Passion and Artifice in Hume’s Account of Superstition

Abstract

‘Superstition,’ Chambers wrote in the Cyclopedia, is ‘religion wrongly directed, or conducted.’2 Hume hardly attempted to disguise the fact that he took all popular religions to be superstitious. His stance not only transformed a familiar opposition between true and false religion into a critique of popular religion, but also raised questions about the very existence of true religion. Martin Be113 effectively describes the extent of Hume’s endorsement of the stock phrases of the eighteenth century concerning superstition. The identification of superstition with false religion, the characterisation of Catholicism as superstitious, even the description of psychological causes of superstition, were all constituents of a perspective that had become common by the time Hume wrote. The unique feature of Hume’s analysis of superstition, according to Bell, the redrawing (or erasing) of the line between superstition and popular religion, was made possible by Hume’s use of the theory of human nature, and in particular the theory of the imagination, developed in detail in the Treatise.