David Hume - Mark G. Spencer

Скачать книгу

of ancient peoples.

      19. H 1:29–46 passim.

      20. Adam Smith to William Strahan, 9 November 1776, in L 2:450.

      21. On Varro, see Enlightenment Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 2003), 169.

      22. There is a short passage in Tacitus on Jews, History, bk. 5, 1–6, in The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 657–60. This depicts them as odd and despicable and Moses as a power-hungry fraud.

      23. See Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 31–32, 52, 71; James Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1909), 170, 192.

      24. Anthony Browning, “History,” in Fortuna Domus, ed. J. B. Neilson (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1952), 41–57; 44.

      25. Robert Wodrow, Analecta or Some Remarkable Providences . . . , 4 vols., ed. Mathew Leishman (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1842–43), 4:212.

      26. Divinity students were not generally charged for the courses they took to prepare for the ministry.

      27. James Balfour Paul, ed. Diary of George Ridpath, Minister of Stitchel, 1755–1761 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 3rd ser., vol. 2, 1922), 200.

      28. The manuscripts of those lectures can be found in the Library of New College, Edinburgh University, MS W12a 5\2. Each Latin lecture as an English language summary on loose sheets, which are still in the volumes. I have depended mainly on those summaries for what follows.

      29. The summary uses spaces as punctuation and is not always written in full sentences.

      30. This was rather like Jonathan Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption (written 1739; published Edinburgh, 1774), but Cuming did not see the cycles of life (degeneracy—revelation—moral improvement—backsliding—revelation, etc. ) as always falling lower; his tended, after 1300 A.D., to be upward and the work more optimistic, as was characteristic of moderate men in the Kirk of his day.

      31. His course somewhat resembled Antoine Goguet’s The Origin of laws, sciences and their progress among the most ancient nations (Paris, 1758; Edinburgh, 1761). The translator was the Reverend Robert Henry.

      32. George Chalmers, The life of Thomas Ruddiman (Edinburgh: John Stockdale; London: William Laing, 1794). The Rankenian Club is sometimes cited as the first Edinburgh club of adult intellectuals devoted to the discussion of religious and philosophical ideas.

      33. The first letter was sent anonymously but is contained in the Leven and Melville Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD 26\13\602. The second is in Philosophical Transactions 42 (1743), 420–21.

      34. What follows rests largely on the notes for Mackie’s lectures and on “A discourse read to the Philosophical Society, 4 March 1741” on “vulgar errors and how to detect ‘em,” both held at Edinburgh University Library [EUL]. Those are discussed by L. W. Sharp, “Charles Mackie, the First Professor of History at Edinburgh University,” Scottish Historical Review 41 (1962): 23–45. See also Esther Mijers,“News from the Republick of Letters”: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie, and the United Provinces, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); her discussion of Mackie as a historian runs pp. 157–84.

      35. EUL, Laing Manuscript 2:37.10; there are also notes dealing with this topic that seem related to his course in MS Dc.5.24.2.

      36. The Scottish chronology for the Middle Ages was first sorted out by Thomas Innes and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, in books published in 1729 and 1776.

      37. This had been apparent to Sir Robert Sibbald and his friends in the 1680s when they rejected some of the fabulous genealogies offered to them by others. One for the Dukes of Argyle showed them as descendants of King Arthur and through him of Brut (Brute or Brutus), a descendant of Aeneas the Trojan. The mythical history of the Scots kings can still be seen, in part, in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, where the portraits of forty of them, painted by Jacob de Wet in the late seventeenth century, still hang.

      38. Among the latter were Gilbert Elliot, Sir Harry Erskine, William Mure of Caldwell, James Oswald of Dunniker, Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees, and many more men whom Hume knew socially throughout his life.

      39. The College reserved the right to make its professors also lecturers in civil history. Professors were paid mainly by students’ fees. There were not enough to support two men. The threat to render the chair virtually valueless gave them a voice in appointments. Rouet may have taught only a civil history course but that is unlikely.

      40. William Rouet, Universal History Notes, National Library of Scotland [NLS], 4992\188.

      41. Ibid., 34.

      42. Ibid.

      43. Ibid., 36.

      44. Ibid., 1–31. The lectures are undated but probably come from c. 1752–55. The lectures may have been given to the Glasgow Literary Society, which met after 1752 and of which Hume was later a member. On the other hand, they may have been part of a special course for students or discourses given to the University. See also Carol Gibson-Wood, “George Turnbull and Art History at Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century,” RACAR 28 (2001): 7–18, especially 10–12.

      45. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and “Religious Realignment Between the Restoration and Union” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–68; Allen, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).

      46. NL 88–89.

      47. The Histoire ecclésiastique par M. Fleury, Prêtre, Prieur d’Argenteüil, & confesseur du Roy (vols. I–XXX) was continued by others as Histoire ecclésiastique pour servir de continuation à celle de Monsieur l’Abbé. The book is not by Cardinal Fleury, who also wrote history, but by Claude Fleury (1640–1723).

      48. “M. Fleuri has given us an excellent work which bears that title; he has added to that a discours raisonné more estimable and precious than his history. This judicious writer, in developing in his discourse the means by which God has conserved His Church, sets out at the same time the abuse on which this species of writing is apt to slip. It is right in principle to say ‘that it is true that truth is one and entire; that if religion is true, the history of the Church is also; that truth ought not to be opposed to truth, & that the ills of the Church have been great, but they serve to confirm the promises of God who will defend it to the end of time against the powers and efforts of Hell.’” Encyclopédie, 1:1052n44.

      49. Ibid., 1:1052.

      50. Ibid., 2:335–37.

      51. Ibid., 3:642–43. Wharton did write a treatise on clerical celibacy, but he was best known as an editor of historical sources, many of which Hume had used in writing his History of England and for attacks on the Jesuits.

      Once regarded as the hero of positivism, Hume is now widely appreciated as a proponent of a hermeneutic philosophy of history. In pursuing his project of developing a science of human culture, of “introducing the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,” Hume recognized that human actions cannot be understood unless

Скачать книгу