By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

of politics, and leave us alone. They are the fools we always suspected. What is moral philosophy, if it is not politics at its most profound?

But then David had gone on to confide in James that for years he had been working on a book, an exploration of the basic nature of man, apparently. And now it was ready for publishing. I intend to call it ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’ and it is an attempt to define what innate senses man is born with, and then how we can best shape those senses; those drivers; to create a being capable of living within a system of government that is both mutually beneficial and moral. So David had written. All well and good.

Their mentor, Hutcheson, had already declared that although man might be driven by his passions, he was also born with the ability to tell good from evil, and thus capable of comprehending not only the power of reason, but its necessity if he was to rule his baser instincts and therefore be able to live together in harmony.

David’s letter, however, had let it be known that although he could not disagree with the initial sentiment, his own belief now was that – and here James always quoted to himself the original text when thinking on it – experience tells us in the long term, any appeal to reason must be hopeless, because reason is the slave to passions too!

The original text because this was where James had begun to feel disconcerted.

Lord Kames, our other great teacher, asked us: why does society exist? David had written.

To protect property, was his answer. But it is self-gratification – man’s greatest passion – that drives us to acquire property in the first place. So it must be reason’s role not to conquer passion, as Francis Hutcheson tells us, but to facilitate it; canalise it so that man does not have to live his life merely plundering and being plundered in return, but can exist in a mutually beneficial contract with his neighbour. If it be money you desire, why rob a bank, when you can open one?  

Reason; the facilitator of the passions.

His friend was proposing to turn Hutcheson’s teaching on its head; the teaching of two millennia of philosophers, right back to Aristotle, that reason must govern the passions. No it isn’t, David was writing. It is only passion, self-interest, that drives us to gain what we want; and reason is merely the way we can achieve it without hurting ourselves or anybody else.

As far James he could see, the consequences of untrammelled passion and self-interest were working themselves out all around him right now and being borne by ordinary people, from those poor, wretched peasants who’d been dragged ignorant from their village serfdom on some remote steppe into a foreign army so that he, James Lindsay, from an obscure Highland backwater, could slay them for no good reason, to the prosperous burghers sitting, waiting by their hearths in this prosperous city, for the Russian shells to start landing; firing their warehouses and their wealth and their very homes.

Right here, right now, on this far Baltic shore, thought James, we could be doing with some of that directing reason or yours, David. When you publish, I hope there will be people prepared to listen.

It wasn’t until much later, sitting alone in the guttering candlelight of his quarters after several bumpers of burgundy, that James realised the ache in his chest was pride for his friend; that he could know such a noble mind. He could barely imagine the intellectual backlash David was going to face for his temerity to think such original thoughts. But then the whole world was living through a new age, where it was time to smash the old icons, and even some new ones, and view all life anew, through a more enlightened prism. So what if young Hume made a few old men choke on their porridge? That there was a mind greater than all these grubbing ones around him; somewhere at work in this senseless anthill, striving to make some sense, trying to map a path to a better future, was enough for him, for now.

That, and the fact that Davy Hume’s letter was serving another purpose; putting a stop to the brooding that stalked him. A moment’s distraction and he would lurch back there in his mind, charging the Russian cuirassiers, and all the blood and mayhem that had followed. All those images in his head, and churnings in his guts, clinging to him ever since, like scabs itching to be picked at.

Like all men, he had always wondered how he might behave when it came to put it to the touch. Would he fall apart or would he stand? Which was why he had kept repeating to himself, well, now you know! … in order to drown out all the other clamour.

12

The Tsarina’s Emissary

The following day, James was summoned to von Bittinghofen’s quarters.

‘General Peter Lacy, the officer commanding all the Russian and Saxon armies before Danzig, would like to meet you,’ said the old general, squinting at him with a suspicious eye.

‘Me? Why?’ It was the best James could do by way of reply.

‘We are sending back his officers tomorrow,’ said von Bittinghofen. ‘They have all signed their paroles, there is no reason to detain them. And he has requested you to command their escort. He says he wishes to meet the enterprising officer who managed to capture one of his major generals, and to thank you for your gentlemanly conduct towards him.’

James was about to remind the general that it was the young cornet of horse, Casimir, who had actually effected the capture, but quickly realised such a response would be redundant. Other matters were in play here.

‘I do not wish to go, sir,’ said James.

This gave