This Sociological Life

You read from the finished manuscript instead - Hume's own voice, dry and precise and finally, devastatingly honest, admitting he'd spent thirty years believing facts spoke for themselves and only lately understood that someone always decides which facts get collected, and why, and who gets to use them afterwards. The room's silence here was heavier, more personal, several people recognising their own small part in exactly the story being read aloud.

"The evidence explains what happened," you said, once you'd finished. "This is what he decided it actually meant, right at the end, when he finally let himself say so."