I've been rooting around just a little in the Hume-Johnson-Boswell literature and have a few things to add.
Describing the background to Boswell's interview with Hume "a-dying," I wrote that Boswell "would have known" of Johnson's low opinion of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. But the subjunctive mood was unnecessary, since Boswell called that very review "Johnson's most exquisite critical essay." I might have added, too, that Johnson can in no way be accused of picking on an obscure upstart of no reputation. For he notes in his review that Jenyns's views are largely a prose version of Pope's "Essay on Man," and he does not exclude Pope from his scathing rebuttal. Indeed, the caustic sentence, "Life must be seen before it can be known," is followed immediately by: "This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be born."
To Boswell's record of his last meeting with Hume, and Adam Smith's letter to William Strachan, one might append a remark of Harvard professor George Sherburn, who, on the subject of Hume's last days, wrote that "the calm cheerfulness of his demise . . . greatly annoyed the orthodox." Hume's contemporary the Reverend William Warburton expressed a more representative opinion: "A wickeder mind, and one more obstinately bent on public mischief, I never knew." What outraged people like Warburton and Johnson? It may have had something to do with the cool polish of the prose Hume deployed in developing his "sceptical" ideas. He exudes confidence and urbane defiance. Here, for example, is Hume summing up an argument advanced in his essay "Of Miracles," which he wrote in 1736 but, deeming it dangerous, did not publish until 1748, when he incorporated it into the work now known as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding :
The plain Consequence is (and it is a general Maxim worthy of our Attention) "That no Testimony is sufficient to establish a Miracle, unless the Testimony be of such a Kind, that its Falshood would be more miraculous, than the Fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that Case, there is a mutual Destruction of Arguments, and the Superior only gives us an Assurance suitable to that Degree of Force, which remains, after deducting the Inferior." When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead Man restor'd to Life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this Person should either deceive or be deceiv'd, or that the Fact, which he relates, should really have happen'd. I weigh the one Miracle against the other, and according to the Superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my Decision, and always reject the greater Miracle. If the Falshood of his Testimony would be more miraculous, than the Event, which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my Belief or Opinion.
Though reviled by many of his countrymen, Hume was very popular in France, where, according to the editor of Eighteenth Century British Literature (Tillotson, Fussell and Waingrow), he "was the object of an almost mystical reverence." He was pleased, therefore, in middle age to gain a staff position on the British embassy in Paris. The very different reactions to his work on opposite sides of the channel persuaded him that Britain was "relapsing fast into the deepest stupidity, Christianity and ignorance." Not that he didn't meet up with some resistance in France. Later in life, recalling an incident from the time he had been working on "Of Miracles," Hume wrote:
I was walking in the cloisters of the Jesuits' College of La Fleche . . ., and engaged in conversation with a Jesuit of some parts and learning, who was relating to me, and urging some nonsensical miracle performed in their convent, when I was tempted to dispute against him; and as my head was full of the topics of my Treatise of Human Nature, which I was at that time composing, this argument [the one summarized above] immediately occurred to me, and I thought it very much gravelled my companion; but at last he observed to me, that it was impossible for the argument to have any solidity, because it operated equally against the Gospel as the Catholic Miracles;--which observation I thought proper to admit as a sufficient answer.
Hume earned the honor of having all his writings placed on the Roman Catholic Index before he died.
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