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According to the irreligious interpretation, there are two key claims that Hume seeks to establish in the Treatise in respect of morality. The first is that Hume defends the “autonomy of morality” in relation to religion. The foundations of moral and political life, he holds, rest with our human nature, not with the doctrines and dogmas of (Christian) religion. Closely connected with this issue, Hume also aims to show that “speculative atheism” does not imply “practical atheism” or any kind of “moral licentiousness.” Taken together, these two components of Hume's moral system constitute a defence and interpretation of “virtuous atheism.”

In this chapter it is argued that Hume’s stress on experiment in moral philosophy has one of its primary sources in Butler’s criticisms of Clarke’s moral rationalism and his arguments for a moral philosophy based on probable reason and restricted to experience. Butler avoids claims about providence and other metaphysical explanations (without at the same time denying their existence), and it is important to understand the origin of his sermons at the Rolls Chapel as discourses to lawyers. Butler also anatomized human nature and tried to give an account of what morals are for creatures like us, both of which prefigure and likely influenced Hume.

Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.

This chapter examines the connections between non-fictional discourses, such as periodicals and philosophy, and the development of the novel. While veracity in narrative still mattered to eighteenth-century readers, the divisions between fact and fiction were more flexible than now, and ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ remained ambiguous terms. Like the emerging novel, early eighteenth-century periodical essays, like those of Defoe, Addison and Steele, seek to capture the flux of contemporary experience through a distinctive persona with a focus on the quotidian. Even austere philosophical treatises such as Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are partly grounded in narrative elements and feature strong personae. A more playful philosophical work like Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristics is also deeply novelistic in its dialogical style and exploration of personal experience, individuality, and sociability, while Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees anticipates later novels with its anti-idealistic sense of social determinism.

The chapter deals mainly with the ‘Essay on Taste’, situates Reid’s position in the debate opened up by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and makes three points: the first about the nature of aesthetic perception; the second about its object, ‘excellence’; and the third about the location of beauty in the forms of nature or works of art, where excellence is expressed. Taste should be viewed as a social operation of the mind. In some cases, it involves a communication from God to human beings. The psychological approach to aesthetic perceptionmust be complemented by a metaphysical account of what makes us feel the beautiful or the grand.