David Hume

Biography

Early life and education

David Hume was born on 7 May 1711 [OS 26 April 1711] as David Home in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket. He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer, daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian, and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell)), and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells. Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never re-married, raised the two brothers and their sister on her own. David's uncle George Home was minister at the parish in Chirnside where he likely attended during his youth.

Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734 because the surname 'Home' (pronounced 'Hume') was not well known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender", as his family was not rich; as a younger son he had little patrimony to live on.

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age—either 12 or possibly as young as 10—at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law, because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have:

an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring.

He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". He did not graduate.

At around age 18, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought", inspiring him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it". As he did not recount what this scene exactly was, commentators have offered a variety of speculations. One prominent interpretation among contemporary Humean scholarship is that this new "scene of thought" was Hume's realisation that Francis Hutcheson's theory of moral sense could be applied to the understanding of morality as well.

Career

Despite having noble ancestry, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession by age 25. As was common at his time, he became a merchant's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche and is likely to have used the college's extensive library.

Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged "atheism", also lamenting that his literary debut, A Treatise of Human Nature, "fell dead-born from the press". However, he found literary success in his lifetime as an essayist and historian, and a career as a librarian at the Advocates Library for the Faculty of Advocates. These successes provided him much needed income at the time. His tenure there, and the access to research materials it provided, resulted in Hume's writing the massive six-volume The History of England, which became a bestseller and the definitive history of England. For over 60 years, Hume was the dominant interpreter of English history. He described his "love for literary fame" as his "ruling passion" and judged his two late works, the so-called "first" and "second" enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on the merits of the later texts alone, rather than on the more radical formulations of his early, youthful work, dismissing his philosophical debut as juvenilia: "A work which the Author had projected before he left College." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his most important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in the Treatise. Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the most important in the history of Western philosophy.

Hume worked for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at age 27. Books 1 and 2 of his treatise were intended to "try the taste of the public", leading to Book 3 Of Morals being published after his feeling that he had "met with success".

Although many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply [his] deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired [his] independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of [his] talents in literature".

Later life

From 1763 to 1765 Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris, where he became secretary to the British embassy in France. Hume was well received among Parisian society, and while there he met Isaac de Pinto. In 1765 Hume served as a chargé d'affaires in Paris, writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State". He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh… to correct and qualify so much lusciousness."

In January 1766 Hume left Paris to accompany Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. Once there, he and Rousseau fell out, leaving Hume sufficiently worried about the damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau that he would author an account of the dispute, titling it "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau".

In 2014 the University of Cambridge academic Felix Waldmann published a previously unknown letter from Hume to his patron Francis Seymour-Conway, Lord Hertford of 20 March 1766, in which Hume communicated a proposal to Hertford from George Colebrooke, Sir James Cockburn and John Stewart to acquire a half-share of slave plantations in Grenada, an island ceded to Britain after the Treaty of Paris (1763) with the other Windward Islands.

Waldmann observed that the previously unknown letter explicated a letter of 20 June 1766 among Hume's papers in the National Library of Scotland, until then miscatalogued as a letter from a man named "d'Ennesy", but in fact from the Governor of Martinique, Victor-Thérèse Charpentier (1732–76), marquis d'Ennery. In the letter, d'Ennery thanked Hume for a letter of 2 February 1766 on behalf of Stewart, Nelson and possibly Alexander Burnet of Grenada (d. 1790), all evidently involved in the purchase of slave plantations:

As Waldmann noted, Hume's Coutts Bank ledger records that he lent £400 to Stewart on 8 February 1766 and "it is not inconceivable that this money was invested in a plantation". On 25 June 1766, Hume received £6 3s 4d interest for a loan of "4 mon: 19 days" from "Archibald Stewart & Co.", the firm that John Stewart co-administered with his father Archibald Stewart (Lord Provost). An indenture for a plantation purchased by Stewart, Nelson and Colebrooke in Grenada reveals that it held 42 slaves by 3 November 1767. As Waldmann recorded, the evidence of Hume's involvement in the slave trade was considerably clearer than the biographical tradition that had associated his early employment in Bristol with a sugar merchant.

