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Michael Ramel Poem
The mind doesn't passively await impressions, no tabula rasa,
The mind is active, understanding, not just a passerby.
He had bete noire towards Christianity, a Scottish Nominalist,
David Hume, born in Edenborough, was a philosophical skeptic.
Born in 1711, died in 1776,
Two months after America’s Independence, a historical prolix.
Pride was Hume’s downfall, a struggle he couldn't hide,
Extinguishing it or moderating or giving into his guide.
People do not move impartially from their theory of knowledge,
To there is no God, like Hume, they hold a grudge.
How can you hate a God you don’t believe in?
To deal with the guilt, they engage in veiled sin.
At least Barkley and Locke defended their Christianity,
Didn’t walk with Hume to skepticism, an absurd reality.
Nothing can be known of the external, internal,
Science, morality, or God, Hume’s view was infernal.
At 23, Hume went to France to write his Treatise,
In 1738, his magnum opus fell, dead born, no protectant lee
Denied the Chair of Moral Philosophy,
Served The Marquis of Annandale, a paid advisory.
Served General Sinclair, British Ambassador to Vienna,
John Witherspoon’s disdain for Hume’s philosophical dilemma.
Hume was again denied a professorship,
So, he became a Librarian, still aboard his sinking ship.
Morals confronted Hume throughout his life,
A struggle from early on, a youthful strife.
His literary works, circular reasoning,
An ethical axe grinding, against God, unpleasing.
His hostility towards the Puritans and Calvin,
The Humean cult of dilettantes, not a philosophical haven.
He was rejected early on, now he is on top,
James Bosworth called on Hume as he approached the final stop.
Eternity is a most unreasonable fancy,
The morality of every religion, a bad legacy.
Religious people were rascals, a serious charge,
Not a playful term, but a critique large.
When the philosophical questions got tough Hume wanted to play games
And said all philosophies should be consigned to the flames
Abstruseness of philosophers, difficult questions they ask,
When Hume had difficulty, he’d play backgammon, a simpler task.
What is an idea? Opposite to impressions,
Degree of vivacity, a mind’s expressions.
Antecedent feelings, sense perceptions,
Impressions of perceptions, empirical reflections.
What impression is the idea derived? Seek it out antecedently,
The empirical criterion, not empirically derived, evidently.
Psychological atomism, compounded perceptions,
Observations of individual perceptions are random connections.
Resemblance, contiguity, cause and effect,
Nominalists believe in particulars, universals reject.
Hume denies the legitimacy of these:
The God of the Middle Ages, the leviathan of Hobbs,
The inconsistent Christianity of Locke and Barkley,
Hume said all philosophy is inconsistent, a paradox, oddly.
Trace everything back to sensation,
Selfhood is not sensational, a philosophical foundation.
Like Descartes’ self-doubting method,
Hume employs an antecedent sensation system, the same thread.
No sensation of self-identity,
Is it really you or really me?
Disjointed but a bundle, how can that be?
If all you have is sensation, what’s between sensational moments, do you see?
When you look in a mirror, do you see your personal identity?
No, you see particular traits, a mind’s entity.
Identity is a property of the mind, a perception of imagination,
No external world in Hume’s worldview, a philosophical isolation.
Again, no connection of ideas in our minds,
Only contiguous colliding of impressions, a philosophical bind.
Is the external world just an illusion, as the Hindu might say,
The basis of belief in the external world, psychological, in a way.
Does Hume have the right to judge my psychological ideas,
When he judges not the world but someone’s psychology, a philosophical plea.
Did Hume destroy substance, self-identity, external world, and causation?
As a Christian, we can say the future will be like the past, a divine
confirmation.
Back to the ethical axe that needs grinding,
From a man who struggled with pride, a philosophical finding.
Holy, Holy, and wholly we must live for the God,
Who Intelligentsia attempted to escape, the Judge of the Universe, a Divine
nod.
Descartes: I think therefore I am,
Hume: Psychological habit, a philosophical jam.
From the first Adam to the penultimate Adam,
We have concocted arbitrary devices to save our sin, a sinful anthem.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God,
For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit, another Divine
nod.
In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God,
What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is God.
This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom,
But in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities, a divine
kingdom.
The person with the spirit does not accept the things from the Spirit of God,
But considers them foolishness, and cannot understand, an ambiguous facade.
The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things,
But such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, to God we can
sing.
For “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ, a divine hymn.
All Kant did was psychologize Hume’s problematic answer,
To his own skepticism, a philosophical dancer.
Hume never came to an understanding of the problem,
Of how to fit nonexistent universals into the world of particulars, a mind long
gone.
“It’s hard to hold a candle with wax melting on your hand,”
My philosophical reprimand.
God is the Original Know-It-All, God knows all things,
He doesn’t learn something new, Oh saints rejoice in Him The Divine King.
Copyright © Michael Ramel | Year Posted 2025
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