Life and Correspondence of David Hume, Volume 1

by John Hill Burton

"This day was a fortnight, my Lord told Mr. Hume to be gone, and that in terms which I shall not repeat; the Monday following, the same directions were renewed in a very peremptory manner, attended with such expressions of resentment, that I advised Hume to go

away the next day, which he did, the 8th; and on the 15th I went out thither, and had told my Lord before, that, if he could be reconciled to have him return, I was very willing to contribute towards it, which proposal was not in the least agreed to. . . . . Hume has not for many months stomached depending in any respect upon my decision, who was originally the cause of his being received at all, and had very great difficulty, long since and at different times, to get my Lord to bear him. He has mistaken the point; for there is nothing irritates his Lordship so much, as the thought of any one showing some tokens of authority, and looking on what he says as caprice, and of no consequence; and I really believe it is some such notion as this, which has produced so thorough an aversion."

There are two different views that may be taken of Hume's motives for not having at once resigned his appointment, at the very commencement of the train of indignities to which he was subjected. Whoever anticipates that a man who had tutored his mind by the rules of philosophy, and who lived an upright and independent life, may be actuated by some better views than those of mere pecuniary aggrandizement, will give him credit for having believed it to be his duty to watch over certain interests of the Annandale family at the sacrifice of his own feelings. Those who, strongly disapproving of his opinions as a philosopher, believe them to be therefore the dictate of a corrupted mind, will probably search for base and selfish motives; and will have little difficulty in identifying them with a pure love of gain, sufficiently strong to absorb all gentlemanly feeling and all spirit of independence. The favourable and charitable view admits of no direct demonstration on which an opponent could

not be able to throw doubt; and, the circumstances being stated, each reader is left to form his own opinion.

There is one thing that Hume never attempts to conceal—his feeling that the situation was in a pecuniary point of view advantageous to him, and his consequent desire to preserve it for his own sake, so long as he could do so with honour. That it should be so is one of those inconsistencies often exhibited in fine geniuses, which ordinary men of the world find it difficult to appreciate. It frequently proceeds from this circumstance, that, not being acquainted with the ordinary beaten tracks towards wealth and independence, which other men so easily find; yet desiring the latter, although perhaps they care not for the former endowment, they lay hold with avidity on any guide that is likely to lead them, by however devious and unpleasant a path, to the desired object. Men whose minds are much occupied with abstract subjects, if they be poor and desire to be free of unpleasant obligations, are thus apt to grasp at trifling rights with a pertinacity which has the air of selfishness. They feel a timidness of their own ability to make way in a bustling active world; and, conscious that it would be vain to compete with hard-headed acute men of business in the enlargement of their fortune, treat with an undue importance any comparatively trifling claims and advantages; while the sagacious world, which sees before it so many more advantageous paths to the objects of men's secondary ambition, ridicules their much ado about nothing. It was Hume's first and chief desire to be independent. That if he had enjoyed a choice of means, to be the hired companion of the Marquis of Annandale would have been among the last on which he would have fixed,

will easily be believed. But this occupation was the only method of gaining a livelihood that offered itself at the time; it was an honest one, and the disagreeable circumstances attending the means were overlooked in the desirableness of the end.

It is necessary, also, along with the account of Hume's efforts to gain a humble livelihood, to keep in mind the state of society in Scotland at that time. The union with England had introduced new habits of living, which made the means of the smaller aristocracy insufficient for the support of their younger children. On the other hand, England was jealous of Scottish rivalry in foreign trade: neither agriculture nor manufactures had made any considerable progress in Scotland; while Indian enterprise was in its infancy, and Scottish adventurers in the East had not yet found a Pactolus in the Ganges. At that period the gentleman-merchant, manufacturer, or money dealer; the civil engineer, architect, editor, or artist, were nearly unknown in Scotland. The only form in which a man poor and well born could retain the rank of a gentleman, if he did not follow one of the learned professions, was by obtaining a commission in the army, or a government civil appointment.[196:1]

Here ended the channels to subsistence along with

gentility, and he who had none of these paths open to him, and had resolved to make an independent livelihood by his own talents or labour, had at once, as the German nobles frequently do in the present day, to abandon his rank, and become a shopkeeper or small farmer, probably with the intention of returning to the bosom of his former social circle when he had realized an independence, but more commonly ending his days with the consciousness that he was, in the words of Henry Hunt, "the first of a race of gentlemen who had become a tradesman." Any lawyer who pays attention to the statistics of the Scottish decisions in mercantile cases, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, will have noticed how frequently it occurs that the younger sons of some good family are mentioned as fulfilling the humblest duties of village tradesmen.[197:1] The practice is now comparatively unknown. The well

educated gentleman's son, if he be brought up to commerce, connects himself with those more liberal departments of it, in which he may reap the advantage of his education and training. To the practice which distinguished the period of depression above alluded to, aided perhaps by the spirit of clanship, we may owe the existence of so many aristocratic names among the humbler tradesmen in Scotland. In England the nomenclature of a city directory will as surely indicate the court and the tradesmen end of the town, as the Norman name used to indicate nobility and the Saxon vassalage. We do not find Edward Plantagenet keeping an oyster shop, or Henry Seymour cobbling shoes; but it would not be difficult to exemplify these humble occupations, in the regal names of a Robert Bruce or a James Stuart. In his essay on "The Parties of Great Britain," published in 1741, Hume alludes to the absence of a middle class in Scotland, where he says there are only "two ranks of men," "gentlemen who have some fortune and education, and the meanest starving poor: without any considerable number of the middling rank of men, which abounds more in England, both in cities and in the country, than in any other quarter of the world."[198:1]