On April 26, 1711, the baptismal register in Edinburgh reported the birth of a “son named David” to John Home and Katherine Falconer. In a different hand, written many decades later, another city official added in the margin: “The child here registered is the celebrated David Hume, Historian and Philosopher.”
Three hundred years later, scholars across Europe and North America are celebrating the event. The great majority of celebrants will be professional philosophers. Hume would have chuckled: His two attempts to join the faculty of Scottish universities flopped. Mostly for this reason, Hume was best known in his lifetime as an essayist and a historian—a fact recalled by the card catalog of the British Library, where “Hume, David” is filed under the heading “Historian.”
We have, of course, since come to appreciate “Hume, David” as one of the most revolutionary thinkers of modernity—the “great infidel,” as Samuel Johnson called him. Hume’s work has bled into nearly every realm of philosophical investigation. Barry Stroud, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, has observed that Hume’s vision of man is “the very paradigm of what it is to have an explanation of something, and therefore in particular of what it is to understand human behavior.” Much less remarked on, but equally important, is Hume’s ability to convey this vision to others. We will always have much to learn from Hume about religion, epistemology, skepticism, and morality, but it is the great Scot’s role as a mediator between the “learned” and “conversible” worlds—the academy and the general public—that is perhaps the most-neglected aspect of his legacy.
“It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” With those light-hearted words, David Hume described the reception of his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature. His account was overstated. In fact, Scotland’s two most important thinkers, Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames, read the Treatise when it was published, in 1739, and grasped its revolutionary implications. Moreover, by the late 1740s, the book had sparked more than a murmur among hard-line Presbyterians appalled by Hume’s religious skepticism.
Still, Hume had a point: Rarely in the history of philosophy had so seminal a book raised so few eyebrows. This was in part due to the fact that the Treatise reflects the spirit of the Enlightenment. Rather than dabble in “hypothetical fancies,” Hume declared it “impossible to form any notion of [the mind’s] powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations.”
Hume’s ambition was to become the Newton of our moral and mental universes. And like Newton’s, Hume’s discoveries were deeply unsettling: Every commonly accepted philosophical concept he touched seemed to disappear. Take the question of causality, as Hume famously does through the illustration of a billiard table: “Here is a billiard-ball lying on a table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball, which was formerly at rest, now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any which we know, either by sensation or reflection. Let us therefore examine it.”
Like Minnesota Fats making an impossible bank shot, Hume then takes the reader by surprise. No matter how far we lean over the table, he observes, or how carefully we fix our eyes on the balls, we will never see the act of causation. Given his argument that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, Hume leads us into an impasse. There is nothing in the sensory world that captures the cause of the moving billiard balls. Cause, after all, is not material. We never see, hear, or touch a cause; instead, we have only a series of contingent impressions.
For Hume, experience itself is the cause of our unfounded but essential belief in cause. Every causal act carries the idea of contiguity—namely, a temporal link between two events, one of which seems invariably to follow the other. Experience tells us that when struck by a moving billiard ball, the second ball will move at a certain speed and in a particular direction: “After the discovery of the constant conjunction of any two or more objects, we always draw an inference from one object to another.” Hume concludes that our abiding faith in cause and effect is not shaped by reason but instead issues from mere habit. The imperative of the laws of nature, of supposedly necessary connections like cause and effect, exists in the mind, not the physical world. “‘Tis in vain to rack ourselves with farther thought and reflection,” Hume concludes with the assurance of someone who has been to the edge of the abyss and back: “We can go no farther in considering this particular instance.”
Yet he does go farther, moving from what we thought we knew about cause and effect to what we thought we knew about ourselves. Turning from the billiard table to our everyday assumptions, Hume pursues his own self only to discover that there is no “there” there. “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” To insist that we can glimpse our selves in the buff, stripped of perceptions or emotions, is as nonsensical as asking our shadow to stand still while we step back to better observe it.
As with the puzzle of causation, so too with ourselves: Our minds, not nature, assures the continuity of our selves. Thanks to the similarity of various experiences in our lives, we come to believe in the existence of a single mind and a unified self. Identity is little more than a “quality” that we attach to sundry perceptions “because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them.” Yet this union no more exists in the external and objective world than does causation. Billiard balls, human selves: Now you see them, now you don’t.
