[This article appeared in Philological Quarterly, Spring 1975.]

David Hume's Fables of Identity

ROBERT H. BELL

David Hume's theory of personal identity has two useful and unexplored literary applications. The theory is pertinent to the study of autobiography in general, since it supplies conceptual support for the legitimacy—indeed, the necessity—of reading all autobiography as one would read fiction. It also helps us reconcile the apparent contradiction between the "self" Hume presents in his autobiography and the "Hume" we see in his earlier writings.

Of course Hume himself had no such mere literary considerations in mind when he was producing A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)—he was after bigger game. His chapter "Of Personal Identity" is an assault upon the very citadel of western thought, and his prose conveys the tensed excitement of revolutionary discovery: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or an­other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception . . . If anyone upon serious and un­prejudic'd reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me."¹ Instead, Hume conceives the self as a "bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a per­petual flux and movement." The whole argument involves many quick­silver movements, now adopting, now dismissing this and that idea. In the concluding chapter which follows "Of Personal Identity," Hume's exult­ance has become fear of where his theory has led him: "I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate . . . When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detrac­tion. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance" (p. 264).

Hume's empiricism leads to pure skepticism, and implies something darker. It is likely that Gibbon, Franklin, or Johnson, subjected to Hume's speculation, would have been content to kick the rock of selfhood, refuting Hume thus. Even Hume's famous disclaimer shows that it is easier to ignore than to deal with the consequences of his argument: "Most fortu­nately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to the purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridicu­lous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther" (p. 269).

What Hume offers in place of the self he has annihilated is our modern belief that the continuity of self is a fiction: "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity." Hume's idea that identity is "such a fiction" destroys old realities and invites new fables, predicting the conception of character in, say, Sar­tre's writing, or in such twentieth-century fiction as Absalom, Absalom: "all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognizable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is, leaving nothing of what is behind but eliding complete and intact and unresisting into the next avatar as the overblown rose or magnolia elides from one rich June to the next, leaving no bones, no substance, no dust of whatever dead pristine soulless rich surrender anywhere between sun and earth." ²

Hume's assertion that "the identity which we can ascribe to the mind is only a fictitious one" has rich implications for literary self-dramatization. Hume insists that the self we have can only be the self we create "in the imagination when we reflect." It is important here to distinguish different meanings of the word "identity," lest we blur the distinction between Hume's precise definition and our current (even fashionable) usage. He is not repudiating personal identity in the sense of "condition of character as to who a person or what a thing is" (Random House Dictionary, 1967); he investigates the sources of that notion, knowing they are likely to remain "something mysterious and inexplicable" (p. 255). His primary argu­ment—"Our chief business"—is to prove that all objects, including the self, "to which we ascribe identity, without observing their invariableness and uninteruptedness, are such as consist of a succession of related objects" (p. 255). While we must recognize Hume's exact meanings, his importance for autobiographers was probably less specific but more exciting. For Hume's suave analysis bequeathes autobiographers the conviction that per­sonal identity is a process, not a substance. He denied that there was any a priori idea of self, and challenged men to discover one by examining their own experience. Only a conscious application of the mind and, Hume further implies, of the "fictive" imagination, could create a unified iden­tity. It would be plausible and gratifying for any autobiographer to con­clude that a more lively imagination will produce a more complex and attractive identity. Not the fiat of the Almighty, but the experience of consciousness, makes a man full and whole, and determines that character "which he calls himself."

Hume is not arguing that personal identity bears no relation to reality, or that our notion of it should defy the "experimental method" his Treatise promulgates. But he shows that only a fictitious conversion of that "infinite variety" of perceptions allows us to imagine one continuous, identical self. The most important principles which "can give ideas union in the imagina­tion," thus producing the idea of "a self," are relations of resemblance and causation. The resemblance between memory and past perceptions helps "convey the imagination more easily from one link to another, and make the whole seem like the continuance of one object . . . In this particular, then, the memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production, by producing the relation of resemblance among the percep­tions" (p. 261). The role of causation in forming our conception of identity suggests to Hume another metaphor: "I cannot compare the soul more properly to anything than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and sub­ordination and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant change of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation" (p. 261).

