Born, in Edinburgh, 26 April 1711. Probably educated at Edinburgh University. Lived in France, 1734–37. Settled at home, at Ninewells, Berwickshire, 1737. Tutor in household of Marquis of Annandale, April 1745 to April 1746. Sec. to Gen. St. Clair in expedition against Canada, 1746–47. With Gen. St. Clair on embassy to Austria and Italy, 1748. Returned to Ninewells, 1749. Removed with his sister to Edinburgh, 1751. Keeper of Advocates’ Library, 28 Jan. 1752 to 1757. Prosecuted historical studies. To Paris, as Sec. to Ambassador, Earl of Hartford, Oct. 1763. Pension of £400, 1765. To England, bringing Rousseau with him, Jan. 1766. Returned to Edinburgh, same year. In London, as Under Secretary of State, 1767–68. Settled in Edinburgh, 1769. Died there, 25 Aug. 1776. Buried in Calton Hill Cemetery. Works: “A Treatise of Human Nature” (anon.), vols. i, ii, 1739; vol. iii, 1740; “Essays, moral and political” (2 vols., anon.), 1741–42; “Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding” (anon.), 1748; “A True Account of the behaviour … of Archibald Stewart” (anon.), 1748; “An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,” 1751; “Political Discourses,” 1752 (2nd edn. same year); “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects” (4 vols.), 1753–54; “The History of England” [under the House of Stuart] (2 vols.), 1754–57; “Four Dissertations,” 1757; “The History of England under the House of Tudor” (2 vols.), 1759; “The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the accession of Henry VII.” (2 vols.), 1762; “A Concise Account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau” (anon.), 1766; “Scotticisms” (anon.), 1770. Posthumous: “Autobiography,” 1777; “Two Essays,” 1777; “Dialogues concerning Natural Religion,” 1779.

Personal

  Nature, I believe, never formed any man more unlike his real character than David Hume. The powers of physiognomy were baffled by his countenance; neither could the most skilful in that science pretend to discern the smallest trace of the faculties of his mind in the unmeaning features of his visage. His face was broad and flat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility; his eyes vacant and spiritless; and the corpulence of his whole person was far better fitted to convey the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than that of a refined philosopher. His speech in English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scotch accent, and his French was, if possible, still more laughable; so that wisdom most certainly never disguised herself before in so uncouth a garb.

  At this time David Hume was living in Edinburgh and composing his “History of Great Britain.” He was a man of great knowledge, and of a social and benevolent temper, and truly the best-natured man in the world. He was branded with the title of Atheist, on account of many attacks on revealed religion that are to be found in his philosophical works, and in many places of his History,—the last of which are still more objectionable than the first, which a friendly critic might call only sceptical. Apropos of this, when Mr. Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, and his brother, lived in Edinburgh with their mother, an aunt of Dr. Robertson’s, and a very respectable woman, she said to her son, “I shall be glad to see any of your companions to dinner, but I hope you will never bring the Atheist here to disturb my peace.” But Robert soon fell on a method to reconcile her to him, for he introduced him under another name, or concealed it carefully from her. When the company parted she said to her son, “I must confess that you bring very agreeable companions about you, but the large jolly man who sat next me is the most agreeable of them all.” “This was the very Atheist,” said he, “mother, that you was so much afraid of.” “Well,” says she, “you may bring him here as much as you please, for he’s the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” This was truly the case with him; for though he had much learning and a fine taste, and was professed a sceptic, though by no means an atheist, he had the greatest simplicity of mind and manners with the utmost facility and benevolence of temper of any man I ever knew. His conversation was truly irresistible, for while it was enlightened, it was naïve almost to puerility.

  Ever since I was acquainted with your works, your talents as a writer have, notwithstanding some differences in abstract principles, extorted from me the highest veneration. But I could scarce have thought that, in spite of differences of a more interesting nature, even such as regard morals and religion, you could ever force me to love and honour you as a man. Yet no religious prejudices, as you would probably term them, can hinder me from doing justice to that goodness and candour which appeared in every line of your letter.

  In attempting to throw some new light upon the abstruse subjects, I wish to preserve the due mean betwixt confidence and despair. But whether I have any success in this attempt or not, I shall always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned more from your writings in this kind, than from all others put together…. Your friendly adversaries, Drs. Campbell and Gerard, as well as Dr. Gregory, return their compliments to you respectfully. A little philosophical society here, of which all the three are members, is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of St. Athanasius; and since we cannot have you upon the bench, you are brought oftener than any other man to the bar, accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness.

  With respect to myself, I am sorry I cannot have the pleasure of taking leave of you in person, before I go into perpetual exile. I sincerely wish you all health and happiness. In whatever part of the earth it may be my fate to reside, I shall always remember with pleasure, and recapitulate with pride, the friendly intercourse I have maintained with one of the best men, and undoubtedly the best writer of the age.

  Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty; for he has no principle. If he is anything he is a Hobbist.

  I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men anywise eminent have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct; not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

  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 he could no longer rise out of his bed…. 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…. When he became very weak, it cost him an effort to speak; and he died in such a happy composure of mind that nothing could exceed it.

  The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind, or the steadiness of his resolutions. His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight, even those who were the objects of it. To his friends, who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities, which contribute more to endear his conversation. And that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. 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.

  I always lived on good terms with Mr. Hume, though I have frankly told him, I was not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him. “But (said I), how much better are you than your books!” He was cheerful, obliging, and instructive; he was charitable to the poor; and many an agreeable hour have I passed with him: I have preserved some entertaining and interesting memoirs of him, particularly when he knew himself to be dying, which I may some time or other communicate to the world. I shall not, however, extol him so very highly as Dr. Adam Smith does, who says, in a letter to Mr. Strahan the Printer (not a confidential letter to his friend, but a letter which is published with all formality:) “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life time 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.” Let Dr. Smith consider. Was not Mr. Hume blest with good health, good spirits, good friends, a competent and increasing fortune? And had he not also a perpetual feast of fame? But, as a learned friend has observed to me, “What trials did he undergo to prove the perfection of his virtue? Did he ever experience any great instance of adversity?”—When I read this sentence delivered by my old “Professor of Moral Philosophy,” I could not help exclaiming with the Psalmist, “Surely I have not more understanding than my teachers!”

  Mr. Burke told me he was well acquainted with David Hume, and that he was a very easy, pleasant, unaffected man, till he went to Paris as secretary to Lord Hertford. There the attention paid him by the French belles savants had the effect of making him somewhat a literary coxcomb. Mr. Burke said that Hume in compiling his history did not give himself a great deal of trouble in examining records, &c.; and the part he most laboured at was the reign of King Charles II., for whom he had unaccountable partiality.

  On the 15th August, 1776, Mr. Hume died in Edinburgh, after having been afflicted for more than a twelvemonth with a complaint which he himself believed would prove fatal. His death, therefore, he had foreseen for some considerable time; yet his cheerfulness and composure of mind remained unabated, and he even exerted, at times, a playful humour, not altogether decorous in so solemn a situation. The world was naturally not unsolicitous to see, whether Mr. Hume, in his dying moments, would express any sentiments different from those which he had published in his philosophical writings. But although he retained the full possession of his faculties to the last, he preserved a most cautious silence on that subject, and never uttered a word that could indicate whether any change had taken place in his opinions, or not. There is every reason to believe, however, that his sentiments remained still the same; for he left for publication, a treatise, entitled, “Dialogues on Natural Religion,” of a similar strain with those which had been printed during his lifetime.

