Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    I Michael Ramsay, is certainly a most singular production for a boy of sixteen. After sundry quotations from Virgil the letter proceeds:— “The perfectly wise man that outbraves fortune, is much gi'eater than the husbandman who slips by lier; and, indeed, this pastoral and Saturnian happiness I have in a gi-eat measure come at just now. I live like a king, pretty much by myself, neither full of action nor perturbation—moUcs somnoa. This state, however, I can foresee is not to be relied on. My peace of mind is not sufficiently confirmed by philosophy to with- stand the blows of fortune. This greatness and elevation of soul is to be found only in study and contemplation. This alone can teach us to look down on human accidents. You must allow [me] to talk thus like a jjhilosopher: ’tis a subject I think much on, and could talk all day long of.'’ If David talked in this strain to his mother her tongue probably gave utterance to “ Bless the bairn! and, in her private soul, the epithet “ wake-minded ” may then have recorded itself. But, though few lonely, thoughtful, studious boys of sixteen give vent to their thoughts in such stately periods, it is probable that the brooding over an ideal is commoner at this age, than fathers and mothers, busy with the cares of practical life, are apt to imagine. About a year later, Hume’s family tried to launch him into the profession of the law; but, as he tells us, “ while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring,” and the attempt seems to have come to an abrupt termin-