very same origin as our inferences from causes to effects, and from effects to causes; nor is there anything but our experience of the governing principles of human nature, which can give us any assurance of the veracity of men. (T 1.3.9.12/SBN 113)
As he expresses it even more clearly, again in the first Enquiry:
Were not the memory tenacious to certain degree; had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or noted for falsehood and villainy, has no manner of authority with us. (EHU 10.5/SBN 112)
In the absence of reasons to believe otherwise, this principle of veracity – of truth, or probity – that we discover in the conduct of our fellow human beings inclines us to believe the testimony of others automatically.15
So strong is this principle of veracity, in fact, that Hume sees it turning easily into a weakness, that of credulity, or a ‘too easy faith in the testimony of others’ from a ‘remarkable tendency to believe whatever is reported, even concerning apparitions, enchantments, and prodigies, however contrary to daily experience and observation’ (T 1.3.9.12/SBN 113, emphasis added), especially when these are of a religious sort. ‘A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence’ (EHU 10.4/SBN 110), as Hume remarks famously, and in such cases we can and should reflect upon and if need be correct our initial judgements in the light of the available evidence. Such occasions arise when the default response to testimony breaks down and the basis for assent is undermined, that is, when ‘contrariety of evidence’ calls into question the assumption of the veracity of the witnesses. The causes of this are myriad, as Hume points out in the course of discussing miracles, arising variously
from the opposition of contrary testimony; from the character or number of the witnesses; from the manner of their delivering their testimony; or from the union of all these circumstances. We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations. There are many other particulars of the same kind, which may diminish or destroy the force of any argument, derived from human testimony. (EHU 10.7/SBN 112–13)
This critical response to testimony is not the norm in everyday life, though it can and does arise, but it sets the standard when it comes to writing history. Indeed, as Welbourne observes, much of the discussion of testimony in the first Enquiry concerns the critical rather than the default response, and in many passages quoted by his critics Hume is actually speaking as a ‘philosophical historian interested in the principles by which the testimony should be evaluated from a historian’s point of view. It is a mistake to think he is commenting on what he conceives to the basis of receiving testimony’.16 Historians are in the business of weighing evidence and comparing contradictory reports in order to decide on one version of events over another. In doing so, they draw on experience and observation to make informed judgements, inferences about the relative likelihood of competing reports. Weighing testimony in this way is still a species of causal reasoning since the ‘ultimate standard . . . is always derived from experience and observation’ (EHU 10.6/SBN 112), but it is employed to discover ‘hidden causes’ where the customary causal reasoning that defines the default response has been called into question.17 This is precisely the situation Hume is describing when he speaks of history as being ‘philosophical’ and ‘true’ as opposed to ‘monkish’ and ‘false’, terms that will make a lot more sense now that Hume’s general view of ‘testimony’ and ‘historical testimony’ has been made clear.
The importance of these concepts is on display right at the beginning of the History of England, which Hume commences with an expression of ‘regret that the history of remote ages should always be much involved in obscurity, uncertainty, and contradiction’ (H 1.3), and a promise in his own efforts to supplant the ‘fables, which are commonly employed to supply the place of true history’ with a consideration of the language, manners and customs that puts history on a firm empirical foundation (H 1.4). The historian is beholden to evidence based on written records, for which reason, in Hume’s view, the invention of modern printing marks an important milestone in historiography as it overcomes one of the great barriers to accurate historical writing. As Hume writes in the Natural History:
An historical fact, while it passes by oral tradition from eyewitnesses and contemporaries, is disguised in every successive narration, and may at least retain but very small, if any, resemblance to the original truth, on which it was founded. The frail memories of men, their love of exaggeration, their supine carelessness; these principles, if not corrected by books and writing, soon pervert the account of historical events; where argument or reasoning has little or no place, nor can ever recall the truth which has once escaped those narrations. (NHR 1.8)18
In preserving the record and saving it from the vagaries of human nature, the printing press is the beginning of the ‘useful, as well as the more agreeable part of modern annals’, Hume observes, events ‘preserved by printing’ being equivalent to truths frozen in time from which the historian selects, confident that the events occurred as reported and that the narration they compose is certain (H 3.82). This allows history to realise its task of
distinguish[ing] between the miraculous and the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances. (H 2.398)
Hume captures this idea that history should be beholden to facts and respond critically to testimony in his conviction that it should be ‘true’ or ‘philosophical’. As Livingston has pointed out, many earlier interpreters of Hume emphasised what they saw as a discontinuity between his philosophy and historical writing, claiming that Hume deserted the former for the latter, lacked any historical sense, or even judged his approach to the past as ‘anti-historical’.19 More recent commentators, by contrast, inspired in part by Duncan Forbes’ influential re-evaluation of Hume’s History, have argued for a fundamental continuity in Hume’s concern with philosophy and history, understanding them as mutually supportive components of his overall approach to the ‘science of man’.20 Mossner, for example, says that, for Hume, philosophy and history ‘are closely akin because the development of the human mind, which it is the historian’s task to trace, provides the materials from which the philosopher derives the very principles of thinking and conduct’,21 and Livingston bases his comprehensive interpretation of Hume’s thought by treating the ‘philosophical and historical work as mirrors to each other’. ‘Hume considered his historical writings as an application and extension of this philosophical work’, Livingston proposes. ‘From the beginning and throughout his career as a writer, he was engaged in historical work as well as in the philosophical problems to which such work gives rise’.22 In a similar vein, Gregory Moses argues that for Hume, the ‘roles of historian and philosopher compliment each other and in some places even overlap’, and that any differences between the two come down to a difference in emphasis rather than one of kind. Both concern ‘historical events and principles’, Moses concludes; both are pursued as a result of natural curiosity, and ‘what counts as an explanation in one or the other is also the same’.23 Victor Wexler, on the other hand, finds Hume to be uncovering a ‘new scene of historical thought’ by extending the sceptical approach of his philosophy into the arena of history,24 and Farr and S. K. Wertz, finally, have emphasised the importance of sympathy as being as central to Hume’s historiography as it is to other parts of his philosophy.25 James Harris has recently brought this line of thinking to its logical conclusion by placing the History on a par methodologically with Hume’s other writings, emphasising that under Hume’s penmanship ‘History made itself philosophical by shifting focus away from the actions of individual historical agents and towards general principles able to explain long-term and large-scale social, political, economic, and cultural change’.26
To urge that history should be philosophical in this sense – sceptical, unbiased and in search of universal principles – will no doubt strike the modern reader as unsurprising, although in the eighteenth century it was a significant departure from accepted practice. As Popkin emphasises, at the time Hume’s attitude was revolutionary since it marked a decisive break with a tradition of ‘theological’ history that until recently had regarded the Bible as a historical document. In dismissing ‘providential and prophetic history totally’, Popkin writes, Hume ‘. . . set a pattern for purely secular history and the secular examination of man. . . . [He] constructed a different kind of historical world for man to live in . . . a world in which the prophetic and miraculous were so unlikely that all that one could profitably study was the actual normal course of events’.27 This was recognised by no less a figure than Edward Gibbon, who went out of his way to describe Hume as ‘our philosophical historian’,28 and, as Laurence Bongie shows in his study of the History’s reception in late-eighteenth-century France, the close connection between Hume’s philosophical views and his historical work was immediately apparent to a readership whose taste demanded that history should follow the model of ‘l’histoire raisonnée as opposed to l’histoire simple’, the writing of which only ‘profound thinkers’ like Hume with a sufficiently ‘reflective turn of mind’ were qualified to undertake.29
Hume’s rejection of prophetic or theological history is evident in his derision towards ‘monkish’ historians, whose writings he sees as reflecting the general ignorance and superstition of the times in which they wrote and the narrow horizons of their form of life. The works of medieval chroniclers and annalists reflect individuals who
lived remote from public affairs, considered the civil transactions as entirely subordinate to the ecclesiastic, and besides partaking of the ignorance and barbarity, which were then universal, were strongly infected with credulity, with the love of wonder, and with a propensity to imposture; vices almost inseparable from their profession, and manner of life. (H 1.25)
On occasion, Hume sees these chroniclers as succeeding only in giving voice to their own beliefs, reporting miracles as fact and celebrating various ‘monkish virtues’ (H 1.38, 133); at other moments, he accuses them of bombast, inaccuracy, exaggeration and ‘spurious erudition’ (H 2.88, 328 and 477) or outright ‘invention and artifice’ designed to blacken the name of those who challenged ecclesiastical privilege (H 1.85, 132 and 241). The Reformation spread with such speed, in Hume’s view, precisely because the Church of Rome was both unacquainted with ‘true literature’ and a stranger to open debate (H 3.142), which made it easier for individuals to perceive the ‘defect in truth and authenticity’ in the Catholic appeal to the purportedly ‘divine origin’ of ecclesiastical power (H 3.140). Protestant historians were no less guilty of expressing their own commitments, which were clearly displayed, Hume reports, in those of their persuasion who ‘spread out the incidents’ of the reign of Henry III in such a way as ‘to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of the court of Rome’ (H 2.4), and in others who ‘endeavoured to throw many stains’ on James V of Scotland because he had opposed the Protestants during his reign (H 3.294).