Naturally, autobiographers do not proffer systematic epistemological theories of personal identity, but they do make the sort of assumptions which A. N. Whitehead described as so obvious people do not know they are assuming them because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. Explorations of evanescent inner space in Tristram Shandy and Boswell's Journals are a short step from the perplexing but vital need of dealing with Hume's "bundle or collection of different perceptions . . . in perpetual flux and movement." Hume's theory of personal identity de­manded new styles of self-definition which we now recognize as modern, for his skeptical analysis cryptically avoids any conclusion, or even hope of resolution: "The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion, which is of great importance in the present affair, viz. that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties." This cheshire cat-like gesture, pointing in contrary directions and disappearing in a smile, seems prophetic nonetheless, describing autobiographers and reflective men upon the quest to create in words whatever self they choose to imagine.

Hume's theory of personal identity also provides a means of understand­ing what appears to be a contradiction between his official life-story, com­posed in 1776, and earlier, much more troubled self-assessments. History has fortuitously preserved a "collection of different perceptions" which invites comparison between Hume's versions of himself. The most significant document is an anonymous letter of about three thousand words, never posted, describing himself to the famous Dr. Arbuthnot.³ It was written in the spring of 1734, after seven years of lonely contemplation and study towards the Treatise had brought upon a debilitating crisis, from which he desperately needed relief. It is exactly such emotional turmoil which the ironic and detached Hume of later years left behind. Such biographical information enables us to compare the tentative point of view of unfulfilled youth, and the poised retrospective assessment of the mature autobiogra­pher. And, more generally, Hume's theory of personal identity alerts us to the possibility of radical discrepancies between "actual experience" and first-person singular "historical" narrative.

Hume imagines Dr. Arbuthnot as a man of rather remarkable virtue: "a skillful physician, a man of letters, of wit, of good sense, and of great hu­manity," something like the young writer, only greater. Yet Hume's flat­tery may be more than a bid for the doctor's sympathy. The process of heroic magnification served another, more crucial need to envision a reader of sublime, commanding authority, sufficient to provide "a satisfying an­swer." Hume is trying to get to realities, to find something in himself to count on. If he has no God to take into his confidence, a God-like man will have to do.

Hume expresses "anxiety concerning the judgment you will form of me," but resolves nevertheless to present "a kind of history of my life." He recalls his family's hopes that he would pursue law, and his early preference for philosophy and criticism. He was exhilarated by the sense that "there is nothing yet established in either of these two sciences, and that they contain little more than endless disputes, even in the most fundamental articles .. . I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not inclined to submit to authority in these subjects, but led me to seek out some new medium, by which truth might be established." Engaged in the baffling and potentially self-defeating denial of intellectual certainty, and of our very existence as a unified self, Hume came to Arbuthnot seeking the very authority he repudiated. Despite his energetic bravado, the value of his vision remained problematic, unless he could be certain that it was the arrogance of genius.

"When I was about eighteen years old," he continues, "there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it." This ruined his health, producing a plethora of symptoms which a doctor diagnosed as "the disease of the learned." Hume was relieved to find that relaxation, exercise, ample bitters, antihysteric pills, and English claret recovered his spirits so that "though they sank under me in the higher flights of genius, yet I was able to make considerable progress in my former designs." He seems to convey, through the image of high flight, ambivalent suggestions of tran­scendence and fall, suitable to jejune genius.

Hume's epistle is an experiment, to cure himself through introspection and enunciation—a version of confession. The stakes were very high. Unable to heal himself, could he presume to cure the universal disease of the learned? To verify his credentials as a student of Human Nature, he must first know himself, like the aspiring psychoanalyst who undergoes analysis. He adds, almost plaintively, "at least this is all I have to depend on" to justify "many a quire of paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own inventions." He draws a pertinent parallel between himself and "the French mystics" and "our fanatics here": "when they give a history of the situation of their souls, they mention a coldness and desertion of the spirit, which frequently returns . . . as this kind of devotion depends entirely on the force of passion, and consequently on the animal spirits, I have often thought that their case and mine were pretty parallel, and that their raptur­ous admirations might discompose the fabric of the nerves and brain, as much as profound reflections, and that warmth or enthusiasm which is inseparable from them." Hume determined, pathetically, to become a merchant in Bristol, to which he was hastening "with a resolution to forget myself, and everything that is past, to engage myself, as far as it is possible, in that course of life, and to toss about the world, from one pole to the other, till I leave this distemper behind me."

