David Hume: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · A Younger Son with No Profession

Law, then commerce, then neither

1711 – 1734 · Edinburgh · Ninewells · Bristol

David Hume was born at Edinburgh in 1711 and brought up at Ninewells, the family's small estate in Berwickshire. His father died when he was an infant; his mother raised the children. The estate went to his elder brother, which settled the shape of his life early — a younger son of a family with more name than money has to be given a profession, and the professions available were the law and the church.

He went to the university at about twelve, which was not unusual then, and read very widely and not at all in the direction intended. The law was tried and abandoned. In 1734 he went to Bristol and lasted a few months in a merchant's counting house before deciding he could not do that either.

What he had instead was a plan he described later without embarrassment: to live very cheaply, in the country, and think. It is worth registering how little that was underwritten by. He had no post, no patron, no inheritance and no publications, and he was twenty-three.

Why this matters

Almost everything Hume is known for was written before he had any position to protect — and he spent the rest of his life not getting the positions that would have given him one.

You have a young man with no profession and a plan to think for a living. What would you ask him?

Ask David

• “Why could you not stomach the law?”
• “What was it like being the younger son at Ninewells?”
• “What did a few months in a counting house teach you?”
• “How did you expect to live while you thought?”
• “What were you reading at university that you were not supposed to be?”

Chapter 2 · The Book That Fell Dead-Born

Three years in France and almost no readers

1734 – 1740 · La Flèche · London

He went to France and settled at La Flèche in Anjou, where living was cheap and there was a library. Over about three years he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739 and 1740. He was twenty-eight when the last volume appeared.

The argument of the book is the one everything else rests on. All our reasoning about matters of fact comes from experience. But look at what experience actually gives us: one thing, and then another thing. We never observe the connection between them — we observe the sequence and supply the rest ourselves, out of habit. From that follows the awkward consequence he was honest enough to state: nothing proves that the future will resemble the past. We expect it because we always have.

The book did nothing. His own phrase for it is the one everybody quotes — it fell dead-born from the press — and he wrote that thirty-seven years later, in the short account of his life, which tells you something about how long it took to stop stinging.

He blamed the writing rather than the readers, at least in public, and did something unusual about it: he rewrote the argument in a shorter and much clearer form as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1748. That is the version with the essay on miracles in it, and it is the version that eventually did damage.

Why this matters

The claim that we never observe a cause is what makes all his later objections work — including the one that the argument from causes exempts its own conclusion from the rule it used.

You have a young man's book and a silence where the reviews should be. What would you ask?

Ask David

• “What do we actually observe, if not the connection between cause and effect?”
• “Why did you blame the writing rather than the readers?”
• “What was La Flèche like to work in?”
• “If nothing proves the future will resemble the past, why do you still expect it to?”
• “What did you change when you rewrote it in 1748?”

Chapter 3 · Twice Refused

A charge he was never allowed to answer

1745 – 1752 · Edinburgh · Glasgow

In 1745 the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh came open and Hume was a candidate. He did not get it. In 1752 the chair of logic at Glasgow came open and he did not get that either. Both times the objection was that he was irreligious, and both times it was made about him rather than to him.

The essay on miracles, published in 1748 between the two attempts, did not help. Its argument is careful and it is not the argument people usually attribute to it. Hume does not say a miracle is impossible. He says a miracle would be a violation of a law of nature; that our evidence for such a law is uniform experience; and that no testimony should be believed unless the testimony being false would be a greater wonder than the event it reports. It is a rule for weighing one improbability against another, and he applies it and finds that no report he knows of passes.

What is worth noticing is what the refusals did and did not change. He went on writing exactly the same things. But the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion — the book where the design argument is dismantled at length, and which he had been working on since around this period — he did not publish, and he never did.

Why this matters

This is where a philosophical position had a career cost, and it is the reason his hardest book only appeared after he could not be questioned about it.

You have two refusals and a book going into a drawer. What would you ask?

Ask David

• “What were you actually accused of, and were you told?”
• “Does your argument make miracles impossible, or only unbelievable?”
• “How do you weigh a report against everything else you have observed?”
• “Did being refused twice change what you were willing to print?”
• “What is in the Dialogues that was not in the Enquiry?”

