The articulate voice from the clouds and the natural library of Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Abstract

This article examines the curious examples that the character Cleanthes presents in Part III of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, namely: i) the articulate voicefrom the clouds (D 3 § 2: 48) and ii) the natural library filled with books which perpetuate themselves in the same manner as animals and vegetables, that is, by descent and propagation (D 3 § 4: 49). The examples, as we shall see, are mental experiments that Cleanthes offers to respond to Philo’s first objections to the argument from design. Among the commentators of Hume’s works, William Morris takes them as bizarre, irrelevant and inconsistent with the experimental methodology of Cleanthes. E. Rabbitte claims that the examples show that Cleanthes missed the central point of Philo’s critique and appears sympathetic to Kemp Smith’s interpretation that the examples serve to illustrate Cleanthes’ failure to recognize the strength and extent of Philo’s critique of the analogy implied in the argument from design and to prepare the way for Philo’s counter-arguments to Cleanthes’ theory. Keith Yandell, in turn, thinks that Cleanthes’ strategy in these examples seems quite appropriate. Based on this set of different interpretations, I intend to clarify the meaning and relationship of these examples with Philo’s critique of the argument from design and to show that, in fact, they may be considered bizarre, but play a key role in the argumentative strategy of Philo and Hume in the Dialogues as a whole, as Smith and Yandell suggest.