Saturday (6/25/22) - only the first rude essay of some infant deity

I came across the following quotation:

"El mundo es tal vez un bosquejo rudimentario de algún dios infantil, que lo abandonó a medio hacer, avergonzado de su ejecución deficiente." Jorge Luis Borges

"The world is perhaps a rudimentary sketch of some infant god, who abandoned it half-finished, ashamed of its poor execution." Jorge Luis Borges

The actual quote I believe is from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", Collected Non-Fictions, (translated by Eliot Weienberger):

"This world," wrote David Hume, "was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on . . ." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion V [1779]). 

The quote is attributed to Hume, then. What did Hume actually say? In Part V of the Dialogues:

"In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, ..., at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES's suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all."

Secondat unpacks this and what Hume actually may have meant in more nuance.*  Briefly, Hume seems to be saying the opposite, that permitting the concept of God to be limited rather than infinite, necessitates this conclusion, and therefore God should be thought of as infinite, or perhaps an infinite process. 

So we have a strange nested sort of Matrioshka configuration, in which a quote, without reference to Hume is now directly attributed to Borges, who only reported the quote as a paraphrase of Hume's in a non-fictional note, which was actually taking as Hume's idea what Hume had put in the mouth of Philo in a dialogue with Cleanthes.  It is not even what Philo thought, but rather the logical extension of the assumption of Cleanthes that God is limited and not infinite, which Philo rejects and is arguing against.

*{Source of the Alamut Borges piece: Translated from the Spanish 'El idioma analítico de John Wilkins' by Lilia Graciela Vázquez; edited by Jan Frederik Solem with assistance from Bjørn Are Davidsen and Rolf Andersen. A translation by Ruth L. C. Simms can be found in Jorge Luis Borges, 'Other inquisitions 1937-1952' (University of Texas Press, 1993)}

NB: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins mentions the [fictional, unreal] Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, attributed the [real, non-fictional] translator, Dr. Franz Kuhn, translator of the real, but fictional, Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese novel.  There is a wiki page for Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. 

Afterword

There is a lengthy quote from Chesterton at the end of this article.  It is from (G.F. Watts (1904), 88). Here it is, in extended form:

There is one definite current conception on which this idea that Watts’ allegorical art is merely literary is eventually based. It is based upon the idea that lies at the root of rationalism, at the root of useless logomachies, at the root, in no small degree, of the whole modern evil. It is based on the assumption of the perfection of language. Every religion and every philosophy must, of course, be based on the assumption of the authority or the accuracy of something. But it may well be questioned whether it is not saner and more satisfactory to ground our faith on the infallibility of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Book of Mormon, than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human speech. 

Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainly{44} what you mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another, “Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. 

Whenever, on the other hand, a man rebels faintly or vaguely against this way of speaking, whenever a man says that he cannot explain what he means, and that he hates argument, that his enemy is misrepresenting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage, and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. Whenever a man refuses to be caught by some dilemma about reason and passion, or about reason and faith, or about fate and free-will, he has seen the truth. Whenever a man declines to be cornered as an egotist, or an altruist, or any such modern monster, he has seen the truth. For the truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing, a thing invented by hunters, and killers, and such artists long before science was dreamed of. The truth is simply that—that the tongue is not a reliable instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and dangerous, like music or fire.