Pen in Hand
[In the following essay, Christensen discusses how Hume characterizes his writing in the autobiographical “My Own Life,” focusing on Hume's use of illness metaphors to explore the writing process.]
But where is the reward of virtue? And what recompense has Nature provided for such important sacrifices as those of life and fortune, which we must often make?
“The Stoic”
While I, miserable Wretch that I am, have put my chief Confidence in thee; & relinquishing the Sword, the Gown, the Cassock, & the Toilette, have trusted to thee alone for my Fortune & my Fame.
HL, 1:52
I
Chronologically, “My Own Life” is Hume's last essay. It is also, in a more general sense, his final composition, the one that pulls everything together, both narratively and practically: Hume's various employments are induced across a whole life, which is written in order that it can prefix the collected works. The risk in such a maneuver is admitted straight off: “It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (HL, 1:1).1 Against the appearance of vanity, the generic affliction of autobiography, Hume will construct a series of defenses. The first is to be “short.” But though Hume seems to promise a brief history of his writings, he also allows himself a “little more”—a narrative design which imitates the life itself, “almost all” of which has been “spent in literary pursuits and occupations.”2 Hume's characterization of his life ingeniously cancels the implication of partiality: a narrative of writings with “a little more” will be a full and adequate account of a life that has “almost all” been devoted to writing. The brevity of the autobiography can be understood in terms of this legitimating symmetry. It too is a little more added to a life, almost all of which has been “spent in literary pursuits and occupations,” in order to represent that little more within writing, thus spending (or investing) everything in literature.
Hume's strategy of abbreviation is most salient at the beginning of the last paragraph of “My Own Life”: “To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say. …” Hume here adopts a posthumous style: posthumous because the historical perspective, so lightly taken, which allows the writer to characterize “Hume,” the author of those works whose relations he narrates, is a position beyond the grave. Death is written here—a death that is, paradoxically, an empowerment. Hume can be more open about his sentiments not because he has chosen to be more sincere but because those sentiments have become characters, representative objects rather than passions. Those characters are now in a determinate relation to an “I” that is the little more that survives, like a posthumous narrator, the death of whatever it was that was possessed by those sentiments and that might have been damaged by expressing them. By being posthumously characterized, the sentiments of the writer are included within his writings and adequated with the narrative of those writings.
The best characterization of the posthumous “I,” then, is the style which it “must use”—as if only that death which necessarily comes to all had forced the “I” to know itself as a well-formed sequence of properties. Yet that style and that necessity indisputably fulfill the plan of life Hume adopted from the outset:
My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.
My very slender fortune, however, being unsuitable to this plan of life, and my health being a little broken by my ardent application, I was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life.
Hume's autobiography attempts to engineer the adjustment by which a plan of life comes to absorb natural necessity to its ends. Hume's life, all of it, until the writing of the autobiography, has been a detour compounded of necessity and design. Driven by necessity he blended his life in letters with a variety of occupations—tutor, aide-de-camp, librarian, undersecretary—so that it could sooner or later acquire the strength to stand independently, a strength that is paradoxically announced by the final breakdown of health that has negated all other necessities. Because practical activity is represented as merely instrumental, Hume's plan of life comes to look very much like a death wish. The wish for death seems to be part and parcel of the “ruling passion” for a permanent “literary fame” that has sustained him through all vicissitudes. But, having said that, we have to acknowledge a rhetorical versatility that permits death itself to be troped as merely the last interruption, and one that seals off a “life” and a fame exempt from all infirmities. A self-imposed death anticipates the inevitable, biological death; the necessitous is preempted and composed by Humean artifice.3 The “I” that writes (as opposed to the “I” that is characterized) would be so impartial that the death of its subject self would be of no great import. Hume's is a stoical autobiography, then, which, utterly without vanity, narrates a life that accomplishes its own death—a project that differs from suicide in that unlike the stoic, who finds in suicide a point of devastation “where his drive for control becomes totally and unsurpassably self-referential in a final triumph over the world outside,”4 the historical “I” of Hume enjoys the profit of existing beyond its natural terminus—in the paragraph that follows the shift to the past tense and in the corpus that the autobiography constitutes and supervises.
If stoical, there is also something oddly romantic about a gesture that treats death as merely a facilitating interruption, as a good career move. And if part of the forcefulness of this gesture derives from its authoritative uniqueness (one can only write one's death once, if it is actually going to count as death), there is something odd in the similarity between Hume's last text and his first. In the unpublished and fragmentary “Essay on Chivalry” Hume initiates his attack on romance with the comment:
’Tis observable of the human mind, that when it is smit with any idea of merit or perfection beyond what its faculties can attain, and in the pursuit of which it uses not reason and experience for its guide, it knows no mean, but as it gives the rein, and even adds the spur, to every florid conceit or fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of nature. Thus we find, when, without discretion, it indulges its devote terrors, that working in such fairy-ground, it quickly buries itself in its own whimsies and chimeras, and raises up to itself a new set of passions, affections, desires, objects, and, in short, a perfectly new world of its own, inhabited by different beings, and regulated by different laws from this of ours.5
Hume's critique of romance (and of philosophy, with which he identifies it) attributes to the fantasist a delusional plot of self-dissolution, burial, and resurrection that is not only a thin encoding of the Christian myth (see Hume's association of life in fairyland with “religious exercise”) but is also the template for the procedure by which Hume attempts to solidify his canon and assure himself of literary fame in “My Own Life.” There he reckons on a “speedy dissolution” that enables him to be “detached from Life,” buries himself in the chimera of the past tense in order to raise himself up in the perfectly new world of literary fame, which is “inhabited by different beings, and regulated by different laws from this of ours.” Now, I do not expose the romance in Hume's final stoical gesture in order to destroy its pretense. On the contrary, I want to recover the full force of its pretense, to mystify a Humean rhetoric that is too often considered to be naturalistic, and to question the status of a canon that is too often taken for granted. What is astonishing about Hume's gesture is not its romantic basis but that it worked, that the wishfulness that constitutes romance proved to have a power over the cultural reality that Hume's books and Hume's reputation inhabit. Hume's wish fulfilled itself in the fame which is indubitably his.6 It may be that its romantic basis takes a little of the “lustre” off Hume's reputation, or it may be that the historical fact of Hume's success has the retrospective effect of either mooting or naturalizing a rhetoric that in its own terms seems so delusional. In any case, it is clear that because of its romantic basis and because it does not stake its success on truth claims, Hume's work cannot be confuted by argument. Hume's work can be effectively opposed only if it is regarded not as a series of propositions but as a literary practice aimed at attaining a reputation exempt from contingency. Authentic opposition to Hume will require a willingness to defame.
