cannot be regarded as selfish. In cases of approbation or reproach our viewpoint is social rather than private. If, e. g., we regard justice as a good attribute, it must be due to the fact that we take a sympathetic attitude towards human life as a whole. It may perhaps be that we at first admire justice solely on account of interest in our own security; but this does not furnish the motive for the appreciation of justice in all those cases which bear no relation to our private welfare. Sympathy or fellow- feeling is therefore the fundamental motive of ethical evaluation;
Hume likewise opposes the intellectualistic conception in the philosophy of religion, just as he does in ethics. He instituted a twofold investigation into the problem of knowledge and he likewise follows the same plan in the matter of religion; i. e. he investigates both the psychological origin of religion and the validity of religious ideas.
Religion does not originate from purely intellectual motives, but from fear and hope, and from the disposition to think of all other beings after human analogy. Primitive man represents the beings to which he takes refuge in the fearful moments of his life in very imperfect form. But the native disposition to expand and idealize is also in evidence here, and man gradually recognizes that his God must be an infinite being and that there can be but one God. Parallel with this idealizing tendency, which has the effect of elevating Deity far above anything human and placing Him at a great distance from the finite world, there is another counter tendency which endeavors to represent Deity as near at hand, present and intuitively perceivable, and religion reveals a constant tendency to oscillate between these two extremes.