  Mallet’s wife, a foolish and conceited woman, one evening introduced herself to David Hume at an assembly, saying, “We deists, Mr. Hume, should know one another.” Hume was exceedingly displeased and disconcerted, and replied, “Madam, I am no deist; I do not so style myself; neither do I desire to be known by that appellation.”

  His temper was calm, not to say cold; but though none of his feelings were ardent, all were engaged on the side of virtue. He was free from the slightest tincture of malignity or meanness; his conduct was uniformly excellent.

  Hume is an author so celebrated, a philosopher so serene, and a man so extremely amiable, if not fortunate, that we may be surprised to meet his name inscribed in a catalogue of literary calamities. Look into his literary life, and you will discover that the greatest portion was mortified and angered; and that the stoic so lost his temper, that had not circumstances intervened which did not depend on himself, Hume had abandoned his country and changed his name!

  Hume’s character of himself was well drawn and full of candour; he spoke of himself as he ought, but added what surprised us all, that plain as his manners were, and apparently careless of attention, vanity was his predominant weakness. That vanity led him to publish his essays which he grieved over, not that he had changed his opinions, but that he thought he had injured society by disseminating them. “Do you remember the sequel of that affair?” said Hume. “Yes, I do,” replied my mother, laughing. “You told me that although I thought your character a sincere one, it was not so; there was a particular feature omitted that we were still ignorant of, and that you would add it. Like a fool, I gave you the MS. and you thrust it into the fire, adding, ‘Oh! what an idiot I had nearly proven myself to be to leave such a document in the hands of a parcel of women!’”

  Through the whole of the memorials of Hume’s early feelings we find the traces of a bold and far-stretching literary ambition…. “I was seized very early,” he tells us in his “Own Life,” “with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and a great source of my enjoyments.” Joined to this impulse, we find a practical philosophy, partaking far more of the stoical than of that sceptical school with which his metaphysical writings have identified him; a morality of self-sacrifice and endurance for the accomplishment of great ends…. He was an economist of all his talents from early youth. No memoir of a literary man presents a more cautious and vigilant husbandry of the mental powers and acquirements. There is no instance of a man of genius who has wasted less in idleness or in unavailing pursuits. Money was not his object, nor was temporary fame;… but his ruling object of ambition, pursued in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amid the blaze of fame, was to establish a permanent name, resting on the foundation of literary achievements, likely to live as long as human thought endured, and mental philosophy was studied.

  We have no authenticated record of Hume ever opening to any human being the religious, or irreligious convictions of his soul. A good-natured and sociable man, kind and indulgent to those with whom he came in contact, he passed through life a solitary being, certainly with no God and apparently with no human being to whom to unbosom himself.

  In 1770, Hume built himself a house in the New Town of Edinburgh, which was then springing up. It was the first house in the street, and a frolicsome young lady chalked upon the wall “St. David’s Street.” Hume’s servant complained to her master, who replied, “Never mind, lassie, many a better man has been made a saint of before,” and the street retains its title to this day.

  Those who differ most widely from the philosophy of Hume cannot fail to appreciate much in the character of the man. His life showed a consistent course of self-command. His passions were kept under the steady control of the reason. He was habitually generous, direct, and open as the day, with no twist in his nature, and with nothing servile. He may be truly described as a man “without dissimulation,”—which is more than can be said of some of his opponents,—as a man of his integrity and candour. His intellectual honesty showed itself in his love of all that could be verified, and in his hatred of what seemed to him to be unrealities. If he had no Celtic enthusiasm, he had in compensation the sunny Saxon temperament; and if never radiant, he was usually serene and cheerful. He had an almost equal appreciation of the Stoic and the Epicurean view of life; but it was towards the latter that his sympathies practically tended. Unaffected, easy-minded, bright, and sociable, but also eminently secular, we find no trace in him of introspection, or of the seriousness and moral thoughtfulness that attend it. He had a clear head, and a generous heart—add to this the absence of jealousy, that common failing of literary circles and coteries; but he lacked the elevation and the nobleness that are usually associated with the philosophy of idealism. He had a singularly keen intellect; but his intellectual vision was singularly limited.

  Dr. Adam Smith relates how Hume diverted himself, a short time before his death, by inventing jocular excuses he might make to Charon, and Charon’s surly answers in return. “I thought I might say to him, ‘Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition; allow me a little time to see how the public receive the alterations.’ But Charon would answer, ‘Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue!’”

  His thorough good nature, as well as his indifference, prevented him from obtruding his opinions upon any who did not sympathise; while no man was a heartier friend or more warmly appreciative of merit—especially in Scotsmen.

  He is with the full ardour of his being a man of society. He delights in the companionship of his fellows, works surely into the intimacy of close friendship, and is ever ready for rippling, glancing humour, giving and receiving electric impulse from casual acquaintance. These features are not commonly associated, but they were united in him. There are two natures in the man, two lives within this one life; the inner, that of the abstract thinker living within a charmed circle where he does not meet friends, save one or two, and where he cultivates an independence that owns no authority; and the outer life of the man who is free of spirit, ready for all occurrences, and given to a playfulness of disposition, and even joviality, which to most onlookers must seem inconsistent with the high philosophic gift. Yet these two natures are indissolubly united—they are constantly appearing in parallel relations as if they were distinct. Together they constitute a nature rarely met with. It were easy, looking now at the one feature, now at the other, to bring home a charge of inconsistency. In a sense, he is inconsistently a thinker who scorns the ordinary levels of thought; a humorist who revels in the pleasures of the passing hour as if life were a play. These apparently contradictory features are as prominent as they have ever appeared in any human life—together they constitute the actual David Hume—philosopher and man of the world.

  No man could have sought for a companion more delightful or entertaining than Hume. With wide experience, with the dignity of an independent thinker, with the concentration and abundant stores of the student, he united a simplicity which thought no evil, and an almost childlike pleasure in the happiness of social intercourse. He fenced himself in with no artificial barrier of haughtiness or reserve. He had an easy flow of humour, which was in his case accompanied, as it not always is, by that social tact which is rooted in good-nature and benevolence. “His conversation,” says one of his friends, “was irresistible, for while it was enlightened, it was naïve almost to puerility.” He excelled above all in that perfect form of raillery which Swift has described—the art of making apparent sarcasm suggest the best qualities of those against whom the sarcasm appears to be directed. No man could attract more successfully all characters and all ages. He could soothe the aged or the unfortunate as happily as he could please the young and frolicsome. With all his calmness of temper, and all his boldness of speculation, he was like a child in his discernment of character, and partook in no degree of that useful but not altogether pleasant faculty of reading character with a judicial eye. If he was an object of suspicion to those whose peace might be disturbed by rumors of his atheism, they were quickly disarmed by his irresistible personality.

A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40

  Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my “Treatise of Human Nature.” It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.

  From what has been already said, it may be seen that we are not to look in Mr. Hume’s “Treatise” for any regular or connected system. It is neither a scheme of Materialism nor a scheme of Spiritualism; for his reasonings strike equally at the root of both these theories. His aim is to establish a universal scepticism, and to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties…. With the single exception of Bayle, he has carried this sceptical mode of reasoning farther than any other modern philosopher.

  The philosophy of Hume, as a whole, originated and fell with himself. A more partial and less daring scepticism might probably have gained many followers; but it is the inevitable result of every system, professing universal unbelief, to destroy itself. The man who by any process of reasoning involves every portion of human knowledge in doubt, instead of persuading any one to follow his conclusions, does little more than controvert his own principles by a “reductio ad absurdum.”

