About a friend of his: "Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor, and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God."
Aside from its tone, it reminds us that the two men were contemporaries, at a moment when Scotland was one of the world's great generators of intellectual fireworks.
James Boswell reported from Hume's deathbed: "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 was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever."
ReplyDeleteThis quotation is an excerpt from http://digital.nls.uk/scotlandspages/timeline/17762.html