BIOGRAPHY

David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1711. His father, a lawyer, died before David was two years old. He was raised by his mother, a deeply religious woman, on a pleasant, but modest, family estate at Ninewells, near Berwick in southern Scotland. Young David was very religious as a boy, often making lists of his sins so that he could seek forgiveness. But shortly after beginning his studies at the University of Edinburgh, at age twelve, he seems to have lost his faith.

Although the family was not poor, there was not enough wealth to provide a comfortable life of study for David, the youngest child. His family decided, therefore, that Hume should follow his father into law. This was not to be, however, for as Hume later wrote, "I found an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuit of philosophy and general learning."

In 1729, when he was only eighteen, Hume had a breakthrough, discovering what he called "a new Science of Thought." He gave up all pretense of becoming a lawyer and applied his energies to his new insight. To conserve his limited finances, he moved to a small town in France, La Flèche, where Descartes had studied. There he completed his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature, Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, published in 1739 and 1740. Hume hoped this work would give him his "love of literary fame"--while putting him in a more comfortable financial situation. But, as he later said, the work "fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots."

For the next thirteen years, Hume held a variety of positions, including tutor to a mad marquess and secretary to a general. During this time, Hume wrote and published his Essays, Moral and Political (1741-1742). The success of this work led him to rewrite Book I of his earlier Treatise, this time titled as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). He added chapters on miracles, free will, and the argument from design, which he had left out of the earlier work, and he omitted many of his psychological speculations. This book enjoyed some success, though its antireligious nature may have contributed to Hume's rejected applications for two different chairs of philosophy. In 1751, he also recast Book III of the earlier Treatise, under the title Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

Edinburgh from Princes Street Garden. The spires on the left belong to New College, University of Edinburgh.

Hume was appointed Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh in 1752. In this post, he wrote a multivolume history of England. He also managed to infuriate the library curators with his selections, and in 1757 he was forced to resign when he refused to remove books the curators considered obscene. In the same year, he published Four Dissertations, including "The Natural History of Religion," "Of the Passions" (a truncated version of Book II of the Treatise), "Of Tragedy," and "Of the Standard of Taste." By now Hume's works had become well known on the Continent, and when he returned to France in 1763 as part of the British ambassador's staff, he was lionized by French intellectual society. Hume was a favorite at French soirées: Sociable and witty, he was called "le bon David" by his French friends.

When Hume returned to England in 1766, he found that his works had finally brought him the literary fame at home that he had so long desired. In 1767, he took another government post, but two years later he resigned and retired to Edinburgh. There he spent his last years quietly, until his death, probably from cancer, in 1776. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the 1750s, was published posthumously in 1779.

BASIC THOUGHT

Hume's philosophy, as developed in the Enquiry, begins with a rejection of the "abstruse speculations" and "superstitions" of contemporary thought. With Locke, Hume agrees that there are no such things as innate ideas; all knowledge comes through sensory experience. Yet as he worked out the implications of these convictions, he came to conclusions quite different from those of his predecessor.

According to Hume, all the perceptions of the mind may be divided into "impressions" and "ideas." Using an empirical distinction, Hume believes impressions to be "more lively" than ideas. These impressions and ideas are then divided into simple and complex, impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection, and so on. The source of impressions cannot be known empirically, so Hume does not address this question. Simple ideas, on the other hand, must come from impressions. In fact, for an idea to have any meaning whatever, it must be derived from an impression or from a combination of impressions. If I have the idea of a gold mountain, for instance, it is because I have previously had impressions that gave rise to the ideas of "gold" and "mountain" that I am now associating. Using this empirical criterion of meaning, it becomes clear that ideas such as "substance," "God," or even "the self" are without a clear meaning. So according to Hume, Locke's idea of an eternal world of "substances" and Berkeley's idea of an all-perceiving God are without meaning.

Hume then considers the association between ideas and argues that there are "only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect." These associations of ideas are really nothing more than habit or "custom" and so do not necessarily reflect the "real world." Take causality, for example. One could imagine Pavlov's dogs hearing the bell, getting the food, hearing the bell, getting the food, hearing the bell ... and after a period of time concluding, "bells cause food." But there is obviously no necessary relation between cause and effect in this case. There is no logical reason why the bell might not sound and yet no food appear. Hume argues that all supposed instances of cause and effect are of this kind. We get so used to seeing two events joined that we conclude that one caused the other. Thus, according to Hume, Locke's claim that the "external world" causes sensations and the Thomistic First-Cause argument for God's existence are without empirical foundation. It also means that the "laws of nature" are founded only on past experience and that we have no a priori evidence that tomorrow will be the same as today.

The remainder of the Enquiry develops the implications of Hume's radical empiricism and deals with the skepticism arising from it. He acknowledges that his own practice does not always reflect his philosophical position. Hume recognizes that despite his causal skepticism, it would not be wise to "throw himself out at the window." As he wrote early on in this work, we must "be modest in our pretensions; and even to discover the difficulty ourselves before it is objected to us. By this means, we may make a kind of merit of our very ignorance."

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion applies the insights of the Enquiry to the question of God. Since there is no necessary relationship between cause and effect, we cannot argue with certainty from an effect, such as apparent design in nature, back to a cause, such as God the Designer. Further, deductions we might make about God from design would make God finite and imperfect because that is how the world is. Finally, Hume argues that even if we allow an analogy between the world and God, it would not necessarily mean a monotheistic God who wills, thinks, and so on. The world might be the result of a cosmic spider or even of divine "animal birth and copulation." Hume's point is that such discussions are ultimately meaningless, given our inability to know anything beyond impressions and ideas.

Philosophers differ in their appraisals of Hume's two greatest works, the Treatise and its reworking, the Enquiry. Many consider the Enquiry more mature; others think the Treatise more brilliant. Hume himself said that the Enquiry, not the Treatise, contained his "philosophical sentiments and principles."