Rousseau's Dog (20 page)

However, it is their reflections about how and where man should live, and about the arts and luxury, that most sharply expose the fundamental contradictions of their brief union. Rousseau glorified nature. His state of nature was one of bliss. But beyond the theory, his autobiographical writings are full of exaltations of nature itself. Of panoramic views, a walk in the country, open air, he writes in the
Confessions:
“all this sets my soul free, gives me greater boldness of thought, throws me, so to speak, into the immensity of things.” The isolated rural life suited his ascetic self-image. Luxury made men soft. Frugality and the good life were inseparable. Hence his distress at what he believed was Diderot's deliberate stab in proclaiming that only the evil man lives alone. Rousseau associated the black vapors of the city with blackness in men's hearts.

While Rousseau's stance on the theater and the organized arts was highly ambiguous, Hume unequivocally promoted the benefits of civilization. He was convivial, a city lover (though preferably Edinburgh over London). His identification with the city was part of a wider urban cosmopolitanism. “A perfect solitude,” he regarded (in the
Treatise
) as “perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer.” The Scot was an advocate of refined tastes, “the study of beauties” such as poetry, music, and art as well as science. These kept us off the streets, mentally challenged us, and even made us more social and gregarious. Science and the arts elevated the human spirit. Thus enriched, he wrote in one essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” people would never be “contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations.” That last phrase, had he been acquainted with it, would surely have angered Rousseau as much as had Diderot's.

City life, said Hume, was good for us. We humans were unusual beings, conspicuous among animals for our combination of physical vulnerability and exacting physical needs. Being puny creatures, he thought, and yet having to be clothed, kept warm, sheltered, and fed, we have had to adapt and cooperate to survive. Only through organization and social activity have humans come to flourish. For humans, cooperation is natural. Hume concurred with his old friend Adam Smith's maxim about one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human race: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Of course, in Marischal's words, Rousseau's attitude to simple acts of generosity made him “more savage than any savage of North America.”

A
T FIRST GLANCE,
our two antagonists did at least share one basic position. Both assailed established religion in their homelands and both were hurt in consequence. Both railed against superstition, both shared a dislike of Catholicism.

Hume's assault on religion was the more intellectually rigorous and sustained, but barely rattled the foundations of the established churches in Scotland and England. In France and Switzerland, Rousseau's challenge was seen by the authorities as highly threatening. Hume's career suffered but Rousseau's life was endangered. The stones that smashed through Rousseau's windows in Môtiers were missiles that, in effect, had the blessing of the priesthood.

Yet even their critiques of religion were very different: different in argument, different in motivation. Rousseau's religious views had pleased nobody—neither Christians nor the atheists and deists. (Deism held that knowledge of God was possible only through reason. Those who believe God set the universe off but then left it alone are also often called deists.) To the
philosophes,
split between a minority who were
deists and the majority who were outright atheists, Rousseau's conviction that God existed, his professed love of God, his belief in God's goodness, his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal—all this was risible. Deeply suspect, too, was his attitude toward the beauty of nature. He saw God in mountains and valleys, in brooks and waterfalls, in thunder and sunshine, in flowers and trees. “Atheists,” he once said, “do not like the country.”

There were also instrumental grounds that justified religion: it was useful, he believed, in promoting patriotic and civic values. But this was not the case for the institutions of religion. By teaching men that salvation lay in the next life rather than this one, these institutions actually undermined the state.

This was not the only point on which he criticized the Christian church (particularly the Catholic Church) as misguided. And when we read the “Savoyard Vicar” section in
Émile,
it is obvious why its passages were regarded as so egregiously blasphemous. Thus, Rousseau thought the direct route to God was through introspection, through the examination of the heart, the pursuit of what he called the “inner light,” through reason. It was not through the clergy and their overblown rituals, nor through Scripture. Priests should be excluded from a child's upbringing. They had no special claim to religious truth—if anything, they were obstacles to its discovery.

As for Hume, he did not intend to cause umbrage—”I would not offend the Godly”—and he amended his
History
to make its relatively bland remarks on religion blander still, though his view was that the church had played a corrupting role in British life. Nonetheless, the comments he did make landed him in trouble, as we have seen, stalling his career. He wrote to Blair to complain. “Is a man to be called a drunkard, because he has been seen fuddled once in his lifetime?”

In fact, he was not seen fuddled once only. Try as he might, he could not conceal his contempt for religion and its superstitions. The
religious fanatic was a peculiarly dangerous animal, thought Hume, and clerics were hypocrites. He admitted that “the church is my particular aversion.”

