David Hume
Scottish philosopher
born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711, Edinburgh, Scot.
died Aug. 25, 1776, Edinburgh
Main
Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist,
known especially for his philosophical empiricism and
skepticism.
Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive,
experimental science of human nature. Taking the scientific
method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as his
model and building on the epistemology of the English
philosopher John Locke, Hume tried to describe how the mind
works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded
that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no
knowledge of anything beyond experience. Despite the
enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume seems to
have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.
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.
David’s 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 merchant’s 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 Flèche on the Loire, in the old Anjou, studying
and writing A Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise was
Hume’s attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical
system. It is divided into three books: book I, on
understanding, aims at explaining man’s process of knowing,
describing in order the origin of ideas, the ideas of space
and time, causality, and the testimony of the senses; book
II, on the “passions” of man, gives an elaborate
psychological machinery to explain the affective, or
emotional, order in man and assigns a subordinate role to
reason in this mechanism; book III, on morals, describes
moral goodness in terms of “feelings” of approval or
disapproval that a person has when he considers human
behaviour in the light of the agreeable or disagreeable
consequences either to himself or to others. Although the
Treatise is Hume’s most thorough exposition of his thought,
at the end of his life he vehemently repudiated it as
juvenile, avowing that only his later writings presented his
considered views. The Treatise is not well constructed, in
parts oversubtle, confusing because of ambiguity in
important terms (especially “reason”), and marred by willful
extravagance of statement and rather theatrical personal
avowals. For these reasons his mature condemnation of it was
perhaps not entirely misplaced. Book I, nevertheless, has
been more read in academic circles than any other of his
writings.
Returning to England in 1737, he set about publishing the
Treatise. Books I and II were published in two volumes in
1739; book III appeared the following year. The poor
reception of this, his first and very ambitious work,
depressed him; but his next venture, Essays, Moral and
Political (1741–42), won some success. Perhaps encouraged by
this, he became a candidate for the chair of moral
philosophy at Edinburgh in 1744. Objectors alleged heresy
and even atheism, pointing to the Treatise as evidence.
Unsuccessful, Hume left the city, where he had been living
since 1740, and began a period of wandering: a sorry year
near St. Albans as tutor to the mad marquess of Annandale
(1745–46); a few months as secretary to Gen. James St. Clair
(a member of a prominent Scottish family), with whom he saw
military action during an abortive expedition to Brittany
(1746); a little tarrying in London and at Ninewells; and
then some further months with General St. Clair on an
embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin (1748–49).
Mature works
During his years of wandering Hume was earning the money
that he needed to gain leisure for his studies. Some fruits
of these 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 these works that Hume
expressed his mature thought.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an attempt
to define the principles of human knowledge. It poses in
logical form significant questions about the nature of
reasoning in regard to matters of fact and experience, and
it answers them by recourse to the principle of association.
The basis of his exposition is a twofold classification of
objects of awareness. In the first place, all such objects
are either “impressions,” data of sensation or of internal
consciousness, or “ideas,” derived from such data by
compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing. That
is to say, the mind does not create any ideas but derives
them from impressions. From this Hume develops a theory of
meaning. A word that does not stand directly for an
impression has meaning only if it brings before the mind an
object that can be gathered from an impression by one of the
mental processes mentioned. In the second place, there are
two approaches to construing meaning, an analytical one,
which concentrates on the “relations of ideas,” and an
empirical one, which focuses on “matters of fact.” Ideas can
be held before the mind simply as meanings, and their
logical relations to one another can then be detected by
rational inspection. The idea of a plane triangle, for
example, entails the equality of its internal angles to two
right angles, and the idea of motion entails the ideas of
space and time, irrespective of whether there really are
such things as triangles and motion. Only on this level of
mere meanings, Hume asserts, is there room for demonstrative
knowledge. Matters of fact, on the other hand, come before
the mind merely as they are, revealing no logical relations;
their properties and connections must be accepted as they
are given. That primroses are yellow, that lead is heavy,
and that fire burns things are facts, each shut up in
itself, logically barren. Each, so far as reason is
concerned, could be different: the contradictory of every
matter of fact is conceivable. Therefore, any demonstrative
science of fact is impossible.
