EARLY LIFE AND WORKS

Hume was the younger son of Joseph Hume, the modestly circumstanced
laird, or lord, of Ninewells, a small estate adjoining the village of Chirnside,
about nine miles distant from Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish side of the
border. Davids mother, Catherine, a daughter of Sir David Falconer, president
of the Scottish court of session, was in Edinburgh when he was born. In his
third year his father died. He entered Edinburgh University when he was about
12 years old and left it at 14 or 15, as was then usual. Pressed a little later to
study law (in the family tradition on both sides), he found it distasteful and
instead read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the
intensity and excitement of his intellectual discovery, he had a nervous
breakdown in 1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.
In 1734, after trying his hand in a merchants office in Bristol, he came to the
turning point of his life and retired to France for three years. Most of this time
he spent at La Flche on the Loire, in the old Anjou, studying and writing A
Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise was Humes attempt to formulate a
full-fledged philosophical system. It is divided into three books: Book I, Of the
Understanding, discusses, in order, the origin of ideas; the ideas of space
and time; knowledge and probability, including the nature of causality; and the
skeptical implications of those theories. Book II, Of the Passions, describes
an elaborate psychological machinery to explain the affective, or emotional,
order in humans and assigns a subordinate role to reason in this mechanism.
Book III, on morals, characterizes moral goodness in terms of feelings of
approval or disapproval that people have when they consider human
behaviour in the light of agreeable or disagreeable consequences, either to
themselves or to others
During his years of wandering Hume was earning the money that he needed
to gain leisure for his studies. Some fruits of those studies had already
appeared before the end of his travels, viz., a further Three Essays, Moral
and Political (1748) and Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding (1748). The latter is a rewriting of Book I of the Treatise (with
the addition of his essay On Miracles, which became notorious for its denial
that a miracle can be proved by any amount or kind of evidence); it is better
known as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the title Hume gave
to it in a revision of 1758. The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals (1751) was a rewriting of Book III of the Treatise. It was in those later
works that Hume expressed his mature thought.

Morals and historical writing

The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a refinement of Humes thinking

on morality, in which he views sympathy as the fact of human nature lying at the basis
of all social life and personal happiness. Defining morality as those qualities that are
approved (1) in whomsoever they happen to be and (2) by virtually everybody, he sets
himself to discover the broadest grounds of the approvals. He finds them, as he found
the grounds of belief, in feelings, not in knowings. Moral decisions are grounded
in moral sentiment. Qualities are valued either for their utility or for their
agreeableness, in each case either to their owners or to others. Humes moral system
aims at the happiness of others (without any such formula as the greatest happiness
of the greatest number) and at the happiness of self. But regard for others accounts
for the greater part of morality. His emphasis is on altruism: the moral sentiments that
he claims to find in human beings, he traces, for the most part, to a sentiment for and a
sympathy with ones fellows. It is human nature, he holds, to laugh with the laughing
and to grieve with the grieved and to seek the good of others as well as ones own.
Two years after the Enquiry was published, Hume confessed, I have a partiality for
that work; and at the end of his life he judged it of all my writings incomparably the
best. Such statements, along with other indications in his later writings, make it
possible to suspect that he regarded his moral doctrine as his major work. He here
writes as a man having the same commitment to duty as his fellows. The traditional
view that he was a detached scoffer is deeply wrong: he was skeptical not of morality
but of much theorizing about it.
Following the publication of these works, Hume spent several years (175163) in
Edinburgh, with two breaks in London. An attempt was made to get him appointed as
successor to Adam Smith, the Scottish economist (later to be his close friend), in the
chair of logic at Glasgow, but the rumour of atheism prevailed again. In 1752,
however, Hume was made keeper of the Advocates Library at Edinburgh. There,
master of 30,000 volumes, he could indulge a desire of some years to turn to
historical writing. His History of England, extending from Caesars invasion to 1688,
came out in six quarto volumes between 1754 and 1762, preceded by Political
Discourses (1752). His recent writings had begun to make him known, but these two
brought him fame, abroad as well as at home. He also wrote Four
Dissertations (1757), which he regarded as a trifle, although it included a rewriting of
Book II of the Treatise (completing his purged restatement of this work) and a brilliant
study of the natural history of religion. In 1762 James Boswell, the biographer
of Samuel Johnson, called Hume the greatest writer in Britain, and the Roman

Catholic Church, in 1761, recognized his philosophical and literary contributions by

putting all his writings on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of forbidden
books.
The most colourful episode of his life ensued: in 1763 he left England to become
secretary to the British embassy in Paris under the Earl of Hertford. The society of
Paris accepted him, despite his ungainly figure and gauche manner. He was honoured
as eminent in breadth of learning, in acuteness of thought, and in elegance of pen and
was taken to heart for his simple goodness and cheerfulness. The salons threw open
their doors to him, and he was warmly welcomed by all. For four months in 1765 he
acted as charg daffaires at the embassy. When he returned to London at the
beginning of 1766 (to become, a year later, undersecretary of state), he brought JeanJacques Rousseau, the Swiss-born philosopher connected with
the Encyclopdie of Denis Diderot and dAlembert, with him and found him a refuge
from persecution in a country house at Wootton in Staffordshire. This tormented
genius suspected a plot, took secret flight back to France, and spread a report of
Humes bad faith. Hume was partly stung and partly persuaded into publishing the
relevant correspondence between them with a connecting narrative (A Concise and
Genuine Account of the Dispute Between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau, 1766).
In 1769, somewhat tired of public life and of England too, he again established a
residence in his beloved Edinburgh, deeply enjoying the companyat once
intellectual and convivialof friends old and new (he never married), as well as
revising the text of his writings. He issued five further editions of his History between
1762 and 1773 as well as eight editions of his collected writings (omitting
the Treatise, History, and ephemera) under the title Essays and Treatises between
1753 and 1772, besides preparing the final edition of this collection, which appeared
posthumously (1777), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in which he
refuted the cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God (held
back under pressure from friends, it was published posthumously in 1779). His
curiously detached autobiography, The Life of David Hume, Esquire, Written by
Himself (1777; the title is his own), is dated April 18, 1776. He died in his Edinburgh
house after a long illness and was buried on Calton Hill.
Adam Smith, his literary executor, added to the Life a letter that concludes with his
judgment on his friend as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit. His distinguished

