Rousseau's Dog (18 page)

In the
Memoirs of George III,
Walpole records: “The situation of the ministers became every day more irksome and precarious.” Conway was under attack by Grenville for his handling of the emergency. Meanwhile, the king was fomenting opposition to his own ministers, worried that his right to tax his colonists was in jeopardy.

Perhaps it was the stress that dispatched Conway to his sickbed. According to Walpole, Conway had “a scorbutic eruption, caught cold, neglected it, it turned to a high fever.” Recuperating on his country estate, the general nonetheless insisted on wandering the grounds despite the freezing temperatures and suffered an inevitable relapse. The matter of the pension waited upon his recovery.

Thus, Hume's rejoicing over the pension was premature. And here we need to jump forward in time. Sure enough, Earl Marischal's seal of approval came from Berlin, but Conway could not speak to the king until May 2. On that day, the general wrote in his formal way to Hume: “His M: is pleased to consent to give him a pension of one hundred pounds per An: —desiring only it might be a secret one.” Conway did not have Rousseau's address and so asked Hume to pass on the king's offer:

The next day, Hume forwarded Conway's letter, instructing Rousseau that it would be necessary to reply with his acceptance and thanks for Conway's good offices. The missive ends with some advice, designed to placate Rousseau, who had been mocked in the London press: “My dear friend, if you must fly from mankind, do not at once renounce the amusement and consolation of society, and feel all the pain which may result from the idle opinions of men and those misrepresented. The expressions contained in this letter of General Conway may convince you in what estimation you are held by all men of character in England. We only wish that you would like our company as well as we do yours.”

I
N SPITE OF
Hume's stated confidence in his relationship with Rousseau, and his zeal in securing him a sanctuary and setting the pension in train, curiously, when Rousseau finally left London, he and Hume had agreed, in the words of the
Monthly Review,
“not to be troublesome to each other by a regular commerce of letters” and to communicate only about the pension so as “not to have the restraint of a continued correspondence.”

“Restraint” rings oddly in this age of letter writing, when every day people communicated with one another at length and post rarely went unanswered (a fact which makes this book possible). Would not saved and savior have wanted to keep in touch?

The probability is that, whatever he might claim in his letters, Hume had rapidly grown tired of his charge and the weight of being responsible for him—”the show-er of the lion” was “weary of his pupil,” as William Rouet had put it in mid-January. John Home, “the Scottish Shakespeare,” also noticed Hume's increasing frustrations “with the
philosopher who allowed himself to be ruled equally by his dog and his mistress.”

Lord Charlemont, who was able to compare Hume's current demeanor with his earlier impressions in Paris, picked up Hume's unease when he bumped into him in the park: “I wished him joy of his pleasing connexion, and particularly hinted that I was convinced he must be perfectly happy in his new friend, as their sentiments were, I believed, nearly similar—'Why no, man,' said he, ‘in that you are mistaken. Rousseau is not what you think him. He is indeed a very sensible, and wonderfully ingenious man, but our opinions are by no means the same. He has a hankering after the Bible, and is indeed little better than a Christian in a way of his own.'”

Hume's reservations about his guest reflected not just his qualms about Rousseau's idiosyncratic views and personality, but also nagging doubts about his rectitude. Was he quite what he claimed? Their stormy passage had shown how hardy Rousseau was, whatever his complaints of chronic illness. What of his financial position? Was it, too, more robust than it seemed? Hume's suspicion on that score arose in Paris. After Rousseau had bemoaned his dire pecuniary state, Hume evidently primed some of his French coterie discreetly to investigate the exile's means. Possibly one of the
philosophes
had told Hume that the Genevan was richer than his protestations of poverty allowed. Indeed, when the successful author fled France, he was not short of money. For
Héloïse, On the Social Contract,
and
émile,
he was to be paid over 14,000 francs.

Back in London, Hume continued to probe. Mme de Boufflers was supposed to be making inquiries on his behalf with Josué de Rougemont, a Parisian banker with whom Rousseau had been associated since about 1762. The wording of Hume's reminder to her is revealing. “It is only a matter of mere curiosity. For, even if the fact should prove against him, which is very improbable, I should only regard it as one weakness more, and do not make my good opinion of him to depend on a single incident.” Yet this pressing for something that might “prove
against” the Genevan was plainly more than curiosity. And while he might regard it as “one weakness more,” Hume's “good opinion” was potentially at stake.

Unknown to Mme de Boufflers, at Hume's request Mme de Barbantane was also pursuing the banker. On February 16, Hume jogged her memory, too. “I know not how your enquiries with M. Rougemont have turned out.” He enlisted the aid of d'Holbach in the same errand. The “mere curiosity” begins to look like a fixation. Rousseau, of course, was ignorant of these letters flying between London and Paris, and of this attempted rummaging into his affairs.