  This treatise is by far the most important of all his philosophical works. If we except certain speculations in history and political economy, it contains nearly all his favourite ideas. He devoted to it all the resources of his mighty intellect. He had read extensively, pondered deeply, and taken immense pains in polishing his style. He could scarcely, indeed, be called a learned man, in the technical sense of the term, but he was well informed. We could have wished that he had possessed wider sympathies with earnest seekers after truth in all ages, but this was not in the nature of the man. His knowledge of Greek was very imperfect at this time (he afterwards renewed his acquaintance with that language); what he knew of Greek philosophy was chiefly through Cicero (his very pictures of the Stoics and Epicureans are Roman rather than Grecian), and he never entered into the spirit of such deep and earnest thinkers as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,—he tells us somewhere that the fame of Aristotle is utterly decayed. In respect even of modern writers, he never comprehended the profundity of such men as Cudworth and Descartes in the previous century; and he had no appreciation of the speculations of Clarke and Leibnitz, who lived in the age immediately preceding his own. He belongs to the cold, elegant, doubting, and secular eighteenth century; and, setting little value on antiquity, he builds for the present and the future on the philosophy of his own time.

  Although it is characterised by a marked simplicity of arrangement, it presents some of the most subtle thought and searching reasoning to be found in any literature.

  The “Treatise of Human Nature” is clear, forcible, and untechnical. Its most striking characteristics are its spontaneity and individuality. Hume owed little to academic training, and wrote his earlier works at a distance from centres of learning, without access to large libraries. The literary beauties of the “Treatise,” however, are marred by its structural defects. It is a series of brilliant fragments rather than a well-rounded whole, and is concerned more with criticism of metaphysical opinions from the point of view of Hume’s theory of knowledge than with the construction of a complete system of philosophy.

  Hume had taken his place in the literature of his country and of the world. He himself, however, was depressed with sense of failure, for he says, “Never was literary attempt more unfortunate than my ‘Treatise of Human Nature.’” He felt disappointed that it did not even “excite a murmur among the zealots.” His power had been concentrated to the utmost, but renown did not come to him, as he had anticipated. What he could do in philosophic thought was accomplished, and he was convinced that the writing was not of slight significance; but the reading public did not know what had been done—his contribution was not of the character to attract readers.

  It was written when he was only twenty-five, and probably no book of the kind, destined to exercise such an extended influence, was ever written by a man of that age, certainly never with greater ease or more supreme command of his own ideas.

Essays

  I am strongly tempted too to have a stroke at Hume in parting. He is the author of a little book called “Philosophical Essays,” in one part of which he argues against the being of a God, and in another (very needlessly you will say) against the possibility of miracles. He has crowned the liberty of the press. And yet he has a considerable post under the Government. I have a great mind to do justice on his arguments against miracles, which I think might be done in few words. But does he deserve notice? Is he known amongst you? Pray answer me these questions. For if his own weight keeps him down, I should be sorry to contribute to his advancement to any place but the pillory.

  I have not yet read the last Review, but dipping into it, I accidentally fell upon their account of Hume’s “Essay on Suicide.” I am glad that they have liberality enough to condemn the licentiousness of an author whom they so much admire:—I say liberality, for there is as much bigotry in the world to that man’s errors as there is in the hearts of some secretaries to their peculiar modes and tenets. He is the Pope of thousands, as blind and presumptuous as himself. God certainly infatuates those who will not see. It were otherwise impossible, that a man, naturally shrewd and sensible, and whose understanding has had all the advantages of constant exercise and cultivation, could have satisfied himself, or have hoped to satisfy others with such palpable sophistry as has not even the grace of fallacy to recommend it.

  I like his “Essays” better than anything I have read these many days. He has prejudices, he does maintain errors,—but he defends his positions with so much ingenuity, that one would be almost sorry to see him dislodged. His essays on “Superstition and Enthusiasm,” on “The Dignity and Meanness of Human Nature,” and several others, are in my opinion admirable both in matter and manner, particularly the first, where his conclusions might be verified by instances with which we are all acquainted. The manner, indeed, of all is excellent; the highest and most difficult effect of art—the appearance of its absence—appears throughout.

  Of the “Political Discourses” it would be difficult to speak in terms of too great commendation. They combine almost every excellence which can belong to such a performance…. The great merit, however, of these discourses, is their originality, and the new system of politics and political economy which they unfold. Mr. Hume is, beyond all doubt, the author of the modern doctrines which now rule the world of science, which are to a great extent the guide to practical statesmen, and are only prevented from being applied in their fullest extent to the affairs of nations, by clashing interests and the ignorant prejudices of certain powerful classes; for no one deserving the name of legislator pretends to doubt the soundness of the theory, although many held that the errors of our predecessors require a slow recourse to right principle in conducting the practical business of the world…. It is certain that Dr. Smith’s celebrated work, with all its great merits, is less of a regular system than the detached essays of Mr. Hume. The originality of the latter’s opinions is wholly undeniable: they were published full fourteen years before the “Wealth of Nations.”

  “Essays on Commerce, Interest, Balance of Trade, Money, Jealousy of Trade, and Public Credit,” display the same felicity of style and illustration that distinguish the other works of their celebrated author. His views of the commercial intercourse that should subsist among nations are alike enlightened and liberal: and he has admirably exposed the groundlessness of the prejudices then entertained against a free intercourse with France, and the fear of being deprived, were commercial restraints abolished, of a sufficient supply of bullion…. Hume and Smith saw and pointed out the injurious operation of the Methuen treaty, and exposed the absurdity of our sacrificing the trade with France to that of so beggarly a country as Portugal.

  Of all the English deistical works of the eighteenth century, the influence of two and only two survived the controversy. Hume’s “Essay on Miracles,” though certainly not unquestioned and unassailed, cannot be looked upon as obsolete or uninfluential.

  No writer on miracles omits to notice Hume. To refute him has been the ambition of every Christian apologist for the last hundred years; but what could really be said in reply was said in his lifetime. It is recorded of a professor in the University of Edinburgh that he annually refuted the great sceptic, and with as much complacency as regularity. A portion of his lectures was always introduced with the words—“Having considered these different systems, I will now, gentlemen, proceed to refute the ingenious theories of our late respected townsman, Mr. David Hume.” As there really was but one answer, that answer has been repeated with variations and amplifications by all who have undertaken to meet his objections.

  “I flatter myself,” says Hume, in the “Essay upon Miracles,” “that I have discovered an argument of a like nature” (the reference is to Tillotson’s argument on transubstantiation), “which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and, consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.” This preliminary trumpet-flourish, intended probably to startle the drowsy champions of the faith into some consciousness of the philosopher’s claims, has been as nearly fulfilled as could have been expected. Hume’s argument, neglected for the moment, soon attracted the assaults of theologians. Since his day eager apologists have denounced it, reasoned against it, passed it under the most rigid examination, and loudly and frequently proclaimed the discovery of some fatal flaw. The fact that the argument is being answered to this day proves that its efficacy is not exhausted. Every new assault is a tacit admission that previous assaults have not demolished the hostile works. It is needless to enquire how far this particular logical crux has contributed to the decay amongst rational thinkers of a belief in the miraculous. That belief forms part of a system of thought, and grows faint as the general system loses its hold upon the intellect. The prominence given to the essay, except as an admirable specimen of the dialectical art, may, therefore, be easily exaggerated. No single essay has sapped the bases of belief. On the other hand, the essay is but a small part of Hume’s attack upon the fundamental dogmas of theology. His popular reputation, indeed, is almost exclusively based upon it; he is known as the author of this particular dilemma; all else that he wrote is ignored; and so exclusively has attention been fixed upon these particular pages, that few of his assailants take any notice even of the immediately succeeding essay, which forms with it a complete and connected argument.