At first, Hume’s radical skepticism disturbed only Hume. His unease erupted at the end of Book One of the Treatise, where Hume contemplates what he has wrought of our everyday assumptions. “This sudden view of my danger strikes me with melancholy; and as ‘tis usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair with all the desponding reflections, which the present subject furnishes me with in such abundance.” Rather than bathing his world in light, Hume’s investigation “affrighted and confounded” him, leaving him feeling like “some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate.”
His cure for this philosophical despair is as stunning as the unexpected cause of the disease. Although reason cannot overcome the siege of skeptical doubt, nature—specifically, human nature—rides to our rescue. “Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium.” With a shrug of his great shoulders, Hume abandons his unsettling reflections: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Reason thus is not the handmaiden to faith, according to the medieval scholastics, nor is it faith’s master, as Hume’s contemporaries believed. Instead, reason is subservient to nature. And faithful to his analysis, Hume does what nature demands. He leaves the dark theater whose images move in strobe-lit procession, rubs his eyes to accustom them to the daylight, and steps into everyday life.
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The silence that greeted the Treatise‘s publication impressed on Hume the limits of stoic indifference. Why is it, he asked a friend, “that we philosophers cannot as heartily despise the world as it despises us?” Incapable of such scorn, Hume instead decided on a new strategy. He no doubt recalled an observation he had made near the beginning of the Treatise—that philosophical works were written in language too “abstruse” for most readers. Yet he now saw that he had committed the same mistake. Even his distant relative Lord Kames jested that “Davey” would need to beat the Treatise into Kames’s head if he were to understand it.
Hume did not take up the older man’s invitation. Instead, he beat his old-fashioned treatise into a new genre—the philosophical essay. Michel de Montaigne had pioneered the form, and his “gaiety” appealed to Hume when, as a student, he discovered the French philosopher’s collected works. Younger contemporaries of Montaigne, like Francis Bacon, had adopted the essay, but it wasn’t until the early 18th century that Joseph Addison and Richard Steele rode the genre to fame and fortune with their journals, The Spectator and The Tatler. For Addison and Steele, the three rules of urbane society were politeness, politeness, and politeness. The editors did not mean, as we do today, the practiced gestures and words that skim the surface of social relations. Rather than the cosmetics of social intercourse that hide the warts and wrinkles of daily life, politeness had a more serious aim: to conform oneself to the standards of society.
Politeness was thus not a solitary occupation. For Addison, polite society was a “fraternity of spectators” consisting of “every one that considers the world as a theatre, and desires to form a right judgment of those who are the actors on it.” True gentlemen and gentlewomen lived—performed—their lives with an audience in mind. The “commerce of discourse,” in Steele’s and Addison’s eyes, was designed both to impress others and to impress ourselves; by acting well, we pleased others and thus pleased ourselves.
Hume commandeered not just the essay form but also its message. He drove it much farther, however, than Addison and Steele ever contemplated; like Adam Smith, Hume delved into the historical and philosophical nature of politeness. In his essay “Of the Refinement of the Arts,” Hume traces the development of clubs and associations that are crucial to human progress and happiness. Through these groups, he writes, “both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behavior, refine apace.” Constant and gentle interaction, encouraged by the art of conversation, polishes men and women. The habits of civility make life pleasant, even possible. Without politeness, Hume concludes, “no human society can subsist.”
But, dear reader, could civilized society subsist without thinkers capable of expounding on critical matters in a light, yet learned style? Enter Hume, philosophical ambassador. Intent on introducing both gentlemen and gentlewomen to philosophy, Hume created for himself a new role: emissary from the “learned” realm of philosophy to the “conversible” world of polite society.
He announced his mission in 1741, just two years after the flop of the Treatise, with the publication of his Essays, Moral and Political. “I cannot but consider myself as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation,” he explained, “and shall think it my constant duty to promote a good correspondence betwixt these two states, which have so great a dependence upon each other.” The age had long suffered from the division of those two realms, Hume observed. Once they are deprived of literary, historical, and philosophical subjects—the stuff of the learned realm—what is left for the denizens of the conversible world to converse about except trifling subjects? At the same time, however, the world of learning has suffered “by being shut up in colleges and cells, and secluded from the world and good company. ... Even philosophy went to wrack by this moping recluse method of study.”
