Michael Fry on David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature

Walter Scott, especially as author of The Waverley Novels (1814-31), would at one time have run Burns close but is today so faded from fashion that he might find trouble in getting mentioned at all.

Besides, of the classic literature, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is for my money by far the best.

From the 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid and other modernists present readers with difficulties even in the 21st century.

If it were up to me, I would still include our philosophy in our literature, so underlining its unique character. And of the philosophers, David Hume is the most literary.

Hume had a quiet, scholarly childhood in his native Berwickshire, on his parents’ land near Chirnside. He developed a literary taste that was among the widest of his generation. For purposes of composition he never found any trouble turning himself into a historian, an economist, an essayist, a letter writer. He came across this fortunate creative urge after he discovered – can it really have been a surprise? – that he was not going to make a living as a philosopher.

After personal crises and breakdowns, Hume at length took the high road to England and, amid odd jobs, also had the good sense to find the publisher for an original work to which he gave the stark title A Treatise of Human Nature.

The publisher was called John Noon and his address was at Whitechapel in the east end of London. The two of them signed a contract on a date for which the anniversary fell last week, September 26, 1739. A contract was still no guarantee of sales, however.

On the cover of the book, underneath the title, there was a line of catchy subtitle with at least the virtue of explaining things a bit better: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

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To a reader like me this announces I am arriving on the right side of my philosophical field. From the author I can surely expect a statement of empiricism, scepticism and naturalism (unlike if I was reading St Thomas Aquinas, for example). In fact it is more promising still.

Today many consider it to be Hume’s greatest work and one of the most influential in the whole history of philosophy.

Hume was born on April 26, 1711, as David Home – he changed the spelling in 1734 while in England, since there the pronunciation of Home as Hume was thought to be “wrong”. His birthplace was a tenement on the southern side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh.

He was the younger of two sons of Joseph Home, a lawyer normally resident at Chirnside, who died just after David’s second birthday. Home’s widow was Catherine, daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Lord President of the Court of Session, and of his wife Mary Falconer (nee Norvell). Catherine decided to raise her children, two brothers and a sister, on her own.

Hume never married and was happy to live partly at Chirnside, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His initial finances were “slender” – the family was not rich and, as a younger son, he had little patrimony to live on.

Hume entered the University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age – 12 or possibly as young as 10 – in a period when 14 was typical.

He first considered a career in the law, because of his family’s tradition. Yet, in his own 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.

Aged 18 or so, 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 tell us exactly what this scene was, critics have offered a range of guesses.

One prime idea in present Humean scholarship is that the new scene featured the chief figure in the previous generation of Scottish philosophers, the Presbyterian minister Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson proposed we make sure theories of moral sense and our understanding of morality should be kept close together. There should be no looking to theory for morals we do not possess.

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He became a popular lecturer, not least because he was the first to address his students in English rather than the previously preferred Latin. He was also, as a man at home in the pulpit, more animated than most 18th-century academics. Through his career he retained a commitment to the liberal arts that connected his thoughts and theories to ancient traditions, as far back as Aristotle and Cicero.

From Hutcheson’s 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. Later, some scurvy spots broke out on his fingers, persuading his doctor to diagnose him as suffering from 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 lead a more active life to animate his learning. His health improved but in 1731 he was afflicted with a ravenous appetite and palpitations of the heart.

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 gained a reputation for being obese, a result of his fondness for good port and cheese.

Such were the physical attributes of the plump young man who, in the introduction to his first book, presented the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation, namely, on an empirical investigation into human nature.

Impressed by Isaac Newton’s achievements in the physical sciences, Hume sought to introduce the same experimental method of reasoning into the study of human psychology, with the aim of discovering the “extent and force of human understanding”.

AGAINST the philosophical rationalists, Hume argues that the passions, rather than reason, are the cause of human behaviour. Further still, our beliefs regarding cause and effect cannot be justified by reason.

On the contrary, our faith in induction and causation is formed from mental habit and custom. We never actually perceive that one event causes another. We only experience the “constant conjunction” of events. Otherwise, in order to draw any causal inferences from past experience, we need to presuppose that the future will resemble the past. This presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.

As for morality, Hume argues that, similarly, ethics is based on emotion or sentiment, not on reason or abstract moral principle. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave to the passions”.

These very detailed points do not alter the fact that A Treatise of Human Nature was the product of an extraordinary intellectual ambition. This is already explicit in the introduction to Book 1, where Hume outlined his conviction that a science of man or a knowledge of human nature should be the basis for all the rest – for mathematics, natural philosophy and natural religion, as well as for logic, morals, criticism and politics.

Further, he would argue that “as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation”.

The consequences of such a simple proposition were even more radical when applied to moral subjects, as well as to natural ones. The multiplication of philosophical systems, which had brought metaphysical reasoning into disrepute, would be at an end.

Hume implied that a philosophy based on experience cannot discover “the ultimate original qualities of human nature” any more than it can reason about entities of which experience gives us no firm knowledge, such as God, his qualities and his operations.

Hume was to spend the rest of his life working and reworking on the essentially simple propositions he put at the heart of the Treatise.

The work goes on by others today.