Death

The diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death from a form of abdominal cancer. Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. Hume asked for his body to be interred in a "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will for it to be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest".

Hume died at the southwest corner of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence and with the help of coincidence, suggests that the street was named after Hume.

His tomb stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill, in the Old Calton Cemetery. Adam Smith later recounted Hume's amusing speculation that he might ask Charon, Hades' ferryman, to allow him a few more years of life in order to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition". The ferryman replied, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years… Get into the boat this instant."

Philosophy

A Treatise of Human Nature begins with the introduction: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature.... Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man." The science of man, as Hume explains, is the "only solid foundation for the other sciences" and that the method for this science requires both experience and observation as the foundations of a logical argument. In regards to this, philosophical historian Frederick Copleston (1999) suggests that it was Hume's aim to apply to the science of man the method of experimental philosophy (the term that was current at the time to imply natural philosophy), and that "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics."

Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of logical positivism, a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists (in summary of their verification principle), unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e., either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless. Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate the ways in which ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.

Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological (rather than a semantic) reading of his project. According to this opposing view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was sceptical about claims to knowledge on this basis.

Impressions and ideas

A central doctrine of Hume's philosophy, stated in the very first lines of the Treatise of Human Nature, is that the mind consists of perceptions, or the mental objects which are present to it, and which divide into two categories: "All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas." Hume believed that it would "not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction", which commentators have generally taken to mean the distinction between feeling and thinking. Controversially, Hume, in some sense, may regard the distinction as a matter of degree, as he takes impressions to be distinguished from ideas on the basis of their force, liveliness and vivacity—what Henry E. Allison (2008) calls the "FLV criterion". Ideas are therefore "faint" copies of impressions. For example, experiencing the painful sensation of touching a hot pan's handle is more forceful than simply thinking about touching a hot pan. According to Hume, impressions are meant to be the original form of all our ideas. From this, Don Garrett (2002) has coined the term copy principle, referring to Hume's doctrine that all ideas are ultimately copied from some original impression, whether it be a passion or sensation, from which they derive.

A related distinction in Hume's philosophy, later known as Hume's fork, divides "All the objects of human reason or enquiry ... naturally ... into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact." Relations of ideas, such as mathematical truths, are discoverable by thought alone, and their denial implies a contradiction. Matters of fact are known through experience and their denial is conceivable, even when they are strongly supported by observation. This distinction is central to Hume's account of causation, since causal claims are not relations of ideas: an effect cannot be deduced from the mere idea of its cause.

After establishing the forcefulness of impressions and ideas, these two categories are further broken down into simple and complex: "simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation", whereas "the complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts". When looking at an apple, a person experiences a variety of colour-sensations—what Hume notes as a complex impression. Similarly, a person experiences a variety of taste-sensations, tactile-sensations and smell-sensations when biting into an apple, with the overall sensation—again, a complex impression. Thinking about an apple allows a person to form complex ideas, which are made of similar parts as the complex impressions they were developed from, but which are also less forceful. Hume believes that complex perceptions can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts until perceptions are reached that have no parts of their own, and these perceptions are thus referred to as simple.

Induction and causation

The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the problem of induction. This may be the area of Hume's thought where his scepticism about human powers of reason is most pronounced. The problem revolves around the plausibility of inductive reasoning, that is, reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved. As Hume wrote, induction concerns how things behave when they go "beyond the present testimony of the senses, or the records of our memory". Hume argues that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner, meaning that patterns in the behaviour of objects seem to persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present. Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties—demonstrative reasoning and probable reasoning—and both of these are inadequate. With regard to demonstrative reasoning, Hume argues that the uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that nature might stop being regular. Turning to probable reasoning, Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past. As this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question, it would be circular reasoning. Thus, no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences.

Hume's solution to this problem is to argue that, rather than reason, natural instinct explains the human practice of making inductive inferences. He asserts that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable [sic] necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel." In 1985, and in agreement with Hume, John D. Kenyon writes:

Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for a moment ... but the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief.

