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‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’
Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains true to this day, but he was to some extent the cause of it. A resolute atheist, Hume advocated burning all books which contained neither mathematics nor experimental science, saying they contained nothing but ‘sophistry and illusion’.
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