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Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 198-200 SPENCER K. WERTZ. Between Hume's Philosophy and History: Historical Theory and Practice. Lanham and Oxford: University Press of America, 2000. Pp. xvi + 157. ISBN 0761815430. This brief book aims to "show an alliance between history and philosophy in Hume's thought"(xii). Six of its eight chapters are revised essays, published originally in academic journals from 1975 to 1996. These essays are sometimes insightful on the links between Hume's philosophical and historical thought. But the book's episodic and disparate origins remain discernible in the finished text, producing uneven results. Wertz says that his "inquiry occupies a space between Hume's philosophy and history; it is not philosophy of history or history of philosophy... but a precursor to both"(xi). An analysis of this preparatory middle-ground begins with Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. There, says Wertz, Hume put forward a single "set of principles" (8) or a "system," which "grows, changes, and undergoes development and expansion" (5). While the book's opening pages are unduly vague about the details of Hume's "system," chapter 2 begins to flesh it out with an intriguing discussion of Hume's "missing shade of blue" experiment. In his analysis of that problem, says Wertz, Hume looked "beyond simple sensible qualities and the ideas annexed to them" (17). For Wertz, Hume the historian, like the agent in the "missing shade of blue" experiment, "knows certain things and facts and on the basis of them he reasons or conjectures about others" (16). Chapter 3 takes as its point of departure what Wertz identifies as "the standard interpretation" (21) of another aspect of Hume's system, his thoughts on human nature. That many scholars have followedj. B. Black's assessment of 1965, and incorrectly assumed that Hume held human nature to be constant in such a way that "history is simply a repeating decimal, " is an accurate observation. However, there have been significant exceptions to that reading and the most important of these Wertz does not note. Indeed, what Wertz identifies as "the standard interpretation" was much more standard before 1975 (the year in which Wertz's essay, on which his chapter is based, was first published), than it is now. Overlooked entirely in Wertz's discussion is a well-known and important chapter on "Social Experience and the Uniformity of Human Nature" in Duncan Forbes's Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1975). Forbes argued convincingly that if "Hume gives the impression of being a psychological uniformitarian, a historian with an 'unhistorical' conception of human nature, it may be because he was, for a number of reasons, especially attracted to the study of politics, in which, he thinks, the regularity of human nature is strikingly obvious"(120). While Forbes's Hume Studies Book Reviews 199 perceptive argument may not have been available to Wertz when the latter published his essay in 1975, it should not have been ignored in his book published in 2000, especially given the centrality of Hume's thoughts on human nature to Wertz's remaining chapters. Related aspects of Forbes's argument would equally have been useful to key arguments put forward by Wertz in other places. David Fate Norton's 1965 essay on "History and Philosophy in Hume's Thought," (in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard H. Popkin [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965]) provides the foundation for Wertz's historiographical argument in chapter 4. "Norton's labeling of Hume's constant interjection of himself into the account or narrative as mere subjectivism," writes Wertz, "is simply wrong"(42). While Norton's argument is more subtle and supported by more textual evidence than Wertz's rendition admits; nevertheless, Wertz supports his claim that Hume thought, as he wrote, that "history ... extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation"(37-38). One of Wertz's strongest and most original arguments was that Hume, in the course of his career as a philosopher , expanded the domains of experience. When Hume...
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