The intensity of Hume's effort to dictate to futurity is apparent even without reference to “On Chivalry.” If the autobiography does everything it can to adequate itself with itself and neutralize the prematurity that is a structural flaw in all self-writing, which can never actually bring its representation of completion into line with the empirical moment of death, Hume's nervousness about his success manifests itself as the production of another text. Subsequent to the autobiography Hume wrote a last will and testament in which he stipulated that henceforth all collected editions of his work would begin with “My Own Life.” The last is made first. Prefixed by a postscript, the canon will tolerate no further adjustments; there can be no doubt about which texts belong to Hume and in what order they fall. This is a strong but a curious move. The tactical positioning of the autobiography indicates a wavering of faith in the mechanical inductive force of the composition which it represents; the natural history of Hume's writings, which had emerged as the merest exercise of inference, comes to appear as willed. Regulation gives way to prescription. The “I” that wills is neither the character of Hume nor the posthumous writer who represents that character; this “I” would elude all incapacitation by speaking with the power of law.
The deployment of “My Own Life” as the prefix to and authorization of the collected works of David Hume displays a prematurity of a different kind from that so skillfully put to use by the posthumous style. It is a prematurity which cannot readily be associated with any particular manner, which may not be a “style” at all. That may seem an occult notion unless we recognize that Hume supplies some precedent for it when in “My Own Life” he juxtaposes a narrative of genealogy with a narrative of composition. Hume figures three of his books as children: the Treatise, which “fell deadborn from the press,” and the two volumes of the History of the Stuarts, which are described as brothers. The pathos of paternity is augmented by the appreciation of an informed reader that this is Hume's sole formal acknowledgment of the Treatise. For Hume to own the Treatise in this fashion is both to terminate it and make it peculiarly difficult to narrate its connection with the subsequent works that Hume is intent on collecting.
I do not mean to say that the epitaph on the Treatise is the end of it either in Hume's career or in the autobiography. On the contrary, Hume candidly describes the use to which he put the Treatise after its demise. “I had always entertained a Notion,” he writes, “that my want of Success, in publishing the Treatise of human Nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter; and that I had been guilty of a very usual Indiscretion, in going to the Press too early. I therefore cast the first part of that work anew in the Enquiry concerning human Understanding, which was published while I was at Turin.” Again, “I there [at his brother's house] composed … my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, which is another part of my Treatise, that I cast anew.” The extension of the genealogical metaphor by means of the suggestive reference to the publication of the Treatise as an “indiscretion” invites us to fill in the outlines of the event: Hume's first and premature “cast” into the press spawned a deadborn child, always a possibility in “the barren and perilous Adventure of Bookmaking” (HL, 2:287). The second and third times he was more experienced, and more discreet. He revised and published, cast anew parts of the Treatise with sufficient prudence to insure healthy issue. The Treatise occupies the place of nature—a savage child, disorderly in its manner, dies, marking a breakdown that is both a natural end and the end of nature. What follows is the socialization of the Treatise, accomplished by a refinement into parts, which permits augmentation of force, partition of employments, and mutual succor—accomplished, that is, by a manner of labor vindicated by the eventual success of Hume's career as a man of letters.
So much is intelligible about the fate of the Treatise in the terms that the Treatise supplies. But what is curious is the way the natural metaphor applied to the Treatise disturbs the passage to success. For Hume to have further offspring the child has to die. Moreover, by the logic of this metaphor, Hume's “casting anew,” the artifice by which the essays are prepared for publication, is a remolding and a throwing forth of the parts of a dead child. Hume's manner is indiscreet. Why metaphorically animate an object whose only purpose is to be dead? His narrative of the passage that makes all his living works post-Treatise conveys the necessity of a violence done to nature, an imposition that impartially slices through the metaphorical body. Which is the fiction: that the Treatise was a natural child or that it died naturally?
The representation of tactics of authorization as the imposition of law and of a cut (on the body of a child, the body of the book) might stretch our faith in the adequation of style and necessity. Hume's exclusions ought to snap it. If “My Own Life” does not claim to be a full-scale autobiography, jammed with the particulars of Hume's life and opinions, it does announce itself and is deployed as the “History of my Writings.” Conjecture does not have to carry us very far to find a biographical event the exclusion of which Hume's modest demurral might be designed to justify. The most notable section of Hume's career omitted from his narrative is its most notorious episode, Hume's friendship and violent break with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which was performed before all of Europe in 1766. There is no distinctive interruption which evinces the omission. Instead, the absence of the Rousseau episode is marked in the “little more” that Hume adds to the history of his writings, the last paragraph, where Hume shifts to the past tense as he concludes historically with a romantic summation of his own character:
In a word, though most men any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of Calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful Tooth: And though I wantonly exposed myself to the Rage of both civil and religious Factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted Fury: My Friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my Character and Conduct: Not but the zealots, we may well suppose, shou’d have been glad to invent and propagate any Story to my Disadvantage, but they could never find any which, they thought, would wear the Face of Probability.
