David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist, and the leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Pushing the empiricist idea that all knowledge comes from experience further than anyone before him, he argued that our beliefs about cause and effect, the self and the external world rest on custom and feeling rather than reason, and that morality springs from sentiment. In his own day he was famous above all as the author of a best-selling History of England; today he is widely considered the most important philosopher ever to write in English.

Hume was born David Home in Edinburgh on 7 May 1711 (26 April in the Old Style calendar then used in Britain), the younger son of a minor landowning family whose estate, Ninewells, lay near Chirnside in Berwickshire. His father died when he was two, and he was raised by his mother. He attended the University of Edinburgh from about the age of ten or eleven, leaving without a degree, and his family hoped he would become a lawyer. Instead he devoted himself to reading philosophy and literature. The intensity of this study brought on a breakdown in 1729 that lasted several years. After a brief, unhappy spell as a merchant's clerk in Bristol, he moved in 1734 to France, living cheaply at La Flèche in Anjou, where René Descartes had been educated by the Jesuits. There, still in his early twenties, he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature.

The Treatise appeared anonymously in 1739 and 1740. Hume later said that it "fell dead-born from the press", an exaggeration, but it sold poorly and attracted mainly hostile notice. Its aim was to build a "science of man" on the experimental method of Isaac Newton, explaining how the mind works by observation rather than speculation.

Following John Locke and George Berkeley, Hume held that all the contents of the mind are perceptions, divided into vivid impressions, such as sensations and feelings, and fainter ideas, which are copies of them. Any idea that cannot be traced back to an impression is suspect. Applied to causation, this test produced his most famous argument. When we see one billiard ball strike another, we observe only one event followed by another; we never observe a necessary connection between them. Nor can reason prove that the future will resemble the past, since any argument for that would assume what it sets out to prove. Our expectation that the second ball will move is the product of habit: having seen such sequences many times, the mind is led by custom to expect the effect. This is now called the problem of induction.

Hume applied the same analysis to the self, which he described as nothing more than a bundle of perceptions in constant flux, and to belief in an external world. His conclusions were sceptical, but he insisted that nature makes it impossible to live as a sceptic: outside the study, everyone believes in causes and bodies, and philosophy cannot and should not shake that.

In ethics Hume argued that reason alone cannot move us to act, writing that reason "is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". Moral distinctions come from feelings of approval and disapproval, rooted in a natural sympathy with others; actions are judged virtuous because they are useful or agreeable to ourselves or to others. He also observed that writers on morals often slide from statements about what is to claims about what ought to be without explaining how, a point now known as the is-ought problem. He considered his An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) the best of all his works.

His writing on religion made him notorious. In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), a shorter and clearer version of the Treatise's first book, the essay "Of Miracles" argued that the testimony for a miracle can never outweigh the uniform experience of the laws of nature. The Natural History of Religion (1757) traced religion to human hopes and fears. His Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, a searching critique of the argument that the order of the world proves a wise designer, was so controversial that it appeared only in 1779, three years after his death. His reputation as a sceptic and atheist cost him professorships at Edinburgh in 1745 and Glasgow in 1751.

Hume found success with lighter forms. His Essays, Moral and Political (1741–1742) and Political Discourses (1752) were widely read, and his essays on money, trade and the balance of trade, which explained how flows of gold and silver tend to correct themselves, influenced his close friend Adam Smith. As keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh from 1752 he wrote The History of England, published in six volumes between 1754 and 1762, covering the period from the Roman invasion to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was accused of Tory sympathies but became the standard history of England for generations and made him rich.

He also served as secretary to a general on a failed military expedition against the French coast in 1746 and on embassies to Vienna and Turin. From 1763 to 1765 he was secretary to the British embassy in Paris, where the salons celebrated him as a hero of the Enlightenment. In 1766 he brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then persecuted on the continent, to England, but Rousseau soon came to believe that Hume was plotting against him, and their very public quarrel became a scandal across Europe. Hume was an under-secretary of state in London in 1767–1768 before retiring to Edinburgh's New Town.

Hume died of an abdominal illness, probably cancer, on 25 August 1776. James Boswell, who visited him shortly before, was disturbed to find him calm and unafraid at the prospect of annihilation, and Smith described his friend in a published letter as close to the ideal of a wise and virtuous man.

His influence on philosophy has been immense. Immanuel Kant wrote that Hume had woken him from his "dogmatic slumber", and Kant's critical philosophy was in large part an answer to Hume's account of causation. Later empiricists, utilitarians and twentieth-century analytic philosophers, from John Stuart Mill to the logical positivists, treated him as a forerunner. Hume belongs both to the empiricist tradition of early modern philosophy and to the wider Enlightenment.

His reputation has also come under scrutiny. In a footnote to his essay "Of National Characters" he expressed the view that non-white peoples were naturally inferior to whites, and a letter published in 2014 showed him passing on to his patron, Lord Hertford, a proposal to invest in slave plantations on Grenada; scholars disagree about whether he was encouraging the purchase or merely relaying it. In 2020 the University of Edinburgh removed his name from one of its tower blocks, renaming it 40 George Square.