Religious dogmatism is only one way in which history can be diverted from its true path, however, it being but the most common instance of hypothetical argument or ‘reasoning upon a supposition’ that supplants the disinterested search for truth (T 1.3.4.2/SBN 83). Corruption of a similar sort also occurs when historians choose to relate the ‘secret history’ of events to excite curiosity (E 564); where ‘national prepossessions and animosities have place’, as Hume reports of English historians writing of Athelstan, the tenth-century Saxon king in the line of Alfred the Great (H 1.84); or when accounts are ‘delivered by writers of the hostile nations, who take pleasure in exalting the advantages of their own countrymen, and depressing those of the enemy’ (H 6.277). Similarly, ‘controversies of faction’ affect the honest weighing of evidence – exemplified in historians’ attempts to assess the nature and consequences of the Norman invasion of 1066 (H 1.227) – as do the tendencies of ‘passionate historians’ to draw inferences based on sentiments rather than sound reasoning (H 4.40). In general, Hume considers the early history of nations and those who chronicled them to be so thoroughly soaked in the stain of superstition and ignorance that the philosophical historian should condemn them to obscurity rather than risk inserting hypotheses where sound matter of fact should have place. He writes:
It is evident what fruitless labour it must be, to search in those barbarous and illiterate ages, for the annals of a people, when their first leaders, known in any true history, were believed by them to be the fourth in descent from a fabulous deity, or from a man, exalted by ignorance into that character. The dark industry of antiquaries, led by imaginary analogies of names, or by uncertain traditions, would in vain attempt to pierce into that deep obscurity, which covers the remote history of those nations. (H 1.17)
Of course, Hume does not rule out the possibility of honest errors, occurring despite the good faith of historians, and even where elements of superstition tarnish an otherwise true narrative they do not impugn the integrity of the whole. Tacitus, Hume notes, is not beyond including accounts of miracles in his history – that Vespasian cured a blind man through his spittle and a lame man by the touch of his foot (EHU 10.25/SBN 122) – as Quintus Curtius reports without question the ‘supernatural courage’ of Alexander the Great ‘by which he was hurried on singly to attack multitudes’ and ‘his supernatural force and activity, by which he was able to resist them’ (EHU 8.8/SBN 84). While Hume never entertains such reports as part of a true narrative, on occasion he is himself willing to admit extraordinary events into the historical record. He reports without comment, for example, Herodutus’ account that the Scythians ‘after scalping their enemies, dressed the skin like leather, and used it as a towel; and whoever had the most of those towels was most esteemed among them’ (EPM 7.14/ SBN 255).
Some mistakes, moreover, are unwitting and arise from simple ignorance and inexperience (H 5.469), or are oversights due to benign prejudice. Such is the case with Livy’s portrayal of Hannibal (EPM Appx. 4.17/SBN 320) and Timæus’ partiality in describing Agathocles, reproached by that author for his tyranny but unsung for his ‘talents and capacity for business’ (EPM Appx. 4.20/SBN 321). Historians can also be forgiven mistakes that are ‘natural and almost unavoidable, while the events are recent’ (H 2.173), and for going astray either because of the sheer complexity of the narrative or where obscure evidence is a barrier to interpretive accuracy. Hume considers naval battles to suffer unavoidably from the former disadvantage, where the historian confronts confusions ‘derived from the precarious operations of winds and tides, as well as from the smoke and darkness, in which every thing there is involved. No wonder, therefore, that accounts of those battles are apt to contain uncertainties and contradictions’ (H 6.277). Of the latter kind, he emphasises the difficulty of deciphering the conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster:
There is no part of English history since the Conquest, so obscure, so uncertain, so little authentic or consistent, as that of the wars between the two Roses: Historians differ about many material circumstances; some events of the utmost consequence, in which they almost agree, are incredible and contradicted by records; . . . All we can distinguish with certainty . . . is a scene of horror and bloodshed, savage manners, arbitrary executions, and treacherous, dishonourable conduct in all parties. (H 2.469)
It is the great benefit of historical investigation, however, that errors of this sort can be corrected through review and reflection, either by contemporary narrators themselves or, as is usually the case, by subsequent generations of historians who peruse extant histories with the wisdom of hindsight and an improved or more accurate knowledge of human motives and conduct (EHU 8.9/SBN 84–5). This is not to say that the historian cannot err, and Hume’s own History has been widely criticised for straying from the path of impartiality. Laird Okie, for example, argues that Hume owed a good deal to ‘pro-Royalist’ writers for his account of the Revolution and Civil War, and that at crucial points he ‘parroted Clarendon’s commentary in an unscholarly manner that does not measure up to the critical, skeptical method attributed to him by his recent champions’,30 while Donald Siebert observes that ‘Hume’s way of writing history is to shape the historical fact for a desired instructive or emotional impact’, which, on occasion, leads him to ‘abandon his normal care in establishing historical truth to tell a morally invigorating story’.31 In a similar vein, writing of the Natural History of Religion, Christopher Wheatley accuses Hume of ‘making a radical departure from accuracy . . . in the interest of forceful presentation’ in order to persuade readers of the ‘unattractive’ nature of Christianity.32 Whether the historian should be making moral judgements at all is a long-standing debate, and some have argued that, rather than moral instruction being a form of prejudice, it is part and parcel of Hume’s method where, as Wertz describes it, ‘presenting the information’ both ‘informs the understanding of the readers’ and makes it possible that ‘moral sentiment arises as an impression within them’.33
At the same time, Hume himself provides instances in his own work of a critical response to reports and subsequent confirmation or correction of the record. The veracity of the aforementioned report of Quintus Curtius on Alexander’s supernatural courage is ‘much to be suspected’ and is easily exploded as a ‘forgery in history’ when we realise that the actions ascribed to him ‘are directly contrary to the course of nature, and that no human motives, in such circumstances, could ever induce him to such a conduct’ (EHU 8.8/SBN 84). Similarly, the ‘whole tenor of English history’, he observes, confirms the once disputed fact that ‘it would be difficult to find in all history a revolution more destructive, or attended with a more complete subjection of the ancient inhabitants’ than the Norman Conquest of Britain (H 1.226–7), and in the standard narrative concerning Cardinal Wolsey’s illegitimate assumption of papal authority in ecclesiastical courts, Hume observes ‘many circumstances’ that are ‘very suspicious, both because of the obvious partiality of the historian, and because the parliament, when afterwards they examined Wolsey’s conduct, could find no proof of any material offence he had ever committed’ (H 3.125n). The actions of King John, by contrast, serve to reveal his vicious character and thus confirm the ‘disagreeable picture’ of him – exaggerated though it might appear – painted by ancient historians (H 1.453). Moreover, even where there is no direct evidence available, a general knowledge of historical circumstances will support the likelihood of something having been the case. Hume reasons in this manner when considering whether well-born thanes resisted the rise of merchants or ceorles through the ranks of medieval society, and suggests that:
Though we are not informed of any of these circumstances by ancient historians, they are so much founded on the nature of things, that we may admit them as a necessary and infallible consequence of the situation of the kingdom during those ages. (H 1.170)
Errors can also be corrected by giving the benefit of the doubt to contemporary reports; writers with a stake in events are more likely to be better informed and more accurately report events than others whose interest is more academic. For instance, Hume writes:
The circumstances, which attended [Robert the] Bruce’s first declaration [to free Scotland from English rule], are variously related; but we shall rather follow the account given by the Scottish historians; not that their authority is in general anywise comparable to that of the English; but because they may be supposed sometimes better informed concerning the fact, which so nearly interested their own nation. (H 2.137)
Indeed, the true historian has not only opportunity to correct errors in these ways, but is under an obligation to do so. While contemporary writers can be forgiven for imputing all errors of a reign ‘to the person who had the misfortune to be entrusted with the reins of empire’ – as Hume writes of the unfortunate Edward III – historians should draw on the benefit of hindsight and the perspective of distance to aid their judgement; it is thus ‘a shameful delusion in modern historians’, Hume charges, ‘to imagine, that all the ancient princes, who were unfortunate in their government, were also tyrannical in their conduct’ (H 2.173–4).
