Hume, David (1711–1776)

DAVID HUME WAS born in Edinburgh in 1711 and attended its university, where it seems he read classics. His attraction to philosophy and writing was marked from boyhood, and a brief attempt at law repelled him as a barren waste of technical jargon. He completed A Treatise of Human Nature at the age of 26 (although it “fell dead-born from the press”).

Though he was the leading philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, allegations of atheism caused him to be turned down for chairs of philosophy in Edinburgh and Glasgow universities. His contemporary fame stemmed mostly from his contributions as an essayist and a historian, with his History of England (1754–62) serving as the principal such work.

Placid and phlegmatic by temperament, Hume was guided in his life as in his philosophy by moderation, and was thought gregarious and attractive by his many acquaintances. He obtained for Jean-Jacques Rousseau refuge and a pension in England during the latter's exile from Switzerland in 1766, but Rousseau quickly quarreled and scurrilously accused him of plotting to ruin his character. Hume secured appointments as secretary to the British ambassador in Paris, France, in the periods of 1763 to 1766 and from 1767 to 1768. He died in 1776.

As the foremost philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume's empiricism followed upon and radicalized that of John Locke and George Berkeley—though the influence upon him of other thinkers from Isaac Newton to Pierre Bayle ought not be disregarded. His work in turn inspired the greater part of what would follow in the Enlightenment, spanning from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, and James Madison's Federalist No. 10, to 19th-century deism and religious skepticism, and contemporary epistemology and scientific method.

A thoroughgoing nominalist in his handling of ideas of material objects as well as mind, Hume adduced arguments against the possibility of grounded, inductively derived expectations about the future, or the knowledge of causation apart from the customary conjunction of two impressions. He also put forth an instrumentalist view of reason as neutral as regards ends and a “bundle theory” of the self as an assortment of perceptions. Moreover, as a pragmatist, he asserted the irrelevance of such theoretical skepticism about the extent of knowledge to the practical concerns of daily life.

To ethics, he contributed a nontheological understanding of utility rooted in individual pleasure. He also observed that normative statements may not be deduced from empirical observations (that is, the is/ought distinction), instead grounding ethics upon human benevolence and “sympathy” rather than rationality. He would become most controversial for his writings on religion, in which he refuted the argument of design from divine existence, and argued that secondhand testimony for a miracle having taken place could never be sufficiently credible to countermand our cumulative experience of the immutability of the laws of nature. He suppressed two essays during his lifetime, “Of Suicide,” which justifies the moral permissibility of its subject, and “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” which rebuts arguments for human immortality.

Contrary to the prevailing mercantilist assumption that foreign trade represented a zero-sum game, based on the mercantilists' definition of a nation's wealth in terms of its stock of money, Hume argued the wealth of a country lay in its labor and commodities, rendering gains from trade possible. His price-specie flow theory perceptively argued against mercantilism that an inflow of specie into one country would unavoidably disperse to other countries, by changing the terms of trade against the first country, thus leading to increased demand for imports and reduced demand for its exports. Hume also produced a “loanable funds” theory of interest, relating interest rates to demand (for loans) and supply (of savings), and on its basis argued that lower interest rates, far from being indicative of excessive abundance of money, were instead symptomatic of a booming commercial economy.

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