It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant who would not attend to his business by candlelight, to plead that he had not broad sunshine.

The candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes....

Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct."[16] Hume develops the same fundamental conception in a somewhat different way, and with a more definite indication of the practical benefits which may be expected from a critical philosophy.

The first and second parts of the twelfth section of the _Inquiry_ are devoted to a condemnation of excessive scepticism, or Pyrrhonism, with which Hume couples a caricature of the Cartesian doubt; but, in the third part, a certain "mitigated scepticism" is recommended and adopted, under the title of "academical philosophy." After pointing out that a knowledge of the infirmities of the human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations, is the best check upon the tendency to dogmatism, Hume continues:-- "Another species of _mitigated_ scepticism, which may be of advantage to mankind, and which maybe the natural result of the PYRRHONIAN doubts and scruples, is the limitation of our inquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.

The _imagination_ of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects which custom has rendered too familiar to it.