The British philosopher David Hume was born at Edinburgh in 1711. His father, a lawyer and landowner, died two years later. Hume and an older brother and sister were then raised by their mother, an ardent Calvinist to whom David, who would earn a reputation as Britain's most notorious infidel, was nevertheless devoted. He never married, which might be attributed to his philosophical pursuits or, alternatively, to his appearance: according to a contemporary,
Wisdom never disguised herself in so uncouth a garb. . . . His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility . . . . [T]he corpulence of his whole person, was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman, than of a refined philosopher.
When he was eleven, he and his brother were sent to the University of Edinburgh--this was not as unusual then as it now seems--to study Greek, logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy (now known as physics), ethics, and mathematics. He left after three years and without taking a degree, which also was common. His own summary of the formal part of his education was that he "passed through the ordinary Course of Education with Success."
He returned home and devoured works of philosophy while his family thought he was studying to be a lawyer. In 1734 he moved to Bristol, where he worked as a clerk--the story of the money-earning part of Hume's younger adulthood is that of an undervalued, freelance intellectual: clerk, tutor, military adjutant, etc. He also had 50 pounds per year from his father's estate. (To get an idea of how much this was worth, Dr Johnson's pension, awarded by the Crown in 1762, was 300 pounds annually; without making him wealthy, he was freed of the necessity of earning a living.) Hume soon moved to France, probably to live more cheaply, and for three years made steady progress on his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature, which was published in 1737, when he was 26. Though it did not make much of an impression upon its first readers--Hume's famous judgment was that it "fell dead-born from the press"--the book is now generally regarded as one of the great contributions to Western philosophy. It is not a work that the general reader will generally enjoy, for the same reason that contemporary reviewers described it as "abstract" and "unintelligible."
What is the subject matter of Hume's Treatise? The parts that I find most intelligible seem to me to anticipate, say, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker's popularizing treatment of a main branch of modern psychology. Why do we believe as we do? Why do we make of external phenomena what we make of them, and are there good reasons to suppose that our impressions are a match for the way things really are? It seems significant to me that Pinker understands the human mind, its strengths and foibles and proclivities, by assuming that it has evolved more or less according to Darwin's rules, and that Hume, writing more than a hundred years before Darwin, frequently buttresses his argument about "human nature" by referring to what can be oberved in other animals. He had a genius, one commentator has said, "for turning questions of metaphysics into questions of psychology."
It was in the realm of religion that Hume's outlook made him notorious to his fellows and, in our time, a philosopher of interest to nonacademics. The central document is probably the essay "On Miracles," which was first conceived as a section within the Treatise before Hume omitted it on the ground that it was "too strong." It appeared as part of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume's effort to express the ideas of his Treatise with more elegance and ease. His argument against miracles is that, faced with fantastic reports of angels and healings and resurrections, the auditor should attempt to determine whether it is more likely that the miracle occurred or that the report of it is false. And it is always more likely that the report is false. Here is a flavor of the argument (and of Hume's prose style):
With what Greediness are the miraculous Accounts of Travellers receiv'd, their descriptions of Sea and Land-Monsters, their Relations of wonderful Adventures, strange Men, and uncouth Manners? But if the Spirit of Religion join itself to the Love of Wonder, there is an End of common Sense; and human Testimony, in these Circumstances, loses all Pretensions to Authority. A Religionist may be an Enthusiast, and imagine that he sees what has no Reality: He may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best Intentions in the World, for the sake of promoting so holy a Cause: Or even where this Delusion has no Place, Vanity, excited by so strong a Temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of Mankind in any other Circumstances; and Self-Interest with equal Force. His Auditors may not have, and commonly have not sufficient Judgment to canvass his Evidence: What Judgment they have, they renounce by Principle, in these sublime and mysterious Subjects: Or if they were ever so willing to employ it, Passion and a heated Imagination disturb the Regularity of its Operations. Their credulity increases his Impudence: And his Impudence over-powers their Credulity.
[Snip]
It is strange, a judicious Reader is apt to say, upon the Perusal of these wonderful Historians, that such prodigious Events never happen in our Days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that Men should lye in all Ages.
Hume in his maturity sought academic posts for which he was turned away on account of his "atheism," and it seems to have had the effect of making him more reserved, less pugnacious, though he always maintained a cheerful urbanity. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was not published during his lifetime, and, while it pretty well demolishes the argument from design for God's existence, the dialogue form makes it possible for Hume to stand to the side of his disputants. The essays "Of the Immortality of the Soul" ("All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions") and "Of Suicide" (proscriptions dismissed as cruel and implausible, especially when one considers the condition of the only people apt to seek its refuge) were likewise withheld during his life. He did publish, in 1757, as part of Four Dissertations, "The Natural History of Religion," which identifies the emotions, including preeminently fear of life's uncertainties and the consequent desire to control the future, as the impetus for religious faith.
It should not go unremarked that Hume in his lifetime was perhaps more well known, and certainly more highly regarded, for his six-volume History of England than for his philosophical works. Voltaire called Hume's History "perhaps the best ever written in any language," and A.J. Ayer, in his Past Masters volume on Hume, declares that it "remains very well worth reading, if only for its wit and the beauty of Hume's style."
In 1763, Hume took a post at the British embassy in Paris, and discovered that in France he was the object of an almost mystical cult of adulation--a stark contrast to what he was used to in his own country, where his writings had been an obstacle to employment. Nevertheless, he returned to Edinburgh in 1766 and spent his last years enjoying dinner parties and whist with his circle of friends. He got fat, ignored the many public attacks on his philosophy, and revised several of the works that were destined for posthumous publication. In 1775 he was afflicted with an illness, probably cancer. In April of the following year he wrote "My Own Life," a five-page autobiography in which his last illness receives the following notice: "[I was] struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no Alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable." Professor George Sherburn, an authority on 18th-century English literature, remarked that "the calm cheerfulness of his demise . . . greatly annoyed the orthodox." Hume died on 25 August 1776. In an obituary, his friend Adam Smith, fellow Scot and the author of The Wealth of Nations, said: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life-time, and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit." In the aforementioned "My Own Life," Hume described himself as "a man of mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper, of an open, social, and cheeful Humour, capable of Attachment, but little susceptible of Enmity, and of great Moderation in all my passions."