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Faced with a figure of David Hume's calibre and standing in the history of Western thought, we inevitably ask ourselves what his core philosophical project might be. What are Hume's true intentions? And can we understand his work, under any single unitary interpretation, as embodying a harmonic and coherent system? Paul Russell's purpose in The Riddle of Hume's Treatise is to provide the key for such a unitary reading. Russell's in‐depth and comprehensive study of Hume's work, and his scrupulous discussion of the philosophical scene in the 17th and 18th centuries, are designed to show that the best way to make sense of A Treatise of Human Nature is to observe it through the lens of Hume's fundamentally irreligious intentions. (‘Irreligious’ is Russell's preferred word.) On Russell's reading a profound irreligious conviction informs the fundamental shape of Hume's entire philosophy; it may be regarded overall as a large scale attack on Christianity. More particularly, Russell argues that the irreligious aims so evident in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and in The Natural History of Religion were already present in the Treatise, in a complete and fully conscious form. Contemporary scholarship generally disregards the importance of the Treatise vis‐à‐vis questions of religion. To the contrary, Russell claims that throughout his work, Hume was developing an organic and structured critique of the metaphysical pretences which thinkers of religious bent put forward in order to furnish their doctrines with philosophical grounds. Such criticism, Russell remarks, goes widely unnoticed with Hume experts today, whereas it was outstandingly clear to his contemporaries. Furthermore, besides providing the prime animus for Hume in the Treatise, this fundamental irreligious aim is also the theoretical device which lends unity to the Treatise as a whole, according to Russell, tying together the three books of which it is composed. Russell observes that present‐day interpreters divide between those who read Hume's Treatise in the light of his scepticism, and those who regard it as a form of naturalism. Thus, one group of critics, following the interpretation originally given by Thomas Reid and James Beattie, sees Hume as the champion of a form of Pyrrhonian scepticism, the philosophical outcome of which is totally negative and destructive. The other, following on from Norman Kemp Smith (The Philosophy of David Hume, 1941), sees Hume as positively engaged in the elaboration of a ‘science of man’ that is naturalistically based. This is a fundamental division in the critical literature on Hume, which forces the advocates of either thesis into views of Hume that are not only different but ultimately incompatible. The problem, in Russell's words, is how to ‘reconcile Hume's ambitions to be the Newton of the moral sciences, not only with his sceptical principles, but with a form of “naturalism” that teaches “that reason, as traditionally understood, has no role in human life” – a claim that, on the face of it, sits uncomfortably with Hume's (Newtonian) “scientific” ambitions’ (p.7). The outcome of this contrast between a sceptical and a naturalistic interpretation of Hume's text is that the Treatise remains something of a puzzle, and Hume, for his own part, ends up appearing an incoherent philosopher, whose main merit is to have trodden in the footsteps of Locke and Berkeley, and, possibly, to have taken empiricism to its logical conclusion. According to Russell, the conflict is resolved when one takes Hume's irreligiousness as the key to his philosophical interests, although this fact only comes to light by looking at the historical and intellectual context in which Hume was working at his philosophical enterprise. Russell's impressive study develops, then, along three lines of inquiry. First, Russell goes over the various articulations of Hume's philosophy as presented in the Treatise. Moving from the theory of ideas to that of space and time, from the analysis of the notion of causality to that of induction, from the nature of matter to that of the immaterial substance which supposedly composes the human soul, Russell argues that all these subjects make sense and can thus be held in a philosophically coherent unity within the framework of Hume's irreligious master‐plan. Secondly, Russell never loses sight of the intellectual background in which Hume moved: both the Scottish society within which the project for the Treatise matured, and the wider European scene are carefully charted, so as to set Hume's ideas in the right perspective through careful analysis of the acrimonious debates between the ‘religious philosophers’ and the ‘speculative atheists’. Thus when Russell finally turns to the contemporary interpretative context, he is able to develop a sweeping critique of the current debate on the grounds that it has largely discounted the merits of proper historical consciousness, and thereby lost sight of Hume's irreligious objectives. Russell's examination convincingly assesses Hume as a philosopher who was firmly planted in the tradition of the ‘radical thinkers’, and who was fully aware, as early as in writing the Treatise, that he was landing a direct blow against Christianity and the philosophical theses which