Author: RAMSAY (Andrew Michael), "The Chevalier":
Title: Les Voyages de Cyrus, Avec un Discours sur la Mythologies.
Description: Amsterdam, Chez Covens & Mortier, 1728. 2 volumes in 1. 12mo, pp. [viii], 187 [188 blank]; [i,] 180, title-pages in red and black, engraved vignette on each title-page, engraved frontispiece for each volume, contemporary vellum, title in ink on spine; some browning of text, but a nice copy. Ramsay's ambitious work was first published the preceding year, and at least thirty editions, in French and English, were published that year. Ramsay appears in his guise as a quietist in this volume, and his intellectual debts can be traced to Fenelon but primarily to Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe. John Laird, in Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (1932) says that Hume's threefold division of reason "into (rational) `knowledge', (casual or experimental `proofs' and (conjectural) `probabilities'" derives from Ramsay, and adds that Andrew Baxter in his Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul cites the relevant passage from Ramsay's work. Hume met Ramsay in 1737 when he was in Paris. In a long footnote in his dissertation "The Natural History of Religion," Hume criticizes Ramsay's allegorical representations in the above work.

Keywords: philosophy travel Scottish Enlightenment


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