ABSTRACT
Adam Smith sets out for Scotland at the end of April in the company of John Home, but unknown to him David Hume set out in the reverse direction at much the same time to consult John Pringle in London about his health. Smith went to Edinburgh on 18 June and was there when Hume arrived back on 3 July, by no means in the state in which Smith could have wished to have seen Hume. Hume's long illness obviously caused Smith a good deal of anxiety, an anxiety which was compounded by the problem of his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Smith still feared the outcry which had led Gilbert Elliot and others to dissuade Hume from publication in the 1750s, and throughout his life so shrank from outright confrontation with religious orthodoxy that he carefully phrased and planned his own work to avoid it.
