Glad he could help someone, but it was not me. You have to expand your mind at some point and accept there is mystery.
“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
I had this experience when I picked up a copy of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and read the thing in the original. I was completely shaken by the beauty of it.
It saddens me because 90% of the beauty is lost in favor of "just getting to the main idea". You lose so, so much. It would be like reciting Homer without an understanding of meter. All beauty would be lost.
I don't follow. The skeptical viewpoint that Hume takes is one that says we can't know. How does that not increase "mystery"? Having answers to questions is the very thing that tends to take mystery away.
"Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind."
This is the quote that provoked uproarious laughter from Einstein, when he read it sitting on the beach at the holiday resort of Caputh(?) in the late 1930s as the storm clouds were gathering over Europe. He thought it genuinely hilarious. I offer this as consolation for your College concern. I am now searching for the reference. It was one of the biographies...
Now, I do think that had we not followed Aristotle and his basic logic principles we wouldn't have had science, nor reached the Moon, nor built smart-phones, but deep down we kind of all know that both Heraclitus and Hume are correct in their suggestion. I like to think that Einstein's laugh (apocriphical or not) was caused by this realization.
Also, to respond to the grand-parent post, I think there's still a lot of mistery in this world. I for myself have become an umanist once I stopped believing in religion or anything similar, meaning the human race never ceases to surprise me and to make me ask "how come we're doing the things we're doing". How come we're altruistic? How come we feel empathy for other people? How come we kill other people in wars? How come we create art? How come we're sometime mesmerized by it? How come we're nostalgic? How come Vronski got tired of Anna Karenina and wanted other things from life, even though she had given everything for him (a marriage, her kid)? How come we still wish Paris hadn't brought Helen back to Troy with him? etc etc
Actually, I think if we had started off with something more like empiricism than Aristotelian rationalism, we'd have gotten to modern sciences a lot sooner.