Others, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, have demurred from Hume's solution, while some, such as Kant and Karl Popper, have thought that Hume's analysis has "posed a most fundamental challenge to all human knowledge claims".

The notion of causation is closely linked to the problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating events that have been constantly conjoining in experience. It is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. At least three interpretations of Hume's theory of causation are represented in the literature:

'Self'

Empiricist philosophers, such as Hume and George Berkeley, favoured the bundle theory of personal identity. In this theory, "the mind itself, far from being an independent power, is simply 'a bundle of perceptions' without unity or cohesive quality". The self is nothing but a bundle of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle. According to Hume:

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. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

This view is supported by, for example, positivist interpreters, who have seen Hume as suggesting that terms such as "self", "person", or "mind" refer to collections of "sense-contents". A modern-day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons.

However, some philosophers have criticised Hume's bundle-theory interpretation of personal identity. They argue that distinct selves can have perceptions that stand in relation to similarity and causality. Thus, perceptions must already come parcelled into distinct "bundles" before they can be associated according to the relations of similarity and causality. In other words, the mind must already possess a unity that cannot be generated, or constituted, by these relations alone. Since the bundle-theory interpretation portrays Hume as answering an ontological question, philosophers like Galen Strawson see Hume as not very concerned with such questions and have queried whether this view is really Hume's. Instead, Strawson suggests that Hume might have been answering an epistemological question about the causal origin of our concept of the self. In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume declares himself dissatisfied with his earlier account of personal identity in Book 1. Corliss Swain notes that "Commentators agree that if Hume did find some new problem" when he reviewed the section on personal identity, "he wasn't forthcoming about its nature in the Appendix." One interpretation of Hume's view of the self, argued for by the philosopher and psychologist James Giles, is that Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. Rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume rejects the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation, Hume is proposing a "no-self theory" and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought (see anattā). The psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that Hume was in a position to learn about Buddhist thought during his time in France in the 1730s.

Practical reason

Practical reason relates to whether standards or principles exist that are also authoritative for all rational beings, dictating people's intentions and actions. Hume is mainly considered an anti-rationalist, denying the possibility for practical reason, although other philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard, Jean Hampton and Elijah Millgram claim that Hume is not so much of an anti-rationalist as he is just a sceptic of practical reason.

Hume denied the existence of practical reason as a principle because he claimed reason does not have any effect on morality, since morality is capable of producing effects in people that reason alone cannot create. As Hume explains in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740):

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason."

Since practical reason is supposed to regulate our actions (in theory), Hume denied practical reason on the grounds that reason cannot directly oppose passions. As Hume puts it, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Reason is less significant than any passion because reason has no original influence, while "A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence."

Practical reason is also concerned with the value of actions rather than the truth of propositions, so Hume believed that reason's shortcoming of affecting morality proved that practical reason could not be authoritative for all rational beings, since morality was essential for dictating people's intentions and actions.

Ethics

Hume's writings on ethics began in the 1740 Treatise and were refined in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). He understood feeling, rather than knowing, as that which governs ethical actions, stating that "moral decisions are grounded in moral sentiment." Arguing that reason cannot be behind morality, he wrote:

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Hume's moral sentimentalism was shared by his close friend Adam Smith, and the two were mutually influenced by the moral reflections of their older contemporary, Francis Hutcheson. Peter Singer claims that Hume's argument that morals cannot have a rational basis alone "would have been enough to earn him a place in the history of ethics."

Hume also put forward the is–ought problem, later known as Hume's Law, denying the possibility of logically deriving what ought to be from what is. According to the Treatise (1740), in every system of morality that Hume has read, the author begins by stating facts about the world as it is but always ends up suddenly referring to what ought to be the case. Hume demands that a reason should be given for inferring what ought to be the case, from what is the case. This is because it "seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others."

Hume's theory of ethics has been influential in modern-day meta-ethical theory, helping to inspire emotivism, and ethical expressivism and non-cognitivism, as well as Allan Gibbard's general theory of moral judgement and judgements of rationality.