Although it is not clear how, by early April Hume's sleuthing had borne fruit. Mme de Boufflers, Mme de Barbantane, and d'Holbach had not come up with anything. But on April 3, in a long epistle to Mme de Boufflers, Hume wrote “that in point of circumstance he is not to be pitied: for I have also discovered, that he has some little resources beyond what he mentioned [in Paris]. … It is one of his weaknesses that he likes to complain. The truth is, that he is unhappy, and he is better pleased to throw the reason on his health, and circumstances, and misfortunes, than on his melancholy humour and disposition.” A note in French on May 2, 1766, probably to Jean-Charles Trudaine de Montigny (an enlightened economist who was comptroller of finances for bridges and embankments, and who had translated Hume's
Natural History of Religion
), spread the “secret” of the royal pension, and added that Rousseau tried to make himself interesting by complaining of poverty and ill health. But Hume had discovered “by chance” that Rousseau had resources “which he hid from us when he accounted to us for his assets.” “By chance” is hardly an accurate rendering of Hume's persistent inquiries—and he was not finished yet.

A
S
H
UME BECAME
more and more wary of his famous dependent, so his dependent's state of mind became increasingly unsettled. Rousseau
might now have been in the land of freedom, but a number of events were combining to perturb him.

First, as we have seen, early in Rousseau's stay in London, he heard that young Louis-François Tronchin was at Hume's lodgings in Lisle Street.

Then there was the circulation in Paris and London of a mocking letter, a spoof in the name of the king of Prussia satirizing Rousseau as wallowing in misery. The letter had appeared in the French capital before Rousseau left for England, and news of it pursued him across the Channel. On January 18, Rousseau told Mme de Boufflers that Hume had just informed him about

Hume mentioned the King of Prussia letter to Mme de Boufflers the following day: Rousseau's suspicion, he said, was that it had been made up by Voltaire.

Third, there was Rousseau's problem in locating a permanent home far from the capital and its crowds, noise, and bustle. Hume was not much more favorable to the wilds of Derbyshire than of Wales, as he explained to his old Edinburgh friend, the Presbyterian cleric Hugh Blair, in a peculiarly negative view of Rousseau and his prospects:

Hume's withering analysis revealed an absence of imaginative sympathy for his guest's state of mind, and was indicative that in both personality and creative style they were polar opposites. In terms of personality, while Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau reveled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. Moreover, while they were both philosophers, two people with a hunger and capacity for abstract thought and with the power to express their ideas, they occupied separate philosophical universes. It was less that they disagreed than that they had no prospect of engagement.

Both were pivotal figures of the age, though each, in his way, stood apart from the era's stress on the primacy of reason in all aspects of human affairs. Their reasoning about reason showed that reason could get us only so far: they both used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason. (Thus, for Rousseau, an appreciation of the world required not just reason but
sensibilité
; for Hume, reason could never supply an underpinning to morality or religion.) But beyond that, they had in their sights two different targets. Rousseau took aim at common conceptions of man's link with society, and the Enlightenment's proud boast of progress (that there had been progress in the human condition,
and that with the systematic application of rationality and information, advances could be speeded up). Hume was concerned, much more fundamentally, with man's link with the world and man's claims to knowledge of that world.

T
HE
S
COT'S
“
DEAD-BORN
”
Treatise of Human Nature
is a seminal work in the history of philosophy, though these days its content tends to be absorbed by students through his later, less dense
Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding
and
Concerning the Principles of Morals.

The overall impact of Hume's fusillade on common sense was, and still is, most unsettling. Applying the utmost intellectual rigor, he blows away the ground under our day-to-day assumptions: we are like the cartoon dog that runs in midair until he sees there is no ground under his paws. If that was where Hume's head led him, with his heart he was almost apologetic. He did not mean to disorient. Even his demolition of religion, ruthless and unsparing in its analysis, caused him some agonized dissonance: to spare the feelings of friends and acquaintances,
le bon David
often downplayed the full extent of his skepticism.

Hume was what we now call an empiricist—that is, he believed that all our knowledge must originate in our experience, which we gain through our senses. Empiricism has a healthy image—in the Anglo-American world at least—of a plain-talking, feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense philosophy: if it were a person, it would be the solid member of a jury, commonsensical, conscientious, and moderate. But that was not Hume's empiricist.

Hume took empiricism to its logical conclusion: his empiricist was a destructive revolutionary. If knowledge cannot be detached from the internal state of the knower, if the world is what it seems to be to
me,
he argued, I cannot be sure that that is how the world objectively is. My senses are merely my senses; there is no guarantee that they are accurate, that they reflect the world beyond. The Scotsman showed that if
we rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no complete confidence in our personal identity (that I am the same person today as I was yesterday); we can have no confidence in the “laws of nature” that we take for granted, such as gravity or cause and effect.

Take the latter. Hume illustrated his problem with billiard balls. When we see one billiard ball strike another, what reason do we have for believing that the impact of the first ball will bring movement in the second? Yes, we are convinced it will have this effect—but why? For, as Hume points out, when we see a relationship appearing to be one of cause and effect, all we experience in reality is one event followed by another—we cannot see, smell, or touch the causation; we do not see, smell, or touch any necessary connection. Each ball's movement is a distinct matter of fact; we observe the second movement following the movement of the first. And it is entirely conceivable that the second will not follow from the first. The second ball might stay rooted on its spot, or turn into a dove; the two balls might explode on impact; the first might just roll backward. The problem of causation is related to that of induction—the inference of a future event on the grounds of past experience. We cannot logically infer that the sun will rise tomorrow just because it has risen on every previous day.