HUME, DAVID. – Philosopher, born on 26 April 1711 at Ninewelles (southern Scotland), died at Edinburgh on 25 August 1776. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, the ancient capital of Scotland, at first, in compliance with his family’s wishes, law; then he turned decisively to the study of philosophy and the classical authors, especially Cicero and Seneca. These were the years in which the philosophical work of Locke and Berkeley was attracting widespread attention, and the young Scotsman was seized by an intense ambition to enter the discussion and place his name beside that of the Englishman and the Irishman. While maturing his plan, he spent several years travelling in order to broaden the horizon of his views. Naturally, Paris, which was then the great centre of the most revolutionary ideas, attracted him more than any other city; and there, from 1734 to 1738, he composed his Treatise of human nature (London 1739–40), his major work, from which he later derived, through revisions and reworkings, his other works on the same subject. The treatise bore the subtitle: An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into the moral subjects (this was Newton’s method, then highly acclaimed), 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 work he had published would secure him the renown he deserved. Its success, however, was mediocre. Moreover, the radically sceptical position he had adopted in it could hardly win him the favour of official scholarship; hence it is not surprising that the University of Edinburgh, to which he applied for a professorship, refused him one. In the meantime he had published, in 2 vols., Essay moral political and literary (1741–42), which, also because of its form, more accessible to persons of general education, had enjoyed greater success with the public. Several years followed during 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 standpoint, the central thesis of the first book of the Treatise. This was followed in 1751 by the Enquiry concerning the principles of morals, which reworked the third book of the Treatise itself. His Political discourses appeared in 1752.
Meanwhile, he had settled for a post as a librarian, where he had the opportunity to devote himself to a vast work, the History of England from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution of 1688, published in several instalments between 1754 and 1771. At the same time he continued his philosophical studies, 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, however, he did not consider it prudent to publish (they appeared posthumously in 1779). The two essays Of suicide and Of the immortality of the soul, which had originally formed part of the Four dissertations, likewise appeared anonymously only in 1777. His fame was by then assured. Thus, when he went to Paris in 1763 as secretary of the legation, he was received there enthusiastically. There he gained the friendship of the great writers and thinkers of the time, Voltaire and Rousseau. With the latter, because of his well-known eccentric character, he subsequently had a sensational quarrel (which H. wished to have made public, in order to demonstrate his own correctness, in a printed pamphlet). In 1767 he entered public affairs as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. But in 1768 he resigned and withdrew to his Edinburgh. He spent his final years among a few friends and many books. After a long illness, he died on 25 August 1776.
The unquestionably most important work of H. is the Treatise, and of this the First Book is fundamental, containing 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 by a rigorous method, in which H. revealed his destructive genius. It must be noted, however, that the value of this critique is limited to the initial premise from which it proceeds, namely, an empiricism understood as a subjectivism founded upon the immediate act of sensation. Thus the result of this scepticism, at least in this respect, was exceedingly beneficial, inasmuch as it compelled philosophy to abandon this position. As is well known, the first to experience this beneficial effect was E. Kant, who, however, came from another school, the Wolffian school, in which an attempt had been made to reconcile empiricism and rationalism.
The decisive point of Hume’s critique is the distinction between the act of feeling-perceiving, which is here defined as an impression (in order 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 the entire edifice of ideas collapses, by means of which both Locke and Berkeley, believing that they could legitimately derive them from the act of perceiving, had sought to explain the world of experience. Another fundamental distinction of Lockean-Berkeleian empiricism was that between external and internal experience: H. maintained that the impression, in its actuality, did not admit the distinction between an external and an internal, between an objective and a subjective.
Once these principles have been established, the author’s task now becomes that of demonstrating the vanity of every idea, or notion (as he habitually calls it), not derived from an impression; and, at the same time, of replacing it with an idea more consonant with and adequate to the impression into which it must be resolved. The book thus becomes a critical treatment of the entire world of ideas, by means of which philosophers had attempted to explain the world of experience. Central to this treatment is the activity of imagination, which is now the faculty of ideas, the faculty that elaborates and unites them into relations in order to construct a genuine body of knowledge comprising not only past experience but also future experience. It should be noted that, in explaining these relations, H. assumes that the original impression is equivalent to a bundle of impressions, from which the first, concrete ideas would derive; these, by a natural law (one may think of Newton’s universal attraction), become associated in such a way that the mind is impelled, as by an unnoticed force, to pass from one to another. The laws of this association are three: resemblance, contiguity, and causality. Here the principle of habit (custom) makes its appearance, as does the tendency to pass from what we presently perceive to what, having perceived it in the past together with the former, we expect to perceive again. Hence that feeling of expectation and confidence which H. 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 (since there is no specific organ for them), but as relations or modes in which impressions present themselves (in the original impression). Space, in fact, is the coexistence of impressions, while time
is the succession of impressions: relations, therefore, not “things,” not an objectively existing reality. 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 example). Hence the devaluation of mathematics, since the precision and rigour of which it boasts, once its ideas are brought back to the concreteness of experience, are revealed as mere approximations.
