* David Hume grew up as the son of an affluent Scots family, acquiring in his youth a love of scholarly pursuits. After completing his formal education, he threw himself body and soul into the construction of his book A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE. The book was a failure, but it did give him a starting point for better efforts that gradually drew more attention to him. He also furthered his personal fortunes through service to the King via a friendly general, giving him enough money to focus on his writing.
* Philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries distinguished "moral" explanations from "natural", or "mechanical" explanations:
Sensible folk are inclined to see the two as distinct, divided by a line separating things that can't be sensibly reduced to a science -- when people try to pretend they are sciences, the results are uninteresting at best, more often comical, sometimes frightening -- and things that can.
Prescientific peoples, however, didn't make much distinction between the two notions, such folk being inclined to see events in the natural world as caused by gods, or other supernatural entities human-like in their thinking. A storm is caused by an angry god; or maybe the storm is an angry god. Primitives typically had a solid grasp of the actual facts of events themselves -- they had to, in order to survive -- but their explanations of them were essentially aesthetic: instead of seeking a stronger grasp of facts, they sought explanations in the forms of comfortable or entertaining stories. That made a certain sense, such explanations being simple and easy to understand, with an event being part of a script of the gods, and humans playing out roles in that script.
With the emergence of modern science, a line between the two domains began to be drawn, with the sciences performing observations of the Universe to determine its laws, its underlying mechanisms. Scholars finally understood that, when it comes to physical facts, a comfortable story was amusing but of no practical use, incapable of advancing our understanding of physical realities beyond what we knew to begin with.
The publication of Isaac Newton's PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA in 1687 was a landmark in this change of mindset, Newton using his three laws of motion and law of universal gravitation to create a theoretical structure that described the underlying workings of the Universe. Significantly, Newton didn't say why the Universe seemed to work that way; he had merely described the behavior of gravity in an "empirical" way. That was how it was observed to work, and that he didn't know any more about it than that: "I frame no hypotheses."
"Empirical skepticism" was not entirely new, but Newton was the first to seriously demonstrate its power. A generation after Newton came David Hume, who believed that empirical skepticism had more general applicability than Newton had considered, believing it as opening the door to an improved way of seeing the world.
BACK_TO_TOP* David Hume was born on 7 May 1711 -- 26 April, as it was then counted in the "old calendar" -- into a family of minor Scots nobility. In an essay titled "My Own Life" penned near the end of his days, he spoke of his ancestry with evident pride:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I was of a good family, both by father and mother: my father's family is a branch of the Earl of Home's, or Hume's; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice: the title of Lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother.
END QUOTE
David's father was Joseph Home -- the name was actually pronounced as "Hume" -- the laird of the estate of Ninewells, next to the village of Chirnside, across the border with England from the town of Berwick, about 14 kilometers (9 miles) away; his mother was Katherine Home.
David was one of three children; the eldest was his brother John, and he had an elder sister, also named Katherine like her mother. Joseph died in August 1713; the cause of death was not recorded, indeed most details of David's early life are very sketchy. The elder Katherine never remarried, instead focusing on raising her children and running the family estate, David remembering her with affection and respect as "a woman of Singular merit" in his later life. He grew up in affluence if not luxury, the "manor" of the estate being much more a large farmhouse than a palace. The family also owned a flat in Edinburgh, about 64 kilometers (40 miles) away.
David Hume was seen as bright from his youth -- his mother judging him "uncommonly wake-minded", meaning he was sharp, this remark being sometimes misinterpreted as saying he was "weak-minded" -- and when his brother John went to Edinburgh University, David followed him, it seems from records in early 1723 -- the usual entrance age was 14, but David was only about 12. There was an expectation that David would go into law, that being a tradition for the Home family, but that was not to be. As David put it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an insurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.
END QUOTE
David was still diligent in his studies of law; in his later life he would draw up legal documents for friends, and a strong sense of legal argument would underlie his writings. However, he honestly wanted nothing more than to be "a Scholar & Philosopher". He energetically dug into classical and contemporary philosophy -- and then he had an illumination, writing "there seem'd to be open'd up to me a New Scene of Thought." As he wrote a few years later, he had acquired a Newtonian view of moral thinking:
BEGIN QUOTE:
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 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 is required to make a man succeed in this study, than to throw off all prejudices either for his own or for those of others.