For this reason, history is particularly suited to be a source of instruction because it provides a general point of view, the same principle already met with in Hume’s moral philosophy but here made transcendent, a vantage point from which to extract general truths about human nature and learn lessons about the present. Its ‘chief use’, Hume observes in the first Enquiry,
is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principle of his science. (EHU 8.7/SBN 83–4)
Given that history ‘affords materials for disquisitions of . . . [manners, finances, arms, commerce, arts and sciences]’, as Hume expresses the same thought in the History, ‘. . . it seems the duty of an historian to point out the proper inferences and conclusions’ (H 6.140). Since ‘each incident has a reference to our present manners and situation’, he writes, ‘instructive lessons occur every moment during the course of the narration’ (H 3.82). For this reason, as Hume remarks of the English people looking back on their history:
An acquaintance with the ancient periods of their government is chiefly useful by instructing them to cherish their present constitution, from a comparison or contrast with the condition of those distant times. And it is also curious, by shewing them the remote, and commonly faint and disfigured originals of the most finished and most noble institutions, and by instructing them in the great mixture of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect government. (H 2.525)
Specific courses of events may even be a source of wisdom for the art of politics. From the history of English revolution, Hume is convinced, ‘we may naturally deduce the same useful lesson, which Charles himself, in his later years, inferred: that it is dangerous for princes, even from the appearance of necessity, to assume more authority, than the laws have allowed them’, as well as ‘another instruction, no less natural, and no less useful, concerning the madness of the people, the furies of fanaticism, and the danger of mercenary armies’ (H 5.545–6).
In contrast to these honest, sometimes unavoidable, and at least partly correctable errors, as well as the wisdom and instruction that can be gleaned from a disinterested contemplation of the past, genuine corruptions of the historical record are the result of systematic and principled distortion, something true historians avoid by scrutinising evidence and reiterating events as they occurred. Ideally, history is a true copy, a veridical depiction, in contrast to the speculation of narratives that – from error, fancy or dogmatism – depart from matter of fact. For this reason, Hume writes in ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, ‘The first page of THUCYDIDES is . . . the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations are so intermixed with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon them, in great measure, to the embellishment of poets and orators’ (E 422). The historian who understands the nature of his enterprise, as Hume puts it,
traces the series of actions according to their natural order, remounts to their secret springs and principles, and delineates their most remote consequences. He chooses for his subject a certain portion of the great chain of events, which compose the history of mankind: Each link in this chain he endeavours to touch in his narration . . . And always, he is sensible, that the more unbroken the chain is, which he presents to his reader, the more perfect is his production. (EHU 3.9)
Thus, if the poet personifies the power of imagination to subvert experience, the historian reflects the force of memory to present and preserve it, as far as possible, in its original form, due position and temporal sequence. Past events are equivalent to impressions, and the products of the historian to adequate ideas; the latter are thus fainter images of the former, but they still correspond to them and ideally preserve them in their original order. Unlike those who exploit the imagination to falsify reality for aesthetic effect, historians memorialize the past; and where they depart from the original it is due to some defect or imperfection in the process of writing, namely when some corruption or another turns true, philosophical history into its false, unphilosophical counterpart. Historians avoid this fate in as far as they ‘confine themselves to strict truth and reality’ (EHU 3.10), to matter of fact (E 564) and to explanation based on causes rather than reasons speculatively attributed to individual actors. Hume writes of Charles’ peace with the Scots in 1639, for example, ‘What were the reasons, which engaged the king to admit such strange articles of peace, it is vain to enquire: For there scarcely could be any. The causes of that event may admit of a more easy explication’ (H 5.267). The historical writer regards the past with a disinterested eye and bears witness to it as it happened, though not necessarily as it was reported, by stripping away falsehood and allowing ‘all human race [to] appear in their true colours, without any of those disguises, which, during their life-time, so much perplexed the judgements of the beholders’ (E 567). Historians, in short, distinguish fact from fiction, as ideas of memory can be separated from those of imagination; they discern the real shape of events under the clutter with which contemporary reports and time have effectively masked them.
History and Imagination
On the face of it, then, the empirical character of philosophical history, a pursuit to be distinguished sharply from the corrupt forms of its speculative counterparts, leaves little room for truck with the imagination, the faculty that trades precisely in the sort of fictions and loose reveries that distort the true narrative of past events. Indeed, the origin of false history lies in the effects of prejudice, credulity, fear and superstition that take hold because the imagination is open to suggestion and easy persuasion. Moreover, in memorialising the past, historians must reject the productive power of the imagination exploited by poets to separate, mix and compound the evidence of sense and experience into new and fantastic creations; this has no place in a discipline constrained by the strict injunction to separate fact from fiction. Poets, we might recall, borrow from history to give some reality to their inventions, and while they ‘commonly have some foundation for their wildest exaggerations’, where they are the sole historians ‘they disfigure the most certain history by their fictions, and use strange liberties with truth’ (H 1.22). For historians to flirt with the creative power of the fancy is thus to court an ally who will inevitably prove their undoing.
Yet, while Hume emphasises the ideally philosophical character of historical writing and its relationship to memory and matter of fact, he also acknowledges that the historian relies upon resources that only the imagination can provide. Far from freeing historians from the influence of that faculty, the nature of historical investigation ties them to it; history, in fact, depends upon the power of the productive imagination and without it the historian’s task would be impossible. This stems from the fact that, unlike memory, which corresponds directly to impressions, history has only indirect access to the originals it copies, and this gives rise in turn to two features of history that impose peculiar constraints on how it is pursued and written.
First, the historian’s originals are events long gone, temporally and spatially remote and available only in and through a historical narrative. Historians bring the past to life by performing the function Hume attributes to the memory when it recalls past impressions: reinvigorating them with something approaching their original force and vivacity. The historian extends the power of memory by transferring the past into the future, turning it into a source of knowledge and instruction on the basis of which judgements about the present and predictions about the future can be made. ‘History, the great mistress of wisdom’, Hume writes, ‘furnishes examples of all kinds; and every prudential, as well as moral precept, may be authorised by those events, which her enlarged mirror is able to present to us’ (H 5.545–6). As Hume says in ‘Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’:
[man is] a creature . . . [who] looks backward to consider the . . . history of the human race; casts his eye forward to see the influence of his actions upon posterity, and the judgments which will be formed of his character a thousand years hence. (E. 82)
The historian thus ‘extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation’ (E 566–7). This task is made possible by the historian’s capacity to annihilate the distance of time and space and bring events into a vivid present, which the reader can experience. This, in turn, can only be achieved by drawing on the power of the imagination, which allows the writer to project him or herself into the past, reviving events that compose it and giving reality to what would otherwise be inaccessible. A ‘man acquainted with history’, as Hume writes, ‘may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century’ (E 567). This is a function of the imagination, however, and not of memory alone.
Second, even though historians rely on memory, they at once interpret and represent the past. When the memory recollects past impressions it refers directly back to the immediacy of lived experience, but the originals of the historian are beyond living memory; they are reports in the form of written record or the judgements of other historians. Thus they are already images, or images of images, copied by others and available as their testimony of events, which, in many or most cases, they never directly experienced. The historian effectively proceeds
by passing thro’ many millions of causes and effects, and thro’ a chain of arguments of almost an immeasurable length. Before the knowledge of the fact [some point in antient history] cou’d come to the first historian, it must be convey’d thro’ many mouths; and after it is committed to writing, each new copy is a new object, of which the connexion with the foregoing is known only by experience and observation. (T 1.3.13.4/SBN 145)
This feature gives history a peculiar method that reflects its dual nature: of being both an extended form of memory – the power of recollection extended into a distant past – and an act of interpretation in which the event is reconstructed, and this is something that requires the representational power of imagination.
