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David Hume
David Hume (1711–1776) was born in Edinburgh,
Scotland, on April 26, 1711. He was educated at
home in the Presbyterian parish of Chirnside, near
Berwick, and studied at the University of Edinburgh
from 1723 until 1726, without taking a degree.
Before leaving the university, he had projected
his Treatise of Human Nature, and between
the ages of fifteen and twenty-three he read widely
and methodically in philosophy and other
branches of learning, making the study of human
nature his principal concern and the source from
which he would draw all true conclusions in philosophy,
morality, and criticism. In 1734 Hume
went to France where he lived quietly for three
years composing his revolutionary systematic study
of human nature, which was published in three
volumes in London from 1739 to 1740. The first
volume concerns the understanding, the second
the passions, and the third morality.
Finding that the work “fell dead-born from the
press without reaching such distinction, as even to
excite a murmur among the zealots,” Hume
penned a review of his own work, which he had
anonymously published as a pamphlet: An Abstract
of a Book lately Published, Entitled, A Treatise
of Human Nature, &c. Wherein The Chief Argument
of that Book is farther Illustrated and
Explained (1740). This remarkable pamphlet is still
the best brief guide to the central arguments and
conclusions of Hume’s theoretical philosophy, so it
is unfortunate that a copy of it did not come to
light until 1933. Though Hume’s Treatise was a
commercial failure during his lifetime, it is now almost
universally regarded as one of the greatest
works of systematic philosophy in the English language.
However, because he was so disappointed
with its reception and was inclined to blame himself
for this fact, he recast the first volume into An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1748), and the third volume into An Enquiry Concerning
the Principles of Morals (1758), both of
which have become philosophical classics.
The Treatise is firmly within the empiricist tradition
of John Locke (1632–1704). No ideas are innate:
all are derived, either directly or indirectly,
from outer or inner experience. Experience is also
the arbiter of all belief. Hume may be regarded as
advancing a sophisticated Lockean viewpoint that
has benefited greatly from the acute criticisms of
Locke made by George Berkeley (1685–1753) and
others. The universally accepted maxim that “every
event has a cause” has no basis in reason. Nor
does the ubiquitous assumption that what has happened
in the past will happen in the future have
any basis in reason. The problem of induction is
emphasized and shown to be insoluble by reason
alone. The faculty of reason is demoted from its
historical hegemony at the same time as the nonrational
faculty of imagination is promoted. The
imagination, however, does not associate or connect
ideas at random. It operates according to principles
and associates resembling ideas, or ideas of
objects that are contiguous in space and time or
that are causally related: “Here is a kind of attraction,
which in the mental world will be found to
have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and
show itself in as many and as various forms.” Reason
gives way to instinct, custom, and habit. The
three types of association “are the only ties of our
thoughts,” so “they are really to us the cement of
the universe.” Many items that reason allegedly discerns
are reduced to projections or expressions of
human nature. In the Abstract, Hume unequivocally
describes his system as “very sceptical”: “Philosophy
would render us entirely Pyrrhonian,
were not nature too strong for it.” His considered
position is that of a moderate or mitigated scepticism,
or one whose otherwise extreme conclusions
have been somewhat “corrected” by common
sense. This is the Hume who woke Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) from his “dogmatic slumber.”
Philosophy of religion
From an early age Hume was preoccupied with religion
and science. Before he was twenty, he set
down in a notebook “the gradual progress” of his
thoughts on theism: “It begun with an anxious
search after arguments to confirm the common
opinion: Doubts stole in, dissipated, return’d, were
again dissipated, return’d again; and it was a perpetual
struggle of a restless imagination against inclination,
perhaps against reason.” It therefore is
unsurprising that the Treatise as originally written
contained several antireligious sections and remarks
that Hume prudently removed before publication.
In 1737 he told a friend that he was “castrating”
his manuscript, or “cutting off its nobler
parts” so that it would “give as little offence as possible.”
He deleted an essay on miracles and probably
also one on the immortality of the soul. But
notwithstanding these precautions, the very first
notice of the work warned readers of its “evil intentions,”
evident from the book’s motto alone:
“Seldom are men blessed with times in which they
may think what they like, and say what they think”.
Hume must have realized that a discerning
reader of the Treatise would have detected echoes
of principles and doctrines prominent in the works
of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Anthony Collins
(1676–1729), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Baruch
Spinoza (1632–1677), and other “free thinkers.” He
therefore should not have been surprised when, in
1745, he applied for a chair in philosophy at the
University of Edinburgh, and the local clergy defeated
his candidacy by charging him with advocating
“universal scepticism” and “downright atheism.”
They also accused him of “denying the
immortality of the soul” and of “sapping the foundations
of morality, by denying the natural and essential
difference between right and wrong, good
and evil, justice and injustice; making the difference
only artificial, and to arise from human conventions
and compacts.” Hume defended himself
against these misunderstandings and misrepresentations,
but thereafter his writings became increasingly
antireligious.
In 1748 Hume published his essay on miracles,
in which he argued that there is no reason to believe
that any miracle has ever occurred. His argument
was attacked by many contemporaries, including
William Adams, John Douglas, Richard
Price, and George Campbell, whose criticisms are
still worth reading. In the same collection Hume
devoted an essay to arguing that there is no reason
to believe in a particular providence or a future
state. This attack on the argument from design was
elaborated in Hume’s posthumously published Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which
is modelled upon Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.
The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) regarded
the Dialogues as “the most profound, the
most ingenious, and the best written of Hume’s
philosophic works.” It remains the classic discussion
of the argument from design (or argument a
posteriori), and some regard it as the most important
work in the philosophy of religion in English.