  The germs of several of Adam Smith’s economic doctrines, and some of Bentham’s, are to be found in these “Essays.” In literary form their merit is great; but it is greater as regards their substance. They are weighted with economic wisdom, with happy and suggestive thoughts on questions of Government; and on the relations of party to party their political sagacity is great. If the “Wealth of Nations” was the chief contribution to the economic literature of England of the eighteenth century, these “Essays” prepared the way for it; and Smith’s debt to Hume was both direct and indirect.

History of England, 1754–62

  Hume has out-done himself in this new History, in shewing his contempt of Religion. This is one of those proof charges which Arbuthnot speaks of in his treatise of political lying, to try how much the publick will bear. If his history be well received, I shall conclude that there is even an end of all pretence to Religion.

  In 1752, The Faculty of Advocates chose me their librarian, an office for which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library. I then formed the plan of writing the “History of England;” but being frightened with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of seventeen hundred years, I commenced with the accession of the House of Stuart, an epoch when, I thought, the misrepresentations of faction began chiefly to take place. I was, I own, sanguine in my expectations of the success of this work. I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and, as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and secretary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against a man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of their fury was over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion. Mr. Millar told me, that in a twelvemonth he sold only forty-five copies of it. I scarcely, indeed, heard of one man in the three kingdoms, considerable for rank or letters, that could endure the book. I must only except the primate of England, Dr. Herring, and the primate of Ireland, Dr. Stone, which seem two odd exceptions. These dignified prelates separately sent me messages not to be discouraged.

  The “History” of Mr. Hume is indeed very far from being laudable. It is a mere apology for prerogative from beginning to end: and, tho’ the best apology which hath been offered, is yet very weak; which shews the cause must be desperate when even so great an advocate utterly fails in its defence. At the same time that his political principles led him to exalt the prerogative, his philosophic opinions forced him to depress the church: while every body knows that no church, no king. Hence his work is one chaos of heterogeneous axioms, and misrepresented events.

  It is surprising, on examining any particular point, how superficial Hume is, and how many particulars are omitted that would have made his book much more entertaining; but perhaps we have no right to expect this in a general history.

  For a judicious choice of materials, and a happy disposition of them, together with perspicuity of style in recording them, this writer was hardly ever exceeded; especially in the latter part of his work, which is by far the most elaborate. The earlier part of his history is too superficial.

  The perfect composition, the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps: the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival, often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.

  The history of England was investigated by Hume, not with the eyes of a patriot but of a philosopher; and from each author whom he consulted, selecting alternately the choicest diction, he constructed an artful narrative, in which strength, precision, elegance, and a copious simplicity are infinitely diversified; a narrative interspersed throughout with the most profound reflections; and, though partial, perhaps, to a particular system or party, enriched with the most philosophical views of the arguments and peculiar opinions of the times.

  It is therefore in his “History of England,” and principally in those parts of it which were the last composed, that we must look for that style of which the merit is universally confessed. Easy and natural as it appears to be, it was the cultivated fruit of long practice, and a sedulous attention to those models which he esteemed the best.

  His greatest work, and that which naturally claims most attention, was his “History of England,” which, notwithstanding great defects, will probably be at last placed at the head of historical compositions. No other narrative seems to unite, in the same degree, the two qualities of being instructive and affecting. No historian approached him in the union of the talent of painting pathetic scenes with that of exhibiting comprehensive views of human affairs.

  The great standards of historical composition which England produced during the eighteenth century are among the most important features of belles lettres. In this species of literature they have surpassed all other nations, if only in leading the way, and as historical models for foreign imitation. Unless I am mistaken, Hume ranks with the foremost in this department…. His description of earlier times is very unsatisfactory: having no affection for them, he could not sufficiently realize them.

  The name of Hume is far the more considerable which occurs in the period to which we have alluded. But, though his thinking was English, his style was entirely French; and being naturally of a cold fancy, there is nothing of that eloquence or richness about him which characterizes the writings of Taylor, and Hooker, and Bacon, and continues, with less weight of matter, to please in those of Cowley and Clarendon.

  Hume was not, indeed, learned and well-grounded enough for those writers and investigators of history who judged his works from the usual point of view, because he was not only negligent in the use of the sources of history, but also superficial.

  The author, indeed, wanted that resolute spirit of industry and research, which alone can lead an historian to become thoroughly acquainted with the valuable writers of the middle ages.

  Hume often puts the names of the monkish writers in his margin; but I fear all he knew of them was through the media of other writers. He has some mistakes which could not have occurred had he really consulted the originals…. Hume is certainly an admirable writer: his style bold, and his reflections shrewd and uncommon; but his religious and political notions have too often warped his judgment.

  Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry.

  In Hume’s narrative the earlier portions were the last composed. To go backwards is scarce less difficult in writing than in walking; and it is no small proof of his merit and ability as an historian, to have overcome that difficulty of his composition, and left it hardly perceptible to a common reader.

  His readiness to rest satisfied with whatever first offered itself, provided it suited his present purpose, without either scrutinizing its internal evidence, or verifying it by reference to earlier and better authority, is forced upon our notice in his account of the battle of Shrewsbury.

  As to his methodicalness, no man ever had a larger view than Hume; he always knows where to begin and end. In his history he frequently rises, though a cold man naturally, into a kind of epic height as he proceeds. His description of the Commonwealth, for example, where all is delineated as with a crayon; one sees there his large mind, moreover, not without its harmonies.

  And now, when we enter upon the reign of William, we have no longer the assistance of the philosophic Hume. We have no longer within our reach those penetrating observations, those careless and inimitable beauties, which were so justly the delight of Gibbon, and, with whatever prejudices they may have been accompanied, and, however suspicious may be those representations which they sometimes enforce and adorn, still render the loss of his pages a subject of the greatest regret, and leave a void which it is impossible adequately to supply.

  A man of his exceedingly inquiring and unrestrained mind, living in the midst of the eighteenth century, might have been expected to have espoused what is called the popular side in the great questions of English history, the side, in later language, of the movement. Yet we know that Hume’s learning is the other way. Accidental causes may perhaps have contributed to this; the prejudice of an ingenious mind against the opinions which he found most prevalent around him; the resistance of a restless mind to the powers that be, as natural as implicit acquiescence in them is to an indolent mind. But the main cause apparently is to be sought in his abhorrence of puritanism, alike repugnant to him in its good and its evil. His subtle and active mind could not bear its narrowness and bigotry, his careless and epicurean temper had no sympathy with its earnestness and devotion. The popular cause in our great civil contests was in his eyes the cause of fanaticism: and where he saw fanaticism he saw that from which his whole nature recoiled, as the greatest of all conceivable evils.

  Considered as calm and philosophic narratives, the histories of Hume and Robertson will remain as standard models for every future age. The just and profound reflections of the former, the inimitable clearness and impartiality with which he has summed up the arguments on both sides, on the most momentous questions which have agitated England, as well as the general simplicity, uniform clearness and occasional pathos, of this story, must forever command the admiration of mankind. In vain we are told that he is often inaccurate, sometimes partial; in vain are successive attacks published on detached parts of his narrative, by party zeal or antiquarian research, his reputation is undiminished; successive editions issuing from the press attest the continued sale of his work; and it continues its majestic course through the sea of time, like a mighty three-decker, which never even condescends to notice the javelins darted at its sides from the hostile canoes which from time to time seek to impede its progress.

  No one can be surprised if in so short a time alloted to the whole work, far more attention was given to the composition of the narrative than to the preparation of the materials. It was altogether impossible that, in so short a period, the duty of the historian should be diligently performed. The execution of the work answers to the mode of its performance. But if the “History” be not diligently prepared, is it faithfully written? There are numberless proofs of the contrary; but we have the most express evidence in the author’s own statement to prove this position.