Though his witticisms were sometimes labored, condescending, or both, Hume had a knack for writing quickly, lucidly, and engagingly. He was soon essaying a wide array of subjects, including politics, economics, love, and marriage, supplying the drawing rooms and clubs of Britain with a steady stream of fodder for thoughtful conversation. Fifteen essays appeared in the first edition, of 1741; Hume nearly doubled his offerings in the next edition, published the following year, and added as many again in 1752. By midcentury he had filled three volumes—an accomplishment that won him not only financial independence but also literary renown.
Essay writing allowed Hume to pursue by other means his war against the philosophical assumptions of his age. Rather than treat philosophy as an abstract system of thought, Hume embraced it as a way of life. In a remarkable series of essays on various philosophical approaches—"The Epicurean,” “The Stoic,” “The Platonist,” and, finally, “The Sceptic"—Hume argues that though these schools differ dramatically from one another, they share the conviction that philosophy is a life calling before it is a professional vocation. With this in mind, Hume gives the last word to the “Sceptic”, who sounds a note of caution about the reach of even skepticism: “The empire of philosophy extends over a few; and with regard to these too, her authority is very weak and limited.” While philosophy is ever eager to force life to obey its dictates, it must instead serve life. As Hume’s Sceptic asks by way of conclusion: “To reduce life to exact rule and method is commonly a painful, oft a fruitless occupation: And is it not also a proof, that we overvalue the prize for which we contend?”
The study of the past, Hume believed, confirms the need for philosophical modesty. In his essay “Of the Study of History,” he tells his female readers that “the study of history ... [is] best suited both to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement.” But, Hume insists, this also applies to men: History favors no gender in its capacity to deepen our understanding of public affairs and strengthen our attachment to moderation. With both feet in the world of experience, historians teach us how to distinguish between the credible and incredible, the probable and improbable. At the same time, historians portray the models of human virtue we should emulate (or models of depravity we should avoid). For this reason, historians, unlike novelists, were “the true friends of virtue.”
A few years after the publication of this essay, Hume decided that while many men were capable of making history, far fewer were capable of writing it. In 1746 he began to research what would become his multivolume History of England; eight years later, the first volume was published. His effort to navigate between the political passions of the age in which Tories and Whigs held different interpretations of the past was not universally well received. As Hume reported to a friend, hostility toward the first volume seemed to be the one thing that all political and religious factions in England held in common. Yet Hume persisted and methodically moved back through more than 1,600 years of history; his last volume appeared in 1762. By then he not only had become Britain’s greatest writer, known in Europe as the “English Tacitus,” but had also become rich: The History earned him 3,200 pounds, a not inconsequential sum in an era when a man who earned 80 pounds a year was considered well off.
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In London, James Boswell’s reaction to Hume’s History reflects the philosophical aims that Hume had set for himself when he began the project. Boswell observed time and again in his journal and correspondence that the History had become his companion and guide. The books, he declared, “enlarged my views, filled me with great ideas, and rendered me happy.”
Why? Most obviously because Hume’s bracing narrative reminded Boswell of the dashing and gallant acts that he hoped to emulate. Perhaps his greatest hero in Hume’s gallery was Lord Falkland, a youthful and idealistic minister of Charles I who was killed at the Battle of Newbury. Hume emphasized Falkland’s “masculine eloquence” and “undaunted love of liberty” during the Civil War; no less important for Boswell, who had already plunged into the libidinous pleasures of London, was the aristocrat’s pursuit of pleasure
Yet a more important, if less dramatic trait of Falkland’s also appealed to Boswell—his obstinate attachment to political moderation. On this, Hume was especially eloquent: “When civil convulsions proceeded to extremities, and it became requisite for him to choose his side, he tempered the ardor of his zeal.” Anxious for his country’s future, Falkland “dreaded the too prosperous success of his own party as much as of the enemy.” It is difficult not to see in this portrayal Hume’s own predicament as a thinker and writer.
For Hume, the goals of the statesman, socialite, historian, and essayist converged on a shared ideal of political moderation and philosophical modesty. John Dewey, one of the few philosophers of the 20th century whose career, like Hume’s, traveled far beyond the academy, echoed the Scot’s understanding of the philosophical life. “Philosophy recovers itself,” Dewey declared, “when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.” To toast his own tercentenary, Hume would certainly raise a glass of claret to that sentiment.