END QUOTE
Hume ended his formal studies in 1725 or 1726, the specifics again being unclear. The destruction of the family flat by fire in 1725 was possibly a factor in the end of his formal education, the Homes then finding new lodgings in Edinburgh. However, he continued his studies, the "tall, lean, & rawbon'd" lad -- as he described himself in a self-conscious letter to a doctor describing his health, the letter never being sent and apparently written only for Hume's own files. In the letter, he spoke of his dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy, saying it contained "little more than endless disputes, even in the most fundamental articles," and in response how he had chosen to strike out on his own scholarly path:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Upon examination of these, I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority in these subjects, but led me to seek out some new medium, by which truth might be established. After much study and reflection on this, at last, when I was about eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and mede me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it. The law, which was the business I designed to follow, appeared nauseous to me, and I could think of no other way of pushing my fortune in the world, but that of a scholar and philosopher.
END QUOTE
He pushed himself so hard that his health and emotional balance suffered. He decided to cool off in his studies, living a more disciplined life and -- through a period of "ravenous Appetite" in 1731 -- ate healthily enough to transform himself into the "most sturdy, robust, healthful-like Fellow you have seen, with a ruddy Complexion & a chearful Countenance." His "distemper" lingered, however, advice from doctors doing little more than to make him suspicious, with good reason, that there was no strong dividing line between the proper doctors of the era and quacks.
Thinking that he needed to get out of his intellectual cloister, in 1734 he took a job for a few months as a clerk with a Bristol sugar merchant. He wrote that he found "that scene totally unsuitable to me", curing him forever of any desire to be a tradesman; it appears he found his employer disagreeable, so focused on making money as to be not merely indifferent to but contemptuous of any other questions in the world. One consequence of his employment in Bristol was that he stopped spelling his name as "Home", since Englishmen to no surprise didn't pronounce it correctly.
Despite his distaste for commerce, there was nothing lazy about David Hume; as his far-ranging output of writings would prove, he was both energetic and ambitious. To make a start in publication Hume then moved to France, ultimately settling down in La Fleche, a little village in Anjou Province noted for its Jesuit college. There he could live cheaply -- he survived on a stipend from the Ninewells estate, estimated to be about 50 pounds sterling a year, just enough to scrape by on -- while he devoured French philosophy, had occasional intellectual sparring matches with the Jesuits, and struggled to put his ideas on paper.
Incidentally, after Hume departed Scotland to work in England, one Agnes Galbraith went to the ecclesiastic authorities to complain that David Hume had got her pregnant and then skipped the country. The authorities questioned Galbraith at length; she was well-known to them as lacking in morals and truthfulness, and she ended up being disciplined without the Hume family being bothered about the matter. It appears Galbraith targeted David Hume simply because he was of a prominent family, and because he conveniently wasn't around to defend himself.
* Hume returned to England in 1737 to arrange publication of his TREATISE ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. Although London was a hotbed of philosophical discourse at that time, he still worried about getting published and the reception his work might face -- "castrating" his manuscript of controversial elements to avoid the censure of Bishop Joseph Butler, then a prominent figure in philosophical circles. Book I, OF THE UNDERSTANDING, and Book II, OF THE PASSIONS, were published anonymously in 1739. Book III, OF MORALS, came out in 1740, along with an anonymous ABSTRACT of the first two volumes.
Hume was, as was his inclination, understated when he said the TREATISE "fell still-born from the press" -- it would be possibly more accurate to say it was murdered, such critical reception as it attracted being overwhelmingly negative. A tale went around that one critic savaged Hume so badly that he, Hume, looked up the critic and threatened him with a sword. The story is implausible: Hume was far more cheerful than not, having his fits of spleen but never inclined to violence; more significantly, at the time of the reported incident, he had retreated to Ninewells to mend his wounds and work on his next project.
