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a causal explanation, but concludes nevertheless that “the whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery” (NHR 87). “The suggestion is that a moral account of popular religious practices (of the sort Hume gave of the seemingly irrational behavior of Athenian politics) is needed but is not available. It is for this reason that Hume is forced to describe the practices of popular religion pathologically as ‘the playthings of monkeys or sick men’s dreams.’”²¹

      Livingston offers a subtle account to show why Hume’s rejection of providential history is justified. Hume, Livingston argues, regarded historical order as mind dependent. History is not a structure objectively present in the world but is “internal to a certain point of view of the world and would not exist at all if people did not adopt that point of view.”²² Still, like moral or aesthetic judgment, historical judgment is not arbitrary or merely relative to some partisan perspective; “the point of view in question is not considered by Hume to be relative to this or that historian; it is a point of view written into the very idea of history.”²³ Historical order is, for Hume, perceived with reference to a grand story line, “the story of the ‘improvements of the human mind.’”²⁴ This theme is not arbitrarily chosen or projected; rather, it is a “received historical theme,” which serves to constitute the community to which Hume addresses himself, “all reasonable people,” “the party of humankind” (EHU 10.27 /125; EPM 9.9/275). “The community would cease to be what it is if that story were no longer told.”²⁵ Therefore, the project of narrating the story of the improvements of the human mind is a condition of the possibility of the existence of humankind.

      Providential history, like Hume’s history and his History, is governed by an overarching story line that brings order and unity to historical events. What is illicit about providential history is that it appeals to the future in order to judge the present, whereas Hume, argues Livingston, shows that it is only legitimate to appeal to the past in order to judge the present. In inferring a cause from an effect, Hume famously argues, we must carefully proportion the former to the latter; “the one can never refer to anything farther, or be the foundation of any new inference and conclusion” (EHU 11.14/137). It is only “vain reasoners” who “instead of regarding the present scene of things as the sole object of their contemplation, so far reverse the whole course of nature, as to render this life merely a passage to something farther; a porch, which leads to a greater, and vastly different building; a prologue, which serves only to introduce the piece, and give it more grace and propriety” (EHU 11.21/141). Providential historians assert that they have knowledge of future events. They attempt to narrate the future, to cast the future into the past tense.²⁶ It is not that they hope or anticipate something in the future, or even that they attempt to predict future events, but that they foresee or foretell the future. Thus, the present is viewed “in terms of future events thought of as, in some sense, already having happened.”²⁷ Many of our concepts, Livingston argues, are past entailing; they hold only if some past-tense statement is true: “is a wife,” “is a priest,” “is a gold-medal winner.” These are critical to the “narrative imagination” and “constitute the conceptual framework of the moral world.”²⁸ We cannot make sense of the present, and certainly cannot coherently evaluate present states of affairs, except with reference to the past. From this Livingston concludes that “social and political legitimacy, in the broadest sense, is constituted by narrative relations holding between past and present existences where the past is viewed as a standard conferring legitimacy on the present and, as Hume paradoxically observes, where the present may also be taken as a standard for conferring legitimacy on the past.”²⁹ Providential history, though, derives its standards not from past or present but from future events, “and these confer not legitimacy but, necessarily, illegitimacy on the present society.”³⁰

      There are several difficulties with Livingston’s analysis of Hume’s attack on providential history. First, Hume’s strictures against those who “reverse the whole course of nature” by making this life “merely a passage to something further” are aimed at those who act for the sake of life in the world to come, a supernatural mode of existence. Inferences to a historical future are something quite different from inferences to an eternal future, and Hume’s attack does not clearly encompass the former, only the latter. Hume focuses on the difficulty of making new inferences from a cause whose existence has been inferred from a single work or production. “The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single being in the universe, not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities, we can, by analogy, infer any attribute or quality in him” (EHU 11.26/144). We can thus infer from experienced effect to divine cause, but cannot infer from this anything that we have not actually experienced as caused by God. Given that human nature and agency are not, unlike God and the universe, a “single work or production,” but rather something of which we have experienced very many instances, we can legitimately construct covering laws governing human agency and use these to infer to the future. The problem with providential history, in Hume’s eyes, is thus not its reference to the future as such, but its claim that God is the cause of history, and more particularly with claims to know a future beyond history.

      Second, even if Hume were successful in undermining the possibility of inferences from past or present to the future, this would not (as Livingston concedes) render illegitimate attempts to predict the future, hope for the future, or hypothesize about the future. Nor does it undercut criticism of the present order on the basis of an imagined and hoped-for future. This is important, since it is not at all clear that all forms of providential history, or even all forms of providential history present in eighteenth-century thought, involve a claim to know the future, to view the future as though it has already happened. Some forms of providential history look to the restoration of a past golden age, thus conforming to Livingston’s stricture that the past be the source for present legitimacy.³¹ Some combine keen hope for the future with an insistence on the impossibility of knowing the future, often rooted in Jesus’s reminder that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). Some see the end of history as inevitable but regard events within history as themselves open, an arena for free, undetermined human action. Some expect catastrophe to usher in a new transhistorical age, while others, focusing on the notion of a millennium, expect gradual improvement culminating in a new historical golden age; the latter, at least, are hardly alienated from the present or tempted to violent revolution.³² And while there were many eighteenth-century theologians who thought it was possible and worthwhile to offer rational proofs of the existence of a future life beyond history, or, like Joseph Priestley, to attempt to discern in contemporary events the guiding hand of God, such efforts are not necessary concomitants of Christian or other sorts of religious faith and indeed have been subject to theological critique as misguided assertions of the power of human reason where a stance of faith is more appropriate. What is needed, then, is a more fine-grained description, which is capable of differentiating among a variety of Christian views of history, all of which might be termed providential in some sense, but not all of which are subject to Livingston’s critique. One result will be that Hume’s own grand story line of the improvement of the human mind will no longer appear sharply distinct from at least some forms of providential history. Hume rejected providential history but embraced his own teleology of progress, one that appealed not, as did nineteenth-century historiography, to an abstract scheme, but one that embodied hope for the future.³³As Noel Jackson notes, “Hume offered a mode of historiography that catered to the needs of a credit economy that depended for its own prosperity upon the image of a stable and largely secular future.”³⁴ Hume’s ordering of the past certainly orients him to the future in a particular way; he hopes for the triumph of the “party of humankind” and for the demise of the monkish virtues, even as his inferences based on past experiences of human nature do not give him excessive confidence that his hopes will be realized. To be able to speak of improvements of the human mind implies not only a point of departure judged vicious or imperfect, but also an imagined perfection of the human mind, in light of which the present is discerned as improved but still imperfect.³⁵

      Finally, it is hardly clear that providential history

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