The Meeting of Minds

In his essay Of Essay-Writing, David Hume divides the world into two kinds of people: the learned and the conversible. The learned tend toward solitary reflection on substantive matters, the “higher and more difficult operations of the mind.” The conversible pursue “the more gentle exercises of the understanding,” including human affairs, judgments of taste and beauty, and the “duties of common life.” The problem, Hume continues, is that the learned and the conversible have become separated, and this separation has had “a very bad Influence both on books and company.”