The TREATISE was certain no best-seller but John Noon, his publisher, who was apparently perfectly happy with small printings as long as they paid for themselves, had no problems dealing with Hume later. The major impact of the TREATISE, at least as far as Hume was concerned, was that a set of scholars had indeed taken notice of him, but not in a good sort of way. At the time, Hume being an unknown, they didn't make much of a fuss about the matter.
BACK_TO_TOP* Hume's TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE was a very mixed work, brilliant in parts, painfully labored and wordy in others, not to mention a bit overblown and pompous -- sometimes painfully missing the deft touch that Hume would acquire later. His references to mathematical thinking, his "system of space and time", were a fiasco; later he would attempt to publish an essay in such a style, but the publisher rejected it after a mathematician explained it was full of holes, and Hume never tried anything like it again.
Given how poorly written the TREATISE was, it wasn't too surprising that it wasn't well received. However, difficulties with the writing aside, the critics simply did not understand Hume's arguments. That was somewhat to be expected, since his arguments were to a degree radical, and certainly contrary to the conventional wisdom, breeding antagonism.
Hume approached his subject matter on a skeptical basis, asking in effect that of what we think and believe, just what of it can be seen as true -- and, about as importantly, how much it matters if it's provably true or not. His only way to approach these questions was effectively behavioral; after all, what else was the question of philosophy, of what we think and believe, all about?
In Book I of the TREATISE, "Of The Understanding", Hume dealt with the issue of fundamental human knowledge. In terms of things that might be judged true or not, Hume divided them into "matters of relation", and matters of observable fact of the physical Universe. By "matters of relation", he simply meant a propositional system such as math, with defined concepts and rules. In such cases, it was possible to obtain absolute proofs -- if not always so, since a propositional system can run itself into contradictions and blind alleys.
As far as matters of observable fact, Hume took the obvious "empiricist" point of view, in that we could only know about matters of observable fact by, duh, what we can reliably observe of them -- "reliable" in the sense that any honest and competent skeptic can make the same observations and get the same results.
Hume asserted that we couldn't know anything about the Universe except by observation -- that we couldn't just sit down and think out "a priori" how the Universe worked. We can think that anything might exist, or think that it might not; the only way to know if it does or not is to go check. No matter how insistent people are in thinking that something does or does not exist, no matter what supposedly logical arguments they make to support their beliefs to that effect, they can only honestly know the existence of something by seeing if it really does exist.
Logical arguments about what exists can be no more valid than their premises as obtained by observation, and their conformance of their results to observations. The premises may not be relevant or correct, and cannot be known to be entirely or even substantially complete. Any perceived mathematical precision of such arguments is irrelevant, since it only reflects the consistency of the arguments to their own premises. We can prove anything is true in theory by the proper selection of assumptions; whether it is true in the material world can only be determined from the evidence.
* In any case, Hume developed a theory of perception, resting on the twin concepts of "impressions" and "ideas". Impressions were direct perceptions of the external world, along with the drives and emotions that exist in our internal mental world. Ideas were ultimately derived from impressions, abstractions of them -- for example, the idea of pain is not the same thing as pain itself. We may unpleasantly remember an injury that caused us great pain, we may remember the particular qualities of the pain, but thankfully we do not honestly experience the agony again.
Our ideas of the objects in the world around us are based on impressions of them; we recognize a particular object by its observable properties, indeed there's nothing else to know about it. Having obtained a set of ideas based on impressions, then we can use those ideas as "building blocks" to generate new ideas:
There are two limits to the process of imagination. The first is obvious, though there are still some who have problems with it: simply because we can imagine something gives no reason to assume it exists, or that it should exist. The second is less so: if we have no impression of something, it cannot be imagined. Blind people cannot visualize color, deaf people have no concept of music, the ideas are meaningless to them. Any attempt to describe something completely outside our experience is an exercise in empty rhetoric; we cannot provide a useful description of it, and nobody who listens to such a description will be any the wiser for it.
Along with the modification of ideas by imagination, we also can establish relationships between them. We see resemblances, for example between a worm and a snake; proximity, for example knowing that we will be able to find both a hammer and a saw in a hardware store; and, last but not least, cause and effect, causality.
