200 Year Anniversary 200 Year Anniversi ATHEIST

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Two hundred years ago y a notorious atheist ed on into immortality.

ivid Hume, who died in burgh on August 25th, 1776 I a long and painful illness)

at different times tutor, staff er, diplomat, librarian, civil at and historian.

* was: also one of the greatest roldest of British philosophers, wid one of the intellectual grandits of Marxism.

• died as he had lived, in a of uncompromising and ful hostility to all religion and stition.

vo famous universities, Edinand Glasgow, distinguished selves by relusing him jobs. АП! scarcely was he in his grave nananafer raine har in hir bef ie clergymen were queuing up to neap vilification and abusive pan phlets on it.

*hat most riled them was that Hurie's philosophical scepticism with stood not only their feeble polimics, but his own painful and ling ring death.

• ames Boswell visited› him near the end, hoping that illness would hav altered his views on religion and the immortality of the soul.

But Hume replied that "he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read dy Adam westoDy Hegel he heard a man was religious, ne concluded he was a rascal" , adding that "it was a most unreasonable each that we sbould exist fox ever A little before (on the 4th July 1776, the day of the American Declaration of Independence) Hume had summoned his close friends (including the economist Adam Smith) to a farewell dinner.

Up to his final hour "The extreme gentleness of his nature Kant never weakened either the firmness of his mind or the steadiness of his resolutions" wrote Smith.

Nonetheless a largely hostile crowd gathered at his funera, perhaps expecting the coffin (which was buried during a heavy rainstorm) to be struck by a refutatory thunderbolt.

They were disappointed. But the philosophical ideas which allowed Hume to die with such scandalous composure survived him. His scep-

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Locke and Clarke" , and that "when d Au