suite of the British Ambassador to find that he was famous there. Finally, in 1766 he went back to England and discovered his fame had at last spread there as well (Jones, 1952).
He spent his last years in Edinburgh as the popular center of Scottish literary and academic society, writing his controversial Dialogues on Natural Religion. He died in 1776, but his Dialogues were not published until 1779, after a good deal of resistance because of the heretical content. Hume may actually have had his greatest effect posthumously, when a young German named Kant read his work and was roused from his "dogmatic slumber' to eventually produce the classic Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 (Durant, 1933, p.196).
Hume's ideas can only be fully understood in the context of the Enlightenment, as a product of Spinoza, Locke, and Berkeley, and a progenitor of Kant. Spinoza's conceptualization of the divine order and supreme rationality of the universe exemplify the philosophy of the seventeenth century. Then, in the eighteenth century, there began a movement toward trying to understand the "inner life" of man instead of the workings of the universe at large. Skepticism and criti
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