Causality is fundamental to human thinking: we only really care about the objects in the Universe because of their effects, and if we wish to have control over those effects, we have to understand their cause. As Hume pointed out, we know objects by their properties, but cause isn't a property of an object. What we actually see as cause and effect is the interaction of two objects that, by all observation, are otherwise independent. We have no way of knowing what this interaction is without experience of it; we just observe the interaction repeatedly, and then infer a cause and effect relationship from it, constructing a theoretical model to describe it.
The bottom line is that our comprehension of the world around us is not at root based on reasoning, but on observation, and in no way does the process of observation and modeling provide absolute proof of a causal relationship. In our observations, we have no ability to check every instance of the interaction that ever happened; we have no way to know if the interaction will work in the future. We do use reasoning in the construction and interpretation of our models of the real world, but again they can only be as valid as their assumptions, and are only as useful as they are verified to be by observation. In short, as far as the external Universe is concerned, we not only can't reason things out "a priori", we can't absolutely prove anything.
Hume wasn't rejecting causality, of course; he was defining it, as the observed consistent conjunction of two otherwise independent objects, with rules established in a "bottom-up" fashion by induction. It is still asserted that Hume had "refuted" causality and induction, but he would have laughed in response. This is how we learn about the world, it's the only way we have. We have no choice but to believe in causality, we'd never be able to do anything if we didn't.
In practice, if we have a substantial body of consistent observations of a causal relationship, we just don't care if we can prove it or not, that's not an issue. Can we prove the Sun will come up tomorrow morning? No, but so what? We assume it does so anyway, and we need make no defense of that belief. The only way to undermine that belief is to provide material evidence that it is wrong, and in the absence of persuasive evidence, there's no case to be made, or even worth listening to.
Hume then analyzed the notion of "belief". He tried to define it, but admitted that we all know what it means: we either feel something is true or something is a fiction. His significant observation was that this decision was indeed a feeling, emotional; if we decide to believe something, we actually know nothing more about the matter than if we decided we didn't. A declaration of belief provides no factual information at all, except that somebody believes something. Yes, we might have rational reasons to believe something, but people also tend to believe what is convenient. Hume astutely pointed out that people have a particular inclination to ignore the factual and believe the sensationalistic, because of the emotional charge they get out of it.
* In Book II of the TREATISE, "Of The Passions", Hume performed a detailed investigation of the passions, examining them as categories: pride and humility, love and hatred, pity and malice, respect and contempt, and so on. While Book I of the TREATISE still gets some respect today, Book II is now seen as the most trivial of the three volumes. That's partly because Hume was more or less belaboring the obvious. Hume saw the passions as important because they led us to belief and actions. People could of course be rational, but what we actually want to do is driven by emotion. That being said, there's not much more to say about it.
That leads to Book III, "Of Morals", in which Hume constructed his model of a moral system. His scheme of morals was entirely secular. That wasn't really a surprise, the theistic basis of morality had long been challenged by philosophers -- but more radically, Hume challenged the established belief of philosophers that morals were based on reasoning. While we certainly do perform rational analyses of moral actions using basic principles, as Hume had it those basic principles were largely derived from human feeling and custom, and any analysis based on them could not be assured to come to an answer predictable by any rigorous logic.
The basis for this assertion was that, as established in Book II, humans were motivated to action, not by reasoning, but by emotion, "sentiment". That can imply no contradiction with reasoning, since reasoning cannot provide us with a particular basis for doing anything. The facts cannot tell us what we want; they simply inform us of the options -- we may want things that are entirely unrealistic, and settle for what meager approximation we can get of it. This is Hume's well-known IS:OUGHT problem, the most significant thing Hume ever said: we can never get from raw facts (IS) to what we feel like doing about them (OUGHT), that being determined by our overall worldview and emotional inclinations.
