Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Routledge Revivals)

John Laird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317950783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The essence of Hume's eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were 'dependent on the science of man', and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted 'the science of man' and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind's understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and Latin sources that shaped Hume's theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally.

Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature

Chapter I

Introductory

§ I. BIOGRAPHICAL

DAVID HUME—for so he preferred to spell the family name of Home—a great philosopher, a notable economist, and generally considered, for more than a century, a great historian, was born in Edinburgh on the 26th of April, O.S., 1711. His father, Joseph Home of the estate of Ninewells, in the parish of Chirnside, near Berwick (who died in Hume’s infancy), belonged to the landed gentry, his ancestors having owned this estate for some generations. They regarded themselves as a branch of the family of the Earl of Home or Hume ; but they were not rich. The philosopher’s mother was a daughter¹ of Sir David Falconer (who, under the title of Lord Newton, had been a Lord of Session in the Courts at Edinburgh), and was described by her famous son (G. III. 1) as ‘a woman of singular merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children’—that is to say, of John Home of Ninewells, the eldest, a sister whom Hume called Katty (B. I. 338) and David, the youngest. She is stated, perhaps apochryphally, to have said at some unspecified date that ‘Oor Davie’s a fine good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded’.²

In his own words, Hume ‘passed through the ordinary course of education with success’ (ibid.), and the name David Home, with the date 27th February 1723, is recorded in the books of Edinburgh University, as an ‘intrant’ into the Bejan or Greek Class, then conducted by Mr. W. Scott who had sixty-three pupils.³ It is to be inferred that the freshman (or bec jaune) was, like many others, proficient enough to omit the Humanity (or Latin) Class, and the earlier part of the Greek Class in this Session (which began in the Autumn). It is also probable that he continued his studies for two years subsequently in the Semi (or Logic) Class, and in the Magistrand (or Natural Philosophy) Class. Hume’s name, it is true, does not appear upon the roll of graduates (or elsewhere than in the above entry). We cannot infer, however, that he was plucked, or other than highly successful. For, in those days, many, and these not the worst, preferred not to graduate.⁴

In his ‘Letter to a physician’ (B. I. 31), Hume remarked that ‘as our college education in Scotland, extending little further than the languages, ends commonly when we are about fourteen or fifteen years of age, I was after that left to my own choice in my reading, and found it incline me almost equally to books of reasoning and philosophy, and to poetry and the polite authors’. Hence in 1734 (the probable date of the letter) Hume ascribed his genuine advance in learning to libraries, not to the University ; and this evidence, probable in itself, is incomparably better than the statement, made at the end of his life in the Advertisement to the definitive edition of his Essays (E. 2), that his Treatise (which he then formally disowned on account of its immaturity) was ‘a work which the Author had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published not long after’, the more particularly as the second part of this statement was, to speak mildly, misleading. Nevertheless, even when full allowance is made for the circumstance that Edinburgh University, when Hume was a boy student there, was a much less stimulating place than it became later in the century, it seems clear that Hume might have obtained, and probably did obtain, an extensive if superficial and introductory acquaintance with philosophy, science and culture within the University walls ; and it is noteworthy that Colin Maclaurin, the celebrated Newtonian, became colleague and successor to Mr. James Gregory⁵ in the chair of mathematics there during the year 1725, Sir Isaac Newton himself having written to the Provost of Edinburgh : ‘I am ready (if you please to give me leave) to contribute twenty pounds per annum towards a provision for him, till Mr. Gregory’s place become void, if I live so long.’⁶

In any case, we find Hume, at the age of sixteen, busy with philosophical composition. ‘All the progress that I made’, he then wrote to his friend Michael Ramsay, ‘is but drawing the outlines, on loose bits of paper : here a hint of a passion ; there a phenomenon in the mind accounted for : in another the alteration of these accounts. … Just now I am entirely confined to myself and library for diversion since we parted’ (B. I. 13). His family thought of the law for him ; but he, for his part, ‘found an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning ; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring’ (G. III. 2). And Cicero (or philosophy) soon took precedence of Virgil (or literary criticism).

Our evidence concerning this stage of Hume’s development, apart from a scrap of correspondence dated 1732⁷ in which he thanked Ramsay for his ‘trouble about Baile’,⁸ another scrap (probably of the same period) in which he asked for ‘Pelisson’s History and the last volume of Rapin’, and a later statement (B. I. 332) in which he spoke of burning ‘an old manuscript book wrote before I was twenty, which contained, page after page, the gradual progress’ of his thoughts about natural religion, is contained in the ‘letter to a physician’,⁹ and is singularly complete. For in addressing this philosopher-physician—who may or may not have received the letter, and was almost certainly Dr. Cheyne, a mountain of a man from Aberdeen who had an extensive practice in London, was the author of works on philosophy and on fluxions, and in his account of ‘the English malady’ (1733) claimed to have explained ‘the nature and causes of nervous distempers’ on purely naturalistic lines with special reference to his own experience—Hume narrated the course of his mental as well as of his physical history with studied clearness.

