The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (review)

There is a need for a new life of David Hume. E. C. Mossner's 1954 biography, The Life of David Hume, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1980), has many small errors and was written from a collection of letters that has been much augmented by the efforts of many scholars, particularly Mossner and David Raynor.¹ Also, the Hume manuscripts have been redated by M. A. Stewart, while David Fate Norton and Mary Norton, as well as others, have tried to shed light on Hume's books and his reading; now there are also better editions of some of Hume's works and even editions of more works than there used to be.² Hume Studies and other journals have made contributions to our understanding of his thought, while general works on the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish society have added much to our knowledge of his time and the situation in which he wrote.

M. A. Stewart has recently tried to state all that is definitely verifiable from manuscript materials about Hume's early life, but he has not said all that can be told about his early intellectual life.³ Stewart says nothing about Hume's development until he was ten, by which time an eager and inquisitive little boy would have absorbed much of the local folklore surrounding the ruins in his area of the Borders as well as the role his kinfolk had played in the events that led to some of those ruins. He says nothing of what a boy brought up on a farm would have come to know about farming, riding, caring for horses, and the like. Stewart also says nothing about the legal education Hume was encouraged to get and probably got at least in part. He infers a lot from a few letters, none of which shows Hume as distinctly more attracted to literature than philosophy at about age sixteen. What is more surprising is that he tells us that Hume's philosophical work was done by 1752, although not all the essays were written by then, and the History of England, which includes argumentation, was hardly begun.⁴ So, new materials are accumulating and need to be gathered and worked into a life, an effort that the annual additions to the Hume bibliography printed in Hume Studies makes easier.

The temptation to do this has been very great. The first to try, even before much of the new material was available, was Gerhard Streminger in 1994.⁵ The next attempt was made ca. 2000 when Cambridge University Press commissioned a life for its series of philosophical biographies. The commission went to three scholars. Because Hume contributed to so many different fields, it was thought only a team could cover them all. That may well be true, but the project failed. That contract for a life has now been given to James Harris, a philosopher at St. Andrews University. The other recent biography is that of Roderick Graham, which, alas, shows all too clearly the problems of attempting one.

There are two principal problems. The first is that Hume wrote profoundly on many different topics and is, perhaps, the greatest philosopher to have written in English. His essays on politics and political economy were benchmarks in those fields. His works on religion were less novel, but his critique of rational theology still keeps many upset and occupied with refutations. He will always get a footnote in aesthetics and will be read for his style as long as eighteenth-century letters have some attraction. Hume remains to this day listed in the British Library as "the historian." The other problem with doing a biography of a man like Hume is that the sources one would like to work from are not always to be had. His early life is poorly documented, as are portions of his career after he became famous. Graham, a television writer and producer by profession, lacks the background to...