As far as morality went, we don't establish any action as immoral except for the fact that we, emotionally, find it repugnant. Is there a law of nature that shows murder is wrong? No -- but we do generally feel that murder is wrong, people simply don't like it, and regard those who don't feel so as diseased. There are things we admire about people; there are things we despise. We each have our feelings of what is right and what is wrong; by an "intercourse of sentiments", we establish a common moral custom.
People want to do the right thing because they want social approval and don't want social disapproval. Hume didn't believe that people only did the right thing out of fear of punishment; he believed it was more driven by what he called "sympathy". Humans are social animals, and they have an instinct to cooperate. Ultimately we are also "shareholders" in our society and want to promote the collective good, just as we want to improve our households.
Of course, the tension between self-interest and the common good persists. To the extent that's a problem, it is exactly the problem a more system is supposed to address. Morality is not just about the rights we owe to others, it's just as importantly about the rights others owe to us. It's a balancing of our own rights and interests against those of the collective, defined in custom and civil law. Society functions on the basis of mutual cooperation. Hume did believe that altruism played a role in society, but did not think it an essential one.
BACK_TO_TOP* Hume didn't stay discouraged at the negative reception to the TREATISE for very long. At Ninewells, Hume churned out two volumes of ESSAYS, MORAL & POLITICAL, which were published in 1741 and 1742. These essays were a mixed lot, some of them so trivial that Hume threw them out in later publications -- and one, "Of National Characters", was no more than a regrettable list of ethnic stereotypes, the most appalling entry in hindsight being:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I Am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.
END QUOTE
It can be said that such a mindset was normal for the era -- and Hume, though not an active abolitionist, denounced slavery in his dissertation "On The Populousness Of Ancient Nations", calling it an example of the "barbarous manners of ancient times", saying that it was a path by "which every man of rank was rendered a petty tyrant, and educated amidst the flattery, submission, and low debasement of his slaves."
In any case, such pratfalls are not common in Hume's work. The ESSAYS were actually well-received, bringing him public attention and beginning the attention, beginning the establishment of his reputation as a leading European man of letters. They did much to raise his spirits in his philosophical endeavours.
Hume worked hard at his writing, but having set out to become a scholar, he greatly wanted an academic position. When a chair of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh went vacant in 1745, Hume lobbied to fill it, but now his enemies came out of the woodwork, accusing him of being an atheist and "hyperskeptic" -- that is, skeptical of everything, all the time, what the scholarly of the time referred to as "Pyrrhonians". The first charge was more or less true, religious conformists caring little about distinctions between different grades of nonbelief, but the second was not. Even today, Hume is labeled a hyperskeptic -- but he was careful to articulate his position as a "mitigated skeptic", only being skeptical to the extent that it was justified. Hume was, in short, skeptical of his own skepticism.
One of his critics distributed a list of damaging citations from Hume's TREATISE. Hume replied in an open letter to Henry Home -- a close friend of long standing, a distant relative, as were all the Homes / Humes of Scotland -- dated 8 May 1745 titled "A Letter From A Gentleman To His Friend In Edinburgh", in particular addressing accusations of hyperskepticism:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... As to the Scepticism with which the Author is charged, I must observe, that the Doctrine of the Pyrrhonians or Scepticks have been regarded in all Ages as Principles of mere Curiosity ... without any Influence on a Man's steady Principles or Conduct in Life. In Reality, a Philosopher who affects to doubt of the Maxims of common Reason, and even of his Senses, declares sufficiently that he is not in earnest, and that he intends not to advance an Opinion which he would recommend as Standards of Judgment and Action.
All he means by these Scruples is to abate the Pride of mere human Reasoners, by showing them, that even with regard to Principles which seem the clearest, and which they are necessitated from the strongest Instincts of Nature to embrace, they are not able to attain a full Consistence and absolute Certainty. Modesty then, and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticism; not an universal Doubt, which it is impossible for any Man to support, and which the first and most trivial Accident in Life must immediately disconcert and destroy ...
BEGIN QUOTE
Hume lost his bid for the seat. He seems to have been infected with wishful thinking, since the university was dominated by conservative clergy; even if he had been appointed, he would have been a foreigner in their midst. However, Hume so wanted an academic position that when another chair of philosophy went vacant at the University of Glasgow in 1751, he would try once more -- with much the same results.
