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David
Hume

1711  —  1776
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
David Hume
David Hume
Edinburgh, 1711  ·  Edinburgh, 1776

The cheerful sceptic who showed that reason cannot prove the sun will rise tomorrow — and slept soundly anyway.

He wrote A Treatise of Human Nature before he was twenty-six; it fell dead-born from the press. He recast it into the Enquiries, lost two university chairs to the clergy, and made his fortune instead with a History of England. Paris adored him as le bon David. Rousseau accused him of a plot. Adam Smith called him as near to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as human frailty permits.

He wrote one footnote on race he never retracted. He will not excuse it.

Consultation

Custom is the great guide
of human life.

Hume speaks from 3,442 chunks across eight works — the Treatise of Human Nature, both Enquiries, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the Political Discourses, the first volume of the History of England, and two volumes of his life and letters.

His discourse holds his two great answerers: Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, the common-sense reply to his scepticism, and Kant's Prolegomena, the book that begins by admitting Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber.

Ask him how you know the future will resemble the past. Ask him whether a machine that learns from data is doing what he said minds do. Ask him about miracles, about money, about his friend Adam Smith — and about the footnote.

CausationThe Problem of InductionIs and OughtMiraclesMoral SentimentScepticismThe History of England
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
A Treatise of Human Nature  ·  Book II, Part III, Section III  ·  1739

Drawn From the Corpus