D’Holbach received a similar note. The German baron replied (in English) that he was glad Hume had “not occasion to repent of the kindness you have shown. … I wish some friends, whom I value very much, had not more reasons to complain of his unfair proceedings, printed imputations, ungratefulness &c. For my part, I wish heartily [Rousseau] may find, in your country, that repose his imagination and the sourness of his temper have deprived him of hitherto.” The letter ends with an intriguing sentence: “Mr. Grimm pays his most sincere thanks for the piece of service you did about Rousseau’s manuscript.” What did he mean by this? The eminent Rousseau scholar R. A. Leigh wondered if Rousseau had read to Hume the section of the Confessions that dealt with Grimm. If so, it would explain something of Hume’s later panic and horror at the prospect of his appearing in those pages.
While Hume was rhapsodizing about Rousseau, he was simultaneously pursuing the question of a royal pension for him, first broached on the boat to England. In late January, Hume informed Mme de Boufflers that a friend of his “who possesses much of [the king’s] confidence” had talked to His Majesty. The pension was agreed on in principle, but Rousseau was seeking advice from his “father” in Berlin—Earl Marischal—on whether to accept it. Since Rousseau was such a contentious figure, the pension would not be made public: “You know that our sovereign is extremely prudent and decent, and careful not to give offence. For which reason, he requires that this act of generosity may be an entire secret.” A P.S. says it will be £100 p.a., “a mighty accession to our friend’s slender revenue.”
For his access to George III, Hume was dependent on General Conway, who at the time had more pressing preoccupations. The Rockingham administration, and Conway in particular, was embroiled in the Stamp Act crisis. The Seven Years’ War had drained the exchequer. In February 1765, under the previous Grenville ministry, stamp duties levied on paper used for all official documents (embracing everything from newspapers to marriage certificates to wills) had been applied to the American colonies, incensing the colonists, who were not represented in the British parliament and who were never consulted. Faced with a wave of protest from across the Atlantic and at home from commercial interests, the new Rockingham government was seeking a way to repeal the detested act while maintaining the right of Parliament to tax the Americans. In the British Isles, the idea that the free-riding colonists should contribute to the cost of campaigns that had lifted the French threat to North America was predictably popular.
In the Memoirs of George III, Walpole records: “The situation of the ministers became every day more irksome and precarious.” Conway was under attack by Grenville for his handling of the emergency. Meanwhile, the king was fomenting opposition to his own ministers, worried that his right to tax his colonists was in jeopardy.
Perhaps it was the stress that dispatched Conway to his sickbed. According to Walpole, Conway had “a scorbutic eruption, caught cold, neglected it, it turned to a high fever.” Recuperating on his country estate, the general nonetheless insisted on wandering the grounds despite the freezing temperatures and suffered an inevitable relapse. The matter of the pension waited upon his recovery.
Thus, Hume’s rejoicing over the pension was premature. And here we need to jump forward in time. Sure enough, Earl Marischal’s seal of approval came from Berlin, but Conway could not speak to the king until May 2. On that day, the general wrote in his formal way to Hume: “His M: is pleased to consent to give him a pension of one hundred pounds per An: —desiring only it might be a secret one.” Conway did not have Rousseau’s address and so asked Hume to pass on the king’s offer:
and that if it is agreeable to him, [George III] shall think himself extremely happy to have been an instrument in providing him any convenience or satisfaction, & in having contributed to procure for one of his distinguished genius and merit these marks of favour & protection which will do honour to this country & in a particular manner to the Royal hand from whom all bounty flows.
The next day, Hume forwarded Conway’s letter, instructing Rousseau that it would be necessary to reply with his acceptance and thanks for Conway’s good offices. The missive ends with some advice, designed to placate Rousseau, who had been mocked in the London press: “My dear friend, if you must fly from mankind, do not at once renounce the amusement and consolation of society, and feel all the pain which may result from the idle opinions of men and those misrepresented. The expressions contained in this letter of General Conway may convince you in what estimation you are held by all men of character in England. We only wish that you would like our company as well as we do yours.”
