David Hume
From Philosopedia
Hume, David (26 April 1711 - 25 August 1776)
A noted Scot, arguably one of the most important philosophers who ever lived, Hume wrote against the possibility of miracles: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” Pierre Sylvain Maréchal (1750 - 1803) cited Hume, the first prominent European to be outspokenly non-theistic, as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. In the Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Antony Flew calls Hume the first major thinker of the modern period whose work was thoroughly secular, this-worldly, and man-centered.
Hume once gave refuge to Jean Jacques Rousseau, although later they had a falling out. Hume is known for pressing the analysis of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of skepticism. He could see no more reason for hypothesizing a substantial soul or mind than for accepting a substantial material world. He was a nominalist, one who rejected any rational or natural theology.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) has a section X, “Of Miracles,” in which Hume did not claim to show that miracles have never occurred. Rather, states William Grey of the department of philosophy, the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, Hume addressed “the epistemological issue of what it is rational to believe, rather than the metaphysical question of what is and is not possible in our sort of world.”
One of his epistemological maxims was
- A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
And in a statement which echoed Ockham and has been called Hume’s Razor, Hume wrote,
- No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”
John M. Robertson evaluates Hume’s work as follows:
- Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, "Of Miracles" (with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early Treatise of Human Nature (1739), posits a principle valid against all supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757), though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism, and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admits, though indirectly, the untenability of deism, and falls back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a development of or a reaction against his work.
Paul Edwards concluded in God and the Philosophers (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998; and God and the Philosophers, Prometheus Books, 2006), “Hume has sometimes been called a deist, but in fact he was what we would now call an agnostic.” Edwards pointed out that the works of Hume and Kant “had a significant impact on Christian and Jewish philosophy, resulting in the widespread adoption of a position known as ‘fideism’—belief in God (or other religious propositions) on the basis of faith alone.”
Although Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature received little interest when published, friendly or hostile, his Natural History of Religion was furiously attacked by Bishop William Warburton in an anonymous tract. Warburton, who had been chaplain to George II and was dean of Bristol, was a learned anti-deist. a warm friend of Alexander Pope and executor of Pope’s estate.
Fortune was not so kind to Hume as fame. At the age of forty, his frugal habits had enabled him to save no more than £1,000. He reckoned his income at £50 a year, but his wants were few and his spirit was cheerful. In 1775 his health began to fail. Knowing that his disorder (hemorrhage of the bowels) would prove fatal, ten days before his death Hume amended his will, making arrangements for his nephew to publish his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. This was because his friend and fellow Scot, Adam Smith, was reluctant to have his own name associated with the work. In a five-page letter to the publisher, “The Life of David Hume, Esq; Written by Himself” (1777), Smith wrote, “Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.” The publisher omitted the reference to “Whining Christians.” Smith also toned down a remark Hume had once made, that perhaps Charon could be talked into delaying his passage to the other word in order to give him more time to rid the world of Christianity. “Good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business; but Charon would reply, O you loitering rogue; that wont happen these 200 years; do you fancy I will give you a lease for so long a time? Get into the boat this instant.” What Smith published, however, was “Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.”
Richard Taylor, emeritus professor of philosophy in Rochester, has contested the idea that Hume was a humanist. “He does not attack faith,” Taylor wrote in Free Inquiry (Spring 1998). “Indeed, the final conclusion of [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion] is that Cleanthes, the defender of religious faith, is the one who came closest to the truth. Hume’s ethical writings were similarly antirationalistic. Morality, he convincingly claimed, rests not on reason, but on sentiment or feeling.”
Although there were some clerical libels about Hume’s last hours, Hume rejected the concept of immortality to his dying day, at which time Adam Smith offered the encomium of Hume: “as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” In a similar vein, D. G. C. MacNabb wrote of Hume, “The manner in which he faced his death from cancer was a paradigm of cheerful philosophic acceptance of annihilation, in the ancient Epicurean tradition.”
