Book: Four Dissertations

Overview
David Hume’s Four Dissertations (1757) gathers four closely connected essays on religion, human psychology, and the arts: The Natural History of Religion, Of the Passions, Of Tragedy, and Of the Standard of Taste. The volume exemplifies Hume’s naturalistic program: explain belief, emotion, and aesthetic value by tracing them to ordinary human sentiments and the operations of imagination and custom rather than to abstract metaphysical principles. The collection also shows his effort to bring the “experimental” approach of observation and causal explanation to topics commonly reserved for theology or rationalist aesthetics.

The Natural History of Religion
Hume asks how religious belief arises and changes over time. He argues that religion originates not from philosophical reasoning about the cosmos but from common human anxieties, hopes, and the tendency to personify unknown causes. Polytheism appears first because it naturally extends everyday experience to a world of limited, anthropomorphic powers influencing fortune, weather, and health. Monotheism, by contrast, is a later refinement driven by philosophical generalization and the urge toward unity and order. Hume emphasizes that neither form reliably promotes virtue. Polytheism may be tolerant but is prone to superstition; monotheism aspires to sublimity but can breed dogmatism and zeal. Across both, credulity, fear, and the search for control over uncertainty guide religious imagination. He repeatedly distinguishes the “origin” question, what leads humans to believe, from the “truth” question, suggesting that tracing belief to passion and custom weakens claims that religion rests on pure reason.

Of the Passions
This dissertation condenses Hume’s moral psychology. Passions are impressions of reflection, feelings that arise within the mind, organized by their causes and effects. Some are direct, like desire, aversion, hope, and fear, which spring from anticipated pleasure or pain and vary with probability; hence the oscillation between hope and fear when outcomes are uncertain. Others are indirect, notably pride, humility, love, and hatred, which depend on a double relation of ideas and impressions: an object related to the self (or another) that is also associated with pleasure or pain. Sympathy transmits sentiments across persons, explaining how others’ fortunes move us and how reputation matters. Reason discovers relations of fact, but motive force belongs to passion; the will follows sentiment, and moral appraisal tracks how character traits elicit pleasing or painful responses in suitably situated observers.

Of Tragedy
Hume addresses the paradox of tragic pleasure: why audiences seek out scenes of sorrow, terror, and distress. His solution appeals to the conversion and predominance of sentiments. The painful passions raised by a tragic story are accompanied and overbalanced by the delight taken in eloquence, composition, imitation, and the conscious safety of spectatorship. Art channels tumultuous emotions into an agreeable exercise; energy and attention are heightened by the very passions that, in life, would be painful. The craft of the poet, diction, plot, proportion, supplies a governing pleasure that transforms the overall experience into one we value.

Of the Standard of Taste
Hume reconciles the maxim that beauty is felt, not proved, with the evident fact that some critical judgments seem better than others. Though taste is founded in sentiment, there is a standard grounded in the joint verdict of competent critics: persons with delicacy of taste, extensive practice and comparison, sound understanding, freedom from prejudice, and proper attention to the work. Time tests reputations by filtering out fashion and accident, allowing durable excellences to emerge. Yet diversity of manners and moral outlook explains some persistent disagreement, especially where works rely on contested norms. The essay thus defends critical norms without abandoning the primacy of feeling.

Significance
Taken together, the dissertations replace appeals to abstract reason or religious authority with explanations rooted in human nature. They offer a unified picture: passions drive belief and action, art refines and redirects those passions, and standards of criticism arise from cultivated sensibility rather than demonstrative proof. The volume became a cornerstone of Enlightenment debates on religion, moral psychology, and aesthetics, shaping later thinking from Romantic theory to modern criticism.