These two features of historical evidence – the remoteness of past events and the interpreted nature of the testimony it involves – stamp history with a character that contrasts with Hume’s other characterisation of it as a straightforwardly empirical discipline distinguished by an emphasis on veridicality and connection to memory. History is, indeed, constrained by recollecting matter of fact, but it is at once a species of ‘invention’ (E 567), and this complicates considerably the injunction that the historian be ‘impartial’ or free of ‘prejudice’. True historians might abjure the creative fictions of literature, but, like poets, they craft scenes in a way that places them in a historical system of things and confers a certain status on the ideas involved. This does not give them real existence, but – to extend Hume’s observation about poetry – still serves as a sufficient foundation for any historical fact. The historian is also obliged to produce a narrative that enlivens the imagination of the reader by facilitating an easy transition among ideas in the imagination. As Addison observed in his essays on the imagination, the historian expresses events in such a way that the audience enters into the narrative, and ‘this shews more the Art than the Veracity of the Historian’, a characteristic exemplified by Livy:
He describes every thing in so lively a manner, that his whole History is an admirable Picture, and touches on such proper Circumstances in every Story, that his reader becomes a kind of Spectator, and feels in himself all the variety of Passions, which are correspondent to the several Parts of the Relation.34
Recognising that in this respect historian and poet share a similar goal, Hume understands that the historian’s craft is also guided by the same three qualities that characterise literary creativity: the magical power to transform ordinary experience into something extraordinary; the capacity to create ideas that are agreeable to an audience; and the rare gift of historical genius to bring about this effect.
The Transformation of Ordinary Experience
As poets work upon ordinary experience to create something marvellous, so historians employ the productive imagination to transform the past, by highlighting certain aspects of it and casting others into shadow. As in poetry, the creation of agreeable ideas involves embellishing the world or, as Hume puts it in the case of history, ‘adorning’ the facts in the process of selecting what is relevant for the narrative (H 3.82). In a historical narrative, what was in reality ugly, repellent or mundane appears beautiful, appealing or in some way fascinating. There is a difference between straightforward memorial representations of events and their historical representation in a true narrative, which casts doubt on the claim, as Wertz has it, that Hume is simply describing events as ‘presenting information’. Wertz is correct to emphasise sympathy as the means by which the historian draws the reader into the narrative by ‘converting’ ideas roused by it into internal impressions that is ‘“lived” again in those readers’,35 but this does not occur by happenstance or follow as an unintended consequence of writing, any more than it follows from prejudice or lack of objectivity; it is, rather, an effect brought about deliberately by transforming reported ‘facts’ in the past into the historical ‘facts’ of a narrative.
Historians achieve this transformation in two related ways. First, they approach the past as the sedimentation of action and events, from which the heavier elements are dredged and placed before the reader as relevant facts. History memorialises the past, but copying it ‘faithfully and at full length’ – to recall Hume’s remark on poetry – would make a history as insipid as a comedy that simply repeated the chit-chat of the tea-table; it would make for what Friedrich Nietzsche aptly calls ‘antiquarian’ history, a mere collection of artefacts laid out on a narrative table.36 ‘History’, Hume writes, in a preamble to considering the reign of Henry III,
. . . being a collection of facts which are multiplying without end, is obliged to adopt such arts of abridgement, to retain the more material events, and to drop all the minute circumstances, which are only interesting during the time, or to the persons engaged in the transactions. . . . What mortal could have the patience to write or read a long detail of frivolous events as those with which it [the reign of Henry III] is filled, or attend to a tedious narrative which would follow, through a serious of fifty-six years, the caprice and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? (H 2.3–4)
From a mass of mundane details, the drama of history is revealed as true by way of events that are deemed important to the matter at hand. The historical lens brings events closer, but in a way that focuses on a select number while pushing the rest into the background. To some degree, the narrative depends on the writer and the kind of history being written and, as a result, there might be more than one true history or correct representation of the past; while different true histories are available, their content and philosophical status still depend on satisfying the criteria governing what count as relevant facts. Such selection might even be guided, as Siebert has argued, by Hume’s desire that his writing have ‘instructive or emotional impact’ so that he would then be ‘shaping [it] for his own artistic and political purposes’, making it ‘didactic history’.37 As John Vladimir Price writes, commenting on the description of Cromwell’s character (H 7.107–10), ‘Hume arranges his facts to speak for themselves, knowing that adroitly arranged facts could be far more impressive than slander or abuse’.38
Second, while in accord with the principles of memory, historians retain the original form and due position of events in temporal sequence. Like poets who condense sequences and gloss events, they are obliged to transform time by representing it in a more or less foreshortened way. A history is not a transcription of events, but a temporal representation of them to suit the purposes of historical narration. To some degree, this reflects the amount, quality and availability of evidence that tends to become more adequate as the historian moves forward through increasingly contiguous events and more extensive written testimony: in the History, Hume’s account of Anglo-Saxon England – from the Roman Empire circa 55 AD to the death of Harold and the Norman Conquest in 1066 – is compressed into some 160 pages of narrative, and he does not begin dating events systematically until the reign of Egbert in 827–38 (H 1.55ff). More significantly, narrative time reflects the importance attached by the author to the events under discussion. As Hume examines events of increasing importance, detail and drama – those leading up to the dissolution of the Long Parliament and Restoration of Charles II, for example (H 6.111–54) – the narrative grows protracted and the temporal sequence slows, sometimes abruptly, from years to months, days and even, as in the events preceding the murder of Thomas à Becket, to a matter of hours (H 1.328–34).
The Creation of Agreeable Ideas
The dramatic representation the historian achieves by transforming and embellishing the past also produces ideas that are agreeable to an audience. Hume explicitly characterises the aim of history in terms of instruction, but he also emphasises that bringing the past into the present is a source of ‘entertainment to the fancy’ (H 1.4), affording ‘occupation or agitation of the mind’ that is ‘commonly agreeable and amusing’ (T 3.3.4.14/SBN 613; see also H 1.4). History entertains because it opens up the world in a unique way, so that
Those, who consider the periods and revolutions of human kind, as represented in history, are entertained with a spectacle full of pleasure and variety, and see, with surprise, the manners, customs, and opinions of the same species susceptible of such prodigious changes in different periods of time. (E 97)
‘In reality’, Hume writes,
what more agreeable entertainment to the mind, than to be transported into the remotest ages of the world, and to observe human society, in its infancy, making the first faint essays towards the arts and sciences: . . . In short, to see all the human race, from the beginning of time, pass, as it were, in review before us; . . .What amusement, either of the senses or imagination, can be compared with it? Shall those trifling pastimes, which engross so much or our time, be preferred as more satisfactory, and more fit to engage our attention? How perverse must that taste be, which is capable of so wrong a choice of pleasures? (E 565–6)
Like poets, historians also rely upon the receptivity of an audience and that same mechanism of sympathy so central to the social and moral life of human beings. ‘The perusal of a history seems a calm entertainment;’ Hume writes, ‘but would be no entertainment at all, did not our hearts beat with correspondent movements to those which are described by the historian’ (EPM 5.32/SBN 223). In this respect, the historian might be compared to the tragedian whose literary depiction of a scene provides occasion through sympathy for the conversion of pain experienced by those at the scene into pleasure for the reader. Hume makes this point when commenting on Cicero, whose speeches brought pleasure through his power of eloquence even while the audience was convinced of the reality of the events narrated:
When he had raised tears in his judges and all his audience, they were then the most highly delighted, and expressed the greatest satisfaction with the pleader. The pathetic description of the butchery, made by VERRES of the SICILIAN captains, is a masterpiece of this kind: But I believe that none will affirm, that the being present at a melancholy scene of that nature would afford any entertainment. Neither is the sorrow here softened by fiction: For the audience were convinced of the reality of every circumstance. (E 219)
Even where readers believe in the facts of the matter, there is a difference between the events as they happened, and the passions they would ordinarily elicit, and the historical depiction of them in a narrative. In the latter, the force and vivacity of the original is transformed, and the effect of pleasure arises from ‘that very eloquence, with which the melancholy scene is represented’ (E 219).
The historical drama, however, must not be painted in colours that are too vivid. Analogous to theatrical scenes that disturb an audience because of their contiguity in space – the self-mutilation in playwright Nicholas Rowe’s Ambitious Stepmother, to recall Hume’s example – some events from history are not amenable to narrative transformation because they lie too contiguous in time. As Damrosch points out, there are occasions when ‘an actual event, for those who have lived through it, may remain too emotionally fraught to be capable of artistic transformation’.39 Such is the case with the massacre of the English in Ireland during O’Neal’s rebellion (1641) where ‘To enter into particulars would shock the least delicate humanity. Such enormities, though attested by undoubted evidence, appear almost incredible’ (H 5.342). Hume acknowledges the same attitude in Clarendon’s account of the execution of Charles I, ‘too horrid a scene to be contemplated with any satisfaction, or even without the utmost pain and aversion’. Hume remarks:
He [Clarendon] himself, as well as the readers of that age, were too deeply concerned in the events, and felt a pain from subjects, which an historian and a reader of another age would regard as the most pathetic and most interesting, and, by consequence, the most agreeable. (E 223–4)
Historical Deliberation
As in poetry, historians do not produce such agreeable sentiments by accident but, as already noted, by deliberately bringing about a response in the reader by employing certain skills and techniques. In poetry, as we have seen, this deliberate use of poetic skill is a double-edged sword because a fictional embellishment of the world cannot be achieved without the aid of exaggeration and artifice, which can be traced in turn to the fact that imagination supplies both the creative power of the poet and the receptivity of the audience, respectively. Historical narratives do not suffer from this problem so acutely, since, instead of transforming reality into fiction, they represent matter of fact as accurately as possible. For this reason, Hume does not denounce history as an essentially corrupt discipline but one that becomes false contingently, when it distorts the empirical record through hypothetical reasoning. As such, it is still a case where the reader is manipulated by the imagination securing an easy transmission of its ideas and making a smooth and easy transition among them.