Smith, one of Hume’s most intimate friends, described how Hume had gone to London in April, 1776, and soon after his return he “gave up all hope of recovery, but submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency and resignation.” His cheerfulness was so great that many people could not believe he was dying. “Mr. Hume’s magnanimity and firmness were such,” said Adam Smith, that his most affectionate friends knew that they hazarded nothing in talking and writing to him as a dying man, and that, so far from being hurt by this frankness, he was rather pleased and flattered by it.” His chief thought in relation to the possible prolongation of his life, which his friends hoped although he told them their hopes were groundless, was that he would have “the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.”
On August 8, Adam Smith went to Kircaldy, leaving Hume in a very weak state but still very cheerful. On August 28, he received the following letter from Dr. Black, the physician, announcing the philosopher’s death:
- Edinburgh, Monday, August 26, 1776
- Dear Sir, — Yesterday about four o’clock, afternoon, Mr. Hume expired. The near approach of his death became evident in the night between Thursday and Friday, when his disease became excessive, and soon weakened him so much, that be could no longer rise out of his bed. He continued to the last perfectly sensible and free from much pain and feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness. I thought it improper to write to bring you over, especially as I heard that he had dictated a letter to you, desiring you not to come. When he became weak it cost him an effort to speak, and he died in such a happy composure of mind that nothing could exceed it.
When Hume died, Benjamin Franklin proclaimed the date as a portent of the attraction of non-theism which would follow. Hume was buried a few days later on the eastern slope of Calton Hill, Edinburgh, his body being “attended by a great concourse of people, who seem to have anticipated for it the fate appropriate to wizards and necromancers.”
“Thus,” says Adam Smith in a 1776 letter to William Strahan, “died our most excellent and never to be forgotten friend. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” Boswell and others were offended by accounts of Hume’s “pagan” death and once wrote that “Were it not for his infidel writings, every body would love him. He is a plain, obliging, kind-hearted man.” But when Boswell visited Hume seven weeks before his death, Hume told him that religion had a bad effect on morality: “He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad . . . [and] that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.” Boswell was shocked by Hume’s persistent infidelity and view that morality depends not on traditional religion but on an innate moral sense. Hoping for a deathbed conversion, Boswell visited the dying Hume and wrote in his diary,
- He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded that he was a rascal. . . . Speaking of his singular notion that men of religion were generally bad men, he said: “One of the men of the greatest honor that I ever knew is my Lord Marischal, who is a downright atheist. I remember I once hinted something as if I believed in the being of a God, and he would not speak to me for a week.”
Samuel Johnson thought it impossible to believe that Hume was actually dying a non-believer and informed Boswell, “He lies, Sir.” Meanwhile, according to Boswell, Johnson, who never attacked Hume in print, wrote in his journal that “Hume and other infidels…destroyed our principles and put nothing firm in their place.” Knowing he was disliked by Johnson and others for his provocative views, Hume had written that, after all, such English critics were “relapsing into the deepest Stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance.”
When, finally, he would die a model and tranquil death, Hume felt, by his deportment he would further support the views he had so eloquently espoused. Any number of contemporary philosophers would agree, including Paul Edwards. In his Immortality (1992), Edwards, citing Hume as one who rejected not only God but also any belief in survival after death, is but one of many who publicly have stated that Hume is among the great philosophers of all time.
A twelve-foot-high statue in honor of Hume is on High Street in the center of Edinburgh, near Hume’s home. Alexander Stoddard, the sculptor, rather than sculpting Hume in period dress chose to clothe him as a “universal man” who spoke beyond his time. The toga-clad Hume is seated, and in his hand he holds a blank tablet (tabula rasa). (David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton have catalogued Hume’s extensive collection of books, using “The David Hume Library” as the title of their National Library of Scotland work. Based on his 1854 edition, The Philosophical Works of David Hume was published as a four-volume work in 1996.)
(See entry for Paul Edwards, who corrected any view that Hume died a deist. Hume, he wrote, rejected both belief in God and in survival.)
{BDF; CE; CL; ER; E, Anthony Flew and Aram Vartanian; FO; FUK; FUS; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; D. G. C. MacNabb, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4; PA; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}
