Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/59

Rh only one stated by both: with regard to the second principle by Aquinas, contrariety, from the illustration with which he has accompanied it, he appears to mean local or physical opposition, such as the opposition of two combatants in a battle, and not the interpretation now generally bestowed on the term by philosophers. But supposing him to have understood it in the latter sense, Hume has taken pains to show that contrariety cannot easily be admitted as a fourth ultimate principle: thus in a note he says, "For instance, contrast or contrariety is also a connexion among ideas, but it may perhaps be considered as a mixture of causation and resemblance. Where two objects are contrary, the one destroys the other; that is, is the cause of its annihilation, and the idea of the annihilation of an object, implies the idea of its former existence." Aquinas, it will be remarked, entirely omits "cause and effect," and his "contiguity" is of a totally different nature from that of Hume, since it embraces an illustration which Hume would have referred to the principle of "cause and effect."

"I had always," says Hume, in reference to the work we have just been noticing, "entertained a notion that my want of success in publishing the Treatise of Human Nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early. I, therefore, cast the first part of the work anew, in the Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, which was published while I was at Turin. But this piece was at first little more successful than the Treatise of Human Nature. On my return from Italy, I had the mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr Middleton's Free Inquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected."

About this period, Hume suffered the loss of a mother, who, according to his own account, when speaking of his earlier days, was "a woman of singular merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing of her children;" and the philosopher seems to have regarded her with a strong and devoted affection. He was a man whose disposition led him to unite himself to the world by few of the ordinary ties, but the few which imperceptibly held him, were not broken without pain; on these occasions the philosopher yielded to the man, and the cold sceptic discovered the feelings with which nature had gifted him, which at other moments lay chained by the bonds of his powerful reason. A very different account of the effect of this event, from what we have just now stated, is given in the passage we are about to quote (as copied in the Quarterly Review,) from the travels of the American Silliman. Without arguing as to the probability or improbability of its containing a true statement, let us remark that it is destitute of proof, a quality it amply requires, being given by the traveller forty years after the death of the philosopher, from the report of an individual, while the circumstance is not one which would have probably escaped the religious zeal of some of Mr Hume's commentators.

"It seems that Hume received a religious education from his mother, and early in life was the subject of strong and hopeful religious impressions; but as he approached manhood they were effaced, and confirmed infidelity succeeded. Maternal partiality, however, alarmed at first, came at length to look with less and less pain upon this declension, and filial love and reverence seem to have been absorbed in the pride of philosophical scepticism; for Hume now applied himself with unwearied and unhappily with successful efforts, to sap the foundation of his mother's faith. Having succeeded in this dreadful work, he went abroad into foreign countries; and as he was returning, an express met him in London, with a letter from his mother, informing him that she was in a deep decline, arid could not long survive: she said she found herself without any support in her distress : that he had taken away that source of comfort upon which, in all cases