IN SPITE OF Hume’s stated confidence in his relationship with Rousseau, and his zeal in securing him a sanctuary and setting the pension in train, curiously, when Rousseau finally left London, he and Hume had agreed, in the words of the Monthly Review, “not to be troublesome to each other by a regular commerce of letters” and to communicate only about the pension so as “not to have the restraint of a continued correspondence.”
“Restraint” rings oddly in this age of letter writing, when every day people communicated with one another at length and post rarely went unanswered (a fact which makes this book possible). Would not saved and savior have wanted to keep in touch?
The probability is that, whatever he might claim in his letters, Hume had rapidly grown tired of his charge and the weight of being responsible for him—”the show-er of the lion” was “weary of his pupil,” as William Rouet had put it in mid-January. John Home, “the Scottish Shakespeare,” also noticed Hume’s increasing frustrations “with the philosopher who allowed himself to be ruled equally by his dog and his mistress.”
Lord Charlemont, who was able to compare Hume’s current demeanor with his earlier impressions in Paris, picked up Hume’s unease when he bumped into him in the park: “I wished him joy of his pleasing connexion, and particularly hinted that I was convinced he must be perfectly happy in his new friend, as their sentiments were, I believed, nearly similar—’Why no, man,’ said he, ‘in that you are mistaken. Rousseau is not what you think him. He is indeed a very sensible, and wonderfully ingenious man, but our opinions are by no means the same. He has a hankering after the Bible, and is indeed little better than a Christian in a way of his own.’”
Hume’s reservations about his guest reflected not just his qualms about Rousseau’s idiosyncratic views and personality, but also nagging doubts about his rectitude. Was he quite what he claimed? Their stormy passage had shown how hardy Rousseau was, whatever his complaints of chronic illness. What of his financial position? Was it, too, more robust than it seemed? Hume’s suspicion on that score arose in Paris. After Rousseau had bemoaned his dire pecuniary state, Hume evidently primed some of his French coterie discreetly to investigate the exile’s means. Possibly one of the philosophes had told Hume that the Genevan was richer than his protestations of poverty allowed. Indeed, when the successful author fled France, he was not short of money. For Héloïse, On the Social Contract, and émile, he was to be paid over 14,000 francs.
Back in London, Hume continued to probe. Mme de Boufflers was supposed to be making inquiries on his behalf with Josué de Rougemont, a Parisian banker with whom Rousseau had been associated since about 1762. The wording of Hume’s reminder to her is revealing. “It is only a matter of mere curiosity. For, even if the fact should prove against him, which is very improbable, I should only regard it as one weakness more, and do not make my good opinion of him to depend on a single incident.” Yet this pressing for something that might “prove against” the Genevan was plainly more than curiosity. And while he might regard it as “one weakness more,” Hume’s “good opinion” was potentially at stake.
Unknown to Mme de Boufflers, at Hume’s request Mme de Barbantane was also pursuing the banker. On February 16, Hume jogged her memory, too. “I know not how your enquiries with M. Rougemont have turned out.” He enlisted the aid of d’Holbach in the same errand. The “mere curiosity” begins to look
like a fixation. Rousseau, of course, was ignorant of these letters flying between London and Paris, and of this attempted rummaging into his affairs.