Yes and no. If by zealots we mean the religious fanatics who did not even murmur at the publication of the Treatise, yes; but if we take into account a wholly singular zealot, Rousseau, then the answer is no. For Rousseau was the great calumniator of Hume's character in his later years, and it was against Rousseau that Hume's friends rose together to vindicate his conduct. What is peculiar about this omission is not its existence—Hume admits to selectivity—but the way this instance of shortening lengthens the text, abetting rather than preventing vanity. The text enacts an odd countereconomy whereby the little less produces a little more: a paragraph of negative constructions and denials (“never soured,” “not unacceptable,” “I never was touched”) which concludes, “I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.” Negatives are redeemed by a skeptical assurance in common sense: “I cannot say there is no vanity” because no “I” can “say” without vanity. All may be vanity, but there are better and worse examples; vanity, like every other passion, is “in some measure”; the question is to what use that passion is put. In one sense the hope that this vanity is not “misplaced” is as confident as its confession: the burden of proof is placed on the reader, who as reader, comprised by Hume's composition, proves the fact of Hume's literary fame and is induced to assent to Hume's decorum. But in another sense the hope expresses an uncertainty about how things are placed, a doubt about whether everything has been composed in the most effective manner. Not unnaturally. For there is another matter of fact that is not mentioned in Hume's autobiography, though it belongs in any history of his writings, another text written by Hume that is not gathered into the works collected under the authorizing prefix of “My Own Life: Exposé Succinct de la contestation, qui s’est élévée entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau; avec les pièces justicatives.” That fact must be cleared and ascertained (a task to which I shall turn in Chapter 7) before one can judge, finally, whether Hume's life attains the composure it designs, whether his vanity is misplaced.
II
From the perspective of the writer, before the adoption of a “historical style,” before publication, before the career, the Treatise does not look like a book; Hume does not conceive of it as a child. Instead it appears as “loose bits of Paper; here a hint of a passion, there a Phenomenon in the mind accounted for, in another the alteration of these accounts; sometimes a remark upon an Author I have been reading, And none of them worth to any Body & I believe scarce to myself” (HL, 1:9). Such at least is the first comment we have on what was to become the Treatise. Hume's letter to Michael Ramsay precedes by some seven years his famous letter to Dr. Arbuthnot (HL, 1:12-18), which also characterizes the Treatise: “I believe … that little more is requir’d to make a man succeed in this Study than to throw off all Prejudices either for his own Opinions or for those of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for the Truth of my Reasonings, which I have multiply’d to such a degree, that within these three years, I find I have scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own Inventions.” Seven years from “loose bits of Paper” to “many a Quire.” It is as if no history has happened, as if we have traversed an inchoate state of uncomposed, disorderly impressions and ideas. Almost no history that is, for one discovery has occurred: “I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience” (HL, 1:16). Hume has learned the necessity of trusting to experience instead of to hypotheses. Where did that discovery come from and where besides to an indefinite multiplication of inventions does it lead? Hume's letter to Dr. Arbuthnot attempts to answer those questions. Not a history of his writings, it is the clinical account of a disease.7
Hume describes his youthful inclination to “Books & Letters,” his conviction, early developed, that “nothing yet [had been] establisht in either of [the] two Sciences” of philosophy and polite letters, and his search for “some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht.” He relates that,
after much Study, & Reflection on this, at last, when I was about 18 Years of Age, there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought, which transported me beyond Measure, & made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it. The Law which was the Business I design’d to follow, appear’d nauseous to me, & I cou’d think of no other way of pushing my Fortune in the World, but that of a Scholar & Philosopher. I was infinitely happy in this Course of Life for some Months; till at last, about the beginning of Septr 1729, all my Ardor seem’d in a moment to be extinguisht, & I cou’d no longer raise my Mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive Pleasure.
There followed a “Coldness,” which he attributed to a “Laziness of Temper,” and which afflicted him for nine months.
There was another particular, which contributed more than any thing, to waste my Spirits & bring on me this Distemper, which was, that having read many Books of Morality, such as Cicero, Seneca & Plutarch, & being smit with their beautiful Representations of Virtue & Philosophy, I undertook the Improvement of my Temper & Will, along with my Reason & Understanding. I was continually fortifying myself with Reflections against Death, & Poverty, & Shame, & Pain, & all the Calamities of Life. These no doubt are exceeding useful, when join’d with an active Life; because the Occasion being presented along with the Reflection, works it into the Soul, & makes it take a deep impression, but in solitude they serve to little other Purpose, than to waste the Spirits, the Force of the Mind meeting with no Resistance, but wasting itself in the Air, like our Arm when it misses its Aim. This however I did not learn but by Experience, & till I had already ruin’d my Health, tho’ I was not sensible of it.