In the third part, the famous critique of the idea of causality occupies pride of place (this is also the part later taken up and developed in the subsequent work, the Enquiry, which, as has been said, enjoyed greater renown for a long period both before and after Kant). The maxim accepted in metaphysics, according to which “everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence,” when brought back onto the terrain of experience from which it originated, reveals its evident flaw: it lays claim to a necessity that, in concrete terms, can never be demonstrated. At most, it is a constancy so far experienced in the succession of two facts, never a true and proper necessity, such that, as in logic, the contrary is excluded. And because of this constancy we trust that what we have observed up to now will continue to exist in the same way in the future. Thus, with the ruin of the principle of causality, the foundation of the experimental sciences as such was swept away.
In the fourth and final part, the most general conclusions of the preceding critique are gathered together, in a certain sense, and applied both to ancient and to modern philosophy. In fact, both the objectivism of the former and the subjectivism of the latter are combated. If the ideas of substance, identity, etc., ultimately reveal themselves to be mere fictions of the imagination, without any real foundation, what remains of what we call “object,” and of what we call “subject”? Nothing concrete. Existence, too, is an abstract idea, insofar as it presupposes those just mentioned. In the end, the self remains alone with itself: a bundle of sensations, an impression of impressions, a series and flow of acts, which do not permit us to affirm anything about reality, not even about themselves. Absolute scepticism, mitigated only by that feeling which, in the philosopher no less than in the ordinary person, follows the spontaneous course of thought and gives him a faith in reality sufficient for the needs of his life.
In the moral problem too, H. attaches himself to the work of his predecessors, to the school of the English moralists, who, in the innate and spontaneous “moral sense,” had sought to save the principle of morality from the destructive criticism of rationalism. “Reason reasoning” has no power in itself to move man to action: passion and feeling are required. On the other hand, feeling is not enough for morality if it is limited to one’s own well-being and utility (selfish system): a higher feeling is required. Along this path, opened by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Butler had proceeded: H. continues their work with a sharper and more precise critique, and determines the principle of moral conscience as a feeling of sympathy, through which we “naturally” feel pleasure or pain together with the pleasure or pain of others (similarly, he says, to the movement of one string communicated to the other strings equally taut). This principle of social life is then consolidated in the further feeling of justice, through which we come to judge the value of an action independently of any present personal pleasure or interest—in other words, to love the humanity of man in every man. This principle of sympathy was later developed by A. Smith; it nevertheless remained susceptible to a utilitarian interpretation, BENTHAM, JEREMY (v.).
Where, on the other hand, H.’s sceptical mentality reappears with all its destructive force is in the philosophy of religion. Here, not only Christianity,
but also that minimum of religion which it was wished to save through the idea, deism (v.), of a “natural religion,” are undermined at their foundations. In the Dialogues, the a posteriori proofs of God’s existence, the cosmological and the teleological, are combated with arguments that already foreshadow those of Kant. The critique of the moral argument is added, emphasizing the fact of the evil that exists in the world, whereby its principle cannot be goodness. In the Natural History of Religion, the principle of religious feeling is sought positively, and is located, in Lucretian fashion, in the terror of death, in the fear of unhappiness, and in the desire and anxiety for well-being. Polytheism is, for H., the earliest and most genuine form of the religious feeling of humanity in general, and from it—not from abstract or philosophical reason—the monotheistic idea subsequently emerges. Although it may seem superior through the work of reflection, it then proves, through its intolerance, inferior to polytheism. In any event, in the conflict of faiths, H. sees only a struggle of superstitions, and once again withdraws, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, “into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.” (v. CAUSA; SCETTICISMO).
All H.’s works are on the Index under the expression opera omnia, decree of 19 January 1761, 10 September 1827.