HUME, DAVID. - Philosopher, b. 26 Apr. 1711 at Ninevelles (southern Scotland), d. at Edinburgh 25 Aug. 1776. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, the ancient capital of Scotland, first, at his family’s wish, law; then he turned decisively to the study of philosophy and classical authors, especially Cicero and Seneca. These were the years when the philosophical works of Locke and Berkeley were attracting general attention, and the young Scot was seized by a powerful ambition to enter the debate and to place his name alongside those of the Englishman and the Irishman. While his plan matured, he spent several years travelling to broaden his outlook. Naturally, Paris, then the great centre of the most revolutionary ideas, was the city he visited most; there, from 1734 to 1738, he wrote his Treatise of Human Nature (London 1739–40), his major work, from which he later derived, with revisions and reworkings, the other writings on the same subject. The treatise bore the subtitle: An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (it was the method then acclaimed from Newton), and was divided into three parts: Of the Understanding; Of the Passions; Of Morals. Meanwhile, he had returned to his homeland, where he believed that the published work would secure him the deserved renown. The success, however, was modest. Moreover, the radically sceptical stance he had adopted in it could hardly win him the favour of the official academy, so it is no wonder that the University of Edinburgh, to which he applied for a chair, refused him. In the meantime, he had published in 2 vols. Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1741–42), which, also due to its more accessible form for the general cultured public, had met with better fortune. Several years followed in which he sought, but in vain, a position, at home or abroad. In 1748 he published An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which restated, in a form also more attractive from a literary point of view, the central thesis of the first book of the Treatise. In 1751 followed the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which reworked the third book of the Treatise itself. In 1752 his Political Discourses appeared.
Meanwhile, he had settled into the post of librarian, where he had the opportunity to devote himself to a major work, the History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, published in instalments between 1754 and 1771. He continued his philosophical studies in the meantime, publishing in 1757 Four Dissertations, the first and most important of which was The Natural History of Religion. Later he wrote the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which he did not deem prudent to publish (they appeared posthumously in 1779). Also the two essays Of Suicide and Of the Immortality of the Soul, which originally formed part of the Four Dissertations, appeared anonymously only in 1777. His fame was now assured. Thus, when in 1763 he went to Paris as secretary of legation, he was enthusiastically received there. He enjoyed the friendship of the great writers and thinkers of the time, Voltaire and Rousseau. With the latter, however, owing to his well-known eccentric character, he had a notorious incident (which Hume wished to expose to the public, to demonstrate his own correctness, in a printed pamphlet). In 1767 he took part in state affairs as an under-secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But in 1768 he resigned and retired to his Edinburgh. He spent his final years among a few friends and many books. After a long illness he died on 25 Aug. 1776.
The work undoubtedly most important of Hume is the Treatise, and fundamental to this is Book I, which contains the critique of the epistemological principle posited by Locke and developed by Berkeley. This is the masterpiece of modern scepticism: critical scepticism, that is, conducted with rigorous method, in which Hume revealed his destructive genius. It must be noted, however, that the value of this critique is limited to the initial assumption from which it proceeds, namely that of an empiricism understood as a subjectivism founded on the immediate act of sensation. Thus the result of this scepticism, at least in this respect, has been exceedingly beneficial, in that it forced philosophy to abandon such a position. As is well known, the first to feel this beneficial effect was I. Kant, who, however, came from another school, the Wolffian, in which an attempt had been made to reconcile empiricism and rationalism.
The decisive point of Hume’s critique of human nature is the distinction between the act of sensing-perceiving, here defined as an impression (to grasp it in its most immediate reality), and the idea. The latter is a reflection subsequent to the act, when the sensation has already passed into memory, and is therefore far less vivid and evident than the impression grasped in its actuality. Thus falls the entire edifice of ideas, with which, believing they could legitimately derive them from the act of perceiving, both Locke and Berkeley had sought to explain the world of experience. Another fundamental distinction of the Lockean-Berkeleyan empiricism was that between external and internal experience: Hume maintained that the impression, in its actuality, did not admit of a distinction between an external and an internal, an objective and a subjective.
Once these principles are established, the author’s aim becomes to demonstrate the vanity of every idea or notion (as he habitually calls it) not derived from an impression; and, at the same time, to replace it with an idea more in conformity and adequate to the impression in which it is to be resolved. The book thus becomes a critical treatment of the entire world of ideas with which philosophers endeavoured to explain the world of experience. Central to this treatment is the work of the imagination, which is now the faculty of ideas, that which elaborates and unites them in relations to construct a genuine and comprehensive knowledge embracing, beyond past experience, also future experience. It should be noted that, to explain these relations, Hume supposes that the original impression is equivalent to a bundle of impressions, from which derive the first, concrete ideas, which, by a natural law (think of Newton’s universal gravitation), associate with one another, as if the mind were driven, as by an unnoticed force, to pass from one to the other. The laws of this association are three: by resemblance, by contiguity, by causality. Here appears the principle of custom (habit), and of the tendency to pass from what we currently perceive to what, having perceived it in the past together with the other, we expect to perceive again. Hence that feeling of expectation and trust which Hume calls belief.