Anyway, 1745 was a tumultuous year for Hume -- indeed, a tumultuous year for all of Britain, with Charles Edward Stuart raising a ragtag army of roughly 5,000 Scots to occupy Edinburgh, and then march on London in hopes of restoring the Stuart kings to the throne of Britain. The initial success of the "Jacobite" rebels was due to of the diversion of British forces to fight the French on the Continent; once troops were brought back home, they quickly crushed the uprising at Culloden, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, on 16 April 1746, with "Bonnie Prince Charlie" escaping to permanent exile in France. It was the last major ground battle to ever take place on British soil. Hume found the spirit of the Jacobites inspiring but had no such high opinion of their wisdom, having no difficulties with the defeat of their cause.
Hume was not much personally affected by the social turmoil, with little more mention of the uprising in his letters other than to refer to "the present unhappy troubles" and "this miserable little war". He had reason to be circumspect in his correspondence, of course, Scots being held in widespread suspicion in England at the time; writing down anything that might sound seditious and could have been used against him would have been unwise.
Hume was far more distracted by his own problems -- not just the fiasco with the University of Edinburgh, but also the death of his mother Katherine, and a misadventure from accepting a position as a tutor for the Marquess of Annandale. Work as a tutor to a young nobleman seemed appealing to Hume, a fitting task for an aspiring scholar, and the job offered to pay well -- but it turned out a nightmare, the young Hume being out of his depth in the noble family's politics, and the marquess falling into complete madness. It was nothing but trouble, and Hume extricated himself only with difficulty; he wasn't paid all he was due, pressing a suit against the estate for 75 pounds that took until 1760 to resolve. Hume was not commercially-minded, but he had a strong Scots sense of the value of money.
BACK_TO_TOP* Hume did end up with a modest but welcome sum of money in his pocket, and went to London in the spring of 1746 to determine what to do next. There he met Lieutenant General James St. Clair of the King's Army, a distant relative of his, who took a liking to Hume -- he was so easy to like -- with the general asking Hume to be his secretary on a military expedition against the French in Canada. Britain and France had been at war from 1740 in what would become known as the "War of the Austrian Succession", a squabble officially over the succession of Maria Theresa to the Hapsburg throne, though in reality it amounted to two sets of European powers pursuing grudges against each other.
In any case, Hume was excited, writing to a correspondent of "such a romantic adventure" -- but he quickly found himself bogged down in the entirely unromantic reality of military bureaucracy, Hume writing of the exercise being crippled by "contrary winds and contrary orders." From late May into August 1746, St. Clair's forces set to sea repeatedly, only to be frustrated by unfavorable winds, with the ministers supposedly in overall direction of the effort not being of one mind of what they wanted to do. Ultimately, there being no hope of a campaign in Canada before the winter set in, the decision was made for St. Clair to take his troops to Boston and quarter them there for the winter, to take the offensive come spring. Once more, the movement was foiled by contrary winds; after a few more weeks of equivocation, the order came down for St. Clair to instead perform a military demonstration against some port in western France.
With the recall of British military forces from Flanders to suppress the Jacobite uprising, the French had been given a battlefield opportunity, and the British had accordingly suffered setbacks there. Handing the French a distraction of their own seemed a good idea, but this operation was no better planned out than the Canadian expedition. In mid-September, St. Clair's force descended on the coastal town of L'Orient in Brittany, but the operation ended up something of a farce, the British pulling out by the end of the month.
The expedition against French Canada was shelved in early 1747 -- though it was not forgotten, to be resurrected as a great British military success late in the next decade. Hume had no real regrets over his participation in the exercise, having found the company of St. Clair and his military family congenial; indeed, Hume had acquired contacts with a number of prominent men whose friendship would prove valuable in the future. St. Clair had even arranged a modest pension for Hume -- pensions being used in that time and place by the powerful to hand government largesse to their favorites, the scheme in modern terms having a degree of similarity to obtaining a government grant. However, officialdom was reluctant to pay up, seeing no cause to grant Hume a bounty for work on a military operation that had accomplished nothing. The result was another long session of fuss that went into the 1760s. It is unclear if Hume ever collected.