In achieving this effect, historians tread a fine line between representing events to bring about agreeable ideas and achieving ‘true and establish’d judgement’ (T 1.3.9.14/SBN 115). They are obliged at once to memorialise events while engaging the sympathy of the reader and to inspire conviction without becoming antiquarian or departing from matter of fact that changes fact into fiction. In Hume’s view, this balance is possible because history refers to matter of fact and aims at bringing about conviction rather than false belief or persuasion. Recollecting events of a history evoke a different feeling from that which accompanies the effects of literature, not because of any ‘intrinsic’ difference between the ideas of each but because one involves testimony and is based in a tradition of knowledge about the past, while the other involves neither.40 ‘Every particular fact is there the object of belief. Its idea is modify’d differently from the loose reveries of a castle-builder’ (T App. 4). As Hume observes in a revealing passage:
If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history, they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order; nor does the incredulity of one, and the belief of the other hinder them from putting the very same sense upon their author. His ideas produce the same ideas in both; tho’ his testimony has not the same influence on them. The latter has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: Represents to himself their actions, and characters, and friendships, and enmities: He even goes so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person. While the former, who gives no credit to the testimony of the author, has a more faint and languid conception of all these particulars; and except on account of the style and ingenuity of the composition, can receive little entertainment from it. (T 1.3.7.8/SBN 97–8)
Hume makes the same point when he recalls sending a copy of Plutarch’s Lives to a female admirer, ‘assuring her . . . that there was not a word of truth in them from beginning to end. She perused them very attentively’, he continues, ‘’till she came to the lives of ALEXANDER and CÆSAR, whose names she had heard by accident; and then returned me the book, with many reproaches for deceiving her’ (E 564).
In these instances, a poetic romance is distinguished from a historical narrative by the degree of belief each inspires, which depends on the degree of force and vivacity they contain and on the way they strike the imagination, their ‘manner of appearance’. Dugald Stewart, for one, later identified Hume’s ability to capture this manner as a mark of the History’s success. ‘There are few books more interesting than Hume’s History of England’, Stewart writes, ‘but, if we conceived the events to be fictitious, it would make a very indifferent romance’.41 ‘A poetical description may have a more sensible effect on the fancy than an historical narration’, as Hume realises.
It may collect more of those circumstances, that form a compleat image or picture. It may seem to set the object before us in more lively colours. But still the ideas it presents are different to the feeling from those, which arise from the memory and the judgement. There is something weak and imperfect amidst all that seeming vehemence of thought and sentiment, which attends the fictions of poetry. (T 1.3.10.10/SBN 631)
Since poetic and historical ideas are similar in kind and differ only according to the degree of force and vivacity they contain, there will be a tendency for the former to come close to the latter and for historical ideas to fade into poetic ones. Poetry enlivens the imagination and passions, whereas history does not (see EPM 5.41), and there is still a sensible difference between the fictions of the former and the facts of the latter. For this reason, history can be false, but never enthusiastic in the manner of a poetic reverie. One does not, after all, rise on the wings of history as one does on those of poetry.
Historical conviction, as Hume makes clear, is ultimately secured by the impression of real existence that lies at the end of the chain of the narrative that anchors the account in the bed of lived experience, at which point doubt and inquiry come to an end. At first sight, the fact that historical evidence takes the form of testimony is a natural barrier to historical truth, since, according to the copy principle, belief diminishes as the distance from the original impression increases, and reasoning over a long period of time and through many transitions requires having ‘a very strong and firm imagination to preserve the evidence to the end, where it passes thro’ so many stages’ (T 1.3.13.3/SBN 144). Perhaps the ancient history is ‘lost in time’ then, since belief consisting only in vivacity would ‘decay by the length of the transition, and must at last be utterly extinguished’ (T 1.3.13.4/SBN 145). While each link in the historical chain is of this kind, connections between cause and effect resemble each other in the same way that a copy of a book resembles the original:
One edition passes into another, and that into a third, and so on, till we come to that volume we peruse at present. There is no variation in the steps. After we know one, we know all of them; and after we have made one, we can have no scruple as to the rest. This circumstance alone preserves the evidence of history, and will perpetuate the memory of the present age to the latest posterity. . . . [A]s most of these [historical] proofs are perfectly resembling, the mind runs easily along them, jumps from one part to another with facility, and forms but a confus’d and general notion of each link. By this means a long chain of argument, has as little effect in diminishing the original vivacity, as a much shorter wou’d have, if compos’d of parts, which were different from each other, and of which each requir’d a distinction consideration. (T 1.3.13.6/SBN 146)
History involves belief that carries conviction, even though events are already images enshrined only in the testimony of others; it can do this because it effectively takes a critical view of testimony and crafts the results into a historical narrative. Unlike poetical fiction, historical inference is ‘proportioned to the constancy of the conjunction. On this is founded our belief in witnesses, our credit in history, and indeed all kinds of moral evidence, and almost the whole conduct of life’ (T Abstract 33/SBN 661).
Despite Hume’s emphasis on the philosophical character of historical writing, then, like poets, historians are obliged to transform experience and produce agreeable ideas by manipulating an audience through the active and passive power of the imagination. As Hume points out, historical ideas differ not in kind from their poetical counterparts but in the way the force and vivacity they contain elicit a particular response in the audience. The nature of its evidence and the causal reasoning involved supply historical narratives with their truth, constituted by the feeling accompanying the sentiments they arouse. As such, there exists what we might term the rules of historical art comparable to those that govern poetry, the satisfaction of which determines the success of a historical narrative. These criteria govern the effective production of appropriate ideas in the mind of the audience and the easy movement of the imagination that brings about pleasure and conviction. As in the case of poetry, the imagination is the active source of historical genius and the means by which an audience is passively affected by historical representation. These general rules of historical criticism are likewise abridgements of historical practice, techniques that govern the success or failure of historical writing.
Historical Ideas and Conviction
First, where the poet brings about plausible fictions, historians must produce ideas that carry conviction by painting an historical picture with colours bright enough to warm the passions of an audience, fill the imagination and satisfy its desire to form a whole, allowing readers to enter into the characters and events related in the narrative. For this reason, Hume maintains, some themes are more suitable than others for treatment by the historian, since the imagination is naturally affected by events that influence it most, in the case of history those that are dramatic and of greater consequence. He remarks:
The histories of kingdoms are more interesting than . . . those of small cities and principalities: And the history of wars and revolutions more than those of peace and order. We sympathise with the persons that suffer, in all the various sentiments which belong to their fortunes. The mind is occupy’d by the multitude of the objects, and by the strong passions, that display themselves. (T 3.3.4.14/SBN 613)
For the same reason,
THUCYDIDES and GUICCIARDIN support with difficulty our attention; while the former describes the trivial reencounters of the small cities of GREECE, and the latter the harmless wars of PISA. The few persons interested, and the small interest fill not the imagination, and engage not the affections. The deep distress of the numerous ATHENIAN army before SYRACUSE; the danger, which so nearly threatens VENICE; these excite compassion; these move terror and anxiety. (EPM 5.33/SBN 223)
Even when narrating events that have this natural appeal to the audience, history must include sufficient detail to engage the reader without producing a merely antiquarian narrative or – as Hume remarks while commenting on James V’s unwise relationship with his favourite, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester – dwelling on demeaning trivialities: ‘History charges herself willingly with a relation of the great crimes, and still more with that of the great virtues of mankind; but she appears to fall from her dignity, when necessitated to dwell on such frivolous events and ignoble personages’ (H 5.53). In some cases, however, the details themselves constitute what is interesting about the subject under discussion. Thus, while considering the reign of Elizabeth, Hume writes:
We have related these incidents at greater length, than the necessity of our subject may seem to require: But even trivial circumstances, which show the manners of the age, are often more instructive, as well as entertaining, than the great transactions of wars and negociations, which are nearly similar in all periods and in all countries of the world. (H 4.44)
Where details are sparse, by contrast, the imagination remains unaffected; the colours of the narrative are dull, the passions cold and the audience distant from the events narrated. As Hume writes:
The indifferent, uninteresting style of SUETONIUS, equally with the masterly pencil of TACITUS, may convince us of the cruel depravity of NERO or TIBERIUS: But what a difference of sentiment! While the former coldly relates the facts; and the latter sets before our eyes the venerable figures of a SORANUS and a THRASEA, intrepid in their fate, and only moved by the melting sorrows of their friends and kindred. What sympathy then touches every human heart! What indignation against the tyrant, whose causeless fear or unprovoked malice gave rise to such detestable barbarity! (EPM 5.34/SBN 223–4)
Historical Works and Design
Second, a historical narrative should not run to adventures but must exhibit order and coherence by having a plan and a design created by the historian in conformity with the principles of association. As ‘a certain unity is requisite in all productions’, Hume writes, ‘it cannot be wanting in history more than in any other’ (EHU 3.14). As in poetry, the historian has some latitude in choosing the connections that give unity to the diversity of events. Contiguity in space and time might suffice, in which case ‘All events, which happen in that portion of space and period of time, are comprehended in his design, though in other respects different and unconnected’ (EHU 3.8). The same can be achieved by focusing on particular themes that distinguish a period, as in the civil transactions that Hume sees as the ‘great ornament of history’ under the Stuarts (H 5.469), or the ‘catalogue of reversals . . . fluctuation and movement’ that unifies the history of ancient Britain (H 2.311).
