British Intelligence Subversion: Shelburne and Bentham—Jeffrey Steinberg.1994.

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British empiricism started from Francis Bacon's inductive method based on sense certainty, all of which was taken directly from such Venetians as Paul Paruta and Pietro Sarpi. With Bacon is Thomas Hobbes, who wrote of human society as a war of all against all, necessarily dominated by a tyrannical leviathan state. Then came John Locke, for whom the human mind was a blank slate destined to be filled by sense perceptions. Locke's hedonism led him to the conclusion that human freedom was an absurd contradiction in terms. Locke was followed by the solipsist George Berkeley, who denied any basis in reality to our sense impressions: They are a kind of videotape played in each one of our heads by some unknown supernatural agency. Perception was the only existence there was.

Then came the Scots lawyer and diplomat David Hume. For Hume also, there is really no human self, but merely a bundle of changing perceptions. In his ``Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'' and other earlier works, Hume attacks the idea of cause and effect. For Hume, there is no necessary connection between a cause and an effect that the human mind can know with certainty; we only have a vague association or habit of thought that one phenomenon has been usually followed by another. But in these same earlier works, Hume had at least accepted the importance of filling the tabula rasa of each new human mind with a stock of received ideas of conduct which can be lumped under the heading of morals or custom, including religion.

During Hume's later years, the power of the Shelburne faction became dominant in Britain, and Hume's skepticism became bolder and more radical. The later Hume, as in his ``Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,'' totally repudiated the notion of custom and morality in favor of an unbridled hedonism that points toward the depths of pederasty and degradation inhabited by Jeremy Bentham.

Immanuel Kant, during his long teaching career in Königsberg, Prussia, had been a retailer of Hume's ideas. The two liberals Kant and Hume had a broad common ground in their determination to eradicate the influence of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But when Hume repudiated all notion of custom and traditional morality, even Kant could not follow. Kant responded with the Critique of Pure Reason to defend the notion of cause and effect as one of Aristotle's categories, against Hume, who had reached a sub-Aristotelian level. On this basis, Kant was able to defend customary ideas of religion and morality, das Sittengesetz.

The Kant-Hume split illustrates why British liberal empiricism tends to be several degrees more rotten than its continental European counterparts.

Original Link:
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/conf-iclc/1990s/conf_feb_1994_js.html