David Hume

• 1. Introduction

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  David Hume was born on the 7th of May 1711 in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket, into a family that was, by his own account, far from wealthy. His father, Joseph Home of Chirnside, died just after David's second birthday. His mother Catherine, who never remarried, raised David and his two siblings on her own. What this boy from a modest Edinburgh household would go on to do was rattle the foundations of Western philosophy so thoroughly that Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest thinkers who followed him, credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers". How does a younger son with slender finances and an early dropout record end up reshaping how humanity understands knowledge, causation, morality, and religion? The answer runs through a boardinghouse in rural France, an Edinburgh bog, a ferocious appetite for cheese and port, and one of the most controversial footnotes in the history of ideas.

• 2. The Early Hunger

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  At the University of Edinburgh, Hume enrolled at an unusually early age, either twelve or possibly as young as ten, at a time when fourteen was the norm. While his family assumed he was studying law and poring over legal texts by Voet and Vinnius, he was secretly devouring Cicero and Virgil. He did not graduate. Around age eighteen, he experienced what he called a "new Scene of Thought", a philosophical breakthrough that inspired him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it." He resolved to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. The effort nearly destroyed him. A persistent coldness set in, which he attributed to a "Laziness of Temper", and it lasted roughly nine months. Scurvy spots appeared on his fingers. His physician diagnosed him with the "Disease of the Learned". Hume's prescribed treatment was a regimen of bitters and anti-hysteric pills, taken alongside a pint of claret each day. By 1731 he had recovered enough to eat vigorously, and the transformation was physical as well as intellectual: he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to "sturdy, robust, healthful-like." He would later become well known for his obesity and his fondness for good port and cheese, which he sometimes used as philosophical metaphors.

• 3. The Treatise and Its Reception

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  By age twenty-five, Hume had no learned profession and no income. He took work as a merchant's assistant, which required him to leave Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou, France, where he had regular discourse with the Jesuits at the College of La Flèche and likely used its extensive library. There, between roughly 1734 and 1738, he completed the work he had labored on for four years: A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects". He finished it at age twenty-eight. Critics in Great Britain described it as "abstract and unintelligible". Hume himself later wrote that the book "fell dead-born from the press." Having spent most of his savings in those four years, he resolved to make "a very rigid frugality" supply his lack of fortune and to regard every object as worthless except the improvement of his literary talents. Despite the disappointment, he wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow." He then published an anonymous pamphlet, An Abstract of a Book lately Published, to summarize the Treatise's main ideas in clearer language, without revealing that he was its author. Scholars today regard the Treatise as one of the most important works in the history of Western philosophy, though Hume himself spent decades dismissing it as juvenilia: "A work which the Author had projected before he left College."

• 4. Knowledge, Causation, Hume's Fork

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  At the heart of Hume's philosophy lies a deceptively simple observation: people never actually perceive that one event causes another. What they experience is only the "constant conjunction" of events, one thing following another, again and again. From this, his problem of induction follows: to draw any causal inference from past experience, one must assume the future will resemble the past. But that assumption cannot itself be grounded in experience without circular reasoning. Hume's solution was not to abandon causal thinking but to relocate it. Rather than reason, he argued, natural instinct and habit explain why humans make inductive inferences. He wrote that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel." His division of all objects of human enquiry into two categories, "Relations of Ideas" and "Matters of Fact", became known as Hume's Fork. Relations of Ideas are knowable a priori and are universally certain; Matters of Fact depend on observation and experience. Charles Darwin's later discovery of natural selection would add real-world weight to Hume's scepticism about the argument from design, and Kant and Karl Popper both acknowledged that Hume's analysis had "posed a most fundamental challenge to all human knowledge claims."

• 5. The Self, Passions, and Morality

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  Hume denied that human beings have any real conception of a unified self. When he looked inward, he wrote, he always stumbled on "some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure." He could never catch himself without a perception. The self, on this account, is nothing more than a bundle of sensations connected by association. The philosopher James Giles has argued that Hume was not reducing the self to a bundle but eliminating it altogether, a view that the psychologist Alison Gopnik has connected to Buddhist thought, suggesting Hume may have encountered Buddhist ideas during his time in France in the 1730s. On morality, Hume was equally radical. He proclaimed that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Moral decisions, he argued, are grounded in moral sentiment, not in rational calculation. His close friend Adam Smith shared this sentimentalism, and both were influenced by the older contemporary Francis Hutcheson. Hume also identified what became known as Hume's Law: no statement of fact alone can ever produce a normative conclusion about what ought to be done. The philosopher Peter Singer later suggested that this argument alone would have been enough to earn Hume a permanent place in the history of ethics.

• 6. Religion, Miracles, and Controversy

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  In 1761 all of Hume's works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The Church of Scotland had previously considered bringing charges of infidelity against him. Hume's religious views were never simple. Contemporaries called him an atheist; modern scholars tend toward "irreligion" or, in philosopher David O'Connor's phrase, "weakly deistic." His 1757 dissertation "The Natural History of Religion" argued that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all derived from earlier polytheistic religions, and that all religious belief traces ultimately to "dread of the unknown." His argument against miracles was the piece he was most proud of. He defined a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity", then argued that the weight of uniform human experience always outweighs the testimony of witnesses, however numerous. He wrote, "I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion." A story he liked to tell captures how his contemporaries viewed him: an Edinburgh fishwife, recognizing him as "Hume the atheist", refused to pull him out of a bog until he declared himself a Christian and recited the Lord's Prayer. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, carried his critique of the design argument to its furthest point.

• 7. The Librarian, the Historian, the Public Man

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  After being blocked from a university post in Edinburgh because ministers petitioned the town council against appointing an atheist, Hume took a position as librarian at the Advocates Library in 1752. The pay was little to nothing, but the job gave him, as he put it, "the command of a large library." He used it to write The History of England, a six-volume work that took fifteen years and ran to over a million words, tracing events from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688. It became a bestseller and, for over sixty years, the dominant account of English history. His Political Discourses, published in 1752, was the only work he considered successful on first publication. From 1763 to 1765 he served in Paris as secretary to the British embassy, where he was well received in Parisian society and met the philosopher Isaac de Pinto. In January 1766 he accompanied Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. The two men fell out spectacularly, and Hume was sufficiently worried about the damage to his reputation that he wrote and published a pamphlet titled "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau." In 1767 he was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department, where he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom."

• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  In 1771 Hume moved into a grand new house on St Andrew Square in Edinburgh's New Town, where he would spend his final years. He wrote a brief autobiographical essay titled "My Own Life" in fewer than five pages, admitting that the "love of literary fame" had served as his "ruling passion" throughout life, and that this desire "never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments." He judged his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals to be, in his own opinion, "of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best." The diarist James Boswell visited him a few weeks before his death and found Hume insisting it was a "most unreasonable fancy" to believe in an afterlife. Hume asked for his body to be placed in a "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will that the inscription carry only his name and the years of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest." He died at the southwest corner of St Andrew's Square, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. Adam Smith later recounted Hume's wry speculation that he might ask Charon, the ferryman of Hades, for a few more years to witness "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition." The ferryman replied: "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Get into the boat this instant." His legacy touched utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, cognitive science, and theology, and his nephew David Hume of Ninewells became a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783.