His deconstruction of religion followed a familiar strategy, the first stage of which was to examine whether there was any logical reason to believe in God. Take the claim that God reveals Himself through “revelation”: truths about the divine apparently shown in empirical/historical sources, such as miracles. In section X of
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
Hume's painstakingly constructed case can be summed up in one sentence: We always have more reason to disbelieve a miracle than to believe in it. If a person claims to have witnessed an act which defied a law of nature—such as that Queen Elizabeth was seen walking and talking five days after her death—then we should ask ourselves whether there are other explanations. We should speculate about the person's motivation, inquire whether there were other witnesses and whether these witnesses were truly independent, and so on. In reality, there was never testimony that has met these stringent criteria. (He thought it no coincidence that sightings of miracles tended to occur “among ignorant and barbarous nations.”) His chapter “On Miracles” ends with a lacerating summary. “So that upon the whole, we may conclude, that the
Christian Religion
not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity.”

Hume's critique of natural religion, in which conclusions reached about God's existence are allegedly based on reasoning, is systematically laid out in
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Composed as conversations between various characters, and published only posthumously, it is often said to be the most important book on the philosophy of religion ever published. Hume scholars tend to concur that Philo, the skeptic, is closest to the voice of the Scotsman.

Having shown—to his satisfaction at least—that received arguments for believing in God were wretchedly inadequate, Hume questioned why it was that so many people persisted in their beliefs. Once more he located the explanation in the psychological rather than the rational. In particular, he believed that religion was the crutch for our apprehensions and anxieties. We have a fear of the unknown, Hume surmised, a fear of those external events that derail our lives, a fear of the erratic and unpredictable. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 had provoked much theological head-scratching. How reassuring to believe that some Greater Being was making sense of these events, imposing some (hidden) order on apparently random fortune or misfortune.

H
OST AND GUEST
could hardly have had outlooks less in sympathy. The instant relationship between them inevitably had shallow foundations: respect for each other's achievements, Hume's compassion for the dispossessed, Rousseau's need for a haven, some mutual friends, the courtesies of the age. There was little else to create any affinity between these two cerebral beings.

In terms of a philosophical dialogue, they could not agree about religion, human nature, the good life, politics, or economics. However, what truly parted them, and held them apart, was the profound disjunction in their intellectual characters.

Hume was all reason, doubt, and skepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination, and certainty. In
Émile,
the Savoyard vicar states that his “love of truth” is “his whole philosophy” whose method “exempts me from the vain subtlety of arguments.” He would “accept as evident all knowledge to which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot refuse my consent.” Observing the heart was not easy: it had to be perceived through opaque rather than clear glass. “We see neither the soul of the other, because it hides itself, nor our own,
because we have no mirror in the mind.” But introspection was crucial. The most powerful validation for his beliefs came from his heart.

Once the man of sensibility was settled, he and the man of rational skepticism had no reason to keep in touch. In this context, Hume was the last person who might fulfill Rousseau's dream of friendship, and the decision not to correspond becomes comprehensible. Of course, Hume had never planned to look after Rousseau from day to day, and we can sense the relief when he later told Blair that Davenport had assumed charge of him.

12

I
T WAS AGREED
with Davenport that Rousseau would leave for Wootton on Wednesday, March 19, 1766, with the two beings whose attachment to him was unconditional, Le Vasseur and Sultan. Hume must have counted the days like a prisoner whose release date comes in sight.

On the afternoon of March 17, Hume passed on to Rousseau and Le Vasseur an invitation from Conway and his wife “to do them the favour” of dining with them the next day. Hume professed complete indifference to Rousseau's decision, assuring him that, “If you decline this invitation, from whatever reason, I shall endeavour to make your excuses. It is not necessary, that you constrain yourself the least in this affair.” Was he really so unconcerned—considering Conway's political rank, his connection to the king, and his importance to Rousseau's financial security?

On Monday evening Rousseau indeed asked Hume to make his excuses: he was ill and not in a fit state to present himself; as for Mlle Le Vasseur, she was “a very good and estimable person but not at all made to take her place amidst grand company.” (Yet, as we have seen, he had insisted on it with others and she had joined him often enough with the French nobility.)

On Tuesday, March 18, Rousseau's little party came up from Chiswick in Davenport's coach to sleep overnight at Hume's lodgings before departing the next day for Wootton. Four or five days earlier, Hume had written to Rousseau to convey a piece of luck: Davenport had learned that a post chaise was returning empty to Ashbourne, near Wootton, and so he had secured a bargain for the travelers. This was a white lie, designed to save Rousseau's purse. The kindly Davenport had hired the chaise and planned to pay the difference between the full and return fares.

That evening, as Hume and Rousseau sat together, their worlds collided. Rousseau had mused on the cut-price chaise and seen through the subterfuge, concluding it was too much of a coincidence—a retour chaise to so obscure a part of the country on the very day he was in need of one. At this point, we proffer only Hume's epistolatory version of events, and a scene narrated a week later by Hume to Hugh Blair: