Education Quote by David Hume

A polite Enlightenment sentence with a knife in it: Hume is blaming the academy and the pulpit for making ignorance look like rigor. “Scholastic learning” isn’t a compliment here; it’s the medieval habit of arguing inside airtight systems, treating inherited authorities as if they were evidence. Add “polemical divinity” and the target sharpens: theology practiced as combat, where winning the dispute matters more than testing the claim. The verb “retarded” does heavy lifting. Hume isn’t saying these fields merely failed to help; he’s saying they actively slowed knowledge down, like ideological drag on the mind.

The subtext is strategic. Hume is not just dunking on religion; he’s diagnosing a whole prestige economy. Scholasticism and doctrinal polemics trained intellectuals to prize verbal dexterity, hair-splitting definitions, and loyalty to a framework over the messy business of observation and experiment. “True knowledge” signals his empiricist bias: what counts is what can survive contact with experience, not what can be deduced from sacred premises or metaphysical abstractions.

Context matters: Hume is writing in the long shadow of Europe’s religious wars and the early modern clash between Aristotelian university curricula and the rising sciences. His broader project is to shrink the empire of certainty. If human understanding is limited, then institutions that sell certainty - especially certainty about God, souls, and ultimate causes - become suspicious not just morally but epistemically. The line works because it flatters the reader’s modern instinct while warning that intellectual culture can become a performance that mistakes argument for insight.