First of all, apologies from Tory Historian for the paucity of posting. (Actually, the non-existence). Other commitments and the presence of builders in the home have made working life extremely difficult. But things are about to change.
In the meantime here is a portrait of a great British philosopher and historian, a Scotsman but one who belongs to us all, something we ought to recall in this year of the Union's Tercentenary.
David Hume cannot quite be called a Tory or anything else. Like all great thinkers he is of himself and not to be pigeonholed. His own comment was charactaristically wry:
I have written on all sorts of subjects . . . yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.He must have been rather proud of that.
There is another comment that is worth quoting as our own age seems to have reverted to the thought processes of the pre-scientific revolution:
All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.It is worth repeating this whenever there is another panic induced by the media and ambitious politicians or, even, scientists in need of money for their pet projects.
0 comments