An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding · Chapter
Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State explained
In this chapter, the narrator engages in a dialogue with Epicurus, who argues that we cannot infer any new facts about divine providence or a future state from the observed order of nature.
What happens
In this chapter, the narrator engages in a dialogue with Epicurus, who argues that we cannot infer any new facts about divine providence or a future state from the observed order of nature. Epicurus maintains that all reasoning must proceed from effects to causes, and that we cannot legitimately add attributes to the cause beyond what appears in the effect. The narrator raises objections about the practical influence of religious belief on conduct, but ultimately the discussion reinforces the limits of human understanding and the role of custom and experience as the only guides for life.
Themes in this chapter
Skepticism and the Limits of Human Understanding
Epicurus argues that human reason cannot legitimately infer divine attributes or a future state beyond what is observed in the course of nature.
Causation and Necessary Connection
The chapter emphasizes that reasoning must proceed from effects to causes, and that inferring from causes to effects is a sophism.
Custom and Habit as Guides
Epicurus asserts that the experienced train of events is the only standard for regulating conduct, and that no new principles can be derived from religious hypotheses.
Characters to notice
- Narrator
Engages in dialogue with Epicurus, raising objections about the practical influence of religious belief on conduct and society.
- Epicurus
Defends the position that no new facts about providence or a future state can be inferred from the observed order of nature, and that all reasoning must be from effects to causes.
Key passages
“All the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life.”
Neither philosophy nor religion can take us beyond ordinary experience or provide different rules for behavior than those we learn from everyday life.
Epicurus emphasizes that all knowledge and guidance for action must come from experience, not from speculative religious or philosophical systems.
“You seem not to remember, that all your reasonings on this subject can only be drawn from effects to causes; and that every argument, deducted from causes to effects, must of necessity be a gross sophism; since it is impossible for you to know anything of the cause, but what you have antecedently, not inferred, but discovered to the full, in the effect.”
You forget that all reasoning about this topic must go from effects to causes; any argument that goes from causes to effects is a fallacy, because you can only know the cause through what you have already fully observed in the effect.
Epicurus reiterates the principle that we cannot legitimately infer new facts about a cause beyond what is already present in the effect.