Given that history memorialises the past and secures conviction by tracing a chain of events to an original scene of action, however, the historian more usually produces unity through cause and effect, accomplished by the imagination that actively draws relations between events that already display a natural attraction (see EHU 3.9). Hume follows this method in his own historical writing, which, as he remarks before embarking on an account of Anglo-Saxon Britain, aims to ‘give a succinct account of the successions of kings, and of the more remarkable revolutions in each particular kingdom’ (H 1.25). Only out of respect for the rule of reporting relevant detail does he depart from this model, as in the case of Henry III, for instance, where he warns the reader that ‘till the end of the reign, when the events become more memorable, we shall not always observe an exact chronological order’ (H 2.4–5).
In this respect, historical technique is of a piece with epic poetry,
where the writer is also obliged to construct a narrative through a chain of cause and effect. Since the difference between the two forms of narrative lies
only in the degrees of connection, which bind together those several events, of which their subject is composed, it will be difficult, if not impossible, by words, to determine exactly the bounds, which separate them from each other. That is a matter of taste more than of reasoning; and perhaps, this unity may often be discovered in a subject, where, at first view, and from an abstract consideration, we should least expect to find it. (EHU 3.15)
Epic poetry differs from history, however, according to the nature of the writing and the effect it aims to bring about. The composer of epic inflames and enlivens the passions to a degree not required of the historian (EHU 3.10); the links he forges in the chain of events are ‘closer and more sensible’, Hume emphasises, ‘on account of the lively imagination and strong passions, which must be touched by the poet in his narration’ (EHU 3.14). The historian carries the narrative over a greater period of time and, being more interested in truth, is less concerned than the composer of epic poetry with affecting the imagination.
Historical Works and Veracity
Third, and finally, history must achieve veracity by attempting to imitate nature. History, to recall and extend Hume’s remark on poetry (E 138), works with images that cannot be equal to the actuality of events; the historian too is an ‘under-workman’ who gives a ‘few strokes of embellishment’ to the past on which he works. The poet satisfies this requirement by simultaneously copying the simplicity and refinement of nature and representing her in all her beauty, la belle nature. Historians follow the same rule in two ways.
First, their depictions are successful when the characters approximate human beings, as they are experienced in common life. If the figures the historian sketches are too artificial, they leave the imagination cold and unmoved. ‘What would become of history’, Hume asks, ‘had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to experience, which we have had of mankind?’ (EHU 8.18/SBN 90). This is especially pleasing to the reader when the virtues are drawn in bright and lively colours. As Hume remarks:
Place in opposition the picture, which TACITUS draws of VITELLIUS, fallen from empire, prolonging his ignominy from a wretched love of life, delivered over to the merciless rabble; tossed, buffeted, and kicked about; constrained, by their holding a poinard under his chin, to raise his head, and expose himself to every contumely. . . . Yet even here, says the historian, he discovered some symptoms of a mind not wholly degenerate. To a tribune, who insulted him, he replied ‘I am still your emperor’. (EPM 7.9/SBN 253)
Second, historians also imitate nature in attempting, as far as possible, to copy the ‘natural order’ of events and preserve the original form. As we saw above, Hume himself represents time in a way that serves a dramatic purpose relevant to the subject matter at hand, but the historian, he maintains, should follow the temporal sequence as accurately as possible because the imagination is pleased more when allowed to pass easily from one idea to another along an orderly and intelligible causal chain. For this reason, Hume observes:
An historian may, perhaps, for the more convenient carrying on of his narration, relate an event before another, to which it was in fact posterior; but then he takes notice of this disorder, if he be exact; and by that means replaces the idea in its due position. (T 1.1.3.3/SBN 9)
In general, he writes:
We always follow the succession of time in placing our ideas, and from the consideration of an object pass more easily to that, which follows immediately after it, than to that which went before it. We may learn this, among other instances, from that order, which is always observ’d in historical narrations. Nothing but an absolute necessity can oblige an historian to break the order of time, and in his narration give the precedence to an event, which was in reality posterior to another. (T 2.3.7.7/SBN 430)
To interfere unnecessarily with the natural order in this way at once interrupts the flow of events depicted and produces unease, which hinders the movement of the imagination in the direction in which it is moving and breaks the relation of ideas that bring it pleasure.
Hume’s references to historical writers are relatively few compared to his more elaborate discussions of literary figures. Where he does offer critical observations, he clearly reveals his preference for ancient authors whom he takes to exemplify the rules of historical art most perfectly and considers the best and most trustworthy models for modern writers to follow. Tacitus, in particular, stands out for his ‘candour and vivacity’ and Hume ranks him as ‘the greatest and most penetrating genius, perhaps, of all antiquity’ (EHU 10.25/SBN 123). Hume’s esteem for ancient historians is also reflected in his many references to them for illustrations of virtue and vice – an honour he does not confer on poets, one might observe – and for the details of religious practice they provide;42 where modern historians receive praise it is largely by comparison with their ancient forbears. For instance, Hume writes:
Camden’s history of queen Elizabeth may be esteemed good composition, both for style and matter. It is written with simplicity of expression, very rare in that age, and with a regard to truth. It would not perhaps be too much to affirm, that it is among the best historical productions which have yet been composed by any Englishman. It is well known that the English have not much excelled in that kind of literature. (H 5.154)
He observes on another occasion:
If the reader of Raleigh’s history can have the patience to wade through the Jewish and Rabbinical learning which compose the half of the volume, he will find, when he comes to the Greek and Roman story, that his pains are not unrewarded. Raleigh is the best model of that ancient style, which some writers would affect to revive at present. (H 5.154)
Again, like literary works, historical writing is still of value even when it does not satisfy all the rules of historical art. Such is the case with Clarendon who, writing of the English Revolution, manages to mix a ‘prolix and redundant’ style with an integrity that made it difficult for him to falsify the facts even though clearly partial to the Royalist cause (H 6.154).
We have seen in this chapter how Hume regards history as philosophical, insofar as it memorialises the past and is beholden to the evidence of matter of fact, but also acknowledges its connection to the imagination, which alone enables the historian to reclaim the past in a historical narrative that at once transforms and adorns events so that they entertain, educate and convince a reader. The imagination is both the active source of historical genius and the means by which an audience is passively affected by historical representation. These principles are manifest as historical techniques or, otherwise conceived, rules of historical criticism that abridge historical practice and offer guidelines for the creation of true and entertaining historical work. In these respects history has features in common with poets, although whereas the poet trades in creative fictions, the ideas produced by the historian feel different, rise to the status of true belief and carry conviction. If history coincides with poetry in its dependence on the imagination to achieve its effects, it departs from it significantly in anchoring its investigations in matter of fact, even though they are lost temporally to a past that requires reconstruction and adornment. This feature of the historical craft, moreover – that it at once memorialise and embellish – gives to history the unique function of painting the past in such a way that it can be a source not only of instruction and wisdom but of moral virtue as well. For ‘the historians’, Hume observes, comparing them favourably with poets and philosophers whose track record in this regard he considers poor, ‘have been, almost without exception, the true friends of virtue, and have always represented it in its proper colours, however they may have erred in their judgements of particular persons’ (E 567).
