The moral animus of David Hume /

A study of Hume's History of England (1754) as practical moral instruction. Siebert (University of South Carolina) draws on essays and dissertations, correspondence, and autobiography to show how Hume's ethics shape and inform his later writing, communicating by precept and example the excellences of compassion, justice, truthfulness, faith in human beings, freedom from fear, and love of the world. Hume believes in benevolence but not pity and humility; he regards religion as subversive of morality, and comes to see Protestant "enthusiasm" as worse than Catholic "superstition"; he defends worldly goods as important parts of happiness, and luxury or refinement as promoting culture and morality; he is a skeptic and pluralist in ethics and sees virtue as cultivating an attitude or ideal not confirming to a system or principle; he commends humanity but also pride and greatness of mind, free love, and suicide; he dies claiming an excellence of character but says vanity is not mere vanity when one's life has been good. This is an excellent book on Hume as a writer, and is highly recommended for collections in history of philosophy and philosophy of literature, along with Jerome Christensen's Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (CH, May'87) and M.A. Box's The Suasive Art of David Hume (CH, Oct'90). -M. Andic, University of Massachusetts at Boston