  Is it possible that this false pleader, this avowed traducer, this narrator of a garbled story, can be the first of British historians? That a writer so unreliable can have won the attention and applause of the best minds of his own and all succeeding ages? That Mackintosh and Brougham and Romilly can have united to place him where he now stands, first among his rivals; while the honest intellect of the Anglo-Saxons of every land cherishes as a priceless treasure this work, in which there is so much that is false and so much that is unworthy? There can only be applied to this singular problem in literature the simplest solution. What we admire in Hume’s History is the display of intellectual power. We read it, not so much for information, as for an agreeable intellectual exercise. In this view it was written, in this it is read. We admire its subtile disputations, its artful array of facts, the genius which shines in its false narrative, and illuminates its unsound disputations. The consciousness that its narrative is unsound heightens the interest of the tale.

  David Hume was not a philosophic historian, for many of his inaccuracies might have been avoided, had he been willing to sacrifice indolence to duty, and encounter the labor of research; he was not a philosophic historian, because his prejudices sometimes made him an eulogist, when he should have been an impartial judge. No man will ever form a correct opinion of any monarch of the house of Stuart from his pages. Hume has no sympathy with the deep-seated love of liberty and sense of justice that glowed in the bosoms of those who opposed the arbitrary claim of prerogative in his favorite kings. Poorer stuff than the Stuarts to make Kings of, never lived in England, and yet no one would learn it from Hume.

  His “History,” notwithstanding some defects which the progress of time and of knowledge is every year making more considerable, or at least enabling us better to perceive, and some others which probably would have been much the same at whatever time the work had been written, has still merits of so high a kind as a literary performance that it must ever retain its place among our few classical works in this department, of which it is as yet perhaps the greatest. In narrative clearness, grace, and spirit, at least, it is not excelled, scarcely equalled, by any other completed historical work in the language.

  For ease, beauty, and picturesque power of style, there was then nothing like it in the range of English historical literature: and for these qualities it yet holds an honoured place on our book-shelves. Yet the day of Hume as an authority on English history has long gone by. The light of modern research has detected countless flaws and distortions in the great book, which was carefully, even painfully, revised as to its style, but which was formed in great part of a mass of statements often gathered from very doubtful sources, and heaped together, almost unsifted and untried…. He wrote exquisitely; but he sometimes spent the beauty of his style upon mere chaff and saw-dust. Much the same thing it was, as if a jeweller should frame a costly casket and grace it with every ornament of art, that its rich beauty might at last enshrine a few worthless pebbles or beads of coloured glass.

  Happily, the influence of Hume’s calumnies has long been an expiring influence. But one of their sources is likely to be perennial. It was not mere Jacobitism which made David Hume distort so perseveringly the career and character of Walter Ralegh. Fire and water are not more antipathetic than were the natures of Ralegh and of Hume. Amongst men of genius, it would be hard to find in more salient contrast breadth and narrowness.

  David Hume was, like Machiavelli, a man of genius. His mind was one of great power and originality. He was a most acute and even subtle reasoner. It has been said that the object of his reasonings was not to attain truth, but to show that it was unattainable. I am inclined to think that his frequent failures in attaining truth are rather attributable to a bad habit he had acquired, through indolence, of carelessness or indifference about the accuracy of his facts.

  The rapidity with which his history was executed, at a time when but little aid was to be derived from the labours of any predecessors in the same field, shows, not, if fairly considered, that he did not devote himself to such diligent research as is the boast of some modern historians; but that, in fact, the means for such investigation were not at that time accessible. Original documents, where they were known to exist, were jealously guarded. And Hume had to trust to his innate sagacity to extract the truth from sources which to a less penetrating intellect would scarcely have conveyed any indication of information. Yet so great was his native shrewdness that, while drawing only from materials open to all, he threw a perfectly new light on many of the most important transactions and greatest characters in our annals, which since his time has been generally admitted to be the true one.

  It still occupies a chief place among English histories, and rightly so, for it is based on the careful study of original sources, the materials are fully mastered and clearly developed, and due attention is paid to the lessons history teaches; persons and times are represented from an impartial point of view on the whole, and the style is fascinating throughout.

  The “History” as a whole is of no high authority. From first to last it is evidently the work of an essayist and “philosopher,” who regarded truth as subordinate to effect, and looked to his own ends, personal and philosophical. To apologize for the misconduct of the Stuarts, to write down the British Constitution, as well as the Christian religion, or at least so much of both as were not then admired by the higher order of the state, were among the objects he sought to attain.

  He was a man of large reading and profound thought, who could see more clearly than others into the relations of causes and effects, and into the relative significance of the events he had to describe in their reference to events elsewhere; and he had a peculiar gift in the discrimination of the true from the imaginary or the false. There was a universal testimony to the superiority of Hume’s work in the countless editions of “Hume and Smollett’s History,”—the inferior author being trusted of necessity when the superior was not available.

  It is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods which renders him, in spite of his unfairness and defective erudition, in spite of his toryism and infidelity, the popular historian of England.

  This work, written more than a hundred years ago, has enjoyed the rank of a classic in historical literature from the day of its completion to the present time. In point of clearness, elegance, and simplicity of style it has never been surpassed. This peculiarity, however, united as it is with the calm and philosophical spirit with which the author contemplates the events he describes, has given the work a rank to which its strictly historical merits never would have entitled it. Indeed, Hume was not an historical investigator in any true sense of the term. He was under much greater obligations to some of his predecessors than he ever acknowledged. With some propriety it may be said that Carte was the miner, while Hume was only the finisher of the materials brought together by his more industrious and thorough predecessor. An historical work written as Hume wrote could hardly fail to abound in gross errors. For a long time many of the mistakes of this history escaped detection; but of late the errors have been shown to be so abundant and so flagrant that the opinion of scholars concerning the value of the work has been completely modified.

  The more closely it is looked into, it will be seen that Hume the Historian cannot be separated from Hume the Philosopher. The fundamental doctrine of empiricism may be seen underlying the whole of the “History.” He wrote the latter work after he had explicitly abandoned a philosophy of a priori principles, and come thoroughly under contemporary influence. A Scotsman trained in France, and a follower of the experiential method, he read the history of his country under the prejudices of his system and position; and he wrote it far too quickly. While his brother historian, Robertson, spent more than six years over his “Scotland,” Hume wrote the first volume of his “England” in little more than a year; and when revising it, he altered rapidly, without the necessary research. His bias against the Whigs grew with that on which it fed. If—as was the case—many of the Roundheads were fanatics, and the majority of the Cavaliers were of a more tolerant spirit, that was enough for Hume. He at once exaggerated both. His historical style is undoubtedly good. It is specially clear and vivid—not a dry digest of annals, but a picturesque narrative, lit up by gleams of happy characterisation, and many felicitous side-comments on men and things.

  Gave himself no time for such research as would now be thought necessary. He became more superficial as he receded further into periods with which he had little sympathy, and was studying merely for the nonce. His literary ability, however, made the book incomparably superior to the diluted party pamphlets or painful compilations which had hitherto passed for history; nor could the author of the “Political Discourses” fail to give proofs of sagacity in occasional reflections. His brief remarks upon the social and economical conditions of the time (see Appendix to James I) were then an original addition to mere political history. The dignity and clearness of the style are admirable. The book thus became, as it long continued to be, the standard history of England, and has hardly been equalled in literary merit.

  Is a classic; though it can hardly be said to be a good book.