Although it is not clear how, by early April Hume’s sleuthing had borne fruit. Mme de Boufflers, Mme de Barbantane, and d’Holbach had not come up with anything. But on April 3, in a long epistle to Mme de Boufflers, Hume wrote “that in point of circumstance he is not to be pitied: for I have also discovered, that he has some little resources beyond what he mentioned [in Paris]. … It is one of his weaknesses that he likes to complain. The truth is, that he is unhappy, and he is better pleased to throw the reason on his health, and circumstances, and misfortunes, than on his melancholy humour and disposition.” A note in French on May 2, 1766, probably to Jean-Charles Trudaine de Montigny (an enlightened economist who was comptroller of finances for bridges and embankments, and who had translated Hume’s Natural History of Religion), spread the “secret” of the royal pension, and added that Rousseau tried to make himself interesting by complaining of poverty and ill health. But Hume had discovered “by chance” that Rousseau had resources “which he hid from us when he accounted to us for his assets.” “By chance” is hardly an accurate rendering of Hume’s persistent inquiries—and he was not finished yet.
AS HUME BECAME more and more wary of his famous dependent, so his dependent’s state of mind became increasingly unsettled. Rousseau might now have been in the land of freedom, but a number of events were combining to perturb him.
First, as we have seen, early in Rousseau’s stay in London, he heard that young Louis-François Tronchin was at Hume’s lodgings in Lisle Street.
Then there was the circulation in Paris and London of a mocking letter, a spoof in the name of the king of Prussia satirizing Rousseau as wallowing in misery. The letter had appeared in the French capital before Rousseau left for England, and news of it pursued him across the Channel. On January 18, Rousseau told Mme de Boufflers that Hume had just informed him about
a pretended letter which the King of Prussia has written me. The King of Prussia has honoured me at every opportunity with his most decided protection and most obliging offers, but he has never written to me. As all such fabrications have no end, and probably will not cease very soon, I ardently wish that people would be kind enough to let me remain ignorant of them.
Hume mentioned the King of Prussia letter to Mme de Boufflers the following day: Rousseau’s suspicion, he said, was that it had been made up by Voltaire.
Third, there was Rousseau’s problem in locating a permanent home far from the capital and its crowds, noise, and bustle. Hume was not much more favorable to the wilds of Derbyshire than of Wales, as he explained to his old Edinburgh friend, the Presbyterian cleric Hugh Blair, in a peculiarly negative view of Rousseau and his prospects:
He was desperately resolved to rush into this solitude, notwithstanding all my remonstrances; and I foresee, that he will be unhappy in the situation, as he has always been in all situations. He will be entirely without occupation, without company, and almost without amusement of any kind. He has read very little during the course of his life, and has now totally renounced all reading: He has seen very little, and has no manner of curiosity to see or remark: He has reflected, properly speaking, and studied very little; and has not indeed much knowledge: He has only felt, during the whole course of his life; and in this respect, his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of: But it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who were stripped not only of his cloaths but of his skin.
Hume’s withering analysis revealed an absence of imaginative sympathy for his guest’s state of mind, and was indicative that in both personality and creative style they were polar opposites. In terms of personality, while Hume’s outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau reveled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau’s language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume’s straightforward and dispassionate. Moreover, while they were both philosophers, two people with a hunger and capacity for abstract thought and with the power to express their ideas, they occupied separate philosophical universes. It was less that they disagreed than that they had no prospect of engagement.
Both were pivotal figures of the age, though each, in his way, stood apart from the era’s stress on the primacy of reason in all aspects of human affairs. Their reasoning about reason showed that reason could get us only so far: they both used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason. (Thus, for Rousseau, an appreciation of the world required not just reason but sensibilité; for Hume, reason could never supply an underpinning to morality or religion.) But beyond that, they had in their sights two different targets. Rousseau took aim at common conceptions of man’s link with society, and the Enlightenment’s proud boast of progress (that there had been progress in the human condition, and that with the systematic application of rationality and information, advances could be speeded up). Hume was concerned, much more fundamentally, with man’s link with the world and man’s claims to knowledge of that world.
THE SCOT’S “DEAD-BORN” Treatise of Human Nature is a seminal work in the history of philosophy, though these days its content tends to be absorbed by students through his later, less dense Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals.
