faithfully than many historians proper, has given us the very form and presence of the times. In his own age, when coarseness was less offensive, he did, as a humorist, the good that mere pleasure can do. His humor, however, is in this age situated where those who are refined or well-dressed will not care to enter. In this direction, as in others, his influence has ceased to be felt. This is the criterion of a truly great man,-that his life has been deepened and chastened by sorrow, enabling him to discern the inner heart of things, so that there rises out of him a kind of universal Psalm; his thought is in our thoughts, and the fruit of his genius scatters its seed across continents and centuries. HUME. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.-Adam Smith. Biography.-Born in Edinburgh, in 1711, and educated at Edinburgh University; was designed for the law, studied, but never practised. He had an insurmountable aversion to everything but literature: 'While they (the family) fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.' His slender fortune and impaired health—the result of a too ardent application-forced him to try mercantile life, but in a few months he found this employment equally uncongenial. He then went to France, studied three years in retirement, living with the utmost frugality, and returned in 1737. His patrimony hardly sufficient for his support, he became tutor one year to a young nobleman of deranged mind; next became a candidate for the professorship of moral philosophy in the university of his native town, but was unsuccessful: 'I am informed that such a popular clamor has been raised against me in Edinburgh, on account of scepticism, heterodoxy, and other hard names, which confound the ignorant, that my friends find some difficulty in working out the point of my professorship, which once appeared so easy." He then acted as secretary, two years, to General St. Clair, directly, in the serious, tragic style, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. If the novel be held to include love, satire, humour, observation, genuine portrayal of facts, of living, veritable persons, and skill in the arrangement of plot and incident, he surpasses Richardson, and perhaps is unsurpassed by any other; if, more justly, the ethical tendency, the predominance of character, is the leading index of power in the novelist, to Richardson must be assigned the seat of honor. Character. - Sanguine, affectionate, extravagant, careless, jolly; a drinker, a roisterer, acquainted with the lower orders of all classes, and familiar with the ups and downs of life. His views were those which commend themselves to a man who sees the world as it is, who has no visionary dreams or passionate aspirations, and who has a thoroughly generous nature. Morality, with him, was not a law; yet in his way, he was a moralist. He satirizes vice, excuses, condemns, suggests moral conclusions. His hero is neither a libertine nor an ascetic; he is a full-blooded healthy animal, with respect for the Church so long as it does not break with common sense, but without exaltation or poetic rapture. The novelist, preeminently of authors, records himself in his writings. Not more decisively does a Chinese drawing reveal its nationality than do the works of his imagination reveal the experience and observation out of which that imagination has grown. His heroes and heroines are his ideals, and these must be built of the idealized materials of his actual life and history. Perhaps he had all the best parts of a man, except delicacy and moderation. Influence.-Probably his only legacy to mankind, certainly his chief one, is the picture he has set before us of English society in his generation. We see pretty much what we should have seen as lookers-on. In vindicating the novel against the loftier pretensions of professed historians, he asserted that in their productions nothing is true but the names and dates, whereas in mine everything is true but the names and dates.' Without going so far, still, as the novel embodies substantially the remarks of the ablest observers upon their contemporaries, we may admit his claim to be a writer of history, who, more faithfully than many historians proper, has given us the very form and presence of the times. In his own age, when coarseness was less offensive, he did, as a humorist, the good that mere pleasure can do. His humor, however, is in this age situated where those who are refined or well-dressed will not care to enter. In this direction, as in others, his influence has ceased to be felt. This is the criterion of a truly great man,- that his life has been deepened and chastened by sorrow, enabling him to discern the inner heart of things, so that there rises out of him a kind of universal Psalm; his thought is in our thoughts, and the fruit of his genius scatters its seed across continents and centuries. HUME. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.-Adam Smith. Biography.-Born in Edinburgh, in 1711, and educated at Edinburgh University; was designed for the law, studied, but never practised. He had an insurmountable aversion to everything but literature: 'While they (the family) fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.' His slender fortune and impaired health-the result of a too ardent application-forced him to try mercantile life, but in a few months he found this employment equally uncongenial. He then went to France, studied three years in retirement, living with the utmost frugality, and returned in 1737. His patrimony hardly sufficient for his support, he became tutor one year to a young nobleman of deranged mind; next became a candidate for the professorship of moral philosophy in the university of his native town, but was unsuccessful: 'I am informed that such a popular clamor has been raised against me in Edinburgh, on account of scepticism, heterodoxy, and other hard names, which confound the ignorant, that my friends find some difficulty in working out the point of my professorship, which once appeared so easy." He then acted as secretary, two years, to General St. Clair, for the pass-word of the night. Equanimitas,' answered the dying emperor. A wise man, who has studied how to live, has learned how to die. Writings.-Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding (1748). In this he recast the first part of an earlier work, Treatise on Human Nature (1737), which, he says, 'fell dead-born from the press. Nor did his speculations now attract much more attention, though they proved eventually to be the most exciting and productive that have been promulgated in modern times. To derive any profit from the consideration of his metaphysical views, the student should remind himself, 1. That the aim of Philosophy is to ascertain the nature and essence of things. 2. Locke was allowed to have established,— (1) That we could have no knowledge not derived from experience. (2) That experience was of two kinds, namely, of external objects and of internal operations; therefore, it had two distinct sources,―sensation and reflection. (3) That all knowledge could consist only in the agreement or disagreement of ideas. (4) Finally, that we could never know things in themselves, but only as they affect us; that is, we could know only our ideas. He supposes the mind to begin its acts of intelligence with impressions; by which is meant the lively sensations we have when we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire, will. When we reflect on any impression, as in acts of memory or imagination, the result is an idea. An idea is, then, the faint image or copy of an impression. Thus, when I see a picture, there is an impression; when I think about this picture in its absence, there is an idea. The difference between impressions and ideas is one of degree merely the former are stronger, the latter weaker; the first are the originals, the second are the vestiges. When, in reasoning, a thing is said to exist, we are to search for an impression (new or old) corresponding to the word used. If no such impression is found, the word, so far as our human faculties are concerned, has no meaning at all. Whether there is any existence corresponding to its meaning, no one can tell there may or may not be. Hence, whether there be an infinite mind behind the veil of phe -- nomena, no mortal may presume to say. That idea is reached by magnifying the human attributes of wisdom and goodness. If it be asked what knowledge we have of an external world, the answer is, that there are certain impressions and ideas which we suppose to relate to it; further we know not. If we look into ourselves, and, watching the figures as they come and go, seek for assurance of our identity and continuity, we find but a string of separate entities, a procession of shadows, called in one view. impressions, in another ideas; not something self-existent, which was, is, and shall continue: 'Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations, succeed each other, and never exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea. ... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.' Hume's philosophical significance is connected chiefly with his speculations concerning causality. No sooner is an event perceived than we conclude at once that it is an effect, and begin to inquire the cause. Between these two terms he could see no other connection, than that the former immediately follows the latter, as in the melting of wax before the flame of a taper. When they are seen to be conjoined repeatedly, we learn to expect that, when the one accustomed to precede makes its appearance, the other will follow; and this expectation strengthens as repetitions multiply. If now the unsatisfied investigator demands a power in the one, which enables it to produce the other, the answer is, such a thing may be; we have no clue to it— no impression of it-by which its existence or non-existence may be argued. Our belief in the maxim that like causes produce like effects is based not on any knowledge of the hidden force through which the one thing brings the other into being, but on habit: When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able in a single instance to discover any power or necessary connection, any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses. The mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects; consequently there is not, in any single instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connection.' The mind cannot perceive any necessary connection between |