James A. Harris - Hume - An Intellectual Biography-Cambridge University Press (2015) PDF

HUME
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire

career of one of Britain’s greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and
historical context all of Hume’s works, from A Treatise of Human Nature
to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the
course of Hume’s intellectual development and paying careful attention to
the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume
experimented. The major events in Hume’s life are fully described, but the
main focus is on Hume’s intentions as a philosophical analyst of human
nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention
is paid to Hume’s intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal
is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an
ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all
the principal questions faced by his age.
James A. Harris is Reader in the History of Philosophy at the University of

St. Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will
Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (2005) and of articles on
Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and various themes in eighteenth-
century British philosophy. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of British
Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (2013) and coeditor, with Aaron Garrett,
of Scottish Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment: Volume One (2015).
Hume
An Intellectual Biography
James A. Harris
University of St. Andrews
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C James A. Harris 2015
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Harris, James A. (James Anthony)
Hume : an intellectual biography / James A. Harris, University of St. Andrews.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-83725-5 (hardback)
1. Hume, David, 1711–1776. 2. Philosophers – Scotland – Biography. I. Title.
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Contents
Preface page vii

Textual Note xiii
Introduction: The Love of Literary Fame 1

Approaches to Hume’s Intellectual Biography 2
Hume as Man of Letters 14
Summary of the Narrative 24
1 Pursuits of Philosophy and General
Learning 35
Shaftesbury as an Antidote to University 38
Mandeville and Bayle as an Antidote to
Shaftesbury 51
Hutcheson and the Scottish Scene of Thought 65
2 Anatomist of Human Nature 78
A Compleat Chain of Reasoning: The
Understanding and the Passions 81
Publication of a First Book 116
Between Mandeville and Hutcheson: Artificial
and Natural Virtues 121
3 Essayist 143
Preparation for the Study of Politics 145
Experiments in Addisonianism 154
Party Politics from an Impartial Point of View 166
Towards the Reduction of Politics to a Science 174
Philosophy Ancient and Modern 186
v
vi Contents
4 The Achievement of Independence 198

A Reputation in Scotland, and Its
Consequences 199
Casting Anew Treatise Book I 216
Lessons of a Jacobite Rebellion 232
5 Two Years at Ninewells 248
Casting Anew Treatise Book III 250
Political Economy for a Commercial World 265
Philosophical Religion, Philosophical
Friendship 289
6 The Start of a History of Great Britain 305
Contexts for Hume the Historian 308
The Errors of the Stuarts 325
7 The Completion of a History of England 352
Among the Moderates 354
On Tudor Despotism 368
The Irrelevance of the Ancient Constitution 387
8 Paris, London, Edinburgh 408
A Sceptic in the Company of Dogmatists 410
Wilkes and America 421
Natural Religion Revisited 438
Afterword: Death and

Character 461
Notes 473
Bibliography 575
Index 611
Preface
This is, so far as I know, the first intellectual biography of Hume. It

is an attempt to give a complete picture of Hume’s ideas as they are
expressed in the full range of his writings on philosophical, political,
historical, economic, literary, and religious subjects. The focus is almost
exclusively on published texts because that is, for the most part, all we
have to go on. There survives only a tiny amount of the very large quantity
of notebooks that Hume must have filled with quotations, questions, and
reflections during the course of his life. There are manuscripts for just
two of his major works: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and The
History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of
Henry VII. He does not seem to have kept a journal. Fewer than 800
of the thousands of letters that Hume must have written are extant, and
most of them shed little light on the origins and refinement of his ideas.
Approximately two-thirds of them date from the 1762–76 period, during
which Hume published almost no new work of real significance. He never
taught at a university, so there are no lecture notes taken by students.
He gave papers to a number of literary societies and philosophical clubs,
but there is no detailed record of the ideas that he tried out in such
contexts. The autobiography he wrote shortly before he died is very brief,
and by his own admission contains little more than ‘a history of my
writings’. It is very difficult indeed, therefore, to get behind the printed
texts and discover the mind of the man who wrote A Treatise of Human
Nature, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, The History of England,
and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Hume did his best to ensure
that all that remained of him after his death were his published works, and
was very successful in the attempt. Nevertheless, this book is more than a
summary account of what Hume said about what and when he said it. It
relates Hume’s works to the circumstances in which they were conceived
and written, and to the debates to which those works were presumably
intended to contribute, and hazards a series of conjectures as to what
vii
viii Preface
Hume’s intentions were in writing in the particular ways that he did

about human nature, politics, economics, history, and religion.
I do not offer a unified interpretation of Hume’s intellectual achieve-
ment considered as a whole. As I explain in the Introduction, I do not
believe that Hume had a single project to which all, or even most, of his
works might be said to contribute. There is no evidence that the hugely
ambitious plan of work announced in the introduction to A Treatise of
Human Nature, that of a ‘compleat system of the sciences’ built upon
the foundation a new ‘science of man’, survived Hume’s abandonment
of the Treatise in favour of essay writing. This does not mean, though,
that Hume’s late nineteenth-century critics were correct in claiming that
Hume had abandoned philosophy in order to satisfy an inordinate appetite
for fame. It makes more sense, I think, to take Hume to have conceived
of himself from the beginning as a man of letters of a particular kind. He
was not exactly what his contemporary James Ralph called ‘a writer by
profession or trade’. Unlike Johnson, he did no journalism, and never
compiled, edited, or translated at the behest of a publisher. Independence
was an important part of his conception of the literary life. He wanted to
be able to write about what he wanted to write about, in the way he wanted
to be able to write about it, without interference from a patron, a political
master, or a bookseller. He also wanted to be free from the demands of
a particular profession. I do not think Hume wanted to be a philosophy
professor any more than he wanted to be a lawyer. He had many and vari-
ous interests, and pursuing them required a liberty impossible to combine
with the duties, educational and pastoral, of an eighteenth-century uni-
versity professor. His interests as explored in his books do not fit together
to form an organized system. What unifies his works is the disengaged,
sceptical, philosophical frame of mind of their author.
It should be emphasized here at the outset that what I have written
does not pretend to be a biography in the proper sense of the word.
Several important episodes of Hume’s life I say little or nothing about.
I do not give anything like a full account of the periods Hume spent
in continental Europe with James St Clair between 1746 and 1748, nor
do I attempt a detailed reconstruction of Hume’s time as Secretary to
the British Embassy in Paris between 1763 and 1766. I cover the final
fifteen years of Hume’s life in a single chapter. The reader looking for
the real story of Hume’s relations with the Comtesse de Boufflers, or a
blow-by-blow description of the disastrous breakdown of his friendship
Preface ix
with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, will be disappointed. So also will the reader

looking for a retelling of those many and by now very familiar anecdotes on
which his reputation as scourge of the Christian religion largely rests. The
best place to start for someone with an interest in Hume’s life considered
as a whole, and not just in his career as an author, remains Ernest Campbell
Mossner’s The Life of David Hume, first published in 1954, and reissued in
a second, corrected edition in 1980. Some, but not much, new biographical
information has come to light since 1980. Several of Mossner’s hypotheses
appear on close inspection to have little or no evidence to support them.
The book is animated by a very lively affection for its subject – an affection
which occasionally gets in the way of a properly dispassionate examination
of the historical facts. Even so, as an account of Hume’s life, it has no
serious rival.
Mossner says in his preface that he writes ‘for a reader less interested in
the ideas than in the man’. This book, by contrast, is written for the reader
less interested in the man than in the ideas, the arguments made in defence
of the ideas, and the language in which the arguments were couched. It
will surely not be the last attempt at an intellectual biography of Hume.
Each episode that I discuss, from Hume’s education at Edinburgh in the
early 1720s to the publication of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
three years after his death in 1779, merits a closer and more extensive
examination than I have given it. My account might be thought of as
something like a preliminary journey through some extremely difficult
terrain. And as I have made that journey, I have been heavily reliant upon
the scholarship of others. To a significant extent this is a work of synthesis,
made possible by the remarkable advances that have been made since the
1960s in the understanding of the intellectual history of the eighteenth
century. I indicate my most important debts in my footnotes. The reader
should be aware, though, that my footnotes do not attempt anything like
a full survey and assessment of the secondary literature on Hume. That
would be the work of a lifetime. Nor do I use the footnotes to register
and explain all my disagreements with other scholars on this or that point
of interpretation. In this I follow Hume’s own example. ‘Controversy,
however civilly conducted, has unavoidably something harsh in its nature’,
he told Andrew Millar in 1755. There will doubtless be occasions in the
future for explanation and defence of the readings offered here.
I was offered the opportunity of writing an intellectual biography of
Hume for Cambridge University Press in early 2003. My first editor,
x Preface
Terry Moore, died before I got started. It fell to Beatrice Rehl to see
this book through to publication, and I am grateful to her and to Isabella
Vitti for their patience and for the good advice they have offered me.
Diane Aronson and Rachel Cox have been extremely efficient production
editors, and I am grateful to them too. Thanks are due also to Pooja
Bhandari and her team for their work on the text.
It would have taken me even longer to write the book had I not been
granted substantial periods of research leave by the School of Philosoph-
ical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews.
I thank two Heads of School, Peter Clark and Katherine Hawley, for
releasing me from my teaching and administrative duties. I am grateful
in particular for having been granted the early sabbatical semester in the
autumn of 2014 that has enabled me to bring the project to completion.
I also thank the following institutions for providing the financial sup-
port that made time away from St. Andrews possible: The Leverhulme
Trust, which awarded me a Research Fellowship for the academic year
2009–10; The Arts and Humanities Research Council, which awarded
me a Fellowship (AH/I022759/1) for the academic year 2011–12; and
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I was a member
for the academic year 2012–13. At the Institute I was made welcome by
the School of Historical Studies, and by Jonathan Israel in particular. It
was an immense privilege to be part of such a distinguished academic
community. I was Hans Kohn Member at the Institute, and I would like
to express my gratitude to the Kohn family for their great generosity.
As I have worked on this book, I have received much assistance from
others in the field. I would like especially to thank Alexander Broadie,
Roger Emerson, Knud Haakonssen, James Moore, Nicholas Phillipson,
John Robertson, M. A. Stewart, Paul Wood, and John Wright for their
advice and support. The encouragement of these senior members – as
I hope they will not mind being called – of the community of histo-
rians of eighteenth-century Scottish thought has been invaluable. Roger
Emerson and John Robertson read a draft of the book for Cambridge Uni-
versity Press and wrote detailed reports which prompted revisions both
large and small. They will probably both wish that the changes I made in
response to their comments had been more extensive still. Robert Mankin,
Emilo Mazza, Nicholas Phillipson, Mikko Tolonen, Wayne Waxman, Carl
Wennerlind, Kenneth Winkler, and John Wright also read the book in
manuscript, and gave me extremely useful advice. I know how difficult it
Preface xi
is to find the time to read and comment on a text as long as this one, and
I am deeply grateful to all of them. In an act of great generosity, David
Womersley provided invaluable proofreading skills during the produc-
tion stage of this book. I also need to thank those who have taken the
trouble to answer my questions and requests for information. At a min-
imum, they are: Thomas Ahnert, Donald Ainslie, Peter Anstey, Moritz
Baumstark, Richard Bourke, Mark Box, Sarah Broadie, Janet Brown,
Vivienne Brown, Paddy Bullard, Dario Castiglione, Alix Cohen, Paul
Davis, Thomas Dixon, Simon Grote, Colin Heydt, Tom Jones, Mark
Jurdjevic, Tony La Vopa, Alexander Long, Neil McArthur, Peter Mil-
lican, Dario Perinetti, Adam Potkay, David Raynor, Isabel Rivers, Eric
Schliesser, Richard Serjeantson, Richard Sher, Mark Spencer, M. A.
Stewart, David Womersley, and Bill Zachs. I am sure that there were
others, and I wish I had kept a better record of this kind of assistance.
All these people have helped to reduce the number of errors of fact and
interpretation that this book contains, but, of course, those that remain
are entirely my responsibility.
My interest in eighteenth-century British letters might have had its
origins in tutorials with Roger Lonsdale while I was an undergraduate
studying English at Balliol College, Oxford. I fear, though, that I made
far too little of the opportunities that those tutorials presented. I was
introduced to Hume by Wayne Waxman while I was a graduate student at
the New School for Social Research. After I returned to Oxford to do first
a BPhil and then a DPhil in philosophy, I talked about Hume often with
David Wiggins and with Galen Strawson. My first steps into the wider
world of Hume scholarship were facilitated by the annual conferences of
The Hume Society, and I would like to record here my admiration for the
care and attention given by the Hume Society and its officers to those at
the outset of academic careers. The egalitarian and friendly atmosphere
of the conferences that the Society hosts around the world is remarkable,
and must be in large part responsible for the flourishing state of Hume
studies today.
Most of my work on this book, both the research and the writing,
was done in the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge in
Edinburgh. The NLS remains what Thomas Carlyle said it was – incom-
parably the best of all the libraries we have in Scotland. There is, in fact, no
other place where this book could have been written, and I am thankful to
the staff of the NLS for their endless courtesy and helpfulness. I thank also
xii Preface
the staff of the Historical Studies and Social Sciences Library at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study, the Firestone Library at Princeton University,
and the Special Collections department of Edinburgh University Library.
Mikko Tolonen and I have talked about Hume more or less con-
tinuously while I have been writing this book, often – but not often
enough – over beer in The Bow Bar here in Edinburgh. I have had many
conversations about Hume, and about much else to do with eighteenth-
century philosophy, with Aaron Garrett. To Mark and Anna Harris, and
to Adam, Tom, and Johnny, many thanks are due for their unfailing hos-
pitality in Crail. Bruce Taylor has, as always, been a source of reassurance
and laughter, even though he lives far too far away. Josh de la Mare has
generously asked for summaries of recent progress during our annual
expeditions in the Scottish Highlands. Chris Wells has often been a gra-
cious host in London. A special mention is due to Lincoln Ellis, who has
seldom refrained during our transatlantic telephone conversations from
reminding me just how long it has taken to get this book done.
I began proper work on Hume’s intellectual biography in the autumn
of 2009. At about the same time I met Jennifer Brown in Edinburgh’s
Usher Hall as we waited for the start of a concert by the Zurich Tonhalle
Orchestra. Over the course of the past five years or so Jennifer and I
have got married and had two children, Florence and Albert. Soon after
Florence was born, Jennifer left her family and friends behind to spend
eight months in Princeton so that I could finish a first draft of this book
at the Institute for Advanced Study. Nor was that the end of the things
she has had to put up with. This book is for her.
Edinburgh
December 2014
Textual Note
Because the development of Hume’s ideas through time is a principal

concern of this book, I quote from original eighteenth-century editions of
Hume’s works. Usually the particular copies I have used are those held
by the National Library of Scotland. Most (though not all) eighteenth-
century editions of Hume’s works are available for inspection on the Gale
Artemis Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database. In Hume’s
early works, all nouns are capitalized. His later works conform with
modern practice in capitalizing only proper nouns. In line with Hume’s
considered view on this matter, and to make my text easier on the mod-
ern eye, I have silently removed capitalizations of non-proper nouns from
quotations of early works. Original spelling, punctuation, and italicization
have, however, been retained. Frequent reference is made to, and quota-
tions are often taken from, works that I believe Hume can be presumed
to have read. It is usually impossible to say with any certainty exactly
which editions of these works Hume read, and I sometimes quote from
standard modern editions. In the interests of uniformity, I have removed
old-fashioned capitalizations from these texts as well.
xiii
Introduction: The Love of
Literary Fame
‘Had hume died at the age of twenty-six his real work in the world would
have been done, and his fame irrevocably established’.1 So wrote Lytton
Strachey in a brief piece on Hume collected in Portraits in Miniature. By
twenty-six Hume had completed the first two volumes of A Treatise of
Human Nature, ‘the masterpiece which contains all that is most important
in his thought’. The Treatise, though, was ‘a complete failure’, and there
followed years of poverty and insignificance. Hume wrote a series of essays
on a variety of topics during these years, but there was nothing in those
essays that Strachey felt compelled to note or discuss. The History of
England could not be ignored in the same way. It had had great success
in Hume’s lifetime, and after his death it remained for many years the
standard work on the subject. But it was too typical of its time to be taken
seriously now. ‘The virtues of a metaphysician are the vices of a historian’,
declared the author of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘A generalised, colourless,
unimaginative view of things is admirable when one is considering the
law of causality, but one needs something else if one is to describe Queen
Elizabeth’.2 The years following The History of England are for Strachey,
as for many before and after him, the stuff of anecdote and no more. The
corpulent Hume, awkward and tongue-tied in the face of the adulation of
Paris, is brought before the reader. So is the corpulent Hume stuck in the
mud of the Nor’ Loch back in Edinburgh, able, despite his atheism, to
recite the Lord’s Prayer in order to get help from a passing fishwife. And
so is the no longer corpulent Hume making jokes on his deathbed about
excuses he might offer Charon to put off death for a little while longer.
Strachey makes it sound as though an intellectual biography of Hume
must be, if not pointless, then at least very brief. Hume had, after all,
thought all his most important thoughts by the age of twenty-six. During
his intellectual maturity, according to Strachey, Hume wrote nothing that
any longer had a claim on the reader’s attention. And the final period of his
life was a time of ‘repose’. Today the writings that followed the Treatise
1
2 Hume: An Intellectual Biography
are given proper attention. The History of England, after a period of neglect
that continued until the mid-twentieth century, has readers again. Hume’s
last years have been shown not to be so empty of intellectual endeavour
as Strachey implies. Almost every aspect of Hume’s thought, in fact,
is now the object of scholarly examination, and there has developed a
consensus concerning Hume’s intellectual achievement taken as a whole
that appears to amount to a complete reversal of Strachey’s interpreta-
tion. The appearance, however, is deceptive. There is a significant respect
in which Strachey’s way of reading Hume’s intellectual development
remains unquestioned. In this Introduction I trace the historical origins
of Strachey’s view of Hume, and show how its fundamental premise func-
tions as the basis also of more recent work. I then propose a different way of
conceiving of Hume’s intellectual life. My suggestion is that we take seri-
ously Hume’s description of himself as having intended from the begin-
ning to live the life of a man of letters. He is best seen not as a philoso-
pher who may or may not have abandoned philosophy in order to write
essays and history, but as a man of letters, a philosophical man of letters,
who wrote on human nature, on politics, on religion, and on the his-
tory of England from 55 BC to 1688. To understand Hume’s intellectual
biography, therefore, we need to understand what it was to be a man of
letters in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century – and also what
was distinctive about Hume’s construal of the literary vocation. Having
summarized the contents of the chapters of this book, I reflect briefly in
conclusion on the story that Hume told about his career as a man of letters
in ‘My Own Life’.
Approaches to Hume’s Intellectual Biography

The first book-length biography of Hume, by Thomas Edward Ritchie,
was published in 1807.3 As its reviewers complained, Ritchie’s book was
little more than a collection of Hume’s letters and miscellaneous minor
writings and withdrawn essays, along with a connecting narrative largely
based on Hume’s ‘My Own Life’.4 In conclusion, though, Ritchie turned
from Hume’s life to his writings. ‘In his literary character’, Ritchie wrote,
‘Mr. Hume is to be considered, 1. As a metaphysician: 2. As a moralist:
3. As a writer on general polity: and 4. As a historian’.5 It quickly becomes
clear that Ritchie took it to be uncontroversial that considered under the
first three of these descriptions, Hume had achieved nothing. Ritchie’s
Introduction 3
observations and criticisms suggest that he himself was a disciple of

Thomas Reid. The premises from which Hume had set out in Book
One of the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
were, according to Ritchie, ‘essentially wrong’, in so far as they saw Hume
take for granted the existence of ideas as the immediate objects of per-
ception and thought, and take for granted also the applicability of ‘the
laws of matter’ to the operations of the mind. And it was not surprising
that from essentially wrong premises Hume came to essentially wrong,
because essentially sceptical, conclusions about the mind’s cognitive pow-
ers. Even so, Hume’s writings on these topics ‘may be useful, for truth is
often elicited and established by the collision of opinion and the boldness
of disquisition’.6 As for Hume’s writings on morality, they were vitiated
by the belief that ‘mere usefulness’ is the basis of virtue. The style of
the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals was agreeable enough, and
there were lessons on politeness in the book not inferior to those to be
found in Chesterfield’s letters to his son – ‘But the seductive picture which
Mr. Hume has given of the general principle of utility may be reversed by
another writer, and perverted to the worst of purposes’.7 The essays on
commercial and constitutional subjects, Ritchie continued, deserved only
superficial notice because they were themselves so superficial. In almost
every case, Ritchie observes, Hume devoted about five pages to subjects
that had, in the hands of other writers, ‘given rise to volumes’.8 There
was nothing, in other words, contained in the two volumes of Hume’s
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects that merited attention. No one
other than philosophers seeking to learn from his errors would have con-
tinued to read Hume had it not been for his much more solid achievement
in the field of history. In the History of England, Ritchie declared, ‘we
every where recognize an indefatigable perseverance in research, a manly
independence of thinking, and a happy talent in the discrimination of
character’.9 The History ‘is a source of useful information to the states-
man, a noble monument of its author’s talents, and an invaluable bequest
to his country’.10
Ritchie succeeds in making it sound as though all the alarm, anxi-
ety, and outrage caused by Hume in his own day, with respect to reli-
gion in particular, had dissipated almost completely in the thirty years
since Hume’s death in 1776. The passing of one generation was all that
it had taken for the threat that men such as Johnson, Warburton, and
Beattie had perceived in Hume’s writings to be felt no longer. The errors
contained in Hume’s ‘metaphysical’ writings were errors still, but they

were not dangerous. Rather, they could be seen as a means whereby a
better philosophy had been developed. This was the view not only of
Ritchie but also of Dugald Stewart in a ‘dissertation’ on the history of
philosophy since the Renaissance written for the fifth (1815–17) edition
of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Hume’s Treatise, according to Stewart,
‘has contributed, either directly or indirectly, more than any other single
work to the subsequent progress of the philosophy of the human mind’.11
This could be said without it being implied that any of Hume’s conclu-
sions were to be endorsed. As read by Stewart, Hume’s ‘aim is to establish
a universal scepticism, and to produce in the reader a complete distrust in
his own faculties. For this purpose he avails himself of the data assumed
by the most opposite sects, shifting his ground skilfully from one position
to another as best suits the scope of his present argument. With the single
exception of Bayle, he has carried this sceptical mode of reasoning farther
than any modern philosopher’.12 Hume’s conclusions are ‘often so extrav-
agant and dangerous, that he ought to have regarded them as proof of the
unsoundness of his data’ – and that was precisely how those who came
after him did regard them. Hume prepared the way for Reid, and also for
Kant – according to Stewart an exponent of an essentially Reidian style of
philosophizing. Hume was entirely correct in his arguments showing that
belief in fundamental cognitive and practical principles could not be given
a rational justification. Where he went wrong was in believing that this was
an inherently sceptical conclusion. The ‘defect in the evidence of these
truths’ proceeded, as Stewart saw it, following Reid, ‘from their being
self-evident, and consequently unsusceptible of demonstration’.13 Reid’s
account of the nature and role of self-evident principles of belief made
worry about Hume’s scepticism unnecessary. For this reason, perhaps,
Hume barely featured at all in the writings of the next great representative
of the Scottish philosophical tradition, Sir William Hamilton. According
to Hamilton, Hume represented a moment of crisis, when philosophers
had been forced to choose between two alternatives, ‘either of surrender-
ing philosophy as null, or of ascending to higher principles, in order to
re-establish it against the sceptical reduction’.14 The crisis had passed,
philosophers like Reid and Kant had chosen ascent to higher principles –
and so Hume could be allowed to slip away into the past, even while,
‘mediately or immediately’, every subsequent philosophical advance had
to be referred to him.15
Introduction 5
In Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, the real question
concerning Hume was about his History of England. There continued to
be confident celebration of, in the words of John Allen in 1825, ‘those
general and comprehensive views, that sagacity and judgement, those
masterly lessons of political wisdom, that profound knowledge of human
nature, that calm philosophy, and dispassionate balancing of opinions,
which delight and instruct us in the pages of Hume’.16 Twenty years
later, Henry Brougham could declare that Hume was the first British
historian of eminence, ‘decidedly to be praised as having been the first
to enter the field with the talents of a fine writer, and the habits of a
philosophic enquirer’.17 His metaphysical writings, on the other hand,
were characterized by what Brougham called ‘a love of singularity, an
aversion to agree with other men, and particularly with the bulk of the
people’ – which was not surprising given that the Treatise was written
while Hume was ‘at an age when the distinction of differing with the
world, the boldness of attacking opinions held sacred by mankind at large,
is apt to have most charms for vain and ambitious minds’.18
But as the decades passed, two waves of criticism were gathering in
intensity.19 On the one hand, Hume was condemned on account of the
scantiness of his research and his reliance on printed sources. An important
impetus for this line of attack was George Brodie’s 1822 History of the
British Empire, a reassertion of Whig complaints about Hume as a historian
that provided the occasion for further assaults in the same vein by Francis
Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review and the young John Stuart Mill in The
Westminster Review. With apparently devastating thoroughness Brodie
sought to show that Hume had failed to make proper use even of those
documents that were available to him in the 1750s. ‘[H]aving embarked
in his undertaking with a pre-disposition unfavourable to calm inquiry
after truth, and being impatient of that unwearied research which . . . with
unremitting industry sifts and collates authorities,’ Brodie claimed, Hume
‘allowed his narrative to be directed by his predilections, and overlooked
the materials from which it ought to have been constructed’.20 This told
Mill that Hume’s History of England ‘is really a romance; and bears nearly
the same degree of resemblance to any thing which really happened, as Old
Mortality or Ivanhoe’.21 To Jeffrey it suggested that Hume’s ‘credit among
historians, for correctness of assertion, will soon be nearly as low as it has
long been with theologians for orthodoxy of belief’.22 At the same time,
Hume came to seem a failure as a historian for a rather different reason – in
fact, precisely because of his calm philosophy and dispassionate balancing

of opinions. For Mill a contrast with the new kind of history being written
by Thomas Carlyle was all that was necessary to force the point home.
Hume fails, Mill argued in a review of Carlyle’s French Revolution: A
History, to present his protagonists as real flesh-and-blood human beings.
He leaves us ignorant of what it was like to be them, of what really passed
in their minds and excited their hearts.23 The two waves of criticism broke
at the same time, in 1849, when the first volume of Macaulay’s History
of England from the Accession of James II appeared. Macaulay had clearly
done a lot more research than Hume had. But also, as one reviewer put
it, where Hume, like Gibbon after him, had written for the intellect only,
in Macaulay we find ‘pictured to ourselves the living and actual reality of
the men, and the times, and actions he describes’.24
If one book can be said to have decisively altered the state of the
debate about Hume in the nineteenth century, and to have made his
philosophy matter once more just as his history began to fade from view,
it was Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865).
Despite his hostility to Hume’s history writing, and to Hume’s politics
more generally, Mill was a recognizably Humean philosopher, intent on
using ‘associationism’ to destroy a philosophy – a combination of Reid
and Kant – which had supposedly given Hume a definitive answer.25 In
the wake of Mill’s demolition of Hamilton, Hume’s scepticism seemed
troubling again. In the mid-1880s, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison was
sure that Hume’s real significance had not yet been properly grasped,26
and James Hutchison Stirling argued that Kant had not, in fact, answered
Hume.27 In Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century (1876), the Reidian reply to Hume was depicted as a failure. On
Stephen’s account, the fundamental problems exposed by Hume were
much more intractable than had been generally acknowledged, and called
for solutions that British philosophers of the eighteenth century were
unable so much as to conceive of. The moral to be drawn, and the moral
that Hume drew, was the necessity of giving up philosophy altogether,
and of ‘turning entirely to experience’. Hume’s ablest contemporaries –
Stephen names William Robertson and Gibbon – followed his example in
‘abandoning speculation’ in favour of history.28 But, Stephen continued,
a purely empiricist, or positivist, history was bound to be unsatisfactory.
It was doomed by ‘an incapacity to recognise the great forces by which
history is moulded, and the continuity which gives to it real unity’.29
Introduction 7
For the same reason – an inability to see ‘the great forces which bind
men together’ – a political philosophy based solely on experience was also
impossible. History and political society were both reduced to meaningless
collections of facts, with no connecting principles.
In this way Stephen sketched what would prove to be an influential
conception of the shape of Hume’s career as an author. Hume began
as a philosopher, the story went, but in the Treatise reasoned himself
into a position which made philosophy look as though it had destroyed
itself under the pressure of systematic sceptical argumentation. Therefore,
he turned from philosophy to subjects which could be treated purely
empirically, such as politics, political economy, and history, but in each
case the work that he produced was evidence that, as Stephen put it, his
power as a destroyer was much greater than his abilities as a creator.30
Moreover, what prevented him from creating anything worthwhile in
politics, political economy, and history was, precisely, the philosophical
conclusions which he had come to in the Treatise. Hume’s scepticism
left him trying to make ropes of sand in his writings on these topics.
James McCosh put essentially the same narrative to work in The Scottish
Philosophy . . . from Hutcheson to Hamilton (1875). The Treatise, according
to McCosh, was undoubtedly Hume’s major work. ‘He devoted to it
all the resources of his mighty intellect’.31 But what he discovered in
the process was the futility of philosophy as such – conceived of as ‘the
science of metaphysics’. Hume, therefore, renounced philosophy and
turned to entirely different kinds of questions – on McCosh’s account, to
attempting (vainly) to show that ‘there could be a science of ethics (and
also of politics) founded on the circumstance, that certain acts are found to
be agreeable and useful to ourselves and others’.32 His efforts in his later
writings, however, merely showed that ‘[w]hatever merit Hume may have
in demolishing error, he has . . . established very little positive truth’.33
The History of England was a monument to Hume’s ‘perseverance in his
life plan, in spite of discouragements’, but it would be easy to show ‘that
the work, taken as a whole, is an illustration of his metaphysical and ethical
theory’.34
This idea that Hume’s intellectual development had two principal
phases – the discovery in the Treatise of the apparent impossibility of
progress in philosophy, followed by the taking up of non-philosophical
issues thereafter – was developed comprehensively, and with a large dose
of vitriol, by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose in the introductions to their
editions of the Treatise (1874) and of Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
(1875). For Green and Grose, as for Stephen, what Hume inadvertently
showed in the Treatise was the necessity of the Kantian revolution in
philosophy. Hence ‘the suddenness with which his labours in philoso-
phy came to end’: Hume ‘had brought his criticism of philosophy to a
point where, as he saw clearly, negation had done its work, and either
he must leave the subject, or else attempt a reconstruction’.35 Grose gave
a moralized inflection to his account of what happened next. Lacking
both appetite and ability for the work of ‘reconstruction’ in philosophy,
Hume succumbed to his appetite for literary fame and devoted himself,
by all means possible, to exciting public attention. ‘Few men of letters’,
according to Grose, ‘have been at heart so vain and greedy of fame as was
Hume’.36 Hume was charged with abandoning philosophy out of ignoble
motives by his friends among late nineteenth-century philosophers as well
as by his enemies. Echoing Mill’s judgement in his essay on Bentham that
Hume was ‘the prince of dilettanti’,37 T. H. Huxley, in his book on Hume
for the series ‘English Men of Letters’ (1879), regretted Hume’s lack of
application. Having seen through to the truth that, as Huxley put it, ‘phi-
losophy is based upon psychology; and that the inquiry into the contents
and operations of the mind must be conducted upon the same principles as
a physical investigation’, Hume gave up on the whole business, exhibiting
as he did so ‘no small share of the craving after mere notoriety and vulgar
success, as distinct from the pardonable, if not honourable, ambition for
solid and enduring fame’. That is, he forsook ‘philosophical studies’ and
took up instead ‘those political and historical topics which were likely
to yield, and did in fact yield, a much better return of that sort of suc-
cess which his soul loved’.38 In his edition of the two Enquiries (1894),
L. A. Selby-Bigge accused Hume of lacking a philosophical justification
for the omissions and additions made as he composed the Enquiry con-
cerning Human Understanding. They could be explained only in terms of
Hume wanting to make himself more interesting to ‘the habitués of coffee-
houses’, and of his wanting also to distinguish himself by offending those
of a religious turn of mind.39
Thus we see how it was that Lytton Strachey could be so confident
that Hume’s real work was done by the time he was twenty-six. This
view did not die out when the philosophical commitments that motivated
it – broadly Kantian in the case of Stephen and McCosh, Hegelian in the
case of Green – became less fashionable, for it survived among the logical
Introduction 9
positivists who identified Hume as the progenitor of their programme

for the wholesale destruction of ‘metaphysics’ and the transformation of
philosophy, strictly distinguished from empirical science, into the a priori
analysis of concepts and meanings.40 However, it began to be questioned
early on in the twentieth century, most notably by Norman Kemp Smith
and John Laird. Both set out to undermine the nineteenth century’s view
of Hume’s achievement as purely negative and destructive. Both took
seriously the programme for a ‘science of man’ described in the introduc-
tion to A Treatise of Human Nature, and both portrayed that programme
as the framework in which all of Hume’s subsequent work needed to
be understood. All of Hume’s work, in other words, went together to
constitute a unified and systematic study of human nature. This has been
a very influential idea in Hume scholarship over the past one hundred
years. I believe, however, that it has been just as harmful to serious
thought about Hume’s intellectual development as was the view that
Hume abandoned philosophy in favour of the pursuit of money and fame.
In two important articles on ‘The Naturalism of Hume’ published in
the Mind in 1905 and then in The Philosophy of David Hume (1941), Kemp
Smith dismissed the view of Hume as, in Mill’s words, ‘the profoundest
negative thinker on record’.41 Far from being, as Stephen had put it, an
‘absolute sceptic’ who had shown ‘that all reasoning was absurd’,42 Hume
was, according to Kemp Smith, a philosopher propounding a new theory
of human nature. Hume’s scepticism was but a prologue to a revolution
in thought whereby the priority of reason over passion was reversed, with
reason left subordinated to feeling not only in the domain of morals, as
Hutcheson had claimed, but also in the domain of belief considered more
generally. This was a complete rejection of ‘the traditional, Platonico-
Cartesian view of reason as the supreme legislator for human life’, in
favour of the idea that ‘Man, no less than the animals, lives under the
tutelage of Nature, and must find in its dictates, not in any programme
which has to justify itself to reason, the ultimate criteria alike of belief and
of action’.43 Kemp Smith’s desire to discredit the late nineteenth-century
view of Hume made it necessary for him to consider the question of
whether Hume was unduly influenced by unworthy motives in giving up
on the Treatise in favour of essays and history writing. Kemp Smith argued
that he was not. The truth, he suggested, was that, when one considered
Hume’s career as a whole, it was the Treatise, and in particular Books I and
II, that looked anomalous. Hume was interested above all in the connection
between philosophy and what Kemp Smith terms ‘general life’. His ideal
was philosophy conceived of as ‘a department of literature, accessible to
all intelligent readers, and in living contact with contemporary thought’.
Such a philosophy had its origins in moral philosophy and concerned
itself principally with ‘criticism, political theory, economics, and what is
so closely bound up with them, especially with morals and political theory,
the study of history’. These matters were the object of Hume’s earliest
‘programme of work’. This was what one must infer, at any rate, from
Hume’s ‘repeated assertion that his mental interests, from his earliest
years, were equally divided between belles lettres and philosophy, and that
literature, as he tells us, was the passion of his life and the source of his
chief enjoyments’. The years spent on Books I and II of the Treatise saw
Hume ‘temporarily deflected from the path which he had marked out for
himself’.44
According to Kemp Smith, it was with moral philosophy that Hume
began, and Hume’s career after the Treatise could be seen as proceeding
in conformity with the ‘teaching’ of Book III. It made perfect sense
that he moved from there to political and economic problems, ‘and in
natural sequence to the application of his political theory in the writing
of his History’.45 All that Hume wrote, in other words, developed out
of his earliest philosophical insights. So what remains in place in Kemp
Smith’s version of Hume’s intellectual biography is, first, the belief that
the earliest phase of Hume’s career was the most important, and, second,
that everything else is to be understood in terms of its relations with that
first phase. These ideas can be seen at work also in John Laird’s Hume’s
Philosophy of Human Nature (1932). Laird asserted that Strachey was
guilty only of some exaggeration in his claim that all Hume’s real work
was done by the time he was twenty-six. Everything that Hume wrote in
later life, ‘not excepting the History and the discussions of religion’, had
‘obvious roots’ in the pre-Treatise period. That period, therefore, required
a more extensive discussion than the whole of the rest of Hume’s life.46
When Laird turned in his final chapter to Hume’s politics, economics,
history, and criticism, it was with a view to considering how far they
showed Hume to have completed, in the fullness of time, ‘his design of
a science of human nature’.47 It could with some justification be said, in
fact, that Laird’s particular version of how Hume’s early years shaped his
later writings proved more influential than Kemp Smith’s. For while few
Hume scholars accepted Kemp Smith’s story of Hume having taken his
Introduction 11
constructive philosophical project direct from Hutcheson and the theory

of a moral sense, claims made by Laird about the enduring significance
for Hume of the project of a ‘Newtonianism of the Human Mind’ became
firmly embedded in the Hume literature by the middle of the twentieth
century. It became common to assert that all of Hume’s writings were to
be seen as developments of the science of human nature initiated in the
Treatise, and that it was for this reason a mistake to claim, as so many
nineteenth-century commentators had, that after the Treatise Hume had
given up philosophy in favour of other kinds of literary endeavour.48
Just as a case could be made for the influence of prevailing philosoph-
ical fashion on the late nineteenth-century view of Hume’s intellectual
development, so twentieth-century readings of Hume can be understood
as having been shaped by wider trends in philosophy itself. The inter-
pretations of Hume offered by Kemp Smith and Laird were attractive
in a philosophical environment where naturalism, broadly and variously
construed, was being embraced as fruitful approach to the understanding
of mind, meaning, knowledge, and morals. Barry Stroud, for example,
in his book on Hume for the Routledge series ‘The Arguments of the
Philosophers’ (1977), explicitly sought to reclaim Hume from the logical
positivists who had defined philosophy in narrow terms as a priori con-
ceptual analysis. According to Stroud, the essence of Hume’s thought in
the Treatise could be separated from the theory of ideas and portrayed,
rather, in terms of the grounding of meaning and concepts in ‘what people
actually think, and feel, and do in human life’.49 This was a philosophical
project that had also been pursued, albeit in contrasting ways, by Wittgen-
stein and by Quine. Stroud located Hume’s science of man in a tradition
that entered the twentieth century by way of Marx and Freud. So did
Annette Baier, in A Progress of Sentiments (1991). Hume’s was a science
of human nature that was not, she claimed, properly read as a prefiguring
of the aims of modern day psychology. It was rather part of ‘a broader
discipline of reflection on human nature, to which Charles Darwin and
Michel Foucault, as much as William James and Sigmund Freud, can be
seen to belong’.50 Hume’s naturalism was to be explicated in terms of a
demonstration that our conception of reason itself needed to be ‘enlarged’,
so that rationality was revealed as ‘a social capacity, both in its activities
and in the standards of excellence by which they are judged’.51 Hume’s
analyses of the passions and of morals in Books II and III of the Treatise
were, on Baier’s reading, essential to this enlargement of reason.
Stroud claimed that on ‘the general interpretation’ that he offered of

the Treatise, Hume’s later books ‘can be seen as much more of a piece
with his philosophical work than has usually been supposed’.52 And Baier
claimed that the ‘quest’ that was begun in the Treatise was ‘continued in
later works’.53 Spencer Wertz’s Between Hume’s Philosophy and History
explicitly presents itself as a tracing of Baier’s understanding of that quest
on into the later works. Wertz is one of those who have challenged the idea
that Hume’s turn to history amounted to an abandonment of philosophy
by arguing that, on the contrary, history was part of Hume’s philosophy
from the outset. In 1965 David Fate Norton argued that Hume’s phi-
losophy and his history ‘are simply different aspects of the same over-all
philosophical skepticism’. Hume’s science of man was, ‘like other skeptics’
inquiry into man’s nature and opinions’, ‘historically based’.54 Accord-
ing Donald Livingston in Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (1984), ‘it
is clear that Hume at no time abandoned philosophy for history’: ‘From
the beginning and throughout his career as a writer, he was engaged in
historical work as well as in the philosophical problems to which such
work gives rise’. But also, the sceptical character of Hume’s philosophy
determined the kind of history he wrote: a narratological study of conven-
tions, saved from relativism by the existence of a ‘governing story line’ in
the form of ‘the story of the progress of the human mind’.55 A broadly
similar unifying account of Hume’s work as a whole, interpreted in terms
of an account of ‘the historical dimension of rationality’, was proposed
by Claudia Schmidt in David Hume: Reason in History (2003).56 In all of
these studies of Hume’s works the Treatise is given prime importance in
the understanding of Hume’s intellectual development. In his first book,
it is claimed, Hume set himself a task that he spent the rest of his life
completing. Indeed it has become a commonplace of Hume scholarship
that there is a fundamental unity and continuity to his thought. Asser-
tions to that effect have become a routine feature of textbook accounts
of Hume’s philosophy.57 But it must be the case, on this way of reading
Hume, that there is a large amount of truth to Strachey’s picture of Hume
as having thought all his important thoughts prior to the publication of the
Treatise. Everything that Hume ever wrote was contained within his first
book. His later work merely drew out that first book’s implications. There
was no real development in Hume’s intellectual life, no new ideas of any
significance, no important sense in which his interests changed with the
passing of the years. If that is so, then it is still doubtful whether Hume
Introduction 13
had an intellectual biography worth writing. There is a system to describe,

but not much of a story to tell.
In Hume’s Philosophical Politics (1975), Duncan Forbes issued a chal-
lenge to all readings of Hume which privilege the philosophy of the Treatise
and insist on understanding the rest of his literary output in terms of that
philosophy. Part of what Forbes called ‘a more truly historical approach
to political thought’ had to be, he claimed, ‘an attempt to counter the
tendency to rely almost exclusively on internal lines of communication in
the interpretation of a given thinker’ – ‘which’, he added, ‘in Hume’s case
usually means trying to connect everything to his philosophy, as though
he lived in a cocoon of his own spinning’.58 Forbes did not go so far as
to attempt to understand Essays, Moral and Political and The History of
England in complete isolation from the Treatise. On the contrary, he pre-
sented the ‘modern theory of natural law’ that Hume laid out in Treatise
Book III as the ‘foundation’ of a science of politics. But Forbes took very
seriously the task of trying to understand the Essays and the History in
terms of their various contexts, intellectual and political, rather than solely
in terms of ways in which they might be related to themes and arguments
from the Treatise.59 In this regard, Forbes’s work has been a major source
of inspiration for the account I give in this book of Hume’s intellectual
biography considered as a whole. For there seems to me to be no evidence
that Hume himself regarded the enormously ambitious ‘compleat sys-
tem of the sciences’ announced in introduction to the Treatise of Human
Nature as providing a rationale for all that he wrote afterwards. Hume did
not say that either Essays, Moral and Political, or Political Discourses, or
The History of England was to be read in that way.60 In later life Hume
nowhere described himself as thinking of his works as a unity of any kind
at all. Once he had given up on the Treatise, Hume never once presented
himself as a systematic thinker, as someone who conceived of his writings
in terms of foundation and superstructure, or of core and periphery, or
of trunk and branches. The abandonment of the project of the Treatise
would appear, on the contrary, to have been the giving up of the whole
idea of a philosophical system, in favour of several distinct and different
kinds of philosophical projects.61
The danger in insisting nevertheless on the unity and systematicity of
Hume’s writings taken as a whole is that the particularity of those various
philosophical projects threatens, not so much to disappear from view, as
never to come into view in the first place. For everything proceeds upon
the assumption that we know from the outset, because of what we are told
in the Treatise, what the character of Hume’s philosophical ambitions is.
Hume’s interest in politics, and what he intended to do in writing on pol-
itics as he did, is simply subsumed into the overall project of a ‘science of
man’. So are his interests and intentions in political economy, in religion,
and in history. The inevitable result is a foreshortening, so to speak, of
our picture of Hume and his intellectual development. What happens at
the beginning is given a great deal of attention, while what happens later
on appears diminished in interest and significance. It becomes harder to
conceive of Hume developing new concerns and projects, to conceive of
him conceiving of himself, and of his writings, in new ways. The idea that
things he read after 1739 might have effected fundamental intellectual
transformations becomes harder to take seriously. It becomes difficult to
imagine Hume reacting to changes in personal, social, and political cir-
cumstances. And it becomes all too easy for Hume’s reader to assume that
they know from the outset what philosophy was for Hume, to assume
that what makes the Treatise philosophical is the same thing that makes
Hume’s politics philosophical, that makes his political economy philo-
sophical, that makes his religion philosophical, that makes his history
philosophical. Reaction against the idea that Hume ‘abandoned’ philoso-
phy for other things has in this way produced a picture of Hume no less
inimical to serious thought about his intellectual development. Another
approach is needed if we are to be sure that we take each of Hume’s major
works on its own terms, as an independent and distinct expression of its
author’s genius, and if we are to diminish the temptation to regard any
one of those works as plainly more important than the rest.62
Hume as Man of Letters

