David Hume (1711–1776)

An Unusually Early Student, and a Formative Crisis

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 as David Home (he adjusted the spelling to "Hume" in 1734, reportedly because "Home" was too easily mispronounced in England), into a family holding the Ninewells estate in Berwickshire. His father died when David was an infant, and he was raised by his mother alongside his siblings. He entered the University of Edinburgh remarkably young — possibly as young as ten, more likely around twelve, against a typical starting age of fourteen — and, after briefly considering law to satisfy family expectations, found himself gripped by what he described as an "insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning." He left without taking a degree, telling a friend that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books."

Around eighteen, he underwent what he later called a transformative intellectual experience — a "new Scene of Thought" whose precise content he never fully specified — followed by a genuine physical and psychological crisis during a period of intense, self-directed study: what his physician diagnosed as the "Disease of the Learned," involving scurvy-like symptoms, palpitations, and considerable personal distress, treated (by 18th-century medical standards) with tonics, activity, and a notably rich diet, after which Hume transformed physically from "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" into the famously stout figure of his later life. established

The Treatise: A Masterpiece That Failed on Arrival

Hume spent several years in France, largely at La Flèche in Anjou — reportedly making use of the substantial library of the Jesuit college there — writing A Treatise of Human Nature, completed at just 27 years old and published in 1739–40. It laid out, in essentially complete form, the philosophical positions for which Hume is remembered today: a rigorous empiricism distinguishing vivid "impressions" from fainter "ideas"; a devastating argument (the "problem of induction") that our reliance on inferring future patterns from past experience cannot itself be rationally justified, resting instead on natural habit rather than proof; an analysis of causation as a matter of observed "constant conjunction" between events rather than any directly perceivable necessary connection; the famous "is-ought" distinction, observing that moral conclusions cannot be validly derived from purely factual premises alone; and a "bundle theory" of personal identity, denying any single unified, continuous self beneath the flow of individual perceptions.

The book was, in Hume's own memorable words, stillborn — it "fell dead-born from the press," received by contemporary reviewers as "abstract and unintelligible" and generating negligible sales. Hume himself later dismissed it as a work of youthful overreach and spent much of his subsequent career producing more accessible restatements of its arguments (principally the Enquiries) that he hoped posterity would judge him by instead. The historical irony is a central and well-documented fact of his legacy: modern scholarship has reversed his own verdict, regarding the Treatise as containing his most philosophically important and distinctive work, ranking among the most significant texts in the Western philosophical canon. established

Chairs Denied Over Atheism

Hume's reputation for irreligion — deserved or not in its full extent — had direct, material professional consequences. In 1745 he was a candidate for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, but lost the position after local ministers petitioned against him specifically over perceived atheism. In 1751 or 1752, he was again passed over, this time for a philosophy chair at Glasgow — notably opposed even by his friend Adam Smith, who feared the public backlash Hume's candidacy risked provoking. By 1761, the Catholic Church had placed his entire body of work on its Index of Forbidden Books, and in the 1750s his friends worked behind the scenes to head off a formal ecclesiastical heresy trial within the Church of Scotland. established

What Did Hume Actually Believe About Religion?

Precisely characterising Hume's own religious position is a genuine matter of ongoing scholarly debate, and this article resists the temptation to flatten it into a simple "Hume was an atheist" headline. His published arguments were consistently and deliberately corrosive toward the rational foundations of organised religious belief — his critique of miracles, his dismantling of the argument from design in the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (which anticipates, in outline, aspects of Darwinian thinking about undirected order), and his 1757 essay tracing the origins of religious belief to psychological "dread of the unknown" rather than genuine revelation, all point in a strongly sceptical direction. Yet Hume was also notably careful, in public, never to declare outright atheism, and scholars differ on how to read this: some (such as Paul Russell) describe him as thoroughly sceptical without being confidently classifiable as a strict atheist, preferring the term "irreligion"; others (such as David O'Connor) argue for a "weakly deistic" final position, characterised more by Hume's own studied ambiguity than by a hidden, fully settled personal conviction either way. What is not seriously disputed is that his contemporaries widely suspected atheism, that this suspicion was the direct cause of his repeated exclusion from academic office, and that his own recorded deathbed conversation (notably with James Boswell, who visited him shortly before his death) shows him describing a belief in an afterlife as a "most unreasonable fancy." established that his views were widely perceived, and treated institutionally, as irreligious/atheistic; disputed as to the most precise modern philosophical characterisation of his actual personal position.

