 The general view defended by Bentley, and many other apologists for religion, is that without religious principles and institutions to guide and motivate us, the moral world will collapse into nihilism, egoism and the arbitrary rule of power. This view of things was further confirmed, as Hume’s near contemporaries saw it, by the philosophy of Hobbes. Hobbes’s basic philosophical project was to advance a secular, scientific account of moral and political life. The foundation of this, however, rests with egoism and moral scepticism. That is to say, according to Hobbes, human nature is driven by psychological egoism and there is no real distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, just or unjust. It was a major task of Hume’s philosophy — particularly as presented in the Treatise — to reconstruct Hobbes’s secular, scientific account of morality while at the same time avoiding the extreme (undiluted) elements of moral scepticism and egoism present in it. Another way of stating these aims, is to say that Hume wanted to show that “speculative atheism” did not imply “practical atheism” or moral licentiousness.