At the same time, given the historian’s reliance on the imagination, one might legitimately ask whether it is a naive oversight on Hume’s part to cite ‘impartiality’ as the sine qua non of the historian’s task, and more than a little disingenuous to declare allegiance to l’histoire raisonnée as if reason could overcome the power of prejudice and passion for party, especially when Hume omits, includes or emphasises certain facts to suit his own purposes. Impartiality itself involves adherence to a certain kind of practice, and surely that can be called into question in the same way as any other article of philosophical faith. Indeed, as Bongie points out, this was Hume’s own fate: by the time of the French Revolution, he reports, it is not ‘Hume’s famous impartiality’ that was doubted, but ‘what is impugned is impartiality itself’.43 This issue is especially pressing in the case of Hume, who is hardly sanguine about the power of reason over passion, and, as we shall see, finds fault with philosophers for basking too much in the warmth of enthusiasm and succumbing too easily to the appeal of a ‘favourite principle’ to which they reduce ‘every phænomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning’ (E 159). Some philosophers of the ‘painterly’ kind, moreover, employ their art deliberately to engage readers, rouse their sentiments and inspire virtue in them.
In Hume’s view, this sort of tension seems unavoidable, although the fact that there is at bottom some matter of fact to which historical work is ultimately accountable means that it does not rise to the status of an antinomy of the sort to be met with in metaphysics, religion or even philosophy itself (as we shall see in the two final chapters). By the very nature of their craft, historians cannot help painting the world in an artful way, and they must recognise that the colours they choose are variable and acknowledge that even the most impartial of histories is subject to the various passions that animate different sects of men. Perhaps in the writing of history, as Moses suggests, ‘passions are not so much repressed as redeployed’.44 At the same time, that readers of the History were, and perhaps still are, incapable of taking the general point of view does not undermine the attempt to write history, which, if pursued with a philosophical spirit, will at least have accuracy as its goal and come closer to achieving it than those that start out from prejudice, dogma or abstract principle alone.45 Unlike poetry, religion and philosophy, it is real existence that is the final arbiter of historical pronouncements, and true history can form models of virtue and wisdom from which those willing to listen might learn how to resist the more wayward forces of the imagination on which the historian also depends.
Notes
1. See ‘Introduction’ in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard H. Popkin (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 109–10 and 413–17. Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second covers the years 1685 to 1702, ending with the death of William III. Hume’s History, as its subtitle advertises, runs from the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55AD to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
2. Some commentators have seen Hume as anticipating the theory of ‘imaginative reconstruction’ associated with R. G. Collingwood and Herbert Butterfield. See Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951) and R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1946] 1993). For a discussion of Hume’s views in the context of those of Butterfield, Collingwood and later philosophy of history, see S. K Wertz, ‘Moral Judgements in History: Hume’s Position’, Hume Studies, 22: 2 (1996), pp. 339–67, and his earlier ‘Collingwood’s Understanding of Hume’. Collingwood, ironically, accused Hume of having abandoned philosophy for history and for holding an anti-historical view of human nature. For a discussion and defence of Hume in this regard, see Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common life, pp. 219–24.
3. See Tony Pitson, ‘George Campbell’s Critique of Hume on Testimony’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 4: 1 (2006), pp. 1–15. Pitson is inclined to think that when ‘Hume is concerned with testimony as a source of belief he generally has in mind historical narratives which purport to provide knowledge of past events’ (p. 5). This seems to place an unnecessarily narrow restriction on how Hume understands ‘testimony’.
4. Alvin I. Goldman, Pathways to Knowledge: Public and Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 201, emphasis added.
5. Jennifer Lackey, ‘Introduction’, in Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (eds), The Epistemology of Testimony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 4 and 7. Lackey’s discussion also serves as a useful introduction to the various positions – non-reductionist, reductionist, and ‘hybrid’ – that contemporary writers have taken. See also Goldman, Pathways to Knowledge, pp. 201–2.
6. C. A. J. Coady ‘Testimony and Observation’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 108: 2 (1973), pp. 149–55, incorporated as Ch. 4 into his Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). See also Frederick F. Schmitt, ‘Justification, Sociality, and Autonomy’, Synthese, 73: 1 (1987), pp. 43–85, and Mark Owen Webb, ‘Why I Know About as Much as You: A Reply to Hardwig’, Journal of Philosophy, 90: 5 (1993), pp. 260–70.
7. Defenders of Hume against Coady et al. include Sarah Wright, ‘Hume on Testimony: A Virtue-Theoretic Defense’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 28: 3 (2011), pp. 247–65; Fred Wilson, ‘Hume and the Role of Testimony in Knowledge’, Episteme, 7: 1 (2010), pp. 58–78, esp. 69–70 and 73–4; Michael Root, ‘Hume on the Virtues of Testimony’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 38: 1 (2001), pp. 19–35; and Paul Faulkner, ‘David Hume’s Reductionist Epistemology of Testimony’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 79: 4 (1998), pp. 302–13. Cf. Saul Traiger, ‘Humean Testimony’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 74: 2 (1993), pp. 135–49, and ‘Experience and Testimony in Hume’s Philosophy’, Episteme, 7: 1 (2010), pp. 42–57, who argues that Hume is actually an ‘anti-reductionist.’
8. See G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Hume and Julius Caesar’, Analysis, 34: 1 (1973); reprinted in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, 3 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 86–92. The quotations are from pp. 87 and 86, respectively.
9. See Donald W. Livingston, ‘Anscombe, Hume and Julius Caesar’, Analysis, 35: 1 (1974–5), pp. 13–19. The quotation is from p. 13.
10. Livingston, ‘Anscombe, Hume and Julius Caesar’, p.14, and Pitson, ‘George Campbell’s Critic of Hume on Testimony’, p. 4. Livingston’s initial point against Anscombe has been much repeated. In addition to Pitson, see Traiger, ‘Experience and Testimony’, pp. 46–7, and ‘Humean Testimony’, pp. 138–9; Faulkner, ‘David Hume’s Reductionist Epistemology of Testimony’, pp. 308 and 312, n. 24; and Welbourne, ‘The Community of Knowledge’, pp. 312–13.
11. Livingston, ‘Anscombe, Hume and Julius Caesar’, pp. 15–16.
12. See Michael Welbourne, Knowledge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), pp. 85–91, and ‘Is Hume Really a Reductivist?’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33: 2 (2002), pp. 407–23, esp. 415–18. A similar emphasis is found in Wilson, ‘Hume and the Role of Testimony in Knowledge’, and in Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, p. 232. Welbourne observes that ‘critics of Hume such as Coady . . . have tended to mistake a discussion of the questions of when and how testimony should be weighed or evaluated, when the default response should be withheld, for a theory of how testimony should be received in the first place’ (Knowledge, p. 90).
13. See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. Derek R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, [1764] 1997), p. 194. Pitson observes that George Campbell framed a similar principle concerning testimony requiring some ‘original grounds of belief’ somewhat earlier. See George Campbell, A Dissertation on Miracles: Containing an Examination of the Principles Advanced by David Hume, Esq; in An Essay on Miracles, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Kincaid & Bell, [1762] 1766), p. 13, and Pitson, ‘George Campbell’s Critique of Hume on Testimony’. On the similarity between Hume and Reid, see Wellbourne, Knowledge, pp. 90–1, and on Reid’s view more generally, James Van Cleve, ‘Reid on the Credit of Human Testimony’, in Lackey and Sosa, The Epistemology of Testimony, pp. 50–74; Goldman, Pathways to Knowledge, pp. 173–9; Coady, Testimony, pp. 120–9; and Root, ‘Hume on the Virtues of Testimony’, pp. 26–7.
14. See Faulkner, ‘David Hume’s Reductionist Epistemology of Testimony’, pp. 305–7, who rightly emphasises this aspect of Hume’s view. See also Root, ‘Hume on the Virtues of Testimony’, who argues (on the basis of the discussion of the virtues in the Treatise) that Hume takes testimony to depend on the virtues of ‘veracity’ and ‘credibility’; he points out that this has the advantage of endowing testimony with a ‘forward looking’ aspect rather than the exclusively ‘backward looking’ perspective to which it is confined when based solely on the past experience of constant conjunction.
