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Religion and the ‘sensitive branch’ of human nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

BENJAMIN D. CROWE
BENJAMIN D. CROWE*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, 215 S. Central Campus Drive, Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, Room 402, Salt Lake City, UT84112
*
e-mail: bcrowe@philosophy.utah.edu
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Abstract

While the theses that (1) human beings are primarily passional creatures and that (2) religion is fundamentally a product of our sensible nature are both closely linked to David Hume, Hume's contemporary Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), also defended them and explored their implications. Importantly, Kames does not draw the same sceptical conclusions as does Hume. Employing a sophisticated account of the rationality of what he calls the ‘sensitive branch’ of human nature, Kames argues that religion plays a central role in the development and perfection of human life.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 251 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. For a clear account of the religious controversy surrounding Kames's views on free will and providence, see Ian S. Ross ‘The natural theology of Lord Kames’, in Paul Wood (ed.) The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 335–350. A more lengthy account of the affair can be found in Ross's excellent intellectual biography of Lord Kames, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 152–165.

2. David Hume Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, J. A. C. Gaskin (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184.

3. On the relationship between Kames's account of the history of religion and Hume's Natural History, see Christopher J. Berry ‘Rude religion: the psychology of polytheism in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Wood The Scottish Enlightenment, 315–334. Berry points out that, unlike Hume, Kames is committed to the idea that religion is, in some sense, an instinctual response that is universal among human beings (318).

4. William C. Lehmann captures this part of Kames's distinctiveness when he observes that, for Kames, natural religion is ‘a product of intuition and experience, and while not itself a product of reason, yet as rationally arrived at and as always in harmony with the demands of man's God-given reason’. See his Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 274. The present essay can be viewed, in part, as an attempt to fill in Lehmann's suggestive comments.

5. For some of the more important studies of this topic, see: Eric J. Sharpe Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1986); J. Samuel Preus Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Peter Byrne Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London: Routledge, 1989); and Peter Harrison ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6. Ross ‘The natural theology of Lord Kames’, 336.

7. See especially Robert C. Roberts Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007), and Mark R. Wynn Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception, and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

8. Ross Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, 101.

9. Henry Home, Lord Kames Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Mary Catherine Moran (ed.) (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2005).

10. Henry Home, Lord Kames Elements of Criticism, 2 vols, Peter Jones (ed.) (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2005).

11. For this useful phrase, see EC, 14.

12. See, for example, Hutcheson's account of the ‘internal sense’ of beauty: ‘This superior Power of Perception is justly called a sense, because of its Affinity to the other senses in this, that the Pleasure does not arise from any knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or of the Usefulness of the object; but strikes us at first with the Idea of Beauty: nor does the most accurate Knowledge increase this Pleasure from prospects of Advantage, or from the Increase of Knowledge.’ See Francis Hutcheson An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Wolfgang Leidhold (ed.) (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), 25.

13. For a helpful discussion of this ‘sentimentalist’ approach to religion, derived in part from Shaftesbury, see Isabel Rivers's magisterial Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, II: Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Rivers briefly discusses Kames's place in this tradition on 257–260.

14. Henry Home, Lord Kames Sketches of the History of Man, Book III, James A. Harris (ed.) (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2007).

15. For a fascinating account of the debate over innateness, see Daniel Carey Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

16. Francis Hutcheson An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett (ed.) (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 2002), 8.

17. ‘The principles of the fine arts appear in this view to open a direct avenue to the heart of man. The inquisitive mind beginning with criticism, the most agreeable of all amusements, and finding no obstruction in its progress, advances far into the sensitive part of our nature; and gains imperceptibly a thorough knowledge of the human heart, of its desires, and of every motive to action; a science, which of all that can be reached by man, is to him of the greatest importance’; EC, 32. For Herder's reference to Kames, see J. G. Herder, ‘Critical forests: fourth grove’, in Gregory Moore (ed.) Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 276–278.

18. Thanks to Lex Newman for a helpful discussion of the concept of an ‘internal sense’ in the Lockean tradition, as well as to an anonymous reviewer for Religious Studies for a number of useful comments.