Doubts had crept in, and the stoic was tempted to turn sceptic.Writing long after to Sir Gilbert Elliott in regard to his " Dialogues on Natural Religion," which sap all religion, be mentions a manuscript, afterwards destroyed, which he had written before twenty."It began with an anxious search after arguments to confirm the common opinion, doubts stole in, dissipated, returned, were again dissipated, returned again; and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclination, perhaps against reason."The letter is supposed by Mr.Burton, on good grounds, to have been written to the celebrated Dr.Cheyne, author of the Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion" (1705), and The English Malady; or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all kinds, Spleens, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal {119} Distempers," &c.It is doubtful whether the letter ever reached Dr.Cheyne, and it may be doubted whether that eminent physician had in all his pharmacopoea a medicine to cure the malady of this remarkable youth.Dr.Cheyne defends with the common arguments the "great fundamental principles of all virtue and all morality: viz., the existence of a supreme and infinitely perfect Being; the freedom of the will, the immortality of the spirits of all intellectual beings, and the certainty of future rewards or punishments." But the youth who proposed to address him had already a system evolved which undermined all these.One could have wished that there had been a friend at hand to direct him away from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, to a better teacher who is never mentioned.Not that we should have expected him in his then state to be drawn to the character of Jesus, but he might have found something in His work fitted to give peace and satisfaction to his distracted soul.But it is useless to speculate on these possibilities.All he says himself is:
" In 1734 I went to Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me.I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat, and I there laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued."
We can easily picture the youth of twenty-three as he set out for France.By nature he is one of a class of persons to be found in all countries, but quite as frequently in Scotland as anywhere else, who are endowed with a powerful intellect, conjoined with a heavy animal temperament, and who, with no high aspirations, ideal, ethereal, or spiritual, have a tendency {120} to look with suspicion on all kinds of enthusiasm and highflown zeal.
With an understanding keen and searching, he could not be contented with the appearances of things, and was ever bent on penetrating beneath the surface; and his native shrewdness, his hereditary predilections, and the reaction against the heats of the previous century, all combined to lead him to question common impressions and popular opinions.He saw the difficulties which beset philosophical and theological investigations, and was unable to deliver himself from them, being without the high sentiments which might have lifted him above the low philosophy of his own day in England and France, and the sophistries suggested by a restless intellect.He knew only the ancient Stoic philosophy in the pages of Roman authors, and the modern philosophy of Locke, as modified by such men as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and driven to its logical consequences by Berkeley: he bad tried the one in his practical conduct, and the other by his sifting intellect, and having found both wanting, he is prepared to abandon himself to scepticism, which is the miserable desert resorted to by those who despair of truth.Meanwhile his great intellectual powers find employment in constructing theories of the mind, in which he himself perhaps had no great faith, but which seemed the logical conclusion of the acknowledged philosophical principles of his time, and quite as plausible as any that had been devised by others, and brought such fame to their authors.
With these predilections, France was the country which had most attractions to him, but was at the same time the most unfortunate country he could have gone to, and the middle of the eighteenth century the most unfortunate period for visiting it.In philosophy, the age had outgrown Descartes and Malebranche, Arnauld and Pascal, and the grave and earnest thinkers of the previous century, and was embracing the most superficial parts of Locke's philosophy, which had been introduced by Voltaire to the knowledge of Frenchmen, who turned it to a wretched sensationalism.In religion he saw around him, among the great mass of the people, a very corrupted and degenerate form of Christianity, while, among the educated classes, infidelity was privately cherished, and was ready to burst out.
Voltaire had issued his first attack on Christianity, {121}