I will suppose, though by way of impossibility, that my complaints against Mr Hume never reached his ears; that he knew nothing of them; but was as perfectly ignorant as if he had held no cabal with those who are acquainted with them, but had resided all the while in China.[38] Yet the behaviour passing directly between us; the last striking words which I said to him in London; the letter which followed replete with fears and anxiety; my persevering silence still more expressive than words; my public and bitter complaints with regard to the letter of Mr d'Alembert; my letter to the Secretary of State, who did not write to me, in answer to that which Mr Hume wrote to me himself, and in which I did not mention him; and in fine my refusal, without deigning to address myself to him, to acquiesce in an affair which he had managed in my favour, with my own privity, and without any opposition on my part; all this must have spoken in a very forcible manner, I will not say to any person of the least sensibility, but to every man of common sense. Strange that, after I had ceased to correspond with him for three months, when I had made no answer to any one of his letters, however important the subject of it, surrounded with both public and private marks of that affliction which his infidelity gave me; a man of so enlightened an understanding, of so penetrating a genius by nature, and so dull by design, should see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing, be moved at nothing; but, without one word of complaint, justification, or explanation, continue to give me the most pressing marks of his good will to serve me, in spite of myself? He wrote to me affectionately, that he could not stay any longer in London to do me service, as if we had agreed that he should stay there for that purpose! This blindness, this insensibility, this perseverance, are not in nature; they must be accounted for, therefore, from other motives. Let us set this behaviour in a still clearer light; for this is the decisive point. Mr Hume must necessarily have acted in this affair, either as one of the first or last of mankind. There is no medium. It remains to determine which of the two it hath been.