From this basis Hume develops his doctrine about
causality. The idea of causality is alleged to assert a
necessary connection among matters of fact. From what
impression, then, is it derived? Hume states that no causal
relation among the data of the senses can be observed, for,
when a person regards any events as causally connected, all
that he does and can observe is that they frequently and
uniformly go together. In this sort of togetherness it is a
fact that the impression or idea of the one event brings
with it the idea of the other. A habitual association is set
up in the mind; and, as in other forms of habit, so in this
one, the working of the association is felt as compulsion.
This feeling, Hume concludes, is the only discoverable
impressional source of the idea of causality.
Mature works » Belief
Hume then considers the process of causal inference, and in
so doing he introduces the concept of belief. When a person
sees a glass fall, he not only thinks of its breaking but
expects and believes that it will break; or, starting from
an effect, when he sees the ground to be generally wet, he
not only thinks of rain but believes that there has been
rain. Thus belief is a significant component in the process
of causal inference. Hume then proceeds to investigate the
nature of belief, claiming that he was the first to do so.
He uses this term in the narrow sense of belief regarding
matters of fact. He defines belief as a sort of liveliness
or vividness that accompanies the perception of an idea. A
belief is more than an idea; it is a vivid or lively idea.
This vividness is originally possessed by some of the
objects of awareness, by impressions and the simple memory
images of them. By association it comes to belong to certain
ideas as well. In the process of causal inference, then, an
observer passes from an impression to an idea regularly
associated with it. In the process the aspect of liveliness
proper to the impression infects the idea, Hume asserts. And
it is this aspect of liveliness that Hume defines as the
essence of belief.
Hume does not claim to prove that the propositions, (1)
that events themselves are causally related and (2) that
they will be related in the future in the same ways as they
were in the past, are false. He firmly believed both of
these propositions and insisted that everybody else believed
them, will continue to believe them, and must continue to
believe them in order to survive. They are natural beliefs,
inextinguishable propensities of human nature, madness
apart. What Hume claims to prove is that natural beliefs are
not obtained and cannot be demonstrated either by empirical
observation or by reason, whether intuitive or inferential.
Reflection shows that there is no evidence for them and
shows also both that we are bound to believe them and that
it is sensible or sane to do so. This is Hume’s skepticism:
it is an affirmation of that tension, a denial not of belief
but of certainty.
Mature works » Morals and historical writing
The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a
refinement of Hume’s 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. Hume’s 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 one’s 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 one’s 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 (1751–63) 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 Caesar’s 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,
paid him the attention of putting all his writings on the
Index, 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 chargé
d’affaires at the embassy. When he returned to London at the
beginning of 1766 (to become, a year later, undersecretary
of state), he brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss
philosopher connected with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and
d’Alembert, 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 Hume’s 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 company—at once intellectual
and convivial—of 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, held back under pressure from friends and not
published until 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:
Significance and influence » As a writer
Hume’s 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.
Significance and influence » As a historian
Library catalogs still list Hume as “Hume, David, the
Historian.” Between his death and 1894, there were at least
50 editions of his History; and an abridgment, The Student’s
Hume (1859; often reprinted), remained in common use for 50
years. Though now outdated, Hume’s 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 citizens, as 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.
Significance and influence » As an economist
Hume steps forward as an economist in the Political
Discourses incorporated in Essays and Treatises as part 2 of
Essays Moral and Political. How far he influenced his friend
Adam Smith, 12 years his junior, 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
Adam 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 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.
Significance and influence » As a philosopher
Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive science of
human nature, and he concluded that man is more a creature
of sensitive and practical sentiment than of reason. On the
Continent he is seen as one of the few British classical
philosophers. For some Germans his importance lies in the
fact that Immanuel Kant conceived his critical philosophy in
direct reaction to Hume. Hume was one of the influences that
led Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French mathematician and
sociologist, to positivism. In Britain his 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 Hume admired Newton, Hume’s
subtle undermining of causality called in question the
philosophical basis of Newton’s science as a way of looking
at the world, inasmuch as this 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 Hume’s questioning of causality if they were
to succeed in their aim of making science the central
framework of human thought. In the 20th century it was
Hume’s naturalism rather than his skepticism that attracted
attention, chiefly among analytic philosophers. Hume’s
naturalism lies in his belief that philosophical
justification could only be rooted in regularities of the
natural world. The attraction of this 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.
Thomas Edmund Jessop
Maurice Cranston
