Meantime, the reader must take Hume's acceptance of the doctrine of final causes and the Design-analogy, for what it is worth. No candid person ought to condemn Hume as he has often been condemned without remembering the allowance to be made for his excessive vanity,[75] his extreme love of paradoxical speculation, and the dramatic irony which runs throughout his writings. These are in fact some of the qualities which make him an unfit schoolmaster for the young, and a shrewd exercise for elder men. One useful lesson we gather just now is learned from the fact that he places a wide gulf between the natural and moral attributes of the Deity, and draws a veil over the latter, because the alleged poverty of our moral ideas precludes any analogy to reason upon, however remote that analogy may appear. Hence Hume's God of Nature becomes a shadow like Wordsworth's Laodamia, scarce fit for the Elysian bowers; He is no longer felt by us to be the God of Human Nature. We cannot here omit to observe that Hume had no thought of worshipping the Order of the World, or of erecting a temple to immutable Laws, blind Force, or any other blank impersonal Necessity. The limit of his inquiry was what to human reason might appear the easiest and most probable interpretation of nature.[76] This question he asked and answered. Whether modern science has added important data on which to found a more conclusive reply is a further inquiry which we shall have to consider, but meantime it appears certain that _if_ the most sceptical theory of the most sceptical scientist were held true, there would still remain the same necessity for asking Hume's question. For neither our life, nor the world we live in, nor the wide universe, have any real cause or aim scientifically assigned them. We should still have to inquire by what agency and to what purpose we and the All exist? That we really _are_ is a fact for you, O reader, and for me; and we cannot but want to discover _whether_ we shall yet _be_, when this brief yet tedious life is done; and if so, whether our present acts and choosings must influence our Hereafter? Science has said nothing to annihilate our interest concerning these topics, nor yet to finally decide them.