HUME, DAVID

HUME, DAVID (1711–1776), was a Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume was born in Edinburgh on April 26, 1711, to Joseph and Katherine Home. Most of his childhood was spent on the family estate at Ninewells, in Berwickshire, forty miles south of Edinburgh near the border of England. At age eleven Hume entered the University of Edinburgh, and upon leaving the university three years later, began to prepare for a career in law. Hume's interest in law was soon eclipsed by his passion for literature, history, and philosophy; over the following decade most of his time was spent studying what he called "polite authors" such as Shaftesbury, Butler, Locke, and Cicero. In 1734, at age twenty-three, Hume left Scotland to take a position as clerk with a Bristol merchant. It was here that he changed the spelling of his surname from Home to Hume, because in Scotland Home is pronounced as Hume is in England; Hume preferred that his name be pronounced correctly, even if it meant changing the spelling. After four months in Bristol, Hume left for the south of France, determined to pursue a life of letters.

In 1737 Hume returned from France with the two volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature in manuscript form. Being sure that the work would bring him instant fame and fortune, he was eager to publish without delay. In his own words, however, the Treatise "fell dead-born from the press." This is not to say that it was not widely read both in Britain and on the continent. Hume undoubtedly meant that the ideas put forth in the Treatise fell dead-born on the minds of those who read it. Reviews of the Treatise were universally negative.

Hume's disappointment was profound. During the six-year period from 1739 to 1745 he lived in virtual seclusion at Ninewells, writing the third volume of the Treatise (published in 1740) and experimenting with the essay form as a medium of expression. Hume's first efforts as an essayist resulted in a two-volume work published in 1742 under the title Essays Moral and Political. This was Hume's first successful publication. Only a small selection of the twenty-seven essays therein contained can be counted as serious philosophical pieces, and these were not the ones that accounted for the popularity of the collection as a whole.

Short of money, in 1745 Hume took a position as tutor to the marquis of Annandale, and in the same year applied for the chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Hume judged that a regular academic appointment would provide both the income and leisure necessary to pursue a full-time life of study. However, his application was opposed by the principal of the university, who accused him of atheism, heresy, and skepticism. His failure to secure this appointment was the second great disappointment of his life.

Hume's next two years were spent traveling in France as secretary to James St. Claire, a general in the British army. The army was of interest to Hume for financial reasons only: He stayed just long enough to accumulate the money needed for another retreat to his study. Between 1747 and 1751 he composed and published his two great treatises: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (originally titled Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding ), and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. These were the first of Hume's serious philosophical works to achieve acclaim.

In 1752 Hume secured an appointment as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. This was the first time Hume had had steady access to a major library. He took the opportunity to pursue a project of long-standing interest—the detailed study of English history. Between 1754 and 1761 Hume published, in installments, his masterful six-volume History of England. Regarded as a classic in Hume's own time, this text remained the standard in its field until the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1763 Hume became secretary to the British embassy in Paris, spending the next three years writing and conversing with the luminaries of the Parisian intellectual set. By this time he was generally regarded as Britain's foremost man of letters. Hume returned to England in 1766 as under secretary of state, but he resigned from the diplomatic service three years later, retiring to Ninewells. In 1775 Hume was stricken with an internal disorder that claimed his life on August 25, 1776.

David Hume was a man of gentle bearing—humane, tolerant, charitable, and generous in his opinions of others. In his autobiographical essay "My Own Life," Hume characterized himself as being of "cheerful nature." From all reports, his wit was sparkling; he was a favorite both in the polite salons of Paris and the rude pubs of Edinburgh. To his French intimates he was known as "le bon David," while his many friends in Scotland referred to him as "Saint David." Although Hume never married, he was not unpopular with the ladies; his charm and good humor more than compensated for his obese physical appearance.

Directly following its poor reception in 1739, Hume made two attempts to stimulate interest in A Treatise of Human Nature. In 1740 he published an essay titled "An Abstract of a Treatise on Human Nature," which identified the nub of the work's method and summarized some of the conclusions of the text. At the same time, Hume was busy at Ninewells preparing a corrected edition of the first two volumes, which he hoped would remove the misunderstandings that his first efforts had generated. But the corrected edition never appeared. The only changes made during this period that survived in printed form were included in an appendix to the Treatise published together with the third volume in 1741. Neither the publication of the Abstract nor the materials appended to the Treatise had the desired effect. It was not until Hume cast the basic theses of the Treatise into essay form and released them in the Enquiries that the ideas first delivered in the Treatise received the sort of attention Hume thought they deserved. In later years, Hume in effect abandoned the Treatise in favor of his Enquiries. In the "Author's Advertisement" printed in volume 2 of the 1777 edition of Hume's works, Hume described the Treatise as a "juvenile work," stating that he had made an "error in going to press too early," and announcing that the Enquiries rather than the Treatise should be taken as expressing his considered views on the topics therein discussed. Still, succeeding generations of scholars have, as it were, rediscovered the Treatise. Most students of the history of philosophy now regard it as Hume's foremost contribution to philosophical literature.

Regarding the impact of the philosophical views first expressed in the Treatise and restated in the enquiries, two comments are in order. First, book 1 ("Of the Understanding") and its companion, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, are generally thought to contain definitive statements of the epistemological theses associated with classical British empiricism and generative of the empiricist trends in Western philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant acknowledges Hume as the one who inspired his own probing into the foundations of human knowledge. The empiricist elements in the philosophies of Mill, Russell, Carnap, and Wittgenstein are in no small measure traceable to the direct or indirect influence of Hume.

