\ 

 xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 243 



breakdown of a machine does not prove that it was not 

 constructed by intelligence ? It proves only that the 

 intelligence was not unlimited. 



On the whole, therefore, Hume cannot be said to have 

 refuted the volitional theory of causation. It yields an 

 answer to Hume which is much simpler, directer, completer, 

 more congruous with common sense and better supported 

 by historical and anthropological evidence than any other. 

 Why, then, has no rationalist even attempted to answer 

 Hume along these lines ? Why do they all continue to 

 torment themselves, and to excruciate their readers, 

 by devising devious, obscure, ambiguous, far-fetched, 

 complicated theories to vindicate so simple and successful 

 a human practice as that of postulating causes ex analogia 

 kominis, the more so that the answers they achieve 

 always fail to answer the essential point, 1 or at best 

 wander away into metaphysical principles so remote from 

 our experience that they cannot even be applied to it, 

 and so answer neither Hume s nor any other question, 

 and in no wise vindicate our actual human practice ? 

 One can hardly believe that the reason was wholly an 

 instinctive hatred of Humanism, a reluctance to recognize 

 man as a measure of things, and human activity as a real 

 force and a real clue to the nature of the world. 



The reason in part cannot but have been a failure to 

 realize the full significance of Hume s results. For this 

 is far more than the refutation of an uncritical theory of 

 causation, far more than the substitution for it of Hume s 

 own theory, far more even than the establishment of a 

 naturalistic and mechanical treatment of the human mind. 

 That a thorough-going Naturalism follows logically and at 

 once from Hume s proof that the conception of human 

 agency rests upon an illusion, is indeed a matter of course. 



1 In Kant s case I take this to be the question why in the end the data given 

 to the mind should be, and ever continue to be, such that the mind can construct 

 a cosmic order out of them. 



