David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience; this places him amongst such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Locke and George Berkeley.
Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified empirically; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but experience only the "constant conjunction" of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.
An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.
Hume denied that people have an actual conception of the self, positing that they experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of , including his rejection of miracles and critique of the argument from design, was especially controversial. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of , early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers".
Reading level
Audio Summary
Played with your browser's voice. Studio-quality audio can be added with a text-to-speech service.
Ask about this article
📝 Quick Quiz1 / 4
What is "David Hume" primarily known for?
Vocix Daily — In Your Inbox
Top stories, deep-dive articles, and "On This Day" history — one crisp digest delivered every morning.
Sources & references
Reference material for this entry is drawn from the open encyclopedic record, including Wikipedia , available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Images are credited individually beside each photo.
David Hume was born on 7 May 1711 [OS 26 April 1711], as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket. He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer; daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian, and his wife, Mary Falconer (née Norvell), and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells. Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never re-married, raised the two brothers and their sister on her own. David's uncle George Home was minister at the parish in Chirnside where he likely attended during his youth.
Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734 because the surname 'Home' (pronounced 'Hume') was not well known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender", as his family was not rich; as a younger son he had little patrimony to live on.
Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age—either 12 or possibly as young as 10—at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law, because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have:
an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring.
He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". He did not graduate.
At around age 18, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought", inspiring him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it". As he did not recount what this scene exactly was, commentators have offered a variety of speculations. One prominent interpretation among contemporary Humean scholarship is that this new "scene of thought" was Hume's realisation that Francis Hutcheson's theory of moral sense could be applied to the understanding of morality as well.
From this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of 10 years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a mental breakdown, first starting with a coldness—which he attributed to a "Laziness of Temper"—that lasted about nine months. Scurvy spots later broke out on his fingers, persuading Hume's physician to diagnose him with the "Disease of the Learned".
Hume wrote that he "went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", taken along with a pint of claret every day. He also decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning. His health improved somewhat, but in 1731, he was afflicted with a ravenous appetite and palpitations. After eating well for a time, he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to being "sturdy, robust [and] healthful-like." Indeed, Hume would become well known for being obese and having a fondness for good port and cheese, often using them as philosophical metaphors for his conjectures.
Despite having noble ancestry, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession by age 25. As was common at his time, he became a merchant's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche and is likely to have used the college's extensive library.
Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged "atheism", also lamenting that his literary debut, A Treatise of Human Nature, "fell dead-born from the press". However, he found literary success in his lifetime as an essayist and historian, and a career as a librarian at the Advocates Library for the Faculty of Advocates. These successes provided him much needed income at the time. His tenure there, and the access to research materials it provided, resulted in Hume's writing the massive six-volume The History of England, which became a bestseller and the definitive history of England. For over 60 years, Hume was the dominant interpreter of English history. He described his "love for literary fame" as his "ruling passion" and judged his two late works, the so-called "first" and "second" enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on the merits of the later texts alone, rather than on the more radical formulations of his early, youthful work, dismissing his philosophical debut as juvenilia: "A work which the Author had projected before he left College." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his most important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in the Treatise. Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the most important in the history of Western philosophy.
1730s
Hume worked for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at age 28. Books 1 and 2 of his treatise were intended to "try the taste of the public", leading to Book 3 Of Morals being published after his feeling that he had "met with success".
Although many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply [his] deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired [his] independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of [his] talents in literature".
Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country." There, in an attempt to make his larger work better known and more intelligible, he published the An Abstract of a Book lately Published as a summary of the main doctrines of the Treatise, without revealing its authorship. This work contained the same ideas, but with a shorter and clearer explanation. Although there has been some academic speculation as to the pamphlet's true author, it is generally regarded as Hume's creation.
1740s
After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1741—included in the later edition as Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary—Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.
In 1745, during the Jacobite risings, Hume tutored the Marquess of Annandale, an engagement that ended in disarray after about a year. The Marquess could not follow with Hume's lectures, his father saw little need for philosophy, and on a personal level, the Marquess found Hume's dietary tendencies to be bizarre. Hume then started his great historical work, The History of England, which took fifteen years and ran to over a million words. During this time, he was also involved with the Canongate Theatre through his friend John Home, a preacher.
In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. From 1746 Hume served for three years as secretary to General James St Clair, who was envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna. At that time Hume wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Often called the First Enquiry, it proved little more successful than the Treatise, perhaps because of the publication of his short autobiography My Own Life, which "made friends difficult for the first Enquiry". By the end of this period Hume had attained his well-known corpulent stature; "the good table of the General and the prolonged inactive life had done their work", leaving him "a man of tremendous bulk".
In 1749 he went to live with his brother in the countryside, although he continued to associate with the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment figures.
