180 HUME viii 



You ask me what is the cause of this cause ? I know not ; 

 I care not : that concerns not me. I have found a Deity ; 

 and here I stop my inquiry. Let those go further who are 

 wiser or more enterprising." (II. p. 466.) 



In other words, Cleanthes, reasoning having 

 taken you as far as you want to go, you decline 

 to advance any further; even though you fully 

 admit that the very same reasoning forbids you 

 to stop where you are pleased to cry halt! But 

 this is simply forcing your reason to abdicate in 

 favour of your caprice. It is impossible to 

 imagine that Hume, of all men in the world, 

 could have rested satisfied with such an act of 

 high-treason against the sovereignty of philosophy. 

 We may rather conclude that the last word of the 

 discussion, which he gives to Philo, is also his own. 



" If I am still to remain in utter ignorance of causes, and 

 can absolutely give an explication of nothing, I shall never 

 esteem it any advantage to shove off for a moment a diffi- 

 culty, which, you acknowledge, must immediately, in its 

 full force, recur upon me. Naturalists* indeed very justly 

 explain particular effects by more general causes, though 

 these general causes should remain in the end totally inex- 

 plicable ; but they never surely thought it satisfactory to 

 explain a particular effect by a particular cause, which was 

 no more to be accounted for than the effect itself. An 

 ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, 

 is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which 

 attains its order in a like manner ; nor is there any more 

 difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former." (II. 

 p. 466.) 



* /. e. natural philosophers. 



