The Notorious

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toc pas Edi (aft wa: off: ser anc anc pai spi che sup buI the ticism is a turning point bourgeois philosophy.

He took Locke's empiricism -the view that the senses are the basis of all knowledge - and drove it, with ruthless logic, to more far-reaching conclusions than Locke had ever dared.

EXPERIENCE

He denied there was any reason innate in man, arguing that all our thoughts, and our moral feelings, arise directly or indirectly from experience and are formed through habit.

Up to Hume's time, philosophers had described and mapped the human mind, always discovering in it certain universal elements -*reason', "moral sense' and so on -which were generally used to justify the immortality of the soul.

to the Labour and Trade Union bureaucrats. This element of the Karl Marx Hume, the arch-empiricist, put the "soul' in his philosopher's crucible, analysed it with logic and roasted it with irony, and discovered - that there was nothing permanent or absolute in it at all!

And he went further, to point out that neither logic nor religion could ever give "proofs' for the existence of man's natural world and still less for God's supernatural one.

*To have recourse to the veracity of the Supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses," Hume sarcastically concluded, "is surely making a very unexpected circuit. If his veracity were at all concerned in the matter, our senses would be entirely infallible; because it is not possible he can ever deceive.

"Not to mention that, if the external world be once called in question, we shall be at a loss to find arguments, by which we may prove the existence of that Being or any of his attributes." (Enquiry Concerning Understanding, para. 120).

Such results greatly upset the clergy. It is easy to understand why