1750s–1760s
Hume's religious views were often suspect and, in the 1750s, it was necessary for his friends to avert a trial against him on the charge of heresy, specifically in an ecclesiastical court. However, he "would not have come and could not be forced to attend if he said he was not a member of the Established Church". Hume failed to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. By this time he had published the Philosophical Essays, which were decidedly anti-religious. This represented a turning point in his career and the various opportunities made available to him. Even Adam Smith, his personal friend who had vacated the Glasgow philosophy chair, was against his appointment out of concern that public opinion would be against it. In 1761 all his works were banned on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Hume returned to Edinburgh in 1751, and in the following year the Faculty of Advocates hired him to be their Librarian, a job in which he would receive little to no pay, but which nonetheless gave him "the command of a large library". This resource enabled him to continue historical research for The History of England. Hume's volume of Political Discourses, written in 1749 and published by Kincaid & Donaldson in 1752, was the only work he considered successful on first publication.
In 1753 Hume moved from his house on Riddles Court on the Lawnmarket to a house on the Canongate at the other end of the Royal Mile. Here he lived in a tenement known as Jack's Land, immediately west of the still-surviving Shoemakers Land.
Eventually, with the publication of his six-volume The History of England between 1754 and 1762, Hume achieved the fame that he coveted. The volumes traced events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 and was a bestseller in its day. Hume was also a longtime friend of the bookseller Andrew Millar, who sold Hume's History (after acquiring the rights from the Scottish bookseller Gavin Hamilton), although the relationship was sometimes complicated. Letters between them illuminate both men's interest in the success of the History. In 1762 Hume moved from Jack's Land on the Canongate to James Court on the Lawnmarket. He sold the house to James Boswell in 1766.
Later life
Paris and Rousseau
From 1763 to 1765 Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris, where he became secretary to the British embassy in France. Hume was well received among Parisian society, and while there he met Isaac de Pinto. In 1765 Hume served as a chargé d'affaires in Paris, writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State". He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness."
In January 1766 Hume left Paris to accompany Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. Once there, he and Rousseau fell out, leaving Hume sufficiently worried about the damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau that he would author an account of the dispute, titling it "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau".
Slavery
In 2014 the University of Cambridge academic Felix Waldmann published a previously unknown letter from Hume to his patron Francis Seymour-Conway, Lord Hertford of 20 March 1766, in which Hume communicated a proposal to Hertford from George Colebrooke, Sir James Cockburn and John Stewart to acquire a half-share of slave plantations in Grenada, an island ceded to Britain after the Treaty of Paris (1763) with the other Windward Islands.
Waldmann observed that the previously unknown letter explicated a letter of 20 June 1766 among Hume's papers in the National Library of Scotland, until then miscatalogued as a letter from a man named "d'Ennesy", but in fact from the Governor of Martinique, Victor-Thérèse Charpentier (1732–76), marquis d'Ennery. In the letter, d'Ennery thanked Hume for a letter of 2 February 1766 on behalf of Stewart, Nelson and possibly Alexander Burnet of Grenada (d. 1790), all evidently involved in the purchase of slave plantations:
As Waldmann noted, Hume's Coutts Bank ledger records that he lent £400 to Stewart on 8 February 1766 and "it is not inconceivable that this money was invested in a plantation". On 25 June 1766, Hume received £6 3s 4d interest for a loan of "4 mon: 19 days" from "Archibald Stewart & Co.", the firm that John Stewart co-administered with his father Archibald Stewart (Lord Provost). An indenture for a plantation purchased by Stewart, Nelson and Colebrooke in Grenada reveals that it held 42 slaves by 3 November 1767. As Waldmann recorded, the evidence of Hume's involvement in the slave trade was considerably clearer than the biographical tradition that had associated his early employment in Bristol with a sugar merchant.
Contrary to Waldmann's claims, Peter Hutton and David Ashton have asserted that "nowhere—absolutely nowhere—in this letter does Hume 'encourage' Lord Hertford to buy...". Alan Bailey similarly suggests: "it is plain that it is Sir George, rather than Hume, who is intent on persuading Lord Hertford to invest". Hutton and Ashton claim that Hertford chose not to invest in the plantations, but there is no extant evidence of Hertford's response.
James Fieser contends that Hume goes beyond merely conveying information: that, by vouching for the partners as 'Men of Substance and Character', attesting to their integrity, Hume "adds to the merit of the deal by essentially putting his own reputation at stake". Moreover, in suggesting that the opportunity was more financially "advantageous" than a previous plantation investment considered by Hertford, "his letter reads more like Hume is encouraging the purchase, rather than just dutifully conveying Colebrook's offer".
Commenting on Hume's letter to d'Ennery, Hutton and Ashton, noting that Hume's letter is no longer extant, point out that it is not known what he wrote, and assert that the reply "provides no evidence to suggest that Hume was actively attempting to facilitate investment in a plantation" and that Hume "may have simply been providing confirmation of Stewart's personal integrity". They also assert that "Waldmann's (2020) insinuation" that money provided by Hume was "used to aid the purchase of a slave plantation, is a baseless speculation" and suggest it was most likely intended to assist in the purchase of a property for Rousseau., although they provide no evidence for this claim or refer to the status of the money provided to Stewart as a loan at commercial interest.
