ABSTRACT
This chapter is in two parts. The first part contains an overview of Hume’s philosophy of religion, and a rejection of the popular framework drawn in terms of the distinction between reasons and causes, in favour of an alternative based on the distinction between superstition and true religion. Hume’s attitude to enthusiasm (the other main corruption of true religion in Christian apologetics at the time) is also briefly examined. The second part then places Hume’s Natural History of Religion in its historical context, by examining the views of Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan , John Trenchard’s treatment of religious experience in his Natural History of Superstition, and Lord Viscount Bolingbroke’s Essay on the Folly and Presumption of Philosophers (to which William Warburton compared Hume’s Natural History). It is argued that a ‘natural history’ in the relevant sense is essentially a psychological study rather than a historical one, and that Hume’s Natural History constitutes an extension of his philosophy of emotion.