This protracted period of emotional struggle and near breakdown is pre­sented quite casually in "My Own Life" some forty years later: "My very slender fortune, however, being unsuitable to this plan of life, and my health being a little broken by my ardent application, I was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life . . ."⁴ For the same reasons that he underplays his emotional travail, he omits the nature and significance of his early religious concerns. As a result, he has been quite literally taken at his word as the Scottish philosophe, famed enemy of piety and scourge of the eighteenth-century divines. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, depicted Hume and his fellow skeptic Voltaire de­parting for infernal regions, under the exultant foot of one of Hume's ortho­dox antagonists, named Beattie, in a well-known painting entitled "The Triumph of Virtue."

No matter what "My Own Life" conveys, or what a round majority of godly men believed, there is more to the story of Hume's spirituality. He had grown up in a relatively enlightened but rigorous household, when Scottish presbyterianism was greatly influenced by English Puritanism "seen in its grimmest form."⁵ He regularly attended church services con­ducted by his uncle, minister of the Chirnside parish; his mother Katherine was considered unusually pious even for that time and place. The lessons the boy imbibed "depicted God as an implacable despot, swift to wrath," and stressed "the doctrine of election and reprobation in all their severity,"⁶— severe enough that witches were still being executed during his teens. Norman Kemp Smith concludes that Hume "must therefore have been very thoroughly indoctrinated with the Calvinist creed,"⁷ and it troubled him for some time. But it was an "identity" he shed, as unsuiting the fearless skeptic's public image.

Hume did discuss his early religious convictions with the ubiquitous Bos­well in the famous death-bed interview. He said that he used to read The Whole Duty of Man, a popular devotional text, and that he made "an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them."⁸ A letter written in 1757 gives further evidence of the profundity of Hume's struggle. Hume asked his friend Eliot for "Whatever you can think, to strengthen that side of the Argument" held by Cleanthes, the philosophical theist of The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. "Any propensity you imagine I have to the other Side [the skeptical position] crept in upon me against my will. And 'tis not long ago that I burn'd an old Manuscript Book, wrote long before I was twenty; which contain'd, Page after Page, the gradual Progress of my Thoughts on that head. It begun with an anxious Search after Arguments, to confirm the common Opinion; Doubts stole in, dissipated, return'd, were again dissipated, return'd again, and it was perpetual Struggle of a restless Imagination against Inclination, perhaps against Reason."⁹

Hume's description of his anxious search is the stuff of spiritual auto­biography, and sounds like an abstract of a Grace Abounding gone sour—or a commentary upon his argument concerning personal identity. Well into the period of self-consciousness, Hume resembled his Calvinist ancestors, who assiduously kept spiritual journals to cast accounts with God. Natu­rally we do not expect a short "history of my Writings" to probe such con­flicts in detail. But the nearly total suppression of intimate beliefs, albeit in the distant past, suggests at once the fictive unity and historical unreliability of autobiography. Hume had said there is nothing "simple and continu'd" in the self, and certainly "there is no such principle in me." As Northrop Frye wryly notes, librarians would presumably classify an autobiography with the novels only if they considered the author a liar; Hume might instruct them otherwise.

Most readers of Hume's brief life-story were unprepared for any possi­bility other than a "simple and continu'd" correlation between the real David Hume and the hero of the piece. "My Own Life" was unusually well-known because it was appended to nearly every edition of Hume's works, including the enormously popular History of England . Though he called it "Little more than a history of my writings," it had a certain notori­ety, stirring strong hostilities for such an apparently innocuous work. This surprises modern readers, who are likely to view the hero of "My Own Life" as a mild-mannered scholar with one ruling passion, a zeal for literary fame, and not an obvious threat to anybody.

