Hume, DAVID, philosopher and historian, was born at Edinburgh on the 26th of April 1711 (o.s.). His father was the laird or proprietor of the estate of Ninewells, in Berwickshire, but David, being the younger son, had to make his own fortune with no other assistance than an education and the influence of his respectable family. He was educated at home and at the university of Edinburgh. His father designed law as his profession, and he submitted to the initial steps of the proper practical training, but it was not a pursuit to his liking. Deserting it, he made experiment of a mercantile life in Bristol; but commerce was not more congenial to him than jurisprudence, and he gave it a very short trial. He now became a student, devoting himself to books with no settled practical object before him. He has recorded his sufferings at this time from despondency and depression of spirits, caused apparently by the effects of monotonous study. At twenty-three years of age he went to France and lived some time in La Flèche, where he describes himself as wandering about in solitude, and dreaming the dream of his philosophy. In 1739 he published the first and second book of his Treatise on Human Nature—the germ of his philosophy, and still perhaps the best exposition of it, since it has there a freshness and decision approaching to paradox, much modified in his later works. Although the dawn of a new era in philosophy, this book was little noticed; in his own words, 'it fell dead-born from the press.' It was a work of demolition. By separating the impressions or ideas created on the thinking mind by an external world from the absolute existence of that world itself he showed that almost everything concerning the latter was taken for granted, and he demanded proof of its existence of a kind not yet afforded. It was thus that he set a whole army of philosophers at work, either to refute what he had said, or seriously to fill up the blanks which he discovered: thus he gave the original impulse both to the Scottish school of philosophy—Reid, and the rest—and to Kant's speculations. In 1741 and 1742 he published two small volumes called Essays Moral and Political; they were marked by learning and thought, and elegantly written, but are not among the more remarkable of his works.
He felt keenly at this time the want of some fixed lucrative pursuit, and his longing for independence was the cause of a sad interruption to his studious and philosophical pursuits. He was induced to become the companion or guardian of an insane nobleman, and had to mix with the jealousies and mercenary objects of those who naturally gather round such a centre. In 1747 he obtained a rather more congenial appointment as secretary to General St Clair, whom he accompanied in the expedition to the coast of France and the attack on Port L'Orient, the depot of the French East India Company; this affair had no important results, but it gave Hume a notion of actual warfare. Next year he accompanied the general in a diplomatic mission to France, and as he travelled he took notes of his impressions of Holland, Germany, and Italy, which are published in his Life and Correspondence.
In 1751 he published his Inquiry into the Principles of Morals, a work of great originality, and one of the clearest expositions of the leading principles of what is termed the utilitarian system. At the same time he intended to publish his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion; but his friends, alarmed by the sceptical spirit pervading them, prevailed on him to lay them aside, and they were not made public until after his death. In his thirty-fifth year he had unsuccessfully competed for the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, and at this period we find him unsuccessful in an attempt to obtain the chair of Logic in Glasgow.
Next year, in 1752, appeared his Political Discourses. Here, again, he made an era in literature, for in this little work he announced those principles of political economy, comprehending the doctrine of free trade, which it fell to his friend Adam Smith more fully and comprehensively to develop. He was appointed at this time keeper of the Advocates' Library, with a very small salary, which he devoted to a charitable purpose. It was here that, surrounded with books, he formed the design of writing the history of England. In 1754 he issued a quarto volume of the History of the Stuarts, containing the Reigns of James I. and Charles I., and presently completed this portion of the work in a second volume, bringing it down to the Revolution. The second volume attracted more notice than the first had done. He then went backwards through the House of Tudor, and completed the work from the Roman period downwards in 1762. While so employed he published Four Dissertations: the Natural History of Religion; of the Passions; of Tragedy; of the Standard of Taste (1757). Two other dissertations, intended to accompany these, were cancelled by him after they were printed—they are On Suicide and The Immortality of the Soul, and were subsequently printed in his works.
In 1763 he went to France as secretary to Lord Hertford's embassy; here he was in his element, and found fame at last. He became familiar with the brilliant wits and savants of the Parisian circle—with Turgot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Buffon, Malesherbes, Crebillon, and the rest, as well as with the hardly less distinguished women, De Boufflers, Du Deffand, and L'Espinasse. His sojourn in Paris was unfortunate in bringing him into intimacy with the restless, vain, and self-tormenting Rousseau, who, after experiencing much substantial kindness from Hume, got suspicious, and forced him into a memorable quarrel. After his return home, in 1766, he accepted the responsible office of Under-secretary of State for the Home Department. In his own Life he says: 'I returned to Edinburgh in 1769 very opulent (for I possessed a revenue of £1000 a year), healthy, and, though somewhat stricken in years, with the prospect of enjoying long my ease, and of seeing the increase of my reputation.' His health gave way in 1774, and he died at Edinburgh, 25th August 1776.
Hume is the outcome of the empirical philosophy of Locke. His philosophical writings do not form a system, but discuss many of the salient ideas of philosophy, mainly in a sceptical or destructive manner. Ideas are but weakened copies of 'impressions' of the senses, outer or inner; mind is a succession of isolated impressions and ideas; the idea of cause depends on the habit of mind which expects the event that usually follows on another, and there is no necessary connection between cause and effect. Hume's History, which gives him a high rank among English historical authors, was not remarkable for historic impartiality (in a later edition more than a hundred alterations on the reigns of the first two Stuarts were made by Hume himself, and all to the Tory side), and has been largely superseded by more modern works; but new editions, with or without the continuation by Smollett, still appear; Dr Brewer's Student's Hume (1858) being a recognised text-book. Hume's position in relation to his predecessors and successors is given under BERKELEY; the article CAUSALITY is largely concerned with the discussion of his views. For the influence of Hume's scepticism in awaking Kant from his dogmatic slumber, see KANT. The most important edition of Hume's works is that by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (4 vols. 1874), with introduction and exhaustive analysis of Hume's philosophy. The Life and Correspondence of David Hume was published by J. Hill Burton (2 vols. 1846); Dr G. Birkbeck Hill edited Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, with copious and valuable notes, in 1889. For his theological position, and his relation to Edinburgh society, complicated by his 'infidelity,' see Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), the autobiography of 'Jupiter' Carlyle, &c. There are short monographs by Prof. Huxley ('English Men of Letters' series, 1879), Prof. Knight ('Philosophical Classics' series, 1886), and Prof. Calderwood ('Famous Scots' series, 1898); and German works by Jodl (1872), E. Pfeiderer (1874), and Gizecki (1878).