In his early twenties, David Hume (1711-1776), who is regarded by many observers as Britain’s greatest philosopher, studied law and worked briefly for a Bristol merchant, but he soon decided he wanted to be a man of letters. Instead of moving to London and becoming a journalist—the usual path for most would-be men of letters in the 18th century—Hume moved to France where, supported by his family, he spent three years writing A Treatise of Human Nature. This “astonishingly ambitious” work, as James Harris calls it in this absorbing intellectual biography, was not a success; yet in three decades Hume would become Britain’s best-known man of letters. In his early fifties, not only was Hume rich—the money he made from his History of England would be the equivalent today of £500,000—he was also “one of the most famous and widely respected men of letters of his day.”
Hume’s admirers included Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith. When Hume died in 1776, Smith, a close friend, said, “I have always considered him . . . as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.” Hugh Blair, the Scottish literary critic and a leading figure in the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland, agreed: “Taking him all in all,” he said, “we shall never see the like.”
Hume, though, had his detractors. Le bon David, as he was called by his French admirers, was also called “the great Infidel” by many orthodox Christians because of his negative view of religion. Samuel Johnson told James Boswell that Hume “has so little scrupulosity as to venture to oppose those [Christian] principles which have been thought necessary to human happiness.” Hume, John Wesley said, was “the most insolent despiser of truth and virtue that ever appeared in the world.”
Harris’s main concern is clarifying Hume’s thought, which is not easy because Hume wrote about so many different subjects: causality, morality, politics, religion, and the history of England. Harris disagrees with those who argue that the Treatise is the key to understanding all of Hume’s writing. Because Hume was “acutely sensitive to the complexities of his time and place,” many of the ideas sketched in the Treatise were abandoned or suffered a sea-change in later works. “There was nothing systematic,” Harris says, “about the manner in which he chose the topics to which philosophical reasoning would be applied.”
After completing the Treatise, Hume spent roughly a decade writing essays, many of them on politics and political economy. He also wrote books on human understanding and on the principles of morals. A decade later, in the 1750s, he wrote the History of England; he also wrote Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which was published posthumously.
In the last 15 years of his life, Hume did little writing. In 1763 he told Adam Smith that he had “abjur’d all literary occupations,” resolving “to give up my future life entirely to amusements.” In 1772 he told a friend about his “great talent for cookery,” to which he intended to devote “the remaining years of my life.” The clubbable Hume enjoyed cooking and conversing with friends, but he also spent time revising and correcting his published works. He had a passion for writing clearly and elegantly.
In 1772, Hume told the Comtesse de Boufflers that he would not move back to Paris, where he had lived in the mid-1760s when he was secretary to the British ambassador. In Edinburgh, he wrote the Comtesse, “there are some people conversible enough.” Conversability—also called sociability—is a central tenet of Hume’s thought. If the citizens of a country where liberty flourishes lack conversability—that is, if they cannot discuss political questions without rancor and personal abuse—violent factional discord may ensue. To reduce the likelihood of violent civil discord, political leaders should promote “luxury,” which roughly means economic growth.
In his essay “On Luxury” Hume argues that there is a strong correlation between commercial expansion and sociability. The expansion of commerce also increases wealth, promotes national power, and reduces idleness. Trade among nations is not a zero-sum game: Hume thought that Britain’s commerce would benefit if other nations also had a flourishing commercial sector.
In The Wealth of Nations, Smith says that Hume was “the only writer” who noticed the positive political effects of commerce, but this is not accurate. Joseph Addison and Bernard Mandeville, two writers who influenced Hume, also wrote about the positive political effects of commerce; but Hume made the case for commerce with more nuance and depth than they did. His essays on political economy were admired by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Indeed, Hamilton says in Federalist 12 that “a prosperous commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth.”
Many British writers, however, disagreed with Hume about commercial expansion. In their view, luxury made citizens selfish and it undermined the military virtues. The antiluxury writers praised the classical city-state, whose citizens were supposedly animated by a disinterested concern for the public good. Hume, Harris argues, rejected the idea “that modern politics might be improved by a return to the ideals of the ancients.” Ancient city-states, Hume says, often were riven with violent civil discord.
Hume worried that Britain’s constitutional order was in danger because many Britons were infected with immoderate political passions. Hume especially disliked self-styled “Patriots,” initially followers of the Tory writer Lord Bolingbroke. Summing up Bolingbroke’s writings, Hume said that they contained “so little variety & instruction; so much arrogance and declamation.” The Patriots often argued that liberty was in danger because the monarchy had corrupted Parliament. The “zeal of patriots,” Hume wrote in 1741, was a threat to the nation.
