thirty years of age, the younger son of a Berwickshire laird. Hume was younger than Reid by one year: both were born on the 26th of April. His name is popularly connected with the History of England; but this Treatise of Human Nature, which somehow found its way into the manse of New Machar, represents his most significant work. It has contributed perhaps as much as any single book to the subsequent progress of philosophy in Europe. Hume indeed penetrates into regions which the ordinary reader fails to connect with everyday interests of life, or with the hopes and fears of human beings. Accordingly, as he tells, the Treatise 'fell dead-born from the press, without attaining such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.' In a letter to his friend Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, written soon after this explosive mixture had been applied, its author announces that the issue was 'but indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book, and if I may believe my bookseller. I am now out of humour with myself; but doubt not in a little time to be out of humour with the world, like other unsuccessful authors. After all, I am sensible of my folly in entertaining any discontent, much more despair, on this account, since I could not expect any better from such abstract reasoning.' This book, which professes to explain 'human nature' as a fact in the universe, conducts to a final paralysis of human intelligence in universal doubt.
This threatened paralysis awoke Reid into his characteristic intellectual life. He was among the first in Europe to see the far-reaching meaning of Hume’s account of man’s condition. He found in it the deep-lying seeds of modern agnosticism. Its rashness was confessed by its author. 'I acknowledge a very great mistake in conduct in publishing
