there is something in the intellectual part of our nature,
resembling the moral sentiment in the moral part of our
nature, which determines this, as it were, instinctively. Very
possibly I have wrote nonsense. However, this notion first
occurred to me at London, in conversation with a man of some
depth of thinking; and talking of it since to your friend H.
Home, he seems to entertain some notions nearly of the same
kind, and to have pushed them much farther.
This is but an idle digression, so I return to the Dialogue.
With regard to the composition in general, I have nothing to
observe, as it appears to me to be conducted with the greatest
propriety, and the artifice in the beginning occasions, I
think, a very agreeable surprise. I don't know, if, in the
account of the modern manners, you [had] an eye to Bruyere's
introduction to his translation of Theophrastes.[324:1] If you
had not, as he has a thought handled pretty much in that
manner, perhaps looking into it might furnish some farther
hints to embellish that part of your work.[324:2]
HUME _to_ GILBERT ELLIOT _of Minto_.
"_Ninewells, 19th February, 1751._
"DEAR SIR,--Your notion of correcting subtlety of sentiment, is
certainly very just with regard to morals, which depend upon sentiment;
and in politics and natural philosophy, whatever conclusion is contrary
to certain matters of fact, must certainly be wrong, and there must
some error lie somewhere in the argument, whether we be able to show it
or not. But in metaphysics or theology, I cannot see how either of these
plain and obvious standards of truth can have place. Nothing there can
correct bad reasoning but good reasoning, and sophistry must be opposed
by syllogisms. About seventy or eighty years ago, I observe, a principle
like that which you advance prevailed very much in France among some
philosophers and _beaux esprits_. The occasion of it was this: The
famous Mons. Nicole of the Port Royal, in his _Perpétuité de la
Foi_,[325:1] pushed the Protestants very hard upon the impossibility of
the people's reaching a conviction of their religion by the way of
private judgment; which required so many disquisitions, reasonings,
researches, eruditions, impartiality, and penetration, as not one in a
hundred even among men of education, is capable of. Mons. Claude and the
Protestants answered him, not by solving his difficulties, (which seems
impossible,) but by retorting them, (which is very easy.) They showed
that to reach the way of authority which the Catholics insist on, as
long a train of acute reasoning, and as great erudition, was requisite,
as would be sufficient for a Protestant. We must first prove all the
truths of natural religion, the foundation of morals, the divine
authority of the Scripture, the deference which it commands to the
church, the tradition of the church, &c. The comparison of these