friends, with ministers of religion among them, certainly admired and loved him, and
there were younger men indebted either to his influence or to his pocket. The mob had
heard only that he was an atheist and simply wondered how such an ogre would
manage his dying. Yet Boswell has recounted, in a passage in his Private Papers, that,
when he visited Hume in his last illness, the philosopher put up a lively, cheerful
defense of his disbelief in immortality.

SIGNIFICANCE AND INFLUENCE

That Hume was one of the major figures of his century can hardly be doubted. So his
contemporaries thought, and his achievement, as seen in historical perspective,
confirms that judgment, though with a shift of emphasis. Some of the reasons for
the assessment may be given under four heads:

David Hume, statue in Edinburgh.

David M. Jensen

As a writer
Humes style was praised in his lifetime and has often been praised since. It
exemplifies the classical standards of his day. It lacks individuality and colour, for he
was always proudly on guard against his emotions. The touch is light, except on slight
subjects, where it is rather heavy. Yet in his philosophical works he gives an unsought
pleasure. Here his detachment, levelness (all on one plane), smoothness, and daylight
clearness are proper merits. It is as one of the best writers of scientific prose in
English that he stands in the history of style.

As a historian
Between his death and 1894, there were at least 50 editions of his History; and an
abridgment, The Students Hume (1859; often reprinted), remained in common use for
50 years. Although now outdated, Humes History must be regarded as an event of
cultural importance. In its own day, moreover, it was an innovation, soaring high
above its very few predecessors. It was fuller and set a higher standard of impartiality.
His History of England not only traced the deeds of kings and statesmen but also
displayed the intellectual interests of the educated citizensas may be seen, for
instance, in the pages on literature and science under the Commonwealth at the end of
Chapter 3 and under James II at the end of Chapter 2. It was unprecedentedly
readable, in structure as well as in phrasing. Persons and events were woven into
causal patterns that furnished a narrative with the goals and resting points of recurrent
climaxes. That was to be the plan of future history books for the general reader.

As an economist
Hume steps forward as an economist in the Political Discourses, which were
incorporated in Essays and Treatises as Part II of Essays, Moral and Political. How
far he influenced Adam Smith remains uncertain: they had broadly similar principles,
and both had the excellent habit of illustrating and supporting these from history. He
did not formulate a complete system of economic theory, as did Smith in his Wealth of
Nations, but Hume introduced several of the new ideas around which the classical
economics of the 18th century was built. His level of insight can be gathered from
his main contentions: that wealth consists not of money but of commodities; that the

amount of money in circulation should be kept related to the amount of goods in the
market (two points made by the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley); that a low
rate of interest is a symptom not of superabundance of money but of booming trade;
that no nation can go on exporting only for bullion; that each nation has special
advantages of raw materials, climate, and skill, so that a free interchange of products
(with some exceptions) is mutually beneficial; and that poor nations impoverish the
rest just because they do not produce enough to be able to take much part in that
exchange. He welcomed advance beyond an agricultural to an industrial economy as a
precondition of any but the barer forms of civilization.

As a philosopher
Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive science of human nature, and he
concluded that humans are creatures more of sensitive and practical sentiment than of
reason. For many philosophers and historians his importance lies in the fact
that Immanuel Kant conceived his critical philosophy in direct reaction to Hume
(Kant said that Hume had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber). Hume was
one of the influences that led Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French mathematician
and sociologist, to develop positivism. In Britain Humes positive influence is seen
in Jeremy Bentham, the early 19th-century jurist and philosopher, who was moved
to utilitarianism (the moral theory that right conduct should be determined by the
usefulness of its consequences) by Book III of the Treatise, and more extensively
in John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist who lived later in the 19th century.
In throwing doubt on the assumption of a necessary link between cause and effect,
Hume was the first philosopher of the postmedieval world to reformulate
the skepticism of the ancients. His reformulation, moreover, was carried out in a new
and compelling way. Although he admired Newton, Humes subtle undermining of
causality called in question the philosophical basis of Newtons science as a way of
looking at the world, inasmuch as that science rested on the identification of a few
fundamental causal laws that govern the universe. As a result, the positivists of the
19th century were obliged to wrestle with Humes questioning of causality if they
were to succeed in their aim of making science the central framework of human
thought.
For much of the 20th century it was Humes naturalism rather than his skepticism that
attracted attention, chiefly among analytic philosophers. Humes naturalism lies in his

belief that philosophical justification could be rooted only in regularities of the natural
world. The attraction of that contention for analytic philosophers was that it seemed to
provide a solution to the problems arising from the skeptical tradition that Hume
himself, in his other philosophical role, had done so much to reinvigorate