xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 235 



general standpoint of intellectualism, foreshadows the 

 welcome it has accorded to Hume s attack upon the con 

 ception of activity. 



Ill 



Hume s criticism of the conception of power or activity 

 is quite as clever, and quite as paradoxical as his criticism 

 of the conception of cause. It is even more essential to 

 his naturalism and more radically destructive in its 

 philosophic effects. Yet, strange to say, it has provoked 

 no remonstrance. The champions of the a priori make 

 no fuss about it, the bodyguard of the Pure Reason raise 

 no hue and cry : it is silently and tamely acquiesced in. 

 It is never denounced in lectures as one of the twin pillars 

 of Hume s all-corrupting scepticism ; its consequences are 

 never dwelt on ; it is never criticized ! This extraordinary 

 state of things seems to be due simply to the domination 

 of intellectualism, which has neither the interest nor the 

 ability to contest the assumptions lurking in Hume s 

 ingenious argument. 



The argument itself does not occur in the body of the 

 Treatise of Human Nature}- In writing the Treatise, 

 Hume appears to have been chiefly concerned to puzzle 

 the philosophers ; so he deals chiefly with the opinions 

 of the learned. Now as these were then, much as now, 

 still under the spell of the intellectualist tradition traceable 

 to Plato, Hume took no notice of the common-sense 

 explanation of the source of the notion of power or agency. 

 He conceives himself to be contending throughout against 

 a metaphysical a priori knowledge of causation by means 

 of which effects could be predicted with certainty prior to 

 all experience. His problem is to find a connexion such 

 that &quot; from a simple view of the one &quot; we can &quot; pronounce 

 that it must be followed by the other.&quot; 2 It is to such 



1 It is astounding, but characteristic, that, in view of this, the preface to 

 T. H. Green s edition of Hume should contain the assertion that the only essential 

 difference&quot; between the Treatise and the Enquiry is &quot; in the way of omissions&quot; 

 made in the latter. 



2 Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, p. 161. 