  It is probable that his History will long hold place on our library shelves; its style might almost be counted a model historic style—if we were to have models (of which the wisdom is doubtful). It is clear, it is precise, it is perspicuous, it is neat to a fault. It might almost be called a reticent style, in its neglect of those wrappings of wordy illustration and amplification which so many historians employ. He makes us see his meaning as if we looked through crystal; and if the crystal is toned by his prejudices—as it is and very largely—it is altogether free from the impertinent decorative arabesques of the rhetorician.

  The old accusations against its partisanship are ridiculous. Hume’s Toryism did not lead him nearly so far from absolute impartiality as Lingard’s “Popery,” as Macaulay’s Whiggishness, as Mr. Green’s neo-Liberalism; and he compensated it by a sort of transcendence of humour which, unfortunately, none of these three shared. Much more serious defects, the first more or less unavoidable, the second the taint of the time, were the incompleteness of his information, and the rather cavalier fashion in which he treated what information he had. But it may be doubted whether his mastery of a sort—and a very excellent sort—of style did not compensate even for these.

  Is, in the writer’s endeavour to make it a philosophic whole, in its clearness of narrative and purity of style, our first literary history. But he is neither exact, nor does he care to be exact. He does not love his subject, and he wants sympathy with mankind and with his country. His manner is the manner of Voltaire, passionless, keen, and elegant.

  Modern critics have shown that Hume’s pages swarm with inaccuracies, and that, what is a worse fault, his predilections for Tory ideas lead him to do wilful injustice to the opponents of arbitrary power. All this, however, is little to the point; Hume is no longer appealed to as an authority. He is read for his lucid and beautiful English, for the skill with which he marshals vast trains of events before the mental eye, for his almost theatrical force in describing the evolution of a crisis. If we compare his work from this point of view with all that had preceded it in English literature, we shall see how eminent is the innovation we owe to Hume. He first made history readable.

Philosophy

  Hume, the most subtle, if not the most philosophical, of the deists; who, by perplexing the relations of cause and effect, boldly aimed to introduce a universal scepticism, and to pour a more than Egyptian darkness into the whole region of morals.

  Dr. Reid rendered good service to the cause of truth, in opposition to the sceptical philosophy of Hume, who dexterously availed himself of the authority of Locke in the support of his own mischievous dogmas.

  In these investigations of Hume, philosophical scepticism stands forth with a power, depth, and logical consistency, such as had never before appeared; recommended, moreover, by great correctness, clearness, and elegance of diction.

  His all-pervading and destructive scepticism determined the course of English philosophy. Since his day, nothing further has been effected in this department of inquiry than strenuous efforts to arrest pernicious influences, tending to sap the very foundations of moral order and to uphold the fabric of necessary convictions by means of various bulwarks.

  Those of my writings to which you refer will be read by no nation: a few speculative men will take them; but none will be rendered more gloomy, more dissatisfied, or more unsocial by them. Rarely will you find one who, five minutes together, can fix his mind even on the surface: some new tune, some idle project, some light thought, some impracticable wish, will generally run, like the dazzling haze of summer on the dry heath, betwixt them and the reader. A bagpipe will swallow them up, a strathspey will dissipate them, or Romance with the death-rattle in her throat will drive them away into dark staircases and charnel-houses.

  The Scepticism of Hume, like an electric spark, sent life through the paralyzed opinions; philosophy awoke to renovated vigor, and its problems were again to be considered in other aspects, and subjected to a more searching analysis…. To Hume we owe the philosophy of Kant, and, therefore, also, in general, the latter philosophy of Germany. Kant explicitly acknowledges that it was by Hume’s reductio ad absurdum of the previous doctrine of Casuality, he was first roused from his dogmatic slumber…. To Hume, in like manner, we owe the philosophy of Reid, and, consequently, what is now distinctively known in Europe as the Philosophy of the Scottish School.

  Hume, the prince of dilettanti, from whose writings one will hardly learn that there is such a thing as truth, far less that it is attainable; but only that the pro and con of everything may be argued with infinite ingenuity, and furnishes a fine intellectual exercise.

  David Hume, however, was a very great man—great as a historian, as every one admits; but greater still as a philosopher; for it is impossible to calculate what a blank, but for him, the whole speculative science of Europe for the last seventy years would have been.

  The marvellousness, acuteness and subtlety of Hume have never been denied; and his influence upon speculation has been aided as much by the alarm his doctrines excited, as by the ingenuity with which they were upheld. If Berkeley met with no refuters, Hume could meet with none. Antagonists have generally been compelled to admit that the skeptical reasoning was unanswerable.

  The centre of Hume’s philosophizing is his criticism of the conception of cause. Locke had already expressed the thought that we attain the conception of substance only by the habit of always seeing certain modes together. Hume takes up this thought with earnestness. Whence do we know, he asks, that two things stand together in the relation of cause and effect?… There needs no further proof, than simply to utter these chief thoughts of Hume, to show that his scepticism is only a logical carrying out of Locke’s empiricism. Every determination of universality and necessity must fall away, if we derive our knowledge only from perceptions through the sense; these determinations cannot be comprised in sensation.

  It was acknowledged by Hume, that it was only in solitude and retirement that he could yield any assent to his own philosophy.

  Hume’s abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation, that no copula had been detected between any cause and effect, either in physics or in thought; that the term cause and effect was loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know only as consecutive, not at all as casual.

  Hume, though a most accomplished reasoner, as well as a profound and fearless thinker, had not the comprehensiveness of Adam Smith, nor had he that invaluable quality of imagination without which no one can so transport himself into past ages as to realize the long and progressive movements of society, always fluctuating, yet, on the whole, steadily advancing. How unimaginative he was, appears, not only from the sentiments he expressed, but likewise from many traits in his private life. It appears, also, in the very colour and mechanism of his language; that beautiful and chiselled style in which he habitually wrote, polished as marble, but cold as marble too, and wanting that fiery enthusiasm and those bursts of tempestuous eloquence, which, ever and anon, great objects naturally inspire, and which rouse men to their inmost depths. This it was, which, in his “History of England,”—that exquisite production of art, which, in spite of its errors, will be admired as long as taste remains among us,—prevented him from sympathizing with those bold and generous natures, who, in the seventeenth century, risked their all to preserve the liberty of their country…. It was this which made him stop where he did, and which gave to his works the singular appearance of a profound and original thinker, in the middle of the eighteenth century, advocating practical doctrines, so illiberal, that, if enforced, they would lead to despotism, and yet, at the same time, advocating speculative doctrines, so fearless and enlightened, that they were not only far in advance of his own age, but have, in some degree, outstripped even the age in which we live.

  Such was Hume’s psychology; an attempt to push analysis to its ultimate limits; valuable in its method, even if defective in its results; a striking example of the acuteness and subtle penetration of its author.

  The subtlest of all our metaphysicians.

