The Scottish Philosophy [72]
wise man that outbraves fortune is surely greater than the husbandman who slips by her; and indeed this pastoral and Saturnian happiness I have in a great measure come at just now. I live a king, pretty much by myself, neither full of action nor perturbation, -- . This state, however, I can foresee, is not to be relied on. My peace of mind is not sufficiently confirmed by philosophy to withstand the blows of fortune. This greatness and elevation of soul is to be found only in study and contemplation; this can alone teach us to look down on human accidents. You must allow me to talk thus like a philosopher; 'tis a subject I think much on, and could talk all day long of." But the attempt had turned out a miserable failure, as he acknowledges in his letter to the physician. Doubts had crept in, and the stoic was tempted to turn sceptic. Writing long after to Sir Gilbert Elliott in regard to his " Dialogues on Natural Religion," which sap all religion, be mentions a manuscript, afterwards destroyed, which he had written before twenty. "It began with an anxious search after arguments to confirm the common opinion, doubts stole in, dissipated, returned, were again dissipated, returned again; and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclination, perhaps against reason."
The letter is supposed by Mr. Burton, on good grounds, to have been written to the celebrated Dr. Cheyne, author of the Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion" (1705), and The English Malady; or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all kinds, Spleens, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal {119} Distempers," &c. It is doubtful whether the letter ever reached Dr. Cheyne, and it may be doubted whether that eminent physician had in all his pharmacopoea a medicine to cure the malady of this remarkable youth. Dr. Cheyne defends with the common arguments the "great fundamental principles of all virtue and all morality: viz., the existence of a supreme and infinitely perfect Being; the freedom of the will, the immortality of the spirits of all intellectual beings, and the certainty of future rewards or punishments." But the youth who proposed to address him had already a system evolved which undermined all these. One could have wished that there had been a friend at hand to direct him away from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, to a better teacher who is never mentioned. Not that we should have expected him in his then state to be drawn to the character of Jesus, but he might have found something in His work fitted to give peace and satisfaction to his distracted soul. But it is useless to speculate on these possibilities. All he says himself is: " In 1734 I went to Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat, and I there laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued."[34]
We can easily picture the youth of twenty-three as he set out for France. By nature he is one of a class of persons to be found in all countries, but quite as frequently in Scotland as anywhere else, who are endowed with a powerful intellect, conjoined with a heavy animal temperament, and who, with no high aspirations, ideal, ethereal, or spiritual, have a tendency {120} to look with suspicion on all kinds of enthusiasm and highflown zeal. With an understanding keen and searching, he could not be contented with the appearances of things, and was ever bent on penetrating beneath the surface; and his native shrewdness, his hereditary predilections, and the reaction against the heats of the previous century, all combined to lead him to question common impressions and popular opinions. He saw the difficulties which beset philosophical and theological investigations, and was unable to deliver himself from them, being without the high sentiments which might have lifted him above the low philosophy of his own day in England and France, and the sophistries suggested by a
The letter is supposed by Mr. Burton, on good grounds, to have been written to the celebrated Dr. Cheyne, author of the Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion" (1705), and The English Malady; or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all kinds, Spleens, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal {119} Distempers," &c. It is doubtful whether the letter ever reached Dr. Cheyne, and it may be doubted whether that eminent physician had in all his pharmacopoea a medicine to cure the malady of this remarkable youth. Dr. Cheyne defends with the common arguments the "great fundamental principles of all virtue and all morality: viz., the existence of a supreme and infinitely perfect Being; the freedom of the will, the immortality of the spirits of all intellectual beings, and the certainty of future rewards or punishments." But the youth who proposed to address him had already a system evolved which undermined all these. One could have wished that there had been a friend at hand to direct him away from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, to a better teacher who is never mentioned. Not that we should have expected him in his then state to be drawn to the character of Jesus, but he might have found something in His work fitted to give peace and satisfaction to his distracted soul. But it is useless to speculate on these possibilities. All he says himself is: " In 1734 I went to Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat, and I there laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued."[34]
We can easily picture the youth of twenty-three as he set out for France. By nature he is one of a class of persons to be found in all countries, but quite as frequently in Scotland as anywhere else, who are endowed with a powerful intellect, conjoined with a heavy animal temperament, and who, with no high aspirations, ideal, ethereal, or spiritual, have a tendency {120} to look with suspicion on all kinds of enthusiasm and highflown zeal. With an understanding keen and searching, he could not be contented with the appearances of things, and was ever bent on penetrating beneath the surface; and his native shrewdness, his hereditary predilections, and the reaction against the heats of the previous century, all combined to lead him to question common impressions and popular opinions. He saw the difficulties which beset philosophical and theological investigations, and was unable to deliver himself from them, being without the high sentiments which might have lifted him above the low philosophy of his own day in England and France, and the sophistries suggested by a