In ‘My Own Life’, the brief autobiography written in April 1776, Hume
told the reader that almost all his life had been ‘spent in literary occu-
pations’. Very early in his life, he wrote, he ‘was seized with a passion
for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great
source of my enjoyments’. His family wanted him to be a lawyer – ‘but
I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of
philosophy and general learning’. In his twenties he resolved ‘to regard
every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in
literature’. His first book was a most unfortunate ‘literary attempt’. Many
Introduction 15
of the rest of his books were harshly criticized, but he succeeded in keep-
ing himself clear of ‘literary squabbles’. In moving from the country to
the city in 1751, he established himself in ‘the true scene for a man of
letters’. At the time of writing he saw signs of improvements in his ‘lit-
erary reputation’, and so there was gratification, at the very end, of the
‘love of literary fame’ that had always been his ‘ruling passion’.63 ‘Lit-
erature’ in the eighteenth century did not mean, as it often does now,
a distinct class of writing, including poetry, novels, and plays, such as
might be grouped together by language on library shelves, or examined as
an academic subject. ‘Literature’ was not something intrinsically different
from ‘history’, ‘philosophy’, ‘politics’, or ‘divinity’. In his Dictionary of the
English Language Johnson defined ‘literature’ as simply ‘Learning; skill in
letters’.64 The man of letters, then, was a man of learning. But he was also
a man of a particular kind of learning – of, to use Hume’s phrase, general
learning. To call yourself a man of letters was to distance yourself both
from the academic specialisms of the university and from the narrow and
pedantic obsessions of the gentleman érudit. Several times in ‘My Own
Life’ Hume referred to his ‘studies’, and he was glad to be able to say
that during the last period of his life he had been able to prosecute those
studies with ‘the same ardour as ever’.65 We are not meant to infer from
this that throughout his life Hume relentlessly concentrated upon a small
number of topics. On the contrary, the implication of having described
himself as a man of letters is that Hume ranged freely, if not across all
of ‘learning’, then across many of its domains. Philosophy was one of his
interests, but only one. When his family supposed he was reading legal
textbooks, he was in reality reading not only Cicero but also Virgil.66
It may have been that early on Hume took his conception of the life
of letters from the writings of Shaftesbury, and, perhaps, especially from
Shaftesbury’s ‘Advice to an Author’. There he would have found a dis-
missal of pedantry and erudition for its own sake, and an emphasis upon
the importance of learning as providing a general nourishment for all
of the powers of the mind. What Shaftesbury believed that the author
needed to establish for himself was a self-knowledge that would give him
an independence of the vagaries of opinion, faction, and fashion. ‘My
Own Life’ suggests, however, that Hume soon came to have a rather more
down-to-earth conception of the independence of a man of letters. One
of the main themes of ‘My Own Life’ is Hume’s journey from having
the ‘very slender fortune’ of the younger brother in a family that ‘was
not rich’ to being, by the age of sixty, ‘very opulent’, with ‘a revenue of
1000 l. a year’.67 The independence that mattered was brutely financial.
But it was also important where the money came from. The life of the
man of letters as Hume conceived of it was incompatible with depen-
dence on the patronage of a member of the nobility or, as was common
during the age of Walpole, of a politician. It was incompatible also with
dependence on being given work by a publisher. It may be that Hume’s
model as he fashioned himself as a man of letters was Pope, the first writer
in English to alter the balance of power between author and publisher
and achieve financial success on his own terms.68 Pope showed that a
writer, if he were sufficiently good, and had sufficient business acumen,
did not need a patron or employer. This new model of authorship made
some uncomfortable. Writing for money sounded mercenary and gener-
ally unrespectable. The old culture of aristocratic patronage might, in a
way, have been a surer guarantee of literary integrity and independence.69
If Hume had any worries on this score, he never confessed them. The tone
of ‘My Own Life’ was one of unabashed pride in his own financial success.
Hume positively trumpeted the fact that the money he received from his
booksellers ‘much exceeded any thing formerly known in England’, and
that it made him not just independent but also opulent.70 Another role
model may have been Voltaire, who, while not averse to the patronage of
the great, was a very capable marketer of his own works. The young Hume
would have known of Voltaire’s remarkable early success with Oedipe and
the Henriade. He may also have been impressed by Voltaire’s remarks in
Letters concerning the English Nation about the ‘great veneration’ paid to
the arts in England, and the more general English veneration for exalted
talents, such as ensured ‘that a man of merit in their country is always
sure of making his fortune’.71
One reason why Hume displayed no anxiety about making money
from his pen may have been the fact that he was not, in truth, what
his age termed ‘a writer by trade’. His family may not have been rich,
but it could give him an allowance nonetheless, and this meant that he
never had to write simply in order to eat. In this important sense he was
independent from the very beginning. He did not need a patron, and
never sought one.72 When, in 1748, he sent the third duke of Argyll a
copy of his Essays, he made sure to be clear that it was a present ‘not to the
duke of Argyle, but to Archibald Campbell, who is undoubtedly a man
of sense and learning’.73 The only dedication he ever wrote was to his
Introduction 17
friend, the minister-turned-playwright John Home. Nor did he ever have

to do any journalism or hackwork. There is in this way a very obvious
contrast between Hume’s life as man of letters and that of his almost exact
contemporary, Samuel Johnson, whose early years were full of hardships
and compromises the like of which Hume was fortunate enough never to
know.74 The contrast between the beginnings of Hume’s and Johnson’s
careers reveals how easy, really, it was for Hume to turn himself into the
man of letters that he wanted to be. His circumstances made him more
like Horace Walpole or Gibbon than like Johnson or Henry Fielding.75
And yet, as Johnson would have been the first to point out, in being
Scottish Hume had a disadvantage that neither Johnson nor Fielding had.
In his biography of William Robertson, Dugald Stewart observed that in
the 1730s, ‘[t]he trade of authorship was unknown in Scotland’.76 Scots
of Hume’s generation, including of course Robertson himself, generally
combined the life of letters with a profession. Henry Home of Kames,
born in 1696, was already showing how a lawyer could at the same time
be a success as an author. There was alternatively the church, as for
Robertson, John Home, and Robert Wallace, or a university professorship,
as for Thomas Reid, George Campbell, and (for a while) Adam Smith,
or a combination of the two, as for Hugh Blair and Adam Ferguson.
For Hume, though, the ideal was not to be constrained by professional
obligations of any kind. He allowed his name to be put forward for two
university chairs, but probably did not really want either of them. Smith,
it is worth remembering, gave up his position at Glasgow as soon as he
could, in order to give himself the liberty he needed to work on The Wealth
of Nations.
Hume was able to remain free of all involvement in any of the insti-
tutions that, in the aftermath of the 1707 Union of Parliaments, defined
Scottish public life. This, one imagines, helped him to think of himself as
not only, or even primarily, a Scottish writer but also a British one, and a
European one too. Another thing that detached him from Scotland was his
lack of interest in the all-important question, as his contemporaries saw
it, of how the country might be improved. Men like Kames, Robertson,
and Archibald Campbell, the third duke of Argyll, were preoccupied by
the problem of how Scotland’s backwardness, as compared with the state
of England, might be remedied.77 Hume was not. He was not opposed
to improvement, needless to say, but he was not prepared to bind him-
self to the cause. This unconcern with the practical business of changing
Scotland for the better was doubtless another reason why he was not very
disappointed by either of his failures to secure a university position. It
was not that Hume regarded public office, or the favours of the powerful,
as in themselves incompatible with the independence necessary to a man
of letters. As he recounted in ‘My Own Life’, at various times he accepted
offers of positions from General James St Clair, from the Earl of Hert-
ford, and from Hertford’s brother, General Henry Seymour-Conway. He
was, moreover, relentless in trying to secure for himself the pensions that
went along with such positions. What he never accepted was a position,
or a favour, that might have prevented him from writing as he wanted to
write. His idea of himself was as a man of letters unconstrained by any
practical demands, whether professional or political, or, for that matter,
moral.
One way of characterizing this conception of the life of the man of
letters is to call it philosophical. Hume’s goal as a man of letters was to be
free enough to be able to rise above the everyday and the particular and,
from that vantage point, to identify and characterize general principles
that were otherwise hard, if not impossible, to discern. This is philosophy
understood not as a body of doctrine or a subject matter, but rather as a
habit of mind, a style of thinking, and of writing, such as could in principle
be applied to any subject whatsoever. Such an understanding of philoso-
phy was common in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, when what we now
call natural science was still called natural philosophy, and when moral
philosophy comprised not only ethics but also what would now be termed
psychology, anthropology, political science, and political economy. In his
Dictionary Johnson gave four definitions of ‘philosophy’. The first was,
simply, ‘Knowledge natural or moral’.78 Twenty years later, the Modern
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences defined philosophy as ‘the knowledge or
study of nature and morality, founded on reason and experience’, and
divided it into three principal parts: the study of logic and metaphysics;
the study of the laws of nature and nations; and the study of bodies ani-
mate and inanimate.79 James Harris, in Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry
concerning Universal Grammar, declared that ‘there is no subject, hav-
ing its foundation in nature, that is below the dignity of a philosophical
inquiry’. And philosophical inquiry was characterized by Harris in terms
of the development of ‘extensive views’ and the transition ‘from small
matters to the greatest’. It was as a philosopher, therefore, that he was
interested in a universal grammar, in the principles common to all human
Introduction 19
languages as such.80 Similarly, in A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of

the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke depicted the investigation of the springs
and the tracing of the courses of the passions as part of a larger search
into ‘the general scheme of things’, in so far as the goal was to reduce
the complex to ‘utmost simplicity’, and thus ‘communicate to the taste
a sort of philosophical solidity’.81 To be a philosopher at this time was
to approach a subject, any subject, in a careful, analytical, and inductive
manner, and to derive from one’s inquiries maximally general explana-
tory principles. Joseph Black was to his contemporaries a philosophical
chemist, and James Hutton a philosophical geologist. A philosophical
approach to religion yielded central principles common to all faiths, and
a philosophical politics, such as that of Montesquieu or Adam Smith,
sought the fundamental laws of political life as such. The philosopher
did not have a practical agenda. That was implicit in his concern for the
general, not the particular. This made philosophical politics look attrac-
tively different from the self-seeking squabbling of party political debate.
On the other hand, it made philosophical religion look, to some at least,
reprehensibly theoretical and ‘cold’.
The original title of Hume’s reworking of Book I of the Treatise, Philo-
sophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, is suggestive of this kind
of understanding of the nature of philosophy. And in that book’s first
‘essay’, Hume went some way towards explaining what he took it to entail.
The philosopher’s characteristic concern, he wrote there, was with general
principles which underlie and explain the particularities of ordinary expe-
rience. The philosopher had to detach himself from the commitments of
everyday life to pursue such inquiries. The ‘turn of mind’ of the philoso-
pher ‘cannot enter into business and action’. The ‘mere philosopher’ was
depicted as living ‘remote from communication with mankind . . . wrapt
up in principles and notions equally remote from their comprehension’.82
Hume’s goal was to bridge the gap between ‘mere philosophy’ and ‘the
world’, but this was always a matter of attempting to disengage the reader
as much as possible from their ordinary beliefs and sentiments, rather
than of compromising the objectivity of the philosopher. The 1742 essays
‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’, taken
together, demanded to be read as, in effect, Hume’s explanation of why
he did not think of himself as able to continue with moral philosophy’s
traditional project of emotional therapy and improvement of character,
and why, as moral philosopher, he concerned himself with the purely
explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judge-

ment. Hume liked to portray himself an anatomist of the moral life – and
as an anatomist also of politics. He made a much more serious attempt
than was common at the time to rise above factionalism and to discuss
politics with genuine impartiality, in the interests of understanding the
deeper forces threatening the much-vaunted constitutional settlement of
1688. And in his writings on commerce, there were none of the usual pleas
of books on trade for this or that piece of legislative reform, in the interests
of this or that part of the mercantile or manufacturing community. The
‘chief business’ of both philosophers and politicians, Hume wrote in ‘Of
Commerce’, was ‘to regard the general course of things’: to ‘enlarge their
view to those universal propositions, which comprehend under them an
infinite number of individuals, and include a whole science in a single
theorem’.83 In his letters to the printer William Strahan, Hume regularly
referred to all of the works collected together under the title Essays and
Treatises on Several Subjects – including the two Enquiries, the Essays,
Moral and Political, the Political Discourses, and the ‘Natural History of
Religion’ – as his ‘philosophical pieces’ or ‘philosophical writings’.84 He
did so because each one was an instance of the application of the philo-
sophical mode of reasoning. Seen in this way, no one of these works was
any more ‘philosophical’ than the rest.
As he began on the History of Great Britain that became a History of
England, Hume told the Abbé le Blanc that ‘The philosophical spirit,
which I have so much indulg’d in all my writings, finds here ample mate-
rials to work upon’.85 Hume’s history writing was meant to be, and was
understood by many of his readers to be, philosophical in the same way
as the Essays and Treatises. History made itself philosophical by shifting
focus away from the actions of individual historical agents and towards
general principles able to explain long-term and large-scale social, polit-
ical, economic, and cultural change.86 Of course the kind of narrative
history that Hume wrote, divided up as was usual into the reigns of kings
and queens, did not give up completely on describing and explaining the
actions of individual agents. Indeed, Hume had something of the novel-
ist’s interest in the foibles and weaknesses of particular human beings. His
style as a historian was to be constantly alternating between the particular
and the general. He wrote in the belief that it was not improper for the
teller of the national story every now and then ‘to make a pause: and to
take a survey of the state of the kingdom, with a regard to government,
Introduction 21
manners, finances, arms, trade, learning’. For ‘[w]here a just notion is

not formed of these particulars, history can be little instructive, and often
will not be intelligible’.87 Tobias Smollett applauded Hume’s ‘attempt
to comprehend all the objects of history’, not only the transactions of
the great but also ‘in order to point out the progress of the nation in
political, commercial, or literary improvements, the regulations which
relate to police, commerce, or the revenue, are minutely observed, and
the essays of genius are considered’. In this way, Smollett asserted, Hume
had ‘involved the reflections of a philosophical historian in the detail of
his facts’.88 Although Hume claimed that he wrote the first volume of his
History in ignorance of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, it is hard to believe
that in his conception of philosophical history he was not to some degree
influenced by Voltaire.89 And Voltaire, for his part, was as laudatory as
Smollett was about Hume’s achievement in The History of England. He
welcomed especially the manner in which Hume’s tendency to reflection
enabled him to break absolutely with the partisanship hitherto endemic
to history writing in English. Hume, according to Voltaire, revealed him-
self to be neither a Parliamentarian nor a Royalist, neither an Anglican
nor a Presbyterian. He was, simply, ‘un homme équitable’. He ‘speaks
of weaknesses, errors, and barbarities, like a doctor speaks of epidemic
diseases’.90
Many of Hume’s early readers, including Smollett, believed that Hume
wrote his History in imitation of Voltaire. Johnson claimed that ‘Hume
would never have written History, had not Voltaire written it before
him’.91 Hume, though, had none of Voltaire’s reforming zeal, neither
in religion nor in politics. Hume did not write, as Voltaire said he did,
pour agir. It is impossible to imagine Hume taking up a case like that
of Jean Calas, or writing a book like Voltaire’s Traité sur la Tolérance.92
Hume seems to have been made uncomfortable by the utopian optimism
and dogmatic self-assurance of the philosophes – which may have been
part of the reason why he attempted to give assistance to their bitter
critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was even more sceptical than Rousseau
himself was as to the possibility of a writer’s doing anything to change
and improve the world in which he lived. His account of human nature,
with its subversion of the authority of reason, and its case for belief
in general as being a function of feeling not rationality, cast doubt on
the very possibility of enlightened reform and improvement. Politics as
Hume describes it is determined by ‘opinion’, and opinion is portrayed
by Hume’s philosophical history as shaped, not by argument, but by

large-scale and impersonal socio-economic forces.
Hume did not make a serious effort to integrate religion into his philo-
sophical history. Religion and religious people were often portrayed by
him as anomalous, and as disruptive of the social and political order. Yet
in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ Hume made it clear that religion,
all the same, has the deepest of roots in human nature. It develops out of
passions such as fear and hope, which are an integral part of the human
constitution. This makes it unsurprising that when Hume imagined a
perfect commonwealth, one of the questions that he felt he had to answer
concerned the best form of church governance. A central problem of
politics, as Hume understood it, was how religion should be managed,
and the dangers it poses to stability contained. This suggests that there
would be little plausibility to a suggestion to the effect that the remit of
the philosophical man of letters, as understood by Hume, was to work
towards the demise of the Christian religion. Philosophical reasoning was,
of course, to be applied to religion as to everything else. Religion was to
be examined from a maximally detached and disengaged point of view.
Superstition and enthusiasm were to be shown in their true lights, and
moderation cultivated in their place. But there was no reason to believe
that philosophy might be able to do anything at all to weaken the hold of
religion on the vast majority of people. Also, there was no pressing need,
in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, to desire the extirpation of the
Christianity as such. No one was being tortured, as Calas was, to make
them confess that they had murdered their son to stop him from convert-
ing to a different religion.93 At home in Edinburgh, Hume enjoyed the
company of moderates of the Church of Scotland, and regarded some of
them as being among the acutest of his critics.94
On his deathbed Hume joked that he might buy some time from Charon
by telling him that he wanted to wait, before entering Hades, until the
downfall of Christianity. Adam Smith’s retelling of the joke in his pub-
lished account of Hume’s death was a provocation to Hume’s enemies,
but, still, the joke was just a joke. I think that it tells us more about Hume’s
willingness to exploit his reputation as an atheist to comic effect than about
his real intentions as a man of letters. Hume also imagined telling Charon
that he had been correcting his works for a new edition and wanted to see
how the public received the alterations. This, though also a joke at his
own expense, does tell us something about Hume’s intentions as a man of
letters. It mattered immensely to him that he find the best possible way of
Introduction 23
communicating his arguments to the reader. The main problem with the
Treatise was, Hume thought, its manner, not its matter. He had misjudged
what the readers of his day expected in the way of style, and had chosen
the wrong form for his theory of human nature. The immense baroque
architecture of his first book appeared to repel people rather than attract
them, and a completely different mode of presentation was needed if
Hume’s ideas were to be known and discussed. Formal questions contin-
ued to be one of Hume’s preoccupations once the rewriting of the Treatise
was complete. He changed his mind more than once, for example, about
how exactly to integrate philosophical reflections into the narrative flow
of his history writing. And to judge by his correspondence with Strahan,
correctness of language and syntax was an obsession with Hume. He was
constantly re-reading his own works, mostly with a view to minute alter-
ations in the choice of words and the structure of sentences. He pressed
for new editions of The History of England and Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects, and very soon after each new edition appeared, he began
pressing for another one. To recognise this is to recognise that Hume’s
career as a man of letters did not come to an end in late 1761, with the
completion of the History. Correction was as important a part of Hume’s
literary life as composition was. No book was ever finished. It was always
in the process of being improved. There is no sign that Hume found this
wearisome. He could have said, as Pope did, that ‘I corrected because it
was as pleasant to me to correct as to write’ – and also that ‘I had too
much fondness for my productions to judge of them at first, and too much
judgment to be pleas’d with them at last’.95
Style mattered so much to Hume precisely because, as a man of letters,
he did not write as a specialist only for fellow specialists. He sought, and
found, a very large readership among the educated men and women of
his day, in Britain, and in Europe more widely. What he wanted from his
readers, but did not always get, was a willingness to join him in a certain
kind of discursive space, in a kind of conversation which, again, might
best be called philosophical. This kind of conversation was philosophical
in its interest in underlying general explanatory principles, but also, and
just as importantly, in the impersonality of its tone. It was intolerable
to Hume how clumsily some of his readers made connections between
his writings and his personal convictions – or lack thereof. In Hume’s
day, assumptions were all too easily made about the character and life
of an author, such that the character and life of the author, rather than
his writings considered in themselves, became the object of discussion.
Essential to the kind of conversation that Hume wanted his writings to

contribute to was a willingness of all parties to focus only on the ideas and
the arguments, without trying to second-guess what someone’s intentions
might be in putting forward such ideas and such arguments, and what
kind of person it might be who could write in this way about that topic.
All political and religious commitments were to be put to one side. To
one of his critics Hume declared that ‘Our connection with each other,
as men of letters, is greater than our differences as adhering to different
sects or systems’. ‘Let us’, he continued, ‘revive the happy times, when
Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the
Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were
insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter
to discourse and conversation’.96 Hume wrote these words, perhaps, more
in hope than in expectation. He was reminded often how hard even the
men of letters among his contemporaries found it to lay aside personal
animosities and rivalries. He was told that he was both a Whig and a
Tory when he took himself to be neither. He was told that he was an
atheist when he believed he had revealed nothing at all in his writings
about his personal religious views. He was told he was licentious and a
subverter of morality when what he thought he had done was merely to
show how morality might better be understood. Sometimes Hume found
these things amusing, sometimes he found them deeply offensive. They
showed him that the philosophical conversation which he desired to join
could not be presumed to be already going on, waiting for him to take his
place in it. His task as a man of letters was to be part of the effort to bring
that conversation, the conversation that we call the Enlightenment, into
existence.97
Summary of the Narrative

To see Hume as first and foremost a man of letters, and to see philosophy as
having been for him a style of thought and of writing rather than a subject
matter or body of doctrine, provides a way of avoiding the dilemma forced
upon the intellectual biographer by the two most common approaches
to his literary career. It is no longer necessary, on this way of reading
Hume, to choose between, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century story
according to which he abandoned philosophy for less demanding subjects
out of a combination of intellectual laziness and the desire for an easy
kind of fame, and, on the other hand, the more recent story according to
Introduction 25
which all of his writings are to be seen as continuations and developments

of the project adumbrated in the introduction of his first book. We can
say instead both that Hume never gave up on philosophy and that there
was nothing systematic about the manner in which he chose the topics to
which philosophical reasoning would be applied. While it is certainly true
that Hume’s cast of mind was essentially and unwaveringly philosophical,
it is also true that he was interested in many things, and that he made no
effort to organise those interests and arrange them in order. Thomas Reid’s
writings, published and unpublished, fit together to form an organised and
unified whole.98 So, arguably, do those of Adam Smith.99 As I read them,
Hume’s do not. And so I make no effort in this book to argue that Hume
had a system in which all his books have their place. I see his writings as
unified only by the analytical intelligence at work in each of them. Also, I
see Hume as having been willing to alter his works in light of changes of
mind and changes of circumstance. He was not engaged in the business
of filling out an intellectual vision in abstraction from the world around
him. He was acutely sensitive to the complexities of his time and place,
and wrote, and corrected, out of a desire to show how philosophy might
illuminate some of the deeper problems faced by the age in which he lived.
My goal in this book is to characterize Hume’s philosophical treatments
of human nature, of politics, of trade, of religion, and of English history,
to locate them in their discursive and historical contexts, and to describe –
and, where possible, account for – the alterations he went on to make to
them.100
In Chapter 1 I make some suggestions as to how to understand Hume’s
intellectual development from when he left college in 1725 to his departure
for France in the summer of 1734. What little evidence we have suggests
that Hume did not get much out of his university education. If he gained
a sense of the importance of experimentalism in natural philosophy from
the lectures of Robert Steuart during his final year, that was probably the
only thing, apart from Latin and Greek, that he took with him when he
left Edinburgh. A short-lived period as a law student might have given
the young Hume an interest in the modern natural jurisprudence that
was just beginning to exert its influence on the development of moral and
political philosophy in Scotland, but Hume’s intellectual interests were
already many and diverse, and a career in law seemed to him incompatible
with following where those interests led. His family let him give up on the
law, and appear to have left him free to read as widely as he wished. The
first really significant event in Hume’s intellectual life may have been an
encounter with Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,

Times. Hume bought, or was given, a copy in 1726, and his earliest letters
give the impression that he spent the next two or three years working very
hard to follow Shaftesbury’s instructions as to how taste, and character,
should be formed. Hume seems to have done his best to turn himself into
a kind of Stoic, albeit one of a modern and polite sort. The experiment
was not a success. It helped to bring on a physical and mental breakdown
in the autumn of 1729, and by the time Hume was on the way to recovery,
he had a completely new sense of his intellectual vocation. He no longer
shared Shaftesbury’s admiration for the moral philosophy of the ancients,
and believed that there was a need for a completely fresh start in the study
of human nature. There is reason to think that Mandeville and Bayle were
important influences on Hume as he formulated this new philosophical
project. Hume was in the right frame of mind to respond enthusiastically
to their scepticism about the conceptions of human nature with which
philosophers had worked hitherto, and to their scepticism about Stoicism,
including in Mandeville’s case the Stoicism of Shaftesbury, in particular.
Cool and realistic descriptions of the power of the passions, especially the
power of pride, might well have been to his taste, along with accounts of
the impotence of reason. But it is reasonable to suppose also that Hume was
attuned to what was going on in Scotland, intellectually speaking, in the
early 1730s. This was the beginning of Hutcheson’s time as Professor of
Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and Hutcheson was without doubt another
powerful influence on Hume’s early intellectual development. Out of the
tension between Mandeville and Bayle on the one hand and Hutcheson on
the other developed key features of the philosophical analysis of human
nature that Hume would expound on in his first book.
Hume went to France in the summer of 1734 and stayed there for three
years. We know almost nothing about this period of Hume’s life other
than that by the end of it Hume had a complete draft of Books I and II of
A Treatise of Human Nature. What he read while writing the Treatise, and
how his ideas developed, can only be guessed at. In Chapter 2 I concentrate
on relating the principal arguments of the Treatise to the texts that it is
safe to assume were important to Hume as he framed his theory of human
nature. Books I and II of the Treatise demand to be read as a self-contained
whole – as, to use a phrase of Hume’s from the Advertisement to the
Treatise, ‘a compleat chain of reasoning’. In Book I a sceptical examination
of the nature of human rationality gave rise to a new account of how beliefs
Introduction 27
are generated, and regulated, by experience. Hume’s scepticism, as I

present it, developed out of a long-standing interest in Bayle, but also out
a sense of the devastating implications of Berkeley’s anti-abstractionism
for conventional philosophical models of the faculty of reason. Hume’s
reconstruction of reason, as I present it, developed out of his Berkeley-
inspired insight that Locke had failed to explain how exactly experience
can be used as a basis for non-demonstrative reasoning about matters of
empirical fact. Many of the materials Hume used in his new account of
probabilistic, causal reasoning were taken from Malebranche. Hume did
not share Malebranche’s interest in the physiological basis of thought, or
his obsession with man’s post-lapsarian tendency to error. But he did agree
with Malebranche about the inability of reason to govern the passions.
For Hume, though not for Malebranche, this meant that an account
needed to be given of how the passions are able to govern themselves.
Book II of the Treatise provided such an account, making crucial use of
the analysis of pride, or ‘self-liking’, in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.
Once the publication of Books I and II was in progress, Hume returned
to Scotland, and to serious work on Book III, ‘Of Morals’. I use Hume’s
correspondence with Hutcheson in 1740 as the basis for a conjecture
about the composition of Book III, arguing that parts 2 and 3 were likely
written before part 1, and that the distinction between artificial and natural
virtues is at the heart of Hume’s philosophy of morals. At the end of
Chapter 2 I consider the question of what Hume might have attempted
in the unwritten books of the Treatise on criticism and politics. I suggest
that ‘Of Criticism’ might have born something like the same relation to
Hutcheson’s work on the sense of beauty as ‘Of Morals’ bore to his work
on the moral sense; and that in ‘Of Politics’ Hume might have attempted
the conjectural history of civil society that would later be explored by
Scottish contemporaries such as Smith, Ferguson, and Millar.
Even as he worked on the Treatise, Hume continued to read widely, in
the classics, and in modern political arithmetic and political economy. I
begin Chapter 3 with an assessment of what the so-called Early Memo-
randa tell us about Hume’s intellectual interests at around the time when
Book III of the Treatise was completed. At this point Hume was already
writing essays, and in the rest of the chapter I consider Hume’s practice
as an essayist in the collections of Essays, Moral and Political published
in 1741 and 1742. Hume said in the advertisement to the 1741 volume
that each of his essays should be considered ‘as a work apart’, and it is
true that there is no way of giving a unified and systematic account of