In the late 1760s, the chief Patriot was not a Tory but the radical Whig John Wilkes. In 1768 Wilkes’s followers rioted in London because Wilkes had been denied a seat in Parliament. Hume worried about “the frenzy of liberty”—so, too, did Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that “this capital . . . is now a daily scene of lawless riot and confusion”—and in 1771 Hume wrote his publisher that “nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.” Thus, Hume agreed with Dr. Johnson that Patriotism—an unreasonable fear that the government is suppressing liberty—”is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
If Hume disagreed with writers who admired the ancient city-state, he also disagreed with writers who admired the Stoic notion of striving to be “above” the passions. When the young Hume tried to live by this ideal, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He soon came to the conclusion that the mind is a swirl of passions—some moderate, others immoderate. Strength of mind or virtue is not the suppression of the passions by reason but “the prevalence of the calm passions over the violent.” And if Hume questions the traditional view of the mind, he also dismisses the notion that there is a moral sense. According to Hume, morality is based on sympathy, which is nourished by sociability: “No quality of human nature is more remarkable . . . than that propensity we have to sympathize with others.” Hume argues that sociability is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for morality. “Hume’s conception of human nature,” Harris writes, “is intensely, almost claustrophobically, social.”
In Hume’s scheme of things, religion is often an enemy of sociability. Christianity, he suggests, lauds the “monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility, and passive suffering.” Many Christians, he argues, are dogmatic, intolerant, humorless. In 1765 he wrote that in London, where he was living at the time, “the little company . . . that is worth conversing with are cold and unsociable.” The English, he says in the same letter, “are relapsing fast into the deepest stupidity, Christianity & ignorance.”
This letter, it should be kept in mind, was written to his close friend Hugh Blair, a leading minister in the Church of Scotland. Hume is teasing Blair—playing the role of “the great Infidel.” Harris notes that, in his letters, Hume “was not very good at being serious about religion.” Yet in joking about religion, Hume makes a serious point: Why is it so difficult for many people to look at religion from a philosophical point of view?
On his deathbed, Hume continued to joke about religion. According to Adam Smith’s account of Hume’s final days, Hume said that he had asked Charon, the boatman who ferries souls to the underworld, to give him more time on earth: “Good Charon, I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up and the clergy sent about their business.” But Charon told him to get into the boat immediately because what Hume wished for would not happen for “200 years.” But Hume did not think that religious belief would ever become a thing of the past. In his Natural History of Religion, he suggests that “the will to believe” (as William James put it) is widespread: “The belief of invisible, intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race, in all places and in all ages.”
Hume once said that “the church is my aversion,” yet for the most part Hume’s irreligion is a calm passion. He often deleted passages from his writing that his religious friends found objectionable. Moreover, he disagreed with the dogmatic atheism of the French philosophes. Gibbon writes that the philosophes “laughed at the skepticism of Hume, [and] preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.” Hume, however, was determined to publish his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion even though some friends urged him to destroy it. He finally agreed to have it published posthumously. The work disturbed his Christian friends because one of the characters says that the argument from design, which was popular with both deists and moderate Christians, has no merit: One cannot infer from the uniformity of the works of nature that there is a God.
Hume does not say there is no God. He says that reason cannot lead us to God. Hume was not a believer, but the argument he makes is one that has been made by many believers, including (in his day) the orthodox wing of the Church of Scotland. It must have amused Hume, Harris suggests, to think that, on this question, he agreed with his Christian detractors.
Harris convincingly argues that Hume exaggerated the extent to which zealots—Hume’s favorite term for those who attacked him—made life difficult for him. Yet Hume continued to be attacked long after he died. When Dr. Johnson died in 1784, an Oxford theologian published a sermon On the Difference between the deaths of the righteous and the wicked, Illustrated in the Instance of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and David Hume, Esq. Hume and Johnson can be seen as inhabiting two ends of the 18th-century British intellectual spectrum: the religious skeptic and the God-fearing Christian. Yet they had much in common. Both disapproved of stoicism, attacked “Patriots,” and defended luxury. Both praised sociability and enjoyed conversing in clubs. Both criticized the Seven Years’ War, and both thought an established church was necessary for political stability.
Both also had a dark view of human nature. Johnson would agree with Hume that “the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions.” And he would agree with Hume that custom and ceremony help to curb “the natural depravity of mankind.” Both Johnson and Hume objected to writers who downplayed human suffering by suggesting that it was somehow part of God’s plan. Johnson criticized deist “speculatists” who explain away evil and suffering: Of one such writer, he says that he “decides too easily upon questions out of the reach of human determination.” Harris notes that in Hume’s History of England “there is unspoken contempt for the idea that the horrors he often describes admit of some kind of providential explanation.”
It is sad that David Hume, who thought of himself as a man of letters, is nowadays mainly read by philosophers. The only chapters here that may be difficult for the lay reader are those on Hume’s History of England: Harris walks into the thickets of English historiography in order to show how determined Hume was to be an impartial historian, agreeing neither with the Tory nor the Whig view of British history. “What he wanted from his readers,” writes Harris, “was a willingness to join him . . . in a kind of conversation which . . . might best be called philosophical.”
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Stephen Miller is the author of Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat.