Within this relatively simplified conception of character, however, Hume creates a myth of selfhood which flouted the beliefs of many eighteenth-century readers. His life-story was offensive because it deals successfully with the problem of autobiographical narration in the new "secular" mode. Before 1776, first-person singular accounts of true worldly experiences had been infrequently ventured. Most autobiographers before Hume wrote in a clearly defined spiritual tradition,¹⁰ in which self-examination was not merely a custom, but an obligation, directed at a transcendent goal: "It is certainly the duty of a Christian," wrote Calvin, "to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul"; instead, the Chris­tian must "set before him as a prime motive of his existence zeal to show forth the glory of God."¹¹ Although the avowed purpose of spiritual auto‑ biography was to abase the self in order to glorify God, Bunyan and other narrators manage to "show forth" in more grandly dramatic flourishes, relishing the complexities of self as though they were interested in it for its own sake.

Hume's perspective, in his autobiography as in his philosophy, is purely and rigorously secular, presenting his life with no divine sanctions or prom­ises. Consequently he is forced to recognize that his motives are suspect, and his opening sentences reflect a natural self-consciousness: "It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life. . . ." Hume helped establish the precedent for the history of mun­dane experiences, without God. A few years later, in his Memoirs, Edward Gibbon acknowledged "the authority of my masters," including "the philo­sophic Hume" as "sufficient to justify my design." ¹²

Hume knew that the presentation of one's life story without spiritual purpose bespeaks a certain "vanity" which threatens to undermine the au­thority of the story, because the narrator must command our trust. He meets this difficulty in an effective, if rudimentary, fashion. He acknowl­edges vanity, refuses to boast when he might, and emphasizes his failures. He concludes, "I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained." But autobiographical narrative tends to take on a life of its own, free of fealty to any supposed "matter of fact . . . easily cleared and ascertained." For instance, Hume's most famous sentence in "My Own Life" thus describes the appearance of his great work: "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." As "a matter of fact," the Treatise did receive a good deal of attention for a first work by an unknown author, as Mossner's biography documents.¹³ Undoubtedly this was in­sufficient reward for a young man of such high aspirations, but it was hardly an epochal misfortune. Hume treats almost all his publications in the same vein, as critical and popular failures. This surely indicates the scope of his expectations, but something much more important is at issue here, implicit in Hume's conception of personal identity as "such a fiction."

The character Hume presented to his readers was the dying philosophe passing into oblivion with stoic equanimity. As had his Calvinist ancestors, Hume wrote his own "funeral oration," but with a significant distinction. We might say that both legitimate spiritual autobiographies and Hume's "My Own Life" create and preserve a cherished image of the self for didac­tic ends. However, such confessional writers as Augustine, Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards would disagree violently with the notion of a cherished self-image; they were convinced that their personal identity was precisely defined in their narratives (and in life, they would insist) by those events, and only those experiences, which pertain to their growth in grace. The narrator of a spiritual autobiography can scarcely imagine that anything else matters; the whole truth of what Perry Miller terms the "Augustinian mode of piety" is "reducible to a concrete problem, the relation of the many to the One." ¹⁴

To Hume, personal identity is never so simply "reducible," nor continu­ous over time. The self can not be viewed as anything persisting before or after the experience of conversion; instead, the self is a "fiction" implying a choice of details from "an infinite variety of postures and situations." As in a novel, we can never know what in that "perpetual flux" has been discarded or ignored in any life-story. Yet we can surely deal with the structure we do have, describing the "fictional" design even when it remains implicit. Hume presents a coherent life story from a special perspective for particular persuasive effects. In "My Own Life" Hume plays the same role he performed on his death bed for Boswell, carefully rendering philosophic calm of mind: "I am, or rather was . . . a man of mild disposition, of com­mand of temper . ." This was his analogue for the shaping principle of spiritual lives; it was this serene death-mask, and not any incidental anti­clericism, which infuriated true believers. How much more comforted the rigidly righteous would have been to see the infidel squirm! Instead, they had to endure the spectacle of Hume's defiant indifference to the prospect of everlasting damnation. As Mossner says cogently, "My Own Life" is "part autobiography and part manifesto." ¹⁵

In Spring 1775 I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment's abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were Ito name the period of my life, which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this latter period. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out at last with additional luster, I knew that I could have but few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.