these two collections of essays taken as a whole. I examine them from
four different points of view. First I focus on those essays where Hume
clearly has Addison as his model, and suggest that they do not take us very
far towards understanding Hume’s ambitions as an essay writer. Many
of them were dropped from later editions of the Essays. Hume’s essays
on British party politics tell us more, I think, about what he wanted to
do with the essay form. They succeeded in presenting in a new light
factional disputes that by the early 1740s would have been very familiar
to Hume’s readers. All writers on politics aspired to ‘impartiality’, but
Hume attains a perspective on political debate that makes it hard to give
his arguments a party-political characterization. Even though these essays
are highly topical, there are frequent suggestions of an underlying philos-
ophy of politics, and I attempt a schematic characterization of what the
essays suggest as to Hume’s idea of the form a ‘science of politics’ should
take. I argue that for Hume, as for many British writers in the first half
of the eighteenth century, James Harrington was the point of departure
for a philosophical analysis of politics. Harrington’s theory of property as
the basis of power and authority needed to be amended in several crucial
ways, however, if it was to accommodate the importance of ‘opinion’ in
politics, and if it was to take account of the political significance of a bur-
geoning international commerce. Finally I examine the more extended
historical explanations of cultural phenomena attempted in the essays ‘Of
Eloquence’ and ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, and
also the argument implicit in the four essays in which Hume ‘person-
ates’ representatives of major schools of ancient philosophy. These last, I
argue, can be understood as an explanation and justification of the purely
‘anatomical’ philosophical method of the Treatise. The Essays, Moral and
Political reached a wider audience than the Treatise did, and their success
might well have prompted Hume to reconsider the question of how, under
modern conditions, philosophy should be written.
Chapter 4 begins with Hume still at the family home in Chirnside,
working on his Greek, continuing to read widely, but, so far as we know,
without writing anything intended for publication. At some point in the
early 1740s, Hume abandoned the project of the Treatise. It would seem
that it took him time to decide what to do next. His first move was to try
to secure some kind of paid employment. He thought initially of work
as a tutor, but then allowed his name to be put forward in the spring of
1745 as a candidate for the soon to be vacant Edinburgh chair of moral
Introduction 29
philosophy. He was not a very plausible candidate, and did not get the
job, apparently to his own relief. The ‘affair at Edinburgh’ generated
a brief pamphlet defending the Treatise and clarifying the nature of its
scepticism. This seems to have spurred Hume on to a complete rewrite of
Book I of the Treatise, to which I then turn. Philosophical Essays concerning
Human Understanding appears to have been begun during time in 1745–
6 when Hume was a tutor and companion to the insane Marquess of
Annandale. It must have been almost finished before Hume embarked
on two years spent mostly abroad in the employment of General James
St. Clair. Hume’s claim was that the Philosophical Essays embodied a
change in the ‘manner’ of his approach to the human understanding but
not in the ‘matter’. There is no reason to quarrel with this assessment,
although it also true that Hume added to the ‘matter’ by developing the
implications of his sceptical account of the understanding for the rational
basis of religious belief. The change in ‘manner’ was dramatic. It suggests
a rethink on Hume’s part about the expectations of his audience and about
how what remained a radical and subversive analysis of the fundamental
principles of human cognition might meet those expectations. After this
I consider another element of the project of rewriting of the Treatise,
three new essays on political obligation written in the wake of the Jacobite
Rebellion of 1745–6. Two of these essays (‘Of Passive Obedience’ and
‘Of the Original Contract’) were published in 1748, but the third (‘Of the
Protestant Succession’) was so likely to cause controversy that it was held
back, to be published in 1752 in Political Discourses. These essays built
on the treatment of allegiance in part 2 of Book III of the Treatise, and
spelled out its implications for Britons in the mid-eighteenth century. At
the same time they gave further definition to Hume’s conception of how
politics was to be made the subject of philosophical examination.
Thanks largely to his time as secretary to St Clair, by 1749 Hume
was able to think of himself as having achieved a measure of financial
independence. For the next two years he did not bother any more about
getting ‘fixt in some way of life’, as he had put it in a letter to Kames
two years earlier. Having returned again to Chirnside, he lived the life of
a man of letters to the full, and wrote an extraordinary amount about a
wide range of subjects in a very short period of time. Between the spring
of 1749 and the summer of 1751 he finished An Enquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals and Political Discourses. He also completed a draft of
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. There is some reason to think that
in addition he wrote ‘The Natural History of Religion’, ‘Of Tragedy’, a
new version of Book II of the Treatise’s account of the passions, and what
might have been a reformulation of Book I of the Treatise’s account of our
ideas of space and time. I begin Chapter 5 with an interpretation of the
Enquiry that emphasizes both the uncompromising character of the moral
philosophy it contains and its attention to the question of literary style.
I then move on to Political Discourses. I set Hume’s political economy in
its contemporary context, in order to make sense of what exactly Hume’s
intentions might have been in the one text that he was prepared to admit
in ‘My Own Life’ as having been an immediate and substantial success.
Again, style – the manner in which Hume treated a set of topics central to
the extant literature on trade – is crucial to understanding what Hume was
about here. Very often in Political Discourses the core argument of an essay
was not Hume’s own invention. His goal, usually, was to raise questions
and provoke further thought, not definitively to establish a theoretical
postulate. It mattered that he was not elaborating a systematic theory of
commerce, in the manner of Cantillon, Steuart, or Smith. His intention
would seem to have been to turn commerce into a subject of reflection
and conversation for those who did not themselves have a direct interest
in one or other of its branches. In the final section of the chapter I take it
as possible, at least, that Hume wrote ‘The Natural History of Religion’,
along with most of the rest of what would be published in 1757 as Four
Dissertations, during this period. My main concern, however, is to offer a
preliminary reading of Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. I suggest that
it can be read as a representation of an idealized intellectual community,
as a portrayal of the kind of philosophical discussion that Hume wanted
to be able to believe was possible in his time and place. I treat some of
his correspondence with other philosophical men of letters – including
Robert Wallace, George Campbell, Thomas Reid, and Richard Price – as
providing evidence of how important it was to Hume that philosophical
friendship was possible even between people who disagreed profoundly
about speculative questions, and about speculative religious questions in
particular.
In 1751, Hume at last left the family home and, with his sister, set
up house in Edinburgh. His first move was to issue a collection of all of
his writings, apart from the Treatise and a handful of his more blatantly
Addisonian essays, with the title Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects.
Having failed to get another university professorship that he probably
did not very much want, this time at Glasgow, he was elected Keeper of
Introduction 31
the Advocates’ Library, and by September 1752 was at work on the first
volume of The History of Great Britain. In the first half of Chapter 6 I
sketch the historiographical context for Hume’s history writing. One very
important point of reference for Hume the historian was undoubtedly
Rapin’s Histoire d’Angleterre and its modernization of the Whig narrative
that had dominated English historical scholarship since the Glorious Rev-
olution. But it would appear that Hume was even more impressed by new
developments in Whig history prompted by Bolingbroke’s adaptation of
Rapin’s narrative to Tory ends. Walpole’s propagandists responded by
adapting Tory history to Whig ends, and Hume’s political essays of the
1740s suggest that he, too, believed that the fundamental Whig objective of
vindication of the 1688 Revolution was best served by being disconnected
from the standard story of how England’s ancient constitution had been
saved from the evil designs of Stuart tyrants. I also consider the revolution
in historical style that Hume intended to effect. In the second half of the
chapter I proceed to an account of the main lines of argument deployed
by Hume in the two volumes of The History of Great Britain, published
in 1754 and 1757. I argue that it is essential to understanding The His-
tory of Great Britain that it be read as a whole. For on Hume’s reading
of seventeenth-century British history, the Civil War achieved nothing.
The fundamental constitutional problem that had caused the Civil War –
the imbalance between the crown’s real power and the beliefs held by
James I and Charles I about basis and extent of the royal prerogative –
was not solved by the time of the Restoration. The Glorious Revolution
as described by Hume was a kind of solution, but one that very well might
never have been arrived at. The Revolution was not inevitable, and, Hume
ended the History by suggesting, the post-1688 constitution represented a
complex balancing act that could all too easily be upset. There was more,
however, to the History of Great Britain than this philosophical analysis of
the fundamental dynamics of recent political history. Hume’s conception
of proper historical style caused him to balance a striving for impartiality
with a desire to emotionally engage the reader with the fate of history’s
victims, both great and small. He wanted the History of Great Britain to
be both philosophical and ‘interesting’.
Having at first intended to take his narrative forward to the accession
of George I, Hume decided instead to go backwards, to the Tudor period
during which the forces responsible for the disasters of the seventeenth
century had begun their disruptive work. Since there had been no such
thing as Great Britain prior to the 1603 Union of Crowns, this required
a change of title. Hume was now writing the history of England. This
is the principal concern of Chapter 7. But before I consider Hume’s
accounts of the Tudor and medieval periods, I describe the attempts made
by the orthodox Calvinist ‘Popular’ faction of the Church of Scotland,
first to prosecute Hume for blasphemy in 1755–6, and then to prosecute
his friend, the playwright John Home, in 1757. I suggest that it was
these episodes that prompted Hume to publish ‘The Natural History of
Religion’. The ‘Natural History’ can thus be seen as an implicit attack
not only on Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim ‘superstition’ but also on the
intolerant fundamentalism of Scottish Calvinists. I then move on to The
History of England, Under the House of Tudor, begun in early 1757 and
published in the spring of 1759. This was a corroboration of the view
expressed in both the political essays and The History of Great Britain that
Tudor England was a more or less absolute monarchy from beginning to
end. Elizabeth’s reign, which took up the entirety of the second volume,
was in other words not the golden age of liberty depicted in standard
Whig history. The Tories, and the Walpolean Whigs, had been right to
downplay the supposed contrast between the last of the Tudors and the
first of the Stuarts. Even as he made this argument, though, Hume sought
to disentangle it from its Tory roots, most obviously in his treatment of the
still vexed question of Mary Queen of Scots. And he was completely even-
handed in his condemnation of the horrors visited upon England by both
Catholic and Protestant monarchs in the aftermath of the Reformation.
Henry VII’s property legislation, and the consequent shift of the balance
of power away from the nobility and towards the House of Commons, may
have been in a sense the origins of the Glorious Revolution, but the path
that led from Henry VII to William and Mary passed through a thicket
of historical accidents, ironies, and unintended consequences. The final
section of Chapter 6 examines The History of England, From the Invasion
of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, written in two years between
1759 and 1761. This was Hume’s completion of the demolition of Whig
history, an account of the medieval period that rested heavily on the Tory
histories of Carte and Brady, designed to show that whatever may have
been truth about pre-Norman England, the Norman Conquest and the
imposition of feudalism changed everything so radically that there was
simply no point to invocations of the native liberties of the Anglo-Saxons.
In 1762, Hume assembled all of his history writing under the title of The
History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in
Introduction 33
1688. The book’s overall argument was that there was, properly speaking,
no such thing as the English constitution. Instead there had been a series
of quite different constitutions, each of which had changed and mutated
into the next. There was, therefore, no privileged historical moment in
relation to which the present could be measured and either celebrated or
found wanting. History could no longer be a weapon for political parties
to use against each other.
The History of England made Hume rich. It also left him unsure what
to do next. His publisher wanted him to return to the original plan of
moving forward from 1688 into the early eighteenth century. There was
also the idea of writing a history of the Christian church. Hume confessed
to having little appetite for the controversies that both of these projects
would certainly involve him in, and instead accepted the invitation of the
British ambassador in Paris, the earl of Hertford, to become his Secretary.
Hume’s time in Paris between September 1763 and January 1766 is my
first subject in Chapter 8. Hume got to know many of the greatest figures
of the French Enlightenment, but he was not prompted as a result to write
anything new. The small amount of evidence that survives suggests that
he was not wholly comfortable among the philosophes, which may be why
when he left Paris, he did so in the company of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
intending to help Rousseau to secure sanctuary and a royal pension in
England. As might have been predicted, things with Rousseau did not go
smoothly, and the friendship fell apart in a very public way. I then describe
the two years Hume then spent in London, first as Deputy Secretary of
State in the Northern Department under the Earl of Hertford’s brother.
Hume witnessed the Wilkite riots of 1768, and first-hand experience of
the London mob prompted further reflection on the dangers inherent in
a failure to achieve the right constitutional balance between liberty and
authority. A jaundiced view of the way British politics was developing in
the second half of the eighteenth century was made more pessimistic still
by the developing conflict with the thirteen colonies in America. In August
1769, Hume returned to Edinburgh for good. The last section of Chapter 8
describes his final years. Hume was more amused than anything else by
James Beattie’s attack on him in the Essay on Truth. He could dismiss
James Macpherson’s Ossian poems as fakes without any of Johnson’s
moral outrage. He was at home among friends, and he was confident of
the general superiority of Scottish letters to English. At the end of his
life, Hume returned to the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and put
finishing touches on his case for the claim that the difference between
theism and atheism is ‘merely verbal’. Right up until the end he was also
still engaged on the endless project, with which he had been constantly
occupied even while in Paris and in London, of perfecting and improving
the Essays and Treatises and the History of England.
At the end of ‘My Own Life’ Hume wrote that he saw ‘many symptoms
of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional lustre’.101
The history of his writings had, as he recounted it, been up until now
one of continual failure and disappointment. Only one of his works, the
Political Discourses, had been successful on first publication. The rest
had been either overlooked and neglected, or met with cries of reproach,
disapprobation, and even detestation. As cannot but be suggested by the
other story told in ‘My Own Life’ – the story of Hume’s progress from
poverty to opulence – there was a considerable amount of exaggeration in
this narrative of neglect and misunderstanding. Not even the Treatise was
the disaster that Hume claimed it was in ‘My Own Life’. Most of his books
met with the kind of reception most writers of the time would only dream
about. Hume was read by everyone, was argued with vigorously by many of
the greatest writers of his day, and was usually admired even by those who
disagreed with him. In this respect ‘My Own Life’ has sometimes been
taken too seriously.102 It has helped to create the almost entirely misleading
image of Hume as a long-suffering victim of intolerance, denied the
success he deserved by an oppressive and bigoted religious and political
establishment. In another respect, though, ‘My Own Life’ has usually not
been taken seriously enough. Hume’s presentation of himself as first and
foremost a man of letters is the key to understanding his career as a writer.
This is not to say, with his nineteenth-century critics, that after giving up
on the Treatise he was overtaken by a dishonourable desire for success at
any price. In ‘My Own Life’ Hume portrayed himself as a man of letters
of a particular kind, neglectful, as he puts it, of ‘present power, interest,
and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices’.103 Distancing himself
from these things, he pursued his numerous interests from a position at a
remove from everyday life, intent on identifying the general principles at
work beneath surface-level particularity and confusion – and intent also
on describing those principles in as elegant and correct a prose as it was
possible for him to craft.
1
Pursuits of Philosophy and

General Learning
avid hume was born in Edinburgh on 26 April 1711.1 He grew

D up at the family home of Ninewells in the village of Chirnside, ten
miles west of Berwick upon Tweed, forty miles south-east of Edinburgh.
His father died when he was two, and his mother did not marry again.
The family, though not rich, was probably able to pay for private tutors
to educate Hume and his brother to college level. What such an education
meant in the first instance was instruction in Latin language and literature,
and perhaps in French as well. In the autumn of 1721 the two boys went
up to enter the College of Edinburgh together. David was ten, and John
twelve. Hume followed the ordinary arts course, and, as was common at
the time, did not graduate.2 Being the second son meant that he needed a
profession, and it was decided that, like his father, he should be a lawyer.
He spent some time reading legal textbooks, and attended lectures at
Edinburgh’s law school, but study of the law did not interest him. In
1742 he would describe law as ‘a laborious occupation’, requiring ‘the
drudgery of a whole life’, and ‘utterly incompatible with every other
study or profession’.3 His family did not force him. He was allowed to
give up the law and appears to have been left free to fill his time as he
wished. He read voraciously and before very long had a clear sense of a
literary vocation. By early 1729 he had decided that his would be a life
of learning and writing, and, exhilarated by this vision of his future, he
applied himself vigorously to his studies.
Six months later he found himself suffering a kind of collapse. He
had pushed himself too hard, and was suddenly no longer able to work
properly at his studies. Reading now made him anxious and depressed.
He had lost his powers of concentration. It took two years for Hume to
begin anew. He had to learn to be more moderate in the way he pursued
the life of the mind, to combine study with physical exercise, and to be
more sociable. By the summer of 1731 he had regained self-confidence
35
and was inspired by the idea of a new intellectual project. He would now
take human nature, every aspect of it, as his subject. He would do what
the philosophers of the ancient world had failed to do – he would analyse
human nature as it revealed itself to experience. As we would say now, he
would examine it scientifically. He would reveal what human beings were
actually like, not what moralists and religious apologists wanted them to
be like. Three years were then spent trying, and failing, to begin on this
project of a new science of human nature. In the spring of 1734 Hume
wrote to a London-based physician for help. He told him that he was
still experiencing the after-effects of his breakdown. He was still unable
to concentrate for any length of time, and as a result was unable to give
proper order to his thoughts. He was unable also to express them ‘with
such elegance & neatness, as to draw to me the attention of the world’.4 He
had decided, therefore, to give up on the life of the mind for a while, and
to learn something of the world. He had got a job with a sugar merchant
in Bristol, four hundred miles away in the south-west of England. A few
months were sufficient for Hume to find ‘that scene’, as he puts it in ‘My
Own Life’, ‘totally unsuitable to me’.5 He then travelled to France, ‘with
a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat’.6 There he wrote
the bulk of his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature.
In this chapter we follow Hume from his time as a student at Edinburgh
to his departure for France in the summer of 1734. The paucity of the
evidence means that we can do little more than speculate about what
Hume was reading, thinking, and writing during this period. In the first
twenty-three years of his life, before he left for France, Hume probably
wrote hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of letters to relations, friends,
and acquaintances. Only four have survived. Three are to a man named
Michael Ramsay, nine years Hume’s senior, possibly his tutor during his
time at college.7 The first of these letters is dated 4 July 1727, and is, as
we will see, suggestive as to how Hume was occupying himself at that
time. The second is dated just ‘July 30’, but mentions that both Hume’s
‘designs’ and his health are in a poor state, and was probably written in
1730. It is short, and is useful only in so far as it gives some information
about what Hume was reading. The third, dated March 1732, tells us that
Hume believed himself to be recovering well, and that he had developed an
interest in the French sceptic Pierre Bayle. The most important source of
information about the earliest phases of Hume’s intellectual development
is the 1734 letter to the physician in London.8 The manuscript of the
Pursuits of Philosophy and General Learning 37
letter is ten and a half pages long.9 This is sufficient for Hume to give ‘a
kind of history of my life’, focusing on his post-college years, with special
attention to the period since the breakdown of 1729. The letter exists only
in draft form, and there is no evidence that it was actually sent. Nor is
there conclusive evidence as to the identity of the addressee. The letter
tells us only that he was Scottish, that he and Hume were strangers, and
that he was ‘a skilful physician, a man of letters, of wit, of good sense, & of
great humanity’.10 No mention is made of him in ‘My Own Life’, which
covers the period to be treated in the present chapter in two brief and
uninformative paragraphs. Apart from a fragmentary manuscript entitled
‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’, all the notebooks
and other papers that Hume accumulated at this time have been lost. A
handful of later letters see Hume referring back to his youth, and we will
make use of them when we can, but what is said in them is usually sketchy
and lacking in detail. There is a small amount of anecdotal material by
other people, most notably a report by James Boswell of a conversation
with the dying Hume about his early loss of religious faith. That is all we
have to go on.
Even so, it is possible to construct a narrative that makes some sense
of how it might have been that a young man living in relative obscurity
in the Scottish Borders conceived of a book as extraordinarily ambitious
as A Treatise of Human Nature. For the most part, Hume was unim-
pressed by the teaching he received at Edinburgh, but, in addition to
more Latin and an introduction to Greek, he was exposed there to the
culture of experimental natural philosophy, and to modern, Protestant,
natural jurisprudence. Both made a lasting impression. The most impor-
tant event of the post-college period, however, was probably the discovery
of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Hume
seems to have given himself over completely to Shaftesbury’s project of
rejuvenating in modern form the moral philosophy of the Stoics. In the
letter to the London physician he compared his state of mind in the late
1720s to the ‘inflam’d imaginations’ and ‘rapturous admirations’ of the
religious mystic. ‘[H]aving read many books of morality, such as Cicero,
Seneca & Plutarch’, Hume told the London physician, ‘& being smit with
their beautiful representations of virtue & philosophy, I undertook the
improvement of my temper & will, along with my reason and understand-
ing’.11 He had tried to attain a perspective on human existence that would
fortify him – not yet twenty years old – against death, poverty, shame, pain,
‘& all the other calamities of life’. It had not worked; there had been a rebel-
lion inside him; the vision faded. The aftermath, as for the disappointed
mystic, was ‘a coldness & desertion of the spirit’. Something unnatural
had been attempted, and another course would have to be followed in the
future. Philosophy and general learning were no longer imagined to be a
means of transcending human nature. They were, rather, means by which
human nature might, for the first time – or so Hume thought – be properly
understood. Hume may well have taken the slyly subversive writings of
Bernard Mandeville, one of Shaftesbury’s most trenchant critics, for a
guide as he made this fresh intellectual start. Certainly Mandeville is a
tangible presence in ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Hon-
our’. It may have been reading Mandeville that led Hume to Bayle. As he
began work on a new theory of human nature, Hume would have been
aware of what else was going on, intellectually speaking, in Scotland in
the early 1730s. In 1730 Francis Hutcheson had come over from Dublin
to take up the Glasgow moral philosophy chair, and Hume must have
known of, and been excited by, the challenge this appointment posed to
the Calvinist moral and religious culture of post-Reformation Scotland.
Hutcheson had defended Shaftesbury’s philosophy against Mandeville,
but, regardless, Hume admired Hutcheson and took his writings seriously.
To a significant extent, the Treatise grew out of the philosophical tension
between Mandeville on the one hand and Hutcheson on the other.12
Shaftesbury as an Antidote to University

Hume signed the matriculation register of the Greek class at Edinburgh
University on 27 February 1723, and inscribed his name in his brother’s
copy of Justin’s Historiae on 6 March. By this time he was well into
his second year of study at Edinburgh. Before he took Greek in the
1722–3 session, Hume would have had a year of Latin language and
literature to round off what he had already learned. In the letter to the
London physician, he remarks in passing that ‘our college education in
Scotland . . . extend[s] little further than the languages’.13 Perhaps what
Hume meant was that the only useful part of college education, or at least
the only part that had been useful to him, was those first two years spent
improving his Latin and gaining a grounding in Greek. In 1735 he would
write to a friend named James Birch that ‘There is nothing to be learnt
from a professor, which is not to be met with in books, & there is nothing
requir’d in order to reap all possible advantages from them, but an order
& choice in reading them . . . ; I see no reason why we shou’d either go
to an university, more than to any other place, or ever trouble ourselves
about the learning or capacity of the professors’.14 This suggests that he
did not see himself as having got very much out of either the third year at
Edinburgh he would have spent in the logic and metaphysics classroom of
Colin Drummond or the fourth year studying natural philosophy under
Robert Steuart.
Certainly Drummond’s class, even by the standards of the day, seems to
have been old-fashioned and uninspiring. He kept exposition of the forms
of the syllogism at the heart of his lecture course. Descartes and Locke
had proposed the replacement of syllogistic formal logic with models
of reasoning grounded in the way people actually reason when they are
engaged in the business of trying to increase their understanding of the
world. Drummond’s pupils were given no sense of the excitement and
significance of this revolution in philosophy. The one modern text that
he taught from, the Logica: Sive, Ars Ratiocinandi by the Arminian Jean
le Clerc, was probably used as an example of fashionable error.15 Notes
taken by Drummond’s students make it plain that religious concerns
were central to his understanding of his subject.16 The science of logic
as Drummond taught it was primarily an analysis of the rather limited
means by which human beings might improve their understanding of
God and of their duties to Him. The emphasis was constantly upon the
difference between ‘supernatural gifts’, ‘the light of revelation delineated
on the sacred page, and the inward aid of divine grace’, and mere ‘natural
gifts’, ‘the powers and faculties that humans are born with’. Faced with
the general imperfection and blindness of fallen humanity, the professor
of logic’s task was to instil in his students means of countering as much as
possible natural tendencies towards error. The metaphysics Drummond
taught was likewise conservative and orientated towards theology. The
textbook he used was by a Dutch opponent of Cartesianism, Gerhard de
Vries.17 De Vries based his positive metaphysics on Aristotle, and so it
may be presumed that Drummond’s students were inculcated with what
Hume would mock in Book I of the Treatise as ‘the fictions of antient
philosophy, concerning substance, and substantial forms, and accidents, and
occult qualities’.18 Hume’s own understanding of logic, moreover, had
nothing to do with the forms of the syllogism. Drummond gave Hume an
edifice to destroy, not a path to follow.
It is more surprising that, when he looked back at his college educa-

tion, Hume had nothing positive to say about Steuart’s natural philoso-
phy class.19 Steuart would have introduced him to the achievements and
method of Isaac Newton, by way of the textbooks of early Newtonians
such as John Keill and David Gregory. Steuart was innovative enough at
least to back his teaching up with experimental demonstrations, but per-
haps more significant than Steuart’s lectures was a ‘physiological library’
that he established in 1724. A catalogue for the library was published the
following year.20 The library’s core was an almost complete collection of
the works of Robert Boyle: together these constitute over a tenth of the
four hundred or so books that made up the library when it was first estab-
lished. Natural philosophy (mechanical, experimental, and mathematical)
was the library’s major concern, but there were also substantial holdings in
natural history, mathematics, and religion (natural and revealed). Books
both ancient and modern were purchased: Lucretius and Seneca feature
in the natural philosophy section, for instance. And there was room for a
certain amount of metaphysics and epistemology in addition to hard sci-
ence: Descartes’s Meditationes and Principia were bought, and also Locke’s
Essay and Malebranche’s Recherche de la Vérité. Controversial figures such
as Hobbes and Gassendi were not neglected, although Hobbes was repre-
sented by De Corpore alone. None of his political works were purchased,
and nor was anything by Spinoza. Hume’s name is among those recorded
in the published catalogue as having ‘contributed to the augmenting’ of
the library. It may be that Hume continued to pay a subscription, and
so retained borrowing privileges, even after completing his studies under
Steuart, but no record survives of what in particular he, or anyone else,
took out, and so there is no basis for speculation as to what in the library,
if anything, Hume found useful as he read and planned in the years after
he left college. There is no evidence that Hume performed experiments of
his own in natural philosophy. He was no Benjamin Franklin, or Joseph
Priestley. Still, the rhetoric of experimentalism would be a marked fea-
ture of the Treatise, and of later writings too, and it is perfectly possible
that it was from Steuart, or at least from his library, that Hume took the
conviction that the only respectable way of pursuing philosophy was by
appeal to experience.21
During this period Edinburgh was unique among the Scottish uni-
versities in not giving moral philosophy a compulsory place in the arts
curriculum. There was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, William Law,
who gave optional public lectures, which there is no evidence that Hume
attended. It seems that he did not attend the classes of Charles Mackie,
the Professor of History, either.22 He does seem to have studied some
advanced mathematics at some point. A transcription in Hume’s hand-
writing survives of a short textbook by a lecturer named George Campbell
on the theory of fluxions, Newton’s term for what we now call differen-
tial calculus.23 The transcription is dated 1726, which might mean that
Hume took an additional class of advanced mathematics after he finished
the arts course the year before. Why Hume bothered to copy the book out
longhand is anyone’s guess.24 At this time also Hume began as a student
of law.25 In ‘My Own Life’ he says that he was given ‘Voet and Vinnius’
to read – and that, in secret, he read Cicero and Virgil instead.26 Hume
was probably required to read Johannes Voet’s edition of the Pandects
and Arnoldus Vinnius’s edition of the Institutes.27 The Pandects and the
Institutes constituted two of the four elements of the compilation of civil
law ordered by Justinian in the sixth century AD, and as such were fun-
damental to legal practice in jurisdictions, such as Holland and Scotland,
which took their principles from Roman law. The Pandects, or Digest,
comprised a comprehensive account, in fifty books, of the laws of Rome,
while the Institutes was intended as a manual, in four books, for working
lawyers. Vinnius’s edition of the Institutes was explicitly aimed at young
students of law, and was liberally supplemented with explanatory notes.
Hume would surely have been told to begin with Vinnius, and then to
proceed to rather more demanding explication by Voet of the Pandects.
In his 1807 biography of Hume, Thomas Ritchie notes how surprising it
is that in the elderly Hume’s account of his own life, ‘the Justinian code,
the source of all that is valuable in the ancient polity of European nations,
should be contemned, in behalf of any poetry which ever emanated from
Rome’.28
In addition to its chairs in Scots Law and Civil Law, since 1707 Edin-
burgh had had a chair in Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations.
As a matter of fact, the first appointee to the position, Charles Aresk-
ine (or Erskine), seems never actually to have done any teaching.29 But
the establishment of the chair is evidence of the significance accorded
in Scotland to developments in natural jurisprudence on the Continent
following the publication in 1625 of Hugo Grotius’s De Iure Belli ac Pacis.
By the 1720s, natural jurisprudence was becoming a significant presence
on the Scottish intellectual landscape.30 The writings of Pufendorf were
at this time already a central part of the moral philosophy teaching done by
Gershom Carmichael at Glasgow. Hume’s Greek teacher at Edinburgh,
William Scot, had written an annotated compendium of Grotius.31 In an
early nineteenth-century account of the progress of philosophy in mod-
ern times, Dugald Stewart would claim that in Scotland the impression
produced by Grotius and his successors in the science of natural law
was ‘peculiarly remarkable’: ‘They were everywhere adopted as the best
manuals of ethical and of political instruction that could be put into the
hands of students; and gradually contributed to form that memorable
school, from whence so many philosophers and philosophical historians
were afterwards to proceed’.32 If Hume was repelled by the neo-scholastic
Aristotelian logic and metaphysics taught by Drummond, as he very likely
was, he might well have been attracted to the self-conscious opposition
to Aristotelian ethics and politics offered by Grotius, Pufendorf, and the
other modern natural lawyers. Thus it is certainly possible, likely even,
that at the time when he was half-heartedly reading Voet and Vinnius,
Hume was looking into Grotius as well.33 Some reason to believe so is
provided by the fact that in a late letter to his nephew David Hume, who
was training for the law at the time, Hume recommends the study of
Latin and Greek literature ‘together with Voet, Vinnius, and Grotius’.34
In a letter to Hutcheson of September 1739 Hume offered a controversial
interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf, claiming that, in order to give
their theories consistency, they needed to accept natural law as having a
foundation in utility.35 The impact of modern natural law is clearly visi-
ble in the account of morality that Hume gave in Book III of the Treatise.
In the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Hume claimed that
Grotius’s account of the origins of justice was the same as his own.36
With college and an abortive period as a law student behind him, Hume
was given the liberty to indulge his ‘passion for literature’, his appetite
for ‘the pursuits of philosophy and general learning’. He found his choice
inclining ‘almost equally’, so he told the anonymous physician, ‘to books
of reasoning & philosophy, & to poetry & the polite authors’.37 This is an
important piece of information. What it suggests is that it would not be
right to imagine the young Hume to have been fascinated by philosophy
and by philosophy alone. The early letters to Ramsay help to fill out the
picture a little. The July 1727 letter begins with thanks for the loan of
a work by Milton. It goes on to portray Hume as alternating between
Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. Ramsay

had sent him a copy of Longinus. Hume had already read some of it, and
was ‘mightily delighted with him’.38 At this time he was also developing a
serious interest in history – notwithstanding his failure to attend Charles
Mackie’s lectures in Edinburgh. In the 1730 letter to Ramsay, Hume asked
his friend either to bring or send ‘Pelisson’s History’, presumably Paul
Pellisson-Fontanier’s Histoire de l’Académie Françoise, and ‘the last volume
of Rapin’, presumably the final volume of Rapin’s Histoire d’Angleterre,
which deals with the reign of James II and the brief interregnum that
preceded the giving of the crown to William of Orange and his wife
Mary.39 If Hume wanted the last volume of Rapin, he may well have
read the rest, and so would have been familiar already with the kind of
Whiggism that he would take as a target in his own History of England.
Hume, then, was reading widely, in the ancients and the moderns, in
poetry and in prose, in English and in French, and in Latin and Greek
too. But he was not reading aimlessly. There seems to have been a purpose
to his studies. In Virgil as much as in Cicero, he told Ramsay in 1727,
he found a state of being that he had been trying to emulate, a ‘peace
of mind’, ‘a liberty & independancy on fortune, & contempt of riches,
power & glory’: ‘Every thing is placid & quiet in both; nothing perturbd
and disorderd’. For the moment Hume’s way of coming at this peace of
mind was Virgil’s rather than Cicero’s. He had managed to slip by and
avoid misfortune, as opposed to being compelled to face it and overcome
it. His happiness was ‘pastoral and saturnian’. And he knew that such
a state ‘is not to be rely’d on’: ‘My peace of mind is no[t] sufficiently
confirmd by philosophy to withstand the blows of fortune; this greatness
of mind is to be found only in study and contemplation, this can alone
teach us to look down upon humane accidents’.40 So he was, as he put
it, practising his ‘rules’, by which he presumably meant the kind of rules
laid down by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations to teach contempt of
death, how to endure bodily pain, how to moderate grief, and the way to
avoid such other disorderly motions of the mind as lust and extravagant
joy. It would perhaps be unwise to take Hume to be completely serious in
this letter, but the letter to the anonymous physician, as we have already
seen, provides additional evidence that Hume did not take his reading,
particularly his reading of the ancients, lightly. He was reading Seneca
and Plutarch as well as Cicero, and he was inspired as a result to try to
improve his temper and his will as well as his reason and understanding.
He was continually ‘fortifying himself’ with reflections on the inevitable
misfortunes of human life.
Hume was writing as well as reading. He mentions ‘papers’ which he
has not sent Ramsay because they are ‘not polishd nor brought to any
form’. They remained ‘loose’ and ‘uncorrect’. Hume was already plagued
by worries about literary style, which were not, as it turned out, ever
to leave him. ‘All the progress that I made’, Hume told Ramsay, ‘is but
drawing the outlines, in 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; sometimes a remark upon an author I have been reading’.41
This is tantalizing. It sounds as though Hume might already be at work
on some of the subjects of A Treatise of Human Nature. But, as we shall
see, Hume was clear in the letter to the physician that in the early 1730s
he was approaching human nature in what he regarded as a completely
new way. So what, then, was he doing in these papers on the passions,
on phenomena of the mind and on the authors he had been reading? We
do not know. But there is perhaps a clue in another early signature. In
1726, Hume acquired, and signed, a copy of the third, 1723 edition of
Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.42 And it
is at least conceivable that Hume found in Shaftesbury a sense of direction
and purpose, a sense of how a passion for literature could be harnessed and
turned to account. Shaftesbury’s kind of guidance was very different from
that provided by a university. Indeed, Shaftesbury was sharply critical
of university teaching. The philosophy of the professors is, he wrote
in the Characteristicks, ‘dronish, insipid, pedantick, useless, and directly
opposed to the real knowledge and practice of the world and mankind’.43
He contrasted modern ‘super-speculative philosophy’, obsessed with the
fine distinctions of metaphysics, with that more practical sort ‘which
relates chiefly to our acquaintance, friendship, and good correspondence
with ourselves’.44 Peace of mind, independence and contempt for worldly
goods and worldly evils were Shaftesbury’s great concerns. Of course,
they were the concerns of the ancient moral philosophers too, but what
Shaftesbury provided his reader with was a means of combining the
spirit of the ancients with the literary sensibility of the moderns. His
philosophy was meant to be adequate to contemporary understandings of
taste. It was not meant to be a lament for a lost world. In the late 1720s,
fresh from university, disappointed by it, hungry for both philosophy and
poetry, Hume was in exactly the right frame of mind to be taken over by
Shaftesbury and his vision of the culture of the mind and heart.45
The Characteristicks was different things to different people. Some
took it as a serious and laudable defence of true religion and genuine
virtue; to others it was an offensive assault on Christianity and on the
necessary conditions of real moral worth.46 It was a complex and various
work, containing, amongst other things, a reasonably formal philosophical
‘inquiry’ into the nature and foundations of virtue, a wide-ranging dia-
logue, or ‘Philosophical Rhapsody’, on religion and morality, and a copious
amount of ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’. It was most definitely not a treatise
or dissertation; it did not present a unified line of argument to a clearly
articulated conclusion. Shaftesbury’s concern was first and foremost with
conduct, with how life should be lived and with the identification of the
goals that were most worthy of pursuit by adult human beings. Not that
the Characteristicks contained anything resembling a teaching or a set of
precepts by which to regulate one’s actions: its author was confident that
the honest and dedicated inquirer would find within himself a guide, a
means of countering the influence of fashion, dogma and faction. And
therefore what Shaftesbury enjoined first and foremost was the acquisi-
tion of self-knowledge. The very purpose of philosophy, he wrote, was
‘to teach us our-selves, keep us the self-same persons, and so regulate our
governing fancys, passions, and humours, as to make us comprehensible
to our selves, and knowable by other features than those of a bare coun-
tenance’.47 Shaftesbury thought of the philosophy of the ancients, and of
the Stoics in particular, as the best help towards genuine self-knowledge.
Shaftesburian Stoicism embodied a resistance to the conventional and
the artificial. It encouraged an inwardly directed mode of enquiry, in the
form of a search for what is good in itself, irrespective of opinion and
historical contingency. And the good in itself was characterized in terms
of reasoned pursuit of virtue and the philosophical subjection of ‘ideas of
pleasure, the suggestions of fancy, and the strong pleadings of appetite
and desire’.48 Someone under Shaftesbury’s influence could be expected
to be a self-consciously serious reader of Stoicism, such as Hume’s 1727
letter to Ramsay suggests he was during this period. He could be expected
to have a taste for what Shaftesbury calls ‘the sublime of characters’,49 a
perfection that was ‘inward’ rather than ‘outward’, a matter of ‘the har-
mony and numbers of the heart, and beauty of the affections, which form
the manners and conduct of a truly social life’.50 It appears to be just this
kind of perfection that Hume thought he detected in Longinus. ‘I think he

really does answer the character of being the great sublime he describes’,
Hume told Ramsay, ‘he delivers his precepts with such force as if he were
enchanted with the subject; and is himself an author that may be cited for
an example to his own rules by any who shall be so adventurous as to write
upon his subject’.51 The ‘inflamed imaginations’ that Hume described
to the anonymous physician might have been the raptures of one who
believed that through study he was able to elevate his own character to
something like the same degree.
We can perhaps picture Hume especially interested by Shaftesbury’s
‘Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author’. Shaftesbury’s topic there was the
preconditions of authorship, and the preparations that needed to be made
by those intent on serious writing, whether in poetry or in philosophy. In
an author, self-knowledge was especially important, for only once it was
acquired could an author speak as a man to men, with strength of mind, and
without regard for ‘opinion and fancy’. Self-knowledge was, needless to
say, not something one could be taught by someone else. Nor was it easy to
acquire. Shaftesbury preached a difficult discipline. The high-flown lan-
guage Hume used in his letter to Ramsay makes it eminently possible to
imagine the young Hume signing himself up to the cause, and the ‘papers’
he was writing may have been the requisite essays in self-understanding.
‘A good poet, and an honest historian’, Shaftesbury wrote, ‘may afford
learning enough for a gentleman.’52 Part of Shaftesbury’s ideal was the
making of oneself into a ‘virtuoso’ as opposed to what the modern age
called a ‘scholar’. The virtuoso was a man of all-round learning and taste,
able to talk intelligently and engagingly on every topic, and possessed
of cultivated powers of judgement and discernment. Hume would have
found in the Characteristicks an intentional blurring on Shaftesbury’s part
of the distinction between the moral and the aesthetic, between being a
man of virtue and being a man of taste. The ideal was a high refinement
of sensibility in general, and the development of a feeling for the inherent
beauty of perfection of character. To this end, the faculty of taste needed
to be exercised just as much as did reason and conscience, and exten-
sive reading in ‘poetry & the polite authors’ was one way in which such
exercise could be done. In 1729, Hume told the anonymous physician,
‘[a]fter much study and reflection’, he had a sudden burst of confidence
in his own capacities. What he calls ‘a new scene of thought’ opened up to
him.53 He imagined that he had found a means – he does not say what it
was – whereby incontestable truths might finally be established in philos-

ophy and in criticism. He could think of nothing else, and strained every
mental sinew to give the vision definition. The result was a nervous and
physical collapse.54
At the beginning of September 1729, Hume told the physician, ‘all my
ardor seem’d in a moment to be extinguisht, & I cou’d no longer raise my
mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive pleasure’.55
Because he felt alright as soon as he put his books aside, he assumed that
the problem was just laziness, and he tried to overcome it by working
even harder. The sense of intellectual inertia did not grow worse, but
nor did it go away, and the result was that Hume felt ‘very uneasy to
myself’. The books of Stoic philosophy he was reading, perhaps as a
result of an infatuation with Shaftesbury and his ideas, only compounded
the problem. He applied himself seriously to the exercises they enjoined,
but without really having any of the problems that those exercises are
designed to remedy. In his case they ‘serve[d] to little other purpose, than
to waste the spirits, the force of the mind meeting with no resistance, but
wasting itself in the air, like our arm when it misses its aim’. By April
1730, various somatic symptoms were beginning to manifest themselves,
in particular ‘a ptyalism or watryness in the mouth’, which a doctor told
him was a sign of ‘the disease of the learned’, roughly what we would
now call depression. Hume took the doctor’s prescriptions with regard to
diet, exercise, and medication seriously, and by the end of 1730 he was,
physically at least, almost completely recovered. ‘I now began to take some
indulgence to myself; studied moderately, & only when I found my spirits
at their highest pitch, leaving off before I was weary, & trifling away the
rest of my time in the best manner I could’.
Three years later, at the time when he wrote to the anonymous physi-
cian, he was in the same condition, able only to study for brief periods,
unable to ‘follow out any train of thought, by one continued stretch of
view, but by repeated interruptions, & by refreshing my eye from time to
time upon other objects’. It seemed to him that there was a comparison to
be drawn between his condition and that of religious mystics and fanatics.
For when such people ‘give a history of the situation of their souls, they
mention a coldness & desertion of spirit, which frequently returns, &
some of them, at the beginning, have been tormented with it many years’.
Like them, Hume had been subject to ‘rapturous admirations’, such as
had ‘discompose[d] the fabric of the nerves & brain’. He, too, had given in
to ‘warmth and enthusiasm’. In the earliest piece of writing by Hume that

survives, an essay on chivalry that we will examine later in this chapter,
there is a passage where Hume might have been describing exactly what
he had been experimenting with in the late 1720s. Philosophy, he wrote
there, ‘tho it cannot produce a different world in which we may wander,
makes us act in this as if we were different beings from the rest of mankind;
at least makes us frame to ourselves, tho’ we cannot execute them, rules
of conduct different from these which are set to us by nature’.56 The
breakdown in the autumn of 1729 made Hume see just how far wide of
nature he had been trying to push himself.
Hume’s comparison of his case with that of a religious mystic unable
to maintain the intensity of his devotion was the only mention of religion
in a remarkably frank account of his life so far. It would appear that at no
point during the difficult past five years had Hume reached for religious
consolation. The frame of mind that the letter bespeaks is entirely secular.
This raises the question of when it might have been that Hume found
that he had left religion behind. There is no reason to think that he was
not brought up to be a practising and believing member of the Church of
Scotland. He would have known well every chapter of The Confession of
Faith instituted in 1647 as the means of ensuring uniformity of religion in
Scotland, ‘and as a special means for the more effectual suppressing of the
many dangerous errors and heresies of these times’.57 The Confession of
Faith begins with an assertion of the primacy of revelation over the light
of nature, asserts the threefold nature of God, and then proceeds directly
to ‘God’s eternal decree’, the doctrine of predestination and the assertion
that while ‘God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel
of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;
yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered
to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second
causes taken away, but rather established’.58 The original sin of Adam
and the justice of God’s punishment of the whole human race are the
animating themes of the entire document, and they are just as prominent
in the two catechisms, Larger and Shorter, that Hume would doubtless
have had to learn by heart. ‘What is the misery of that estate whereinto
man fell?’, it is asked in the Shorter Catechism: ‘All mankind by their fall
lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made
liable to all miseries in this life, to death it self, and to the pains of hell
for ever’, comes the answer.59 On being asked by James Boswell in 1776
whether he was not religious when young, Hume replied that he was, ‘and
he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the
catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving
out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing,
having no inclination to commit them. This, he said, was strange work; for
instance, to try if, notwithstanding his excelling his schoolfellows, he had
no pride or vanity’.60 The ‘Brief Heads of Self-Examination . . . collected
out of the foregoing Treatise concerning the breaches of our Duty’ that
Hume was referring to is thirteen pages long and lists about five hundred
possible ways of sinning.61
If Hume did come under the spell of Shaftesbury and the Characteri-
sticks, his sense of the proper nature of religion would then have changed
considerably. Shaftesbury was certainly not an atheist, but he had no
affection for the Christianity of his day, primarily because he regarded
it as having forgotten Christ’s original insistence on the importance of
love and benevolence for one’s fellow men, and as preaching a ‘merce-
nary’ kind of virtue, such as has its motive only in desire of reward or
fear of punishment. Furthermore, the reverence that Shaftesbury had for
the teachings of the ancients pushed him some distance away from the
idea, strong especially in Calvinist Protestant countries such as Scotland,
that men are made worthy in the eyes of God solely by acknowledgement
of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. ‘[W]e Christians’, he complained close
to the beginning of the Characteristicks, ‘who have such ample faith in
our-selves, will allow nothing to poor heathens’.62 He went on to argue
that it was a sign of the health of ancient cultures that philosophy had
the right to question the pretensions of the religious, and to effect a
divide between true religion on the one hand and mere superstition on
the other. Shaftesbury was even prepared to criticize Saint Paul himself,
and argue that philosophy properly understood, far from being vain and
deceitful, ‘has the pre-eminence above all other science and knowledge’:
‘By this science it-self is judg’d, spirits are search’d, prophecys prov’d,
miracles distinguish’d: the sole measure and standard being taken from
moral rectitude, and from the discernment of what is sound and just in the
affections’.63 The religion promulgated in the Characteristicks was thus a
religion of virtue, though it had a prominent place also for belief in an
intelligent and benevolent creator of the universe, since, as Shaftesbury
put it, ‘Nothing indeed can be more melancholy, than the thought of
living in a distracted universe, from whence many ills may be suspected,
and where there is nothing good or lovely which presents it-self’.64 Belief
in a providential and rational order provides support and reassurance for
the virtuous person. Establishing that, contrary to appearances, human
nature is an element of the supremely beautiful system of the universe was
the principal concern of the dialogue ‘The Moralists’, a work designed,
so Shaftesbury said, to rescue its reader from the misconceptions taught
from the church pulpit and the university lectern.
It would seem, however, that once Hume began moving away from
the beliefs he had been brought up and educated into, he was unable
to come to a halt when he reached this more philosophical and ‘natural’
religion. It was generally supposed at this time that the natural science
of Boyle and Newton provided overwhelming evidence of the existence
of a creator God. That would very likely have been a constant theme of
Robert Steuart’s lectures in natural philosophy, as it was of the writings
of Robert Boyle that so dominated Steuart’s class library. Hume would
have found the same confidence in the theological significance of modern
science in many of the most popular writings of the early eighteenth
century. In number 543 of The Spectator, for instance, Addison had written
that ‘A Sir Isaac Newton . . . can look through a whole planetary system;
consider it in its weight, number, and measure; and draw from it as
many demonstrations of infinite power and wisdom, as a more confined
understanding is able to deduce from the system of an human body’.65 All
the works of nature, according to William Derham’s frequently reprinted
Physico-Theology, no matter however examined, whether by microscope
or by telescope, ‘bear testimony to their infinite workman; and . . . they
exceed all humane skill so far, as that the most exquisite copies and
imitations of the best artists, are no other than rude bungling pieces to
them’.66 At some point Hume began to lose confidence in this entire
way of thinking. In 1751, when he was at work on a first draft of the
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Hume would write to his friend
Gilbert Elliot that he had just burned an old notebook ‘wrote before I was
twenty’ containing the ‘gradual progress’ of his thoughts on rational proofs
of the existence of God. ‘It began with an anxious search after arguments,
to confirm the common opinion: doubts stole in, dissipated, return’d, were
again dissipated, return’d again: and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless
imagination against inclination, perhaps against reason’.67 Boswell reports
Hume saying that ‘he never had entertained any belief in religion since he
began to read Locke and Clarke’.68 Neither Locke nor Clarke was a very
conventional Christian, but both did produce a priori arguments for the
existence of a creator of the universe with the attributes traditionally taken
to be possessed by God. Hume presumably meant Boswell to understand
that perceiving the weakness of such arguments was what helped him on
the way to unbelief.69
Hume would have been well prepared by his Calvinist upbringing to
be sceptical of the possibility of giving religion a foundation in reason. He
would have been taught from an early age that reason in all human beings
was corrupted as an effect of Adam’s sin. The letter to the physician
suggests that Hume was familiar with the writings of both French mystics
and of ‘our fanatics here’, writings that would have given little or no role
to reason in their descriptions of the extremes of devotion. What made
Hume unusual was that he had none of the emotional need for religion
that, for most of his contemporaries, made it at the deepest level an
irrelevance whether or not the principles of religion could be given rational
demonstration. In the case of Boswell, for example, it is reasonably plain
that the basis of his faith was not reason but the combination of a more
or less permanent sense of guilt with a very lively fear of death. Even
in the self-consciously elevated and rarefied climate of the writings of
Shaftesbury one senses a basic inability seriously to consider the idea that
the universe has no father and governor. The Epicurean and Lucretian
hypothesis that the world might be without origin and without an inherent
principle of order was simply too terrifying to contemplate. One finds
again and again in the moral philosophy of the century the claim that,
however naturally virtuous they might be, human beings need to believe
in a providential order, and also in a life after death, if they are not to
be reduced to despair by the way things go in the world.70 Hume was
different. Losing religious belief may for all we know have been a painful
process, but once it had gone, he appears never to have missed it.
Mandeville and Bayle as an Antidote to Shaftesbury

