🎱 Module 2 — The Life and World of David Hume | Hume Course

Jul 30
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Module 2 — The Life and World of David Hume

In a French village near a Jesuit college, a young man of twenty-six spent his days scribbling at a book he believed would remake the whole of human knowledge. He had no university post, no patron, no reputation, and no real prospects. He had already pushed himself so hard, a few years earlier, that his mind nearly broke under the strain. And the book taking shape in that quiet countryside, A Treatise of Human Nature, would in time become one of the most important works of philosophy ever written. It would simply take the world about forty years to notice.

That young man was David Hume, and the gap between the size of his ambition and the silence that first met it runs straight through his whole life. He wanted fame in his own time and got it, though for the wrong books. He wanted to change how people think and did, though mostly after he was gone. To follow the ideas in this course, it helps to know the man who paid for them in advance: cheerful, stubborn, scandalous to his neighbors, and, underneath the easy good humor, completely unwilling to flinch.

Edinburgh and the New Scene of Thought

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, into a respectable but far from wealthy family of the minor Scottish gentry. He was born David Home, and changed the spelling later so the English would stop mispronouncing it. His father died when Hume was barely two, and he was raised, with an older brother and sister, by his mother, Katherine, a capable and devout woman who ran the family's small estate at Ninewells in the Borders. The household was strict Presbyterian, the demanding Calvinism of the Scottish Kirk. The boy absorbed it early and shed it young, though he kept its moral seriousness for the rest of his life.

He entered the University of Edinburgh at around twelve, which was less startling then than it sounds now, and left a few years later without a degree, which was also ordinary. His family steered him toward the law, the respectable path on both sides of the family. Hume found it unbearable. By his own account he could not keep his eyes on a law book with a poet or a philosopher within reach. Something else had taken hold of him, and he could barely name it.

In his late teens, Hume later wrote, a new scene of thought opened up before him, and it seized him whole. He felt he could see a way to set the entire study of human nature on a fresh foundation, and he threw himself at it with a force his body could not bear. Around the age of eighteen he broke down, in what he described as a long nervous illness: racing thoughts, exhaustion, physical complaints the doctors of the day could not explain. He tried a few months in a merchant's office in Bristol to steady himself, and it did not take. What finally settled him was a decision to leave the country and write the thing out of his system.

La Flèche and the Treatise

In 1734 Hume crossed to France and eventually settled at La Flèche, a quiet town on the Loire best known for the Jesuit college where, a century earlier, René Descartes had been schooled. There was a quiet irony in the choice, since the book Hume was about to write would do much to dismantle the confident rationalism Descartes stood for. Living cheaply, far from anyone who might distract or discourage him, Hume spent roughly three years on A Treatise of Human Nature and finished it before he turned twenty-seven.

The Treatise is staggering in ambition. Its subtitle promised an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, which in plain terms meant studying the human mind the way a scientist studies nature, by observation rather than by armchair logic. Hume was convinced that if the workings of the mind could be mapped honestly, the rest of human knowledge might finally rest on firm ground. Books One and Two appeared in 1739, Book Three the year after.

Then came the disappointment Hume would never quite stop describing. In the short autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, he produced the most famous sentence ever written about a book's poor reception: the Treatise, he said, fell dead-born from the press. It is a marvelous line, mournful and self-mocking at once, and it is also not quite true. The book was reviewed, it was noticed, and it stirred enough unease among the pious that Hume felt obliged to publish an anonymous pamphlet in its defense. What wounded him was not total silence but the wrong kind of attention, and the failure of the work to make the splash its author knew it deserved. He decided, reasonably enough, that the fault lay less in the matter than in the manner, and that he had rushed to print too young.

The Castrated Treatise and the Atheist's Reputation

There is a telling detail in how the Treatise was made. Before publishing, Hume cut from the manuscript a section arguing against miracles, along with other passages he feared would offend religious readers. He described the act, with his usual black humor, as castrating his work so it would give as little offense as possible. It is worth pausing on what that reveals about his world. A young philosopher with a genuinely revolutionary book felt he had to surgically remove his boldest material simply to earn a hearing, and even then the suspicions trailed him for the rest of his days.

Those suspicions carried real costs. In the 1740s Hume twice tried for a university chair, first in moral philosophy at Edinburgh, then in logic at Glasgow. Both times he was blocked, and the charge was always the same: skeptic, infidel, very probably an atheist, a man unfit to shape young minds. The reputation was not wholly unfair, since Hume did doubt the religious certainties of his age, but it cost him dearly. One of the greatest philosophers in the history of the language was judged too dangerous to teach undergraduates, and he never held an academic post of any kind.

He earned his living instead in the improvised ways open to a clever man without a chair. He spent a wretched year as tutor to a young nobleman who turned out to be insane. He served as secretary to a general, joining a bungled military raid on the French coast and, later, a diplomatic mission to the courts of Vienna and Turin. In his thirties, one of the finest minds in Europe was taking whatever work he could find, still waiting for the world to catch up.

The Librarian Who Became a Bestseller

Hume's fortunes finally turned, and they turned on an unlikely hinge: a library job.

In 1752 he was made keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, then one of the great book collections in Britain. The salary was small, but the access was priceless, and it handed Hume the raw material for the project that would make his name. Over the next decade he wrote a sweeping, six-volume History of England, more than a million words, narrating the nation's past with a novelist's eye and a skeptic's refusal to flatter either side. It was an enormous success. For the better part of a century, readers across Europe knew Hume first and foremost as a historian, and the History brought him the financial independence he had chased since youth.

