There is a corresponding absence of pedantic ornament. A young writer who has read much, is generally more anxious to show his learning and information than his own power of thought. With many the defect lasts through maturer years, and they write as if to find a good thing in some unknown author, were more meritorious than to have invented it. Montesquieu, whom Hume has been accused of imitating, carried this defect to a vice, and often distorted the order of his reasoning, that he might introduce an allusion to something discovered in the course of his peculiar learning. That Hume had read much in philosophy before he undertook his great work, cannot be doubted, but he does not drag his readers through the minutiæ of his studies, and is content with giving them results. In many respects, indeed, one would have desired to know more of his appreciation of his predecessors. The name of Aristotle is, it is believed, not once mentioned in the work, and there are only some indirect allusions to him, and these not very respectful, in casual remarks on the opinions of the Peripatetics. One would have expected from Hume a kindred sympathy with the great master of intellectual philosophy, and a respectful appreciation of one whose inquiries were conducted with a like acute severity, but whose mind took so much more wide and comprehensive a grasp of the sources of human knowledge. It has been often observed, that a person so original in his opinions as Hume, ought to have made a new nomenclature for the new things which he taught. But he has no philosophical nomenclature; he appears indeed to have despised that useful instrument of method, and means of communicating clear ideas to learners. This want has prevented his system from being clearly and fully learned by the student, while it has at the same time probably made his works less repulsive to the general reader. He seems indeed hardly to have been conscious of the advantage to all philosophy, of uniformity of expression. Using the words "force," "vivacity," "solidity," "firmness," and "steadiness," all with the same meaning, he speaks of this usage as a "variety of terms which may seem so unphilosophical;" and then observes, more in the style of one who is tired of philosophical precision than of a philosopher, "Provided we agree about the thing, 'tis needless to dispute about the terms."