David Hume: An Introduction to His Philosophical System

1. Hume's Life

CHAPTERI O N E Hume's Life David Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in Edinburgh.! His father was Joseph Hume, ofNinewells, near Berwick, and the family were moderately prosperous Border gentry, quite prominent in local affairs , and strict Presbyterians. Hume's father died when David was only two, and his mother did not remarry. He was a precocious reader and was sent, with his elder brother John, to Edinburgh University when he was only twelve years old; a more normal age would have been fourteen. He describes his intellectual development in his briefautobiography , My Own Life: I passed through the ordinary course ofeducation with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits'of philosophy and general learning ; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly devouring .2 Clearly, Hume preferred a literary career to the standard Scottish destination ofthe law, and he had acquired a passion for Cicero and other classical authors. But it is worth pausing to notice other features ofhis development that he either does not mention or does not stress. The first is that Hume never saw himself as a philosopher exclusively, but as someone with a passion for literature and "generallearning ." He says near the end ofthe same document that his "ruling passion" was "my love ofliterary fame." For him, philosophy was only part ofthe literary life he wished, and we might well expect that this choice would be reflected in his estimate of philosophy's (' I 1 2 I CHAPTER ONE importance when discussing its role in human life. His detractors, of whom there will always be many (especially among those who have a more exclusive devotion to philosophy), have been inclined to think that he arranged the contents ofhis philosophical writings to maximize his chances ofliterary fame at the expense oftheir philosophical quality.3 There is a crumb of truth in this, but no more, as we shall see below. A second and more important fact to notice is that the study of classical authors came, very ear1y, to be a substitute for the religious devotions ;that he experienced in his home. It is clear that by the time he left the university, he had abandoned all Christian convictions and had formed the lifelong opinion that religion, especially the popular predestinarian Calvinism dominant in the Scotland of his youth, was an unnatural and malign influence in human life and served only to intensify the fears and anxieties that moral reflection should enable us to overcome. He turned for such moral solace to classical writers, especially to Cicero, whose influence on his philosophical system is very deep. Hume's intellectual environment at Edinburgh was not exclusively classical, however. While the extent and importance ofit are a matter of controversy, he clearly absorbed some of the increasing intellectual influence of Newtonian physics.4 It is generally supposed that it played an important part in the formation of what he described as "a new scene ofthought" that completely ousted the law in the center ofhis attentions in 1729 and was to lead, in an amazingly few years, to his first and greatest philosophical work - A Treatise ofHuman Nature. In the short run, however, the intense intellectual exertions occasioned by the excitement ofhis philosophical discoveries led to what we would now call a breakdown. He described his symptoms, and his efforts to deal with them, in a remarkable letter that he addressed to a physician (tentatively identified by Mossner as John Arbuthnot).5 He experienced a "coldness and desertion of the spirit," "scurvy spots" on the fingers, "wateriness in the mouth," and a sudden ravenous appetite that transformed him from a "tall, lean and rawboned!' youth into the fat figure who stares at us from the two famous Allan Ramsay portraits. The letter may well not have been ,sent, but it is a remarkable piece of clinical self-description and shows that Hume had become very fully acquainted with his own nature. But although he correctly diagnosed himself as suffering from the "disease of the learned," his prescription was less successful: he went to Bristol to enter business with a merchant and...