I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes....... I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least.... "Well," said I, "Mr. Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity." "No, no," said he. "But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realiti...es; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hume, and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient f...ood to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient f...ood to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This, indeed, has always been the fate of the few that have professed scepticism, that, when they have done what they can to discr...edit their senses, they find themselves, after all, under a necessity of trusting to them. Mr. Hume has been so candid as to acknowledge this; and it is no less true of those who have shewn the same candour; for I never heard that any sceptic runs his head against a post, or stepped into a kennel, because he did not believe his eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a sim...ilar fate from the hand of Hume in 1737.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... what is especially insufferable in a woman is a restless, bold, domineering manner, for this manner goes against nature.... [e...llipsis in source] No matter what her worth, no matter that she never forgets that she could be a man by virtue of her superiority of mind and the force of her will, on the outside she must be a woman! She must present herself as that creature made to please, to love to seek support, that being who is inferior to man and who approaches the angels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine ...under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot; the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »