Note 73 — ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER II.

There can be no doubt that Cleanthes is meant for the representative man, both from the tenor of the Dialogue itself and from a letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot, of Minto, given by Burton, I. 331-6. The following extracts may be acceptable to the reader:—"You would perceive by the sample I have given you, that I make Cleanthes the hero of the dialogue: whatever you can think of, to strengthen that side of the argument, will be most acceptable to me. Any propensity you imagine I have to the other side, crept in upon me against my will; and 'tis not long ago that I burned an old manuscript book, wrote before I was twenty, which contained, page after page, the gradual progress of my thoughts on that head. It began with an anxious search after arguments, to confirm the common opinion; doubts stole in, dissipated, returned; were again dissipated, returned again; and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclination, perhaps against reason.... I could wish Cleanthes' argument could be so analyzed, as to be rendered quite formal and regular. The propensity of the mind towards it,—unless that propensity were as strong and universal as that to believe in our senses and experience,—will still, I am afraid, be esteemed a suspicious foundation. 'Tis here I wish for your assistance; we must endeavour to prove that this propensity is somewhat different from our inclination to find our own figures in the clouds, our faces in the moon, our passions and sentiments even in inanimate matter. Such an inclination may, and ought to be controlled, and can never be a legitimate ground of assent.

"The instances I have chosen for Cleanthes are, I hope, tolerably happy, and the confusion in which I represent the sceptic seems natural, but—si quid novisti rectius, etc.... He (Cleanthes) allows, indeed, in part 2nd, that all our inference is founded on the similitude of the works of nature to the usual effects of mind, otherwise they must appear a mere chaos. The only difficulty is, why the other assimilations do not weaken the argument; and indeed it would seem from experience and feeling, that they do not weaken it so much as we might naturally expect."

It seems clear on the whole, that, so far as Physico-Theology went, Hume was not ill qualified for a Natural Theologian. All the more so perhaps, because, while seeing the difficulties which attach themselves to this kind of argument, he pronounced it to hold conclusively at last.