By John Knox
Before we get carried away by the 300th anniversary of David Hume, let’s remember that he was to blame for making us a nation of sceptics. The Scottish shrug of the shoulders and the suspicion of success was born with him on 7 May 1711.
Hume was even uncertain of his own birthday. In his memoirs he gives the date as 26 April, the day by the old-style Julian calendar which went out of use in 1752. An interesting mistake to make, for the man whose greatest distinction in his own lifetime was as a historian.
But it is his mistake in philosophy for which Hume is most famous today. He argued that nothing in the moral sciences can be proved by reason. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” he wrote. “All our reasonings concerning cause and effect are derived from nothing but custom.”
Thus the difference between right and wrong is not something that can be proved by reason. It is to do with feelings of humanity or simply the accepted traditions of society. To most of us these days, this seems obvious – but to a world still dominated by the Catholic Scholastics who traced all rules about the good life back, by reason, to God, this was heresy. To many religious people it still is.
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Hume’s “atheism” prevented him getting a teaching job at both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. And no wonder, because Hume’s extreme scepticism was an attack on the whole deductive method of reasoning. For example, Hume in effect argued that because there is creation it does not follow that there must be a creator, or because there is private property, it does not follow that it is wrong to steal. It does not take long to work out that both of these propositions are nonsense. Something must have created the world, call it what you will – chance, the force of nature, God. And private property is impossible if stealing is not frowned upon. In the end, Hume had to admit he had walked up a cul-de-sac. He could not hold to his own philosophy and, in his later essays, he ended up supporting the usual liberal nostrums of his day – property, the rule of law etc. Sandy Stoddart’s statue of Hume in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh neatly illustrates the bareness of his philosophy. Hume is dressed rather chillingly for the Scottish weather in a Roman senator’s off-the-shoulder toga. He is slumped, confused and exhausted, over a half-written essay. He is quite out of keeping with the well-dressed and triumphant kings, soldiers, poets, economists and preachers who populate the other plinths along the Mile, where so many figures of the Scottish enlightenment used to meet for coffee. So why is Hume regarded by so many as the greatest philosopher Scotland has ever produced? Partly because scepticism is a popular position to hold these days – especially, as I say, in Scotland. But more importantly, it’s because Hume was on to something. Although he failed, the reaction to his failure has shaped our philosophy ever since. As scientists often say, you learn as much from your failed experiments than your successful ones. To refute Hume's scepticism, the “Common Sense” school of Scottish philosophy developed, led by Thomas Reid of Aberdeen University. He argued that we could deduce a perfect truth from other truths, but we had to be careful and be guided by the evidence as far as possible. This new search for evidence was what made Hume important – influencing modern western philosophy ever since. He was the first behaviourist. The valuable part of Hume’s most famous work A Treatise of Human Nature lies in its subtitle, “Being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.” Philosophers before him, notably Francis Bacon in England, had championed the experimental method in science and the Encyclopaedists in France had made rigour and fact-gathering a popular method of acquiring knowledge – as opposed to quoting the Bible or other higher authorities. But, after his ambitious subtitle, Hume did not make much progress. His Treatise is a turgid affair, without many real examples. One of the few occurs on page five, when he says: “We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine-apple without having actually tasted it.” In a way, this is true. But you can infer the taste by someone describing to you that it lies somewhere between an orange and an apple, a bittersweet taste. You don’t have to go to the moon to know that it is not made of cheese. But neither the moon nor a pineapple are moral subjects and Hume never really has a clear idea where the science of objects ends and the science of morality begins. We see this most clearly when Hume attempts to describe the workings of the mind. He does so without any real experiments or expertise. He says, for instance, that when we see something with our own eyes – the room in which we are sitting, for example – it creates a strong impression on the mind and that impression is stronger than the general idea of a room. He has no way of knowing this except by anecdote. There are no wires to the brain in Hume. What he really wants to say is that abstract ideas are much weaker than real impressions and thus we should look to the solid evidence of the real world around us, rather than accept the ideas floating around in ancient writings or philosophical texts. Hume was only 26 when he published the Treatise and perhaps he would have made a better job of it if he had let his thoughts mature a little. Not surprisingly, it “fell still-born from the press”, to quote his autobiography. “But being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I very soon recovered from the blow.” He turned his hand to essay-writing, at which he was much more successful, and to secretarial work. A little-known and unexpected episode in Hume’s life was his three years as secretary to General St Clair. He was part of an expeditionary force which set out to defeat the French in Canada in 1746, but ended up fighting the French in France. The “battle” near Orléans turned out to be a farce, with the French retreating before the British even got there. Hume eventually got a steady job back in Edinburgh, as keeper of the library of the Faculty of Advocates – now the National Library. With so many books at his disposal, he set out to write a very popular History of England in six volumes. He didn’t however much like the English. “It has been my misfortune,” he says in a letter to a friend, “to write in the language of the most stupid and factious barbarians in the world.” And yet he also turned his back on much of Scotland, showing no interest in the Highlands or the Gaelic world. He was very much a lowlander and an Edinburgh man. Like most Scotsmen, Hume was a parcel of contradictions. He could be angry one minute – with his builder, with his friend Lord Elibank, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And yet, in the next minute, he could be composed, urbane and kind. He gave his earnings as keeper to the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. He arranged asylum for Rousseau in England. Hume would often write modestly of being like a man who has “the temerity to set out to sea in a leaky, weather-beaten vessel” and at the same time he could write, to shocking effect, essays against miracles and dialogues concerning “natural” religion. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “the errors in religion are dangerous, those in philosophy are only ridiculous.” Hume never married, but lived at times on the family estate at Chirnside in Berwickshire, and in later life with his sister and his cat in a flat in the New Town. The street has since become St David’s Street, which would have amused Hume. He entertained his friends there – of which there were many – until he died in August 1776, having just seen, and approved of, the American declaration of independence. His friend and literary executor Adam Smith wrote of him: “Upon the whole, I have considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly the idea of the perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” This seems to be the hagiography of the present age as regards St David. I have tried to show that Adam Smith, as in so many things, was only half right.Want to discuss other issues? Join the debate on our new Scottish Voices forum
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