vm THEISM; EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 179 



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 l 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.) 



It is obvious that, if Hume had been pushed, 

 he must have admitted that his opinion concerning 

 the existence of a God, and of a certain remote 

 resemblance of his intellectual nature to that of 

 man, was an hypothesis which might possess more 

 or less probability, but, on his own principles, 

 was incapable of any approach to demonstration. 

 And to all attempts to make any practical use 

 of his theism; or to prove the existence of the 

 attributes of infinite wisdom, benevolence, justice, 

 and the like, which are usually ascribed to the 



1 I.e. Natural philosophers. 



N2 



