Book Reviews 209 consistent with everything they had asserted to be true of sense experience, intuitive moral sensibility, a reasoned discovery of a First Cause and a scriptural revelation of that Cause’s concern for human kind, quizzing such writers about their primary convictions, establishing for them a lean stripped-down version of their theories by discarding material inconsistent by the standards of modern philosophers is both to enlarge and to belittle what they actually wrote. It is helpful, though not entirely novel, to work out why Hume left without formal reply the Scottish common-sense writers’ claims to have answered and demolished the Treatise. Less is achieved by examining Kames at length enough to unbalance this book but still without space to do him justice in his own right. Norton explains correctly (p. 174) that the obvious inference from publication dates should not rule Kames out of consideration as part of Hume’s philosophical context, but why should half-a-dozen major names offer the most illuminating setting for Hume’s intentions? Hume acknowledged few debts and engaged in very little controversy. There would have been at least as much to be said for composing a tapestry of contemporary preoccupations from evidence plucked from dozens of writers or, conversely, reading the Treatise and Enquiries as most important for making ‘new discoveries in philosophy’ (which was Hume’s own claim). It would seem that Norton has set himself a number of tasks and resolved to feed all his findings into this one book. The generous footnoting, on the page where it should be, illustrates this: some notes are mere references, some acknowledge agreements or disputes with others in the field but some get out of hand and become young essays. On pp. 111 and 112 and pp. 114-7 a sub-argument about virtue and Hume’s ontology of morals threatens to overwhelm what is formally presented as the text; on the last two of these pages there are over eighty lines of notes and only just over seven of text. This material either is or is not necessary to the argument and should have been woven in or discarded accordingly. One separate, and minor, cavil: Norton ingeniously attempts to defuse Hume’s arresting assertion that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’. Hume’s knowledge of classical slavery meant, suggests Norton, that he would have had in mind educated Greek tutors, not mere chattels, but ‘clever, instructing’ slaves (p. 128) This will not wash. In ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ Hume writes at length of the ‘forced labour’, ‘chains’, ‘low debasement’ and ‘torture’ which customarily characterised the lot of a slave in classical Rome; he is in no doubt that the only humane response to such ‘unbounded dominion’ is disgust. What David Fate Norton has given us on Hume is valuable. His examination of the central problem he has set himself is careful, if rather slow-moving, and it will be impossible to restate the view he has undertaken to demolish without major works of reconstruction. Linda Kirk University of Sheffield NOTES 1. W orks, Vol. iii, eds. Green and Grose (London, 1882) zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXW After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Let us join Professor MacIntyre in assuming that some social catastrophe wiped out