The Scotsmen Who Invented Modernity

Dying of cancer, David Hume wrote some notes about his life. The final paragraph is rather moving because he speaks of himself in the past tense:

>To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men, any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: Not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/humelife.html

David Hume, Adam Smith, James Clerk Maxwell, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, James Watt, Alexander Fleming, Lord Kelvin - the list goes on... For such a tiny nation Scotland has truly had a remarkable influence on “modernity”.

Only tangentially related, but David Hume and Benjamin Franklin were close friends. Franklin has always stuck me as a very modern thinker for his time, too. I'd long admired both Hume and Franklin, but didn't realize they were close friends until I dug in and read a Franklin biography a few years back.

Franklin actually stayed with Hume in Edinburgh for a while. I'm sure the Philadeplhia to London to Edinburgh trek was a tad more involved in the 1700s than it is today. :)

“To write against him, is, you may depend upon it, the very thing he wishes you to do.”

Don't feed the trolls.

It should be noted that Smith's warning about the potential for merchants to collude is not an endorsement of government intervention to prevent such collusion. The collusion warning is followed by:

>It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. . . . A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.

Which again shows Smith viewed the respect for freedom as a moral imperative.

If anyone is interested in the problems inherent in Hume's arguments, I recommend Feser's series of blog posts on the subject:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/search?q=hume

But no true Scotsman would invent modernity.