Chapter 4 · The History Paid, the Philosophy Did Not

A librarian with a very large collection

1752 – 1766 · Edinburgh · Paris

In 1752 he was made keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. The salary was small and the collection was not, and he used it to write the History of England, which came out in volumes through the 1750s and into 1762.

The History is the thing that made him. It sold, it was argued about, and it gave him an income that the philosophy never had. He is quite candid that this was the point. He wanted readers, and having failed to get them with the books he cared most about, he got them with the one that took the longest.

From 1763 he was secretary at the British embassy in Paris, and the salons received him in a way Edinburgh never had — a stout, plainly dressed Scotsman with an accent, treated as the most distinguished philosopher in Europe. In 1766 he brought Rousseau to England to help him, and within months the friendship had collapsed into a public quarrel with letters printed on both sides. It is the least attractive episode in his life and he does not come out of it especially well.

Throughout, the Dialogues stayed unpublished, and he kept adding to them.

Why this matters

A philosopher whose arguments could not get him a post got fame and money from history-writing instead — which is worth knowing before treating his cheerfulness as the ease of a man who never wanted anything.

You have the famous historian and the unpublished philosopher, in the same person. What would you ask?

Ask David

• “Why did the History succeed when the philosophy did not?”
• “What was Paris like after Edinburgh?”
• “What happened with Rousseau?”
• “Did writing history change how you thought about evidence?”
• “Why keep revising a book you had decided not to publish?”

Chapter 5 · A Visitor Who Wanted Him to Change His Mind

April to August 1776

1776 – 1779 · Edinburgh

In April 1776, knowing he was dying, Hume wrote My Own Life — four or five pages, finished in an afternoon, describing his own character with a detachment that unnerved people at the time and still does.

In July, James Boswell came to see him. Boswell was frightened of death, had been for years, and part of his reason for going was to find out whether a dying unbeliever would hold. He recorded the conversation. Hume was thin and cheerful, said he found the idea of surviving death no more likely than he ever had, and made a joke about it. Boswell went away and could not stop thinking about it.

Hume died on 25 August 1776. Adam Smith, his closest friend, wrote a public account of his last months and of his temper in them, and was attacked for it more fiercely than for anything in his own economics — the offence being that Smith had described a man dying well without religion, and had said so calmly.

The Dialogues appeared in 1779, arranged for by his nephew. In them the design argument is not refuted so much as taken apart in stages: the world is compared to a machine, but we have no experience of universes being made, only of machines; and a designer inferred from this world would have to be inferred as this world actually is, which is not obviously the conclusion anybody wanted.

Why this matters

The Dialogues are the text behind almost every later objection to the design argument, and their author made sure he would never have to defend them in person.

You have the short autobiography, the visitor and the posthumous book. What would you ask?

Ask David

• “What did Boswell come to find out?”
• “Why write an account of your own character?”
• “What is wrong with comparing the universe to a machine?”
• “Was it fair to publish the Dialogues where nobody could question you?”
• “Why were people so angry at Adam Smith's account of your death?”

What David changed

Hume set the objections that later argument has mostly been variations on: that the design argument is an analogy drawn from a part to a whole we have no second instance of; that an argument from causes cannot exempt its own conclusion; and that testimony has to be weighed against everything else we have ever observed. He did all of it before geology or evolution existed, which is why he cannot be answered by pointing at them.

A debate that continues

Whether Hume was a sceptic about religion or an atheist concealing it, and whether keeping the Dialogues back until after his death was prudence, cowardice or simple good manners, has been argued about since 1779 and is not settled.

Keep exploring — ask David

• “If we never observe a cause, what are we doing when we explain something?”
• “How much evidence should it take to believe an extraordinary report?”
• “Is being unable to prove a thing the same as having reason to deny it?”

Related lives

• Thomas Aquinas — Who Would Not Let Faith Fear Reason
• Adam Smith — Father of Modern Economics
• Augustine of Hippo — Who Wrote Down What He Had Been

Related themes

Arguments for the existence of God · Belief, uncertainty and unbelief · Miracles and evidence