70 HUME I 



subjects. 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 " agnosti- 

 cism," from its profession of an incapacity to 

 discover the indispensable conditions of either 

 positive or negative knowledge, in many pro- 

 positions, respecting which, not only the vulgar, 