The History of England: His Actual Bestseller

While Hume's philosophy struggled for a mainstream audience during his lifetime, his six-volume History of England (1754–1762), researched and written while he served as Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, became a genuine bestseller and remained the standard popular reference history of England for well over half a century afterward. Hume himself, somewhat wryly, identified "love of literary fame" as his own "ruling passion" in his brief autobiography, "My Own Life," written in the final year of his life. established

Paris, Rousseau, and a Very Public Falling-Out

Hume's years as secretary at the British embassy in Paris (1763–1765) saw him lionised among French Enlightenment intellectuals, who affectionately nicknamed him "le bon David." This period also produced one of the more colourful episodes of his later life: in 1766, Hume helped arrange refuge in England for the persecuted philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, only for the relationship to collapse dramatically amid Rousseau's escalating paranoid accusations against him — a public dispute serious enough that Hume felt compelled to publish his own written account defending his conduct. established

Race, Slavery, and a Legacy That Cannot Be Cleanly Separated From His Philosophy

This is the part of Hume's story that a "great Scots" retrospective too easily skips past, and this article does not skip it. In his 1753 essay "Of National Characters," Hume included a footnote (later revised for a posthumous 1777 edition) asserting a hierarchy of races and expressing scepticism that non-white peoples were capable of the same civilisational achievements as Europeans — language scholars and historians today variously describe as "especially shocking," "deeply puzzling," and "highly prejudicial speculation," even allowing for the genuinely different intellectual and moral context of the mid-18th century. This was not an isolated slip: in 2014, the historian Felix Waldmann uncovered a previously unknown 1766 letter in which Hume personally vouched for and encouraged a friend, Lord Hertford, to invest in a Grenadan slave plantation scheme, describing the men proposing it as "Men of Substance and Character" and framing the opportunity in favourable terms; bank records show Hume separately lent money, around the same period, to one of the men involved in the scheme.

The scholarly interpretation of exactly how far this goes — whether Hume was an active encourager of the investment and personally implicated in profiting from slavery, or a more passive conduit of information whose language has been over-read — remains genuinely contested among specialists (compare, for instance, the differing readings offered by Felix Waldmann, James Fieser, and Alan Bailey). What is not seriously disputed is that the letter exists, that Hume's own words in it went beyond neutral reportage into active endorsement of the men proposing the deal, and that this sits in real, unresolved tension with Hume's own published philosophical disavowals of slavery elsewhere in his work — tension some scholars describe frankly as a form of personal hypocrisy. This controversy has had concrete modern consequences: in 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed its David Hume Tower (now known by its street address, 40 George Square) specifically citing concern over these views. This article treats the footnote and the plantation letter as established historical facts, and the precise degree of Hume's personal moral culpability for the latter as disputed among historians, rather than settled in either a fully exculpatory or fully condemnatory direction.