The Hume glimpsed in this account, a youth of infinite happiness, ardor, and excessive pleasure, who exercises without restraint the force of his mind, is one that we shall not encounter again in his subsequent writings. By definition, since all of those characteristics are associated with an enthusiastic philosophizing which not only antedates all the texts that comprise the Hume we can come to know but which obstructed the production of those texts. Solitary and fervent, the young Hume's reading produced reflections that left no impression on him, or at least did not impel him to make any impressions on others—those others who, as members of society, would supply the “resistance” necessary to turn a moral imagination to moral use or who, as readers, would confirm the reality of the philosopher's grandiose conceptions.8 Solitude is a state of reading (or “learning” or “study”), and reading means vulnerability to being “smit with … beautiful Representations of Virtue & Philosophy.” Such representations have a considerable power: they encourage one to attempt improvement and fortification. But though they arouse the idea of power they do not transfer power. Self-fortification occurs on the grounds of an illusory self-sufficiency. The cloistered reader imagines a strength that overcomes everything instantly and thus tests itself against nothing actually.9
The stimulus of the classical moralists was pornographic, or at least appears so by its effect on the young philosopher, who, struck (smit) by the ancients, became enamored of (smit with) their example and, aroused to a conviction of a kind of phallic omnipotence, smote the air with his arm in an onanistic waste of spirit. Solitary reading of the classical moralists catapulted Hume into a blockage compounded of autoerotic power fantasies and feelings of waste. Moral writing has had vicious consequences.10 Importantly, for the young Hume acting morally is identified with writing moral philosophy, representing unto others as one has been represented to: utility is inextricably bound up with exchange. Or, not quite as one has been represented to, for as we shall see, although this reading experience became for Hume a touchstone for the power available to a deeply attractive kind of representation, it was a mode whose attractions he had to resist. Hume would not smite.
The question why he had to resist comes to the same as what was unsatisfying about onanistic reflection, what was vicious about waste.11 For Hume, as for the ancients summoned to testify by Foucault, “sexual austerity” should not be understood “as an expression of, or commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions, but as the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty.”12 For Hume in particular, neither reflection nor waste can ever be pure: reflection is always annexed to an “occasion,” and waste is always subjected to an economy. Or, to put it another way, ideas are not without impressions. Experience teaches us that one must resist being smitten by making us “sensible” that reflection and waste are the fluxions of disease:
Some Scurvy Sports broke out on my Fingers, the first Winter I fell ill, about which I consulted a very knowing Physician, who gave me some Medicines … & at the same time gave me a Warning against the Vapors, which … I fancy’d myself so far remov’d from … that I despis’d his Warning. At last about April 1730, when I was 19 Years of Age, a Symptom, which I had notic’d a little from the beginning, encreas’d considerably, so that tho’ it was no Uneasyness, the Novelty of it made me ask Advice. It was what they call a Pryalism or Watryness in the mouth. Upon my mentioning it to my Physician, he laught at me, & told me I was now a Brother, for that I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned.
Hume became sensible of the wastefulness of his reflection when he discovered that it had ruined his health, when he discovered, that is, that it was not pure waste but disease. Reading and reflection produce a kind of writing in the sensible impression of a “Symptom.” Waste has, then, a kind of value, for the symptoms that mark the ruin of health make Hume a legible text to the right kind of reader, a practitioner. The arm may miss its aim, but that action does not go unrecorded; it is documented by “scurvy spots” at the ends of the fingers. The voice that goes unused in the silent passion does not fall into utterlessness, but writes its silence into a “Watryness in the mouth.” These symptoms, which Hume noticed but could not understand, forced him out of the study, and inserted him into a discourse: he sought the advice of a specialist, who informed him that he was become, although solitary, a “Brother.”13 Although the illness had ruined Hume's health, no one, as the expert must tell us, has a disease alone: disease may threaten one's survival, but disease also inducts us into a community of sufferers, affiliated by the same symptoms. The appearance of the symptom is, as it were, a natural resistance to being smitten by the beautiful representations of the classical moralists—resistance as a form of automatic writing, of compulsive discursiveness, and of forced affiliation.14
The account of the “Disease of the Learned” to Arbuthnot is the pattern for the analysis of inductive affiliation within the Treatise as it is the condition of possibility for the composition of the Treatise itself. Hume's filiative reading of the ancients ends badly; his failure is experienced as symptoms of a disease that make it vital for Hume to seek the advice of a professional man. Hume did not arbitrarily decide to affiliate himself, to become a brother and a patient. Affiliation is as natural as disease and the desire for a cure.
To say that affiliation is there from the beginning is not to deny a graduation of the kind of connections Hume makes. Hume first consulted a professional man of medicine who could prescribe a drug, diet, or regimen that would cure a disease that he understood as merely organic, albeit particular to the “Learned.” He records his diligent observance of the prescription he received and his moderate improvement: he succeeded in “abating the Symptoms for a little time.” A summation in direct address follows: “Thus I have given you a full account of the Condition of my Body, & without staying to ask Pardon, as I ought to do, for so tedious a Story, shall explain to you how my Mind stood all this time, which on every Occasion, especially in this Distemper, have a very near Connexion together.” This prelude to a catalog of another group of symptoms evinces Hume's revised appraisal of his disease as a more complicated phenomenon, an “Occasion” which mutually implicated mind and body. Consequently, Hume has sought out Dr. Arbuthnot, a man who is not only a “skillful Physician” but also “a man of Letters, of Wit, of Good Sense, & of great Humanity.” Arbuthnot looks like a specialist to one who is afflicted with a general malady. It takes a physician who is a man of letters, one for whom every bodily occasion is the opportunity for mental reflection, to cure the disease of the learned.
The condition of Hume's mind, excited and unsettled by sporadic bursts of insight and power, is the condition of the incipient Treatise:
Having now Time & Leizure to cool my inflam’d Imaginations, I began to consider seriously, how I shou’d proceed in my Philosophical Enquiries. I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, & the Source from which I wou’d derive every Truth in Criticism as well as Morality. I believe ’tis a certain Fact that most of the Philosophers who have gone before us, have been overthrown by the Greatness of their Genius & that little more is requir’d to make a man succeed in this Study than to throw off all Prejudices either for his own Opinions or for those of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for the Truth of my reasonings, which I have multiply’d to such a degree, that within these three Years, I find I have scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own Inventions.
