Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/220

 disappear and for it would be substituted "God, the Soul, Responsibility." D. May 22, 1885.  HUMBOLDT, Baron Alexander von, German naturalist. B. Sep. 14, 1769. Ed. private tutors, and Frankfort and Göttingen Universities. He devoted himself early to science, publishing a geological work in 1790. In 1791 he entered the Academy of Mining, and he was Superintendent of Mines for Bayreuth and Anspach 1792-95. His famous travels in South America occupied the years 1799 to 1804. He then settled in Paris, and published the results in thirty large volumes. His Ansichten der Natur (2 vols.) was published in 1808, and circulated all over Europe. In 1827 he returned to Berlin and wrote his chief and most Rationalistic work, Kosmos (4 vols., 1845-58), a naturalistic account of the universe. One of the most encyclopaedic scientists of the time, Humboldt was a Pantheist like his friend Goethe, and a contemptuous anti-clerical like his friend F. Arago. His letters (see, especially, Correspondancc d A. de Humboldt avec F. Arago, 1907) use very strong language about the Churches to the end of his life. He calls Luther "that diabolical reformer." D. May 6, 1859.  HUMBOLDT, Baron Karl Wilhelm von, German statesman. B. June 22, 1767. Ed. private tutors, and Frankfort and Göttingen Universities. In 1790 he was appointed Referendary in the Berlin Supreme Court and Councillor of Legation. He lived at Jena, a close friend of Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1797, and was Prussian minister at the Papal Court from 1801 to 1808. He became Privy Councillor and Minister of Education in 1809, founded Berlin University in 1810, and was second Plenipotentiary of Prussia at the Vienna Congress in 1814. After discharging other important State missions, he became Minister of the Interior in 1819, but he was too progressive for the court and was compelled to resign. In 1830 he rejoined the State Council. Baron Wilhelm was a philologist of distinction and a generous patron of art and science. He was a Deist, though less outspoken than his brother. D. Apr. 8, 1835.  HUME, David, historian and philosopher. B. (Edinburgh) Apr. 26, 1711. It is said that he studied Greek at Edinburgh University at the age of thirteen, but his early life is obscure. He devoted himself to classical literature and philosophy. Living in France from 1734 to 1737, he seems to have developed his heresies there, and written most of his Treatise on Human Nature (2 vols., 1739; 3rd vol., 1740). This and his Essays, Moral and Political (1741 and 1742) received little attention, and he became tutor to the Marquis of Annandale, and then secretary to General St. Clair. The Essay Concerning the Human Understanding (1748) and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) attracted little more notice than their predecessors, and Hume in 1752 became librarian to the Faculty of Advocates and began to write his history. In 1757 he published his Four Dissertations (including the Natural History of Religion, which was heatedly attacked), which had been written earlier. In 1763 he was appointed secretary to the English ambassador at Paris. Hume professed Theism, though he dissolves into verbiage all the current arguments for it, and his philosophy of the mind is one of the chief bases of later Agnosticism. His argument against miracles, contrasting the unreliability of human testimony with the perceived uniformity of nature, had great influence; and he had also considerable influence on political economy and on ethics. He was "the acutest thinker in Great Britain of the eighteenth century", and one of the most painstaking and conscientious of historians. Christians put out malicious legends about his condition in his last days. Sir L. Stephen shows (in the Dict. Nat. Biog.) that he died "with great composure," but genially admits that "a man dying of