The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

the godly, spiteful, pious, splenetic, charitable, unrelenting, meek, persecuting, Christian, inhuman, peace making, furious Anderson is at present very hot in pursuit of Lord Kames.¹

      He did succeed, soon after moving to Edinburgh, in becoming Librarian for the Faculty of Advocates, and used his access to the library to write a history of England. It was meant to be an impartial account, and it turned out to offend no one, Hume found, other than the Whigs and Tories, English, Scots, and Irish, churchmen and sectarians, free-thinkers and pious, patriots and courtiers. Nevertheless, it sold, and he became more than independent, indeed “opulent.” Between volumes of the history, he also published a Natural History of Religion, which was, to his satisfaction, violently attacked by the pious. In the summer of 1758, in order to put his Tudor volumes through the press, he went to London for his first visit in ten years. It had always attracted him, and now the freedom from bigotry, and the respect for himself as a literary man that he found there pleased him so much that he was disposed never to leave. He met everyone: at the table of David Garrick, he became acquainted with Burke, whose “very pretty Treatise on the Sublime” interested him. The young Gibbon boldly sought him out. Through his old friend, Gilbert Elliot, Lord of the Admiralty and favourite of Pitt, he met George Grenville, Charles Townshend, and Temple; he played whist with the Duke of Argyll; and Shelburne invited him to join the distinguished circle he was gathering around him. Still, parody in disgust with the London mobs and the general nationalist hysteria inspired by Pitt, he decided to forsake “that mobbish people.” The big world with its wit, its elegance, and gaiety attracted him, but he preferred, after all, his simple independent life in Edinburgh. When Boswell came to see him in 1762, he found Hume “sitting at his ease reading Homer,” in his “pretty little house,” actually the third story of a vast building, James’s Court, where he had hung classical engravings around the sitting room.

      But his plans to remain peacefully in Edinburgh were broken by an invitation in 1763 to assist the Earl of Hertford in his embassy to Paris. With a short interruption, Hume stayed on in Paris for five years, first as secretary to the embassy, then as chargé d’affaires, and finally, under General Conway, as undersecretary, serving ably in all these capacities. In Paris, his history and his essays had won him more fame than at home—Voltaire admired him, he became an intimate of Diderot and d’Alembert, Mme. du Deffand and the other leading hostesses vied for his presence in their salons, and his popularity amazed and wounded Horace Walpole. He became so fond of Mme. de Boufflers that he was tempted to become her permanent admirer, but remembered in time, assisted by her ambitions to marry the Prince de Conti, that he was but an awkward fat Scotsman, and fled back to Edinburgh.

      From France Hume took home, along with a host of gratifying memories, a volatile French genius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been commended to his care by Mme. de Boufflers. Hume undertook to get for him a pension from the king of England, and to arrange for his living quarters, refusing to heed friends who assured him that Rousseau’s suspicious nature was beyond rescue. But a man like Rousseau was not within Hume’s comprehension; when the storm broke Hume was, most unlike himself, enraged, and the quarrel became an international scandal. But not even Rousseau’s strange ingratitude could for long disturb his serenity. He was immune to rancour, just as he was a stranger to sin and tragedy. His only regret was, he wrote to Gilbert Elliot, that his old house in James’s Court was

      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 a la Reine copy’d 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 [Ambassador to Vienna, St Petersburg, and Copenhagen] speaks of it for eight days after, and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself Apprentice to my Lass to learn it.¹

      He lived long enough to congratulate Gibbon on reviving English letters and to rejoice that Smith’s Wealth of Nations lived up to all expectations. During the long illness that preceded his death, his only worry was to arrange ror me publication of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion which his friends, solicitous for his reputation, wished him to suppress. He continued to pay calls and receive visitors, and was amused, though never convinced, by the varied, hopeful prognostications of his physicians. There was much to laugh about in death as in life. Not long before he died, he read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead and tried to think, he told Adam Smith, of what excuses he might make to Charon: could he stay for a new edition of his works?

      But Charon would answer, “When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.” But I might still urge, “Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term?”

      After all, Hume pointed out to his friends, he had done all he had meant to do, and left his friends and relations in good circumstances—“I therefore have all reason to die contented.”¹

      When Boswell came to investigate the dying man’s state of mind, Hume was reading a new book, Dr. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, and much to Boswell’s dismay, showed no sign of either repentance or agitation. Johnson, the devout Christian, could not bear even to discuss death; Hume expected annihilation very shortly, and was content. He wanted nothing beyond his span on earth and feared nothing thereafter. He had no quarrel with the natural lot of man. For he was, as he said in his funeral oration on himself, “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 Passions.”

CHAPTER 2

       The Kirk

      Hume’s moderation had, however, been acquired. It was fashioned by rebellion against the dogmatic and austere civilization that bred him. Beneath the bland surface of his life, there is another story that begins with Scotland in the early decades of the eighteenth century, where Calvinism still ruled with much of its early strength but little of the grandeur. It produced a tension that shaped Hume’s genius, and determined his development from a son of the Kirk to an outrageous infidel philosopher and finally to a worldly essayist and historian. Although puritanism survived in England as well, and inspired Hume’s heirs, there it took on subtler, sophisticated shapes. In Scotland puritanism had its last moment of simplicity, and the emotions it fed on and generated, obscured later by intellectual wrappings, could still be seen plainly.

      The Reformation had not, as in England, reduced religion to a political and individual concern. Instead, it replaced Catholicism with another complete interpretation of all the facts of existence. The Calvinism that took over in Scotland (everywhere but the Highlands) removed from Christianity all pagan vestiges. It not only forbade outward emblems, ceremonies, and images, and emphasized the justice and infinite, awful majesty of God, rather than love or hope of salvation; it aspired to read the Divine Will, and in place of the contemptuous indifference that had characterized Scotland under Romanism, it brought an unqualified dogmatism. The Old Church was swept away rather than reformed and there was little left to temper the zeal of the Reformation.

      The events of the following centuries confirmed the most extreme tendencies. Under Cromwell, all but rigid Covenanters were excluded from power, and Scotland was placed thoroughly under the heel of the Church. When the Episcopal clergy returned during the Restoration and in turn dismissed the Presbyterians, they effectively destroyed any hope for a moderate Presbyterianism. In exile, the older men acquired what Bishop Burnet called “a tangled scrupulosity,” a habit of enlarging minor differences into great issues, in short, a fanaticism