This is the first substantive characterization in Hume's writings of what will be the enabling empiricist perspective of the Treatise, that which will distinguish it from all previous philosophical texts. The passage also dramatically identifies the experience from which Hume derived his method of trusting only to experience. Hume contrasts his method with those “Philosophers who have gone before us, [who] have been overthrown by the Greatness of their Genius.” But if we ask who those unfortunate philosophers are, the only answer suggested by Hume is “the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity.” It is as if Locke, Descartes, Malebranches, and Hutcheson—all those modern philosophers on whom Hume depended and against whom he wrote—never existed. In what possible sense could such a misprision be justified? In what possible sense could it be fair to say that those philosophers from antiquity who transmitted to us moral philosophy were overthrown by their genius?
Hume's conclusions are entailed by the appearance of those symptoms, which convinced him that the transmission of the moral philosophy of Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero was an overthrow of genius, insofar as reading those authors provoked spasmodic identification and onanistic reflection. Ancient moral philosophy was of such force that it overpowered all moral consequences, ending only in a reader who smote the empty air. The group of “philosophers who have gone before” must thus be expanded to include not only the classical moralists but also David Hume, who is made a genius by their genius and is overthrown in their overthrow. Hume can disregard all intermediate philosophers because his reading of the ancients has been entirely unmediated; and the experience of failed filiation grounds a philosophy which can rest neither on hypothesis nor authority but on experience, since experience, becoming sensible of the waste of spirits consequent upon the exaltation of genius, is all that makes it possible for Hume to write any philosophy at all. Hume becomes the representative modern philosopher by becoming the only modern philosopher who has experienced the overthrow of the ancients—an overthrow which is figured on his body as it will be inscribed on the pages of the Treatise. Hume's overthrow is his disease. But that disease which cuts him off from the halcyon days of solitary, omnipotent reflection is also the defense against overthrow by his own genius because it is in the disease and out of the disease that he recognizes a production: he “finds” he has scribbled many a quire, just as he finds he has scurvy spots on his hands. Despite the blockage of writing there are pages and pages of script. The interdiction on invention coincides with a multiplicity of inventions.
But, Hume writes, that is not the same as health. He complains that all the writing he has done to this point has not
been done to any Purpose. … My Disease was a cruel Incumbrance on Me. I found that I was not able to follow out any Train of Thought, by one continued Stretch of View, but by repeated Interruptions, & by refreshing my Eye from Time to Time upon other Objects. Yet with this Inconvenience I have collected the rude Materials for many volumes; but in reducing these to Words, when one must bring the Idea he comprehended in gross, nearer to him, so as to contemplate its minutest Parts & keep it steddily, in his Eye, so as to copy these Parts in Order, this I found impracticable for me, nor were my Spirits equal to so severe an Employment. Here lay my greatest Calamity—I had no Hopes of delivering my Opinions with such Elegance & Neatness, as to draw to me the Attention of the World, & I wou’d rather live & dye in Obscurity than Produce them maim’d & imperfect.
Improvement refines wants. Hume began with an account of a disease generated by an incapacity to write, then described his discovery of a writing symptomatic of the disease. Now he complains of the inhibitions on reducing those assorted scribblings into words and words into a neat and elegant whole. He identifies a perfected book as both the cure for the disorder of the collected materials and the more than metaphoric cure for the disease of the learned. Hume, then, suffers from the complaint of not being able to compose a unified book. He cannot write the book because he is oppressed by the fantastic hope that on its publication his enormous need for attention would be fully satisfied by the responsive attention of the world. Hume imagines an economy of ideal correspondence: my full attention produces a unified book which is exchanged for your full attention. An economy and an emblem of narcissistic satisfaction: the book to be delivered by the labor of writing will be a Humunculus reflecting in all its parts its author, whose perfection must by ratified in the reflexive admiration of its readers. Any lapse or disorder in the book, any mutilation, would jar that delicate nexus of condign fascination; the writer would discover his own flaws in the averted eyes of disgusted readers. Rather than suffer that failed filiation, rather than deliver his child into the world maimed and imperfect, he would abort the project and live and die in obscurity.
Wanting a cure, the one grim consolation lies in a conviction of singularity: “Such a miserable Disappointment I scarce ever remember to have heard of. The small Distance betwixt me & perfect Health makes me the more uneasy in my present Situation. Tis a Weakness rather than a Lowness of Spirits which troubles me, & there seems to be as great a Difference betwixt my Distemper & common Vapors, as betwixt Vapors & Madness.” If this unheard-of predicament suggests the perfect disequilibrium between infirmity and necessity which providentially singles man out among the creatures, then it may be appropriate to ask whether the desire for perfect health is actually healthy. After all, it is the idea of the beautiful book that produces, as if by association, thoughts of death.
It is necessary to ascertain exactly where Hume is in the composition of the Treatise. This is not the sort of empirical question that can be settled by comparison of the manuscript materials left over from 1734 with the published work, since it is the status of that published work as a composition that is in question. Instead we need to inquire into the relation between what the Treatise is and Hume's ideas of what the Treatise might be. We may begin by distinguishing between the composition and the writing of the Treatise, for although Hume's complaint testifies to his failure to finish the Treatise as a book, it is fair to say that the Treatise has been written. It has been written as those symptoms that appeared to mark the extrication of Hume from the thrall of the ancients and the overthrow of their authority—an overthrow documented by the marks on his hands and the notations on his paper that make Hume a writer despite himself. The assertion that “little more is requir’d to make a man succeed in this study than to throw off all Prejudices for his own Opinions or for this of others” implicitly identifies a completion. It also executes a transformation: the “little more,” as in “My Own Life,” indicates a surplus of vanity, here attached to a notion of success. That “little more” of organizing, connecting, embodying the scattered impressions that lies between the writing of the text and the success of the book is the exact analogue to the “small distance” between Hume and that “perfect health” which he requires to compose.