Fieser notes that the "precise service that d'Ennery performed for Stewart and his representatives" is a matter of speculation, and any documentation "that explicitly states the intended purpose of Hume's loan to Stewart" is not extant. Fieser does, however, observe that "the timing of the loan and Hume's letter to d'Ennery are too close for us to reasonably think it was for a different project"; the loan to Stewart of "approximately £75,000" in 2022 currency, repaid with interest of "approximately £1,000", "was likely more of a loan to a friend rather than as a pure business venture", although, as Waldmann first acknowledged, "the purpose of the loan is not recorded".
Bailey notes that "nothing in the letter [to Hertford] indicates that Hume ... had any pecuniary interest in the matter" and, he contends, there is "no compelling evidence" that Hume ever "personally profited ... from the institution of plantation slavery". However, Waldmann has argued that "Hume sought to benefit" from slavery, a reference to Hertford's role as Hume's patron and his brother Henry Seymour Conway's role as Hume's employer; by 1769 the family had procured a substantial pension for Hume.
Bailey describes Hume's March letter to Lord Hertford as the document that "comes closest to raising serious doubts about the sincerity of Hume's published disavowals of chattel slavery". He suggests that the letter "might perhaps be seen as an instance of Hume allowing social convention and his personal obligations ... to lure him into an inappropriate degree of collusion with this scheme". Danielle Charette describes the incident as one of "personal hypocrisy".
As to the charge of racism, based on the footnote Hume appended to his essay "On National Characters" in 1753, and had amended as an endnote for a posthumous 1777 edition, Hutton and Ashton acknowledge that its content is "especially shocking—and deeply puzzling". Bailey describes it as "highly prejudicial speculation". Fieser suggests that independent scholar Kendra Asher's discussion "is the only one to date suggesting that the footnote might not represent Hume's true views". Fieser suggests that Asher's interpretation "must be taken seriously", but stresses the need to "address head on" the indications that Hume both 'encouraged' and 'assisted' friends in the investment in a slave plantation.
Final years
In 1767 Hume was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Here, he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom". In 1769 he returned to James's Court in Edinburgh, but in 1771 moved into a grand new house on St Andrew Square, where he lived until his death in 1776. Hume's nephew and namesake, David Hume of Ninewells (1757–1838), was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was a Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and rose to be Principal Clerk of Session in the Scottish High Court and Baron of the Exchequer. He is buried with his uncle in Old Calton Cemetery.
Autobiography
In the last year of his life, Hume wrote an extremely brief autobiographical essay titled "My Own Life", summing up his entire life in "fewer than 5 pages"; it contains many judgements that have been of enduring interest to subsequent readers of Hume. Donald Seibert (1984), a scholar of 18th-century literature, judged it a "remarkable autobiography, even though it may lack the usual attractions of that genre. Anyone hankering for startling revelations or amusing anecdotes had better look elsewhere."
Despite condemning vanity as a dangerous passion, in his autobiography Hume confesses his belief that the "love of literary fame" had served as his "ruling passion" in life, and claims that this desire "never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments". One such disappointment Hume discusses in this account is in the initial literary reception of the Treatise, which he claims to have overcome by means of the success of the Essays: "the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment". Hume, in his own retrospective judgement, argues that his philosophical debut's apparent failure "had proceeded more from the manner than the matter". He thus suggests that "I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early."
Hume also provides an unambiguous self-assessment of the relative value of his works: that "my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; which, in my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best." He also wrote of his social relations: "My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary", noting of his complex relation to religion, as well as to the state, that "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". He goes on to profess of his character: "My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct." Hume concludes the essay with a frank admission:
I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.
Death
The diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death from a form of abdominal cancer. Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. Hume asked for his body to be interred in a "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will for it to be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest".
Hume died at the southwest corner of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence and with the help of coincidence, suggests that the street was named after Hume.
His tomb stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill, in the Old Calton Cemetery. Adam Smith later recounted Hume's amusing speculation that he might ask Charon, Hades' ferryman, to allow him a few more years of life in order to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition". The ferryman replied, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.... Get into the boat this instant."
Writings
A Treatise of Human Nature begins with the introduction: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature.... Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man." The science of man, as Hume explains, is the "only solid foundation for the other sciences" and that the method for this science requires both experience and observation as the foundations of a logical argument. In regards to this, philosophical historian Frederick Copleston (1999) suggests that it was Hume's aim to apply to the science of man the method of experimental philosophy (the term that was current at the time to imply natural philosophy), and that "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics."
Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of logical positivism, a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists (in summary of their verification principle), unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e., either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless. Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate the ways in which ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.
