The Scottish Philosophy [73]
restless intellect. He knew only the ancient Stoic philosophy in the pages of Roman authors, and the modern philosophy of Locke, as modified by such men as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and driven to its logical consequences by Berkeley: he bad tried the one in his practical conduct, and the other by his sifting intellect, and having found both wanting, he is prepared to abandon himself to scepticism, which is the miserable desert resorted to by those who despair of truth. Meanwhile his great intellectual powers find employment in constructing theories of the mind, in which he himself perhaps had no great faith, but which seemed the logical conclusion of the acknowledged philosophical principles of his time, and quite as plausible as any that had been devised by others, and brought such fame to their authors.
With these predilections, France was the country which had most attractions to him, but was at the same time the most unfortunate country he could have gone to, and the middle of the eighteenth century the most unfortunate period for visiting it. In philosophy, the age had outgrown Descartes and Malebranche, Arnauld and Pascal, and the grave and earnest thinkers of the previous century, and was embracing the most superficial parts of Locke's philosophy, which had been introduced by Voltaire to the knowledge of Frenchmen, who turned it to a wretched sensationalism. In religion he saw around him, among the great mass of the people, a very corrupted and degenerate form of Christianity, while, among the educated classes, infidelity was privately cherished, and was ready to burst out. Voltaire had issued his first attack on Christianity, {121} in his " Epitre a Uranie," published in 1728, and the fire spread with a rapidity which showed that there were materials ready to catch it and propagate it. Sixty years later, one so fond of order and peace would have been scared by the effects produced by scepticism, so powerful in overthrowing old abuses, and so weak in constructing any thing new or better but at this time infidelity was full of hope, and promising an era of liberty and peace. The very section of the Catholic Church which retained the highest faith and the purest morality, had unfortunately been involved in a transaction which favored the sceptical tendency among shrewd minds. Only a few years before, the people believed that the sick were healed, and the blind made to see at the tomb of the famous Jansenist, the Abbe Paris; the noise made by the occurrences, and the discussions created by them, had not passed away when Hume arrived in Paris; and the youth pondered the event, to bring it out years after in his " Essay on Miracles." While he lived at La Fleche, a Jesuit plied him with some "nonsensical miracle," performed lately in their convent, and then and there occurred to him the famous argument which he afterwards published against miracles. " As my head was full of the topics of the `Treatise of Human Nature,' which I was at that time composing, the argument immediately occurred to me, and I thought it very much gravelled my companion; but at last he observed to me that it was impossible for that argument to have any validity, because it operated equally against the gospel as the Catholic miracles, which observation I thought fit to admit as a sufficient answer."
After living a short time in Paris, he retired to Rheims, and afterwards went to La Fleche, where he passed two of the three years he spent in France. We know nothing of his employments these years, except that he devoted himself most earnestly to the composition of his " Treatise on Human Nature." In 1737 he brought it over with him to London, where he published the two first books the end of the following year.
This treatise is by far the most important of all. his philosophical works. If we except certain speculations in history and political economy, it contains nearly all his favorite ideas. He devoted to it all the resources of his mighty intellect. He {122} had read extensively, pondered deeply, and taken immense pains in
With these predilections, France was the country which had most attractions to him, but was at the same time the most unfortunate country he could have gone to, and the middle of the eighteenth century the most unfortunate period for visiting it. In philosophy, the age had outgrown Descartes and Malebranche, Arnauld and Pascal, and the grave and earnest thinkers of the previous century, and was embracing the most superficial parts of Locke's philosophy, which had been introduced by Voltaire to the knowledge of Frenchmen, who turned it to a wretched sensationalism. In religion he saw around him, among the great mass of the people, a very corrupted and degenerate form of Christianity, while, among the educated classes, infidelity was privately cherished, and was ready to burst out. Voltaire had issued his first attack on Christianity, {121} in his " Epitre a Uranie," published in 1728, and the fire spread with a rapidity which showed that there were materials ready to catch it and propagate it. Sixty years later, one so fond of order and peace would have been scared by the effects produced by scepticism, so powerful in overthrowing old abuses, and so weak in constructing any thing new or better but at this time infidelity was full of hope, and promising an era of liberty and peace. The very section of the Catholic Church which retained the highest faith and the purest morality, had unfortunately been involved in a transaction which favored the sceptical tendency among shrewd minds. Only a few years before, the people believed that the sick were healed, and the blind made to see at the tomb of the famous Jansenist, the Abbe Paris; the noise made by the occurrences, and the discussions created by them, had not passed away when Hume arrived in Paris; and the youth pondered the event, to bring it out years after in his " Essay on Miracles." While he lived at La Fleche, a Jesuit plied him with some "nonsensical miracle," performed lately in their convent, and then and there occurred to him the famous argument which he afterwards published against miracles. " As my head was full of the topics of the `Treatise of Human Nature,' which I was at that time composing, the argument immediately occurred to me, and I thought it very much gravelled my companion; but at last he observed to me that it was impossible for that argument to have any validity, because it operated equally against the gospel as the Catholic miracles, which observation I thought fit to admit as a sufficient answer."
After living a short time in Paris, he retired to Rheims, and afterwards went to La Fleche, where he passed two of the three years he spent in France. We know nothing of his employments these years, except that he devoted himself most earnestly to the composition of his " Treatise on Human Nature." In 1737 he brought it over with him to London, where he published the two first books the end of the following year.
This treatise is by far the most important of all. his philosophical works. If we except certain speculations in history and political economy, it contains nearly all his favorite ideas. He devoted to it all the resources of his mighty intellect. He {122} had read extensively, pondered deeply, and taken immense pains in