uphold it. Specifically, Russell shows that to comprehend Hume it is fundamental to look at two authors in particular, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Clarke. It is by situating Hume within the contention between Clarke's and his followers’ rationalistic defences of Christianity, and the atheists and ‘libertines’ who opposed them and embraced the legacy of Hobbes (and Spinoza), that one is able to see the irreligious project of the Treatise in proper context. On the one hand, we should relate Hume's activities to the dispute (in Scotland) between Andrew Baxter and William Dudgeon; on the other, the extent to which Hume had Hobbes in mind in composing the Treatise is revealed by its structural mirroring of Hobbes’ Elements of Law—as Russell is able to show. In developing his thesis, Russell accurately represents the positions of the several parties engaged in the debate; he thus provides an extremely useful and informative book, in which the terms of an extremely varied and lively philosophical discussion are well mastered and represented. That notwithstanding, Russell's ambition is not merely historiographical, but also, and chiefly, philosophical in the strict sense. His fundamental concern is for the intrinsic reasonableness of Hume's Treatise, in the belief that if a unitary interpretative key might be supplied, then justification for it must be primarily philosophical, not plainly historiographical. The key, as we have seen, is ‘irreligiousness’, in the peculiar Humean sense of a ‘virtuous atheism’. Herein lies a positive philosophical project, the aim of which is to programmatically dismantle the theoretical foundations of religion, and of Christianity in particular. Hume's ‘virtuous atheism’ uncovers ‘Hume's philosophy in the Treatise as fundamentally an effort to discredit the metaphysical and moral paraphernalia of orthodox religious systems and redirect human investigations to the study of the “science of man,” whereby we may develop a secular, scientific account of the foundations of moral and social life’ (p. 285). ‘Virtuous atheism’ is therefore Hume's way of realising his ‘Lucretian mission’ (a mission Russell himself appears to embrace) as an atheist philosopher willing to elaborate a philosophical anthropology, diametrically opposed to that Christianity has to offer. This mission promotes a naturalist and sentimental philosophy focused on establishing the conditions by which human beings may live free and happy lives, released from the yoke of religion. For Russell, ‘to the extent that we can remove religious barriers to education and knowledge, commerce and wealth, and liberty and tolerance, to that extent we may expect to dull and weaken the need for religion in human society’ (p. 299). This philosophical engagement, supported by impressive scholarly erudition, is among the virtues of Russell's book. Hume emerges as a great secular moralist, whose philosophy never loses sight of human beings as they are in ‘common life’. And if Humean philosophy preserves a sceptical component, this scepticism has to be understood, according to Russell, ‘dynamically’. That is to say, the negative dimension of Humean scepticism is given only at the speculative level, while at the practical level it corresponds to a sentimental philosophy which freed human beings from religious illusions and chimeras, thus allowing them to fully flourish. Hence, Hume's intentions find their right collocation thanks to a philosophically enlightened research, which allows to find continuity in what would otherwise remain a rather perplexing, even mysterious, enterprise – a charge frequently levelled against Hume. One possible shortcoming of Russell's work, from our point of view, lies in the priority accorded to the religious dimension as against the sentimentalist character of Hume's philosophy. Although we would not dispute that Hume's philosophy, as expressed in the Treatise, is irreligious, and credit Russell with having convincingly argued for this thesis, still we may ask if irreligiousness comes first in Hume's intentions, and not, rather, the wish to promote a science of human nature based on sentiment – a wish which in turn would lead, among its several outcomes and implications, a thorough attack on the philosophical grounds of religion. Under a sentimentalist account of Hume's argument, morality is inextricably dependent on the sentimental and affective constitution of human beings, and it is this fact which cuts off theology from ethics (for a recent discussion of this point, see Thomas Holden's Spectres of False Divinity: Hume's Moral Atheism, OUP, 2010). Thus, an alternative slant to the overall reading of Hume's project might be to see it as presenting a sentimentalist perspective which transcends the grounding of philosophy in the understanding alone, and thereby accomplishes the feat of overcoming the division between scepticism and naturalism; once again, we have a key which provides the sought‐after unity to the project of the Treatise. Still, there is a sense in which these points are no more than points of detail. For close inspection of Humean sentimentalism and irreligiousness proves them to be mutually dependent. This too is something which Russell's book has the merit of arguing splendidly.
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