The irony of Hume's conception of success is that the result he imagines looks very much like the state of stunned admiration he had escaped. He wants to turn the Treatise into a beautiful representation which will fix on him the attention of an audience smitten with its neatness and elegance: in the transformation of notes and quires into a book, the text “itself” seems to vanish or, rather, it becomes a completely adequate representation of a perfect self, perfectly appreciated. When I call this narcissistic, I mean roughly what Hume does in his observation that “authors have this privilege in common with lovers, and founded on the same reason, that they are both besotted with a blind fondness of their object” (HL, 1:27). By “narcissistic” I intend to indicate the intransitive character of this relationship, which may be a transaction of sorts, but can only be imagined as the first and last transaction in a system that is no real economy because it is not dynamic: to succeed in this fashion is to be completely and permanently esteemed and thus relieved of the necessity of ever writing another book. It is the dream of a savage, or of a genius who prepares his own overthrow by making himself vulnerable to the merest violence: a muttered comment, an averted glance, the very passage of time, or any movement in space would be enough to mar this elegant representation, to maim this imagined body.15
Yet if this notion of narcissistic satisfaction is associated with the request for a cure from Dr. Arbuthnot, the fact that the letter was not posted implies that Hume has at least temporarily abandoned the fantasy of perfect health. He writes of his “despair of ever recovering.” The scene on which he now enters is completely different from that which he came upon as a youth. But more significant than his despair of a cure are the remedial measures he takes to
keep myself from being Melancholy on so dismal a Prospect. … Being sensible that all my Philosophy wou’d never make me contented in my present Situation, I began to rouze up myself; & being encourag’d by Instances of Recovery from worse degrees of this Distemper, as well as by the Assurances of my Physicians, I began to think of something more effectual, than I had hitherto try’d. I found, that as there are two things very bad for this Distemper, Study & Idleness, so there are two things very good, Business & Diversion; & that my whole Time was spent betwixt the bad, with little or no Share of the Good. For this reason I resolved to seek out a more active life, & tho’ I cou’d not quit my Pretensions in Learning, but with my last Breath, to lay them aside for some time, in order the more effectually to resume them.
Rather than follow through on his appeal to a physician, preferred among his kind because he is a man of many parts, Hume determines to partition himself, to put down his study and indolence and to take up business and diversion. This is, as the cliché would have it, to make a virtue of necessity. For in taking up business (Hume mentions his imminent removal to Bristol, where he will clerk for a trader) Hume chooses to encumber himself with an occupation as he has been encumbered by his disease: both occupation and disease have the same immediate result, to divert him from his composition of the Treatise—but the differences that make business and diversion virtues are that, though driven by disease to this course, Hume controls the choice of a particular activity, and can, moreover, improvise a way to represent necessity as a course of action in a narrative of regular cycles of diversion and resumption.
That ability is empirically derived; one finding is prepared for by another: “I found that I was not able to follow out any Train of Thought, by one continued Stretch of View, but by repeated Interruptions, & by refreshing my Eye from Time to Time upon other Objects” (emphasis added). The first interruption is the natural effect of the disease—a moment of inadvertence disturbing the deliberate application of the mind. But at some point the interruptions are “found” to be “repeated,” a point where the affiliative ambiguity of “found”—which hovers between the innocent “discover” and the knowing “invent,” and which is congruent with the moment of reflection that turns savage avidity into social self-interest—effects an almost imperceptible transition between the natural and the artificial, where, that is, the symptom of the disease becomes a remedy for the disease, where a necessitous disruption of a train of thought becomes a technique for continuing the train. Finding repeated interruption is practically indistinguishable from representing interruption. Interruption thus becomes part of the process of composition, so that what had been suffered by a patient can be imposed by an author as a home remedy.16
Hume has revised his understanding of the symptom: it has changed from being an effect of the disease into a metaphor for the disease, an interruption that articulates a train of thought. It now appears as what it always was, not something that disrupts what can no longer be called writing but something that facilitates the mechanical composition of greater wholes out of individual ideas. The metaphorization of symptom coincides with an emphasis on a globalizing tendency under the rubric of thought or idea, which establishes a series of correspondences subject to indefinite extrapolation, as for example, in “My Own Life,” where Hume reiterates “symptom” with the casualness appropriate to a dead metaphor, even employing it (although perhaps a bit nervously) as a trope on which to pin his hopes for fame, when he speaks of seeing “many Symptoms of my literary Reputation's breaking out at last with additional Lustre.” Hence if Hume finds the specific kind of diversion of refreshing the eye does not work when the time comes to reduce “the rude Materials” into “Words [what could these materials have been before they were words, what kind of writing is being openly repressed in such a reconstruction?], when he must bring the idea he comprehended in gross, nearer to him, so as to contemplate its minutest Parts, & keep it steddily in his Eye, so as to copy these Parts in Order,” he nonetheless is provided with an analogical logic that prepares him to cope with the greater problem: he opts for a greater diversion, not refreshment of the eye but revival of the whole man by the interruption of study with a life in business. Because he is practicing the same technique of repeating interruption to fulfill his ambition of eventual order, there is no essential difference between the kind of diversion he employs in his study and that which he engages in Bristol. Both are the same kind of composition, a composition in which the production of material, of writing, has either been finished or eclipsed, a composition which is a history of writing rather than writing itself, a composition in which whatever one finds can by careful, improvisatory representation be put to some kind of advantage. The bundles of notes and quires of paper are the closest one can get to pure waste that is precisely not economic. It is because such mere writing has no use, stands in no relation to anyone, produces no advantage, and therefore cannot be exchanged that Hume gets sick.17 Nothing if not psychosomatic, Hume's disease is an incapacitating self-imposition which appears as a symptom, a metaphor for writing. Although it is a “wasteful” interruption, the symptom, unlike the “rude Materials,” enables his induction into a discourse of correspondences, an indefinite exchange motivated by the vivid idea of eventual advantage. By metaphorizing interruption Hume turns the necessitous into a remedial technique and technique into a way of life. He represents life not as a single idea or as a neat and elegant body but as a process of continual adjustment, a career, and establishes the grounds for the eventual transformation of an existential moment of crisis into the functional articulation of a formula: “Human happiness, according to the most received notions, seems to consist in three ingredients: action, pleasure, and indolence: and though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the particular disposition of the person; yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting, without destroying, in some measure, the relish of the whole composition” (ST, p. 49). Formulas invite definitions, and the Humean man of letters might be faithfully defined by inverting Julia Kristeva's characterization of modern poetry, which she describes as an “artistic practice [which] is the laboratory of a minimal signifying structure, its maximum dissolution, and the eternal return of both.”18 Hume's discursive practice is the laboratory of a maximal signifying structure, its minimum dissolution, and the regular return of both. Although the propriety of the definition is clear from Hume's letter, its implications can be clarified only by an exploration of the career which it distills.
