Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/363

351 HUME 35 L and that which detached circumstances gave him occasion to form. He finds &quot; Rousseau a very modest, mild, well- bred, gentle-spirited, aud warm hearted man as ever I knew in my life,&quot; and thinks he &quot; could live with him all his life in mutual friendship and esteem.&quot; At the same time he cannot avoid remarking that Rousseau &quot; is a great humorist&quot; (i.e., full of caprices); that though &quot; he intends seriously to draw his own picture in its true colours. . . nobody knows himself less ;&quot; that he would be unhappy in solitude, &quot;as he has, indeed, been always in all situations.&quot; The quarrel which all the acquaintances of the two philo sophers had predicted soon came, and no language had expressions strong enough for Rousseau s hatred and distrust of his protector, Hume, it must be admitted, came well out of the business, and had the sagacity to conclude that, after all, his admired friend was little better than a madman. In 1769 Hume settled in Edinburgh, and in one of his most delightful letters he gives an animated descrip tion of the domestic economy of his later years. 1 The house alluded to as that to which he was about to remove was built under his own directions at the corner of what is new called St David Street ; and we may picture it to our selves as being, during the closing period of Hume s life, the centre of the most lively and cultivated society of Edinburgh. The gay and cheerful temper of the philo sopher, his unfailing equanimity, and the solid goodness of his heart had made him many friends, even among those who dissented most from his religious views. The resolute strength with which he pushed speculation to its limits was combined with a perfect gentleness of disposition and an amiability that endeared him to all who had the pleasure of knowing him. He was singularly free from jealousy, and no feature of his character is more attractive than the unfailing cordiality with which he welcomed the literary successes of those who might have been thought his rivals. To Robertson and Smith, his personal friends, he is open and unrestrained in his praise and commendation ; and his good services were ever exerted in their cause. To opponents of whose merits he was convinced, to Campbell and Reid, he was cordial and generous. His respect for his own profession led him always to encourage those who had engaged their fortunes in the perilous hazard of literary success, and to extend to them his good offices. For Black- well and for Smollett, in their misfortunes, he exerted him self to the utmost. Nor was he without his recompense. During the closing decade of his life he was the acknow ledged patriarch of literature ; the veneration and respect of his friends, for his character no less than for his abilities, were unbounded. The &quot;gaiety of his temper,&quot; says Adam Smith, &quot;so agreeable in society, and which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly J &quot;I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in James Court, which is very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my life ! I have just now lying on the table before me a receipt for making soupe d la nine, copied with my own hand ; for beef and cabbage (a charming dish), and old mutton, and old claret, nobody excels me. I make also sheep-head broth, in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it for eight days after ; and the Due de Nivernois would bind himself apprentice to my lass to learn it. I have already sent a challenge to David Moncrief ; you will see that in a twelvemonth he will take to the writing of history, the field I have deserted ; for, as to the giving of dinners, he can now have no further pretensions. I should have made a very bad use of my abode in Paris, if I could not get the better of a mere provincial like him. All ray friends encourage me in this ambition, as thinking it will re dound very much to my honour.&quot; to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.&quot; In the spring of 1775 Hume was struck with a tedious and harassing though not painful illness. A visit to Bath seemed at first to have produced good effects, but on the return journey northwards more alarming symptoms de veloped themselves, his strength rapidly sank, and, little more than a month after he had reached Edinburgh, he died (25th August 1776). No notice of Hume would be complete without the sketch of his character drawn by Lis own hand : &quot; To conclude historically with my own character, I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments), I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my fre quent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary ; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, 1 had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men anywise eminent have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked, by her baleful tooth ; and, though 1 wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seem to be disarmed on my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct ; not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of proba bility. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced ono ; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleansed and ascertained.&quot; The more his life has become known, the more confidence we place in this admirable estimate. The philosophical writings of Hume, which mark a distinct epoch in the development of modern thought, can here be considered in two only of the many aspects in which they present themselves as of the highest interest to the historian of philosophy. In the Treatise of Human Nature, which is in every respect the most complete exposition of Hume s philosophical conception, we have the iirst thorough-going attempt to apply the fundamental principles of Locke s empirical psychology to the construction of a theory of knowledge, and, as a natural consequence, the first systematic criti cism of the chief metaphysical notions from this point of view. Hume, in that work, holds the same relation to Locke and Berkeley as the late J. S. Mill held with his System of Logic to Hartley and James Mill. In certain of the later writings, pre-eminently in the Dialogues on Natural Religion, Hume brings the results of his specu lative criticism to bear upon the problems of current theological discussion, and gives in their regard as previously with respect to general philosophy the final word of the empiiical theory in its earlier form. The interesting parallel between Hume and J. S. Mill in this second feature will not be overlooked. In the first instance, then, Hume s philosophical work is to be regarded as the attempt to supply for empiricism in psychology a consistent, that is, a logically developed theory of knowledge. In Locke, indeed, such theory is not wanting, but, of all the many in consistencies in the Essay on the Human Understanding, none is more apparent or more significant than the complete want of harmony between the view of knowledge developed in the fourth book and the psychological principles laid down in the earlier part of the work. Though Locke, doubtless, drew no distinction between the problems of psychology and of theory of knowledge, yet the discussion of the various forms of cognition given in the fourth book of the Essay seems to bo based on grounds quite distinct from and in many respects inconsistent with the fundamental psychological principle of his work. The perception of relations, which, according to him, is the essence of cognition, the demonstrative character which he thinks attaches to our inference of God s existence, the intuitive knowledge of self, are doctrines incapable of being brought into harmony &amp;gt;-ith the view of mind and its development which is the keynote of his general theory. To some extent Berkeley removed this radical in consistency, but in his philosophical work it may be said with safety there are two distinct aspects, and while it holds of Locke on the one hand, it stretches forward to Kantianism on the other. Nor in Berkeley are these divergent features ever united into one harmoni ous whole. It was left for Hume to approach the theory of know ledge with full consciousness from the psychological point of view, and to work out the final consequences of that view so far as cog nition is concerned. The terms which he employs in describing the aim and scope of his work are not those which we should now employ, but the declaration, in the introduction to the Treatise, that the science of human nature must be treated according to the