We must submit to this fatigue, in
order to live at ease ever after; and must cultivate true
metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and
adulterated."--(IV. pp. 10, 11.)
Near a century and a half has elapsed since these brave words were
shaped by David Hume's pen; and the business of carrying the war into
the enemy's camp has gone on but slowly. Like other campaigns, it long
languished for want of a good base of operations. But since physical
science, in the course of the last fifty years, has brought to the front
an inexhaustible supply of heavy artillery of a new pattern, warranted
to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest skulls, things are
looking better; though hardly more than the first faint flutterings of
the dawn of the happy day, when superstition and false metaphysics shall
be no more and reasonable folks may "live at ease," are as yet
discernible by the _enfants perdus_ of the outposts.
If, in thus conceiving the object and the limitations of philosophy,
Hume shows himself the spiritual child and continuator of the work of
Locke, he appears no less plainly as the parent of Kant and as the
protagonist of that more modern way of thinking, which has been called
"agnosticism," from its profession of an incapacity to discover the
indispensable conditions of either positive or negative knowledge, in
many propositions, respecting which, not only the vulgar, but
philosophers of the more sanguine sort, revel in the luxury of
unqualified assurance.
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