15. In this respect at least, insofar as he locates a natural principle to explain why we believe others, Hume appears to be in, or very near to, the same ‘non-reductionist’ camp established and occupied by Reid and Campbell. This point is made by Welbourne in Knowledge, pp. 90–1, and ‘Is Hume Really a Reductivist?’, pp. 418–22.
16. Welbourne, Knowledge, pp. 88. Obviously, the failure to draw the distinction between the default and critical responses to testimony (and the kinds of inference attending each) goes a good way to explaining how Coady and others are at least partially mistaken in glossing Hume’s entire position as ‘reductionist.’
17. This point is brought out nicely by Wilson, ‘Hume and the Role of Testimony in Knowledge’, pp. 70–1. See, in this context, Hume’s juxtaposition of a false belief in the immortality of the soul with a ‘true and establish’d judgement; such as is deriv’d from the testimony of travellers and historians’ (T 1.3.9.14/SBN 114–15).
18. It is worth noting that, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Stewart viewed Hume’s Natural History as an example of what he termed ‘conjectural history’, a method that, in the absence of direct empirical evidence, allows for inferring the likelihood of probable conduct on the basis of the principles of human nature and knowledge of circumstances. Whether or not this is an accurate characterisation of the Natural History, it is not Hume’s method in the History of England. For a discussion of the sense in which Hume’s method coincides and diverts from Stewart’s methodological maxim, see Simon Evnine, ‘Hume, Conjectural History, and the Uniformity of Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31: 4 (1993), pp. 589–606, and, more recently, Juan Samuel Santos Castro, ‘Hume and Conjectural History’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 15: 2 (2017), pp. 157–74.
19. For an outline of these earlier views, see Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. 210–12; Laird Okie, ‘Ideology and Partiality in David Hume’s History of England’, Hume Studies, 11: 1 (1985), pp. 1–32, esp. 1–4; and, more recently, Claudia M. Schmidt, ‘David Hume as a Philosopher of History’, in Mark G. Spencer (ed.), David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), pp. 161–79.
20. See Duncan Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to David Hume, History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Duncan Forbes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), and Hume’s Philosophical Politics, Chs. 8 and 9.
21. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, p. 301.
22. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. ix and 214.
23. Gregory Moses, ‘David Hume as Philosophical Historian’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 35: 1 (1989), pp. 81 and 83–5. See also David Fate Norton, ‘History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought’, in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, pp. xxxii-l; Stephen Paul Forster, ‘Different Religions and the Difference they Make: Hume on the Political Effects of Religious Ideology’, Modern Schoolman, 66: 4 (1989), pp. 253–4; and Donald T. Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 119–20.
24. Victor G. Wexler, ‘David Hume’s Discovery of a New Scene of Historical Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10: 2 (1976–7), pp. 185–202.
25. Farr, ‘Hume, Hermeneutics, and History’; and Wertz, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, esp. pp. 343–6. See also Douglas Long, ‘Hume’s Historiographical Imagination’, in Mark G. Spencer (ed.), David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), pp. 201–24. A similar emphasis is found earlier in Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. 214–24. Cf. Donald T. Siebert, ‘The Sentimental Sublime in Hume’s History of England’, Review of English Studies, New Series, 40: 159 (1989), pp. 352–72, who calls the History a ‘good example of sentimental literature’, which celebrates the ‘hero of feeling’ (pp. 353 and 354).
26. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, p. 20. ‘The philosophical spirit’, Harris writes later in his discussion of Hume’s volume on the Stuarts, ‘expressed itself most clearly of all in those passages in which Hume sought to reduce political debates to their most essential and abstract principles, by balancing the best case that could be made on one side against the best that could be made on the other, and then presenting a considered judgement to the strengths and weaknesses of each argument’ (p. 339).
27. Richard H. Popkin, ‘David Hume: Philosophical versus Prophetic Historian’, in Kenneth R. Merill and Robert W. Shahan (eds), David Hume: Many-sided Genius (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 83, 89–90 and 92.
28. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted in Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume, p. 119.
29. Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 5. Making a somewhat different point, Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, reports that in Hume’s time, among writers both at home and abroad, it was ‘commonplace’ opinion – ‘almost a cliché’ – that party politics had made an objective account of English history impossible (p. 308).
30. Okie, ‘Ideology and Partiality in Hume’s History of England’, pp. 16–17. Okie is referring to Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon (1609–74), politician, statesman and author of The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–4). Okie explains what he sees as Hume’s lack of partiality in the following terms: ‘When Hume began work on his History . . . he had other concerns in mind besides political philosophy. Hume . . . had an axe to grind: The History was, in part, a “vehicle” for attacking the Whigs because Hume resented the Whig monopoly of place, position and literary taste’ (p. 24). See also Robert J. Roth, S. J., ‘David Hume on Religion in England’, Thought, 66 (1991), pp. 51–64, who argues that ‘it was an anti-Presbyterian and anti-Puritan bias which coloured his [Hume’s] whole view of the history of that [early Stuart] period’ (p. 52; see also pp. 53 and 62), and for a different view, Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the ‘History of England’ (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979), pp. 8 and 22–3.
31. Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume, pp. 55 and 58. Cf. pp. 121–2, where Siebert makes a similar point while discussing Hume’s treatment of ‘three religious heroes’: Thomas à Becket, Joan of Arc and Sir Thomas More. See also his remark that ‘Hume’s History projects a moral vision by its ability to reshape the past, to impose meanings on the past, creating patterns that imply a corresponding beauty in human nature – all too seldom instantiated in human life, it is true, but nonetheless capable of being discovered, indeed created in the fiat of narrative, by the historian’s moral imagination’ (p. 21).
32. Christopher J. Wheatley, ‘Polemical Aspects of Hume’s Natural History of Religion’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19: 4 (1986), pp. 502–14. The quotations are taken from p. 513.
33. Wertz, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, p. 343. See also Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. 243–6; Farr, ‘Hume, Hermeneutics, and History’, pp. 301–2; and for a discussion of the issue beyond Hume, Adrian Oldfield, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, History and Theory, 20: 3 (1981), pp. 260–77. Cf. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, who places Hume’s impartiality in the context of the battle between Whig and Tory interpretations of history, of which he provides a useful overview (pp. 308–19). Hume, Harris writes, ‘realised that . . . a separation of the politics of the present from the politics of the past opened the way to a new kind of historical impartiality’ (p. 321), although he also acknowledges that Hume’s readers were ‘encouraged, coerced even, into a sympathetic emotional engagement with the victims of history, both small and great’, and the result in some cases was ‘to blur the distinction between history on the one hand and fiction on the other’ (pp. 348–9).
34. Addison, Spectator No. 420, p. 574. He also observes that ‘As the Writers in Poetry and Fiction borrow their several Materials from outward Objects, and join them together at their own Pleasure, there are others who are obliged to follow Nature more closely, and to take entire Scenes out of her. Such are Historians, natural Philosophers, Travellers, Geographers, and, in a Word, all who describe visible Objects of a real Existence.’
35. See Wertz, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, pp. 340 and 343–4. Elsewhere (pp. 348, 351, passim) Wertz does credit historians with some ‘skill’ in animating their personages, but he appears to assume that the effects of the narrative somehow emerge without deliberate intent on the part of the historian. Cf. Oldfield, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, on which Wertz draws approvingly. Oldfield is less inclined to rule out authorial intent, but he, too, suggests that moral judgement and moral education emerge from the historian ‘telling us about the moral dilemmas which faced the men of the past, and about the ways in which these dilemmas were resolved, and by allowing contemporaries to speak for themselves. . . . The richly diverse resources of the historian can thus be harnessed to the task of moral education, without his having to crack his own whip’ (p. 275).
36. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Uses and Abuses of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
37. Siebert, ‘The Sentimental Sublime in Hume’s History of England’, pp. 366, 368–9 and 372. Siebert notes of Hume’s treatment of Mary Queen of Scots: ‘Closer examination reveals that Hume has de-emphasised or suppressed certain details, given others greater prominence, and added interpretive commentary. These touches urge the narrative towards that thematic conclusion and emotional effect Hume desires’ (p. 357).
38. John Vladimir Price, The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 83.
39. Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson, p. 64.
40. On this point see Livingston, ‘Anscombe, Hume and Julius Caesar’, p. 16.
41. The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 11 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co.) 5: p. 273.
42. See, for example, EPM 6.16, 7.9, 13–15/SBN 240, 253, 254–5; and NHR 4.6–9, 12.20–1.
43. Bongie, David Hume, p. 136, emphasis added.
44. See Moses, ‘David Hume as Philosophical Historian’, pp. 87–9.
45. On this point, see Mossner, ‘Was Hume a Tory Historian?’, pp. 115–17.