The Great Infidel

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This is the story of the life of the famous philosopher, one of Scotland's greatest men. Through Hume's life, we are shown the Enlightenment from its roots, through its sometimes difficult growth to its flowering in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Using original sources, some for the first time, we witness Hume's disappointment with the reception of his Treatise of Human Nature - 'it fell dead-born from the press' - although it is now seen as a pivotal work in European thinking, and follow his adventures during a farcical invasion of France. His Essays and History at last brought him the fame he had sought, but also caused the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland to attempt to excommunicate him. The accusation that Hume was an atheist is disproved while, more light-heartedly, his time as a diplomat shows him at the heart of the gossip of pre-Revolutionary Paris, where he was 'Le Bon David'.