Had William Paley (1743–1805) carefully studied it,
he might never have written Evidences of Christianity
(1794) or Natural Theology (1802). Along
the way Samuel Clarke’s (1675–1729) a priori argument
for the existence of God is refuted, and the
objections to theism from the existence of evil are
forcefully presented.
The Dialogues involves three disputants: the orthodox
rationalist theologian Demea, the “careless
sceptic” Philo, and the scientific theologian Cleanthes,
who frequently echoes Bishop Butler’s Analogy
of Religion (1736). Though the argument from
design is subjected to sustained criticism, and the
attentive reader may be convinced that the canons
of scientific reasoning do not issue in theism, at the
end Cleanthes seems to emerge as the winner, leading
some mistakenly to conclude that Cleanthes
speaks for Hume himself. But the Dialogues were
so “artfully written” that Philo the sceptic only appears
to be “silenced.” In a private letter Hume said
that he objected “to everything we commonly call
religion, except the Practice of Morality, and the
Assent of the Understanding to the Proposition that
God exists.” But in the Dialogues the concept of
God is virtually evacuated of all meaning, so such
“assent” amounts to little or nothing. Hume’s friend
Dr. Hugh Blair, who advised against publishing the
Dialogues during Hume’s lifetime, remarked that
they are “exceedingly elegant” and “bring together
some of his most exceptional reasonings, but the
principles themselves were in all his former works.”
Most scholars now hold that Philo represents Hume
himself. Hume denied that he was an atheist or a
deist, so he is perhaps best viewed as a not-so-careless
sceptic.
In the Treatise Hume argued that morality is
not founded on reason, but on passion. Reason
alone cannot motivate people to act, and one cannot
logically derive statements about what one
“ought” to do from statements about what “is” the
case. One’s sense of justice rests upon self-interest,
limited generosity, utility, human conventions, and
sympathy or fellow-feeling with the sentiments of
others. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) said that the
scales fell from his eyes when he read this part of
Hume’s work. Though utility enters into his explanation
of the evolution of morality, Hume himself
was not a utilitarian. But he was one of the first to
insist upon the autonomy of morality, and especially
its independence from religious belief. In the
Natural History of Religion (1757) he inquired into
the causes of religion and speculated as to how
monotheism had evolved from primitive polytheism,
while emphasizing the absurd doctrines and
immoral consequences of most world religions.
His critics argued that, though his temperament
enabled him to be just without being religious,
most people require the sanctions of religion in
order to be just.
Anonymous writings
Hume counted several of the more liberal Church
of Scotland ministers as friends but resented those
evangelical ministers who had lobbied against his
appointment to a professorship at Edinburgh and
Glasgow and who, in the mid-1750s, had unsuccessfully
tried to have the Church of Scotland excommunicate
him. He carefully cultivated the character
of a “virtuous infidel” by encouraging the
literary projects of his clerical friends (and potential
literary rivals) such as Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson,
and Robert Wallace; and by anonymously publishing
favourable reviews of William Robertson’s History
of Scotland, William Wilkie’s epic poem the
Epigoniad, and Robert Henry’s History of Great
Britain, as well as of Adam Smith’s Theory of
Moral Sentiments. The extent of Hume’s clandestine
literary activity has yet to be determined.
In “My Own Life” (1777), Hume asserted that
he was “a man of mild dispositions, of command
of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour,
capable of attachment, but little susceptible
of enmity.” Adam Smith (1723–1790) testified that
his “constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion
of good nature and good humour … without even
the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the
disagreeable source of what is called wit in other
men.” Nevertheless, under cover of anonymity,
Hume composed several satires against the clergy
and corrupt politicians. “The Bellman’s Petition”
(1751) is directed against an increase in the
stipends of ministers of the Church of Scotland.
The far more ambitious, lengthy, and scathing Sister
Peg (1760) is directed against politicians who
had defeated his friends’ struggle to reestablish a
militia in Scotland. An anonymous satire from 1758
is directed against the commonly felt “antipathy to
the corn merchant” during times of famine and “affection
for the Parson” who at such times inveighed
against the supposedly greedy corn merchants.
In it Hume argued that these popular
sentiments were based upon ignorance, superstition,
and bad reasoning; good reasoning should direct
one’s passions in the opposite direction, so
that one should instead feel affection for the useful
corn merchants and antipathy for the useless parsons
who “cram us with Nonsense, instead of feeding
us with Truth.” In these works Hume appears
to have revenged himself against those who had
previously opposed him.
Political history
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hume
was best known as an historian. His multivolume
History of England is not only a narrative history
but is a philosophical study of the English constitution
in which he never misses an opportunity to
satirize the folly and hypocrisy of self-interested
politicians and clergymen. His historical research
was informed by his political and economic theories,
which were less conservative than many have
assumed. Believing that the first duty of a historian
is to be accurate and impartial, while the next is
the be instructive and entertaining, he succeeded
so well in fulfilling these obligations that his history
is still read, while those of most of his contemporaries
have sunk into oblivion. Though born a
Scotsman, Hume always strove to write an elegant
and correct English and to surpass the best English
stylists. Occasionally some vanity is evident in his
writings, which gives them a conversational tone
and an engaging character. Hume believed that
good writing “consists of sentiments, which are
natural, without being obvious.” He repeatedly revised
his works in order to perfect them. His views
in philosophy, politics, economics, theology, history,
and criticism were generally original and unobvious
and so artfully expressed as to disguise his
artfulness.
Hume died on August 25, 1776, and was
buried in Calton Hill cemetery, overlooking Edinburgh.
At his internment someone was overheard
to say: “Ah, he was an atheist.” To which another
answered: “No matter, he was an honest man.”
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