Second, it should also be noted that, in book 3 of the Treatise and in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume sets the stage for much of what follows in nineteenth- and twentieth-century moral philosophy. Here Hume works out a hedonistic, rule-based, and utilitarian theory of ethics very much like the one suggested more than a hundred years later by John Stuart Mill in chapter 5 of Utilitarianism. This theory has served as one of the major foci of moral-theoretical reflection in twentieth-century philosophical literature. It might be added that at least some commentators (e.g., A. J. Ayer, 1980) claim to find in Hume's ethical writings rudiments of the so-called emotive analysis of ethical language—a theory not brought to maturity until the mid-twentieth century, but very influential in British-American moral philosophy since that time. Whether or not this last claim can be sustained, it is clear that Hume stands as a major figure in the history of ethics. Putting it all together, it is hard to imagine how the last two hundred years of Western philosophy would have gone, had the ideas expressed in the Treatise really fallen dead-born from the press.

The corpus of Hume's writings includes seven texts that specifically treat religious topics. In order of their appearance in published form, they are: (1) "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," published in 1742 as one of the Essays Moral and Political ; (2) "Of Miracles" and (3) "Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State," which appeared in 1748 as parts 10 and 11 respectively of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding ; (4) "The Natural History of Religion," one of Four Dissertations published in 1757; (5) "Of Suicide" and (6) "On the Immortality of the Soul," brought out together in 1777 under the title Two Essays ; and (7) the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which occupied Hume's attention periodically during the last twenty-five years of his life and was finally published in 1779.

All these texts are critical of religion—of religious institutions, religious practices, theological doctrines, and/or theological arguments. Correlatively, all were greeted in orthodox circles with suspicion and, in some cases, with hostility. Most were in one way or another suppressed either by Hume or by his publishers for fear of reprimand from the religious community. Thus, "Of Miracles," written prior to 1739 and originally intended for inclusion in the Treatise, was deleted from the text prior to publication, because Hume judged that it might be found scandalous and thus detract from the reception of his work. Similarly, "Of Suicide," "Of the Immortality of the Soul," and an early version of Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were all scheduled for publication in 1756, but they were suppressed by Hume's publisher for prudential reasons. All three were published only after Hume's death and even then without the author's or publisher's name attached. It should be recalled that in 1745 Hume's appointment at the University of Edinburgh had been opposed because his writings were judged wanting on religious grounds. Eighteenth-century Britain could be hard on religious dissenters; neither Hume nor his publishers sought to cause offense.

Although Hume is best known for his views in epistemology and moral philosophy, the essay "Of Miracles" and the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion are generally regarded by contemporary philosophers as classics in the philosophy of religion. "Of Miracles" is centered on the question of whether evidence supporting the claim that a given miracle occurred could ever be strong enough to warrant belief, given the facts that (1) a miracle is by definition an event whose occurrence violates natural law, and (2) the evidence supporting the claim is derived entirely from human testimony. Hume's negative verdict is based on a general historiographical principle that is applicable not only in the study of religion, but in any area of inquiry that relies on human testimony as a major source of evidence: namely, that the credibility of any given piece of testimony is in part a function of the plausibility of what is affirmed within it.

Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is focused on a very special version of the argument from design used by a number of eighteenth-century devotees of Isaac Newton's theological writings. In the course of the discussion, Hume not only delivers what many believe to be the definitive refutation of the argument from design (even anticipating the nineteenth-century Darwinian account of adaptation in nature), but he also presents a series of sharply penetrating critical studies on a wide variety of other important theological topics such as divine attribution, the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and, especially, the problem of evil. It should be added that, apart from its stunning philosophical merits, Hume's Dialogues can also be credited with what is perhaps the most beautifully executed employment of the dialogue form in Western philosophical literature.

Bibliography

Works by Hume

Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. In Essential Works, edited by Ralph Cohn; a reprint of the original 1779 edition. There are modern editions by Norman Kemp Smith (Oxford, 1935), Henry Aiken (New York, 1948), and myself (Indianapolis, 1970).

History of Great Britain from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. 6 vols. The most recent edition is by R. Worthington (New York, 1880).

Hume on Religion. Edited by Richard Wollheim. New York, 1963. This text includes all seven of Hume's works on religion and the autobiographical essay "My Own Life."

Hume's Enquiries (1894). Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. 3d ed. Oxford, 1975. Contains both An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. There is also a modern edition of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding with Hume's autobiographical essay, "My Own Life," and a letter from Adam Smith concerning Hume's death (La Salle, Ill., 1956).

Hume's Philosophical Works. 4 vols. Edited by Thomas H. Green and Thomas S. Grose. London, 1874–1875. Contains all of Hume's philosophical works except the "Abstract."

A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford, 1888. Book 1, "Of the Understanding," has been published more recently in a volume that includes the appendix to the Treatise and the "Abstract," edited by D. G. C. MacNabb (London, 1962).

Works about Hume

Ernest C. Mossner's The Life of David Hume (New York, 1954) is the best available biography. It is a rich and abundant account. Norman Kemp Smith's The Philosophy of David Hume (London, 1941) is a well-worked-out analysis of Hume's ethical and epistemological theories. Barry Stroud's Hume, a thoughtful and patient work with a useful bibliography, covers much the same ground (London, 1977). See also A. J. Ayer's Hume (New York, 1980). The various editions of Hume's Dialogues by Kemp Smith, Aiken, and myself all contain commentaries on the text. Kemp Smith's is thought by some to be definitive. My own is more detailed (110 pages) and also contains a bibliography. See also Richard Wollheim's introduction to Hume on Religion. Wollheim comments briefly but broadly on Hume's writings on religious topics.

Nelson Pike (1987)