[13] Madame d'Epinay gives a ludicrous account of Hume's performance when pressed into a tableau, as a Sultan between two slaves, personated for the occasion by two of the prettiest women in Paris:—
"Il les regarde attentivement, il se frappe le ventre et les genoux à plusieurs reprises et ne trouve jamais autre chose à leur dire que Eh bien! mes demoiselles.—Eh bien! vous voilà donc.... Eh bien! vous voilà ... vous voilà ici? Cette phrase dura un quart d'heure sans qu'il pût en sortir. Une d'elles se leva d'impatience: Ah, dit-elle, je m'en étois bien doutée, cet homme n'est bon qu'à manger du veau!"—Burton's Life of Hume, vol. ii. p. 224.
PART II.
HUME'S PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER I.
THE OBJECT AND SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.
Kant has said that the business of philosophy is to answer three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? and For what may I hope? But it is pretty plain that these three resolve themselves, in the long run, into the first. For rational expectation and moral action are alike based upon beliefs; and a belief is void of justification, unless its subject-matter lies within the boundaries of possible knowledge, and unless its evidence satisfies the conditions which experience imposes as the guarantee of credibility.
Fundamentally, then, philosophy is the answer to the question, What can I know? and it is by applying itself to this problem, that philosophy is properly distinguished as a special department of scientific research. What is commonly called science, whether mathematical, physical, or biological, consists of the answers which mankind have been able to give to the inquiry, What do I know? They furnish us with the results of the mental operations which constitute thinking; while philosophy, in the stricter sense of the term, inquires into the foundation of the first principles which those operations assume or imply.