"A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century"
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Hume is selling a seductive kind of immortality: not the afterlife, but an expanded lifespan built out of other people’s time. The line flatters the historically literate reader as someone who has effectively hacked the limits of one human biography. If you know the past, you’ve “lived from the beginning of the world” - not by mysticism, but by disciplined attention to the record of human behavior.
The rhetoric is doing quiet Enlightenment work. “May, in some respect” is the tell: Hume hedges, measuring his claim like a scientist, even as he delivers a grand payoff. That measured tone is part of the persuasion. He isn’t preaching reverence for dusty chronicles; he’s proposing history as an instrument, a compounding asset. The metaphor of a “stock of knowledge” turns reading into accumulation and growth, anticipating the modern faith that information can be banked and leveraged.
Subtextually, Hume is also puncturing the ego of the present. If your mind has centuries in it, today’s certainties look provisional. History becomes a solvent for local superstition and political hysteria, the kind of perspective that makes fanaticism harder to sustain. There’s a sly moral psychology underneath: people repeat themselves; institutions cycle; passions recur in new costumes. Knowing that doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but it gives you more data on what humans do when they insist they’re unprecedented.
Context matters: an 18th-century philosopher watching commercial modernity accelerate, skeptical of inherited authority, and hungry for a secular guide to human nature. For Hume, history isn’t a museum. It’s the closest thing to a long-term experiment we get.
The rhetoric is doing quiet Enlightenment work. “May, in some respect” is the tell: Hume hedges, measuring his claim like a scientist, even as he delivers a grand payoff. That measured tone is part of the persuasion. He isn’t preaching reverence for dusty chronicles; he’s proposing history as an instrument, a compounding asset. The metaphor of a “stock of knowledge” turns reading into accumulation and growth, anticipating the modern faith that information can be banked and leveraged.
Subtextually, Hume is also puncturing the ego of the present. If your mind has centuries in it, today’s certainties look provisional. History becomes a solvent for local superstition and political hysteria, the kind of perspective that makes fanaticism harder to sustain. There’s a sly moral psychology underneath: people repeat themselves; institutions cycle; passions recur in new costumes. Knowing that doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but it gives you more data on what humans do when they insist they’re unprecedented.
Context matters: an 18th-century philosopher watching commercial modernity accelerate, skeptical of inherited authority, and hungry for a secular guide to human nature. For Hume, history isn’t a museum. It’s the closest thing to a long-term experiment we get.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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