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DONALD W. LIVINGSTON. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago, 1998. Pp. xviii + 433. $68; $25 (paper).
Much instruction and considerable delight await scholars of eighteenthcentury literature in this magisterial new book. Elaborating on ideas first mapped out in Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (1984), Mr. Livingston allows us to see Hume whole - a moralist as well as a philosopher, a patriot as well as a sage. The Hume who emerges from Mr. Livingston's pages is (like Johnson) a Ciceronian humanist, drawing upon the Latin rhetorical tradition. He strives for eloquence with which to refine the wisdom of common life and common forms. Hume's program evokes the shades of Swift and Pope; aptly, Hume has been dubbed by Mark Box a "Scriblerian Humanist" (The SuasiveArt of David Hume, 1990).
I hear the familiar questions: "But wait! Wasn't Hume an arch atheist? A radical empiricist, a skeptical innovator? A man who exploded the notion of personal identity? And, despite all his mischief, a sentimental Tory?" Mr. Livingston dispels whatever lingers of such long-standing misconceptions. He persuasively presents Hume as a philosophical (heist not without sympathy for revealed...