In the event, Hume does not post his letter to Arbuthnot. He no longer needs a specialist or a professional because he has learned to read himself—a reading which writes itself. The letter has done its work as representation and instance of the technique by which Hume can remediate the disease of the learned; the wish for a cure, for a complete embodiment and total success, has been adjusted to take advantage of the dynamic singularity intrinsic to “the small Distance betwixt me & perfect Health”—a gap which Hume will generalize as the dynamic articulation of a variety of contexts, indeed of contextualization itself and of the context he has become.19 If Hume henceforth will be characterized by a “certain moral complacency,”20 the complacency, not unearned, is a professional virtue. No longer a mere philosopher or writer, he is now by virtue of necessity a man of letters.
Notes
-
All quotations from the autobiography are taken from the reprint in HL, 1:1-7.
-
Leaving aside the question of evaluation, Roy Pascal is not quite accurate when he asserts that “Hume's Life, important historically as one of the first extended accounts by a writer of his literary progress, fails to reach greatness because of Hume's unwillingness to tell us of anything but the facts directly relevant to his publications; from it one could scarcely guess at the content of his Essays.” Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 15. Hume tells us a little more than the bare facts, and the relation between the “little more” and the facts is of considerable importance in assessing the conduct of the Essays.
-
Barry Lydgate comments on the difference between the textual practice of Montaigne and the practice of those authors of whom Montaigne says (in Lydgate's paraphrase) that “the only trustworthy perspective … is the unified perspective of death”: “Nothing so drastic as a real death is necessary to render the Essais trustworthy. In a compositional method that respects the integrity of what is already printed, each successive printing represents a literary death in the context of biological life, a new definition point that allows the author both to be and to know. Self-description becomes self-understanding, which, described in its turn, can lead to greater self-knowledge, and so on indefinitely.” Lydgate, “Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and the Structure of Montaigne's Essais,” PMLA 96 (March 1981): 221. Similar in that they each represent death, Montaigne and Hume are considerably different in how and why they represent it. There is only one autobiographical essay in the canon of Hume, for whom self-description becomes self-control rather than self-knowledge. Death is represented only once—not because it is singular but because its representation identifies it as only another correspondent of that technical incapacitation that occurs continually.
-
Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 24.
-
“David Hume's ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’” ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Modern Philology 45 (August 1947): 57.
-
Albeit ironically. Hume sought literary fame and has for the most part achieved a lesser philosophical fame. Hume sought to achieve what Joseph Harrison has called, in an unpublished essay on William Blake, “canonical self-inscription,” but, as Hume consistently attests, the canon he had in mind was not the history of the great dead philosophers. Rather, he sought to create a canon that would have the classical, particularly Ciceronian virtues of comprehensiveness and independence. Hume's canon would stand on its own as the work of an independent man of letters. Hume did fail in the sense that he could not foresee or prevent the appropriation of his work by post-Kantian professional philosophy.
-
Unless otherwise identified, subsequent quotations of Hume in this chapter are taken from the letter to Arbuthnot (misidentified as George Cheyne by Greig) in HL 1:12-18. The most influential treatment of this letter in the context of tracing the origins of Hume's thought is Norman Kemp Smith's in his Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of Its Origins and Central Doctrines (London: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 14-17. For two recent discussions of this letter see John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 31-37, and John A. Dussinger, “David Hume's Denial of Personal Identity: The Making of a Skeptic,” American Imago 37 (1980):334-50.
-
On the general importance of resistance in Enlightenment strategy Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno comment: “Every spiritual resistance [enlightenment] encounters serves merely to increase its strength. Which means that enlightenment still recognizes itself even in myths. Whatever myths the resistance may appeal to, by virtue of the very fact that they become arguments in the process of opposition, they acknowledge the principle of dissolvent rationality for which they reproach the Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972), p. 6. See also Hubert L. Dreyfus's and Paul Rabinow's commentary on Foucault's Discipline and Punish in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 143.
-
Cf. Hume's later discussion of a similar state in “The Stoic,” where he admonishes: “Your indolence itself becomes a fatigue; your pleasure itself creates disgust. The mind, unexercised, finds every delight insipid and loathsome; and ere yet the body, full of noxious humors, feels the torment of its multiplied diseases, your nobler part is sensible of the invading poison, and seeks in vain to relieve its anxiety by new pleasures, which still augment the fatal malady” (ST, p. 110).
