With this all else falls to the ground.  It would be as unwise in us, as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses.  Men do not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have motives.  We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace.  Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume’s agency was exceedingly to his advantage.  Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at.  But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do.  He was at great pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau’s mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the removal of the condition of privacy.  Besides undeniable acts like these, the state of Hume’s mind towards his curious ward is abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as Rousseau’s gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to Hume and other persons.  In the presence of such facts on the one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau’s charges with gravity is irrational.

If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his misconduct.  But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude.  He reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years before.  He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had once used of Rousseau’s character, and substituting in their place the most unfavourable he could find.  He gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his bosom.  Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in English.  This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D’Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various expressions in Hume’s narrative, which he pronounced too harsh.  It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of letters always does.  The governing committee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man can have.