Death, and "Le Bon David's" Famous Composure

Hume died in Edinburgh on 25 August 1776, of abdominal cancer, at age 65. His final months produced two of the most-cited documents in his biography: his own brief autobiographical essay "My Own Life," in which he reflected on his career and reputation with characteristic wit and self-awareness ("I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one"); and Adam Smith's own account of visiting the dying Hume, which records Hume speculating, with apparently genuine good humour, about a mythical conversation with Charon, the ferryman of the dead, joking that he might ask for a few more years to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition," only to be told, in his own imagined version, to "get into the boat this instant." This calm, even playful, acceptance of mortality — widely reported by contemporaries and consistent across multiple independent accounts — became something of a celebrated model of a specifically philosophical, irreligious "good death" for later secular and Enlightenment writers, and is genuinely well documented rather than invented after the fact, though its retelling over the following centuries has understandably taken on something of a legendary, exemplary quality beyond the bare historical record. established core facts; Shared/Traditional in its later symbolic elevation. Hume specifically requested a simple Roman-style tomb inscribed only with his name and dates, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest" — a request honoured in his surviving tomb in Edinburgh's Old Calton Cemetery.

Legacy

Hume's philosophical influence is difficult to overstate: Immanuel Kant credited Hume's account of causation and induction with waking him from what Kant called his own "dogmatic slumbers," directly prompting the critical philosophy for which Kant himself is remembered; Hume's moral sentimentalism shaped his friend Adam Smith's own ethical and economic thought; and his empiricism, scepticism about induction, and analysis of causation remain live, foundational reference points in contemporary philosophy of science, epistemology and cognitive science. The philosopher James D. Madden has argued that only Darwin rivals Hume's role in undermining confidence in design-based arguments within the Western intellectual tradition. established

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The philosopher everyone had to answer

The philosopher Alexander Broadie argues that once Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), it became "difficult, almost impossible" for philosophers in Scotland or elsewhere in Europe to write as if he had not existed. Thomas Reid built the Scottish common sense school as an answer to him, and Immanuel Kant said that his own philosophy was driven partly by the need to reply to Hume. Hume also saw history as evidence for his "science of man": records of wars, intrigues and revolutions were, he wrote, "so many collections of experiments" from which the principles of human nature could be drawn.

Broadie also stresses that Hume was unusual among the Scottish literati. His writings on religion, The Natural History of Religion (1757) and the posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), still leave room for argument over whether he was an atheist, a deist or a sceptic, but most of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were committed Calvinists, and many were Kirk ministers. That is one of the main contrasts Broadie draws with France, where the leading thinkers held no university chairs and were mostly deists or sceptics.

Hume and America: admired historian, distrusted philosopher

The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (1975), shows that Americans received the two halves of Hume's work very differently.

Franklin's friend. established Hume met Benjamin Franklin during Franklin's Scottish tour of 1759, and the two corresponded. When Franklin prepared to sail home in 1762, Hume wrote that America had sent Britain "gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc., but you are the first philosopher and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her" (as quoted by Hook). On Franklin's second visit, in 1771, he stayed with Hume in Edinburgh, and Hume gave a large dinner in his honour. The young medical student Benjamin Rush met Hume at Sir Alexander Dick's table in 1766–68.

On the American quarrel. established Although a Tory in his view of English history, Hume attacked the government's policy towards the colonies with great force in his last years, and was among the Scottish friends of Franklin who opposed the war (Hook, following W. L. Mathieson).

Early American readers. established Jonathan Edwards wrote to the Edinburgh minister John Erskine on 11 December 1755 that he had read Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals as well as Kames's Essays, one of the earliest signs of Scottish philosophy being read in America. In 1782 James Madison's list of books to be bought for Congress included Hume's History of England and his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects.

The philosophy kept at arm's length. established Hook finds that Hume's reputation for irreligion limited his American publication. Apart from his autobiography (Philadelphia, 1778), nothing by Hume was printed in America until the first two volumes of the History of England appeared at Philadelphia in 1795. His Philosophical Essays were not printed there until 1817, at Georgetown and Philadelphia, bound with George Campbell's reply to Hume on miracles; Campbell's Dissertation on Miracles had been printed at Philadelphia in 1790. The Scottish common sense philosophy of Reid and Stewart, which presented itself as a reply to Hume, became the standard teaching in American colleges instead. A North American Review essay of 1830 granted Hume great natural acuteness but dismissed his metaphysics and morals as "strange aberrations" (as quoted by Hook).