The overall impact of Hume’s fusillade on common sense was, and still is, most unsettling. Applying the utmost intellectual rigor, he blows away the ground under our day-to-day assumptions: we are like the cartoon dog that runs in midair until he sees there is no ground under his paws. If that was where Hume’s head led him, with his heart he was almost apologetic. He did not mean to disorient. Even his demolition of religion, ruthless and unsparing in its analysis, caused him some agonized dissonance: to spare the feelings of friends and acquaintances, le bon David often downplayed the full extent of his skepticism.
Hume was what we now call an empiricist—that is, he believed that all our knowledge must originate in our experience, which we gain through our senses. Empiricism has a healthy image—in the Anglo-American world at least—of a plain-talking, feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense philosophy: if it were a person, it would be the solid member of a jury, commonsensical, conscientious, and moderate. But that was not Hume’s empiricist.
Hume took empiricism to its logical conclusion: his empiricist was a destructive revolutionary. If knowledge cannot be detached from the internal state of the knower, if the world is what it seems to be to me, he argued, I cannot be sure that that is how the world objectively is. My senses are merely my senses; there is no guarantee that they are accurate, that they reflect the world beyond. The Scotsman showed that if we rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no complete confidence in our personal identity (that I am the same person today as I was yesterday); we can have no confidence in the “laws of nature” that we take for granted, such as gravity or cause and effect.
Take the latter. Hume illustrated his problem with billiard balls. When we see one billiard ball strike another, what reason do we have for believing that the impact of the first ball will bring movement in the second? Yes, we are convinced it will have this effect—but why? For, as Hume points out, when we see a relationship appearing to be one of cause and effect, all we experience in reality is one event followed by another—we cannot see, smell, or touch the causation; we do not see, smell, or touch any necessary connection. Each ball’s movement is a distinct matter of fact; we observe the second movement following the movement of the first. And it is entirely conceivable that the second will not follow from the first. The second ball might stay rooted on its spot, or turn into a dove; the two balls might explode on impact; the first might just roll backward. The problem of causation is related to that of inducti
on—the inference of a future event on the grounds of past experience. We cannot logically infer that the sun will rise tomorrow just because it has risen on every previous day.
How then to explain our hitherto unquestioned assumptions about causality and induction? Well, says Hume, when events are constantly connected in time and space, we naturally make the mental leap from one to the other. Thus, we have experienced the temperature from a fire so often that when we place our hand near some flames, custom and habit lead us to anticipate heat. In place of a logical basis for our beliefs, Hume substitutes a psychological one.
His reflections on “personal identity” were equally counterintuitive. You might have the idea that there is some enduring entity—the self—that constitutes the essential “you,” that makes the “you” digesting these words now the same “you” who absorbed the previous paragraph some moments ago, the same “you” who went to kindergarten and who will eventually age and die. The Rousseau who fell on his knees before a blue periwinkle believed he was the same Rousseau who had picked a periwinkle three decades earlier when out walking with Mme de Warens. But, argues Hume, this notion of identity is illusory. Try to reflect on your “self.” Try to locate this immutable thing that is supposed to make you, you. All you can detect is a disparate bundle of perceptions. In Hume’s words: “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound etc. I never catch my self, distinct from some such perception.” The various snapshots passing through one’s mind are not linked by any invisible film.
In the face of Hume’s skeptical juggernaut, we risk a psychological flattening. If all our deepest assumptions about the way the world works are shown to be illusory, to be derived neither from reason nor from the senses, how can we function, how can we force ourselves out of bed in the morning? Indeed, in the Treatise Hume confesses that his theoretical musings even have a debilitating impact on their creator, making him morose and lethargic. But he always finds a way to carry on. Fortunately, the human animal, even the Humean animal, can dwell on such reflections for only a short spell. Our instincts overpower our reason: we cannot help but assume the existence of causality and cannot help but rely and act on past experience. As Hume himself put it: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.” (And, indeed, his deliberations on economics and history take for granted personal identity, consistency in human conduct, and cause and effect in the material world.)
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