Here, therefore, the disciplined inquirer will obtain a prolific field of discovery, if he wishes to convince himself how little originality pervades the set of opinions just now in fashion.
But the student of Hume ought surely to be a disciplined inquirer. Many senior residents at our Universities will, therefore, join me in regretting that his sceptical treatises should be so commonly found in the hands of very young men. So far as such readers are concerned, it does not much signify whether Hume's fallacies are due to onesidedness of intellect or (as has been said by a critic, once himself a doubter) whether he was influenced "by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of arguescents." An opinion scarcely libellous, considering what Hume has said respecting the validity of his own paradoxes. However this may appear, the fallacies remain fallacies, and are less easy of detection than they would have been were their author a systematic thinker, instead of a philosophical dilletante. Under any circumstances, it is not every aspirant to the "Round Table" for whom the quest after secret spells is fitted. The youthful knight has his own ward to keep, and needs help—not hindrance, much less betrayal—inasmuch as:—
"Tis his to struggle with that perilous age
Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege
Of boyhood;—when young Dionysus seems
All glorious as he burst upon the east,
A jocund and a welcome conqueror;
And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea
She rose and floated in her pearly shell,