  We shall now repeat the leading points of Hume’s system, in the usual order. I.—The standard of Right and Wrong is Utility, or a reference to the Happiness of mankind. This is the ground, as well as the motive, of moral approbation. II.—As to the nature of the Moral Faculty, he contends that it is a compound of Reason, and Humane or Generous Sentiment. He does not introduce the subject of Free-will into Morals. He contends strongly for the existence of Disinterested Sentiment, or Benevolence; but scarcely recognizes it as leading to absolute and uncompensated self-sacrifice. He does not seem to see that as far as the approbation of benevolent actions is concerned, we are anything but disinterested parties. The good done by one man is dune to some others; and the recipients are moved by their self-love to encourage beneficence. The regard to our own benefactor makes all benefactors interesting. III.—He says little directly bearing on the constituents of Human Happiness; but that little is all in favour of simplicity of life and cheap pleasures. He does not reflect that the pleasures singled out by him are far from cheap; “agreeable conversation, society, study, health, and the beauties of nature,” although not demanding extraordinary wealth, cannot be secured without a larger share of worldly means than has ever fallen to the mass of men in any community. IV.—As to the substance of the Moral Code, he makes no innovations. He talks somewhat more lightly of the evils of Unchastity than is customary; but regards the prevailing restraints as borne out by Utility. The inducements to virtue are, in his view, our humane sentiments, on the one hand, and our self-love, or prudence, on the other; the two classes of motives conspiring to promote both our own good and the good of mankind. V.—The connexion of Ethics with Politics is not specially brought out. The political virtues are moral virtues. He does not dwell upon the sanctions of morality, so as to distinguish the legal sanction from the popular sanction. He draws no line between Duty and Merit. VI.—He recognizes no relationship between Ethics and Theology. The principle of Benevolence in the human mind is, he thinks, an adequate source of moral approbation and disapprobation; and he takes no note of what even sceptics (Gibbon, for example) often dwell upon, the aid of the Theological sanction in enforcing duties imperfectly felt by the natural and unprompted sentiments of the mind.

  It is rather curious that although David Hume’s “still-born” “Treatise of Human Nature” had then been before the world for fourteen years, and his “Inquiry concerning Human Understanding” for nearly four years, no allusion to Hume is to be found either in the published or the hitherto unpublished writings of Berkeley. Yet he was Berkeley’s intellectual successor in the leadership of European thought, as far as speculative power, subtlety, and the general line of inquiry pursued are concerned; and in both these works the Scotch philosopher gives his own negative solution of the chief questions which Berkeley had pursued from youth to old age. Berkeley’s attack upon abstractions, as well as his metaphysical analysis of mathematical quantity and of the material world, largely influenced the philosophical education of Hume; as Hume in his turn awoke Kant, and through Kant modern Germany. Berkeley, Hume, and Kant were the three great speculative minds of the eighteenth century, connected in chronological and philosophical succession.

  Hume’s philosophical significance is connected principally with his speculations concerning casualty. His skepticism is founded on the assertion, that the casual idea, owing to its origin in habit, admits of use only within the field of experience: to reason from data given empirically to that which is transcendent (or lies beyond the whole range of experience), like God and immortality, appears to Hume unlawful. To this is to be added that Hume, particularly in his earliest treatise, expresses an equally negative judgment concerning the idea of substance; that I, he argues, is a complex of ideas, for which we have no right to posit a single substratum or underlying substance. Hume’s ethical principle is the feeling of the happiness and misery of man. The moral judgment is based on the satisfaction or disapprobation which an action excites in him who witnesses it. Owing to the natural sympathy of man for his fellows, an action performed in the interest of the common welfare calls forth approbation, and one of an opposite nature, disapprobation.

  Everybody knows that Hume was a sceptic. It is not so generally known that he has developed a full system of the human mind. Students of philosophy should make themselves acquainted with it. It has in fact been the stimulating cause of all later European philosophy: of that of Reid and his school; of that of Kant, and the powerful thinkers influenced by him; and of that of M. Cousin, and his numerous followers in France, in their attempt to combine Reid and Kant. Nor is it to be omitted that Mr. J. S. Mill, in his “Examination of Hamilton,” has reproduced to a large extent the theory of Hume, but without so clearly seeing or candidly avowing the consequences.

  Hume was the first writer who distinctly realized the limits within which a sensationalist individualism is confined, and also the first who carried out, with something like fidelity, that substitution of psychology for ontology, which his predecessors had been more ready to prescribe than to practice.

  In Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the three classic names in the history of British speculation, we have brought before us three very distinctly marked individualities. Characterized with reference to their philosophic tendencies, Locke is the serious, or, rather, the jejunely sober, inquirer; Berkeley, the philosophic seer and positivist, and Hume the academic sceptic. In their personal lives all three are, although in different ways, almost equally admirable. Locke combines gaiety and gravity in the good breeding of the gentleman. Berkeley unites transparent purity of nature with the eloquent defense of ideals and unflagging labor for their realization. Hume applies the brakes—always an ungrateful labor—to the precipitous train of human speculation; he is the sworn enemy of all enthusiasms; he is the Mephistopheles, or “spirit of denial,” in British thought.

  While so much of the career of this great thinker, in thought so clear, in heart so kindly, is on its spiritual side a darkness and a grief to Christian minds, let us remember the undoubted evidence of reaction and recoil from the gloom of doubt which no one has more eloquently expressed, and let us give as much acceptance as we can to the words uttered amidst the shock of his mother’s death, and uttered as a reply to the charge of having broken with all Christian hope—“Though I throw out my speculations to entertain the learned and metaphysical world, yet in other things I do not think so differently from the rest of the world as you imagine.”

  As a philosopher of religion Hume is the finisher and destroyer of deism…. Hume never denied the existence of God, never directly impugned revelation. His final word is doubt and uncertainty…. In his moral philosophy Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic…. Only once since David Hume, in Herbert Spencer, has the English nation produced a mind of like comprehensive power. Hume and Locke form the culminating points of English thought. They are national types, in that in them the two fundamental tendencies of English thinking, clearness of understanding and practical sense, were manifested in equal force. In Locke these worked together in harmonious co-operation. In Hume the friendly alliance is broken, the common labor ceases; each of the two demands its full rights; a painful breach opens up between science and life.

  If you are to enjoy the inner life, you must bear also its burdens and its doubts. To become sure of yourself, you must first doubt yourself. And this doubt, this skepticism, which self-analysis always involves, who could express it better than the great Scotchman, David Hume? Hume is, I think, next to Hobbes, the greatest of British speculative thinkers, Berkeley occupying the third place in order of rank. I cannot undertake to describe to you in this place the real historical significance of Hume, his subtlety, his fearlessness, his fine analysis of certain of the deepest problems, his place as the inspirer of Kant’s thought, his whole value as metaphysical teacher of his time. What you will see in him is merely the merciless skeptic, and, in this superficial sketch of the rediscovery of the inner consciousness, I don’t ask you to see more.

  The Philosophy of Hume was a destructive assault upon the main position of the Deists respecting the origin of all religions save what they called “the religion of nature.” On the other hand, not only by its criticism of the basis of positive belief in general, but also by its dealing with the proofs of the Christian creed in particular, it presented to Christian Apologists problems of the gravest consequence.

  Although Hume’s writings are so much better known at first hand than those of Cumberland and Gay,—the only two of his English predecessors who can really be said to have stated the Utilitarian principle,—it is more difficult than might be supposed to present his views on Ethics in a way to leave no room for misunderstanding. In the first place, one has to keep in mind Hume’s relation to the “moral sense” school, and avoid attributing either too much or too little importance to this relation; and, in the second place,—what is much more important,—one has to decide, after the most careful examination and comparison, whether one shall accept his earlier or his later treatment of Ethics as the more adequately representing his system.

  The theory of causation first set forth by David Hume has attracted more attention and led to more discussion than any other philosophical doctrine of modern times.

General

  The great David Hume.

  If we may judge of him by his writings, will scarcely be charged with the fault of having carried humility to an excess. A pity it is that he hath not made a better use of his abilities and talents, which might have laid a just foundation for acquiring the praise he seems so fond of, as well as rendered him really useful to the world, if he had been so industrious as to employ them in serving and promoting the excellent cause of religion, as he hath unhappily been in endeavouring to weaken and expose it.

