“... the doctrines of geology) was said to signal the nearness of the end. Cumming thought David Hume was the arch-frog that creeps from the mouth of the dragon in the Book of Revelation; and geologists were the offspring of the frog. Benton is at considerable pains to show that his particular disaster is the ‘big one’, ‘the greatest ...”

“... but that it so often comes from within the discipline itself. The fifth column has included Hume, who instructed us to ‘commit to the flames’ any work of inquiry that ventures beyond the bounds of quantitative and experimental reasoning; A.J. Ayer, who insisted that much past and present philosophy is unverifiable nonsense; and, more ...”

“... case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured sceptic, who enjoyed Rousseau’s company, and was not unduly put out by his ...”

“... of isolation and unease, of hopelessness. The strange democracy of madness is his theme: David Hume and his breakdown, as described to the physician George Cheyne; and from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, the story of the idiot boy, who spent the summer eating bees, his only earthly occupation. Porter takes his cue from Burton’s ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and ...”

“... it is right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50,’ David Cameron said in his resignation speech. Few doubted that the prime minister could send the notification – the question was when it would be sent – but the claimants in Miller challenged this assumption. Treaties are agreements between states. But states ...”

“... or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy to be recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth contained only two references to ...”

“... their doubts about the desirability and viability of such a strategy. One of the many virtues of David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire is that its author is markedly transatlantic in background, and consequently able to understand and mediate between these very different intellectual sensibilities and scepticisms. Trained at Princeton ...”

“... with aberration and divergence. In his brave and inventive reconstruction, Wild Diversions (1972), David Thomson found a good image for it: ‘He did not live in the conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out ...”

“... and Descartes as its midwives. It then continues, by way of Newton, Locke and (for some purposes) Hume, to the French Philosophes, reaching its end, if not its climax, in Kant. It is overwhelmingly a secular phenomenon, whose protagonists (at the least) attach little positive value to religion. In short it is the Enlightenment of traditional ...”

“... baronage. Smith should not be aligned too closely with critics of the Ancien Régime. Like David Hume, he admired the way modern European monarchies, such as France, protected personal freedoms. When outlining the complex patchwork of taxes which ‘oppressed’ the subjects of the French monarchy, he felt compelled to point out that France was ...”

“... and its importance to national wealth and power. He referred to Voltaire and Montesquieu, and to David Hume, who in 1753 had unequivocally judged African lesser than white men. He regarded Buffon as a major antagonist, with his insistence that climate determined skin colour. Barrère, the anatomist and contributor to the 1741 essay competition, was more ...”

“... need not produce notes at all. He first provided endnotes, not footnotes, and it was a letter from David Hume that urged him to put source references on the page. Gibbon took this advice, but put the satirical notes on the page also, with great benefit to the reader, for now the joke was not so widely separated from its occasion. In another of his ...”