And what is the dire necessity and “iron” law under which men groan?  Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears.  I suppose if there be an “iron” law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground.  But what is all we really know, and can know, about the latter phaenomena?  Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground under these conditions; that we have not the smallest reason for believing that any stone so circumstanced will not fall to the ground; and that we have, on the contrary, every reason to believe that it will so fall.  It is very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of belief have been fulfilled in this case, by calling the statement that unsupported stones will fall to the ground, “a law of Nature.”  But when, as commonly happens, we change will into must, we introduce an idea of necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere.  For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.  Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind’s throwing?

But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law, the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas.  The fundamental doctrines of materialism, like those of spiritualism, and most other “isms,” lie outside “the limits of philosophical inquiry,” and David Hume’s great service to humanity is his irrefragable demonstration of what these limits are.  Hume called himself a sceptic and therefore others cannot be blamed if they apply the same title to him; but that does not alter the fact that the name, with its existing implications, does him gross injustice.

If a man asks me what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply that I do not know; that neither I, nor any one else, has any means of knowing; and that, under these circumstances, I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all, I do not think he has any right to call me a sceptic.  On the contrary, in replying thus, I conceive that I am simply honest and truthful, and show a proper regard for the economy of time.  So Hume’s strong and subtle intellect takes up a great many problems about which we are naturally curious, and shows us that they are essentially questions of lunar politics, in their essence incapable of being answered, and therefore not worth the attention of men who have work to do in the world.  And he thus ends one of his essays:—­