Hume's brazen "character" terrified the zealots and troubled thoughtful waverers everywhere. Boswell has recorded Dr. Johnson's indignant re­action to Hume's philosophic "detachment" at the end; it is an assessment by a man always overwhelmed by fear of annihilation, and yet keenly aware of the importance of role-playing: "He lied . . . He had a vanity in being thought easy." And then, in a brilliant and ironic application of Hume's own test for the validity of miracles, he added: "It is more probable that he lied than that so very improbable a thing should be as a man not afraid of death; of going into an unknown state and not being uneasy at leaving all that he knew. And you are to consider that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive not to lie." ¹⁶

Of course, autobiographers should not be castigated as liars by readers who expect to discover their own version of truth, or sincerity, and find a fictional identity instead—any more than actors on soap-operas who are sent money by sympathetic viewers should be indicted for fraud. Autobiography can not promise that experience will be rendered authentically, even if "authenticity" merely means treating incidents as they were regarded when they occurred. Let us suppose that the autobiographer creates a character out of a "collection of different perceptions . . . in a perpetual flux and movement." As Hume argued in the Treatise, no one can identify the persistence of any stable self, not even one's own self. Surely autobiography cannot render all the myriad sensations, dreams, and experiences which make up a life; it is only the creative use of memory which "make[s] the whole seem like the continuance of one object." My hypothesis is not meant to excuse the reader's wilful ignorance of "fact which is easily cleared and ascertained," but to discover what comes to light when we cede autobiography more creative autonomy. We usually assume that autobiography is a first-person singular account of "what really happened," but the verisimilitude of the genre may be only apparent—part of the convention of telling your own story.¹⁷ The autobiographer usually conceives his story as a gradual development of awareness, independence, or moral consciousness, creating a unity he probably never experienced. Thus are created remarkable characters of all stripes—visionaries, Casanovas, buffoons, braggadocios, saints, heroes, and the chief of sinners. Great autobiographers, like great novelists, continually surprise us not only with the fecundity of seemingly meager lives, but with the joy of freeing life from the tyranny of facts. As we have seen, Hume shapes "My Own Life" as a death-bed polemic, challenging the pious belief that even infidels finally turn to God. Seeking to dramatize philosophic acceptance, Hume has either forgotten or suppressed the religious and emotional turmoil of his youth. "My Own Life" glosses over crises and conflicts, such as "philosophical melancholy and delirium," which do not suit his hero, in the same way a spiritual autobiographer purges experiences irrelevant to the quest for grace.

Hume as autobiographer selects, or invents, a self which disregards the hubbub of that "bundle or collection of different perceptions" which he had once discovered within himself. Because the "I" of the Treatise and of various autobiographical documents are so different from the persona of "My Own Life," we might be tempted to conclude that Hume rejected his own theory of personal identity—as if the speculation of the Treatise appeared "so cold, and strain'd and ridiculous" that he could not bear to entertain it any farther. Yet Hume's ultimate "self" is really not incompatible, but absolutely consistent, with his theory in following what he called the "natural propension . . . to imagine that . . . identity." And he imagined a very "classical" character indeed, far removed from, say, Tristram's histrionic or Boswell's mercurial "variety of postures and situations" which more clearly illustrate the "Humean self." "My Own Life" is what Erik Erikson would call "official identity, the moment when life suddenly becomes biography."¹⁸ The process of presenting a life for public uses is always problematic and open to inquiry; it is disconcerting only to the hagiographer who may observe that the saint's body has begun to putrify.

