than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen above (p. 131), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed blows inflicted on him by Bacon--“his fame,” to use Hume’s own language, “was utterly decayed;”[304.1] and as for Plato, St. Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and could appreciate their excellence {305} as some kilted piper picked up from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had--the fruit of private study in his riper years--more than usually falls to the lot of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary, I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated thus--“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”[305.1] The complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the ancient moralists, {306} is only less ludicrous than the benign self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the _Deontology_ of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but the old Socratic formula:-- Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.