OUR Scottish Enlightenment apparently had shades of endarkenment, given a recent ad hominem attack on David Hume. A petition launched by Edinburgh University student Elizabeth Lund to rename its David Hume Tower because the philosopher, historian, economist “wrote racist epithets not worth repeating here” has been signed by more than 1700 people.

Despite her reluctance to quote Hume, her observation stands. That “notorious footnote” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, in which Hume said he was “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites” disgraces the very man who damned slavery as “more cruel and oppressive than any civil subjection whatsoever”.

Hume scholars acknowledge the blunder, albeit an unproven speculation rather than a firm conclusion. It wasn’t his only gaffe. The Swiss, he postulated, were more honest than the Irish, and that in an era when “Irish” often included Highland Gaeldom.

Racism apart, this was plain sloppy thinking. The few African-descended people in Hume’s Scotland lived mostly on rural estates. London (where much racial vitriol targeted Scots) and Paris were different, but he probably never discoursed with anyone of African heritage.

Hume was talking nonsense. Today we read authors such as Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ben Okri; the poetry of Jackie Kay, Dennis Brutus, and Derek Walcott; admire Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; and listen to John Coltrane and Aretha Franklin.

From an a posteriori vantage – something historians witheringly label “presentism” – Hume’s footnote is absurd. African-American Phillis Wheatley’s Poems Religious and Moral proved to his friend Voltaire that colour was no impediment to being a poet, but by then Hume was in decline.

Besides, her excessive piety would have appalled him. Ironically, Hume could have confounded his footnote with his own system of reasoning by arguing that it isn’t possible to arrive at a causal inference by a priori means, but that’s beside the point.

What isn’t beside the point is that the normally cautious moderate Hume, for most philosophers living and dead, was the greatest thinker of the English speaking world.

Adam Smith praised him “as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit”. Julian Baggini implores: “If ever there were a time in recent history to turn to Hume, now is surely it. The enthusiasts are on the rise, in the form of strongman political populists who assert the will of the people as though it were absolute and absolutely infallible.”

He also had enemies. Thomas Jefferson, whose Scotophobia infected the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, banned Hume’s books from the University of Virginia. “Common Sense” philosopher James Oswald, Hume’s friend in the 1740s, later attacked his scepticism, manifestly influenced by his slave trafficking brother and paymaster, Richard.

AS was said of devolution, enlightenment was a process, not an event. Trial and error featured.

Ms Lund’s petition, too, has a “notorious footnote”, her suggestion that David Hume Tower be renamed after Edinburgh alumnus Julius Nyerere, the homophobic dictator who ran Tanzania as a one-party state for two decades, detaining opponents without trial. She has since decently relented.

Hume, she claims, offends “BIPOC” students – a recent North American acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Yet indigenous Scots might not appreciate being instructed by others on the naming their institutional buildings, and might even feel it amounts to a form of “cultural colonisation”.

Since Ms Lund writes articles in Norwegian, a link with Norway seems possible. It was on a school trip to Norway many years ago, led by Tam Dalyell, that I discovered one of the creepiest places anywhere. Norway, declared independent in 1905, celebrated its zeitgeist by inviting sculptor Gustav Vigeland (fortuitously, he’d changed his name from Adolf) to create an Aryan wonderland of naked statues in a vast park which, according to Paul Gauguin’s son – who admittedly had been detained in a Quisling concentration camp – “reeks of Nazi mentality”.

Vigeland subscribed to the Nazi magazine Ragnarok, and would “welcome German soldiers with their excellent discipline to walk around between my work”. I admire Norway (and the way they’ve kept their oil revenues) and have liked every Norwegian I’ve met but, given Vigeland, I’m not so sure we should take their advice on who we choose to celebrate in our public realm.

Anyway, here’s a better idea. Edinburgh’s first black student was Jamaican William Fergusson. He enrolled in 1809, graduated in medicine in 1813, and became president of Sierra Leone in 1841. He should have a statue on the south-east corner of George Square, where he could keep an eye on the David Hume Tower. Now that would be a petition worth signing.

David Black’s play Nancy’s Philosopher, about the controversial relationship of David Hume and Nancy Ord, was performed at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery during the 2019 Edinburgh Festival