The historian everyone read. established The History of England was a different matter. A seven-volume edition was published, probably simultaneously, at Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston in 1810, with further editions at Albany (1816) and Philadelphia (1821–22). Samuel Miller's Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) said Hume had raised his country's standing in historical writing "to a very high rank". In 1832 the North American Review complained that Hume had "exercised an unbounded influence over American readers", so that young Americans, though "sworn friends of freedom", took the side of Charles I.

Jefferson's objection. established Thomas Jefferson, who owned Hume's works, came to see the History as a Tory text dangerous to young republicans. In 1810 he recalled the enthusiasm with which he had "devoured it when young" and the years it took "to eradicate the poison it had instilled into my mind" (Jefferson's letters, as quoted by Hook from Sowerby's catalogue of his library). The North American Review's complaint of 1832 echoed his.

shared Hook's picture, that Americans honoured Hume as a historian and stylist but kept his philosophy at a distance until well into the nineteenth century, fits the publication record. It concerns general readers and college teaching; a few individual Americans, Jefferson and Madison among them, read Hume's essays closely, and Madison's debt to Hume's political essays is a separate, much-discussed question.

1. Hume's philosophical masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, was such a commercial and critical failure on publication that Hume himself described it as having "fallen dead-born from the press" — and yet modern scholars consider it his greatest work.
2. He was denied university chairs twice, at Edinburgh and Glasgow, specifically over accusations of atheism — and his own friend Adam Smith opposed his Glasgow candidacy out of fear of public backlash.
3. Kant credited Hume with waking him from his own "dogmatic slumbers" — a direct philosophical debt from one of history's most influential thinkers.
4. Hume's actual bestseller during his lifetime wasn't his philosophy at all — it was his six-volume History of England, the standard popular history of the country for over sixty years.
5. In 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed its David Hume Tower over concerns about his documented views on race and a 1766 letter connecting him to investment in slavery.
6. French intellectuals affectionately nicknamed him "le bon David" during his years in Paris.
7. His deathbed conversations, recorded by Adam Smith and James Boswell, show him facing death with striking calm and even humour — joking about negotiating with the mythical ferryman of the dead for a few more years.
8. Hume specifically requested a plain, simple tomb inscribed only with his name and dates — a request honoured in his surviving grave in Edinburgh's Old Calton Cemetery.
9. Hume told Benjamin Franklin in 1762 that he was the first great man of letters America had sent to Britain, and Franklin stayed in Hume's house on his second Scottish visit in 1771.
10. No American printer published Hume's philosophical essays until 1817, and then only bound together with a Scottish minister's refutation of his argument on miracles.

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1. "Hume's philosophy was celebrated and successful throughout his lifetime." Not accurate — his most important philosophical work, the Treatise, failed on publication; his actual bestseller was his History of England. established correction.
2. "Hume was a straightforward, openly declared atheist." He was widely perceived and institutionally treated as such, and his arguments were strongly corrosive to religious belief, but he never made an unambiguous public declaration, and precise scholarly characterisation of his personal position remains disputed.
3. The footnote on race and the Grenada slavery letter are sometimes omitted entirely from popular celebratory accounts of Hume. This article treats both as established facts requiring serious engagement, not minimisation.
4. The exact degree of Hume's personal moral culpability regarding the 1766 plantation letter is genuinely contested among specialists — treat confident claims in either direction (full exoneration or full condemnation) with appropriate caution. disputed
5. Do not assume Hume's philosophy shaped early American college teaching directly. Americans read his History widely, but his philosophical essays were not printed in America until 1817, and the colleges taught Reid's and Stewart's replies to him. established (publication record).
6. Hume's calm deathbed demeanour, while well documented, has taken on a somewhat legendary, exemplary quality in later secular retellings beyond the bare historical record. established core facts; Shared/Traditional in its later symbolic use.

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