He had, he said, ‘fairly got the disease of the learned’ (or the ‘vapours’) as a result of over-study, and, while coollyrelating such physical symptoms as a ptyalism, a touch of scurvy, and a rapid change from raw-boned leanness to a corpulence impervious to riding and other strenuous exercise, was chiefly concerned about a recurrent spiritual lassitude, which seemed to him to be similar to the ‘coldness and desertion of the spirit’ of ‘the French mystics’ and of ‘our fanatics here’, This malady had seriously interrupted the course of life he had planned for himself. He had seen very early that philosophy and criticism ‘contained little more than endless disputes’, had ‘found a certain boldness of temper’ growing within him until ‘when I was about eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought,¹⁰ which transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it’. Yet, in a few months ‘all my ardour¹¹ seemed in a moment to be extinguished’ ; and it was a full two years before Hume could adapt himself to the altered situation which presented itself to him in the following light :

‘I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more upon invention than experience : every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and of happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal study, and the source from which I would derive every truth in criticism as well as morality. I believe it is a certain fact, that most of the philosophers who have gone before us, have been overthrown by the greatness of their genius, and that little more is required to make a man succeed in this study, than to throw off all prejudices either for his own opinions or for those of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for the truth of my reasonings, which I have multiplied to such a degree, that within these three years, I find I have scribbled many a quire of paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own inventions. This, with the reading most of the celebrated books in Latin, French and English, and acquiring the Italian, you may think a sufficient business for one in perfect health, and so it would had it been done to any purpose ; but my disease was a cruel encumbrance on me. I found that I was not able to follow out any train of thought, by one continued stretch of view, but by repeated interruptions, and by refreshing my eye from time to time upon other objects.. Yet with this inconvenience I have collected the rude materials for many volumes : but in reducing these to words, when one must bring the idea he comprehended in gross, nearer to him, so as to contemplate its minutest parts, and keep it steadily in his eye, so as to copy these parts in order,—this I found impracticable for me, nor were my spirits equal to so severe an employment. Here lay my greatest calamity. I had no hopes of delivering my opinions with such elegance and neatness, as to draw to me the attention of the world, and I would rather live and die in obscurity than produce them maimed and imperfect.’

In view of this ‘calamity’,¹² Hume had decided, he said, to enter the office of ‘a considerable trader in Bristol’ in the hope that a change of occupation, and an active life, might dispel the vapours and enable him, before very long, to resume his philosophical labours with better prospects of ‘a continued stretch of view’. He meant, apparently, to deliver the letter while en route to Bristol ; and he did make his experimental entry into the trader’s office. A few months of the life, however, sufficed, and, in his own words : ‘I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat ; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in literature’ (G. III. 2).

Hume’s choice of a retreat in provincial France was doubtless determined in part by motives of economy combined with his desire to see something of the world (B. I. 38), but largely, we must suppose, by a sense of affinity with the French genius. As he wrote some eight years later (G. III. 159) :

‘The English are, perhaps, greater philosophers ; the Italians better painters and musicians ; the Romans were greater orators ; But the French are the only people, except the Greeks, who have been at once philosophers, poets, orators, historians, painters, architects, sculptors and musicians. With regard to the stage they have excelled even the Greeks. And, in common life, they have, in a great measure, perfected that art, the most useful and agreeable of any, l’Art de Vivre, the art of society and conversation.’

It is true that, at the time, as Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) and (a few years earlier) Fontenelle’s Eloge de Newton testified, the current of philosophical ideas was rather from England to France than from France to England. Hume may even have regarded himself as an unknown but able emissary from the land of experimentalism to the home of a waning Cartesianism and decrepit scholasticism ; but he must have expected, as the event proved, that residence in France would help the ‘elegance and neatness’ of the work he had planned and so largely written, and would diminish its insular quality.

Unfortunately, we know very little of this first visit to France. He went first to Rheims (au Peroquet verd)¹³ but finally selected La Flèche in Anjou as the scene of his literary labours. There he spent over two years ‘very agreeably’ (G. III. 2) and ‘enjoyed the advantages of leisure for study’ (B. II. 100). Local tradition says that he lived in the small château of Yvandeau on the slopes of a coteau some two miles from the pleasant town.¹⁴ And although Hume never mentioned the fact, it is scarcely credible that he did not remember, pretty frequently, that another great philosophical revolutionary, Descartes himself, had been educated at the Jesuit College of La Flèche.

In the cloisters of the College Hume discussed the subject of miracles with ‘a Jesuit of some parts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter I. Introductory
• Chapter II. The Principles of Sensory Phenomenalism
• Chapter III. Space, Time and External Existence
• Chapter IV. Causality, Experiment and Induction
• Chapter V. Bodies and Minds
• Chapter VI. Nature and Scepticism
• Chapter VII. The Passions
• Chapter VIII. Ethics and the Sense of Humanity
• Chapter IX. Politics, Economics, History and Criticism
• Chapter X. Religion
• Index