In early 1731, once he had got through the worst and was able to work again
at least some of the time, Hume, so he told the London physician, was
possessed by a new sense of how he ought to proceed in his philosophical
enquiries. He had looked again at the writers he had immersed himself in
after leaving college, and had discovered what seemed to be a fatal flaw.
It now seemed to him that
the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity, labor’d under the inconve-

nience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypo-
thetical, & depending more upon invention than experience. Every one consulted
his fancy concerning schemes of virtue & of happiness, without regarding human
nature upon which every conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to
make my principal study, & the source from which I wou’d derive every truth in
criticism as well as morality.71
There seems here to be a certain amount of continuity with the project

fixed on in the moment of enthusiasm two years earlier when a ‘new scene
of thought’ had seemed to open up. Hume was sure then that he had found
the means of settling the controversies that endlessly arose among ‘the
philosophers’ and ‘critics’. What had changed, it would seem, was Hume’s
sense of what that means might be. We do not know what he believed it was
in 1729. But now he was sure that the possibility of progress lay in a study
of human nature that took experience, and only experience, as its guide.
Hitherto philosophers – most of them, at least – had been content to rely
on theories of human nature developed in Greek and Roman antiquity.
They had not thought the matter through for themselves. It is worth
noting that Hume was not rejecting the idea, characteristic of all ancient
philosophy, that the study of human nature is the only proper foundation
for argument about how life should be lived. That idea had been challenged
by some Christian thinkers, notably Augustine and those he influenced
among the Protestant Reformers, who thought it better to rely for moral
guidance on the revealed word of God. It had also been challenged more
recently by philosophers who thought that the laws of morality could be
demonstrated a priori, without recourse to experience, in the manner of
mathematics. Hume took no notice of these lines of thought in the letter
to the physician. He took it as obvious that the ancients were right to
begin with human nature. The problem was that their understanding of
human nature was as faulty as their understanding of physical nature. It
was time for moral philosophers to emulate the natural scientists of the
seventeenth century, and begin afresh.
Remarks made in correspondence with Hutcheson in 1739 suggest that
what had come to seem untenable to Hume was the idea, characteristic
both of ancient thought and of modern exponents of ancient ideas like
Shaftesbury, that all human beings have, because of how they are consti-
tuted, one particular end to which they are naturally fitted. The whole idea
of a final cause of human nature, a purpose for which human beings were
created, seemed, Hume told Hutcheson, ‘pretty uncertain & unphilo-
sophical’: ‘For pray, what is the end of man? Is he created for happiness
or for virtue? For this life or the next? For himself or his maker?’72 It is
conceivable that already in the early 1730s, Hume had arrived at the view
that final causes needed to be expunged just as completely from the study
of man as they had been from the study of nature. This was a view with a
provenance in philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza, and it seems safe to
assume that by this time Hume was familiar with the ideas of both of the
great bêtes noires of the seventeenth century, even if there is no positive
evidence that he ever made a close study of either. His only extended
discussion of Spinoza’s ideas, a critique in the Treatise of the supposedly
materialist ontology of mind developed in the Ethics, was based on Bayle’s
article on Spinoza in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique.73 And in the
one place in his works where he comments directly on Hobbes’s philoso-
phy, in The History of England, Hume describes a supposedly ‘licentious’
and ‘positive and dogmatical’ system which won Hobbes fame in his own
time, but which is ‘much neglected’ now.74 It is not necessary, however,
to look to either Spinoza or Hobbes for a proximate source of Hume’s
scepticism about Hutcheson’s conception of philosophy. If Hume was
looking for a guide as to how to develop a rigorously non-teleological
study of human nature, the most obvious place to look, in Britain at this
time, was not to Hobbes and Spinoza, but to Bernard Mandeville.75
Mandeville had announced in the introduction to his principal work,
The Fable of the Bees, that ‘One of greatest reasons why so few people
understand themselves, is, that most writers are always teaching men
what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with what
they really are’.76 Philosophers, according to Mandeville, characteristi-
cally begin with a conception of what they take to be real happiness, and
then lay down instructions as to how such happiness is to be attained,
without taking the trouble to find out whether it has a basis in the desires
that real people actually have. Happiness, philosophers say, lies in virtue,
and if we find in ourselves inclinations towards other things, that fact only
shows that we have yet to understand what it is that, at the deepest level,
we really want for ourselves. Mandeville claimed that ‘most of the ancient
philosophers and grave moralists, especially the Stoicks’, were guilty of
failing to ensure that the virtue they claimed to be true happiness had a
proper grounding in study of actual human nature. They place happiness
‘in the calm serenity of a contented mind free from guilt and ambition; a
mind, that, having subdued every sensual appetite, despises the smiles as
well as the frowns of fortune, and taking no delight but in contemplation,
desires nothing but what every body is able to give to himself: a mind,
that arm’d with fortitude and resolution has learn’d to sustain the great-
est losses without concern, to endure pain without affliction, and to bear
injuries without resentment’.77 This sounds like the happiness that Hume
had been seeking in the 1720s. It was, Mandeville argued, an impossible
ideal that contradicted at every point the natural desires of human beings.
It is easy to imagine Hume, in the aftermath of a breakdown partially
caused by the enthusiastic embrace of the philosophy of the Stoics, agree-
ing with Mandeville that the right place to begin in moral philosophy was
not with the things that people say are best, but rather with the things
that, in fact, ‘they seem to be most pleased with’.78
According to Mandeville the study of human nature ought to be, in
the first instance, the study of the passions. ‘As for my part’, he had
declared in the introduction to the Fable, ‘without any compliment to the
courteous reader, or my self, I believe man (besides skin, flesh, bones,
&c. that are obvious to the eye) to be a compound of various passions,
that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him
by turns, whether he will or no’.79 Mandeville’s entire theory of human
nature was predicated on the inability of reason to govern the passions,
an inability that would seem to have been for Hume, in the early 1730s, a
matter of recent and painful experience. Mandeville took as his principal
target those theories of human nature, and of morality and politics, that
regarded the passions as weaknesses, as unfortunate frailties that need to
be transcended, or at least suppressed, if happiness is to be possible, both
for individuals and for society at large. His principal teaching was that,
on the contrary, the happiness of both individuals and society depends
upon admitting that the passions are, as he put it at one point, ‘the very
powers that govern the whole machine’.80 The Fable of the Bees was an
extended argument to the effect that complaints about the luxury and
corruption of the age were disingenuous, if not flatly hypocritical. The
rising standard of living that Britons enjoyed, he argued, depended upon
precisely the vices of avarice and dishonesty that moralists bemoaned.
Public benefits, as the work’s subtitle had it, flowed from private vices.
What we might like to think of as the triumph of reason over passion – for
instance, and most notably, the way people learn to disguise their most
vicious passions and to cultivate instead the appearance of a concern for
the good of others – was, on Mandeville’s analysis, merely the triumph of
one passion over another. It was the triumph of pride over cruder forms
of selfishness. Mandeville was accused of gross immorality in portraying
human beings in this light. But, he asked in reply, ‘What hurt do I do
to a man if I make him more known to himself than he was before?’ The
reality was that ‘we are all so desperately in love with flattery, that we
can never relish a truth that is mortifying’.81 Again, it is easy to conceive
of this refusal on Mandeville’s part to indulge in wishful thinking about
human nature, this rejection of the merely fanciful in the name of a new
and rigorously impartial estimate of what human beings are really like, as
having chimed very well with Hume’s state of mind in the early 1730s.
In 1723, Mandeville had added to The Fable of the Bees a comprehensive
critique of the ideas at the heart of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks.82 While
Shaftesbury’s notions are a ‘high compliment to human-kind, and capable
by the help of a little enthusiasm of inspiring us with the most noble
sentiments concerning the dignity of our exalted nature’, the fact was,
Mandeville argued, that ‘the solidity of them is inconsistent with our daily
experience’.83 The main question to be asked of Shaftesbury was whether
it is true that in some things – in morality, and in beauty – there is a ‘real
worth and excellency’, ‘a pre-eminence of one above another; which every
body will agree to that well understands them’.84 The self-cultivation
preached by Shaftesbury was a means by which one might turn oneself
into something truly good and truly beautiful. It was a way of ordering
the mind so that what was preeminent in itself was preeminent in one’s
thoughts and feelings. However, what experience showed according to
Mandeville was that there was no general agreement, nor any likelihood
of general agreement, as to what, exactly, the good and the beautiful
might be. In morals as in criticism, consensus was nowhere to be found.
The hunt for the good and the beautiful in themselves was, Mandeville
claimed, ‘not much better than a wild-goose-chace that is but little to be
depended upon’. Shaftesbury’s picture of virtue as the culmination of the
proper development and refinement of human nature was, moreover, ‘a
vast inlet to hypocrisy, which being once made habitual, we must not only
deceive others, but likewise become altogether unknown to our selves’.85
Virtue, on Mandeville’s view, always involved self-denial. Or rather, it
involved the education and redirection by others of one’s selfish passions,

for the strength of those passions entailed that it was false to suppose that
a man may ‘govern himself by his reason with as much ease and readiness
as a good rider manages a well-taught horse by the bridle’.86 Mandeville
therefore completely rejected Shaftesbury’s conception of virtue as the
result of autonomous individual effort. Morality, on his view, was a social
artefact. This, too, might have been an appealing line of thought to Hume
in the wake of the failure of his Shaftesburyan experiment in solitary
self-creation.
Mandeville gave two different accounts of the social origins of moral-
ity. In ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue’, published in 1714
as part of the first edition of The Fable of the Bees, the story was of the
manipulation of the bulk of mankind by crafty ‘politicians’. The begin-
ning of the story was the principle that ‘All untaught animals are only
solicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their
own inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their
being pleased will accrue to others’.87 Nothing could be done to change
this. Selfishness was an ineradicable feature of human nature. How, then,
might we first have been persuaded to regard selfishness as a vice, and
to prefer, or at least to say that we prefer, the good of others to our
own? There must have been some reward offered for this violence com-
mitted upon the self, and, given how many rewards would have been nec-
essary to compensate everyone on the occasion of every virtuous action,
the reward can only have been imaginary. It must have been something
that somehow cost nothing but at the same time was able to function as
an acceptable recompense for self-denial. Those who took on the business
of ‘civilizing’ mankind found such a reward, Mandeville claims, in the
‘bewitching engine’ of flattery. They told human beings that they were
better than animals, nobler and more rational, and persuaded them that
it was in accord with their superior natures that they should resist and
subdue the violent impulses of their natures. Then the human race was
divided into two classes: the low and grovelling and poor and voluptuous
on the one hand, and the lofty and high-minded and intellectual and
refined on the other. The superior class, in its self-conceit, could be sure
to take upon itself a concern for the good of society as a whole, and would
do the organising and governing necessary to the efficient functioning of
the social machine. The lower class would do all the actual work, and
though not much better than animals in fact, they would try to think of
themselves as better, and in order to be praised by their superiors, and

to think well of themselves, would hide their imperfections as best they
could and ‘cry up self-denial and publick-spiritedness as much as any’.88
In this manner, the first human beings were ‘broke’: ‘from whence it is
evident, that, the first rudiments of morality, broach’d by skilful politi-
cians, to render men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly
contrived that the ambitious might reap the more benefit from, and govern
vast numbers of them with the greater ease and security’.89
In the Treatise Hume would explicitly criticise the idea that morality
might have had its origins in the wiles of skilful politicians, and it must be
doubtful whether the argument of the ‘Enquiry’ ever held much appeal for
him. He surely found food for thought, though, in the manner in which
Mandeville refined and complicated his view of the origins of virtue in a
new work that appeared in 1729. This may have been originally intended
as a self-standing book, though it appeared as the second volume of a
new edition of the Fable, entitled simply ‘Part Two’.90 It was a dialogue
between Horatio, ‘who had found great delight in my Lord Shaftsbury’s
polite manner of writing, his fine raillery, and blending virtue with good
manners’, and Cleomenes, ‘an advocate for . . . the Fable of the Bees’.91
The basic supposition that virtue involves an overcoming of untaught
human nature remained in place in ‘Part Two’, but Mandeville’s analysis
of human nature had changed, in such a way that ‘politicians’ were no
longer needed to explain the origins of morality. Early on Cleomenes
introduces what turns out to be a crucial distinction between self-love and
what he calls ‘self-liking’. He observes that ‘as no creature can love what it
dislikes’, it is necessary, in order that we should love ourselves sufficiently
to value our own preservation above all things, ‘that every one should have
a real liking to its own being, superior to what they have to any other’.92
Human beings, however, seem also to be possessed by ‘a diffidence, arising
from consciousness, or at least an apprehension, that we do over-value
ourselves’, and it is this ‘that makes us so fond of the approbation, liking
and assent of others; because they strengthen and confirm us in the good
opinion we have of ourselves’.93 In ‘self-liking’ Mandeville found the
origins first of systems of honour, and then of systems of morality. Both
were means by which self-liking satisfied itself. Neither depended upon
the machinations of politicians. The mutations and refinements of self-
liking take time, Cleomenes admits, and in ‘Part Two’ history replaced
political craftiness as the motor of moral development. ‘[W]e often ascribe
to the excellency of man’s genius, and the depth of his penetration’, says
Cleomenes, ‘what is in reality owing to length of time, and the experience
of many generations, all of them very little differing from one another
in natural parts and sagacity’.94 The bulk of ‘Part Two’ was a lengthy
and complex account of the origins, not just of manners and morality,
but of human society as such. An account was given of the slow, faulty
beginnings of fundamental social institutions such as property, law, and
government. It was thus an engagement with the natural law tradition
just as much as it was an engagement with Shaftesbury’s ideas, and might
have prompted Hume to further reflection on the notions of ‘sociability’
that he would have found in Grotius and Pufendorf, whom – so we have
speculated – he read while a student at Edinburgh. We will see in Chapter
2 just how central some of the key ideas of ‘Part Two’ would be to Hume’s
own theory of sociability in the Treatise.
‘Part Two’ of The Fable of the Bees had its own second part, in the
form of An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, published in 1732. This
would seem to have been an influence on Hume’s earliest surviving piece
of philosophical writing, ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern
Honour’, which almost certainly dates from the early 1730s.95 It was
presumably one of the ‘inventions’ mentioned by Hume in his letter to
the London physician. In it Hume sketched an explanation of the ori-
gins of the ideals of bravery, ‘extreme civility’, and extravagant chastity
supposedly characteristic of the knights of the Middle Ages. These ide-
als, Hume argued, had no precedent in the world of ancient Greece and
Rome. This was also what Mandeville had claimed in the Enquiry. The
notion of ‘a principle of courage, virtue, and fidelity, which some men
are said to act from, and to be as aw’d, as others are by religion’ was,
according to Mandeville, ‘entirely Gothick, and sprung up in some of the
most ignorant ages of Christianity’.96 Hume’s aim seems to have been
to fill in the details of a fundamentally Mandevillean historical schema.
He described how Rome’s ‘Moorish & Gothic’ conquerors, overawed by
the civilisation they had vanquished, attempted to imitate both its man-
ners and its cultural achievements. By the time Rome fell, the Christian
religion had discredited the philosophy of Greece, and so when the con-
quering barbarians began to acquire, as Hume puts it, ‘the relish of some
degree of virtue & politeness beyond what they had ever before been
acquainted with’,97 they had nothing to work with other than the tribute
normally paid to courage in battle by the rude and warlike peoples. What
they did, therefore, was to turn bravery into the principal component
of merit. Hume’s description of how this was done is unmistakeably
Mandevillean. It was a matter of the imitation by the people at large of the
distinctive virtue of those in positions of political authority, an imitation
encouraged by politicians because they were the people ‘who principally
reap advantage by it’.98 The earliest periods of ancient Greek and ancient
Rome had also seen priority given to courage above all other virtues. The
tribes that overwhelmed Roman civilization, though, valued courage in a
particularly extreme and impossible form. They drained courage of any
trace of natural roughness and savagery, by mixing it with the notion of
love, a passion as capricious as it is natural, capable of being worked up
into all manner of fantastic forms. The result was the ideal of the brave yet
courteous and genteel ‘cavalier or knight-errant’, determined to display
his valour in battles with giants, but at the same time humbly submissive
to all damsels in distress. This ideal had in turn an effect on ‘ordinary
life & conversation’. It generated ‘an extravagant gallantry and adoration
of the whole female sex, & romantic notions of extraordinary gallantry &
adoration for one mistress’. It was also responsible for the popularity of
tournaments and their displays of ritualised single combat. It is possible
that in the missing final section of the essay Hume went on to offer an
account of how ideas of honour prevalent in his own time developed out
of the chivalric code of the medieval period. In the essay ‘Of the Rise and
Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ he would use ‘gallantry’ and ‘the point
of honour’, and the duels arising from them, as paradigmatic instances of
distinctively modern manners.99
Mandeville’s main concern in the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour
was with the apparent incompatibility of martial virtue with Christian
ethics, and with the ways in which the medieval churchmen and kings
had cultivated honour as a means of instilling soldiers with ‘artificial
courage’. ‘No set of people have so artfully play’d upon mankind’, he
remarked, ‘as the Church of Rome’.100 Hume’s ‘Essay on Chivalry and
Modern Honour’ lacks this anti-clerical agenda. In line with what one
would expect of one who had taken human nature as his study, Hume was
interested in the psychological mechanism at work in the creation of the
chivalric ideal. ‘Tis observable of the human mind’, he wrote, ‘that when
it is smit with any idea of merit or perfection beyond what its faculties
can attain, & in the pursuit of which, it uses not reason & experience for
its guide, it knows no mean, but as it gives the rein & even adds the spur
to every florid conceit or fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of nature’.

In this way the mind ‘raises up to itself a new set of passions, affections,
desires, and objects, & in short a perfectly new world of its own, inhabited
by different beings, & regulated by different laws, from this of ours’.101
This mechanism, however, was not then taken apart and analysed. Hume
restricted himself to noting the ways in which it supplements and alters the
original dispositions of human nature. The essay is in fact structured by a
contrast between what is natural, in the sense of being first in order of time,
and what is artificial, the result of imagination and invention. Chivalric
honour, as described by Hume, was a very extravagant artifice indeed. It
was an elaborate perversion of courage, the virtue that is always admired
the most ‘in all rude ages, & in the infancy of every state’. In primitive
societies courage is the means whereby men acquire authority, and ensure
that their authority is respected. ‘Simple & untaught nature’, Hume wrote,
‘betakes itself alwise to force to obtain its ends, & even admires more bodily
force, & that mental force of courage, which resembles it, than an ability
of a different kind [i.e., ‘conduct or policy’], which may teach the right use
of both’.102 Hume deployed Mandevillean language as he made this point.
He drew attention to the role played by politicians, ‘the governors of the
nation’, in defining a society’s ideas of merit. But it is noteworthy that
Hume did not go all the way with Mandeville in defining virtue as such
as an artificial construct. His analysis of chivalry as unnatural depended
upon the contrast with the natural virtue of courage. There remained in
place, then, something of the Shaftesburian idea that modern manners
were a corruption of ancient simplicity and purity. The manners of the
ancients were described as having a ‘plain roughness’ that ‘one cannot but
prefer’ to the ‘chimerical & affected politeness’ of the Middle Ages.103
Thus Hume refrained from repeating Mandeville’s claim, in the ‘Enquiry
into the Origin of Moral Virtue’, that what carried so many of the ancients
to extreme lengths of virtue ‘was nothing by their policy in making use of
the most effectual means that human pride could be flatter’d with’.104 We
will see that in the Treatise too Hume stepped back from endorsing every
aspect of Mandeville’s analysis of the origins of virtue.105
It cannot be established with certainty that as he recovered his sense
of intellectual purpose in 1731 and the years that followed, Hume did so
with the help of what he found in Mandeville. But if he did, it would
help to explain a great deal of the Treatise. It would also make sense of
things that Hume wrote, not only in the ‘Historical Essay on Chivalry
and Modern Honour’ but also in several of his surviving early letters.
The language Hume used to describe his condition in the letter to the
anonymous physician – as an instance of ‘the disease of the learned’,
and of ‘weakness of spirits’ – suggests a familiarity with Mandeville’s
Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, published first in
1714 and reissued in a third, corrected edition in 1730.106 A letter to
Michael Ramsay written soon after Hume’s arrival in Rheims also had
a distinctly Mandevillean feel, arguing that the artificiality of French
manners bespoke more ‘real politeness’ than the rough naturalness of the
English.107 In The Fable of the Bees Mandeville, as we have seen, joined
those who sought to remedy a chronic lack of self-knowledge on the part
of humankind at large. In the very first sentence of the Fable, Mandeville
had observed that
as those that study the anatomy of dead carcases may see, that the chief organs and
nicest springs more immediately required to continue the motion of our machine,
are not hard bones, strong muscles and nerves, nor the smooth white skin that
so beautifully covers them, but small trifling films and little pipes that are either
over-look’d, or else seem inconsiderable to vulgar eyes; so they that examine into
the nature of man, abstract from art and education, may observe, that what renders
him a sociable animal, consists not in his desire of company, good-nature, pity,
affability, and other graces of a fair outside; but that his vilest and most hateful
qualities are the most necessary accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and,
according to the world, the happiest and most flourishing societies.108
In a letter to Hutcheson of September 1739, to which we will return

in Chapter 2, Hume would describe his own philosophical method in
a strikingly similar way. These letters make it sound as though Hume
so thoroughly assimilated Mandeville’s writings that Mandevillean turns
of phrase and styles of argument came naturally to him, perhaps even
without his being aware of the fact.
Another letter to Ramsay establishes that by March 1732, Hume had
become interested in the work of Pierre Bayle. ‘I thank you for your trouble
about Baile’, he wrote. ‘I hope it is a book you will yourself find diversion
and improvement in’.109 The way Hume expressed himself here makes it
possible that when he wrote to Ramsay, he had not yet read the book in
question himself. Perhaps Ramsay had bought or borrowed it for him, and
Hume was keenly looking forward to him bringing it down to Chirnside,
while encouraging his friend to read it in the meantime. It may have been
an interest in Mandeville that led Hume to Bayle. One of Mandeville’s

books, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness,
published in a new edition in 1731, was by its author’s open admission
heavily indebted to ‘Monsieur Baile’.110 In fact, it was in parts little more
than translation and paraphrase of passages from Bayle’s Dictionnaire.
Mandeville followed Bayle in building a case for religious toleration on
the inability of any denomination of Christianity to demonstrate that its
doctrines are more coherent and righteous than those that it condemns
as rank superstition. Bayle, according to Mandeville, ‘has taken more
pains, and used more arts, than any other in these latter ages, in showing
what might plausibly be said for many heterodox opinions’. Mandeville
justified the fact that he had ‘made great use’ of Bayle, without quoting
or even mentioning him, by pointing out that the Dictionnaire was ‘not
common, but among men who have great libraries’.111 It was a large and
expensive book. The third edition, published in 1720 in Rotterdam, ran
to four folio volumes. So did the first English translation, brought out by
no fewer than thirteen London booksellers in 1710. If it was a borrowed
copy that Ramsay had procured for Hume, getting hold of it from a man
with a great library might well have caused him some trouble. Finding a
copy among the booksellers of Edinburgh also might not have been easy.
There does, though, seem to have been an effort made in Edinburgh in
the early 1720s to sell copies of Bayle’s other major work, the Oeuvres
Diverses. The book was imported directly to Edinburgh from the Nether-
lands, with the cost covered by subscription.112 So it also possible that it
was the Oeuvres Diverses and not the Dictionnaire that Hume was thanking
Ramsay for his trouble about.113 Hume certainly read both books at some
point early in his career. Perhaps he read both before he went to France.
However, it seems likely that, on Hume as on Mandeville, it was the
Dictionnaire that had the most immediate and dramatic impact. It would
have confirmed Hume’s already well-developed sense of the weaknesses
of the usual arguments for the existence of God. And it would have made
vivid to Hume a more general scepticism about the capacity of philos-
ophy to solve the metaphysical problems it had traditionally posed for
itself.114
According to Mandeville in the Free Thoughts, what causes sin is not,
usually, want of faith, or a lack of proper appreciation of the terrible
consequences of vice. Christians want to be good, and to be seen to be good
in the eyes of God. The problem was that ‘they are not able to overcome
their appetites, and curb their passions, or rather have not resolution
enough to set about and persevere in the attempt of it, whilst they are
unassisted with the divine grace’.115 In The Fable of the Bees Mandeville
explored at length the – as it turns out – beneficial consequences of the
fact that ‘man is so unaccountable a creature as to act most commonly
against his principle’.116 This ‘contradiction in the frame of man’ is a
recurrent theme in all of Bayle’s writings. One of the most notorious parts
of the Dictionnaire was the article on the Old Testament King David,
which described in extensive detail the very many crimes against nature
committed by this biblical hero and prophet, while acknowledging that he
was a man ‘filled with piety, and a great zeal for the glory of God’.117 Piety
and zeal for the glory of the God did not necessarily mean a moral life.
Conversely, Bayle argued, a moral life did not necessarily rest on piety.
Another extremely controversial element of the Dictionnaire was Bayle’s
willingness to accept that notorious atheists like Epicurus, Machiavelli,
Hobbes and Spinoza had all been, despite their principles, good men who
had lived decent lives. Of Spinoza, for example, Bayle wrote that those
acquainted with him, ‘and the peasants of the villages where he lived a
retired life for some time, do all say that he was a sociable, affable, honest,
friendly, and a good moral man’. ‘This is strange’, Bayle continued; ‘but
after all, it is not a more surprising thing than to see some men live an ill
life, though they be fully persuaded of the truth of the Gospel’.118
The assumption that someone who lacked religious belief must live
immorally was one that Hume would be confronted with all his life.
His moral philosophy was, implicitly, an argument intended to show the
assumption to be completely baseless. The young Hume would surely
have been fascinated by what Bayle says in an ‘Explanation Concerning
Atheists’ added to the second edition of the Dictionnaire: that ‘it ought not
be reckoned a scandalous paradox, but rather a very possible thing, that
some men, without religion, should be more strongly excited to a good
moral life by their constitution, in conjunction with the love of praise
and fear of disgrace, than some others by the instinct of conscience’.119
Like Mandeville in the Free Thoughts, he would have found compelling
the notorious account of a prosperous and peaceful society of virtuous
atheists given by Bayle in Pensées Diverses sur la Comète (one of the texts
collected in the Oeuvres Diverses). Such a state would need, it was true,
‘very strict laws, and very well executed’: ‘But do’s [sic] not every state
require the same?’. ‘Human justice’, Bayle argued, not the law of God, is
the basis of ‘human vertue’.120 Both those whom Bayle called ‘theoretical
atheists’, people who lack religious belief but live as virtuously as God
desires them to, and those he called ‘practical atheists’, people who might
have impeccable beliefs but live dissolute and vicious lives, were proof
of the lack of necessary connection between speculative conviction and
action. They were further proof that, as Bayle put it in the Pensées Diverses,
man ‘hardly ever acts by fixt principles’.121
Bayle thus portrayed human beings as determined in their actions by
their passions, not by their convictions. The truth about the reach of
human reason had, he thought, been shown by the Greek sceptic Pyrrho
of Elea. Pyrrho, Bayle explained, ‘found in all things reason to affirm and
to deny; and therefore he suspended his assent after he had well examined
the arguments pro and con, and reduced all his concluions to a non liquet,
let the manner be further enquired into’.122 Further enquiry instructed Bayle
as to the necessity of Pyrrhonist suspension of belief when it came to all
of the fundamental questions of both metaphysics and religion. Reading
Bayle would surely have sharpened Hume’s interest in the difficulties
philosophers had in making sense of philosophical principles such as the
infinite divisibility of extension, or the supposed distinction between the
‘primary’ qualities of things (such as extension and motion) and ‘sec-
ondary’ qualities (like colour, temperature, and smell), or the freedom of
the will. It would also have reminded Hume, if he needed reminding, that
the sceptic does not give up on the ordinary business of life because he is
incapable of finding any reasons to believe in one thing rather than its con-
trary. Pyrrho lived a thoroughly conventional life, according to Bayle. ‘He
kept house with his sister, and had an equal share in the smallest domestic
concerns’.123 Society does not need to be afraid of sceptics, Bayle argued,
‘for the sceptics do not deny, but that men ought to conform to the cus-
toms of their country, and practise moral duties, and resolve upon those
things from a probable reason, without staying for certainty’.124 In Book
I of the Treatise Hume would show himself especially deeply interested
in this last issue: How, exactly, was one to ‘resolve upon things from a
probable reason’? Bayle himself said little about this, because his over-
riding concern was to illustrate the many ways in which true religion is
grounded, not in any kind of reason, but in revelation and faith. But his
depiction of scepticism posed a more general explanatory problem about
the role of reason in belief that at some point in the 1730s Hume took it
upon himself to try to solve.
Hutcheson and the Scottish Scene of Thought

Hume was not reading only Mandeville and Bayle as he tried to put
his breakdown behind him in the early 1730s. Far from it. He told the
anonymous physician in the spring of 1734 that he had been reading
‘most of the celebrated books in Latin, French & English, & acquiring the
Italian’.125 He must have done this reading mostly at the family home in
Chirnside. The household decamped annually to Edinburgh for the winter
social season, but for much of the rest of the year Hume was very likely
alone with his books in his mother’s house, while his brother managed the
family estate and his sister kept house for their mother. However, we do not
need to picture Hume living at Chirnside in the middle of an intellectual
desert. The Borders had at the time something of a literary scene of its own
that Hume seems likely to have known about, and that may have had an
impact on the development of his philosophical and literary interests.126
By now Hume had got to know Henry Home of Kames, the future Lord
Kames, at this point in his long career still working hard to establish
himself as an advocate in Edinburgh.127 The village of Kames is fewer
than ten sparsely populated miles from Chirnside, and the two men must
surely have spent time together when Kames was down from the capital
during court recesses. Kames, fifteen years Hume’s senior, had already
started publishing, and in 1732 brought out Essays upon Several Subjects of
Law. One can imagine Hume disputing with him about the naturalness of
rights of property, and about the overall viability of the project of ridding
Scots law of its ambiguities and contradictions by bringing it into closer
relation with the principles of the law of nature.128 In the third book of the
Treatise, as we will see in Chapter 2, Hume argued for the artificiality of the
distinction between possession and property, and sought to undermine
the basis for differentiating cleanly between ‘natural’ and ‘positive’ law.
Nor was Kames interested exclusively in the philosophy of law. With
entirely characteristic self-confidence, he had initiated in the early 1720s
an exchange of letters with Samuel Clarke, by then one of the Church
of England’s leading theologians and metaphysicians, and author of very
widely read defences of a priori natural religion and of a priori moral
philosophy. Kames questioned the success of Clarke’s reconciliation of
human freedom with divine foreknowledge, and also doubted his claim
that all duties to others could be reduced to the injunction that we should
do as we wish to be done by.129 Again, one can imagine Kames and Hume
discussing these and many other issues raised in Clarke’s works. In the
Treatise Hume took explicit aim at Clarke’s argument for the principle
that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause – a principle that Kames,
too, denied could be proved to be true.130 It is possible, then, that some
of Hume’s early thinking about metaphysics and morals was done in the
company of Kames, the man whom in 1745 Hume would describe as ‘the
best friend, in every respect, I ever possest’.131
Hume might also have been aware of the writings of Andrew Baxter,
a resident of Duns, six miles from Chirnside. In 1733, Baxter published
An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul; wherein the Immateri-
ality of the Soul is evinced from the Principles of Reason and Philosophy.
Kames had corresponded with Baxter about the metaphysical founda-
tions of Newtonian science in the early 1720s, and it is not out of the
question that he introduced Hume to Baxter while Baxter was writing the
Enquiry. Baxter’s principal objective in the Enquiry was to make clear, in
an argument that owed much to Clarke, that materialism – the doctrine,
endorsed by notorious ‘atheists’ such as Lucretius, Hobbes, and Spinoza,
that everything in the universe is material, with no place left for imma-
terial minds, or an immaterial creator – was self-refuting. Materialism,
according to Baxter, was incompatible with the possibility of motion and
change, and, of course, motion and change were very obvious features of
the universe as we experience it. Motion and change must be the result
of immaterial substances – human minds, and God – possessed of powers
of self-motion. The Enquiry also contained a critical engagement with
another response to materialism, George Berkeley’s argument that in fact
the only substances that existed were immaterial ones, and that the very
idea of a material substance involved an internal contradiction. Baxter was
one of the first to misunderstand Berkeley as a proponent of a scepticism
according to which nothing existed outside the mind of the individual
perceiver, such that there was no difference between waking experience
and dreams. Hume did not read Berkeley in this way,132 but Baxter’s book
is one means by which Hume might have become acquainted with Berke-
ley’s ideas.133 It is hard, however, to imagine Hume being much impressed
by Baxter’s answer to Berkeley. It is hard also to imagine Hume being
much impressed by the Enquiry’s case against materialism. Kames wrote
to Baxter propounding a rival metaphysics.134 The Treatise suggests that
Hume’s response, perhaps inspired by his reading of Bayle, would have
been to wonder whether metaphysics was possible at all.
Another writer on philosophical topics living in close proximity to

