David Hume

David Hume was born on April 26, 1711, in Edinburgh, the second son of Joseph Home of Ninewells, an advocate, and Katherine Falconer, daughter of a president of the Court of Session. His father died when David was an infant, and his mother raised the children at Ninewells, the family estate near Chirnside in Berwickshire. The family name was spelled Home; David later changed the spelling to Hume so that English speakers would pronounce it correctly ^[1].

He entered the University of Edinburgh unusually young, around the age of ten or twelve, and studied the standard curriculum of Latin, Greek, logic, and natural philosophy. The family intended him for the law, a natural path given his father's profession, but Hume found legal study tedious. He later recalled that while his relatives imagined him reading law texts, he was secretly devouring Cicero and Virgil ^[1][2].

In his late teens Hume threw himself into an intense program of private reading and philosophical reflection. The strain told on his health: around 1729 he suffered what he described as a disorder of both body and mind, marked by low spirits and physical symptoms that a physician diagnosed in the fashionable terms of the day. To recover, he briefly tried a career in commerce, working as a clerk for a Bristol sugar merchant in 1734. The experiment lasted only months, but it confirmed that his vocation lay elsewhere ^[2].

Leaving Bristol, Hume moved to France, where living was cheap and he could write without distraction. He settled at La Fleche in Anjou, near the Jesuit college where Descartes had once studied, and there composed the bulk of A Treatise of Human Nature, his attempt to build a complete science of the mind on observation and experience ^[1][3].

The Treatise appeared in London in three volumes between 1739 and 1740, when its author was still in his twenties. Hume famously judged that it fell dead-born from the press, attracting little notice and less understanding. The verdict was too harsh, since the book drew some reviews, but the disappointment was real. Convinced that the fault lay in the manner rather than the matter, he began recasting his ideas in shorter, more polished forms ^[2][3].

His Essays, Moral and Political, published in 1741 and 1742, found the readership the Treatise had missed. Yet his growing reputation for religious skepticism carried a cost. In 1745 he was passed over for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh after clergy and town councillors objected to his views, and a similar bid at Glasgow failed in 1752. Instead he took a series of practical posts: tutor to the unstable Marquess of Annandale, secretary to General James St Clair on a military expedition and on embassies to Vienna and Turin ^[1][4].

During these years he rewrote the first book of the Treatise as the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748 and later retitled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The 1751 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals followed, a book Hume considered his best. In 1752 the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh elected him their librarian, a modest office that gave him command of a large library and the materials for his next great project ^[2][4].

Any account of David Hume achievements begins with his analysis of causation. Hume argued that when we say one event causes another, we never perceive a necessary connection between them. We observe only that events of one kind have regularly followed events of another kind, and custom leads the mind to expect the pattern to continue. Reason alone cannot justify this expectation, a difficulty now known as the problem of induction. The argument, set out in the Treatise and sharpened in the first Enquiry, remains a live problem in philosophy ^[3][5].

Hume extended his empiricism into morals, arguing that moral judgments spring from sentiment rather than reason, and that reason is, in his provocative phrase from the Treatise, the slave of the passions. He grounded ethics in human feelings of approval and sympathy, an approach that shaped later utilitarian and sentimentalist traditions. His essay Of Miracles, included in the first Enquiry, contended that testimony can never establish a miracle, since the uniform experience supporting the laws of nature will always outweigh the reports of witnesses. The essay provoked replies for decades ^[1][5].

Hume was also a formidable economist. His Political Discourses of 1752 examined money, interest, trade, and public credit, and articulated the price-specie-flow mechanism, the argument that trade surpluses raise domestic prices and thereby correct themselves, making mercantilist hoarding of gold self-defeating. Adam Smith, his close friend, absorbed and extended these arguments in The Wealth of Nations ^[4][6].

Between 1754 and 1762 Hume published The History of England in six volumes, running from Julius Caesar's invasion to the revolution of 1688. The History was the work that made him wealthy and famous in his lifetime, going through many editions and remaining the standard account of English history for decades. Contemporaries who knew nothing of the Treatise knew Hume the historian ^[1][2].

Hume never married and had no children. Stout, sociable, and even-tempered, he was known to friends as le bon David, a nickname he acquired in Paris, where his good humor charmed the salons. He described himself in his brief autobiography as a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, and those who knew him largely agreed ^[2][7].

His religious skepticism made him a controversial figure at home. In the mid 1750s some members of the Church of Scotland's General Assembly moved to have him formally censured for infidelity, but moderate clergy, several of them his friends, blocked the effort. Hume prudently withheld his most dangerous manuscript, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, arranging for it to appear only after his death ^[1][5].

From 1763 to 1765 he served as secretary to the British embassy in Paris under Lord Hertford, where he was feted by philosophes and aristocratic hostesses alike. He returned to Britain in 1766 accompanied by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he had offered refuge. The friendship collapsed within months when Rousseau, gripped by suspicion, publicly accused Hume of plotting against him. The quarrel became a European scandal, and Hume, stung, published an account of the affair in self-defense ^[1][7].

After a spell in London as an under-secretary of state for the Northern Department from 1767 to 1768, Hume retired to Edinburgh in 1769 with a comfortable income from his books and his posts. He built a house in the developing New Town, on a street that Edinburgh wits, and eventually the city itself, called St David Street in his honor ^[2][7].

His final years were spent revising his works, dining with the literati of the Scottish Enlightenment, and enjoying a settled domestic routine with his sister Katherine. In the spring of 1775 he was struck by an internal disorder, most likely a cancer of the bowel, that he recognized as fatal. He faced the prospect with a calm that fascinated observers. James Boswell visited the dying philosopher hoping to find him wavering about the afterlife, and recorded with unease that Hume remained cheerfully unpersuaded of any existence beyond death ^[7][8].

In April 1776 he composed My Own Life, a short and disarmingly candid autobiography, and settled his affairs, entrusting the Dialogues to his nephew after Adam Smith declined the responsibility of publishing them. Hume died in Edinburgh on August 25, 1776, and was buried on Calton Hill. Smith's published letter describing his friend's serene death angered the devout more, Smith said, than anything he had written about commerce ^[1][8].

Hume's philosophical reputation grew steadily after his death and now stands higher than it ever did in his lifetime. Immanuel Kant wrote that Hume interrupted his dogmatic slumber, and the critical philosophy Kant built in response defined the next era of European thought. In the twentieth century, logical positivists and analytic philosophers claimed Hume as an ancestor, and his treatments of induction, causation, personal identity, and the distinction between facts and values remain starting points for current work ^[3][5].

The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, is widely regarded as the most searching critique of the argument from design ever written, and his essay on miracles still anchors debates in philosophy of religion. In economics, his monetary essays are studied as early statements of ideas later formalized in international trade theory ^[4][6].

Hume's legacy has also come under scrutiny. A footnote he added to his essay Of National Characters asserted the inferiority of non-white peoples, and in 2020 the University of Edinburgh removed his name from a campus tower pending review, citing the passage. Scholars continue to weigh that footnote against the body of his thought. For readers seeking David Hume facts beyond the controversies, the essentials of any David Hume biography hold firm: a skeptic of genial temper who asked how much human beings can really know, and whose answers still set the terms of the question ^[5][9].