I answered, that it was not for me to say at what point of the scale a man might become an orthodox doubter; but I was, at all events, glad that he had not gone all the lengths which some had gone, or professed to have gone; who, if they had not reached that climax of Pyrrhonism, to doubt even if they doubt, yet had declared the attainment of all truth impossible.  I then bantered him a little on the advantages of “absolute scepticism”; told him I wondered that he should throw them away; and reminded him of the success with which the sceptic might train on his adversary into the “bosky depths” of German metaphysics,—­the theories of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel.  “If truth be in any of those dusky labyrinths,” said I, “you are not compelled to find her; the more unintelligible the discussion becomes, the better for the sceptic; you may not only doubt, but doubt whether you even understand your doubts.  You may play ‘hide and seek’ there for ten thousand years.”  “For all eternity,” was his reply.  But he said he had no wish to seek any such covert, nor to play the sceptic.

I told him I was glad to find that his scepticism did not—­to use Burke’s expression on another subject—­“go down to the foundations.”  He answered that he was afraid it did on all subjects really of any significance to man.  “As to the present life,” he continued, “I am quite willing to accept Bayle’s dictum:  ’Les Sceptiques ne nioient pas qu’il ne se fallut conformer aux coutumes de son pays, et pratiquer des devoirs de la morale, et prendre parti en ces choses la sur des probabilites, sans attendre la certitude.’”

I was not sorry that he took Bayle’s limits of scepticism rather than Hume’s:  I told him so.

Hume, he said, was evidently playing with scepticism; for himself, he had no heart to jest upon the subject.  The Scotch sceptic acknowledged that the metaphysical riddles of his “absolute scepticism” exercised, and ought to exercise, no practical influence on himself or any man; that the moment he quitted them, and entered into society, “they appeared to him so frigid and unnatural” that he could not get himself to interest himself about them any further; that a dinner with a friend, or a game at backgammon, put them all to flight, and restored him to the undoubting belief of all the maxims which his meditative hours had stripped him of.  It was natural, Harrington said; for such scepticism was impossible.  He added, however, that, had Hume been honest, he would never have employed his subtilty in the one-sided way he did; “for,” said he, “if his principles be true, they tell just as much against those who deny any religious dogmas as against those who maintain them.  Yet everywhere in relation to religion—­take the question of miracles, for example—­he argues not as a sceptic at all, but as a dogmatist, only on the negative side.  If his doctrine of ‘Ideas’ and of ‘Causation’ be true, he ought to have maintained that; for any thing we know, miracles may have occurred a thousand times, and may as often occur again.  Hume,” he said, “was amusing himself; but I am not:  nor can any one really feel—­many pretend to do so without feeling at all—­the pressure of such doubts as envelop me, and be content to amuse themselves with them.”