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“MISCELLANIES. DEATH OF HUME,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Magazine United, vol. 2 (March 1810), pp. 462–4.
Anonymous
The Panoplist was a long-lived religious magazine founded in Boston by Rev. Jedediah Morse in 1805. In 1808 The Panoplist was merged with the Massachusetts Missionary Magazine. In 1810, when the essay reprinted below was published, Jeremiah Evarts was editor of the Panoplist. On the Panoplist see Neal L. Edgar, A History and Bibliography of American Magazines, 1810–1820 (Metuchen, 1975), pp. 67, 187–8; API, pp. 142, 174; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 262–5.
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THE following admirable remarks on the death of the celebrated infidel, David Hume, are extracted from a critique on Ritchie’s Life of Hume: in the Eclectic Review. ‘His death,’ as the Reviewer observes, ‘will probably be admitted, and even cited, by infidels, as an example of the noblest and most magnanimous deportment in the prospect of death, that it is possible for any of their class to maintain: an example, indeed, which very few of them ever, in their serious moments, dare promise themselves to equal, though they may deem it in the highest degree enviable. It may be taken as quite their apostolic specimen, standing parallel in their history to the instance of St. Paul, in the records of the Christians, ‘I have fought a good fight,” &c.
‘For a short time previous to his death, he amused himself with playing at cards, making whimsical legacies, and other trifling occupations. As an instance of his ‘sportive disposition,’ ‘notwithstanding the prospect of speedy dissolution,’ his biographer relates, that, when reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, he diverted himself with inventing several jocular excuses which he supposed he might make Charon, and in imagining the very surly answers which it might suit the character of Charon to return to them: — “Upon further consideration,” said he, “I thought I might say to him, ‘Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the public receive the alterations?’ But Charon would answer, “When you see the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so honest friend, please to step into the boat.” But I might still urge, ‘Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfal of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.’ But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.”
This anecdote is accompanied with the following just and striking reflections on the part of the Reviewer: — ‘1st. Supposing a certainty of the final cessation of conscious existence at death, this indifference to life, if it was not affected (which indeed we suspect it to have been in part) was an absurd undervaluation of a possession which almost all rational creatures, that have not been extremely miserable, have held most dear, and which is, in its own nature, most precious. To be a conscious agent, exerting a rich combination of wonderful faculties, — to feel an infinite variety of pleasurable sensations and emotions, — to contemplate all nature, — to extend an intellectual presence to indefinite ages of the past and future, — to possess a perennial spring of ideas, — to run infinite lengths of inquiry, with the delight of exercise and fleetness, even when not with the satisfaction of full attainment, — and to be a lord over inanimate matter, compelling it to an action and an use altogether foreign to its nature, — to be all this, is a state so stupendously different from that of being simply a piece of clay, that to be quite easy and complacent in the immediate prospect of passing from the one to the other, is a total inversion of all reasonable estimates of things; it is a renunciation, we do not say of sound philosophy, but of common sense. The certainty that the loss will not be felt after it has taken place, will but little sooth a man of unperverted mind, in considering what it is that he is going to lose.
‘2. The jocularity of the philosopher was contrary to good taste. Supposing that the expected loss were not, according to a grand law of nature, a cause for melancholy and desperation, but that the contentment were rational; yet the approaching transformation was, at all events, to be regarded as a very grave and very strange event; and therefore jocularity was totally incongruous with the anticipation of such an event; — a grave and solemn feeling was the only one that could be in unison with the contemplation of such a change. There was, in this instance, the same incongruity which we should impute to a writer who should mingle buffoonery in a solemn crisis of the drama, or with the most momentous event of a history. To be in harmony with his situation, in his own view of that situation, the expressions of the dying philosopher were required to be dignified; and if they were in any degree vivacious, the vivacity ought to have been rendered graceful, by being accompanied with the noblest effort of the intellect, of which the efforts were going to cease for ever. The low vivacity of which we have been reading, seems but like the quickening corruption of a mind whose faculty of perception is putrifying and dissolving, even before the body. It is true, that good men, of a high order, have been known to utter pleasantries in their last hours; — but these have been pleasantries of a fine, ethereal quality, — the scintillations of animated hope, — the high pulsations of mental health, — the involuntary movements of a spirit feeling itself free even in the grasp of death, the natural springs and boundings of faculties on the point of obtaining a still much greater and a boundless liberty. These had no resemblance to the low and labored jokes of our philosopher, jokes so labored as to give strong cause for suspicion, after all, that they were of the same nature, and for the same purpose, as the expedient of a boy on passing through some gloomy place in the night who whistles to lesson his fear, to persuade his companions that he does not feel it.
‘3. Such a manner of meeting death was inconsistent with the skepticism to which Hume was always found to avow his adherence; for that skepticism necessarily acknowledged a possibility and a chance that the religion which he had scorned might notwithstanding, be found true, and might, in the moment after his death, glare upon him with all its terrors. But how dreadful to a reflecting mind would have been the smallest chance of meeting such a vision! Yet the philosopher could be cracking his heavy jokes; and Dr. Smith could be much diverted at the sport!
‘4. To a man who solemnly believes the truth of revelation, and therefore the threatenings of divine vengeance against the despisers of it, this scene will present as mournful a spectacle as perhaps the sun ever shone upon. We have beheld a man of great talents and invincible perseverance, entering on his career with the profession of an impartial inquiry after truth, met at every stage and step by the evidences and expostulations of religion and the claims of his Creator, but devoting his labors to the pursuit of fame and the promotion of impiety, at length acquiring and accomplishing, as he declared himself, all he had intended and desired, and descending toward the close of life amidst tranquillity, widely-extending reputation, and the homage of the great and the learned. We behold him appointed soon to appear before that Judge to whom he had never alluded but with malice or contempt; yet preserving to appearance an entire self-complacency, idly jesting about his approaching dissolution, and mingling with the insane sport his references to the fall of ‘superstition:’ — a term of which the meaning is hardly ever dubious when expressed by such men. We behold him at last carried off, and we seem to hear, the following moment, from the darkness in which he vanishes, the shriek of surprise and terror, and the overpowering accents of the messenger of vengeance! On the whole globe there probably was not acting, at the time, so mournful a tragedy as that of which the friends of Hume were the spectators, without being aware that it was any tragedy at all.’