The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

       A Man of Moderation

      Puritanism does not often breed defenders of pagan virtues. Yet it was parody because he grew up in a culture preoccupied with hell that David Hume came to speak so profoundly for the tolerant civilization, devoted to living gracefully here and now, that flourished in the great Whig houses of eighteenth-century England.

      He was born in Edinburgh, in 1711, the younger son of the Laird of Ninewells, a modest and picturesque estate near the village of Chirnside. After a few years at the University of Edinburgh and a faint-hearted attempt to study law, he settled on being a man of letters. At twenty-three, he left home to seclude himself in France for three years; and in the cloisters of the Jesuits’ college in La Flèche where Descartes had been a student, he wrote most of his revolutionary Treatise on Human Nature. The book was barely noticed when it appeared. But the hopeful author, “being naturally of a sanguine and cheerful temper,” soon consoled himself and retired to Ninewells to prepare a volume of essays, which was published in 1742 and met with some small success. As his literary efforts did not, however, provide enough to supplement his slender patrimony, he was obliged to look for more immediate ways of increasing his income. For a year, he lived as a companion to the mad Marquis of Annandale. Then in 1747, he became secretary to General St. Clair, and attended him on some clumsy and ill-fated expeditions, as well as in his embassies to Vienna and Turin. Hume performed his duties carefully, observed with detached interest the warlike operations in which he participated, and enjoyed the sights on the way. It was amusing to be presented at court in Vienna, especially since he could not manage a bow, but he disapproved of Maria Theresa’s efforts to establish a “Court of Chastity.” Everything was most enlightening: “There are great advantages in travelling,” he wrote in his journal to his brother, “and nothing serves more to remove prejudices.” He had not, for instance, expected to find Germany so “fine a Country, full of industrious honest People … it gives a Man of Humanity Pleasure to see that so considerable a Part of Mankind as the Germans are in so tolerable a Condition.” He predicted (with the insight that led him to foresee a little later the disturbed state of America) that if Germany were united, “it would be the greatest Power that ever was in the World.…”¹

      By the time his appointment with General St. Clair came to an end, he had become the David Hume familiar to us, no longer a rawboned, rustic Scotsman, disposed to be intense and a recluse, but a pordy man of the world. He still spoke English with a broad Scottish accent, and French very badly, all in a thin, somewhat effeminate voice. His appearance was even more misleading, or so it seemed to one companion who has given us the most vivid picture of him:

      His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility. His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person, was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined philosopher. … His wearing an uniform added ready to his natural awkwardness, for he wore it like a grocer of the trained bands.²

      But the portraits by his friend Allan Ramsay show more than the blandness—a half amused, half melancholy man, with a dreamy quizzical expression, a man who enjoyed watching mankind and did not mind being thought more simple than he was. He appears to be an accepting man, resigned to whatever fortune granted him. And it is not surprising to find him writing as he did to Henry Home when, at the end of St. Clair’s campaign, it seemed that he would return home with no gain in resources:

      I shall stay a little time in London, to see if anything new will present itself. If not, I shall return cheerfully to books, leisure, and solitude in the country. An elegant table has not spoilt my relish for sobriety; nor gaiety for study, and frequent disappointments have taught me, that nothing need be despaired of, as well as that nothing can be depended on.³

      Things turned out better than he expected. Hume accumulated enough for an income of about fifty pounds a year, sufficient for his wants. Within the next few years, he became established as a literary man: another volume of essays, his Political Discourses, was at once successful. His Enquiry on Human Understanding, as well as his Enquiry on Morals, into which he had recast the Treatise, were very well received. He began to think of establishing himself somewhere permanently. As he agreed with Bayle that town was “the true scene for a man of Letters,” and had decided against London, he moved in 1751 to a flat in Edinburgh.

      His life was orderly and social. In the mornings, after a walk around Salisbury Craigs, he worked; four or five times a week he dined out and returned home early to his studies. Other evenings he could be found at some tavern, like Cleriheugh’s, where his friends often gathered with other men of letters, lawyers, and magistrates. At home he provided his friends with modest fare—roasted hen, minced collops, and punch, but the best in company and conversation. His visitors included besides the leading Scots literary men and disbelievers, some liberal defenders of the faith, very often William Robertson, historian and minister, leader of the church Moderates. His old ties with Lord Kames and other friends of his youth were renewed; and he became very attached to Adam Smith, with whom he remained on the closest terms until he died.

      His tone was always easy and good-humoured, never righteous. It suited his ideal of society, “the happy times when Atticus and Cassius, the Epicureans, Cicero, the Academic, and Brutus, the Stoic, could all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished agreeable matter to discourse and conversation.”¹ Afraid of no one, and not disposed to guard his tongue, the host was often far from reverent—ready with a tale about churches and bishops and crowds of immortal souls, or about the Mohammedan converted to Catholicism who concluded that God no longer existed because he had been eaten yesterday in Church. He could as easily gossip about the divorce of a duchess or the paternity of a lord, as discourse on the immorality of Restoration drama, or Shakespeare’s lack of refinement. Ordinary affairs of business were well within his province—he quarrelled with his publishers, inquired into the credentials of a Latin tutor, used his influence to solicit favours for his friends, and followed the politics of the day with critical and sometimes caustic impartiality. He was disappointed when the pious and respectable thought him unfit to teach moral philosophy at Glasgow, but he generally dismissed them with a laugh. When there was a move to excommunicate him, he wrote to Allan Ramsay:

      You may tell that reverent gentleman the Pope, that there are many here who rail at him, and yet would be much greater persecutors had they the power of doing. The last Assembly sat on me. They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot. But they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing. My friends,