Chirnside was the deist William Dudgeon.135 Dudgeon was a tenant
farmer in Coldstream, which meant that when his pamphlet The State
of the Moral World Considered elicited outrage soon after its publication
in 1732, it was the Chirnside Presbytery that investigated the matter.
Dudgeon and his book were discussed by the Presbytery every month in
late 1732 and early 1733 at meetings where Hume’s uncle George Home
was always present, and it is inconceivable that Hume was unaware of
the attempt to get Dudgeon to confess to ‘gross errors, subversive of all
religion, and in direct contradiction to the Holy Scriptures’.136 It was
two errors in particular that the Chirnside Presbyters were concerned
about. First, Dudgeon had appeared to ‘deny and destroy, all distinction
and difference between good and evil’, in so far as he denied that there
is any such thing as moral evil, the kind of evil that people deserve to
be punished for, on the grounds that, in Dudgeon’s words, ‘whatever
particular ills may be, yet there is no evil in the whole of the government of
a perfectly good being’.137 What evil there was in the world was, according
to Dudgeon, the result of misjudgements on the part of individuals as to
the nature of and the means to achieve the good, and was as such part
and parcel of the finitude and imperfection ‘which is inseparable from all
created beings whatsoever’.138 Secondly, and as a consequence, Dudgeon
had, so it seemed to the Presbytery, denied that this life is a state of sin
such as must be redeemed by the punishments justly to be inflicted on
men and women in the life to come. Dudgeon had presented this world
as ‘a state of discipline to train us up in virtue’ rather than as a ‘state of
trial’ in which we are bound to be found wanting.139 He had therefore
denied that a future state was necessary in the sense that there had to be
a time when all would be ‘set to rights’. Things were already as right as
they could be. Providence ensured that human beings were improving all
the time in this world. When we die, Dudgeon asserted, we pass on to a
future state in which we continue to improve. No other hypothesis was
consistent with the infinite goodness of a God who wants above all for us
to be happy. There was nothing very original to Dudgeon’s argument. It
articulated a vision of the human condition in relation to God that could
have been taken directly from Leibniz’s Théodicée. Dudgeon’s use of the
concept of a merely ‘moral’, non-physical necessity as a way of showing
moral responsibility to be compatible with the necessitation of action
by motives was far from novel.140 It is unlikely that Hume would have
found The State of the Moral World Considered very interesting, except as
an example of an approach to the problem of evil that demanded to be
shown to be hopeless. Hume always found it impossible to believe that it
could be true there is in fact no real evil in the world. In a fragmentary
manuscript from around the time of the completion of the Treatise he
argued that a ‘comprehensive view’ suggested that ‘evil predominates in
the world’ and human life is a ‘scene of misery’.141 Hume’s scepticism
about Dudgeon’s kind of theodicy would later be clearly expressed in
Essay XI in Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (Part XI
of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding) and in Parts X and XI of
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.142
Even so, Hume surely sympathized with Dudgeon. He must have
recognised that those who were intent on punishing him were potential
threats to his own freedom of thought and expression. The religious,
moral, political, and cultural life of Scotland, Hume would have been
aware, was at this time becoming increasingly polarised as religious tra-
ditionalists, such as the Chirnside Presbyters, made moves to stem an
inflowing tide of new and, as they saw it, ungodly ideas. The certain-
ties of the covenanting Calvinism of the seventeenth century appeared
to be under threat. So also did the ecclesiastical arrangements reached
in Scotland after 1688. A desire on the part of the state for control over
appointments within the Church of Scotland seemed to go hand in hand
with the fostering of opinions that conflicted with Calvinist orthodoxy
concerning original sin, human depravity, and the absolute dependence
of all human beings on divine grace. The attempted prosecution of
Dudgeon’s State of the Moral World Considered was just one manifestation
of a general attempt by traditionalists to fight back against the forces that
were eating away at Scotland’s claim to be a nation singled out by God
for special favour. Since 1710, a principal site for this struggle had been
the University of Glasgow, and a series of attempts on the part of tra-
ditionalists to censure and remove the Professor of Divinity there, John
Simson.143 Central to Simson’s teaching were the ideas that the Chirnside
presbyters had found objectionable in Dudgeon’s pamphlet: that God is
essentially benevolent, that a loving God could not be a God who had con-
demned the vast majority of human beings to endless suffering because of
Adam’s sin, and that the means of salvation were available to all through
the exercise of reason. By 1729, Simson’s opponents had succeeded in
having him suspended, though not deposed. In the same year, however,
a much more potent threat to orthodoxy hove into view. After the death
in November of the previous incumbent, Gershom Carmichael, Francis
Hutcheson was proposed for – and, after a fight, elected to – the chair
of moral philosophy.144 This, one imagines, must have been a cause for
celebration to all of those interested in the modernization of religious and
moral thought in Scotland. Hutcheson, like his teacher Simson, insisted on
God’s benevolence, and made plain his abhorrence for hard-line Calvin-
ist notions of original sin and predestination. Dudgeon might with some
justification have supposed that in bringing out The State of the Moral
World Considered he was doing little more than developing ideas to be
found in Hutcheson’s published works. To Hume too, we may suppose,
Hutcheson’s arrival in Scotland was a significant source of inspiration. It
would have reassured him that it was possible, even in the country of John
Knox and George Buchanan, for a moral philosophy to flourish which,
like the natural philosophy of the previous century, took experience, and
not biblical dogma, as its guide.
Hutcheson’s inaugural lecture at Glasgow, delivered in Latin on 3
November 1730 and published, also in Latin, soon afterwards, took as its
theme the very question that Hume told the anonymous physician that
he had fixed upon as his main concern in early 1731. Hutcheson told
his audience he had decided ‘to attempt a closer consideration of human
nature and to inquire whether there are in our nature the seeds of almost
all the virtues, or, in other words, motives to virtue of every kind’. This,
after all, was the view ‘of the best of the ancient writers, who described
virtue as the best and most perfect life according nature’.145 But it quickly
became clear that Hutcheson – unlike Hume – thought that the ancients
were right to describe virtue in this way, and right also in their concep-
tion of ‘life in accord with nature’. Hutcheson told his audience that he
would concentrate upon ‘those aspects of the human mind which make us
sociable’. He would examine the theories of sociability offered by mod-
ern natural lawyers such as Grotius and Pufendorf, and show that they
have not ‘sufficiently addressed the general question of what those things
are which are properly called natural to man, or the particular question of
what the sociality [socialitas] of our nature consists in, or, finally, with what
part of our nature we are rendered apt and inclined to society, whether it
be society without human government or civil society’.146 The right way
of explaining these things was by way of a consideration of the question
of the ends, or purposes, obvious in the way human beings are made –
precisely the question that in 1739 Hume would tell Hutcheson was ‘pretty
uncertain & unphilosophical’. The state which has the best claim to be
called ‘natural’, Hutcheson argued, is ‘the most perfect condition which
[mankind] can attain by the resources implanted in their nature’: it is in
this sense that ‘social life is natural to man, whether in the state of liberty
or in the civil state’.147 Hume, we can be sure, would have found this
completely unconvincing. It was, he believed, exactly the wrong way to
go about illuminating the relation between human nature and the truths
of morality. The philosophers that Hutcheson attacked in his inaugural
lecture – Grotius and Pufendorf, but also Hobbes – had, on Hume’s view,
been right to give up on the arguments from final causes that had vitiated
the theories of human nature developed by the ancients. So it cannot be
imagined that Hume welcomed every aspect of Hutcheson’s preferred
way of doing moral philosophy. Rather, Hutcheson’s inaugural lecture
would have mattered to Hume because it was so clearly a challenge to
the combination of medieval scholasticism and reformed theology that
had dominated, if not the teaching of Hutcheson’s immediate predeces-
sor in the moral philosophy chair,148 then the teaching in many other
Scottish university classrooms, including those in which Hume had sat in
Edinburgh in the early 1720s.
Hume may well have read Hutcheson’s early works, An Inquiry into the
Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and An Essay on the Nature and
Conduct of the Passions and Affections. with Illustrations on the Moral Sense,
before Hutcheson began teaching at Glasgow.149 Or they might have been
among the ‘celebrated books’ he devoured in the early 1730s. Either way,
he was bound to have been struck by the challenge they posed to the view,
which, as Hutcheson noted, was held both by modern philosophers and
‘our Christian moralists’, that all human desires ‘are reducible to self-love,
or desire of private happiness’.150 Hutcheson’s response to this view was
simple and direct. It was that it was an inadequate explanation of much
of our ordinary experience of human life, and that it lacked any positive
justification. There was no good reason, Hutcheson argued, not to believe
what it comes naturally to us to believe: that human beings sometimes,
perhaps often, act generously, without thought of their own concerns,
motivated solely by an interest in the welfare of others. In the Inquiry
he asked his reader to consider the case of ‘an honest farmer’ who ‘will
tell you, that he studies the preservation and happiness of his children,
and loves them without any design of good to himself’.151 There was no
need, Hutcheson argued, to disbelieve the farmer, or to take it that he

does not properly understand his own feelings. There were philosophical
arguments which purported to show that appearances are deceptive in
such cases, but, Hutcheson claims, none of those arguments were sound.
In this connection he mentioned Mandeville in particular – ‘a late author’
who claimed that, while it is true that all mothers naturally love their
children, this passion, like all others, ‘center[s] in self-love’.
On Mandeville’s account, when a child is first born, ‘the mother’s
love is but weak’. It grows as the child grows and ‘by signs . . . begins to
express his sorrows and joys, makes his wants known, and discovers his
love to novelty and the multiplicity of his desires’.152 The pleasure that
the mother takes in satisfying those desires is the motive for satisfying
them, and that pleasure, according to Mandeville, is always selfish. To
Hutcheson this appeared quite implausible. It is much more natural to
believe, he claimed, that the love of a mother, or a father, has nothing to do
with ‘prospect of advantage’. And if there is selflessness here, why not
believe that there may be selflessness also in our dealings with others, in
what we ordinarily suppose to be friendship, gratitude, public spirit, and
compassion? In fact, why not suppose that we are capable of being selfless
in our dealings in all human beings as such, regardless of their relation
to us, regardless of whether or not there is any chance they might benefit
us in return? Hume was never tempted to go that far. He believed that
there was a limit to the extent to which we could be selflessly generous to
others. But within that limit, he seems always to have believed, concern
for the good of others is real. It is perfectly possible that he arrived at
this view before he read Hutcheson. In the Characteristicks Shaftesbury
insisted on the reality of natural benevolence.153 And Joseph Butler, in
Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, published in 1726, gave an especially
clear demonstration of the fallacy involved in assuming that the fact that
the satisfaction of a desire yields pleasure means that acting on that desire
must be selfishness – an argument that Hume explicitly endorsed in a
footnote to the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding of
1748.154 Hutcheson’s books might have done no more than confirm Hume
in a conviction of the baselessness of the supposition of universal human
egoism. They would certainly have reinforced the belief, which Hume
surely had from the start, that, however powerful Mandeville’s challenge
to received wisdom, there were respects in which Mandeville himself was
overly beholden to the philosophical, and religious, culture of his time.
In the Inquiry and the Essay and Illustrations Hutcheson was concerned
just as much with moral judgement as with moral motivation. In this con-
nection he fought a war on two philosophical fronts, against those who,
like Mandeville, claimed that self-interest wholly determines our sense
of moral right and wrong, and also against those who argued that moral
judgement has nothing to do with sentiments of any kind, and is properly
understood as a species of pure reason. On both fronts Hume was on
Hutcheson’s side. In Book III of the Treatise he endorsed Hutcheson’s
case against moral rationalism. In the footnote to the Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding where he backed Butler’s refutation of
philosophical egoism, there was also a description of how Hutcheson ‘has
taught us, by the most convincing arguments, that morality is nothing in
the abstract nature of things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment or
mental taste of each particular being; in the same manner as the distinc-
tions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of
each sense or organ’.155 In the Treatise Hume made it clear also that, like
Hutcheson, he rejected the Mandevillean claim that moral ideas could
simply be manufactured by ‘politicians’ through the manipulation by
flattery of the selfish passion of pride. It might have been possible for
politicians to construct an idea of the public good, distinct from the idea
of private good, Hutcheson argues, but there was no way they could have
made us honour and love, as we plainly do, those who dedicate themselves
to that idea simply because they dedicate themselves to it. No amount of
political skill could create sentiments ex nihilo. The fact was that we have
feelings of esteem, and also of contempt, that are irreducible to, some-
times even at odds with, self-interest, and Mandeville is unable to explain
where those feelings come from.156 Hume agreed. Again, if Hume was
not persuaded of this by Hutcheson, Hutcheson would have reinforced
his convictions, and so helped to complicate in a further way his response
to Mandeville and The Fable of the Bees. Yet Hutcheson’s own view of the
origin of our ideas of moral good and evil – that we are given them by a
special internal sense, the ‘moral sense’, analogous to the ‘external’ senses
of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell – was not a view that Hume seems
ever to have shared. In the Treatise he claimed that it was inconsistent
with the practice of good natural philosophy to postulate a special faculty
as soon as one came across particular ideas which did not seem easily
reducible to familiar general kinds. The notion of a ‘moral sense’ seems
to Hume to have looked like a premature surrender of the explanatory
ambitions of a modern science of human nature. Here Mandeville and

Hutcheson between them can be thought of as having provided Hume
with a philosophical challenge – how to explain the moral sentiments
without recourse to either self-interest or to a moral sense – that would
turn out to be central to the theory of morals developed in Book III of the
Treatise.
Hutcheson was very likely also important to Hume as he developed his
ideas about ‘criticism’, the other of the two areas of philosophy that, so
he told the anonymous physician, depended crucially upon a new study
of human nature. In the Inquiry Hutcheson prepared the way for his case
against the reduction of morality to self-interest, and for the existence of
a moral sense, with a consideration of the idea of beauty. The pleasure of
the perception of beauty, and the pain of the perception of ‘deformity’,
Hutcheson argued, do not depend upon ideas of utility. On the contrary,
convenience and use are often neglected to achieve a beautiful effect, and
no amount of rewards or threats can alter our sense of what is beautiful and
what is not. More importantly, the simple idea, the feeling, the pleasure, of
beauty is in itself different from any idea of personal advantage. Hutche-
son took this as evidence that the mind contains a distinct ‘sense of beauty’
just as it contains a distinct ‘moral sense’. Ideas of beauty and harmony
are, he claimed, similar in kind to Lockean ideas of ‘secondary qualities’.
They are ‘excited’ by the perception of primary qualities – in particular,
by the perception of a combination of primary qualities that Hutcheson
terms ‘uniformity amidst variety’. Remarks made in the Treatise suggest
that Hume was no more persuaded by the hypothesis of a sense of beauty
than he was by the hypothesis of a moral sense. What Hutcheson showed
Hume was what a systematic treatment along broadly Lockean lines might
look like. Hume, we can suppose, was alert to the ways in which Hutch-
eson incorporated into his theory the ideas of others who had written on
topics in criticism. Hutcheson made especially obvious use of a famous
series of essays on ‘the pleasures of the imagination’ by Addison in
The Spectator.157 Early on in the Inquiry he distinguished between ‘origi-
nal’ and ‘comparative’ beauty – ‘or, if any like the terms better, absolute,
or relative’. Original or absolute beauty is what is found in works of nature,
along with ‘artificial forms, figures, theorems’, while comparative or rel-
ative beauty ‘is that which we perceive in objects, commonly considered
as imitations or resemblances of something else’.158 Addison had made
exactly the same distinction in terms of the difference between ‘primary
pleasures’, ‘which entirely proceed from such objects as are before our
eyes’, and ‘secondary pleasures’, pleasures of the imagination arising from
comparison of a work of art with something which it is taken to imitate
or otherwise represent.159 Addison had connected his thoughts about
the pleasures of the imagination with aspects of Locke’s philosophy, but
a fully worked-out theory was not what essays in the Spectator could
aim at.
There are perhaps a few clues about Hume’s developing ideas about
‘criticism’ to be found in the ‘Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’.
There he compared Gothic architecture with what he described as its
‘Grecian models’. Greek buildings are, Hume says, ‘plain, simple, &
regular, but withal majestic & beautyful’. When the Goths imitated them,
though, ‘they run [sic] into a wild profusion of ornaments, & by their
rude embellishments departed far from nature & a just simplicity’. ‘They
were struck with the beauties of antient buildings, but ignorant how
to preserve a just mean; & giving an unbounded liberty to their fancy
in heaping ornament upon ornament, they made the whole a heap of
confusion, & irregularity’.160 They did the same, Hume continues, when
they created ‘a new scheme of manners or heroism’. This kind of contrast
between the art of the ancient world and that of the Middle Ages was
conventional enough. Indeed, Hume’s language suggests that he, like
Hutcheson, drew rather heavily upon the Spectator in this connection. In
Spectator number 62 Addison had compared those poets who are unable
‘to give that majestick simplicity to nature which we so admire in the
works of the ancients’ to ‘Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture,
not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and
Romans, have endeavoured to supply its place with all the extravagances
of an irregular fancy’.161 The subject of this issue of the Spectator was
the nature of wit, and the distinction to be drawn between true and false
wit. It took its departure from Locke’s differentiation between wit and
judgement, and discusses a number of writers on the subject, including
Dryden and the French critics Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau
and Jean Segrais.162 Hume may have been pursuing his interest in the
philosophical basis – that is, the basis in human nature – of the principles
of criticism by way of reading these and other authors, very likely including
Dubos.163 It would seem, however, that at the time of the writing of the
‘Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’, Hume had yet to
develop distinctive ideas of his own about either criticism or the history
of manners and morals. The contrast between what is natural and what
is the product of the imagination, would, as we will see, be subject to
wholesale revaluation in the Treatise. Hume at this point in his intellectual
development, despite whatever he had absorbed from Mandeville’s books,
had enough in common with Hutcheson to be able to express a very
standard eighteenth-century preference for the natural over the fanciful
and artificial.
Hutcheson must surely have been a very significant figure for Hume
in the 1730s.164 He was proof, for one thing, that it was possible for a
Scottish philosopher – or at least an Irish philosopher who had been a
student at and then taught at a Scottish university – to write a polite prose,
unstained by either religious or political enthusiasm, such as deserved the
attention of men of letters throughout Great Britain, and further abroad
as well. Although undoubtedly influenced by Malebranche, as Hume
would be himself, Hutcheson was first and foremost a Lockean philoso-
pher, intent on banishing innate principles from the philosophy of mind,
alive to crucial Lockean distinctions such as between simple and complex
ideas, between primary and secondary qualities, and between the natural
functioning of the mind and perversions introduced by fantastical asso-
ciations of ideas – and yet resistant to the assumption that Lockeanism
entailed the attempt to derive every perception of pleasure and pain from
education, custom, or the prospect of personal advantage. Hutcheson’s
was a critical Lockeanism. He was in important respects a Shaftesburian
too, but, again, a critical one, who found in Shaftesbury too much of the
philosophy of self-interest, too little willingness to ground virtue in an
instinctive benevolence that did not need to be shown to be in an agent’s
interests to be a reliable motive to action. Hutcheson mattered to Hume
not because Hume agreed with much of either his moral philosophy or his
theory of beauty, but because he could engage with his ideas in the same
critical and productive way as Hutcheson had engaged with Locke and
Shaftesbury. Mandeville can be regarded as having provided Hume with
the tools necessary for that engagement. Hume was no more Mandeville’s
disciple than he was Hutcheson’s. He disagreed with several of Mandev-
ille’s principal ideas. The evidence that we have suggests, rather, that the
tension between Hutcheson and Mandeville was enormously productive
for Hume as he developed his theory of how human nature provided a
source for the truths of morality – and perhaps, though Hume never wrote
up his account, of criticism too.
In the three years since he had begun to recover from his breakdown,
Hume told the London physician in the spring of 1734, he had ‘scribled
many a quire of paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own
inventions’. In so doing he had ‘collected the rude materials for many
volumes’. It is possible that he was sharing these materials with Kames,
Ramsay, and others. If so, they were unable to help him with giving
order and coherence to his efforts. He lacked, so he felt, a clear sense
of intellectual purpose. He failed to focus and keep a single idea steadily
in his eye as he enumerated its minutest parts and arranged them in
proper order. ‘Such a miserable disappointment’, he told the physician
in London, ‘I scarce ever remember to have heard of’.165 Throughout
his life Hume had a tendency to exaggerate the difficulties he met with
as an author. It now seemed to him that a complete change of scene was
necessary. He had found that, just as ‘study & idleness’ were bad for his
condition, so ‘business & diversion’ were good for it, and so, finally, he
had ‘resolved to seek out a more active life’. This was not to say that he had
given up completely on his ‘pretensions in learning’. He meant merely
‘to lay them aside for some time, in order the more effectually to resume
them’. He had decided to spend some time as a merchant, ‘and having
got recommendation to a considerable trader in Bristol’, he was hastening
there, ‘with a resolution to forget myself, & every thing that is past, to
engage myself, as far as is possible, in that course of life, & to toss about the
world, from one pole to the other, till I leave this distemper behind me’.166
The journey from Chirnside to Bristol would have two legs: a sea voyage
from Berwick upon Tweed to London, and then a journey by stagecoach
from London to Bristol. Therefore Hume had the opportunity to consult
someone who had made a special study of the kind of ‘distemper’ from
which he had now been suffering for almost five years.
Two suggestions have been made as to the identity of the ‘skilful physi-
cian’ and ‘man of letters, of wit, of good sense, & of great humanity’ to
whom Hume wrote the letter upon which we have relied so heavily in this
chapter. One possibility is that it was John Arbuthnot. He had attended
Queen Anne on her deathbed, and was a close associate of Jonathan Swift
and Alexander Pope.167 The best guess, though, is that it was George
Cheyne, doctor to Robert Walpole and Samuel Richardson, and author

of a work on the principles of natural religion, of an Essay on Health
and Long Life that was issued in an eighth edition in 1734, and, most
suggestively of all, of The English Malady, a pioneering study of depres-
sion, published in 1733.168 In The English Malady Cheyne endorsed the
‘common observation . . . that fools, weak or stupid persons, heavy and
dull souls, are seldom much troubled with vapours or lowness of spirits’.
Nervous disorders tended to be visited on the intelligent and reflective,
and it was obvious that ‘[t]he works of imagination and memory, of study,
thinking, and reflecting . . . must necessarily require bodily organs’. Intel-
lectual overexertion, excessive application to ‘the arts of ingenuity, inven-
tion, study, learning, and all the contemplative and sedentary professions’
must wear out and spoil these organs, and this must in turn ‘affect and
deaden the whole system, and lay a foundation for the diseases of lowness
and weakness’.169 It would not be surprising if it were to the author of
such a book, published very recently, that Hume wrote about his worries
concerning his state of mind. Cheyne’s writings on religion manifested
a keen interest in mysticism, and this might have been what prompted
Hume’s reflections in the letter on the analogy between his condition and
the ‘coldness & desertion of the spirit’ mentioned ‘in the writings of the
French mysticks, & in those of our fanatics here’. And if Cheyne was the
addressee of the letter, and if the letter was actually sent, then we have
the beginnings of an explanation of why, when it became obvious that
the life of a merchant’s clerk was not for him, Hume, instead of returning
home to Scotland, moved on to France. For, assuming that a connection
with Hume was maintained for long enough, Cheyne might have been
willing to give Hume a letter of introduction to one of his friends in Paris,
Andrew Michael ‘the Chevalier’ Ramsay.170 Somehow, at any rate, Hume
found the courage to leave Britain for the first time, with no firm plans
to return, and a very meagre income to live off. His intention, we may
presume, was to stay there for as long as it took to write the book that he
had been planning since 1731, but that he had so far found it impossible
to begin.171
2
Anatomist of Human Nature
ume spent around a month in Paris in the late summer of 1734.

H All we know about this first visit to what thirty years later he would
call ‘the centre of the polite arts’, the ‘place of the world which I have
always admird the most’,1 is that the Chevalier Ramsay received him and
introduced him to Parisian society. Ramsay, twenty-five years older than
Hume, had lived in France since 1710, and in Paris since 1716. He had
studied under the guidance of, and been received into the Catholic Church
by, Archbishop Fénelon. He had been a secretary to the celebrated mystic
Madam Guyon, and he had spent time at the Stuart court in exile as
tutor to the young Charles Edward. He had written works defending both
Fénelon’s poetry and his political principles, and in 1727 had published
the hugely popular Voyages de Cyrus, an account of the education of
the perfect ruler in the style of Fénelon’s own Télémaque. He was one
of the first French Freemasons. It is very hard indeed to imagine what
he and Hume might have had in common, but Hume tended to make
a virtue of cultivating amicable relations with people whose ideas were
opposed to his own, and he was able to tell James Birch that Ramsay had
treated him ‘with all imaginable kindness’.2 This kindness extended to
letters of introduction to families in the university town of Rheims, which
Hume had fixed on as the place where he would settle down to write
his book on human nature. One of these letters was to a man judged by
Ramsay, so Hume says, to be ‘one of the most learned in France’ – perhaps
the early Newtonian Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly, or the Abbé Noel-
Antoine Pluche, Jansenist and author of the Spectacle de la Nature, a much
reprinted set of ‘discourses on such particulars of natural history as were
thought proper to excite the curiosity, and form the minds of youth’.3
Rheims was a much cheaper place than Paris, and the thirty or so families
that comprised society there were ‘a polite sociable people, & what is of
considerable advantage to a stranger, are easily made acquainted with’.4
78
Anatomist of Human Nature 79
Hume told Michael Ramsay that the Chevalier had advised him ‘to
observe carefully & imitate as much as possible, the manners of the
French’, on the grounds that ‘tho’ the English, perhaps, have more of the
real politeness of the heart, yet the French certainly have a better way of
expressing it’.5 A few weeks of observing French manners were sufficient
to convince Hume that the Chevalier, even after almost twenty-five years
in France, had got things back to front. The truth was that the French had
more ‘real politeness’ than the English did, meaning ‘softness of temper,
& a sincere inclination to oblige and be serviceable’. This, Hume noted,
was very conspicuous in France, among porters and coachmen just as
among the nobility, ‘so that I have not yet seen on quarrel in France, tho’
they are every where to be met with in England’.6 As Hume developed
this self-consciously paradoxical thesis in the letter, the continuing grip
on him of Mandevillean ideas becomes unmistakeable.7 The essence of
politeness, he argued, is not simplicity and honesty. True politeness does
not come from within, and in fact has nothing at all to do with the heart.
It is cultivated rather by rigorous conformity to intrinsically trivial rules
and customs – just like military courage, and superstitious devotion. The
result is that politeness becomes second nature, and a more reliable princi-
ple of conduct, especially towards complete strangers, than even the best
native disposition. No one in France worries about whether or not expres-
sions of politeness are sincere. The civilities of the French, Hume pointed
out, ‘are not design’d to be believ’d’. Sometimes they are as a result so
far from the truth as to be ‘too glaring’ – and it is then, and only then,
that the smooth understatement of the English gentleman shows itself to
be a better way for politeness to express itself.8 This, as Hume may have
relied upon Michael Ramsay knowing, was a direct contradiction of the
elevation of ‘internal politeness’ over ‘superficial civility’ preached in the
Chevalier Ramsay’s Voyages de Cyrus.9 Hume surely meant his friend to
be impressed by his wordliness and independence of mind.
Rheims proved to be not quite cheap enough, and by May 1735 Hume
was installed instead at La Flèche in Anjou. What took him there in partic-
ular is not known. Again, he found the people ‘civil, & sociable’ – ‘& besides
the good company in the town’, he wrote to Birch, ‘there is a college of a
hundred Jesuits, which is esteem’d the most magnificent both for buildings
& gardens of any belonging to that order in France or even in Europe’.10
This was the college at which Descartes had studied between 1606
and 1614. The Jesuits had always officially condemned Cartesianism,11
but by the time when Hume went to live in La Flèche, the college seems
to have been where Jesuits were sent who had become too interested in
modern heterodoxies, especially the version of Descartes’s philosophy
developed by the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche. Malebranche’s biogra-
pher had been sent to La Flèche in 1706, and he had converted a number of
his fellow priests to Malebranche’s distinctive combination of the philoso-
phies of Descartes and Augustine.12 Hume spent a little more than two
years in this intellectual environment, but, again, we know almost noth-
ing of how he passed his time there. Only one letter survives from this
period. All we know for sure is that when he left La Flèche in August
1737, he had with him a complete draft of a two-volume account of the
human understanding and the passions, the first instalment of A Treatise
of Human Nature. Back in England, he remained in London until the
Treatise was published in early 1739. He then went up to Scotland, where
he would stay until 1745. The first task he undertook there was to write a
brief summary of Books I and II of the Treatise, as a means of highlighting
what he took to be his principal innovations in the philosophical study of
human nature. An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entituled, A Treatise
of Human Nature, was published in the spring of 1740. Six months later
appeared Book III of the Treatise, ‘Of Morals’. He was at this time also
already at work on a collection of essays.
Whether Hume had begun from scratch when he got to France or
already had drafts of some of the material for the Treatise, we do not know.
Either way, his ideas and arguments were very likely shaped to some extent
by what he read in the libraries of Rheims and La Flèche. In particular, as
we will see, the Malebrancheanism still in the air at the college in La Flèche
seems to have thoroughly permeated Hume’s philosophical imagination.
Hume had an interest in Bayle before he went to France, but it may be
supposed that his interest in modern scepticism deepened and broadened
while he was in the country of Montaigne and Pascal, leading him on to,
for example, François La Mothe du Vayer, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, and
Pierre-Daniel Huet. It is safe to imagine him enthusiastically exploring
the complex intellectual world of late seventeenth-century French moral
thought – the world out of which had grown Mandeville’s Fable of the
Bees and his Enquiry into the Origin of Honour. Occasional references in
the Treatise tell us that at some point Hume read La Rochefoucauld, and
he probably also read the writings of such as Pierre Nicole and Jacques
de l’Esprit. At some point certainly he read the ‘Logique de Port-Royal’
written by Nicole and Antoine Arnauld. But, for the most part, what he
read, and what he made of what he read, can only be guessed at. No
notebooks of any kind survive from Hume’s time in France. Nor are there
any manuscript drafts of the material published in the first two volumes of
the Treatise. We do not know in what order Hume composed the sections
and parts of his book, nor how his ideas, and his ways of expressing his
ideas, developed during the 1730s. We are forced, therefore, to restrict
ourselves to relating the arguments of Books I and II of the Treatise to
the texts that it is certain, or almost certain, that Hume read while he
was developing his theory of human nature. On the other hand, with
regard to Book III, ‘Of Morals’, we can be slightly more ambitious. The
development of the text can be guessed at with some confidence, in light
of Hume’s correspondence with Hutcheson in late 1739 and early 1740.
An Advertisement prefixed to Volume One of the Treatise informed the
reader that there would follow treatments not only of morality, but also
of politics and criticism. These ‘will compleat this Treatise of Human
Nature’.13 The treatments of politics and criticism never appeared, and
there is no evidence they were even begun. It is not clear when, or why,
Hume abandoned the project announced in the Advertisement, nor when
and why he gave up on plans for a second, corrected edition of what had
already been published.
A Compleat Chain of Reasoning:

The Understanding and the Passions
In the aftermath of the breakdown he suffered in 1729, Hume had resolved
to make ‘human nature’ his ‘principal study’. It was, so he told the anony-
mous physician whom he wrote to in 1734, ‘the source from which I
wou’d derive every truth in criticism as well as morality’.14 As we saw in
Chapter 1, it seems likely that this interest in human nature had a source
in personal experience of how the moral philosophy of the ancients, and of
the Stoics in particular, misunderstood the fundamental needs of human
beings. Hume seems to have taken Shaftesbury’s philosophy to heart,
and to have attempted to live the life of a modern-day Stoic, continually
arming himself with ‘reflections against death, & poverty, & shame, &
pain, & all the other calamities of life’.15 Not having any calamities to face,
however, he had strained the muscles of the mind in the same way that the
arm can be strained when one completely misses what one intends to hit.
The attempt to achieve total control over natural emotions through the
exercise of philosophical reason had failed. Moreover, it had done more
harm than good. Far from enabling Hume to overcome a fit of depression,
it had compounded the problem, and dissipated his self-confidence still
further. What little evidence we have suggests that Hume recovered his
ambitions as a philosopher under the tutelage of Mandeville and Bayle.
They offered a radically different understanding of human nature and of
the tasks of philosophy, sceptical about the capacities of reason, broadly
Epicurean in their sense of human nature and its basic needs and desires.
Both denied that philosophy had a substantial role to play in the conduct
of life. Both portrayed passion as too strong for reason. And both gave
a central place in human nature to apparently dangerous and anti-social
passions such as self-love and pride. Yet neither described the passions as
inherently at odds with our interests. On the contrary, the social life that
is our deepest need, they both argued, develops as a result of the com-
plex ways in which self-love and pride satisfy themselves in interpersonal
relations. Hume moved to France to work further on this conception of
human nature. There is, however, no reason to think that Hume was at
any point merely a follower of Mandeville and Bayle. He was interested in
and attracted by the ways in which Hutcheson, and possibly also Butler,
had criticized the selfish theory of human nature. He may have debated
the nature and foundations of justice with Kames, perhaps with reference
to the modern natural jurisprudence he had very likely been exposed to
in Edinburgh in the 1720s. He may also have discussed with Kames fun-
damental principles of metaphysics, such as the maxim that every event
must have a cause. Hume had many different ideas to sort through, bring
to order, and then express, as he put it in the letter to the London physi-
cian, ‘with such elegance and neatness, as to draw me to the attention of
the world’.16
Neither Mandeville nor Bayle, nor Hutcheson nor Butler, had by this
time published a systematic theory of the mind.17 In the Introduction to
the Treatise, Hume explained that he intended to present an organized
and comprehensive account of all of the principal elements of human
nature. Yet he had no obvious model to follow in the writings of his
immediate predecessors and contemporaries. In the same year that Hume
moved to France, Pope published An Essay on Man. It may have been
that Hume took inspiration from the poet’s ‘general map of man’. Pope
was one of those to whom he would send copies of the recently published
Treatise of Human Nature. But it must be doubtful whether Hume would

have agreed with Pope that ‘in the anatomy of the mind as in that of
the body . . . more good will accrue to mankind by attending to the large,
open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves
and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our
observation’.18 The kind of mental anatomy that Hume was interested
in undertaking was, precisely, dissection of the most obvious features of
human nature into their much less obvious, and sometimes unattractive,
constituent parts. And Hume had none of Pope’s interest in using human
nature as a means of vindicating divine providence. For a guide as to how a
study of how human nature as such should be conducted, Hume may have
had to look back all the way to Hobbes, whose Elements of Law, published
in 1650, included a book on human nature the structure of which is
strikingly similar to the structure of the Treatise.19 It too was an account of
reason and the passions that gave a central role to an associative (or, to use
Hobbes’s term, ‘discursive’) imagination, and to pride. It too described the
passions, not reason, as the causes of human actions. The Elements of Law
was not, however, very widely available in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Between 1652 and 1750 it seems to have been republished only
once, in 1684, so we cannot be certain that Hume read it. It is at least as
likely, anyway, that Hume found inspiration for the systematic study of
human nature in the French Cartesian tradition. Malebranche especially
seems to have had an important role in the development of Hume’s
ideas. Malebranche was another of those who explored the passion of
pride in detail, and who shared Hume’s scepticism as to the ambitions of
philosophers of the Stoic tradition. He was sceptical generally about the
human capacity for rationality, and was frequently praised on that account
by Bayle. Several of the more prominent explanatory principles deployed
by Hume in the Treatise – including vivacity as a property of impressions
of sense, natural beliefs as the product of the associative disposition of the
imagination, the tendency of the mind to project its emotions onto the
outside world, and the principles of sympathy and of comparison – had
been used also by Malebranche in his own ‘science of man’.20
In a letter written in August 1737, on his way back from La Flèche
to Britain, Hume put Malebranche’s De la Recherche de la Vérité at the
head of a list of books his friend Michael Ramsay needed to read in
order to understand the Treatise. The others were Bayle’s Dictionnaire,
or at least its ‘more metaphysical articles’, Descartes’ Meditationes, and
Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge.21 In the Introduction to the

