* * * * * It has for some time been rather the fashion to find the grounds of a man’s scientific beliefs in his personality and in the character of the environment in which he lives. And doubtless thinking, like any other activity, has its psychology, an insight into which is helpful enough, though it is notoriously easy to find that characteristic _après coup_ which we should never have been able to predict beforehand. When I say, then, that Hume had many human traits reminding us of the Philosophers of the Garden whose science is so sympathetic with his own, it must not be supposed that only such as are of like easy habit of body and companionable temper of mind should take to his principles. But it is interesting to note, after having followed the furious career of Bruno, looked in on the sober reclusion of Spinoza, that a different type of man may utter great thoughts; the type that could look back, at fifty-eight years, on a life well filled with profitable industry, and forward to one thus comfortably pictured in a letter to a friend: “I have been settled here [in Edinburgh] for two months, and am here body and soul, without casting the least thought of regret to London, or even Paris. I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in James’s Court which is very cheerful and even elegant, but too small to display my great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my life! I have just now, lying on the table before me, a receipt for making _soupe à la reine_, copied with my own hand; for beef and cabbage (a charming dish) and old mutton and old claret nobody excels me. I make also sheep-head broth in a manner that Mr. Keith speaks of it for eight days after; and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself apprentice to my lass to learn it. I have already sent a challenge to David Moncreiff: you will see that in a twelvemonth he will take to writing history, the field I have deserted; for as to the giving of dinners, he can now have no further pretensions. I should have made very bad use of my abode in Paris if I could not get the better of a mere provincial like him. All my friends encourage me in this ambition, as thinking it will redound very much to my honor.”