Aesthetics

Hume's ideas about aesthetics and the theory of art are spread throughout his works, but are particularly connected with his ethical writings, and also the essays "Of the Standard of Taste" and "Of Tragedy" (1757). His views are rooted in the work of Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson. In the Treatise (1740), he touches on the connection between beauty and deformity and vice and virtue. His later writings on the subject continue to draw parallels of beauty and deformity in art with conduct and character.

In "Standard of Taste", Hume argues that no rules can be drawn up about what is a tasteful object. However, a reliable critic of taste can be recognised as objective, sensible and unprejudiced, and as having extensive experience. "Of Tragedy" addresses the question of why humans enjoy tragic drama. Hume was concerned with the way spectators find pleasure in the sorrow and anxiety depicted in a tragedy. He argued that this was because the spectator is aware that he is witnessing a dramatic performance. There is pleasure in realising that the terrible events that are being shown are actually fiction. Furthermore, Hume laid down rules for educating people in taste and correct conduct, and his writings in this area have been very influential on English and Anglo-Saxon aesthetics.

Free will, determinism and responsibility

Hume, along with Thomas Hobbes, is cited as a classical compatibilist about the notions of freedom and determinism. Compatibilism seeks to reconcile human freedom with the mechanist view that human beings are part of a deterministic universe, which is completely governed by physical laws. On this point, Hume was influenced greatly by the scientific revolution, particularly by Isaac Newton. Hume argued that the dispute between freedom and determinism continued over 2000 years due to ambiguous terminology. He wrote: "From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot...we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression", and that different disputants use different meanings for the same terms.

Hume defines the concept of necessity as "the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together", and liberty as "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will". He then argues that, according to these definitions, not only are the two compatible, but liberty requires necessity. For if our actions were not necessitated in the above sense, they would "have so little in connexion with motives, inclinations and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other". But, if our actions are not thus connected to the will, then our actions can never be free: they would be matters of "chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence". The philosopher John Passmore writes that confusion has arisen because "necessity" has been taken to mean "necessary connexion". Once this has been abandoned, Hume argues, "liberty and necessity will be found not to be in conflict one with another".

Moreover, Hume goes on to argue that, in order to be held morally responsible, it is required that our behaviour be caused or necessitated, for:

Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil.

Hume describes the link between causality and our capacity to rationally make a decision from this an inference of the mind. Human beings assess a situation based upon certain predetermined events and from that form a choice. Hume believes that this choice is made spontaneously. Hume calls this form of decision making the liberty of spontaneity.

Religion

The philosopher Paul Russell contends that Hume wrote "on almost every central question in the philosophy of religion", and that these writings "are among the most important and influential contributions on this topic." Touching on the philosophy, psychology, history and anthropology of religious thought, Hume's 1757 dissertation "The Natural History of Religion" argues that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all derive from earlier polytheistic religions. He went on to suggest that all religious belief "traces, in the end, to dread of the unknown". Hume had also written on religious subjects in the first Enquiry, as well as later in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Although he wrote a great deal about religion, Hume's personal views have been the subject of much debate. Some modern critics have described Hume's religious views as agnostic or have described him as a "Pyrrhonian skeptic". Contemporaries considered him to be an atheist, or at least un-Christian, enough so that the Church of Scotland seriously considered bringing charges of infidelity against him. Evidence of his un-Christian beliefs can especially be found in his writings on miracles, in which he attempts to separate historical method from the narrative accounts of miracles. Nevertheless, modern scholars have tended to dismiss the claims of Hume's contemporaries describing him as an atheist as coming from religiously intolerant people who did not understand Hume's philosophy. The fact that contemporaries suspected him of atheism is exemplified by a story Hume liked to tell:

The best theologian he ever met, he used to say, was the old Edinburgh fishwife who, having recognized him as Hume the atheist, refused to pull him out of the bog into which he had fallen until he declared he was a Christian and repeated the Lord's prayer.

