DAVID
HUME

David Hume, the renowned moral philosopher, went to school in Chirnside until he was 12, before going on to study law. His family home was Ninewells Estate.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland's greatest philosopher belonged to one of Berwickshire's great families. "My father's family" he wrote in a letter dated April 1776, "is a branch of the Earl of Home, or Hume". As his biographer, Anthony Flew, remarks, "In our own time the same extended family has supplied a Prime Minister".

On the death of his father, an Edinburgh solicitor, young David was brought by his mother, Katharine, to the family seat, Ninewells, where he would live, from time to time, throughout his life. Here he spent his teens, during which time he experienced a religious conversion, influenced by the local minister, whose religion seems to have been heavily laden with doom and prohibitions. Not surprisingly, Hume turned his back on it after a few years. It left him with a jaundiced and distorted view of Christian morality in general, much of which he disparagingly described as 'monkish virtues'.

In his twenties, Hume threw himself eagerly into literature and philosophy, hoping to secure a Professor's chair at Edinburgh University, where he had studied. Probably because of his religious scepticism, he was rejected, and most of his writing was done while he lived on his earnings as a Private Secretary in the diplomatic service.

Hume's most famous writings are his Treatise of Human Nature and his two 'Enquiries', concerned with 'Human Understanding' and 'The Principles of Morals', but it is the work in which he skilfully attacks the religion he had abandoned which was, and remains, especially controversial. Hume's natural good humour and social graces made him welcome in the best society, and he is said to have made hundreds of friends but few enemies. It was perhaps because of these enemies, though, that his friends persuaded him to defer publication of his 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' until after his death. This brilliantly argued work claims that the classic 'proofs of God' (such as the claim that the Universe is so well designed that it must have had a designer, and that the designer must be God) just don't work. Religion, Hume claimed, cannot be based on reason.

Ironically, far from damaging the Christian faith, as his sceptical friends perhaps hoped, Hume's point has greatly encouraged those Christians who insist that God is only discoverable by faith. His work has performed a service where he would have least have expected it.

David Hume dies in 1776, leaving many friends to mourn him, and a reputation to the glory of Scottish philosophy. Adam Smith said of him 'I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly as possible to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit'. He was, said A.J. Ayer, 'the greatest of British philosopher's.


Bob Harrison
Tutor in Moral Philosophy,
University of Edinburgh

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