Then there are the farther coincidences, that Cheyne was a Scotsman, that he was an eminent man in his profession, and that he had bestowed some attention on mental philosophy. "I passed my youth," he tells us, "in close study, and almost constant application to the abstracted sciences, wherein my chief pleasure consisted." "Having," he elsewhere says, "had a liberal education, with the instruction and example of pious parents, (who at first had designed me for the church,) I had preserved a firm persuasion of the great and fundamental principles of all virtue and morality: viz. the existence of a supreme and infinitely perfect Being, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the spirits of all intellectual beings, and the certainty of future rewards or punishments. These doctrines I had examined carefully, and had been confirmed in, from abstracted reasonings, as well as from the best natural philosophy, and some clearer knowledge of the material system of the world in general, and the wisdom, fitness, and beautiful contrivance of particular things animated and inanimated; so that the truth and necessity of these principles was so riveted in me, (which may be seen by the first edition of my 'Philosophical Principles,' published some years before that happened,[45:1]) as never after to be shaken in all my wanderings and follies."[45:2] It may be mentioned also, as a circumstance likely to bring Cheyne's work early under Hume's observation, that it contains a long statement of the case of Dr. William Cranstoun, an eminent medical man then residing at Jedburgh, in the same district of country with Ninewells. FOOTNOTES: [1:1] Old Style. [1:2] He is entered in the list of members on 23d June, 1705, as "Mr. Joseph Hume of Ninewalls." It thus appears that the orthography of the name adopted by his son, and which will be found to have been so much the subject of dispute, was not a novelty to the family. [2:1] Both the "Peerage" and the "Baronage" of Scotland, by Robert Douglas, are well known to Scottish genealogical antiquaries. The former was published in 1764. The latter, in which there is a brief account of the Ninewells' family, in 1798.