al. His speculations in reference to religion
are chiefly contained in his Essays on the Human Understanding. A brief
explanation is necessary to show the dependence of his theology on his
philosophy.

The speculations of Locke, as we have before had occasion to notice, gave
an impulse to psychological investigations. He clearly saw that knowledge
is limited by the faculties which are its source, which he considered to
be reducible to sensation and reflection; but while denying the existence
of innate ideas, he admitted the existence of innate faculties. Hartley
carried the analysis still farther, by introducing the potent instrument
offered by the doctrine of the association of ideas. Hume, adopting this
principle, applied it, in a manner very like the independent
contemporaneous speculations of Condillac in France, to analyse the
faculties themselves into sensations, and to furnish a more complete
account of the nature of some of our most general ideas, such, for
example, as the notion of cause. The intellectual element implied in
Locke's account of the process of reflection here drops out. Faculties are
regarded as transformed sensations; the nature of knowledge as coextensive
with sensation. According to such a theory therefore, the idea of physical
cause can mean nothing more than the invariable connexion of antecedent
and consequent. The notion of force or power which we attach to causation
becomes an unreality; being an idea not given in sensation, which can
merely detect sequence.

Such was Hume's psychology; an attempt to push analysis to its ultimate
limits; valuable in its method, even if defective in its results; a
striking example of the acuteness and subtle penetration of its author.
There is another branch of his philosophy in which he is regarded as a
metaphysical sceptic, in reference to the passage of the mind outwards, by
means of its own sensations and ideas, into the knowledge of real being,
wherein he takes part with Berkeley, extending to the inner world of soul
the scepticism which that philosopher had applied to the outer world of
matter. In the psychological branch Hume is a sensationalist, in the
ontological a sceptic. The latter however has no relation to our present
subject. It is from the former that his views on religion are deduced. In
no writer is the logical dependence of religious opinion on metaphysical
principles visible in a more instructive manner. For we perceive that the
influen