Apart from his pertinacious fight for economy Hume was not always fortunate in his political activity.
Horace Walpole, who gives an unfavourable picture of his private character, acknowledges that Stone possessed "abilities seldom to be matched"; and he had the distinction of being mentioned by David Hume as one of the only two men of mark who had perceived merit in that author's History of England on its first appearance.
He published works on Leibnitz, empiricism and scepticism in Hume's philosophy, modern pessimism, Kantic criticism, English philosophy, Heraclitus of Ephesus and many other subjects.
It is a Treatise on Trigonometry, by a Scotsman, James Hume of Godscroft, Berwickshire, a place still in possession of the family of Hume.
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Herbert Spencer are not systematic materialists, but show tendencies towards materialism.
