True or False:
1. George Berkeley on one of his trips to the continent took a detour to study tarantulas.
2. David Hume once received Last Rites from a Catholic priest.
3. When Napoleon attributed the heavens to the work of a Creator, Laplace said, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
4. George Berkeley wrote a book advocating tar-water as a universal medicine.
5. Leibniz thought that Chinese hexagrams were a form of binary mathematics.
6. Thomas Reid held that animals, like humans, have immaterial souls.
7. Cardinal Gerdil, a Malebranchean, missed becoming pope by two votes.
8. Joseph Butler was Bishop of Durham.
9. Diderot tells us that David Hume once said he had never met an atheist.
10. Kant wrote a book on the moral interpretation of the Christian religion.
Answers:
(If I've done this right, you should be able to run your cursor over this section, selecting the text, to see the answers to all the questions.)
1. True; we learn this from his Italian journals (strictly speaking he took the detour to study the folklore about both the 'tarantella' and the tarantula).
2. True; however, he was delirious with fever.
3. False; the saying is part of a late fictionalization of a real event.
4. True; it was called Siris.
5. True; he wrote an article about it.
6. True; see Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, Paul Wood (ed.)
7. False; he missed it by one vote.
8. True; although he was Bishop of Bristol longer.
9. True; Hume said it to d'Holbach, the famous French atheist.
10. True; it is called Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
