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HUM tells us that he abandoned the attempt in disgust—a curious result, since at that time the studies of a Scottish lawyer were of a very speculative kind; and we might suppose the authors he abjured—Voet and Vinnius—to have been congenial to a mind like his. Soon afterwards he seems to have studied himself into a state of morbid nervousness. He wrote a letter to a physician—Dr. Cheyne, it is supposed—full of curious autobiographical particulars, and indicating symptoms which medical men are now familiar with as results of excessive mental exertion. "Every one," he says, "who is acquainted either with the philosophers or critics, knows that there is nothing yet established in either of these two sciences, and that they contain little more than endless disputes even in the most fundamental articles. Upon examination of these, I found a certain boldness of temper growing on me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority on these subjects, but led me to seek out some new medium by which truth might be established. After much study and reflection on this, at last, when I was about eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it."

Before he wrote this document, he had spent a short time in Bristol in an attempt to be trained to commerce; but he found this profession as uncongenial as law. He probably intended a quiet sarcasm on the place when—describing, in his history, the attempt of Nayler the fanatic to personify the Saviour—he says, "He entered Bristol mounted on a horse—I suppose from the difficulty in that place of finding an ass." He soon afterwards spent three years in France, where at Rheims, and in wanderings about the jesuit college of La Fleche, and holding curious converse with its inmates, he turned his ruminations to account by the composition of the "Treatise of Human Nature." The first and second volumes were published in January, 1739. It is remarkable that for a book so little adapted to any prevailing taste, he received from a publisher the sum of £50. It entered the world unnoticed, and all its ruthless attacks on common received opinions seemed doomed to pass into oblivion. Time passed on, and indeed other works had come from his pen, before the remarkable originality and power of the treatise commanded the attention of philosophers. When they came to deal with it, they found it to be a power before which they must entirely yield if they could not overcome it by gigantic efforts. In his other works he acquired a purer style, more clearness and precision in stating his argument, and more method in arranging his whole ground. But the strength of his system lay in this first effort. The word had gone forth that could not be recalled, though it destroyed many a symmetrical system of philosophy.

Fundamentally this work was a grand extension of the Baconian system, that we must have a foundation for all that we hold as known. Bacon applied the principle chiefly to physical science. Hume brought it into mental. It was not his function to build up; the process was unsuitable to his taste—perhaps, also, to his capacity. He contented himself with the congenial labour of toppling down other fabrics of philosophy by pulling away their fictitious and fragile foundations. The human mind he said, embraced within itself no substantial realities; its consciousness of external things was only its own tissue of ideas formed by impressions, which were in words only a type of actual things. So all the systems of mental philosophy, which started with the human mind as a separate constructing power capable of building up a structure of belief to itself, were nought but words. It was a great era in the history of mental philosophy. Though the author of the "Treatise" could not build up, others could. He cleared the ground of the old incumbrances, and subsequently his opponents of the Scottish school—at a still later time the German philosophers—erected new systems more substantial than the old.

He published the third volume of his "Treatise" in 1740. Nothing seems to have broken in upon his own obscurity and that of his book, except that it brought him into friendly communication with Francis Hutcheson. He grumbled that it should not even have evoked the zeal of the bigots; but the failure, instead of disgusting him with literature, seems immediately to have urged him into a new channel; and in 1741-42 he published his "Essays, Moral and Political," deserting metaphysics, and clinging to such matters of the real world as "the liberty of the press;" "the parties of Great Britain;" and "the independency of parliament." But neither fame nor fortune attended this second effort. In the meantime years passed on, and he must live. He failed in an attempt to be appointed professor of moral philosophy in the university of Glasgow, and for mere bread undertook a function which must have been very uncongenial to a spirit like his. He accepted of the office of companion, it might almost be said of keeper, to a young insane nobleman, the marquis of Annandale. He says quietly in his "Own Life "—"I lived with him a twelvemonth. My appointments during that time made a considerable accession to my small fortune." But it was a year of misery, for the philosopher had to endure continuous discussion with an uneducated and vulgar-minded man in the confidence of the family who treated Hume as one who, like himself, could only have taken the appointment that he might play out some game for personal aggrandizement.

In 1746 he was appointed secretary to General St. Clair, and accompanied him on his expedition to the coast of France. The object was to surprise and take Port L'Orient, a place then of considerable importance as the depot of the French East India Company. The expedition was mismanaged, but it gave Hume, in whose mind historical ideas were working into shape, an opportunity of seeing actual military operations. Two years afterwards he attended General St. Clair on a mission to Turin, and he left amusing notices of his journey thither. In his absence his "Inquiry concerning Human Understanding" was published, a work intended to supersede the "Treatise," as going over the same ground in a manner more to his satisfaction. He complained that this effort also was neglected; but in the meantime his "Essays" gained popularity, and a third edition of them was demanded in 1748.

In 1751 he published the "Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals." The leading opinion is, that the tendency to be useful to mankind at large is the proper criterion of the propriety of any action or of any opinion in morals. Though some glimmerings of the same idea occur in Aristotle's Nichomachian Ethics, this is perhaps the first work in which the utilitarian philosophy is set forth in a systematic form. In 1752 appeared the political discourses, "The only work of mine," he says, "that was successful on the first publication." In these short and apparently slight, but really powerful essays, will be found the germ of free-trade and other doctrines of the existing school of political economy.

In 1754 appeared a quarto volume, being the "History of Great Britain, volume i., containing the reigns of James I. and Charles I., by David Hume, Esq." The second volume, bringing down the history to the Revolution, was published in 1756. He then went back to an earlier epoch, and wrote the history of the house of Tudor, in two volumes. Afterwards he resolved to accomplish the earlier part, and in 1762 published, also in two quarto volumes, the "History of England from the Invasion by Julius Cæsar to the Accession of Henry VII." The controversies connected with this work are so large, that they can but be briefly alluded to in an article like this. Subsequent historians charged him with a wilful perversion of history in favour of despotic principles and high crown prerogatives. That he did not do thorough justice to the old spirit of freedom latent in the British constitution may be true; but his errors were unintentional. His sceptical spirit attended him as he wrote, and when he found men striving after factious and fanatical objects, he doubted if the constitutional principles and practices on which they professed to rely were old. If he had inquired in the right quarter, among ancient records and parliamentary proceedings, he would have found more truth than he anticipated in the assertion about old constitutional safeguards of freedom. But the method of drawing history inductively from such ample sources had not then come into use. He knew little of the common law of England, or of the constitution, and was, therefore, in the hands of the chroniclers, the best and clearest of whom would of course take him captive. Hence it is that in the account of the great civil war he implicitly follows Clarendon. It is observable that in the alterations which he made in the later editions, he continued to imbue his history still more thoroughly with high prerogative opinions. With all its faults the book possesses and deserves its popularity, from the sweetness of its style and the easy flow of its narrative.

The year 1763 opened for Hume a new world. He became secretary of the British embassy to France under Lord