David Hume (born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711,Edinburgh, Scotland—died August 25, 1776, Edinburgh) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist known especially for his philosophicalempiricism andskepticism.

Humeconceived ofphilosophy as the inductive, experimentalscience of human nature. Taking thescientific method of the English physicist SirIsaac Newton as his model and building on theepistemology of the English philosopherJohn Locke, Hume tried to describe how themind works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. Despite the enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume seems to have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.

Early life and works

Hume was the younger son ofJoseph Hume, the modestly circumstanced laird, or lord, of Ninewells, a small estate adjoining the village of Chirnside, about nine miles distant from Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish side of the border. David’s mother, Catherine, a daughter of Sir David Falconer, president of the Scottish court of session, was in Edinburgh when he was born. In his third year his father died. He entered Edinburgh University when he was about 12 years old and left it at 14 or 15, as was then usual. Pressed a little later to studylaw (in the family tradition on both sides), he found it distasteful and instead read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the intensity and excitement of hisintellectual discovery, he had a nervous breakdown in 1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.

In 1734, after trying his hand in a merchant’s office inBristol, he came to the turning point of his life and retired to France for three years. Most of this time he spent at La Flèche on the Loire, in the old Anjou, studying and writingA Treatise of Human Nature. TheTreatise was Hume’s attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical system. It is divided into three books: Book I, “Of the Understanding,” discusses, in order, the origin of ideas; the ideas ofspace andtime; knowledge and probability, including the nature ofcausality; and the skepticalimplications of those theories. Book II, “Of the Passions,” describes an elaborate psychological machinery to explain the affective, oremotional, order in humans and assigns a subordinate role toreason in this mechanism. Book III, onmorals, characterizesmoral goodness in terms of “feelings” of approval or disapproval that people have when they considerhuman behaviour in the light of agreeable or disagreeable consequences, either to themselves or to others.

Although theTreatise is Hume’s most thorough exposition of his thought, at the end of his life he vehementlyrepudiated it as juvenile, avowing that only his later writings presented his considered views. TheTreatise is not well constructed, in parts oversubtle, confusing because ofambiguity in important terms (especially “reason”), and marred by willful extravagance of statement and rather theatrical personal avowals. For those reasons his mature condemnation of it was perhaps not entirely misplaced. Book I, nevertheless, has been more read among academic philosophers than any other of his writings.

Britannica Quiz

Philosophy 101

Returning toEngland in 1737, he set about publishing theTreatise. Books I and II were published in two volumes in 1739; Book III appeared the following year. The poor reception of this, his first and very ambitious work, depressed him; he later said, in hisAutobiography, that “it felldead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” But his next venture,Essays, Moral and Political (1741–42), won some success. Perhaps encouraged by this, he became a candidate for the chair ofmoral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1744. Objectorsallegedheresy and evenatheism, pointing to theTreatise as evidence (Hume’sAutobiography notwithstanding, the work had not gone unnoticed). Unsuccessful, Hume left the city, where he had been living since 1740, and began a period of wandering: a sorry year near St. Albans as tutor to the mad marquess of Annandale (1745–46); a few months as secretary to Gen. James St. Clair (a member of a prominent Scottish family), with whom he saw military action during an abortive expedition to Brittany (1746); a little tarrying in London and at Ninewells; and then some further months with General St. Clair on an embassy to the courts ofVienna andTurin (1748–49).

Mature works

During his years of wandering Hume was earning the money that he needed to gain leisure for his studies. Some fruits of those studies had already appeared before the end of his travels, viz., a furtherThree Essays, Moral and Political (1748) andPhilosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748). The latter is a rewriting of Book I of theTreatise (with the addition of his essay “On Miracles,” which becamenotorious for its denial that amiracle can be proved by any amount or kind of evidence); it is better known asAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the title Hume gave to it in a revision of 1758. TheEnquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) was a rewriting of Book III of theTreatise. It was in those later works that Hume expressed his mature thought.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

AnEnquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an attempt to define the principles of humanknowledge. It poses in logical form significant questions about the nature of reasoning in regard to matters of fact and experience, and it answers them by recourse to the principle ofassociation. The basis of Hume’s exposition is a twofold classification of objects ofawareness. In the first place, all such objects are either “impressions,” data of sensation or of internalconsciousness, or “ideas,” derived from such data bycompounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing. That is to say, the mind does not create any ideas but derives them from impressions. From this Hume develops a theory of linguisticmeaning. A word that does not stand directly for an impression has meaning only if it brings before the mind an object that can be gathered from an impression by one of the mental processes just mentioned. In the second place, there are two approaches to construing meaning: ananalytical one, which concentrates on the “relations of ideas,” and anempirical one, which focuses on “matters of fact.” Ideas can be held before the mind simply as meanings, and their logical relations to one another can then be detected by rational inspection. Theidea of a plane triangle, for example, entails the equality of its internal angles to two right angles, and the idea ofmotion entails the ideas of space and time, irrespective of whether there really are such things as triangles and motion. Only on that level of mere meanings, Hume asserts, is there room fordemonstrative knowledge. Matters of fact, on the other hand, come before the mind merely as they are, revealing no logical relations; their properties and connections must be accepted as they are given. That primroses are yellow, that lead is heavy, and that fire burns things are facts, each shut up in itself, logically barren. Each, so far as reason is concerned, could be different: the contradictory of every matter of fact is conceivable. Therefore, there can be no logically demonstrative science of fact.

From this basis Hume develops his doctrine aboutcausality. The idea ofcausality is alleged to assert a “necessary connexion” among matters of fact. From what impression, then, is it derived? Hume states that no causal relation among the data of the senses can be observed, for, when people regard any events as causally connected, all that they do and can observe is that they frequently and uniformly go together. In this sort of togetherness it is a fact that the impression or idea of the one event brings with it the idea of the other. A habitual association is set up in the mind; and, as in other forms of habit, so in this one, the working of the association is felt as compulsion. Thisfeeling, Hume concludes, is the only discoverable impressional source of the idea of causality.