The character of Hume is prey to the whims of fortune, critical hostility, "speedy dissolution," and, doubtless, imminent putrefaction—but he is a real hero for all that, delivering a suave and bold proclamation: "Death, where is thy sting?" In "My Own Life," Hume applies his theory of per­sonal identity and ignores significant elements of his personal history. But both the philosophical theory and the biographical information remind us of the essential "fictiveness" of life-stories, and alert us to the persuasive tactics of the genre. Autobiographers, with such great models as Augustine, are liable to have a central, even if covert, design in creating such fables of identity. When asked what a critic requires, T. S. Eliot replied that he must be very intelligent. Literary critics can most intelligently comprehend auto­biographies as fictive constructs which may ignore, select, shape, and use verifiable details to create a unified pattern "in the imagination when we reflect." We need, in short, the imagination to recognize "such a fiction" as the creation of self, and the curiosity to learn what "matters of fact" may be relevant. As the example of Hume shows, careful scrutiny of both fact and fiction teach us that we can never really know the dancer from the dance.

NOTES

¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford U. Press, 1967), p. 252. All subsequent references to Hume's theory, unless otherwise indicated by page number, are from the Treatise, pp. 251-63. Hume's analysis was new and startling, but as he points out, the nature of personal identity had become a "great question in philosophy, especially of late years in England . . ." Generally Hume is applying and extending the empirical assumptions of John Locke, who must be credited with raising the question for most eighteenth-century readers ("Of Identity and Diversity," chapter 27 of Book II of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding). See also the responses of Lord Shaftesbury (Mis­cellany IV, chapter 1 of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc.), Bishop Butler (appendix to Analogy of Religion), and Thomas Reid (Essay III, chapters 4 and 6 of Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man). As Ian Watt notes in The Rise of the Novel (U. of California Press, 1965, p. 18), the controversy "even reached the pages of the Spectator," and was eventually parodied by the inimitable Tristram Shandy: "—my good friend, quoth I—as sure as I am I—and you are you—And who are you? said he.—Don't puzzle me; said I" ed. Ian Watt (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1965), p. 4oo.

² William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 196.

³ For the fascinating story of this letter, see E. C. Mossner, "Hume's Epistle to Dr. Arbuth­not, 1734, the Biographical Significance," Huntington Library Quarterly, 7, No. 2 (1943-44), 135-52. The text for the "Epistle" is in Letters ofDavid Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford U. Press, 1932), I, 12-18, and all references are to this text.

⁴ David Hume, "My Own Life," in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 3-11. All subsequent references to the "Life" are from this text.

⁵ Rev. A. J. Campbell, Two Centuries of the Church of Scotland: 1707-1929, cited by Norman Kemp Smith, introduction to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (New York: Social Sciences Publishers, 1948), p. 4.

⁶ Campbell, cited by Smith, p. 4.

⁷ Smith, p. 4.

⁸ Hume, cited by Boswell, Boswell in Extremes: 1776-1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. is.

⁹ Hume, Letters, I, p. 154.

¹⁰ Until recently, spiritual autobiography was a literary genre neglected by nearly everyone except Perry Miller and William Haller, whose concerns are not strictly literary. See The New England Mind^. The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) and The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper, 1957). In the last several years, several illuminating literary analyses have also appeared. Among them: Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix (London: John Murray, 1958); Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia U. Press, 1969); John Morris, Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1966); Daniel B. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton U. Press, 1968); G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton U. Press, 1965); Joan Webber, The Eloquent I: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

¹¹ Calvin, cited by Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Harvard U. Press, 1965), p. 54.

¹² Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges Bonnard (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1966), p. 2.

¹³ E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (U. of Texas Press, 1954), chapter 10 (esp. p. 132).

¹⁴ Miller, p. 8.

¹⁵ Mossner, The Life of David Hume, p. 591.

¹⁶ Johnson, quoted by Boswell, Boswell in Extremes: 1776-1778, p. 155.

¹⁷ The criticism of autobiography has swelled recently. In addition to the studies of spirit­ual autobiography, cited above, see the following full-length examinations: James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton U. Press, 1972); Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Harvard U. Press, 1960); Robert Sayre, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, and Henry James (Princeton U. Press, 1964); Wayne Shu­maker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (U. of California Press, 1954).

¹⁸ Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 53.