* Hume still had more money in his pocket; he hadn't needed to spend much, living well at the general's table. In fact he had put on considerable weight, becoming notably fat, making jokes at his own expense about his mass. In any case, with the decision to abandon the expedition, Hume was back where he started, at loose ends in London. General St. Clair invited Hume to accompany him on campaign in Flanders, but it wasn't a paying job, and Hume felt he had better things to do.
In the summer of 1747, Hume decided to return home to the Ninewells estate, where he dove into writing again. His primary focus was to trim down the essentials of his TREATISE into a more digestible form. Hume had acquired misgivings about the TREATISE, later writing in his autobiography:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I had always entertained a notion, that my want of success in publishing the Treatise of Human Nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early.
END QUOTE
Hume would ultimately repudiate the TREATISE, calling it a "juvenile work". The result of his effort to improve the "manner" of his writing were two slender volumes:
They would not make much of a splash in his lifetime, though the first ENQUIRY would prove the most significant and enduring of his works. He followed the second ENQUIRY with another set of essays titled POLITICAL DISCOURSES, published in 1752. To Hume's gratification, POLITICAL DISCOURSES proved to be "the only work of mine, that was successful on first Publication: it was well received abroad and at home."
BACK_TO_TOP* Hume might have got all three volumes out sooner had he not been diverted by the good General St. Clair again. British leadership felt their Austrian and Sardinian allies weren't carrying their weight in the struggle against the French, and so St. Clair was ordered to the courts of these two nations, Vienna and Turin respectively, to brace them up. St. Clair asked Hume to be his secretary again, and so Hume was in London again by early 1748, soon shipping out to the Netherlands. He was thoroughly seasick on the passage, but at least had the satisfaction of observing "an Admiral as sick as myself."
The general and his entourage made their way across friendly German states until they picked up a boat ride down the Danube to Vienna; the weather being pleasant, the passage became a tourist excursion of sorts, Hume describing it as a "variety of scenes presented to us, & immediately shifted, as in an opera." The Britons arrived in Vienna in early April and got to work, Hume finding it easy to focus on his duties, since the supposedly cosmopolitan city was surprisingly thin on diversions.
Hume actually wore the uniform of a British officer, though it would be hard to imagine a much less military figure. Granted an audience with the Empress Dowager after their arrival, the visitors were supposed to curtsy, walking backwards as they left -- an awkward movement, leaving them in danger of falling foul of each other and "tumbling topsy-turvy", with Hume's companions "desperately afraid of my falling on them & crushing them." The Empress Dowager, seeing the difficulty, told them: "Allez sans ceremonie!" -- "Go without ceremony!", noting that they were clearly unpracticed with the ritual and the floor was slippery.
Finishing his business in Vienna by late in April, the general and his staff made their way to Turin by way of Milan -- a journey of about two weeks, due to bad roads and carriage breakdowns. They remained in Turin into the fall, Hume's stay being marked by tales from his colleagues of his clumsy and futile attempts at romance with a pretty but indifferent young countess, and of a dangerous bout with a fever that reduced him to what they described as "deliriums and ravings". They uncharitably needled him about his crazed behavior; Hume irritably called them "boobies" in response, saying: "The organization of my brain was impaired, and I was as mad as any man in Bedlam."
The War of the Austrian Succession ended in mid-October with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle. Peace between Britain and France would only last a few years, but in any case General St. Clair departed Turin with his people in late November, traveling through France, with a layover for rest and relaxation in Paris, returning to London no later than the first days of 1749. Hume remained in London into the summer, to then return to Ninewells. His association with General St. Clair was a mixed experience, but Hume, with his bubbly disposition, had no real complaints:
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These two years were almost the only interruptions which my studies have received during the course of my life: I passed them agreeably, and in good company; and my appointments, with my frugality, had made me reach a fortune, which I called independent, though most of my friends were inclined to smile when I said so: in short, I was now master of near a thousand pounds.
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