my Treatise of Human Nature, a book which pretended to innovate in all the sublimest parts of philosophy, and which I composed before I was five-and-twenty. But what success the same doctrines better illustrated and expressed may meet with adhuc sub judice lis est. I wish I had always confined myself to the more easy parts of erudition.’ Accordingly, about ten years after, Hume presented his 'sceptical doubts' in a milder form, and accompanied by a 'sceptical solution' of them, in an Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; but it was Hume in the original Treatise, not as recast in the Inquiry, that moved Reid. Kant, like Reid, was awakened from what he calls his 'dogmatic slumber' by David Hume; but it was the Inquiry, not the Treatise, of which last he appears ignorant, that roused Kant. Reid grappled with the more open and all-pervading uncertainties of the earlier work.
Let us look into the book which appalled the young minister of New Machar by the spectre of a meaningless universe and illusory human nature. Its author seemed to be indulging in 'a peculiar strain of humour when he set out in his introduction by promising with a grave face no less than a complete system of the sciences upon a foundation entirely new, namely, human nature, while the intention of the whole work is to show that there is neither human nature nor science in the world. He surely believed, against his principles, that he should be read, and that he should retain his personal identity till he reaped the reputation justly due to his metaphysical acumen.' Reid found him taking for granted as his fundamental maxim, that nothing can be admitted as true which cannot be logically deduced from impressions of sense. Hume found the impressions of sense to be transitory, and distinguished