Treatise, though, Hume situated himself in the rather different tradition
of the application by British philosophers of ‘experimental philosophy’
to ‘moral subjects’. ‘Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftsbury, Dr. Mandeville,
Mr Hutchinson, Dr. Butler, &c.’ were identified as having ‘begun to put
the science of man on a new footing’, and this, Hume made it plain, was
the project that he wanted the Treatise to be read as contributing to.22
The Malebranchean version of the science of man, in order to explain the
pervasiveness of human error, had sought to join investigation of the mind
with a series of hypotheses about the physiological basis of thought and
feeling. For Malebranche, as for Descartes, man is essentially a union of
mind and body, and so an essential part of understanding human nature
is understanding the body, especially the brain, the ‘traces’ made upon it
by the stimulation of the sense organs, and the stimulation in turn of the
‘animal spirits’ by those traces. In the Treatise Hume indicated that he did
not regard physiology as having any role to play in his investigations into
human nature. At the start of both Book One and Book Two, Hume made a
point of distinguishing between the anatomical study of the physical causes
of sensations and his own, as we might say now, psychological examination
of the ways in which sensations are transformed into beliefs and passions.23
The anatomy of the mind as Hume understood it did not depend upon the
anatomy of the body.24 Here Hume followed Locke, who at the beginning
of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had declared that he would
‘not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind; or
trouble my self to examine, wherein its essence consists, or by what
motions of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come to have any
sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings’.25
In the Treatise Hume thus presented himself as developing a charac-
teristically British attention to experience, along with a characteristically
British lack of interest in hypotheses about fundamental principles of
ontology. He was a good deal more self-conscious about his method and
its implications than any of the five philosophers he named as his prede-
cessors. All had made a virtue of grounding their theories in experience,
but none had been given to extensive methodological reflection. Hume,
by contrast, is explicit about intending to replicate in the science of the
mind the achievement of the natural philosophers of the previous cen-
tury. The subtitle of the Treatise announces ‘An Attempt to Introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’. The language
of the Introduction is full of allusions to Bacon. Hume would limit him-

self to what could be proved by ‘careful and exact experiments’, he would
‘endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing
our experiments to the utmost and explaining all effects from the simplest
and fewest causes’, and he would reject ‘any hypothesis, that pretends to
discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature’.26 And, although
it is a striking fact that Hume never once mentioned Newton by name in
the Treatise, it would seem that he wanted his book to be understood as
a move towards replicating the explanatory success of Newton’s natural
philosophy.27 Thus the fundamental principles that govern the associa-
tive dispositions of the imagination were, he wrote later in the Treatise,
examples of ‘a kind of attraction, which in the mental world will be
found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself
in as many and as varied forms’.28 According to Hume there were three
such fundamental principles, just as there were three fundamental laws of
motion in Newton’s physics. It may be that these suggestions of an affinity
between his project and that of Newton’s Principia showed the contin-
uing influence on Hume of Robert Steuart’s lectures and class library,
and of the developing Scottish culture of experimental philosophy. Alter-
natively, it may be that Hume had read Voltaire’s Letters concerning the
English Nation, and knew that the opinion of the most advanced people on
both sides of the Channel was that, while Descartes deserved respect for
having, in Voltaire’s words, ‘first brought us to the path of truth’, Newton
had discovered in gravitational attraction ‘the great spring by which all
nature is mov’d’.29 However, Hume advertised the differences as well as
the similarities between his project and that of the natural philosophers. It
would not be possible to set up experiments of the kind that Newton had
used to such effect in his works. Human beings put in the inevitably artifi-
cial situation of a laboratory experiment would be bound not to behave in
a normal, natural way. The science of the mind would have to be derived
from ‘a cautious observation of human life’. Its data would be collected
from ‘men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures’.30
The Understanding
The Treatise made use of sources of information other than observation
of human behaviour. History and literature, for example, were occasion-
ally used as evidence to confirm a theory about one or other principle of
the mind. And introspection was continually deployed, as the reader was
asked to look inside himself, or herself, and to confirm the truth of this or
that claim about our perceptions and how they interact with each other.
Introspection was appealed to in the very first argumentative move that
Hume made in the Treatise. Locke, according to Hume, had ‘perverted’
the meaning of the word idea when he used it as a term for all the con-
tents of the mind.31 There was a distinction to be drawn, Hume believed,
between ideas properly so called – the perceptions, or mental represen-
tations, involved in thinking and reasoning – and perceptions such as
sensations, passions, and emotions, ‘as they make their first appearance in
the soul’. There was no ‘particular name’ for this latter class of perceptions
‘in the English or any other language’, Hume claimed, so it was neces-
sary to coin one, and the best one he could think of was impressions. The
reader, Hume was sure, would understand the distinction he was trying
to draw by differentiating between ideas and impressions – because they
would ‘readily perceive the difference between feeling and thinking’.32
Introspection was better than words as a means of capturing the contrast.
Impressions feel forceful and violent, while ideas are the ‘faint images’
of the sensations, passions, and emotions that occupy us in our thinking,
reasoning, and remembrance. The distinction between ideas and impres-
sions allowed Hume to restate the Lockean thesis concerning innateness
in a more precise way: as the claim that no ideas are innate, and that all
our ideas – all our simple ideas, anyway – are derived from impressions.
It could then be left an open question, whether any impressions might
deserve to be called innate. Hume later on in the Treatise claimed that it
was obvious that some impressions do deserve to be so called: for instance,
‘benevolence and resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children’.33
Having amended Locke’s empiricism in this way, Hume proceeded to
put it to work in ways intended to reveal the absence from the mind of
ideas that philosophers had supposed all human beings to have. There
was no source in experience, Hume argued, for the idea of substance in
the abstract. There could be no idea of something property-less, in which
properties inhere. Nor could there be an idea of the ‘modes’ that traditional
metaphysics had postulated as, by their nature, necessarily inhering in sub-
stances. The idea of gold, for example, is really just a collection of ideas of
properties such as yellow colour, a certain weight, malleability, fusibility,
and dissolubility in aqua regis, each of which is derived from particular
sensory impressions. We have no idea of what, metaphysically speaking,
unites these properties and makes them properties of one thing, because
we have no impressions of anything over and above the properties.34
Gold was Locke’s own example when he made just the same point about
the content of the idea of substance,35 and here again Hume wanted the
reader to recognize that he was following in Locke’s footsteps. It was
Locke who had shown what could be achieved in philosophy by focusing
the attention of the reader on the contents of the mind, and asking the
reader to be honest about what is to be found there and what is not. That
was the way to limit our pretensions to knowledge, and to stop us making
conjectures about what we have no understanding of. According to Locke,
our lack of knowledge of things as they are in themselves, our reliance
on how things manifest themselves to us in experience, was redeemed by
our ability to use experience as the basis for rational conjectures about the
world and about how we should conduct ourselves in it. In the absence
of knowledge there was at least the distinction between the probable and
the improbable, and the possibility of proportioning of the degree of
belief to the quantity and quality of evidence. Hume, though, pushed
the inherent scepticism of Locke’s concentration on experience at the
expense of philosophical theory much further than Locke himself did.
Our ignorance is more extensive, he argued, than a lack of insight into the
‘real essences’ of substances. Attend carefully to your thoughts, Hume
claimed, and you will find that you do not really know what you mean
when you say that one thing causes another to happen. You will find that
you have no conception of an external world different and distinct from
your perceptions of that world. You will find you have no clear idea even
of yourself, different and distinct from the perceptions that fill your mind.
The sceptical argument, therefore, could not be stopped where Locke
wanted it to stop. Its conclusion was not merely that things in them-
selves are unknowable. It was, instead, that the very idea of things in
themselves, of a realm of reality different and distinct from the world of
experience, was inconceivable. According to Hume, this was made clear
not by French sceptics like Bayle and Huet, but rather by Berkeley.36
Hume was more unequivocally positive about Berkeley than he was about
any other philosopher named in the Treatise. He described him as ‘[a] great
philosopher’ who had made ‘one of the greatest and most valuable dis-
coveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters’.37 This
discovery was that the general or abstract ideas with which philosophers
characteristically concern themselves – for instance the idea of substance,
and of cause, and of body, and of mind – do not, and cannot, exist. Gen-
erality is merely a function of language, according to Berkeley. We can
talk about ‘man’ or about the properties of triangles as such, but we need
to remember that all we have any idea of is the particular perceived prop-
erties of particular human beings or triangles. Philosophers tend to forget
this, and to imagine that the ability to talk in universal terms is justified by
insight into the essential features of an ‘objective’ and mind-independent
reality. The truth is that we have not so much as an idea, no conception
whatsoever, of such a reality. This would be a realm of human nature,
or triangularity, ‘as such’, different from and independent of the world
as we experience it. But all our ideas can tell us about is the world as we
experience it, and that is a world of sensuous particularity. The necessary
abstractness of a conception of the world ‘as it is in itself’ is a permanent
barrier in the way of its intelligibility. We can talk about it in the most
general of terms, but we cannot begin to describe what it might be that
we are talking about.38
In the Treatise Hume’s endorsement of Berkeley’s critique of abstract
or general ideas was followed immediately by a treatment of the ideas of
space and time aimed directly at the Newtonian conception of an absolute
space and time that functioned, so to speak, as a container for the uni-
verse to be placed in.39 Space, on Newton’s view, was empty apart from
bodies like planets and their moons. Time was distinct from the sequence
of events that made up the history of the universe. It was the frame of
reference that made it possible to locate events in a sequence of before and
after. Berkeley’s strictures against abstract ideas, however, dictated that it
was impossible to distinguish, as Newton wanted to distinguish, between
space and time as they really are, and space and time as they appear to us in
experience. All the ideas that we have of space derive from our experience
of particular bodies and their relations. The ideas we have of time derive
from the succession of ideas in the mind. Berkeley suggested that this
provided a way of settling the longstanding dispute as to whether space
was infinitely divisible or composed ultimately of indivisible parts. Exten-
sion considered purely abstractly may be infinitely divisible, but sensory
experience cannot be divided any further than minima sensibilia, the very
smallest things we are able to see or feel.40 Hume took up Berkeley’s sug-
gestion and developed a complex explanation of how extensionless minima
sensibilia are amalgamated by the imagination to produce the experience of
extended physical objects.41 The idea of extension, or of space, was, Hume
claimed, nothing other than the idea of visible or tangible points arranged
in a certain order. It followed that we have no idea at all of unfilled space,
that is, of a vacuum. It followed also that a vacuum is impossible.42 This
much stronger conclusion followed because, so Hume claimed, our ideas
of space and time cannot be anything other than veridical. There was no
way, on the Berkeleyan view of experience that Hume had adopted as
his own, of drawing a comprehensible distinction between the world as
we experience it and the way it is ‘in itself’. For, as Hume put it, it is
‘impossible for us to so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing
specifically different from ideas and impressions’: ‘Let us fix our attention
out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace our imagination to the
heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a
step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those
perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass’.43
Berkeley himself did not regard his anti-Newtonian account of space
and time as sceptical in tendency. On the contrary, he conceived of his phi-
losophy as an anti-sceptical strategy, that would close the divide between
appearance and reality characteristic of modern thought – characteristic,
that is, both of Newton’s distinction between absolute space and time and
space and time as they appear, and of Locke’s distinction between our
ideas of substances and their hidden real essences. Anti-abstractionism
in general was for Berkeley primarily a means of preserving the essential
truths of metaphysics and religion. It led to the rejection of the supposed
idea of an independently existing realm of the world as it is in itself, but
left intact thinking human beings directly dependent for their thoughts,
indeed for their entire being, on a continuously active divine mind. Hume,
though, used Berkeley’s anti-abstractionism as the basis for a Pyrrhonist
attack on metaphysics as such. The case against abstraction rested on
close attention to what can and cannot be separated in the realm of ideas.
The existence of the objects of perception, Berkeley insisted, cannot be
separated from their being perceived. I cannot so much as conceive of an
object of perception existing unperceived. He made this point by com-
paring this impossible separation with other separations that are perfectly
possible. ‘I may indeed divide in my thoughts or conceive apart from
each other those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so
divided’, he observed in Part One of The Principles of Human Knowledge.
‘Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive
the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose itself. So far I will not
deny that I can abstract’ – but no further.44 This was far enough to get
Hume thinking about other ideas that could be separated from each other,
and to lead him to the conclusion that all ideas that are different, and
so distinguishable, are ‘separable by the thought and imagination’. And
the converse was true too: ‘that whatever objects are separable are also
distinguishable, and what objects are distinguishable are also different’.45
Armed with this principle, Hume devised arguments that cast doubt
on supposedly indubitable metaphysical truths. The evident distinctness
and so separability of ideas of cause and effect, for example, made it easy,
according to Hume, for us ‘to conceive any object to be non-existent this
moment and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of
a cause or productive principle’.46 And that meant that there was, contrary
to received philosophical wisdom, no obvious contradiction or absurdity
in postulating an event that had no cause. No attempted demonstration
of the impossibility of events without causes, Hume argues, succeeds in
overcoming this problem. Berkeley raised searching questions about the
coherence of calling any object of perception a cause, but he did not cast
doubt on the principle that every event must have a cause of some kind.47
Hume did not stop here. He found himself pushed on towards the
demolition of reasons for believing both in an external world of distinctly
and continuously existing objects of perception, and in a simple and
identical mind or self that, as we say, has impressions and ideas. Berkeley,
again, did not understand his rejection of an external world of non-mental
material substances as a rejection of the external world as such. He did not
mean to detract in the slightest from the reality of the world we experience.
His conclusion was not the radical scepticism about the very existence of
a world outside the individual mind that Descartes had developed at the
beginning of the Meditations. But, Hume found, once you took as seriously
as Berkeley did the particularity and separability of all perceptions, it
fairly quickly became impossible to be able to make any sense at all
of the existence of objects outwith the perceiving mind. This left the
senses looking, contrary to Berkeley’s intentions, deceptive in the way
they appear to give us information about independently existing external
objects. The senses are obviously incapable by themselves of giving us a
conception of a world that continues to exist while we do not perceive it.
Nor can reason by itself prove the existence of an external world. The
idea of such a world, and belief in that idea, must then be a function of the
imagination. But a minute examination of how, exactly, the imagination
generates the idea and the belief left Hume unable to trust his putatively
natural conviction that an external world exists. ‘I cannot conceive’, he
declared after an exhaustive examination of the question, ‘how such trivial
qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can ever lead
to any solid and rational system’.48 Neither the system of the ancients,
founded on the metaphysics of substance and accident that Hume had
already rejected, nor the system of the moderns, founded on a distinction
between ‘primary’ qualities (like shape and impenetrability), possessed
by objects as they are in themselves and ‘secondary’ qualities (like colour
and taste) existing only in the mind of the perceiver, was either solid or
rational.
Things were no better when it came to the pretensions of philosophical
theorizing about the mind itself. Mental substance, contrary to what
Berkeley assumed, was no easier to make sense of than physical substance.
Distinguishable and separable perceptions appeared to be able to exist
independently of a mind that ‘had’ them just as they appeared able to
exist independently of each other. Calling the mind immaterial was no
help in this regard – there were just as many intractable problems with the
Cartesian view of the mind as an immaterial substance as there were with
Spinoza’s ‘hideous hypothesis’ of thought as a modification of matter.49
The whole question of what kind of substance the mind might be was
‘absolutely unintelligible’.50 When one looked within one’s own mind,
furthermore, one searched in vain for anything over and above one’s
individual perceptions. There appeared to be nothing at all to explain how
it was that those perceptions belonged to one person and not to anyone
else. Introspection tells each of us that we are ‘nothing but a bundle
or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’.51
The faculty of imagination was needed here, as with external objects, to
explain the belief that each of us has that we are, as Hume puts it, ‘possest
of an invariable and uninterrupted existence thro’ the whole course of our
lives’.52
Hume’s explorations of Lockean empiricism thus radically destabilized
the more or less commonsensical picture of reality with which Locke
himself operated. Locke’s moderate scepticism concerning the extent
of our knowledge of substances was turned into a questioning of the
coherence of the very idea of substance, and, more unnervingly still,
of the very idea of an external world. Nor was that the full extent of
scepticism about the ability of our cognitive faculties to make sense of the
world apparently presented to us in experience. It was not only claims
to demonstrative certainty that there was reason to doubt. Confidence in
all probable judgements, as well, appeared liable to be sapped and in the
end reduced to zero by reflection on the permanent possibility of error
in any assessment of probability. Reflective assessment of the safety of a
judgement can always be made to seem in need of yet further reflective
assessment, on to the point where, as Hume says, ‘there remains nothing
of the original probability, however great we may suppose it to have been,
and however small the diminution by every new uncertainty’.53 This
looked like a conclusive vindication of the Pyrrhonist view that there is
no good reason to assent to any proposition whatsoever, and that the only
rational thing to do is completely to suspend judgement about everything.
It made it look as though Hume was one of those who, in Bayle’s words,
‘make profession of admitting no certain marks of distinction between
truth and falshood; so that if truth, by chance, appeared to them, they
could never be sure that it was truth’.54 Yet Hume was not, so he said,
one of ‘that fantastic sect’. He denied that it was possible sincerely and
constantly to ‘hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in
any thing possest of any measures of truth and falsehood’.55 Like Pascal,
he was certain that no true Pyrrhonist had ever existed – that nature, as
Pascal had put it, ‘upholds the powerlessness of reason’, and prevents us
from reaching the more extreme stages of sceptical doubt.56
‘Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d
us to judge as well as to breathe and feel’, Hume declared. ‘Whoever has
taken pains to refute this total scepticism, has really disputed without an
antagonist, and endeavour’d by arguments to establish a faculty, which
nature has antecedently implanted in the mind, and render’d unavoid-
able’.57 The point of following sceptical argumentation to its conclusion
was to make it obvious that the judgements that we naturally make about
the world, and about ourselves, are not the work of a faculty of pure rea-
son. If they were, then pure reason itself, once it had shown them to be
lacking in justification, would be able to rid us of them. It cannot. How,
then, to explain our natural dispositions to judgement? How, exactly, did
nature save us from extravagance, and make us judge as involuntarily as
we breathe and feel? This was a question that Hume was confident he had
a new answer to. Hume’s answer built on the account of natural judgement
given by Malebranche in La Recherche de la Vérité, but stripped it of its
physiological underpinnings, and reconstructed it in purely psychological

terms.58 Introspection would be essential to the development of Hume’s
theory of belief and belief-production, since the core of the theory was
feeling, and the way ideas, in themselves faint and cold, come to feel as
vivid and compelling as the sensations that experience constantly presses
upon us. For the truth about the judgements that nature prompts us to
make was that, as Hume put it, ‘belief is more properly an act of the sensitive,
than of the cogitative part of our natures’.59
In the Abstract Hume observed that philosophers had hitherto been
almost exclusively interested in how to achieve demonstrative certainty.
They had had very little to say about ‘probabilities, and those other
measures of evidence on which life and action intirely depend, and which
are our guides even in most of our philosophical speculations’.60 In support
of this claim he cited Leibniz, who in the Théodicée had remarked that
‘The most excellent philosophers of our time, such as the authors of The
Art of Thinking, of The Search for Truth, and of The Essay concerning
Human Understanding, have been very far from indicating to us the true
means fitted to assist the faculty whose business it is to make us weigh the
probabilities of the true and the false: not to mention the art of discovery,
in which success is still more difficult of attainment, and whereof we have
nothing beyond very imperfect samples in mathematics’.61 The Théodicée
was in large part a reply to Bayle, and probable reasoning was of interest
to Leibniz because it promised a means of showing that, contrary to what
Bayle constantly urged, the inability to achieve certainty in matters of
religion does not entail that we are forced to ‘captivate our understanding
to the obedience of faith’.62 For his part, Hume believed that he had
discovered that the middle-ground between, on the one hand, the kind of
rational certainty achievable in mathematics and, on the other, complete
submission of the understanding to articles of faith, was much harder
to characterize than philosophers had assumed hitherto. It was difficult
to see, that is, how we settle on one thing rather than another as being
where the truth lies when it comes to a question of empirical fact. Of
course, we do this all the time.63 Forming expectations on the basis of
our experience of the world, expectations which we are prepared to act on
even though we know that they might be falsified by how things actually
turn out, is something we do every hour of the day. It is also, albeit in
a much more self-conscious and sophisticated way, what ‘experimental’
natural scientists do when they construct their theories on the basis of
experience and nothing but experience. And yet it turned out to be very
hard to explain how we – both ordinary people and natural scientists –
do this in a way that made it look like a rational thing to do. On the
demonstrative, mathematical conception of rationality that philosophers
had been most interested in since the start of the scientific revolution, it
was, Hume saw, actually irrational to believe anything at all on the basis of
experience alone. The fact that we use experience as a basis for belief all
the time, in ordinary life as well as in natural science, told Hume that an
entirely new theory of rationality was needed. Laying out such a theory –
a theory about belief, belief-production, and belief-justification – was the
main constructive project of Book I of the Treatise.
The beliefs that we act on in ordinary life are, according to Hume,
primarily beliefs about causes and effects. When we form an expectation
about what is going to happen in the future, we are thinking about the
future as an effect of how things stand in the present. When we reflect
on the past, we are thinking about the past as the cause of the present.
Our everyday thinking is causal through and through. What, then, is it
to conceive of one thing as the cause of another? There are three things
characteristic of a causal relation, Hume argued: a cause comes before its
effect in order of time; it does not act at distance, but comes into contact
with what it acts upon; and in acting, it does something that makes its effect
take place. This was all so much common sense, but the third element of
the causal relation, a cause’s ability to make something happen, is not at
all easy to understand. The underlying idea seems to be that somehow,
once the cause has acted, it is impossible for the effect not to happen.
The cause necessitates the effect. But, Hume argued, there seems to be
no way of making sense of this kind of necessity. For the separability
of ideas to which Berkeley drew his reader’s attention makes it look as
though it is always possible for us to separate our ideas of cause and effect,
and to conceive of one without the other. We seem, then, to spend our
lives forming causal beliefs that do not satisfy even the most obvious,
commonsensical criteria for the application of the concept of cause.
Malebranche had noted this, and had condemned all everyday causal
beliefs as fundamentally mistaken. His view was that, when it comes to
causal relations, we should stop believing what we naturally believe.64
Hume, however, was fascinated by the question of how to understand our
apparently nonsensical belief in the existence of necessary relations. How,
he wanted to know, do we persuade ourselves that one thing rather than
a host of possible others is bound to happen in the future, or must have

happened in the past? Locke’s answer to this question was the obvious
one: that we do so by considering what is most likely to happen, or to
have happened, given how things have turned out in our own experience.
We use our experience to assign a ranking of probabilities, and form our
beliefs on that basis. Locke called this ‘the lowest degree of that, which can
be truly called reason’. According to Locke, it is of the essence of reason
that it ‘perceives the necessary, and indubitable connexion of all the ideas
or proofs one to another, in each step of any demonstration that produces
knowledge’.65 According to Hume, if this is the essence of reason, then
ordinary causal thinking is not rational even in the lowest degree. For
there is no way of using this model of reason to move beyond experience
to the formation of belief about what lies beyond experience. Experience
is only a good guide to probability of any future or past event if it can
be assumed that there is a fundamental uniformity and unchangingness
to how things go in the world. That assumption provides the general
premise that reason needs to get from descriptions of how the world has
been experienced to be to conclusions about how it will be, or how it was
at times beyond one’s own experience. But there is no non-circular way of
using one’s own experience to prove that, in general, one’s own experience
is a good guide to how things will go and have gone. So, Hume asked, if
causal beliefs are not the product of reason, what are they? And how do
we come by them?66
The act of mind that we call believing something, being persuaded
that something is true rather than merely conceiving of it as possible,
had not, so Hume claimed, been explained by any previous philosopher.
In this regard, at least, modern philosophers like Locke and Descartes
constituted no improvement upon the scholastic philosophy Hume had
been taught at Edinburgh. Locke and Descartes held that it was enough
to characterize belief simply as what happened when reason revealed two
ideas to be related in the right kind of way. The paradigm case was a
mathematical proof that two ostensibly different things – ‘2 + 3’ and ‘5’,
say, or ‘the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle’ and ‘the
sum of the squares of the other two sides’ – are in fact identical. There
were two problems here, Hume thought. The first was that a belief that
something or other existed – a chair, or God – cannot be construed as
the perception of a relation between ideas, because there appears to be no
idea of existence as such to be joined with the idea of a chair or of God.
An idea of existence as such was plainly ruled out on Berkeleyan approach

to abstraction. But, secondly, even where there are two ideas related in
a judgement, belief is not always contingent upon perceiving a relation
between them. Causal beliefs, notably, arise in the mind without percep-
tion of the necessary connection that we ordinarily take to be an essential
component of the causal relation. I believe that one thing that I observe
now will cause something else to happen, but, considered in itself, there
is nothing to my idea of the effect in its relations with other ideas that
differentiates it from a mere conception. It is separable from my idea of
the cause, and is in this respect no different from my ideas of a poten-
tially infinite number of other possible effects that the cause might have.
And if the idea of the effect is no different from any other idea in its
relations with the idea of the cause, it must be in virtue of a change in
one of its non-relational properties that a mere conception turns into a
belief. Hume’s view was that the change in question must be a change
in how the idea feels to the mind.67 He had already established that the
perceptions of the mind differ according to the force and vivacity with
which they strike us. Sensory impressions press themselves upon us more
insistently, in a more lively manner, than do the ideas we consider in
rational reflection. The distinction between the ideas of idle fancy and
ideas that we believe in could be understood in exactly the same terms.
Belief would then differ from conception only in being more forceful and
vivacious. In the Treatise Hume struggled to characterize with precision
exactly what the feeling of belief is like. It was possible, surely, that just
as a passion can be a powerful force without necessarily being intensely
felt, so also can a belief.68 However, introspection strongly suggested that,
despite the difficulties inherent in an accurate characterization of what we
would now call the phenomenology of belief, this was the right approach
to understanding how belief differs from other acts of mind. ‘Nothing is
more evident’, Hume claimed, ‘than that those ideas, to which we assent,
are more strong, firm and vivid, than the loose reveries of a castle-builder’.
The person who reads a story as a history receives the same ideas as does
the person who reads it as a romance. The only difference is the former
has a lively involvement in the story, while the latter’s feelings are, in
comparison, faint and languid.69
The next question to be answered was what makes an idea acquire the
forcefulness and vivacity that turns it into a belief. In the Treatise Hume
explored this question at length and from a number of different angles.
He differentiated between beliefs about what seem to be matters of pure

chance and beliefs that express an assessment of probability, and between
assessments of probability that are ‘philosophical’ and those that are
‘unphilosophical’. He also examined beliefs based on testimony, and in
particular those that are the product of education, which is responsible, he
estimated, for ‘more than one half of those opinions, that prevail among
mankind’.70 In every case, Hume claimed, belief is to be explained in the
same terms. The increased vivacity and forcefulness that distinguishes
belief from conception has to have some source, and that source must
be the vivacity and forcefulness of an impression with which the idea
is related. For instance – to use a famous example mentioned only in
passing in the Treatise, and deployed at length first in the Abstract and
then in the Philosopical Essays concerning Human Understanding71 – my
belief that a stationary billiard ball is about to start moving in a particular
direction at a particular rate is related by my observing another billiard
ball moving towards it at particular angle and speed. Something of the
liveliness of my perception of the moving ball gets attached to the idea of
the stationary ball moving off in a certain way. There is no other possi-
ble source for the increase in liveliness of that idea. Yet there has to be
something further to explain why that idea, and not a dozen other ideas I
might have about what will happen when the two balls collide, increases in
liveliness.
In the absence of any idea of necessary connection between the impres-
sion and the idea, the only possible explanation lies, according to Hume, in
repeated experience of billiard balls interacting in a certain way. Repeated
experience generates expectations as to what will happen on billiard tables.
Repetition, in other words, creates an associative habit of mind that moves
thought from an impression to an idea. And, Hume wrote, ‘as we call every
thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new
reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the
belief, which follows any present impression, is deriv’d solely from that
origin’.72 This had a dramatic implication: that ‘all probable reasoning is
nothing but a species of sensation’, which is to say that ‘’[t]is not solely in
poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in
philosophy’.73 By ‘philosophy’ here Hume meant all reasoning that seeks
to establish conclusions on the basis of experience. And the point was that
this ‘reasoning’ was not, after all, anything like reasoning as reasoning
has usually been construed. There was no difference in kind between the
beliefs of the least educated men and women and the most sophisticated
inferences of a Locke or a Newton.74 Nor, Hume was at pains to empha-
size, was there a difference in kind between the reasoning of human beings
and the reasoning of animals. This was the note on which he chose to end
his long account ‘Of Knowledge and Probability’ in the Treatise.75 It was,
or should be, ‘a kind of touchstone, by which we may try every system
in this species of philosophy’, that any mental operation plainly common
to human beings and animals, for instance the use of experience to form
expectations about the future, should be explained in terms of capacities
of mind plausibly regarded as common to human beings and animals.76
On Hume’s picture of belief-formation, then, ‘probable’ beliefs are gen-
erated automatically in the mind. They are not the result of the perception
of relations obtaining between ideas. On the contrary, the causal relation
that we ordinarily take to obtain between objects of experience is a relation
that gains definition only once the custom of forming expectations is well
entrenched. We cannot but become aware of a certain pressure the mind
felt when one billiard ball is observed moving towards another. We feel it
is inevitable that the usual thing will happen when the first ball hits the
second, we cannot but believe that the second ball will move in a partic-
ular way, and this feeling of being compelled to believe that something
is about to happen, or must have happened in the past, is, according to
Hume, the origin of the thought that there is a necessary connection of
some kind between the movement of the first ball and the movement of
the second. For there is no other possible source of that thought. All our
impressions and ideas taken by themselves are separable from each other.
Causality is not out there in our experience of the world, ready to be turned
from an impression into an idea. Yet we clearly do have an idea of causal
relations between events as distinct from mere constant conjunctions of
events; that idea must have some impression as its source; and the only
possible source is the observing and predicting mind itself. The idea of
necessary connection, therefore, is an idea of something that happens in
our own minds, not an idea of something out there in the world. This,
Hume thought it proper to remind the reader, was an answer to ‘one of
the most sublime questions in philosophy, viz. that concerning the power
and efficacy of causes’: it was an answer to that question which entailed,
extraordinarily, that the power and efficacy of causes ‘exists in the mind,
not in objects’, and that it is impossible ‘for us ever to form the most dis-
tant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies’. ‘Either we have no idea of
necessity’, Hume insisted, ‘or necessity is nothing but that determination

of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes,
according to their experienc’d union’.77 Philosophers before Hume, espe-
cially in the Cartesian tradition, but also Locke, had argued that we do not
experience objects in the world as necessarily connected with each other.
They had found some other source for the idea of causal power and nec-
essary connection: in our idea of divine omnipotence, as Malebranche had
it, or, as others, including Locke, had it, in our introspective experience
of control over our own minds.78 Hume argued that the separability of
ideas and impressions applied just as obviously in both of these cases as it
did in our ordinary experience of objects. And the Berkleyan conclusion
of his account of space and time applied here too. There was no possibility
even of conceiving of a necessary connection between objects as they are
in themselves, different and distinct from the determination of thought
that we first ‘spread’ onto the world and then misinterpret as one of the
world’s objective properties.79
The mind’s ‘propensity to spread itself on external objects’ is, accord-
ing to Hume, a function of the imagination. Everywhere that philosophers
had supposed a faculty of rational insight, Hume found the imagination,
and beliefs produced by custom and habit. This amounted to a complete
subversion of the contrast standardly drawn between reasoning on the
one hand and the association of ideas on the other. It no longer made
sense to take the association of ideas to be, in Locke’s words, a ‘disease’,
a ‘sort of madness’, by definition a perversion of rationality.80 Yet Hume
did not take this line of thought so far as to dissolve entirely the dis-
tinction between true and false causal beliefs.81 The difference between
genuinely causal relations and mere constant conjunctions and coinci-
dences remained important. It was a prominent aspect of ordinary life,
and also, of course, of all scientific practice. Hume sought to do it justice
by formulating a list of general rules by means of which a causal relation
between objects is more precisely characterized, and differentiated from
other kinds of relation. Taken together, these rules constitute the ‘logic’
of all experimental philosophy.82 They are ‘the natural principles of our
understanding’. They are implicit in the way we naturally form expec-
tations and frame explanations. They are ‘very easy in their invention’.
Even so, they are ‘extremely difficult in their application’.83 ‘Unphilo-
sophical’ principles, including education and blind trust in what other
people tell us, along with an addiction to the ‘general rules’ of prejudice
and supposed common sense, constantly get in the way of the rigorous
and consistent application of this logic to experience. However, the fact
that there was a distinction to be drawn between unphilosophical and
philosophical reasoning, a natural distinction derived from the untutored
workings of the mind, showed that there was a point to the kind of inves-
tigation that Hume was undertaking in the Treatise. To reveal that what
had hitherto been called a special faculty of reason was in fact the work
of the imagination was not to pull the ground from under the science of
human nature that Hume had proposed to himself in the aftermath of the
mental breakdown of 1729–31. On the contrary, by examining the natural
beliefs that survived even the most extreme scepticism, Hume had found
his way to a justification of the experimental method that he and his age
took to be the only proper way of searching after truth. The way was clear
to move on from the examination of the understanding to an examination
of the passions, such as would lay the foundation for further examinations
of morals, criticism, and politics.
Or was it? Was it, in fact, as easy as that to vindicate the project of an
experimental science of man? Could that project really be protected from
the Pyrrhonian scepticism that it was possible to develop on the basis of a
combination of Lockean empiricism and Berkeleyan anti-abstractionism?
In the final section of Book I of the Treatise Hume described a crisis
of confidence generated by precisely this question. The description is
extremely vivid, so much so that it is tempting to suppose that what is
portrayed is a crisis that Hume himself underwent, a kind of repeat of the
breakdown of 1729–31 sufficient to make the enterprise of a new theory
of human nature look pointless because completely self-defeating. Just as
he was about to ‘launch out into those immense depths of philosophy’
that had to be navigated in the examination of the passions, and of morals,
criticism, and politics, it suddenly struck him how frail was the ship in
which he would have to make the voyage. That ship was a faculty of mind
which had turned out to be, in essence, no more than a means by which, on
the basis of experience and habit, certain ideas strike the mind in a more
intense and lively manner than do others. The reason why those ideas
strike the mind in that way appeared ‘trivial’, a function not of reason but
of the imagination, and the imagination, everyone knew, is ‘inconstant and
fallacious’. The imagination cannot be followed implicitly – and there is
no other way to follow it – without leading one into error. Causal reasoning
is involved in the generation of the idea of an external world, and the idea
of an external world collapses under the pressure of rational reflection.

‘When we trace up the human understanding to its first principles’, Hume
lamented, ‘we find it to lead us into such sentiments, as seem to turn into
ridicule all our past pains and industry, and to discourage us from future
enquiries’.84 The causal connection that is the preeminent concern of
all philosophers had turned out to be merely a ‘determination’ of the
observing mind. Thus ‘when we say we desire to know the ultimate and
operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object,
we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning’.85
While in the grip of this crisis of confidence, it seemed to Hume that
we, all of us, are faced with what he called ‘a very dangerous dilemma’.
Either we relax and accept all the beliefs that the imagination forces on
us, or we resolve to believe only what rationality permits us to believe. To
take the former route is bound to result in accepting so many absurdities
and obscurities that we will end up ashamed of our credulity. But to take
the latter route is bound to be to end up believing nothing at all – since it
has already been shown that ‘the understanding, when it acts alone, and
according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves
not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy
or common life’.86 Hume found himself ‘confounded’ by the question of
how to proceed. He began to see himself as being ‘in the most deplorable
condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly
depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty’.87
It need not be that Hume really did succumb to despair at some point
in the composition of the Treatise. It may be rather that this pathos-laden
description of philosophical catastrophe was nothing more than an artful
way of clarifying the proper relation, as Hume understood it, between the
two dominant themes of Book I: radical scepticism on the one hand, and a
commitment to experimental science on the other. For the crisis described
at the end of Book I resolved itself by way of a realignment of reason and
natural dispositions to believe, such that they are shown to be in harmony,
not conflict, with each other. And what enabled this reconciliation was
not a renunciation of scepticism, but rather the deeply sceptical principle
that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe one thing rather than
its contrary, we might as well – for there is no reason not to – follow
our inclinations. ‘[I]f we are philosophers’, Hume wrote ‘it ought only
to be upon sceptical principles, and from an inclination, which we feel
to the employing ourselves after that manner’.88 Philosophy as Hume
understood and practised it had its source in the passion of curiosity.

Curiosity gave him a reason to believe that philosophy was worth pursuing
even in light of philosophy’s evident inability to validate itself. There were
things that he was ‘uneasy’ at not understanding – why he approved of this
and disapproved of that, believed that but not this, called one thing reason
and another folly – and he felt himself pushed forward in his enquiries
by a desire to rid himself of that uneasiness. There was also a concern
for the ignorance of ‘the entire learned world’ about these matters, along
with an ambition to distinguish himself by ‘contributing to the instruction
of mankind’. These were sentiments that he felt naturally springing up
within himself – ‘and shou’d I endeavour to banish them, by attaching
myself to any other business or diversion, I feel I shou’d be a loser in point
of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy’.89 These sentiments
gave Hume a reason to doubt his doubts, and to carry on despite them.
There was, therefore, in the end no need to accept Bayle’s insistence that
the only escape from doubt lay in the obeisance of faith. And this was a
good thing, since, as Hume did not fail to point out here at the end of
Book I of the Treatise, philosophy is both a safer and more agreeable guide
in life than ‘superstition’ – regardless of the kind or denomination of the
superstition in question. Superstition is all too powerful, ‘often able to
disturb us in the conduct of our lives and actions’. Philosophy, on the other
hand, even if false and extravagant, has little capacity to interrupt for long
the course of our natural propensities. ‘Generally speaking, the errors in
religion are dangerous’, Hume notes, whereas ‘those in philosophy only
ridiculous’.90 Leaving unanswered the question of how false religion is to
be distinguished from true, Hume could now allow his curiosity to push
him on into the realm of the passions.
The Passions
The conclusion of Book I of the Treatise sufficed to explain, if any expla-
nation were needed, why an account of the passions was essential to a com-
prehensive theory of human nature. The passion of curiosity, on Hume’s
account, gave a point to the pursuit of truth. To a being without that
passion, philosophy could have no value, because of the manner in which
the understanding, ‘when it acts alone’, subverts itself and makes belief
impossible for the rational person to maintain. Quite generally, Hume
believed, something’s mattering to us, something’s being of importance
in life, something’s being a goal to be pursued, depended upon its being

the object of a passion. Reason, when it acted alone, could make nothing
matter. Not only did some of the most basic concerns of human beings –
for companionship and status and wealth – issue from our passions but so
did morality, politics, art, and also, according to Hume, religion. Under-
standing the passions was therefore absolutely necessary to the science
of man. In the terms of Hume’s basic analysis of our perceptions, the
passions are impressions, but ‘secondary’ rather than ‘primary’ impres-
sions, reflective responses to the sensations that arise immediately in the
mind as a result of the constitution of the body or of the interaction of
the body with external objects.91 Here he followed Hutcheson, who had
said that ‘we denote by the affection or passion, some other perceptions
of pleasure and pain, not directly raised by the presence or operation of
the event or object, but by our reflection upon, or apprehension of their
present or certainly future existence’.92 Still following Hutcheson, Hume
noted a distinction between those reflective responses to sensation that are
characteristically ‘calm’ and those that are characteristically ‘violent’. By
contrast, the feelings excited by morality, and by beauty both man-made
and natural, are generally calm. They would be the subject of later instal-
ments of the Treatise. For now Hume was concerned with the passions
that impinge most forcefully on human life: that is, with passions like love
and hatred, grief and joy, pride and humility. His intention was to explain
‘their nature, origin, causes, and effects’. This was the self-consciously
modest agenda of a modern natural philosopher. It was surely meant to be
obvious to the reader from the outset that it was no part of the programme
of the Treatise to give advice as to how the passions might be controlled.93
Many books were written in the eighteenth century about the government
of the passions.94 Philosophical writing on the passions had in fact always
standardly proceeded with view to, as Hutcheson had put it in his book
on the topic, ‘some general conclusions concerning the best management
of our desires’.95 The Treatise would be an exception.
The first problem for any analysis of the passions was how to organize
and classify them. Hume would certainly have been familiar with the Stoic
division of the passions into the four basic passions of joy, desire, grief,
and fear. As spelled out in, for example, the Tusculan Disputations – which
Hume said he had been reading in his earliest surviving letter, written
to Michael Ramsay in July 172796 – joy (laetitia) arises in the presence
of the good, while grief (aegritudo) arises in the presence of evil. Desire
(libido or cupiditas) arises in the anticipation of the good, and fear (metus)
arises in the anticipation of evil.97 The Stoic classification had been enor-
mously influential, but had also been extensively modified and revised.
Malebranche, for example, had reinterpreted and extended it on the basis
of a more fundamental division, as he saw it, between love and hatred.
Love and hatred are, according to Malebranche, ‘the two parent pas-
sions’.98 They produce the ‘general passions’ of joy, desire, and sadness,
according as the object of love or hatred is actually possessed, possibly pos-
sessed, or impossible to possess. The six basic passions, on Malebranche’s
analysis, are thus joyous love, desiderative love, and melancholy love; and
melancholy aversion, desiderative aversion, and joyous aversion.99 Par-
ticular passions are all ‘species’ of these general passions, distinguished
by ‘the different judgments that cause or accompany them’. It followed
that ‘to know the passions and to enumerate them as exactly as possible,
it is necessary to investigate the different judgments we can make about
goods and evils’.100 Hutcheson was strongly influenced by Malebranche’s
attempt to ground the Stoic theory of the passions in a Christian philos-
ophy of love, but, so he claimed, love, and indeed all of the fundamental
passions enumerated by Malebranche and by the Stoics before him, admit-
ted of a distinction that Malebranche had had too little to say about. For,
as Hutcheson pointed out, ‘No modifications of mind can be more dif-
ferent from each other, than a private desire, and a publick; yet both are
called love’.101 It needed to be made much clearer than Malebranche had
made it that not all love and aversion in general, nor all the particular
passions, were selfish. ‘It may be useful’, Hutcheson remarked, ‘to con-
sider our affections and passions more particularly, as they are excited by
something in our frame different from self-love, and tend to something
else than the private pleasures of the external senses or imagination’.102 It
would then be seen that, as Hutcheson put it, ‘Every passion or affection
in its moderate degree is innocent, many are directly amiable, and morally
good: we have senses and affections leading us to publick good, as well as
to private; to virtue, as well as to external pleasure’.103
Hutcheson understood himself to be issuing a challenge to a wide range
of recent writers who had insisted on the fundamental selfishness of all
human beings. He had Mandeville squarely in his sights, and Hobbes,
of course, but also modern natural lawyers like Pufendorf and Locke,
along with those ‘Christian moralists’ who posited ‘the prospect of private
happiness’ as ‘the sole motive of election’.104 He was criticized in turn by
defenders of the cause of private happiness, or self-interest, as a necessary

and adequate foundation of moral virtue.105 In the Treatise, however,
Hume showed little interest in coming to a definitive conclusion as to how
much of human nature is selfish and how much interests us selflessly in the
good of others. Certainly he did not use this question as a way of organizing
his account of the passions. Nor did he follow Malebranche in taking the
Stoic classification of the passions as his point of departure. Reading
Malebranche helped Hume to develop his treatment of the passions,
as we will see, but the principal taxonomical principle he deployed in
Book II of the Treatise appears to have been entirely his own invention.
He divided the passions into those that are ‘direct’ and those that are
‘indirect’. There was no obvious precedent for such a division of the
passions.106 When he introduced the distinction right at the beginning
of Book II, Hume admitted that at this point in his argument he could
neither justify nor explain it. All he could do was talk in very general terms
of a difference between those passions ‘such as arise immediately from
good or evil, from pain and pleasure’ and those passions ‘such as proceed
from the same principles, but by the conjunction of other principles’. As
examples of direct passions, he listed ‘desire, aversion, grief, joy, hope,
fear, despair and security’. Examples of indirect passions were ‘pride,
humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, generosity,
with their dependants’.107 Though Hume did not put it this way himself,
this division of the passions amounted to a declaration that the Stoic
approach to the classification of the passions was hopeless as an attempt
to organize the realm of the passions in its entirety. There was obvious
and presumably intentional overlap between Hume’s list of the direct
passions and the Stoic list of the basic passions from which all others can
be derived. To distinguish so categorically between those passions and
another quite different group of passions was in effect to say that there
was a whole group of passions that both the Stoics and modern refiners of
the Stoic typology, like Malebranche and Hutcheson, had fundamentally
misunderstood. It was to say that pride, humility, ambition, and the rest
needed to be examined on their own terms. They were responses to good
and evil, just like the Stoic passions, but they were different kinds of
responses, requiring a different kind of analysis.
It seems unlikely to have been a coincidence that the passions Hume
called ‘indirect’, and put into a separate category from those that had been
focused upon in the Stoic tradition, were the passions most prominent
in Mandeville’s writings on human nature. Pride had been described by

