The Prisoner's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF

there was no doubt, and all through the day Hume had found himself delighting in the beauty of the gorgeous red coat’s golden embroidery and the warmth of its heavy wool. Yet again his hand moved to feel thecraftsmanship of the decorative work at his wrist, his senses secretly comforted by the touch to his fingers.
    He looked through the window into the small garden and picked up a lost train of thought again. The coat had reminded him of his birthday, and his birthday of the march of time. Had he gone forward, he wondered? He turned to look at the study that he loved so much and thought that he had. He was a man that set much store by comfort and order and he felt that the threat of penury, without doubt his greatest anxiety, had retreated further during the year. When he’d left Scotland as an impoverished young man many years before he had worked as a clerk for a sugar importer in Bristol and he liked to keep the memory of those days of repetitive and unimaginative stocktaking fresh in his mind. The work had left him with a fear of tedium and a horror of debt; but it had also given him the determination to earn his living by the power of his intellect and not by meeting the demands of others.
    Yes, there had indeed been progress he felt. The
Treatise on Human Nature
that he’d worked so hard on had been published eight years earlier and it was now no longer the failure that it had once seemed. He remembered the exhilaration of its first appearance and then the terrible depression that had descended on him when it had – as he now felt able to joke with his friends – fallen ‘dead-born from the press’. But sales had increased steadily over the years since then, as had his fame, and with them had followed the health of his purse and the standing of his reputation.
    It was true that he had no wife yet but he set little store by this shortcoming. He was used to looking after his own needs and he enjoyed the company of men. And, of course, he said to himself, he was yet to meet a woman that he could converse with on the subjects that interested him.
    And while it was also true that his hopes of a professor’s gown at the University were in ashes he had accepted long ago that ifthe price of a chair was the rejection of his atheism then this ambition would have to be forever closed to him. Besides, he could be comfortable without it. His friends understood his position, even if they disagreed with it, and the sales from his books, his tutoring and the small amount he received from his family’s rents were more than enough for this friendly house and its good cellar. And the warmth of his new clothes.
    Yet again he was returning to ponder on whether to bring out a revised edition of the
Treatise
when he heard his maid’s knock on the door. She stood shyly in the doorway, framed by the early evening light.
    â€˜Mr Adam Smith is here to see you, sir.’
    Hume smiled broadly.
    â€˜Good, good. Show him in, please.’
    And here was a further pleasure to mark his birthday, he thought to himself. He had heard so much about this Mr Smith and was greatly looking forward to spending an evening with him. Smith was by all accounts a prodigy, some were even claiming him to be a genius, and although he was not yet twenty three he was already being spoken of by Hume’s friends as the coming man.
    But there were other stories about him too and Hume smiled to himself as he recalled some of the things he’d heard. Of Smith’s great intellect and insights there was never anything but confirmation. But what a strange fish he was said to be, speaking rapidly to the empty air as if he was arguing with himself and beaming suddenly into the winds to his imaginary friends.
    â€˜Still, he has the most beautiful smile a man ever witnessed,’ Hume’s friend Bruce McLean had said. ‘There isn’t a bad bone in his body’.
    It now seemed that half the people of Edinburgh were