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be capable of entering into the logic governing foreign beliefs and practices. Still, Hume draws limits to the scope of hermeneutic analysis. On Hume’s account, theistic belief is self-contradictory, requires self-deception, and gives rise to unintelligible behavior. The “moral scientist” is thus licensed to suspend the hermeneutic enterprise and turn to other kinds of explanation. Are these limits justified? We cannot assess them by recourse to external standards, since no such standards are available to us. We can, though, assess them from within, developing an internal critique. The boundaries Hume sets for the range of sympathetic understanding are plausible only if “artificial lives” can be clearly distinguished from the wide range of variation exhibited by “natural lives.” As we will see, on closer examination the distinction crumbles; theistic belief and practice offer no intrinsic barrier to understanding. Indeed, Hume’s own historiographical practice offers evidence of this. Further, Hume’s refusal of providential history can be made plausible only if something like his distinction between natural and artificial lives can be maintained; absent this, Hume’s own philosophical history emerges as itself providential in character.

      Hume’s argument that religious lives constitute a special exception to the task of arriving at an internal grasp of foreign perspectives is sometimes replicated by Hume scholars, as we see in Donald Livingston’s endorsement of Hume’s critique of providential history. Moreover, the special treatment Hume gave to theism has helped to legitimate modern historiography as an enterprise that is not merely methodologically naturalistic but actually metaphysically naturalistic. It remains the case in contemporary historiography that religion is often subjected to reductionistic analysis in scholarship otherwise devoted to the task of understanding people on their own terms.¹ The cost, in terms of missed opportunities for understanding, is high.

      Relinquishing the Search for External Standards

      David Hume: Philosophical Historian, published in 1965 by David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin, played a key role in catalyzing a reassessment of the relationship between Hume as historian and Hume as philosopher. It did so by characterizing Hume’s historical writings as an expression of his constructive skepticism. The selection of texts—from Hume’s Treatise, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, History of England, essays, and letters—along with the editors’ introductory essays, issued a challenge to the established view that there was no intrinsic connection between Hume’s philosophical and historical work. At times, Hume’s philosophy had been viewed as antihistorical; indeed, even his overtly historical writings had been judged to be antihistorical.² Norton and Popkin insisted instead that even Hume’s “most ‘philosophical’ work is historical.”³ While the essential nature of reality cannot be known, the regularities of experience can be, and it is with these that the historian is occupied. Nevertheless, Norton argued that Hume’s new skeptical science was hounded by the same skeptical problems that its focus on appearances was designed to avoid. What is appearance and what is reality, in this case with respect to the past? “In the science of man as much as in purely speculative metaphysics, a criterion of truth appears to be lacking, so that custom and education, one’s personal experiences, play an overriding, though logically indefensible, part in the formation of the judgments and claims making up that science—just as the skeptics had claimed they did in the formation of man’s speculative theories.”⁴ Norton argued that Hume developed an implicit critical method in response to this problem, seeking to authenticate written documents and weigh the value of testimony. Nevertheless, Norton concluded that the assessment of evidence remains finally “a matter of personal opinion and prior decision”; there is “still no external or shared standard by which evidence can be evaluated.”⁵ He appealed to “Of Miracles” to bolster his claim that Hume consciously accepted the fact that individual experience is our final standard, seeing this as the only way to avoid a patent circularity in the argument (i.e., disputes over the past are settled by appealing to the past). We decide a priori whether we will take certain kinds of evidence seriously or not, and we do so on the basis of our own experience. Hume’s method, then, is permeated with subjective elements. Norton concludes that “Hume’s critical method, and with it, the science of man, failed, failed as he surely suggests all enterprises conceived after his model must fail”—even if we cannot refrain from forming opinions, and in this sense are licensed by nature to continue the enterprise.⁶

      If Norton saw Hume as a constructive skeptic, later interpreters would tend to emphasize the “constructive” aspect of this characterization. So Donald Livingston, who declares himself indebted to David Hume: Philosophical Historian for helping him see the unity of Hume’s philosophical and historical work, argues that Hume adhered to a philosophy of common life, according to which philosophy’s task is to “methodize and correct” the customs and judgments of common life, repudiating philosophy’s false pretension to stand above and outside all social convention.⁷ Hume gave up on the misguided attempt to know the real apart from human custom and judgment and accepted instead the task of reflecting on the real through these human conventions. This might be regarded as a form of mitigated skepticism, but it is better understood as a form of pragmatism, although Livingston himself does not invoke the term. Total skepticism, in contrast, is understood to be the outcome of a falsely autonomous conception of the task of philosophy. It continues to lurk as a threat only insofar as the temptation to an autonomous philosophy also continues to exercise residual charm. Within the philosophy of common life, in contrast, the process of piecemeal internal criticism continues unscathed.

      It is hardly surprising that such an interpretation of Hume’s thought would prove compelling in a postfoundationalist context, nor that Hume so understood would become the focus of a surge of philosophical attention. What, then, becomes of Norton’s diagnosis of the failure of Hume’s critical method, on this interpretation? “Custom and education” do play a key role in the formation of judgments and claims, including the evaluation of historical evidence. But if there is no “external” standard, there are nevertheless “shared” standards; the alternative is not between subjectivism on the one hand and autonomous, external, philosophical judgments on the other. Repudiating as an illusion the aspiration to external standards, Hume regards objectivity as constituted by intersubjective standards. These may, to be sure, be corrupted or provincial, but they are also, by the same token, always open to correction.

      History and the Task of Sympathetic Understanding

      There remains a danger that the philosophy of common life, having given up on objective standards of judgment in the strongest (if illusory) sense, will strive to portray as shared, communal standards the judgments of a narrow minority. And indeed Hume has been seen as having done precisely this. R. G. Collingwood, for instance, indicted Hume for imposing eighteenth-century values on the past and found Hume incapable of understanding a past age on its own terms. Alasdair MacIntyre accused Hume, more precisely, of championing the values of the English landowning class.⁸ But Hume was certainly well aware of the challenges posed to human society by differences in perspective: “‘twere impossible we cou’d ever make use of language, or communicate our sentiments to one another, did we not correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation.” (T 3.3.1.16/582)⁹ Moral judgment, he argued, requires that we give up our particular point of view, and consider character “in general, without reference to our particular interest” (T 3.1.2.4/472). It is not enough that we be disinterested, though; we must achieve a “sympathy with those, who have any commerce with the person we consider” (T 3.3.1.18/583). So a sympathetic understanding of the perspectives of others is vital to our capacity to evaluate others and hence bound up with the enterprise of history, which Hume unabashedly regards as normative.¹⁰ Historians, unlike poets, philosophers, and politicians, are the “true friends of virtue, and have always represented it in its proper colours” (E 567). History “keeps in a just medium” between the extremes of a cold and abstract philosophical perspective on the one hand and the “warped” judgment of the man of business on the scenes of life on the other; history “places the objects in their true point of view” (E 568). History is capable of doing this because it gives us a sympathetic understanding of those whose perspectives are initially alien to us, allowing us both to perceive and to assess their reasons for acting.

      This

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