However, in works such as "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm", Hume specifically seems to support the standard religious views of his time and place. This still meant that he could be very critical of the Catholic Church, dismissing it with the standard Protestant accusations of superstition and idolatry, as well as dismissing as idolatry what his compatriots saw as uncivilised beliefs. He also considered extreme Protestant sects, the members of which he called "enthusiasts", to be corrupters of religion. By contrast, in "The Natural History of Religion", Hume presents arguments suggesting that polytheism had much to commend it over monotheism. Additionally, when mentioning religion as a factor in his History of England, Hume uses it to show the deleterious effect "superstition and fanaticism" has on human progress. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume wrote: "Generally speaking, the errors in religions are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."

As a historian of England

From 1754 to 1762 Hume published The History of England, a six-volume work which extended (according to its subtitle) "from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Inspired by Voltaire's sense of the breadth of history, Hume widened the focus of the field away from merely kings, parliaments and armies, to literature and science as well. He argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty that was ever known amongst mankind". It "must be regarded as an event of cultural importance. In its own day, moreover, it was an innovation, soaring high above its very few predecessors." Hume's History of England made him famous as a historian before he was ever considered a serious philosopher. In this work, Hume uses history to tell the story of the rise of England and what led to its greatness and the disastrous effects that religious fanaticism had on its progress. For Hume, the history of England's rise may give a template for others who would also like to rise to its current greatness.

Hume's The History of England was profoundly impacted by his Scottish background. The science of sociology, which is rooted in Scottish thinking of the eighteenth century, had never before been applied to British philosophical history. Because of his Scottish background, Hume was able to bring an outsider's lens to English history that the insulated English Whigs lacked.

Hume's coverage of the political upheavals of the 17th century relied in large part on the Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1646–69). Generally, Hume took a moderate royalist position and considered revolution unnecessary to achieve necessary reform. Hume was considered a Tory historian and emphasised religious differences more than constitutional issues. Laird Okie explains that "Hume preached the virtues of political moderation, but ... it was moderation with an anti-Whig, pro-royalist coloring." For "Hume shared the ... Tory belief that the Stuarts were no more high-handed than their Tudor predecessors". "Even though Hume wrote with an anti-Whig animus, it is, paradoxically, correct to regard the History as an establishment work, one which implicitly endorsed the ruling oligarchy".

Historians have debated whether Hume posited a universal unchanging human nature, or allowed for evolution and development.

Political theory

Many of Hume's political ideas, such as limited government, private property when there is scarcity, and constitutionalism, are first principles of liberalism. Thomas Jefferson banned the History from the University of Virginia, feeling that it had "spread universal toryism over the land". By comparison, Samuel Johnson thought Hume to be "a Tory by chance [...] for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist." A major concern of Hume's political philosophy is the importance of the rule of law. He also stresses throughout his political essays the importance of moderation in politics, public spirit and regard to the community.

Throughout the period of the American Revolution, Hume had varying views. For instance, in 1768 he encouraged total revolt on the part of the Americans. In 1775 he became certain that a revolution would take place and said that he believed in the American principle and wished the British government would let them be. Hume's influence on some of the American Founding Fathers can be seen in Benjamin Franklin's suggestion at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 that no high office in any branch of government should receive a salary, which is a suggestion Hume had made in his emendation of James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana.

The legacy of religious civil war in 18th-century Scotland, combined with the relatively recent memory of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, had fostered in Hume a distaste for enthusiasm and factionalism. These appeared to him to threaten the fragile and nascent political and social stability of a country that was deeply politically and religiously divided. Hume thought that society is best governed by a general and impartial system of laws; he is less concerned about the form of government that administers these laws, so long as it does so fairly. However, he also clarified that a republic must produce laws, while "monarchy, when absolute, contains even something repugnant to law".

Hume expressed suspicion of attempts to reform society in ways that departed from long-established custom, and he counselled peoples not to resist their governments except in cases of the most egregious tyranny. However, he resisted aligning himself with either of Britain's two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, explaining that "my views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices".

