George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 8

[366] for the useful; the true for the seeming; knowing

Chap. LXIII.} 1776. May.

nothing of a universal moral government, referring every thing to the self of the individual. Hume brought this philosophy of materialism to the test, and applying doubt to its lessons, laid bare its corruption. His profound and searching scepticism was the bier on which it was laid out in state; where all the world might come and see that it really was no more. But while he taught the world that it led to nothingness, he taught nothing in its stead.

It was the same in practical life. Hume might oppose the war with America, because it threatened to mortgage all the revenues of the land in England; but ever welcome at the Bourbon palace and acceptable to George the Third, he had professed to prove that tyrants should not be deposed, that the euthanasia of the British constitution would be absolutism. Scepticism like this could not build up a commonwealth or renovate the world; there must be a new birth in philosophy, or all is lost in the world of reflection; in political life there is no hope of improvement, but from that inborn faith in the intelligent, moral, and divine government of the world, which always survives in the masses. Away, then, with the system of impotent doubt, which teaches that Europe cannot be extricated from the defilements of a selfish aristocracy or despotism, that the British constitution, though it may have a happy death, can have no reform. Let scepticism, the wandering nomad, that intrudes into every field only to desecrate and deny, strike her tents and make way for a people who have power to build up the house of humanity, because they have faith in eternal truth and trust in