Mandeville as so considerable a part of man’s nature as to be ‘so inseparable
from his very essence (how cunningly soever some may learn to hide or
disguise it) that without it the compound he is made of would want one
of the chiefest ingredients’.108 Pride, according to Mandeville, generates
an insatiable appetite for honour, which is to say, for the good opinion
of other people. And the reverse of honour is dishonour, or ignominy,
‘likewise called shame, from the effect it produces’; ‘for’, Mandeville
wrote, ‘tho’ the good and evil of honour are imaginary, yet there is a
reality in shame, as it signifies a passion, that has its proper symptoms,
over-rules our reason, and requires as much labour and self-denial to be
subdued, as any of the rest’. The influence of shame is such that it may be
said that ‘the most important actions of life often are regulated according
to the influence this passion has upon us’.109 In The Fable of the Bees pride
and shame were described as distinct passions, albeit of course closely
related ones. In An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour this was regretted
as a mistake. Mandeville’s considered view was that pride and shame
are ‘different affections of one and the same passion, that are differently
observed in us, according as we either enjoy pleasure, or are aggriev’d on
account of that passion’.110 The passion in question here was ‘self-liking’.
Self-liking was introduced into Mandeville’s analysis of human nature in
‘Part Two’ of The Fable of Bees, and, as we saw in Chapter 1, it refined
and complicated Mandeville’s belief that all human actions are motivated
by self-love. We human beings need constant reassurance in our liking of
ourselves, we are always worried that our self-liking is unjustified: pride
is self-liking satisfied, shame is self-liking denied. All of the passions
that Hume called ‘indirect’ could be understood as modes of self-liking.
Certainly passions such as ambition, vanity, and envy fitted easily into a
Mandevillean framework. Love and hatred, along with pity, malice, and
generosity, were there presumably in so far as they too could be understood
as passions that arise according as other people either gratify or frustrate
our liking of ourselves. Notoriously, Mandeville had subjected generosity
in particular to a scathingly cynical reduction to self-love in his ‘Essay on
Charity, and Charity-Schools’. Sometimes, he had argued, we treat other
people kindly because it causes us too much discomfort to do otherwise.
At other times we do so simply because we want to be well thought of. At
no time do we forget ourselves and act without consideration of what is in
our interests.
Mandeville’s agenda of exposing the selfishness of every human thought

and action had roots in a tradition of French writers, including Pascal,
Nicole, and La Rochefoucauld, in which Hume was certainly interested.
His interest, though, did not extend to an endorsement of the idea that
any appearance of benevolence, or of any other virtue, is bound to be
nothing other than hypocrisy.111 At one point in Book II he mentioned
‘[t]hose, who take a pleasure in declaiming against human nature’ in a
way that makes it clear that, while such writers had important insights
into the human condition, declaiming against human nature was not his
concern.112 What Hume found in Mandeville’s treatment of pride and of
self-liking seems more likely to have been, first, a vivid and persuasive
account of the sheer variety of the things that we are given pleasure by
and take pride in, and, second, an insightful exploration of the extent to
which passions such as pride and shame are intensified by a sensitivity to
the opinions of other people. Neither of these elements of Mandeville’s
thought was essentially connected to his version of the thesis of funda-
mental human selfishness. Both of them would have chimed with Hume’s
well-developed sense of the implausibility of the Stoic theory of human
nature. For the Stoics held to the view that there is such a thing as a
single highest good for human beings – virtue – and that the task of moral
philosophy was to reveal how our desires can be ordered and harmonized
in such a way that life becomes, simply, the pursuit of virtue. Shaftesbury,
as we saw in Chapter 1, sought to revive this conception of human nature
and this conception of philosophy; and Mandeville, as we also saw, was
unable to take it seriously. Mandeville’s conception of human happiness
was taken, he said, not from the things that people say are best, but from
the things they seem to be most pleased with. ‘[H]ow can I believe that
a man’s chief delight is in the embellishments of the mind’, Mandeville
asked, ‘when I see him ever employ’d about and daily pursue the pleasures
that are contrary to them?’113 Like Mandeville, Hume was impressed by
how many and how different are the things that human beings take plea-
sure in possessing. We are proud not only of the embellishments of our
minds but also of personal attributes like beauty, strength, agility, grace in
comportment. We compliment ourselves too on our ‘address in dancing,
riding, fencing, and . . . dexterity in any manual business or manufacture’.
We also think well of ourselves for such things as ‘country, family, chil-
dren, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs, cloaths’.114 Also like
Mandeville, Hume was impressed by how these pleasures increase at the
thought of the fact that other people admire or envy us for them. It was
nonsense to imagine, as the Stoics did, that the actions and opinions of
other people can have no impact on true human happiness. We can taste
no pleasure without being able to like ourselves – and we can only like
ourselves to the extent that we believe that others like us. Our passions are
thus thoroughly conditioned by a sense of how we are seen by others. And
this was by no means necessarily a weakness to be condemned. Mandeville
pointed out that love of praise, or desire of the applause of others, is often
a spur to virtue. Hume developed this line of thought in the account he
gives of the virtue of proper pride, or ‘greatness of mind’, in Book III of
the Treatise.115
The same things that make us proud, according to Hume, make us love
other people. Here by ‘love’ he often means what we might more naturally
call admiration, or esteem. When other people lack these things, we hate
them – where by ‘hate’ he often means what we might more naturally call
contempt.116 Virtue, then, is only one of the qualities that we admire in
another person, and so there was no plausibility to Hutcheson’s moralized
conception of love of another as ‘generally attended with some approbation
of him as innocent at least, or being of a mixed character, where good is
generally prevalent’.117 We are just as likely to esteem another person for
being rich and powerful as for being benevolent or just – though Hume
was willing to call vice and virtue ‘the most obvious causes’ of love and
hatred.118 Our esteem for the rich and powerful, Hume insisted, is not
principally derived from an expectation or hope of personal benefit, as
was shown by the fact that we respect them, not only when they show no
inclination to oblige us in any way ‘but also when we lie so much out of the
sphere of their activity, that they cannot even be suppos’d to be endow’d
with that power’. We admire the possessions of a very rich man, down
to his ‘tables, chairs, scritoires, chimneys, coaches, sadles, ploughs’, in
virtue of their beauty and usefulness alone, by imagining the satisfactions
their owner is given by them, without there being anything about them
which speaks to our own self-interest.119 This admiration, Hume went on
to observe, has no connection with benevolence or a disposition to reward
the object of our love. This was another respect in which Hutcheson was
wrong in his definition of love. Love has no necessary connection with
‘desire of the happiness of another’.120 There is no particular end that
either love or hatred endeavour to attain. Only ‘the original constitution
of the mind’, ‘an arbitrary and original instinct implanted in our nature’,
explains the connection between love and benevolence, and hatred and
anger. ‘I see no contradiction in supposing a desire of producing misery
annex’d to love’, Hume wrote, ‘and of happiness to hatred’.121 As with
arbitrary and original instincts generally, there was nothing to say about
those cases where love is, as a matter of fact, followed by benevolence.
Hume was more interested in cases where benevolence is ‘counterfeited’
by compassion or pity, defined as a concern for others involving no love
or warm feeling. Again the reader senses the influence of Mandeville, who
had also described ‘pity or compassion’ as the ‘counterfeiting’ of genuine
charity.122 Hume was more interested still in counterfeited hatred, that is,
in disinterested malice, ‘which imitates the effects of hatred . . . and gives
us a joy in the sufferings and miseries of others, without any offence or
injury on their part’.123 In his sights once more here was Hutcheson, who,
rather optimistically, had claimed that ‘the misery of another, for its own
sake, is never grateful’.124
Both our esteem for the rich and powerful and the counterfeiting of
benevolence in the form of compassion demand to be explained in terms of
a mental principle that Hume called sympathy. We admire the rich man’s
house because of the way in which we are able to imagine the pleasure it
gives its owner, and, in imagining those pleasures, we make them vivid to
ourselves. We can concern ourselves with the good of others even where
we have no benevolent feelings for them on account of the simple fact of
the resemblance that obtains between all human beings. What we have in
common with others enables the idea of another’s interests and passions
and pains and pleasures to, as Hume put it, ‘strike upon us in a lively
manner’ – and ‘[i]f this be true in general, it must be more so in affliction
and sorrow’, for ‘[t]hese have always a stronger and more lasting influence
than any pleasure or enjoyment’.125 ‘No quality of human nature’, Hume
declared, ‘is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences,
than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive
by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different
from, or even contrary to our own’.126
Hume was of course not the first to notice sympathy and its effects.127
The idea that we can be powerfully affected by the emotions of others,
especially their afflictions and sorrows, is a commonplace of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thought, often explored by way of commentary on
a famous passage from Lucretius describing the feelings occasioned in a
person observing from the shore the plight of a wrecked and sinking
ship.128 Lucretius himself had dwelled on the happiness felt by the

observer of such a scene that he is not on the ship, and there had been
many who had followed him in giving a selfish construal of the dynamics
of sympathy. According to Hobbes, for example, it was ‘joy’ that explained
why ‘men take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that
are at sea in a tempest, or in fight, or from a safe castle to behold two armies
charge one another in the field’.129 Men also feel pity in such situations, he
admitted, but pity is itself no more than ‘imagination or fiction of future
calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present
calamity’.130 This was also Mandeville’s conception of pity. People ‘shriek
out when they see others in danger’, Mandeville claimed, because ‘some-
times we make the case of others too nearly our own’. We reflect ‘with
too much earnest’ on how we would feel when in such danger, and are
emotionally, even physically, affected by our imaginings.131
Hume’s conception of sympathy was strikingly different. It was not
a means by which we think ourselves into the situation of another in
order to imagine what we ourselves we would feel in that situation. It
involved, rather, a kind of forgetting of the self, as one is taken over by the
sentiments of another person and in a way briefly becomes that person in
the process. If the shipwreck is close enough to me, Hume thought, so that
I can see and hear the sufferings of those about to perish, those sufferings
will become my own. ‘No man has so savage a heart’, he asserted, ‘as
to reap any pleasure from such a spectacle, or withstand the motions of
the tenderest compassion and sympathy’.132 Sympathy tunes us in, so to
speak, to the feelings and opinions of others. It provides an explanation of
how it is that we are so acutely receptive to how we are seen by others –
of how it is, as Hume put it, that ‘the minds of men are mirrors to one
another’.133 Hutcheson called sympathy ‘the publick sense’ and defined
it as ‘a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others, and to
be uneasy at their misery’. It ‘finds much matter of compassionate sorrow
among men’.134 Here at least, from Hume’s point of view, Hutcheson
was perfectly correct. Yet it seems likely that Hume’s own conception
of sympathy was taken, at least in part, from Malebranche’s description
of a ‘compassion in spirits’ that generates impressions so ‘acute’ that
some people ‘often feel a kind of shivering in the legs . . . when they look
carefully at someone with a wound there, or actually receive a blow there’.
For Hume, as for Malebranche, sympathy is a form of ‘contagion’.135
Another of the key explanatory principles deployed by Hume in his

analysis of the indirect passions, the principle of comparison, may also
have been found in Malebranche.136 Generally speaking, Malebranche
claimed, we tend to judge things not as they are in themselves, but as they
seem to us when compared with each other and with ourselves. We have a
tendency to be over-impressed by ideas of greatness. Greatness, grandeur,
makes us feel ourselves to be smaller and more insignificant than we really
are. It generates, Malebranche said, ‘a kind of vicious humility that might
be termed spiritual baseness’.137 We prefer to be able to think of ourselves
as great, and being able to look down on others is a significant help to that
end. For Hume, too, it was a salient feature of human nature both that we
‘judge of objects more from comparison than from their real and intrinsic
merit; and where we cannot by some contrast enhance their value, we are
apt to overlook even what is essentially good in them’,138 and that this
applies nowhere more evidently than in the case of our judgements of
ourselves. Our assessments of our condition and circumstances give us
more or less satisfaction according to how our condition and circumstances
seem in comparison with those of other people. If other people seem much
more fortunate than us, our own good fortune, no matter how real it is, will
not please us. If other people can be made to seem much less fortunate than
us, intolerable circumstances suddenly become tolerable. ‘The misery of
another gives us a more lively idea of our happiness’, Hume observed,
‘and his happiness of our misery’.139 The principle of comparison was
thus ‘a kind of pity reverst’, and was used by Hume to explain malice, ‘the
unprovok’d desire of producing evil to another, in order to reap a pleasure
from the comparison’. It also explained envy, understood as ‘excited by
some present enjoyment of another, which by comparison diminishes our
idea of our own’.140 If the shipwreck is far enough away, it is true that
pleasure is reaped from my idea of my own happiness, as compared with
the miserable condition of those at sea in the storm.
Hume had an interest in the complexities and perversities of the emo-
tional life at least equal in intensity to that of Malebranche and Mandeville,
and Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. In the Treatise, however, his overriding
ambition was to show that the passions could be reduced to explanatory
order. The indirect passions could be the occasion for explanatory inge-
nuity in a way that the direct passions could not. There was nothing to
say about the direct passions, other than that they arise naturally in the
mind from good and evil, pleasure and pain. In their case, ‘[t]he mind by
an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the
evil, tho’ they be conceiv’d merely in idea, and be consider’d as to exist
in any future period of time’.141 In the case of the indirect passions, it
was obvious enough that original instincts could not be appealed to. The
causes of pride, humility, love, and hatred are so various that it was quite
implausible to imagine a unique innate disposition of the mind at work
in each and every case. There was thus substantive philosophical work to
be done, Hume thought, in discovering general principles able to explain
what all the causes of pride and love, and humility and hatred, have in
common. In respect of the causes of the indirect passions, he wrote early
on in Book II of the Treatise, ‘moral philosophy is in the same condition
as natural, with regard to astronomy before the time of Copernicus’.142
The principles of sympathy and comparison were important elements
of Hume’s explanatory schema, but more fundamental still was what he
termed a ‘double relation of impressions and ideas’. Every indirect passion
comprises a particular impression of pleasure or pain characteristic of that
particular passion, along with an object (either the self or another person),
and a cause. What needed explanation was how the cause of the passion
points the mind either to the self or another person, and gives rise to a
particular kind of pleasure or pain as it does so. Hume’s solution rested
on the identification of, first, a pain or pleasure that anyone might feel in
contemplating the cause of the passion, and, second, a relation between
that cause and either the self or another person. The relation of ownership
I have to my house prompts me to think of myself when I think of it. The
pleasure that anyone might feel in beholding my house follows on the
heels of this relation of ideas, and arouses the particular pleasure of pride.
Hume devoted a considerable amount of space in Book II to applying this
general explanatory schema to each of the indirect passions, and to back-
ing up his identifications of the causes of the various passions by showing
how alterations of one of the schema’s four variables produces alterations
in one or more of the other three. Nowhere in the Treatise, in fact, was his
use of the ‘logic’ of experimental reasoning, the rules by which to judge
of causes and effects, more strenuously self-conscious.143
From this sober application to the passions of the experimental method
of reasoning Hume extracted two remarkable corollaries. The first con-
cerned the faculty of will, traditionally conceived of as a kind of executive
power in the mind, as the means by which choices are made and decisions
implemented. Hume declared that he could find no place for such a fac-
ulty in an experientially grounded science of the mind. It is a matter of
plain experience, he argued, that, given the usual circumstances, actions
reliably follow their usual motives. Certainly we all speak and act as if
we regarded people as entirely predictable in what they do. And where
we accept that they are not predictable, or that they have acted out of
character, we assume that there is still some motive or circumstance that
would, if we knew it, make their actions perfectly intelligible. We speak
and act, in other words, as if human behaviour is just as much a matter
of necessity as the behaviour of animals, the growth of plants, and the
operation of weather systems. The fact that we do not understand human
behaviour well enough to grasp the nature of the necessary connections
that there seem to be between motives and circumstances and actions is
not evidence of any deep difference between human beings and the natu-
ral world, since, as had already been shown in Book I’s account of causal
reasoning in general, we do not in any case of a putative causal connection
have insight into what it is in the cause that makes the effect happen. And
the fact that human behaviour looks to be determined wholly by motive
and circumstance meant that there is no role for a faculty of will to play
in an explanation of why we do what we do. There was therefore no place
for an executive faculty of choice and decision making in Hume’s theory
of the mind. The will was reduced to the status of a kind of epiphenome-
nal accompaniment to action: Hume described it as, merely, ‘the internal
impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any
new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind’.144 In this way Hume,
like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, portrayed the motions of our bodies
and minds as just as thoroughly necessitated as the motions of insects and
rocks. But he did so in a way intended to rid the doctrine of necessity of its
supposedly threatening and subversive connotations.145 For that doctrine
properly understood did not entail that motive and circumstance compel
our actions and choices in a way that might obviously rob us of responsi-
bility for what we do. The necessity of action involved only regularity and
predictability. Far from being a threat to responsibility, it seemed rather
to be its precondition, since a person is only responsible for an action if
that action is in character, if it can be taken to proceed from something in
the agent that is, as Hume put it, ‘durable or constant’.146 The idea of a
free will by means of which we are able to countermand the influence of
motive and circumstance could thus be portrayed as nothing more than a
philosopher’s myth, a scholastic confusion between ‘the liberty of spon-

taneity’, a freedom that is the opposite of violence and constraint, which
we do have, and ‘the liberty of indifference’, a freedom that would involve
actions with no causes at all, which we do not have, and do not need.147
The second startling corollary was that another standard way of depict-
ing our control over the passions, by means of a faculty of reason able
to order and govern them, involved a fundamental misunderstanding.
Human nature was not a site of conflict between reason on the one hand
and passion on the other. There were philosophers, notably among the
Stoics, who wanted us to believe that such a conflict was the most impor-
tant dimension of human existence, and that life was lived well only to
the extent that the conflict was won by reason. ‘On this method of think-
ing the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems
to be founded’, Hume observed; ‘nor is there an ampler field, as well
for metaphysical arguments, as popular declamations, than this suppos’d
pre-eminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and
divine origin of the former have been display’d to the best advantage:
The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been
as strongly insisted on’.148 Hume risked misleading the reader when he
declared, in a famous phrase, that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and
obey them’.149 Plenty of sceptics about human rationality, including Bayle
and Mandeville, had made that kind of claim before.150 But Hume’s point
was not that reason is bound always to lose out to passions that have all
the advantage when it comes to strength and persistence. Instead, it was
that no such conflict between reason and passion ever actually takes place.
Reason by its very nature is unable to enter into a contest with passion for
control over human life. Reason, as we might say now, is purely theoretical
in its concerns, and the most it can do with respect to action is to identify
means to ends and point out that some ends are unattainable. The real
struggle is one that takes place between passions. It only appears as though
we are caught between reason and passion because some passions are so
‘calm’, and cause so little disorder in the soul, that they feel as though
they are not passions at all. It followed that strength of mind, the virtue
that philosophers would like to present as the result of the suppression of
passion by reason, was to be understood in terms of, in Hume’s words,
‘the prevalence of the calm passions over the violent’.151 Hume gave no
advice as to how such prevalence could be ensured. In light of what he
had said about the will and practical reason, it was not obvious what we
can each of us do about the particular configuration of passions that deter-
mines our character. In the final sections of Book II an analysis is given
of the dynamics of the passions, of how passions increase and diminish in
violence as a result of such things as custom and repetition, the operations
of the imagination, the opening up and reduction of distance in space and
in time, and changes in judgements of probability.
Hume drew attention in various places to the ways in which his account
of the passions in Book II ‘confirms’ the principal claims made in Book I.
The dynamics of the domain of the passions are the same as the dynamics
of the domain of the understanding. Changes in the vivacity and forceful-
ness of the perceptions of the mind are crucial in both, and in both those
changes are depicted as the effect of the associative dispositions of the
imagination. This was one way in which, as Hume put it in the Adver-
tisement to the Treatise, ‘[t]he subjects of the understanding and passions
make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves’.152 There was, though,
another, and deeper, sense in which this was true. In Book I Hume staged
a comprehensive demolition of what we might call a rationalist conception
of belief. On his account, belief is a feeling, not a perception of relations
between ideas, and its causes usually lie in the imagination, not in a faculty
of rational insight or anything resembling the faculty of reason as usually
construed. It was therefore more or less inevitable that in Book II it would
be shown that reason is unable to assert controlling authority over the
realm of the passions. The problems caused by the passions were bound
to be problems that the passions themselves were going to have to solve,
since there was nothing else – nothing, that is, in the overwhelmingly
secular conception of human nature that Hume was working with – that
could possibly solve them. On Hume’s account it is the checking of pas-
sion by passion that creates order in human affairs.153 By means of his
analysis of the passions of pride, humility, love, and hatred, and especially
by means of his description of the roles of sympathy and comparison in the
mutations of these passions, Hume explained how each of us is restrained
in our passions by the passions of those around us.
Books I and II taken together can thus be read as Hume’s version of the
doctrine of natural sociability introduced into modern philosophy by the
seventeenth-century natural lawyers.154 Certainly Hume’s conception of
human nature is intensely, almost claustrophobically, social. Man is, he
claimed, ‘the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of
society, and is fitted for it by most advantages’. ‘We can form no wish’,
he continued, ‘which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is,
perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes
when enjoy’d a-part from company, and every pain becomes more cruel
and intolerable’.155 The society of others is our deepest need, and the
groundwork for social life is laid by the passions themselves, not by reason
and the discovery of laws of nature, nor by the artifices of politicians.
Mandeville’s depiction of the evolution of society in ‘Part Two’ of The
Fable of the Bees may have been Hume’s inspiration here. So also may
have been Bayle’s case for the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists,
made possible, simply, by natural self-love and pride. Malebranche may
also have provided some vital ideas.156 But in its details, as well as in its
ambitions to completeness and systematicity, Hume’s account of human
sociability was all his own.157
Publication of a First Book

Hume left La Flèche in August 1737 and was in London again a month
or so later. He remained there until February 1739. His principal concern
was to find a publisher for a book that was, so he told Kames, so full of new
opinions that it was impossible to summarize. But before Hume could let
the book go, he had to polish his style and diction as best he could. What
had appeared satisfactory when he was ‘alone in perfect tranquillity’ in
Anjou no longer seemed so now that the great event of publication was
almost at hand.158 The prospect of seeing the Treatise in print was for
Hume both exhilarating and terrifying. Sometimes he felt elevated ‘above
the clouds’ by what he had written, at others depressed with doubts and
fears.159 Despite his conviction that his ideas, and even his language,
were completely new, he needed the reassurance that the approval of
others would provide. He looked forward to philosophical evenings with
Kames, should his friend come to London in the spring of 1738. He
wanted to be introduced by Kames to Joseph Butler, so that the author of
Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and The Analogy of Religion might be
induced to give his judgement on the manuscript. He probably sought the
opinion of others as well. By March 1738, he was lodging at the Rainbow
Coffeehouse, a place frequented by Huguenot refugees from France, and
there he might well have met Pierre Desmaizeaux, friend, editor, and also
biographer of Bayle. A year later he would describe Desmaizeaux as a ‘good
judge’ whose ‘instruction & advice’ he depended upon.160 He wrote to

Kames that his work would have to be ‘castrated’, rid of its ‘nobler parts’,
before it could be shown to someone such as Butler.161 The letter in which
Hume told Kames this suggests that the parts in question would not be
reattached when the final draft was prepared prior to publication. It seems
likely that they were places in the text where he drew explicitly sceptical
inferences concerning the rationality of religious belief. It might be that
what Hume cut out included a version of the critique of the analogical
argument to design that would be sketched in the Philosophical Essays and
developed at length in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. That
would not have been out of place in the discussion of ‘unphilosophical’
probability in Part Three of Book I of the Treatise. Nor would have a more
extended account of testimony, such as might have included reflections on
the rationality of belief in reports of purported miracles. In 1762, Hume
would tell George Campbell that the central argument of Section Ten of
the Philosophical Essays, ‘Of Miracles’, had first occurred to him during a
conversation with one of the Jesuits at La Flèche.162
Whatever it was that Hume cut out in anticipation of showing his book
to Butler, there was plenty left to prompt disquiet in religiously minded
readers.163 Had he read the manuscript of the Treatise and met with its
author, Butler would doubtless have wanted to discuss Hume’s criticism
of arguments for the principle that every event must have a cause, and
probably much else besides. Yet even without recommendations from
established authors of good repute, and despite the fact that he did not
want his name to appear on the title page of his book, and had neither
patron nor subscribers to underwrite the cost of publication, Hume found
a bookseller willing to take the Treatise on. A copy of the agreement
between him and John Noon of Cheapside survives, dated 26 September
1738.164 It stipulates that in return for fifty pounds and twelve bound
copies, Hume would give Noon the right ‘to have hold and enjoy the
sole property benefit and advantage of [the Treatise] not exceeding one
thousand copies thereof’. The book would be printed in two volumes,
of octavo size. No second edition would appear unless Hume bought at
full price all unsold copies of the first. The Treatise sold at ten shillings
(i.e., half a pound sterling) a copy. This was a safe enough investment
on Noon’s part, and two years later Hume would describe himself as
having ‘concluded somewhat of a hasty bargain with my bookseller from
indolence & an aversion to bargaining’.165 At the end of January 1739, there
appeared on the shelves of Noon’s shop A Treatise of Human Nature: Being

an Attempt to Introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral
Subjects, fronted by an epigraph from Tacitus: ‘Rara temporum felicitas,
ubi sentire, quæ velis; & quæ sentias, dicere licet’, ‘Rare happiness of our
times, that you may think as you will, and speak as you think’.166 This was
surely an intentionally ambiguous choice of epigraph. The same passage
from Tacitus had been used as an epigraph before, by Spinoza, in the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and by Addison, in the first issue of his
pro-Whig journal The Free-Holder. It might have been an expression of
Hume’s regret that the times were such that he was not, in fact, able to
speak as he thought – that, in particular, he was not able to say what he
thought about religious matters, for fear of offending men like Butler.167
Alternatively, it might have been a sincere celebration of what two years
later Hume would describe as ‘the extreme liberty we enjoy in this country,
of communicating whatever we please to the publick’.168
With the Treatise published, Hume had nothing to keep him in London,
and he headed home to Chirnside as soon as the weather permitted a
sailing to Berwick. In mid-February he was still waiting for a boat, and
wrote to Kames wracked with anxiety about how his book would be
received. He was sure that its success would remain in doubt for a very
long time – for ‘[t]hose, who are accustom’d to reflect on such abstract
subjects, are commonly full of prejudices; & those, who are unprejudiz’d,
are unacquainted with metaphysical reasonings’. ‘My principles are also
so remote from all the vulgar sentiments on this subject’, he continued,
‘that were they to take place, they wou’d produce almost a total alteration
in philosophy; and & you know revolutions of this kind are not easily
brought about’.169 Hume was convinced from the outset that he would
be misunderstood, and, as we shall see, remained for the rest of his life
disposed to expect his works to be either misread or ignored. In ‘My Own
Life’, stealing a phrase from Pope, he claimed that the Treatise ‘fell dead-
born from the press; without reaching such distinction as even to excite a
murmur from the zealots’.170 In fact, by the standards of the day it was
reviewed fairly widely.171 No fewer than six reviews had appeared by
the end of 1739. Most – though not all – of these notices were in varying
degrees hostile, and at some point in the second half of 1739 Hume decided
that the singularity and novelty of the Treatise was obstructing the progress
of the philosophical revolution he meant to bring about. It was necessary
to help readers to see the importance of the book by condensing it into
a ‘single and concise’ chain of reasoning, ‘where the chief propositions

only are linkt on to each other, illustrated by some simple examples, and
confirmed by a few of the more forcible arguments’. So Hume composed
an ‘abstract’ of the Treatise, a brief summary that pretends to have been
written by a third party hoping to ‘encrease [the author’s] auditory, by
removing some difficulties, which have kept many from apprehending
his meaning’.172 It was published in the spring of 1740, and is a helpful
guide to what, a year or so after the completion of the Treatise, Hume
believed was his book’s principal contribution to the project of ‘try[ing] if
the science of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts
of natural philosophy are found susceptible of’.173
The Abstract was in essence a recapitulation of the main argument of
Part Three of Book I of the Treatise. It presented Book I as an exercise in
‘logic’, the sole end of which ‘is to explain the principles and operations
of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas’.174 There was barely
any mention of the arguments contained in Parts Two and Four, only brief
paraphrases of Hume’s account of our idea of the mind as ‘nothing but a
system or train of different perceptions . . . without the notion of any thing
we call substance, either simple or compound’,175 and of his critique of the
infinite divisibility of time and space. The focus was almost exclusively
on Part Three’s ‘explication of our reasonings from cause and effect’.
Throughout the Treatise, ‘there are great pretensions to new discoveries
in philosophy’ – ‘but if any thing can intitle the author to so glorious a
name as that of an inventor, ’tis in the use he makes of the principle of the
association of ideas’. The use to which that principle was most arrestingly
put, the reader was told, was as the basis for a demonstration that it is
custom, not reason, that is ‘the guide to life’.176 From this it was shown
to follow that the difference between belief and simple conception – ‘a
new question unthought of by philosophers’177 – consists merely in ‘a
peculiar feeling or sentiment’. It was noted also that our idea of the causal
relation derives from causal inferences, not vice versa – which is to say
that ‘either we have no idea at all of force and energy, and these words are
altogether insignificant, or they can mean nothing but that determination
of the thought, derived by habit, to pass from the cause to its usual
effect’.178 ‘By all that has been said’, Hume concluded, ‘the reader will
easily perceive, that the philosophy in this book is very sceptical, and
tends to give us a notion of the imperfections and narrow limits of human
understanding’.179
Little was said in the Abstract about the account of the passions given in
Book II, even though it was there, so Hume claimed, that the ‘foundations’
had been laid for what he would go on to say about morals, criticism, and
politics. Hume restricted himself to pointing out his success in identifying
the ‘common circumstances’ linking the causes of the indirect passions,
and to explaining how his treatment of liberty and necessity ‘puts the whole
controversy in a new light, by giving a new definition of necessity’.180
The tight connection between Hume’s new definition of necessity and
his approach to the freedom of the will was made more explicit still in
the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, and, considered
as a whole, the Abstract reads like a significant step on the way from
Book One of the Treatise to the Philosophical Essays. It suggests that as
early as late 1739, Hume was distancing himself from the Pyrrhonism
explored so devastatingly and disturbingly in Book I, and identifying his
philosophy instead with the more moderate kind of fallibilism implicit in
his explanatory account of causal inference. But the time for a fundamental
rethink as to how his ‘logic’ should be formulated lay in the future. The
task at hand now was to start building on the foundations provided by
Book II of the Treatise’s account of the passions.
In Book II, in the course of an explanation of why virtue causes pride
and vice causes humility, Hume had made mention of ‘the controversy,
which of late years has so much excited the curiosity of the publick, whether
these moral distinctions be founded on natural and original principles, or arise
from interest and education’.181 The examination of this controversy, he
had told the reader, would have to wait for ‘the following book’. (For the
moment it had been sufficient to point out that the analysis of pride and
humility developed in the opening sections of Book II could be shown to
work regardless of how the controversy was decided. Either way, the plea-
sure produced by virtue explained why virtue causes pride, and the pain
or uneasiness produced by vice explained why vice causes humility).182
Such a characterization of the principal question to be addressed in Book
III of the Treatise is both noteworthy and, in light of his probable interests
in the late 1720s and early 1730s, unsurprising. It is noteworthy because
it does not present Hume’s main concern as a moral philosopher as being
a consideration and resolution of the dispute between those who founded
moral distinctions on principles of reason and those who founded them
on the sentiments. This was a dispute that had been vigorously prose-
cuted by British philosophers since the publication of Hutcheson’s Inquiry
in 1725.183 Hutcheson’s postulation of a moral sense had been criticized

by Gilbert Burnet, John Balguy, and John Clarke, and in a series of texts
Hutcheson had criticized the criticisms of these and other defenders of the
rationalist position. Hume’s view was that Hutcheson had had the better
of his opponents. There was much in Hutcheson’s moral philosophy that
Hume did not accept, as we will see, but on this issue he had almost
nothing to add to what Hutcheson had already said.
Hume’s description of what his project would be in Book III is, even
so, unsurprising because it indicates that his interest when it came to
moral philosophy was precisely what one might expect in one who had
first enthusiastically immersed himself in the ancients and in Shaftesbury,
and who had then, in disappointment, found himself deeply attracted to
Mandeville’s coldly anatomical scepticism. Stoics ancient and modern –
including Hutcheson – had defined the difference between virtue and vice
in terms of the difference between the natural and the unnatural. Virtue
was life according to nature, life in harmony with the dispositions innate
to human beings as such. Vice was violence done to human nature, a denial
of our deepest needs and desires that could only result in unhappiness. Yet
following the Stoics, and adopting their maxims, had brought Hume close
to mental, emotional, and physical collapse. Hume had experienced for
himself the ways in which, as he put it in the ‘Historical Essay on Chivalry
and Modern Honour’, philosophy can set as at odds with ourselves, and
‘make us frame to ourselves, tho’ we cannot execute them, rules of conduct
different from these which are set to us by nature’.184 So, then, what
were the rules of conduct set to us by our nature? What in morality was
natural, and what was conventional, the result of custom and education?
Was Mandeville right to claim that all of morality, every aspect of the
distinction between virtue and vice, was the product of human invention
and artifice?
Between Mandeville and Hutcheson:

Artificial and Natural Virtues
Hutcheson was a polite and mildly complimentary reader of Books I and
II of the Treatise. ‘I should be glad to know where the author could be
met with’, he told Kames in April 1739.185 Not long after this Hume
sent Hutcheson a copy of the manuscript of Book III. Hume would have
known that there was a great deal in his moral philosophy with which
the elder philosopher was bound to disagree. Hutcheson’s comments on