Comfortable at last, and increasingly celebrated, Hume spent the mid-1760s in Paris attached to the British embassy, and there he met a kind of adoration he had never known at home. The Paris salons took him up as a hero of the age. Its grand hostesses competed for his company, and the French, charmed by his warmth and unhurried good sense, christened him le bon David, the good David. He loved it, mostly, though he admitted in letters to missing the plain, blunt talk of his Edinburgh friends.

It was around this time that the strangest episode of his life unfolded. Hume befriended the brilliant, tormented Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then being hounded across Europe for his writings. With real generosity Hume helped Rousseau find refuge in England and worked to secure him a royal pension. A friend had warned that Rousseau tended to turn on those who helped him, and the warning proved exact. Sliding toward paranoia, Rousseau became convinced that Hume was the secret ringleader of a vast plot to disgrace him, and said so publicly. Hume, stung and anxious for his good name, made the very un-Humean decision to publish his side of the quarrel. The whole affair was painful and faintly absurd, a rupture between two of the century's greatest minds that read, in places, like a domestic melodrama.

The Major Works, Named and Placed

Hume's reputation now rests on a handful of works, written across his life and often revised. Named and placed, without yet opening what is inside them, they are these.

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739 to 1740). His first and most ambitious book, written in his twenties and largely overlooked at the time. Nearly all of his famous ideas appear here first, across its three books on the understanding, the passions, and morals. Hume later disowned it as a work of his youth, a verdict posterity has firmly overruled.
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748). A leaner, more graceful reworking of the Treatise's first book, written to win the readers the Treatise never found. His argument on miracles, cut from the original, finally reached print here.
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). A recasting of his moral philosophy, and the book Hume himself called, without hesitation, incomparably the best he ever wrote.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (from 1741). A growing collection of elegant essays on everything from commerce and government to art and love, including the economic writing that influenced his friend Adam Smith.
The History of England (1754 to 1762). The six-volume bestseller that made him famous and solvent, and the work most of his own century knew him by.
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (published 1779). His most daring book, a debate over the arguments for God, which he judged too explosive to release while alive and arranged to have published only after his death.

The Honest Record

Honesty is one of this series' core commitments, and it means telling the whole of a person, the parts that do not flatter included. Hume's record carries a real stain.

In a footnote he added to his essay Of National Characters, Hume wrote that he was apt to suspect black people, and indeed all non-white peoples, to be naturally inferior to whites. The remark is racist, and there is no softening it. It is ugly on its own terms, and views like it were used, then and after, to justify monstrous things. That a mind so devoted to questioning inherited assumptions failed so completely to question this one is a genuine and uncomfortable fact about him.

A few things are worth stating plainly alongside it, not to excuse the remark but to see it accurately. That footnote is, as far as the documentary record shows, very nearly the only place Hume committed such views to paper; it is not the cornerstone of a developed racial theory the way it would later become in some other thinkers. Such views were common, though not universal, among educated Europeans of his century, and some of his own contemporaries, including the writer James Beattie, attacked the footnote directly, which means Hume cannot be wholly excused as a man who could not have known better. There are also separate and contested claims about Hume's involvement in the business of slavery, which scholars continue to weigh and dispute.

The reckoning is not only historical. In 2020, after a student petition and amid the worldwide protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, the University of Edinburgh removed Hume's name from its tallest building, the David Hume Tower, and renamed it 40 George Square. The decision was, and remains, sharply debated. Some welcomed it as a refusal to honor racism without comment. Others, including eminent historians, called it an act of anachronism that judged an eighteenth-century man by twenty-first-century standards and shrank a vast intellectual legacy down to a single footnote. Both responses belong in the record as what they are: a live argument, not a closed verdict.

The approach this series takes is the one a fair reader would want. Hume's racism is neither hidden nor explained away, and it is also not used to wave off the philosophy, which stands or falls on its own arguments. A thinker can be brilliant and wrong, generous and blinkered, in the same lifetime. Holding both in view at once is not a betrayal of honesty. It is what honesty actually looks like.

A Philosopher's Death

Hume's life ended much as it had been lived, which is to say with disconcerting good cheer.

In his final years he was struck by a wasting illness of the bowels, almost certainly cancer, and he met it with a calm that unsettled nearly everyone who saw it. The age expected a famous unbeliever to grow frightened at the end, to reach for the comforts of religion as the dark came on. Hume did no such thing. He kept revising his books, dined with his friends, played cards, and joked about his approaching death with a lightness that struck some as heroic and others as outrageous.

The diarist James Boswell, fascinated and a little appalled, called on the dying Hume expressly to see whether the composure was real. He found Hume serene, and was told plainly that the prospect of life after death was a most unreasonable fancy. Boswell left shaken, unable to square the peace of this cheerful infidel with everything he had been raised to expect. Hume, for his part, amused himself imagining a conversation with Charon, the ferryman of the classical underworld, begging a little more time to see the superstitions of the world begin to crumble, and picturing the boatman's gruff refusal.

When Hume died in 1776, his close friend the economist Adam Smith wrote a short public letter describing those last months, and it caused an uproar wildly out of proportion to its length. Smith had done nothing more provocative than tell the truth: that Hume had faced death with perfect cheerfulness, and had come as near to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as human frailty allows. To praise the serene death of a notorious skeptic, and to set him beside the dying Socrates, was more than the pious could stomach, and Smith later said the letter brought him ten times the abuse his economics ever had.

Hume left careful instructions for the work he had kept hidden. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, his dismantling of the arguments for God, were entrusted to family with a firm plan for their release, and in 1779, three years after his death, his young nephew saw them into print. For his tomb on Edinburgh's Calton Hill, Hume wanted no boast and no creed, only his name and his dates, leaving the rest, as he put it, to posterity. Posterity has been adding to it ever since.

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🎱 Module 2 — The Life and World of David Hume | Hume Course