-
What I have called the pornographic stimulation of the classical might less sensationally be described as its romantic power. See Hume's characterization of it in the passage from the essay “On Chivalry,” discussed above: “Philosophy, … tho’ it cannot produce a different world in which we may wander, makes us act in this as if we were different Beings from the rest of mankind; at least makes us frame to ourselves, tho’ we cannot execute them, Rules of conduct different from these which are set to us by Nature” (p. 57). The same impulse gives rise in the author and the reader to the taste for an extravagantly strenuous philosophy and “that Monster of Romantick Chivalry.” As we shall see in Chapter 4, Hume's practice as an essayist was aimed at reforming both philosophical writing and the chivalric mode by mitigating their power to smite.
-
This is not an idle question. For a later attack on the presuppositions of political economy which bases its critique on the symbolic, communal efficaciousness of waste, see Wordsworth's “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Or, nearer to hand, cf. Boswell's account of Johnson's rejection of mechanicism: “‘If,’ said he, ‘a man says he would rather be the machine, I cannot argue with him. He is a different being from me.’ I said a man, as a machine, might have agreeable sensations; he might have music. ‘No,’ said he, ‘he could not have music, at least no power of producing music, for he who can produce music may let it alone. He who can play upon a fiddle may break it.’” Boswell's Journal of “A Tour to the Hebrides,” ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York: Literary Guild, 1936), p. 85.
-
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 136-37.
-
It was a French rather than an English doctor, Samuel A. A. D. Tissot, who, in 1768, systematically discoursed upon the modern variant of the disease of the learned, De la santé des gens de lettres. Discussing symptoms, he mentions that the “diseases of men of letters have two principal sources: the hard work of the mind and the continuous repose of the body; to make an exact tableau of these one need but trace in detail the nefarious effects of these two causes.” Tissot distinguishes between ordinary readers and his subjects according to the criterion of wasteful effects and effects that are diseased, to be sure, but symptomatic of a nobler pursuit: “The inconveniences of frivolous books are a waste of time and tired eyesight; but those who by the power and liaison of ideas lift the soul beyond itself and force it to mediate wear out the spirit and exhaust the body, and the greater and longer this pleasure the more fatal the results.” Quoted in Rémy G. Saisselin, The Literary Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979), p. 141.
-
Edward Said has written of “the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that … provides men and women with a new form of relationship, … affiliation.” Said calls it “the deliberately explicit goal” of writers like Eliot, Lukacs, or Freud, “of using that new order to reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order.” He remarks on the difference that “if a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict—the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life,’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.” Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 19-20. Said's basic distinction seems right enough, but the attempt to tie it to late-nineteenth-century thinkers is mistaken. Cf., for example, the telling change of spelling that the young David made in his name, from Home to Hume—an allegory of deliberate affiliation. Anglicizing is useful only to a second son, who, because he will not come into the estate, must think about becoming useful. That Hume will not inherit his father's estate is perfectly just. That he must affiliate with others in order to make his fortune is perfectly necessary. Hume is the Home that must leave home—not because he is prodigal but because in moral submission to the authority of the hierarchical system of law into which he is born he must be prudent. Hume retains the family name but adjusts it in order to facilitate the affiliations which are his lot in life, the means to his livelihood.
-
As Hume's reference to Cicero suggests, the dream of the savage or the genius is scarcely distinguishable from the dream of oratory—applause without delay or diminution. Hume fantasizes in “Of Eloquence” that “whenever the true genius arises, he draws to him the attention of every one, and immediately appears superior to his rival” (ST, p. 69). Here is Goldsmith in a similar vein: “Of all kinds of success, that of an orator is the most pleasing. Upon other occasions, the applause we deserve is conferred in our absence, and we are insensible of the pleasure we have given; but in eloquence, the victory and the triumph are inseparable. We read our own glory in the face of every spectator; the audience is moved, the antagonist is defeated, and the whole circle bursts into unsolicited applause.” The Bee, no. 7, in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 10 vols. (New York: Putnam's), 6:269. See Chapter 4 below for a discussion of Hume's rejection of the oratorical model.
-
A stoic trait—at least according to Gordon Braden, who declares that “stoicism's central strength is its calculus of adaptation to unchangeable realities” (Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition, p. 17). Compare Freud's discussion of symptoms as “transcriptions” of “a number of emotionally cathected processes, wishes and desires. … These mental processes,” he comments, “being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance—to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process of ‘conversion’) in somatic phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms. By systematically turning these symptoms back (with the help of a special technique) in emotionally cathected ideas—ideas that will now have become conscious—it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.” Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Human Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 30. Patient and analyst, Hume develops the symptoms and in the course of this letter develops the technique to turn those symptoms back into conscious ideas. The knowledge that he obtains, however, is not of the origin of psychic structures but of the process of conversion and reconversion (“turning … back”) that identifies the special technique common to hysteric and sympathetic doctor. The locus classicus of Hume's application of the principle of conversion in aesthetics is the essay “Of Tragedy.”
-
On the concept of waste and its pertinence to a critique of both Marxism and political economy, see Jean Baudrillard's The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos, 1975), pp. 143-145 and passim.
-
Julia Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” in Desire and Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), p. 25.
-
Cf. this account with Charles Camic's prescription of the conditions for the emergence of cultural change from “experiences from which individuals can infer orientations that differ from preestablished attitudes and assumptions.” Camic's conditions (considerably condensed) are (1) the “cognitive capacity actually to draw from [experiences] whatever principles they imply,” (2) commitment to the principles, and (3) generalization of “their orientations to fields outside of the setting in which they were constructed.” Experience and Enlightenment: Socialization for Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 107-8.
-
John Dunn, “From Applied Theology to Social Analysis,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 133.
Abbreviations of Works Cited
HL: The Letters of David Hume. Ed. J. Y. T. Greig. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932.
ST: David Hume. Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays. Ed. John W. Lenz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.