  “Why, Sir, his style is not English; the structure of his sentences is French. Now the French structure and the English structure may, in the nature of things, be equally good. But if you allow that the English language is established, he is wrong. My name might originally have been Nicholson, as well as Johnson; but were you to call me Nicholson now, you would call me very absurdly.”

  Next comes the Scotch Goliath, David Hume; but where is the accomplished stripling who can cut off his most metaphysical head? Who is he that can stand up before him, and prove the existence of the universe and its Founder? He hath an adroiter wit than all his forefathers in philosophy if he will confound this uncircumcised. The long and dull procession of reasoners that have followed since have challenged the awful shade to duel, and struck the air with their puissant arguments. But as each new comer blazons “Mr. Hume’s objections” on his pages, it is plain they are not satisfied the victory is gained. Now, though every one is daily referred to his own feelings as a triumphant confutation of the glozed lies of this deceiver, yet it would assuredly make us feel safer to have our victorious answer set down in impregnable propositions.

  Hume was a Tory; he was also a Scotchman:—this renders the almost uniform absence of Scotticisms, from his style, a subject of surprise—if not of astonishment.

  Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and perhaps he reached on the French more than he was acted on by them: but neither had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Flèche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not so much morally lived as metaphysically investigated.

  Hume’s reputation as a philosopher and an historian has long been on the wane, his views in both are regarded as partial and one-sided; it is believed that in his science he gave exclusive prominence to one set of faculties and that in his estimate of facts he was almost as exclusively guided by one set of authorities. Praised by one school of critics beyond his merits, depreciated by another below his deserts, there is reason to suspect that he has been more frequently judged by the supposed consequences of his doctrines than by the doctrines themselves, and though in the examination of principles it is not possible to neglect their obvious tendency, yet there is a danger that these tendencies may be measured by our own preconceived notions rather than by the necessary and immediate inferences from the author’s writings and statements.

  Hume is considered also as one of the most dangerous and insidious enemies by whom the Christian religion has ever been attacked.

  Morality survives, we know not well how, in Hume…. There is a cogency in this resting upon only the lowest grounds; the winter-vitality of the moral convictions of Hume is worth more than any summer exuberance of sentiment.

  The character of the true sceptic was never more clearly exhibited than by David Hume, the philosopher and historian, whose name is so well known and firmly established among the greatest of his century, and whose works and influence have produced as much effect upon men’s minds and beliefs as it is possible for a perpetual negative to produce. He is not only a born representative of the class, but even to a great extent of his time, which was an unbelieving age, full of profanities, great and small, and an immense and astonishing indifference to everything spiritual and unseen. He was one of the most clear-sighted men of his day—keen in pursuit of truth, not moved by any throes of mental anguish because of his inability to believe one dogma or another, but still far from setting himself up as an authority above other authorities, or arrogating a superior judgment. He was no profligate, eager to cover his sins by the abrogation of moral laws—no revolutionary, bent upon satisfying his own ambition by the overturn of all things. Neither was his spirit affected by the gloomy nothingness of the system he believed. He was an honest, cheerful, comfortable, unexcited soul, full of a steady power of labour, much patience and good-humour, and a certain sober light-heartedness, whatever was his fortune. The devoutest believer, with all the succours of religion, could not have behaved with more composure and dignity in the presence of death; nor is the sober quiet of his life less remarkable.

  The autobiography of Hume is singularly interesting, as being the portrait of a modest, firm, independent, and just man.

  Hume is always idiomatic, but his idioms are constantly wrong; many of his best passages are, on that account, curiously grating and puzzling: you feel that they are very like what an Englishman would say, but yet that after all, somehow or other, they are what he never would say,—there is a minute seasoning of imperceptible difference, which distracts your attention and which you are forever stopping to analyze.

  Hume, in style nearly perfect.

  An accomplished reasoner, an original, profound, and fearless thinker, more remarkable for depth than for erudition. As a philosopher, the greatest in the school of materialism; as a historian, the first to treat the sequence of historical events in a philosophical manner; as a man, one of the leaders of the race.

  Mr. Hume confessed himself the prince of sceptics, as Voltaire was the prince of scoffers.

  Hume’s place in literature is not, at the present moment, adequate to what we know of his powers of intellect or to his originality as a thinker. He is acknowledged to be a great man, but he is very little read. His “History,” in fragments, and his “Essay on Miracles,” which still enjoys a kind of success of scandal, are all that the general reader knows of Hume. If we deplore this fact, it must be admitted that his cool and unimpassioned criticism of belief, his perpetual return to the destructive standpoint, yet without vivacity, as one who undermines rather than attacks an opposing body, his colourless grace, the monotony of his balanced and faultless sentences, offer to us qualities which demand respect but scarcely awaken zeal, and, in short, that Hume although a real is a somewhat uninspiring classic. His great merit as a writer is his lucidity, his perfectly straightforward and competent expression of the particular thing he has it on his mind to say.

  A studied and artful—sometimes a strained—simplicity is the chief characteristic of his style. He never attempts the majestic periods of Johnson or Gibbon; while a certain air of stiffness and precision effectually prevents his being spirited on the one hand, or colloquial on the other. His prose flows on with a steady and even motion, which no obstacle ever retards, nor any passion ever agitates. In the whole of his writings there is scarce one of those outbursts of emotion which at times animate the pages even of the coolest metaphysicians. Scorn there is in abundance; but it is the amused and pitying contempt of a superior being who watches from afar the frailties and vices from which himself is consciously exempt. Enthusiasm, or righteous indignation, was a total stranger to Hume’s cast of mind. But his sneer and his sarcasm, though by far less elaborate and less diligently sustained, are hardly less effective and pointed than Gibbon’s…. Hume’s vocabulary is copious and well chosen, but never picturesque…. Many men have written English prose with greater ease, fluency, and freedom, and many with greater dignity and effect; but few with more accuracy, purity, and elegance of diction than David Hume.

  Hume is impeccable in paragraph unity from the point of view of subject analysis. His unity depends on the philosophic scheme, the previsedly careful articulation of framework. It is not the picturesque unity of Macaulay. In spite of occasional extreme sententiousness, and his very sparing use of sentence-connectives, Hume’s coherence is always good. The sententiousness is never left unexplained. If the reader is ever delayed it is by the balance of the sentence, but he is never seriously checked by this. In Hume the formal balance breaks in upon the sequence as waves pass beneath a boat and lap it sharply, but only to drive it onward. Hume’s favorite order is loose, with a tendency to eschew initiatory sentences. The topic sentence is likely to be somewhat indefinite, becoming clear with the first amplifying sentences. To sum up: Hume represents the long paragraph adapting itself to the Johnsonian balanced sentence. His integers of style are larger than Johnson’s, but less unwieldy than Gibbon’s. He is retrogressive in percentage of very short sentences.

  His philosophical importance has lasted better than his historical, because his history, though full of ability, was written without access to many documents since laid open, and with a somewhat insufficient attention to careful use of those that were accessible; while his philosophy, needing nothing but the furniture of his own mind, and employing that in the best way on one side of perennially interesting and insoluble questions, remains a point de repère for ever. It is indeed admitted to have practically restarted all philosophical inquiry, being as much the origin of German and other theory as of the Scottish school and of later English negative materialism. Luckily, too, the value of literary work as such is far more enduring than that of either philosophy or history by themselves. For they may be superseded, but it never can. And Hume’s expression was for his special purposes supreme—perfectly clear, ironical, but not to the point of suspicious frivolity, and as polished as the somewhat dead and flat colour of the style of the time would admit.

  David Hume was without question the man of greatest mental grasp whom Scotland produced in the eighteenth century.