This is the first part of the book. The second contains the celebrated critique of the ideas of space and time. Space and time reveal themselves not as impressions (there being no specific organ for them), but as relations or modes of presentation of impressions (in the original impression). Space, indeed, is coexistence; time is succession of impressions: relations, then, not “things”, not a reality objectively existing. The reality, for example, of the mathematical point lies in the idea corresponding to the impression of a minimum of perceptibility (a grain of sand, for instance). Hence the devaluation of mathematics, in that the exactness and rigour of which they boast, when their ideas are brought back to the concreteness of experience, reveal themselves as mere approximations.
In the third part, the famous critique of the idea of causality stands out (this is also the part later taken up and developed in the subsequent work, the *Enquiry*, which, as has been said, enjoyed greater notoriety both before and after Kant for a long time). The maxim accepted in metaphysics, according to which “everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence,” when traced back to the terrain of experience from which it originated, shows evident cracks: it claims a necessity that, in concrete terms, is never demonstrable; at most, it is a constancy thus far experienced in the succession of two facts: never a true necessity, such as that in logic, where the opposite is excluded. And it is on this constancy that we rely to believe that what we have observed so far will continue to exist in the same way in the future. Thus, with the ruin of the principle of causality, the very foundation of the experimental sciences was swept away.
In the fourth and final part, the most general conclusions of the preceding critique are, in a sense, gathered and applied both to ancient and modern philosophy. Both the objectivism of the former and the subjectivism of the latter are challenged. If the ideas of substance, individuation, etc., ultimately reveal themselves to be mere fictions of the imagination, without any real foundation, what remains of what we call “object” and what we call “subject”? Nothing concrete. Existence itself is an abstract idea, since it presupposes those just mentioned. In the end, only the act remains with itself: a bundle of sensations, an impression of impressions, a series and flow of acts that do not allow us to affirm anything about reality, not even about ourselves. Absolute skepticism, mitigated only by that sentiment which, in the philosopher no less than in the common man, follows the spontaneous course of thought and gives him a faith in reality sufficient for the needs of his life.
In the moral problem as well, Hume aligns himself with the work of his predecessors, the school of English moralists, who in their hymn to the spontaneous “moral sense” had sought to salvage the principle of morality from the critical structures of rationalism. “Reasoning reason” has no power in itself to move man to action: passion, sentiment, is needed. On the other hand, sentiment alone is not enough for morality if it is limited to one’s own well-being or utility (*selfish system*): a higher sentiment is required. Following the path opened by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Butler had taken this route; Hume continues their work with a sharper and more precise critique, and defines the principle of moral conscience as a sentiment of sympathy, through which we “naturally” feel pleasure or pain along with the pleasure or pain of others (similarly, he says, to the movement of a string that is communicated to others equally taut). This is a principle of social life, which is then consolidated in the further sentiment of justice, by which we come to judge the value of an action independently of any present pleasure or personal interest: that is, to love the humanity of man in every man. This principle of sympathy was later developed by A. Smith; however, it was still susceptible to a utilitarian interpretation, BENTHAM, JEREMY (v.).
Where, instead, Hume’s skeptical mentality reappears with all its destructive force is in the philosophy of religion. Here, not only Christianity but even that minimum of religion which one sought to preserve with the idea, adopted by the tenth (v.), of a “natural religion,” is undermined at its roots. In the *Dialogues*, the a posteriori proofs of the existence of God—the cosmological and the teleological—are refuted with arguments that already preclude those of Kant. Added to this is the critique of the moral argument, emphasizing the fact of evil in the world, so that its principle cannot be goodness. In the *Natural History of Religion*, the positive search for the principle of religious sentiment is undertaken, and it is placed, in a Lucretian manner, in the fear of death, in the dread of unhappiness, and in the desire and anxiety for well-being. Polytheism, for Hume, is the first and most genuine form of the religious sentiment of humanity in general, and from it, not from abstract or philosophical reason, does the monotheistic idea emerge, which, even if it seems superior through the work of reflection, is then shown, with its intolerance, to be inferior to polytheism. In any case, in the clash of faiths, Hume sees only a struggle of superstitions: and once again, in an Enlightenment spirit, he retreats “into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy” (v. CAUSE; SKEPTICISM).
All of Hume’s works are on the Index under the expression *opera omnia*, decrees of 19 January 1761 and 10 September 1827.