Lost in the Castle of Scepticism: Sceptical Philosophy as Gothic Romance
Scottish essayist and poet James Beattie’s fictional parody, ‘The Castle of Scepticism: A Vision’ (1767), maligns David Hume’s sceptical philosophy by re-casting it as Gothic romance.1 Beattie’s unnamed narrator recounts his visit in a dream to Hume’s Castle of Scepticism, a haunting fortress in which absurdity passes for wisdom, paranoia reigns, and darkness, madness and the threat of violence hang heavily over all. At the story’s climax, divine intervention brings Hume to his knees, where he recites the Apostles’ Creed (‘I believe …’), breaking scepticism’s spell and returning the narrator to the real world. Equating scepticism with Gothic romance allows Beattie simultaneously to ridicule scepticism by association with a literary genre infamous for its absurdities, while borrowing from Gothic romance’s arsenal of terrifying effects to highlight scepticism’s dangerousness.