Good Christians had hoped, that ere he left the world there might be a change of sentiment, and an acknowledgment of the existence of God, and the need of a Saviour.Many of them maintained that it was impossible for an infidel to die in peace, and it was reported among religious circles, that, though he was cheerful when his unbelieving friends visited him, he had terrible uneasiness when left alone.Some of these rumors utterly break down when we try to trace them to their original sources.The statement, however, of Mr.
Robert Haldane of Airthrey, as to what he learned from his neighbor, Mr.Abercromby of Tullibody, must contain some truth.Mr.Abercromby was travelling to Haddington in a lumbering stage-coach." The conversation during the tedious journey turned on the death-bed of the great philosopher, and as Mr.Abercromby's son-in-law, Colonel Edmonstoune of Newton, was one of Hume's intimate friends, he had heard from him much of the buoyant cheerfulness which had enlivened the sick room of the dying man.Whilst the conversation was running on in this strain, a respectable-looking female, dressed in black, who made a fourth in the coach, begged permission to offer a remark: `Gentlemen,' she said, `I attended Mr.Hume on his death-bed, but, I can assure you, I hope never again to attend the death-bed of a philosopher.' {133} They then cross-examined her as to her meaning; and she told them that, when his friends were with him, Mr.Hume was cheerful even to frivolity, but that when alone be was often overwhelmed with unutterable gloom, and had in his hours of depression declared that he had been in search of light all his life, but was now in greater darkness than ever." This is Mr.Haldane's statement, as taken from Mr.Abercromby. We confess we should like to know more of this woman in black, and to have taken part in the cross-questioning.The question is left in that region of doubt where Hume himself left all religion.He died on Monday, August 26, 1776, at four o'clock in the afternoon.
Everybody knows that Hume was a sceptic.It is not so generally known that he has developed a full system of the human mind.Students of philosophy should make themselves acquainted with it.It has in fact been the stimulating cause of all later European philosophy: of that of Reid and his school of that of Kant, and the powerful thinkers influenced by him and of that of M.Cousin, and his numerous followers in France, in their attempt to combine Reid and Kant.Nor is it to be omitted that Mr.J.S.Mill, in his "Examination of Hamilton," has reproduced to a large extent the theory of Hume, but without so clearly seeing or candidly avowing the consequences.I rather think that Mr.
Mill himself is scarcely aware of the extent of the resemblance between his doctrines and those of the Scottish sceptic; as he seems to have wrought out his conclusions from data supplied him by his own father, Mr.James Mill, who, however, has evidently drawn much from Hume.The circumstance that Mr.Mill's work was welcomed by such declamations by the chief literary organs in London is a proof, either that the would-be leaders of opinion are so ignorant of philosophy that they do not see the consequences; or that the writers, being chiefly young men bred at Oxford or Cambridge, are fully prepared to accept them in the reaction against the revived mediaevalism which was sought to be imposed upon them.In no history of philosophy that we are acquainted with is there a good account of the system of Hume.As few persons now read, or in fact ever did read, through his weighty {134} volumes, we are in hopes that some may feel grateful to us, if in short space we give them an expository and critical account of his philosophy, with a special facing towards the philosophy which has been introduced among us by the British section of the nescient school of Comte.
Hume begins thus his famous "Treatise of Human Nature:""All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I call <impressions> and <ideas>.The difference betwixt them consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness.