Contributions to economic thought

Hume expressed his economic views in his Political Discourses, which were incorporated in Essays and Treatises as Part II of Essays, Moral and Political. To what extent he was influenced by Adam Smith is difficult to assess; however, both of them had similar principles supported from historical events. At the same time, Hume did not demonstrate the concrete system of economic theory which could be observed in Smith's Wealth of Nations. However, he introduced several new ideas around which the "classical economics" of the 18th century was built. Through his discussions on politics, Hume developed many ideas that are prevalent in the field of economics. This includes ideas on private property, inflation and foreign trade. Referring to his essay "Of the Balance of Trade", the economist Paul Krugman (2012) has remarked that "David Hume created what I consider the first true economic model."

In contrast to Locke, Hume believes that private property is not a natural right. Hume argues it is justified, because resources are limited. Private property would be an unjustified, "idle ceremonial," if all goods were unlimited and available freely. Hume also believed in an unequal distribution of property, because perfect equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry. Perfect equality would thus lead to impoverishment.

David Hume anticipated modern monetarism. First, Hume contributed to the theory of quantity and of interest rate. Hume has been credited with being the first to prove that, on an abstract level, there is no quantifiable amount of nominal money that a country needs to thrive. Second, Hume has a theory of causation which fits in with the Chicago-school "black box" approach. According to Hume, cause and effect are related only through correlation. Hume shared the belief with modern monetarists that changes in the supply of money can affect consumption and investment. Lastly, Hume was a vocal advocate of a stable private sector, though also having some non-monetarist aspects to his economic philosophy. Having a stated preference for rising prices, for instance, Hume considered government debt to be a sort of substitute for actual money, referring to such debt as "a kind of paper credit." He also believed in heavy taxation, believing that it increases effort.

Legacy

Due to Hume's vast influence on contemporary philosophy, a large number of approaches in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science are today called "Humean".

The writings of Thomas Reid, a Scottish philosopher and contemporary of Hume, were often critical of Hume's scepticism. Reid formulated his common sense philosophy, in part, as a reaction against Hume's views.

Hume influenced, and was influenced by, the Christian philosopher Joseph Butler. Hume was impressed by Butler's way of thinking about religion, and Butler may well have been influenced by Hume's writings.

Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), credited Hume with awakening him from his "dogmatic slumber".

According to Arthur Schopenhauer, "there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together".

A. J. Ayer, while introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism in 1936, claimed that his views were "the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume".

Albert Einstein, in 1915, wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating the theory of special relativity.

Hume's problem of induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper. In his autobiography, Unended Quest, he wrote: "Knowledge ... is objective; and it is hypothetical or conjectural. This way of looking at the problem made it possible for me to reformulate Hume's problem of induction." This insight resulted in Popper's major work The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In his Conjectures and Refutations, he wrote that he "approached the problem of induction through Hume", since Hume was "perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified".

Works

1734. A Kind of History of My Life. – MSS 23159 National Library of Scotland.

A letter to an unnamed physician, asking for advice about "the Disease of the Learned" that then afflicted him. Here he reports that at the age of eighteen "there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought" that made him "throw up every other Pleasure or Business" and turned him to scholarship.

1739–1740. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

Hume intended to see whether the Treatise of Human Nature met with success, and if so, to complete it with books devoted to Politics and Criticism. However, as Hume explained, "It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots" and so his further project was not completed.

1740. An Abstract of a Book lately Published: Entitled A Treatise of Human Nature etc.

Anonymously published, but almost certainly written by Hume in an attempt to popularise his Treatise. This work is of considerable philosophical interest as it spells out what Hume considered "The Chief Argument" of the Treatise, in a way that seems to anticipate the structure of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

1741. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (2nd ed.)

A collection of pieces written and published over many years, though most were collected together in 1753–54. Many of the essays are on politics and economics; other topics include aesthetic judgement, love, marriage and polygamy, and the demographics of ancient Greece and Rome. The Essays show some influence from Joseph Addison's Tatler and The Spectator, which Hume read avidly in his youth.

1745. A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh: Containing Some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles Concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintain'd in a Book lately publish'd, intituled A Treatise of Human Nature etc.