Hume’s manuscript do not survive, and have to be reconstructed from
Hume’s letter in reply, dated 17 September 1739. That letter makes it
clear that, as could have been predicted, Hutcheson objected to the idea
that any of morality might be called artificial rather than natural, and
also to Hume’s claim, to which we will return later, that the basis for
calling any virtue natural leaves it unclear why a distinction should be
drawn between traditional moral virtues and everyday abilities of mind
and body. Even so, it seems that there was a sense in which Hutcheson
recognised an affinity between Hume’s philosophical project and his own.
He recognised, that is, that they had a common enemy. ‘I intend to
follow your advice in altering most of those passages you have remarkt
as defective in point of prudence’, Hume told Hutcheson.186 Hutcheson
had perhaps identified for Hume places where readers inclined towards
religious orthodoxy were most likely to react with the kind of hostility
that he had himself faced since he had returned to Scotland to take up
the Glasgow moral philosophy chair. Hutcheson wanted to help Hume to
avoid that kind of trouble. To this end, possibly, he had also recommended
that Hume do something about the tone of the book taken as a whole.
Hume’s letter tells us that Hutcheson had missed ‘a certain warmth in the
cause of virtue, which . . . all good men wou’d relish, & cou’d not displease
amidst abstract enquirys’.187 Hume would certainly make things easier for
himself if he were able to combine liberty of speculation with reassurance
that he did not mean to cast aspersions on the reality and importance of
the distinction between virtue and vice. With all the self-belief, not to
say arrogance, of youth, however, Hume made it clear that any warmth
in the cause of virtue would have been an unconscionable compromise
from his point of view. The tone of the book was essential to Hume’s
self-conception as a moral philosopher. The way he explained himself on
this point strongly suggests that Mandeville still had a very powerful hold
upon him. ‘There are different ways of examining the mind as well as the
body’, he told Hutcheson, for all the world as if this would have been news
to the Glasgow professor. ‘One may consider it either as an anatomist or
as a painter; either to discover its most secret springs & principles or to
describe the grace & beauty of its actions.’ ‘I imagine it impossible to
conjoin these two views’, he continued. ‘Where you pull off the skin, &
display all the minute parts, there appears something trivial, even in the
noblest attitudes & most vigorous actions: nor can you ever render the
object graceful or engaging but by cloathing the parts again with skin &
flesh, & presenting only their bare outside’.188 There was a clear echo
here, surely self-conscious, of the very first sentence of The Fable of the
Bees.189
Despite this refusal on Hume’s part to admit into his moral philosophy
anything in the way of warmth of moral sentiment, there is reason to
think that Hume made a number of significant alterations to ‘Of Morals’
in light of Hutcheson’s comments.190 In a letter dated 4 March 1740 he
told Hutcheson that ‘the book is pretty much alter’d since you saw it;
& tho’ the clergy be always enemys to innovations in philosophy, yet I
do not think they will find any great matter of offence in this volume’.191
Doubtless some of the alterations were mere clarifications intended to ward
off unnecessary controversy. For instance, Hume reminded Hutcheson
that he had called justice artificial but not unnatural;192 and the final
paragraph of the section entitled ‘Justice, Whether a Natural or Artificial
Virtue?’ has the feel of an addition made to underline just this point.193 It
may be, though, that much more of this section, perhaps even all of it, was
a new addition. The September 1739 letter to Hutcheson had a lengthy
postscript intended to prove that ‘Actions are not virtuous or vicious; but
only so far as they are proofs of certain qualitys or durable principles in
the mind’.194 The argument Hume developed there is stated at greater
length in the section ‘Justice, Whether a Natural or Artificial Virtue?’, and
Hume’s postscript would be otiose if Hutcheson had read that section in
anything like its published form.
Furthermore, it is not altogether obvious that any of what we know as
Part One of ‘Of Morals’, where Hume argues against moral rationalism
and in favour of moral sense theory, was included in the manuscript that
Hume sent to Hutcheson in 1739. In the September 1739 letter Hume
addressed the question of what is meant by the word ‘natural’ when used
in philosophical ethics, and told Hutcheson that his (Hutcheson’s) sense
of the word was ‘founded on final causes; which is a consideration, that
appears to me pretty uncertain & unphilosophical’.195 This would not
have been necessary if Hutcheson had already read something resembling
Hume’s discussion in Part One of the various things one might mean by
calling the distinction between virtue and vice ‘natural’. In a third letter to
Hutcheson dated 16 March 1740 Hume asked for advice about the way he
concluded a ‘reasoning’ about the role of sentiment in the making of moral
distinctions. This ‘reasoning’ seems to have been the entire argument of
Section One of Part One, ‘Moral Distinctions Not Deriv’d from Reason’,
and, again, Hutcheson would not have needed to be told that Hume had
expressed himself in the way in question if that section had been included
in the manuscript he had been sent.196 It is possible, then, that ‘Of Morals’
as originally conceived by Hume had just two parts, one on those virtues
that deserve to be called artificial, and another on those that may be called
natural. That would not have been surprising given the way in which
Hume’s main concern in his moral philosophy is characterised in Book
Two of the Treatise, which, in turn, and as we have seen, was unsurprising
given the development of Hume’s philosophical interests in his early life.
In Part One of the published version of ‘Of Morals’ Hume introduced
himself to the reader as a philosopher who accepted Hutcheson’s case
against moral rationalism, and who took as his point of departure the
principle, established by Hutcheson, that we make moral distinctions by
means of a sense that gives us pleasure when we observe some actions and
pain when we observe others.197 ‘Morality, therefore’, Hume asserted,
‘is more properly felt than judged of’. ‘To have the sense of virtue’, he
went on, ‘is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from
the contemplation of character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or
admiration’.198 Whether or not Part One was included in ‘Of Morals’ as
originally conceived, we can imagine Hume as having used Hutcheson’s
thesis as a way of organizing his thoughts on the question of the relation
between morals and human nature. For Hume, this was a question in
the first instance about how we make moral distinctions. He took it as
more or less obvious that in the moral domain we are concerned primar-
ily not with actions or their consequences, but with the character traits
out of which we act in our dealings with other people. Some character
traits we call virtues, others we call vices. But do we make such distinctions
as it were instinctively, as a result of proclivities inherent in untutored
human nature? Is making distinctions in morality like making distinctions
between colours or tastes? Or are some, maybe all, of the distinctions that
we make between virtues and vices habits that we learn through upbring-
ing and education? Is making distinctions in morality more like making
distinctions between good and bad manners? Hutcheson, Hume thought,
had given good reasons to think that the making of moral distinctions is
not the work of reason alone. To see that work as done by feelings, more-
over, fitted well with the theory of belief that Hume had developed in
Book I of the Treatise. So, the real question was whether it is by means of
natural and untutored feelings that in every case we distinguish between

virtue and vice.
Hutcheson himself, so Hume might well have thought, had provided
reasons to be sceptical about this. For Hutcheson had acknowledged that
in the case of justice, it is not always obvious to untutored feeling how
virtue is to be differentiated from vice. Sometimes what justice requires
offends our moral sensibilities, as when a ‘wealthy miser’ is judged to
have the right at any time to recall a loan even from ‘the most industrious
poor tradesman’.199 The rules of justice can be made to look as though
they contradict natural beliefs about fairness and equity. Hutcheson had
argued that an enlarged conception of ‘universal good’ can be used in
such cases to explain the distinction between justice and injustice, so that
what looks wrong at the level of individual cases can be shown to serve
the interests of all at a more universal and impartial level. His theory
demanded, however, that even in these cases, moral goodness had to be
understood in terms of benevolence, and, along with many of Hutcheson’s
readers, Hume believed that what these cases showed was, precisely, that
justice could not be understood as benevolence of any kind.200 Most people
do what justice requires out of the belief that that is what they must do.
Justice is done, when it is done, as a matter of duty, not benevolence. And
what is it about acting of duty, Hume wondered, that might appeal to the
moral sentiments, and give us the same kind of immediate pleasure as, for
example, a simple and spontaneous act of kindness? How can an agent’s
belief that something is the right thing to do be sufficient to explain why
we approve of the agent for doing that thing?
In the postscript to the September 1739 letter to Hutcheson Hume
intimated that these questions about the morality of justice had been
inspired by the sceptical treatment of Stoic ethics in Cicero’s De Finibus.
Cicero had proved against the Stoics ‘that to every virtuous action there
must be a motive or impelling passion distinct from the virtue, & that
virtue can never be the sole motive to any action’.201 Hume noted that
Hutcheson himself did not assent to this.202 Nor did Shaftesbury, who had
claimed that only actions done out of a sense of duty had the status of gen-
uinely virtuous actions.203 We can perhaps see Hume here reconstructing
in philosophical terms the visceral, emotional reaction against Stoicism
caused by his breakdown of 1729–31. The love of virtue for virtue’s
own sake that was prized by both ancient Stoics and modern revivers of
Stoicism such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was being presented in a way
that made it look like moral nonsense. And what seemed to follow when
it came to justice was precisely the conclusion that Mandeville sought to
establish with regard to virtue in general: that, as Hume put it towards the
end of the first section of his discussion of justice in the Treatise, ‘the sense
of justice and injustice is not deriv’d from nature, but arises artificially,
tho’ necessarily from education, and human conventions’.204
Hume, however, did not move straight from here to an endorsement
of the by now notorious account given by Mandeville in ‘An Enquiry into
the Origin of Moral Virtue’ of how morality was imposed upon the mass of
humanity by scheming ‘politicians’. Instead, and in line with the interest
that, so we speculated in Chapter 1, he probably took in later Mandevillean
texts such as ‘Part Two’ of the Fable of the Bees and the Enquiry into
the Origin of Honour, Hume looked for a more recognisably historical
account of the way in which the rules of justice were first established
by human beings. To speak of the origins of justice was necessarily,
Hume thought, to speak of the origins of property. Rules fixing who has
a right to claim what as their own were bound to come first, historically
speaking, because they are the most basic prerequisite of peaceful human
coexistence. This was not an original insight on Hume’s part. The natural
lawyers of the seventeenth century, in their examinations of the conditions
of the possibility of human sociability, had also given priority to respect
for rights of property. Much of the account that Hume gives of ‘the
origin of justice and property’ was taken from the natural jurisprudence
of Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Barbeyrac.205 It was also similar in
spirit, and in some of its details also, to the story of human development
traced by Lucretius in Book Five of De Rerum Natura. The guiding
thread of the narrative was the progress and refinement of self-interest.
As we have seen, Hume did not endorse the reduction of all human
motivation to selfishness. But, he claimed, our natural generosity to others
is limited in its scope. It exhausts itself in our dealings with relatives and
friends. Small-scale communities like families and tribes are inevitably in
competition with each other for limited resources, and so the possessions
of one family or tribe are always in danger of being forcibly removed and
used by another. The intolerability of the constant state of conflict caused
by human need and indigence eventually makes it seem obvious that it
is in the interests of all for conventions to be settled on to protect the
possessions of each small-scale community. Thus self-interest in effect
solved the problem that it itself posed. In some writers of the seventeenth
century – notably French moralists such as Pierre Nicole – this kind of

story is told as a means of illustrating God’s providential care even for
fallen, sinful human beings.206 In Hume, as in Mandeville, it is stripped
of this significance. All that had to happen for conventions about property
to be invented, Hume says, was an alteration of the direction of self-
interest. And it was not very surprising that this had happened. Such an
alteration ‘must necessarily take place upon the least reflection’.207 It is
nothing other than obvious that self-interest is much better satisfied by
its restraint than by its free and unlimited expression. By the same token,
it is obvious that ‘’tis utterly impossible for men to remain in that savage
condition, which precedes society’. Man’s ‘very first state and situation
may justly be esteem’d social’.208
Hume intended it to be plain what the differences were between his
account of the origins of justice and the account given by Hobbes. He
did not want his reader to confuse what he meant by calling justice
artificial with the Hobbesian picture of justice as an institution dependent
for its very existence and moral significance on the will of an absolute
sovereign power.209 Hence his reiteration of the point frequently made
by Hobbes’s critics among the natural lawyers, that human society is
possible without the existence of government. But in addition to, and
underlying, this familiar reply to Hobbes was a deeper point that subverted
not only Hobbes’s theory of justice but also the theories of his natural
lawyer opponents.210 For Hume rejected wholesale the very idea of natural
right, the idea that was as fundamental to Hobbes’s argument for the
sovereign’s right to decide the nature of justice as it was to Locke’s
argument for property rights obtaining prior to and independent of the
institution of government. Hume depicted justice and property as having
their foundation not in natural right but rather in a realization, such as all
human beings could very easily arrive at, of the usefulness of rules fixing
property and its transfer.211 In the September 1739 letter to Hutcheson
Hume quoted Horace in one of his more Epicurean moods: ‘Atque ipsa
utilitas justi prope mater & aequi’, ‘utility is the mother of justice and
equity’. ‘Grotius and Puffendorf ’, Hume observed, ‘to be consistent, must
assert the same’.212 Hume would have known, and Hutcheson would
have known – and Hume would have known that Hutcheson would have
known – that Grotius explicitly took this position, conceived of as a
species of scepticism about natural law, as his target.213 What was found
useful might change from society to society, and Grotius’s ambition, and
Pufendorf’s too, was to show the rules of justice to be ‘dictates of right

reason’, inalterable and universal. Hume’s point was that the utility of
conventions regarding property was useful in so basic a sense that large-
scale human society, the peaceful co-existence of families and tribes, was
impossible without them. They were so basic, in fact, that there was no
harm in calling them laws of nature – just so long as it was understood
that what ‘natural’ meant here was nothing more elevated than ‘what is
common to any species, or . . . what is inseparable from the species’.214
‘Nothing is more vigilant and inventive than our passions’, Hume noted;
‘and nothing is more obvious, than the convention for the observance
of these rules’.215 These were not ‘laws of nature’ predicated, in the
manner of natural lawyers like Pufendorf and Locke, on rights with which
human beings as such were endowed by their creator. Nor were they laws
that stood to be given particular specification by a God-given faculty of
rationality. When Hume explained the particular rules used by human
beings to determine rights of property, he did so using mechanisms of a
custom-driven associative imagination taken directly from his analysis of
the workings of the understanding in Book I of the Treatise.
Several of the seventeenth-century natural lawyers, though not Locke,
had spelled out the obligations imposed by rights of property in terms
of compacts or contracts. Grotius and Pufendorf depicted human beings
as able to come to binding agreements in a state of nature as to who
owns what.216 Hobbes dispensed altogether with the possibility of justice
in a state of nature, but grounded the obligation to respect the rules of
justice in a contractual agreement made by all parties in such a state,
an agreement which simultaneously created society, government, and
inescapable political obligation. Hume believed that to rest justice on
utility made it unnecessary to suppose, as both the natural lawyers and
Hobbes had had to suppose, that there was a natural obligation to keep to
the terms of contracts even in a state of nature. This was a deeply original
insight on Hume’s part, and underscored the completeness of his rejection
of the theories of justice that had been current in Protestant Europe since
Grotius’s De Iure Belli et Pacis.217 The idea of a natural duty to keep
promises, Hume argued, was no more intelligible than the idea of a natural
duty to respect justice in the form of conventions regarding property. A
promise – being bound, on pain of blame and possibly punishment, to
do something just because one has uttered a particular form of words –
is intelligible only in the context of a convention among human beings
that someone will be blamed or punished who utters those words and
then fails to do what they have said will do. There was nothing credible
about the idea, familiar to Hume from the natural lawyers, that in making
a promise one simply willed a new moral duty into existence.218 For
morality, as Hutcheson had made clear, is a function of sentiments, not
will. The feelings of praise and blame which the moral sense gives us
attach themselves to motives indicative of traits of character, but, as in
the case of respect for property, what we praise people for when they
keep their promises is simply the fact that they have done what they were
obliged to do. And doing one’s duty simply because one believes it is one’s
duty, so we have seen Hume argue, is not in itself a morally appealing
thing.
It was a puzzle, then, how it came to be believed that there is such a
thing as a duty to keep one’s word, and the beginning of a solution to
that puzzle had to be a conjectural-historical account of the development
of the convention that holds people to their word. As with conventions
regarding property, Hume found the origins of promise-keeping in a very
elementary form of self-interested social interaction. People need the help
of others, to harvest perishable crops say, and often they need the help
of those they have no particular reason to trust. I help you bring in your
harvest today, on the understanding that you will help me next week. But
how can I be sure that you will not renege on the agreement? Only if there
is a convention, which we both know that we both understand, that if
you do renege on the agreement, you will be sanctioned, and not trusted,
and so not helped, in the future. What makes me trust you is my belief
in your appreciation of the utility of this convention, or at least my belief
in your belief that you will be sanctioned if you renege – not your having
somehow managed to oblige yourself to help me in the future by an act of
will reported by a special form of words.
Hume allowed that the obligation to keep promises could be called a
law of nature, though only for the same reasons that the obligation to
respect conventions regarding property and its transfer could be called
laws of nature. Human beings had no choice but to live in society with
one another, and property and promises were essential to that end. In
small societies, furthermore, we could be expected to submit ourselves
to these laws, so that, as the natural lawyers had maintained against
Hobbes, there was no need for political authority to compel us to respect
them. For Hume, though, as not for the natural lawyers, there was a
significant difference between small and large societies.219 One way of

defining the difference would be to say that in a large society it is much
more difficult than in a small one to find reasons to trust a stranger –
and much more likely also that one’s dealings will be with strangers, not
friends. It is all too likely that a stranger will abuse one’s property, or
renege on an agreement, just because they have the ability to disappear
into the crowd and evade sanction and punishment.220 In a large society,
Hume concluded, what Hobbes says is true: government is needed in
order to ensure that the fundamental conventions upon which society
depends are observed. This did not mean, however, quite what Hobbes
took it to mean – that the very possibility of justice and property depended
upon politics. It meant, rather, that the duties imposed upon us by our
governors are so connected with our natural duties that, as Hume put it,
‘the former are invented chiefly for the sake of the latter; and that the
principal object of government is to constrain men to observe the laws of
nature’.221
Hume’s sense of the importance of the difference between small and
large societies thus explained why his account in ‘Of Morals’ of the origins
of property and of promises had to be followed by an account of the origins
of government and of the obligation to obey the government one lives
under. Like property and promises, government is according to Hume an
obvious invention of self-interest, another means by which self-interested
people ensure that their interests are satisfied. We all easily recognise that
we are all very likely not to act in our long-term interests. We will all be
tempted to steal, cheat, and break promises. Recognising these things, we
all find reason to create a power sufficient to coerce everyone into obeying
conventions that are in everyone’s interests. And we ensure that this power
serves our interests by giving those who exercise it an interest in ensuring
that it serves our interests. Despite Hume’s rejection of natural rights of
property, in its essentials his story of the beginnings of government is in
accord with the story told by Locke in Two Treatises of Government. The
function of government is for Hume, as for Locke, essentially juridical, a
means of solving disputes about property and contracts that are bound to
arise after, in Hume’s phrase, ‘an encrease of riches and possessions’.222
Hume was prepared to allow that the very first governments must have
had their origin in the consent that Locke, along with many others in the
Whig tradition, understood to be the basis of all human authority as such.
‘When men have once perceiv’d the necessity of government to maintain
peace, and execute justice’, Hume argued, ‘they wou’d naturally assemble
together, wou’d chuse magistrates, determine their power, and promise
them obedience’.223 Since Hume had already shown that the keeping of
promises is an artificial virtue, this was sufficient to show that allegiance
and obedience to the government one lives under is also an artificial virtue.
No one who has political authority has it as a function of being by nature
superior to everyone else, or as a function of God’s will. Authority is
something that human beings give to other human beings. But there was
a distinction to be drawn, Hume thought, between the earliest forms of
government and the governments we live under now. It was implausible,
to the point of being ridiculous, to imagine that the obligations we are
under to our governments have their basis in any kind of promise. For one
thing, such an idea was plainly at odds with common sense. No ordinary
person dreams of ascribing political obligation to a promise they have
made at some point to the government of their country.224 For another,
Hume had established that the obligation to keep promises is, in large
societies, only strict where a government is in place to enforce observance
of the convention. So, on pain of vicious circularity, a promise could not
be supposed to be the basis of political obligation in a large society, the
kind of society that Hume and his readers lived in. Hume did not take
this argument to be at odds with the principle that political power and
political obligation are artificial and not natural. Rather, he looked to the
utility that explained the institution of promises, and of property, for
an explanation also of why there is taken to be virtue in allegiance. The
fundamental basis of the obligation to obey one’s government is that, in
almost all circumstances, it is in one’s interests to do so. There was no
need to appeal in addition to a promise that none of us is conscious of
having made. In this way Hume brought to light a new way of thinking
about the moral basis of politics.225 He had found an alternative both to
traditionalist divine right theory and to what in the Treatise he calls ‘our
fashionable system of politics’, the system of the Whig government that
had been in place since the accession of George I in 1714.226 He would
spend much of the rest of his life defining and developing a philosophy of
politics that was as sceptical about the myths of Whiggism as it was about
the myths of Toryism.227
In ‘Of Morals’, Hume concluded his account of those virtues that
demand to be called artificial with a brief account of why it is that chastity
and modesty are expected of women. He began with what sounded like
a criticism of Mandeville’s writings on this topic. Mandeville was surely

meant to be understood to be one of the philosophers ‘who attack the
female virtues with great vehemence, and fancy they have gone very far in
detecting popular errors, when they can show, that there is no foundation
in nature for all that exterior modesty, which we require in the expressions,
and dress, and behaviour of the fair sex’.228 But all of that was too obvious
to need spelling out. Much more interesting would be an examination
‘after what manner such notions arise from education, from voluntary
conventions, and from the interest of society’.229 That was not the only
place in ‘Of Morals’ where Hume rather pointedly distanced himself
from Mandeville, and especially from the idea that morality should be
understood as in its entirety the product of the artifices of ‘politicians’.
At the end of his account of the origins of property Hume mentioned,
dismissively, ‘certain writers on morals’ who have tried ‘to extirpate all
sense of virtue from among mankind’ by depicting all of morality as the
product of ‘the artifice of politicians’.230 Later he rejected this picture
of the origins of morality as ‘not consistent with experience’.231 The
Mandeville that Hume was dissociating himself from in these passages
was the provocateur Mandeville of ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of Virtue’
and the Defence of Publick Stews. One of the reasons why Hume wanted to
put distance between himself and that Mandeville was that he was much
more interested in another Mandeville, the Mandeville of ‘Part Two’ of
The Fable of the Bees, who had told subtle and complex stories about the
development of moral and political institutions that made no mention of
scheming politicians and were similar in spirit, and sometimes in points
of detail, to Hume’s own conjectural histories of property, promising, and
government.232 Another reason was that, as we have seen, he agreed with
Hutcheson that there was a fatal problem with the very idea of politicians
inventing moral distinctions. ‘[E]ducation never makes us apprehend any
qualitys in objects’, Hutcheson had argued in the Inquiry, ‘which we have
not naturally senses capable of perceiving’; education might make us see
advantage to ourselves in actions which at first sight look detrimental to our
well-being, but it ‘never could have made us apprehend actions as amiable
or odious, without any consideration of our own advantage’.233 Hume
accepted the force of this argument against Mandeville. He agreed that
the moral sentiments could not be manufactured, neither by politicians
nor by anyone else. Such sentiments are natural, in the sense that they
arise in us as a matter of untutored instinct. Some traits of character please
us in a perfectly immediate and unreflective manner. This is not the case

with honesty, fidelity to promises, or allegiance, but it is true as regards
such things as ‘[m]eekness, beneficence, charity, generosity, clemency,
moderation, equity’.234
There were, then, virtues that deserved to be called natural. The answer
to the question raised but postponed in Book II’s discussion of the pride
and humility caused by virtue and vice was that, while some moral distinc-
tions arise from interest and education, others are founded on natural and
original principles. One way of reading Hume’s moral philosophy in Book
III of the Treatise is to take him to be saying that while Mandeville is right
about some elements of morality (the artificial virtues), Hutcheson is right
about the rest (the natural virtues).235 Such a reading would be seriously
mistaken. For it turns out that Hume’s understanding of what it means to
call a virtue natural is very different from Hutcheson’s. There is no rea-
son to think that Hume ever believed in the existence of what Hutcheson
called ‘the moral sense’. From the fact that moral sentiments cannot be
manufactured by politicians it did not follow, according to Hume, that
they must be produced in us by a special moral faculty, different and
distinct from all the other faculties of the mind.
Hume made this clear in his account of the natural virtues in Part
Three of the published version of ‘Of Morals’, but it was obvious already
in the places in Part Two where he turned from the origins of the artificial
virtues to brief explanations of why it is that we call honesty, fidelity to
promises, and allegiance virtues and not merely manifestations of rational
self-interest.236 The beginnings of this way of conceiving of honesty and
so forth lie, once again, in changes wrought by the mutation of small
societies into large ones. In a large society it is not always obvious why,
for instance, it is in my interests always to respect the laws of property. It
can easily seem that one instance of dishonesty is unlikely to threaten the
social order. But even in a large society I am very sensitive to, and liable to
be displeased by, the dishonesty of others. We consider their dishonesty,
as Hume put it, ‘prejudicial to human society, and pernicious to every one
that approaches the person guilty of it’.237 This cannot be out of our sense
of our own self-interest, since, in a large society, it is not always obvious
that the dishonesty of others harms us any more than our own dishonesty
does. Hume’s suggestion was that the dishonesty of others displeases us
as a function of sympathy with those whose interests they violate. We
have seen that sympathy is one of the primary principles put to work by
Hume in his explanation of the dynamics of the passions in Book II of the

Treatise. It is not in itself a moral faculty. It is in itself morally neutral,
merely a means by which we are affected, or infected, by the passions and
opinions of others, whatever they may be.238 In the case of displeasure at
the dishonesty of others, sympathy is a means by which we find ourselves
feeling the displeasure felt by victims of dishonesty. This displeasure
takes on a specifically moral character, Hume argued, when we consider
the situation from a general and impartial point of view.239 For ‘every
thing, which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey,
is call’d vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner, is
denominated virtue’. ‘[T]his’, he concluded, ‘is the reason why the sense
of moral good and evil follows upon justice and injustice’.240 The point is
that a special sense is not necessary to explain why we call justice morally
good and injustice morally evil. Sympathy, as refined and corrected by
‘the general survey’, is sufficient.
Postulation of a special moral sense was, Hume thought, at odds with
the usual procedures of good experimental science. It was a familiar fea-
ture of the natural world that observable variety is the product of a few
basic explanatory principles, and inductive study of human nature should
proceed on the assumption that the same were true of the mind. The
hypothesis of a moral sense would only be legitimate, then, if there were
no way of explaining moral distinctions in terms of more general prin-
ciples of mental functioning. And it was obvious to Hume that in fact
there was a more general principle to appeal to. Many moral distinctions
appeared to be grounded in considerations of the usefulness of virtue and
the harmfulness of vice. This was true not only of all the artificial virtues
but also of a number of the natural ones. For example, what Hume termed
‘greatness of mind’ – the ‘due degree of pride’ that we might now term
self-respect – is, Hume argued, eminently useful to us in the conduct of
life.241 The same goes for personal virtues such as courage and ambition.
Social virtues like beneficence, charity, generosity, and so on, on the other
hand, plainly make us useful to others. It is a fair presumption, he thought,
that the usefulness of a character trait is the reason why it is approved
and taken to be a virtue. For sympathy can explain how the usefulness
of a virtue, whether to the person who explains or to others, gives us
the pleasure that, suitably corrected, is distinctively moral approval. So
there is no need to look beyond sympathy and utility for the origins of
sentiments of approval and disapproval in the case of these virtues.
Hume acknowledged that there is more to our approval of virtues like

goodness and benevolence than their utility. There is also an immediate
agreeableness to such character traits, especially to the person who pos-
sesses them. This agreeableness is part of the reason why we call them
virtues. But sympathy can explain this too. Sympathy attunes us to the
agreeableness that the truly benevolent person finds in his benevolence,
and makes us take pleasure in it – which is to say, makes us approve of it.
Taking the virtues all together, Hume concluded, the fundamental basis
of moral distinctions appears to be a fourfold distinction between what
is useful to self, what is useful to others, what is agreeable to self, and
what is agreeable to others. There does not seem to be a single virtue
that is approved in light of one or more of these considerations. Here was
another aspect of Hume’s rejection of the Stoicism he had experimented
with ten years previously. To reduce all of virtue to the useful and agree-
able was to advertise a scepticism about the category of value that the
Stoics especially prized, the honestum, the good in itself, the good that
is recognised as such independently of consideration of the utile and the
dulce. For Hutcheson, the moral sense was a means of reconstructing the
concept of the honestum in modern, Lockean terms.242 The explanatory
parsimony of natural philosophy gave Hume a reason silently to endorse
Mandeville’s suspicion that the hunt for the honestum was no better than
a wild goose chase.243
Hume’s confidence that the moral sentiments could be explained in
terms of the way sympathy picks up on utility and agreeableness led
him to extend the catalogue of virtues in a manner ostentatiously at odds
with the philosophical common sense of his age.244 The very fact that he
chose ‘greatness of mind’ as the first natural virtue to examine in Part
Three of ‘Of Morals’ was an unmistakable sign of a wish to challenge the
conventional list of Christian virtues. Hume knew very well that many
considered pride, whether ‘proper’ or not, to be a vice. Christian moral-
ists, both Catholic and Protestant, had always inveighed against pride as
a prime manifestation of man’s refusal to recognise his natural sinfulness.
Hume justified himself by observing that, regardless of what Christianity
says against pride and in praise of humility, ‘the world naturally esteems a
well-regulated pride, which secretly animates our conduct without break-
ing out into such indecent expressions of vanity, as may offend the vanity
of others’.245 Hume’s treatment of greatness of mind in the Treatise was
more than twice as long as his treatment of goodness and benevolence;
and, what was even worse from the point of view of the traditionally
minded, it was followed by sections which sought to efface the difference,
first, between moral virtues and ‘natural abilities’ such as intelligence and
wit, and second, between moral virtues and ‘advantages’ such as good
looks and wealth. All of these things are either useful or agreeable, or
both, Hume argued, which left the supposed distinction between them
and moral virtues looking merely verbal, an invention of moralists seek-
ing to exploit the fact that the moral virtues, unlike natural abilities and
advantages, can be cultivated by threats of punishment and promises of
reward. This difference between moral virtues and natural abilities and
advantages does exist, but is, according to Hume, not sufficient to estab-
lish a difference in kind. Again, he believed that here he had ordinary
opinion on his side. ‘[I]n common life and conversation’, he claimed, peo-
ple ‘naturally praise and blame whatever pleases or displeases them’, and
‘consider prudence under the character of virtue as well as benevolence,
and penetration as well as justice’.246 He also pointed out the modern
obsession with the will, which was one of the reasons why the moral and
supposedly voluntary virtues had been singled out for special considera-
tion, was unknown among the ancients. Thus he told Hutcheson in his
letter of September 1739 that ‘upon the whole’ he took his catalogue of
virtues ‘from Cicero’s Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man’.247 Where
for Hutcheson Cicero was at heart a Stoic, albeit a moderate one, and a
philosopher of the honestum, for Hume he was an eclectic, and a sceptic
about all philosophical systems.248
In the ‘Advertisement’ to Book III of the Treatise, Hume claimed that
it was a self-standing work, and that the only thing that someone who
had not read Books I and II needed to be told about was the distinction
between impressions and ideas. This was probably Hume worrying that
people might be deterred from reading Book III by the reputation for
difficulty that Books I and II had already acquired. In fact, much of his
moral philosophy had its origins in the earlier volumes of the Treatise,
and especially in the account of the indirect passions given in Book II.249
For the beginnings of the moral sentiments as described by Hume lie
in, precisely, the passions of pride, humility, love, and hatred. That is,
moral estimation of greatness of mind, benevolence, intelligence, wit,
and the rest of the natural virtues starts as pride in, and love of, these
traits of character. Moral condemnation of the lack or contraries of these
virtues starts as humility and hatred. Hume stressed this very close to
the beginning of his analysis of the natural virtues, when he declared that
‘these two particulars are to be consider’d equivalent, with regard to our
mental qualities, virtue and the power of producing love or pride, vice and
the power of producing humility or hatred’.250
For Hume morality was not, as it was for Hutcheson, a unique and irre-
ducible domain of human experience. The moral sense was not elevated to
a position of authority above the passions from where it issued injunctions
as to how the passions should be regulated. Rather, moral sentiments were
passions, albeit, as we have seen, passions moderated and corrected by the
attempt to see things, morally speaking, from a maximally general and
objective point of view. According to Hume, it is not easy for us to see
things from that point of view. We know that we need to, if we are to ensure
that our moral sentiments do not clash with those of other people, but very
often, Hume suggested, we succeed in doing no more than talking, voicing
moral judgements, as if our sentiments were properly impartial. Moral
sentiments are always only sentiments after all; they are not judgements
of reason, and they are always the sentiments of a particular individual
in a particular situation.251 But even if we do manage to render our sen-
timents impartial to a degree, all we have done is modify what Hume
called our ‘taste’. And, he said, it is usually the case that mere taste is
unable to have much of an effect on what we actually do: ‘Sentiments
must touch the heart, to make them controul our passions: But they need
not extend beyond the imagination, to make them influence our taste’.252
In a manuscript correction to one of his own copies of the Treatise Hume
sought to emphasize just this point. ‘This latter principle of sympathy is
too weak to controul our passions’, he wrote; ‘but has sufficient force to
influence our taste, & give us the sentiments of approbation or blame’.253
In several places in ‘Of Morals’ Hume drew attention to the ways in which,
when it comes to the control of the passions and the regulation of action,
the moral sentiment is supplemented by the ‘artifice of politicians’ and by
‘publick praise and blame’, along with ‘private education and instruction’
and ‘the interest of our reputation’.254 With this final twist in his argument
Hume made his debt to Mandeville clear for all to see.
Parts Two and Three of ‘Of Morals’ thus went together to constitute
a comprehensive assault on central elements of Hutcheson’s moral phi-
losophy. The appearance given by Hume’s endorsement in Part One of
Hutcheson’s case against the idea that moral ideas might be manufactured
by politicians was deceptive. Hume was in no way a believer in the moral
sense as it had featured in Hutcheson’s writings. This adds to the reasons,

detailed earlier, to be unsure that Part One of ‘Of Morals’ was a feature
of the manuscript that Hume sent Hutcheson in the late spring or early
summer of 1739. Section Two of Part One has the title ‘Moral Distinc-
tions Deriv’d From a Moral Sense’ – but it is just not true that moral
distinctions as Hume explains them are derived from a moral sense. The
larger argument of ‘Of Morals’ was exactly what Hume said it was in the
‘Conclusion of this Book’. What Hume had tried to show, according to
the ‘Conclusion’, was that ‘sympathy is the chief source of moral distinc-
tions’, and in the ‘Conclusion’ this doctrine was explicitly contrasted with,
and argued to be superior to, the position of ‘[t]hose who resolve the sense
of morals into original instincts of the human mind’.255 We know for sure
that in its published form the ‘Conclusion’ was written after Hutcheson
read Hume’s manuscript. ‘I have sent you the Conclusion, as I have alter’d
it’, Hume wrote in his letter to Hutcheson of 4 March 1740, ‘that you
may see that I desire to keep on good terms even with the strictest &
most rigid’.256 In the ‘Conclusion’ Hume took Hutcheson’s advice and
tried a little warmth in the cause of virtue. He did so by arguing that his
sympathy theory of the moral sentiments did better than the moral sense
theory could when it came to self-reflexive endorsement on the part of the
moral faculty.257 He also indicated how his system of morals ‘may help us
to form a just notion of the happiness as well as of the dignity of virtue, and
may interest every principle of our nature in the embracing and cherish-
ing that noble quality’.258 But that this was not a last-minute concession
to Hutcheson’s style of moral philosophy was immediately made clear,
when Hume insisted that ‘[s]uch reflexions require a work a-part, very
different from the genius of the present’. ‘The anatomist ought never to
emulate the painter’, Hume explained: ‘nor in his accurate dissections of
the smaller parts of the body, pretend to give his figures any graceful and
engaging attitude or expression’.259 So, we might ask, what is going on in
Part One of ‘Of Morals’? Why did Hume make a show of identifying him-
self with Hutchesonianism, first by reiterating Hutcheson’s arguments
against moral rationalism, and then by appearing to endorse the view that
moral distinctions are derived from a moral sense? It is difficult to avoid
concluding that he did so merely to reassure the reader who might other-
wise have been immediately put off by the argument for the artificiality
of justice with which Part Two begins. Perhaps, on reflection, he had
decided that it would be wise not to begin with what was bound to remind
his reader of the arguments of sceptics like Mandeville and Hobbes about
the morality of moral distinctions.260
Hutcheson, we may imagine, was an acute enough reader to recognise
just how close Hume comes in ‘Of Morals’ to the Mandevilleanism that
he, Hutcheson, had sought to refute in his Inquiry. And yet, maybe
because he knew that despite this philosophical difference, deep though
it was, he and Hume were on the same side against the strict and rigid,
he was willing to help Hume to get ‘Of Morals’ published by his own
bookseller, Thomas Longman. We do not know what kind of bargain
Hume struck with Longman, but Book III of the Treatise was published
at the end of October 1740, together with the ‘Appendix’ to Books I
and II.261 It had an epigraph of its own, taken from Lucan’s Civil Wars:
‘Duræ semper virtutis amator,/Quære quid est virtus, et posce exemplar
honesti’, ‘Constant lover of austere virtue, ask what virtue is, and ask for
an example of a good man’. The lovers of austere virtue Hume had in
mind probably included both the strictly and rigidly religious and those,
like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, inclined towards the morality of the
ancient Stoics.262 His point, presumably, was that the morality that our
sentiments instruct us in is not, in fact, austere at all. It is a morality that
develops out of the pride we take in, and the love we feel for, not only
the strict virtues of justice and the Christian virtue of charity but also
the legitimate self-satisfaction of the well bred, and the pleasure taken by
us all in wisdom, good sense, wit, eloquence, good humour, a handsome
face, a shapely body, and the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy. The
man – or woman – who possesses all of these traits and advantages is, so
the argument of ‘Of Morals’ suggests, the very model of virtue.
In March 1740, Hume told Hutcheson that he waited ‘with some impa-
tience’ for a second edition of the Treatise, ‘principally on account of alter-
ations I intend to make in my performance’.263 The Appendix published
with Book III tells us something of the alterations Hume had in mind,
comprising as it does a number of clarificatory passages to be inserted at
various points in the text of Book I. ‘I have found by experience’, Hume
explained, ‘that some of my expressions have not been so well chosen,
as to guard against all mistakes in the readers’.264 Like the Abstract, the
Appendix made it clear that Hume took the theory of belief presented
in the Treatise to be his most important contribution to philosophy. The
Appendix began with a restatement of the case for the view that it is only
‘feeling or sentiment’ that distinguishes belief from simple conception,
and that the feeling in question is ‘a firmer conception, or faster hold, that we
take of the object’.265 The most remarkable feature of the Appendix itself
is a venting of despair on Hume’s part as to his ability to solve a problem
arising from his insight that the self, as it reveals itself to introspective
experience, is not a single and simple enduring substance, but rather a
collection of particular perceptions. The problem arose from the fact that,
even so, we believe ourselves to be single persons who remain the same
through time, and so it needed to be explained how that belief arises.
What, then, was ‘the principle of connexion, which binds [our particular
perceptions] together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity’?
Hume now believed that the answer to this question given in Book I of
the Treatise was ‘very defective’ – but he was unable to improve upon it.
He found he must ‘plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this
difficulty is too hard for my understanding’.266
Further evidence of changes that Hume intended to make in a second
edition is provided by copies of the book containing corrections made
in Hume’s handwriting. One of these copies – referred to earlier, and
of which only Volume Three is extant – was reported in the nineteenth
century to contain ‘a vast of corrections and additions in the handwriting
of the author’.267 But the letter to Hutcheson of March 1740 is the last
we hear of a second edition of the Treatise. The next surviving letter,
to Kames, is dated June 1742, and by that time Hume was preoccupied
by the success of the first volume of his essays. He told Kames that
the essays ‘may prove like dung with marl, & bring forward the rest of
my philosophy, which is of a more durable, though of a harder & more
stubborn nature’268 – which may indicate that he was still hoping for a
new edition of the Treatise, or may look forward to the reformatting of
Hume’s philosophy that would be begun in the Philosophical Essays. At
some point in the early 1740s, anyway, Hume gave up on the Treatise
altogether. We cannot be certain why.269 In ‘My Own Life’ he intimated
that it was because of the poor reception given the first three volumes,
but the truth is that their reception was not so very poor at all. They
were relatively widely reviewed, and, if the reviews were largely negative
because uncomprehending, surely that was only what was to be expected
in the case of a book so full of new opinions and terminology that its
author felt that he ‘cou’d not propose by any abridgement to give my
system an air of likelyhood, or so much as make it intelligible’.270 It is
more plausible that Hume’s experiments with the essay form persuaded
him that he could give his ideas more ‘likelyhood’, and make them more
intelligible, by presenting them in an entirely new way.
And what of the further books on politics and criticism that Hume
promised in the Advertisement to Books I and II? They were alluded
to again in the Abstract, but not after that. There is in fact no evidence
that they were even so much as begun. It is possible that a Book IV on
criticism would have stood in the same kind of relation to Hutcheson’s
account of judgements of beauty as does Book III to Hutcheson’s account
of judgements in morals. An attempt would have been made, very likely,
to explain our ideas of beauty without recourse to a Hutchesonian special
sense. A hint, perhaps, of what Hume’s approach would have been is to
be found in his remark that the sense of beauty ‘depends very much’ on
the principle of sympathy, as is shown by the fact that ‘where any object
has tendency to produce pleasure in its possessor, it is always regarded
as beautiful’: hence ‘Most of the works of art are esteem’d beautiful in
proportion to their fitness for the use of man, and even many of the
productions of nature derive their beauty from that source’.271 It is likely
that another touchstone for a book on criticism would have been Dubos’
Reflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture. Dubos’s main concern
was the explanation of the various kinds of pleasure that we are given by
the various kinds of art. His approach to the pleasures of tragedy, as we
will see in Chapter 5, was an important reference point for Hume in the
essay ‘Of Tragedy’ – and it is possible that a Book IV of the Treatise would
have considered the same question. Fontenelle would probably have been
important too. ‘There is not in the world a finer piece of criticism than
Fontenelle’s Dissertation on Pastorals’, Hume says in the 1742 essay ‘Of
Simplicity and Refinement’; ‘wherein, by a number of reflections and
philosophical reasonings, he endeavours to fix the just medium, which is
suitable to that species of writing’.272
As for the projected Book V on politics, something of a puzzle might
seem to be created by the inclusion in Book III of discussions of the origin
of government and of the source and limits of allegiance. Those sound
like issues in politics, not morals. But they were issues that, according to
Hume, naturally arose out of a consideration of the origins of justice. When
it came to justice, on Hume’s view, there was in fact no clean distinction
to be drawn between morality and politics. The obligation to justice is
as much a political obligation as a moral one. Also, of course, political
obligation itself has a moral dimension. But spelling these things out did
not exhaust the interest that an anatomist of human nature might have
in politics. There were further questions to be asked about the origins
of civil society, and about the different forms that government took.
Did an analysis of human nature, taken together with a general account
of the circumstances in which human beings found themselves, help to
provide a schema whereby to understand the stages through which society
developed as human beings moved from the most primitive state towards
the invention of law, arts, and sciences? Could such an analysis illuminate
the most fundamental differences between monarchical, aristocratic, and
republican forms of government? Hume’s age believed that the answer
to both questions was ‘Yes’. The theory of human nature was the point
of departure for explorations of these issues by fellow Scots such as
Kames, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar. A conjectural
account of human history that divided the progress of society into four
stages – hunting-gathering, shepherding, agriculture, and commerce –
was a central feature of the analyses of social and political life that they
developed. All were deeply influenced by Montesquieu’s approach to
the understanding of the historical and geographical determinants of the
systems of laws characteristic of the forms of government. A Book V
of the Treatise would surely have made a path-finding journey through
this kind of terrain. It would, we may imagine, have built on the theory
of justice of Book III to offer a detailed history of property, and of the
different forms property takes in the stages of societal development. As
Smith did later, Hume might have taken inspiration from the theories of
sociability laid out in the natural jurisprudence of Grotius and Pufendorf,
and combined them with a full-blown account of human nature to produce
a science of origins and fundamental features of the commercial societies
of the modern world. It is arguable that Hume provided the philosophical
foundations of the lectures on jurisprudence in which Smith explored
these questions while a professor at Glasgow.273 Hume’s moral philosophy
was foundational also for the history of civil society developed by Millar in
The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.274 There seems no reason to doubt
that, had he wanted to, Hume himself could have used his own theory of
human nature to something like the same end.
3
Essayist
n december 1737, soon after his return from France, Hume had written
I to Henry Home of Kames confessing ‘a certain shamefacedness I have
to appear among you at my years without having yet a settlement or so
much as having attempted any’. ‘How happens it’, he continued, ‘that
we philosophers cannot as heartily despise the world as it despises us?’1
Hume was perhaps embarrassed, not so much at not having secured a
‘settlement’, a position in the world, a job, as at not having even tried to
find one. Ever since leaving college, apart from the months spent with a
merchant in Bristol in 1734, he had devoted himself single-mindedly to
the satisfaction of his passion for literature. He hoped the Treatise would
show that he had been right to do so. Yet Hume is unlikely to have hoped
that by itself the Treatise would enable him to establish himself to the
world as an independent man of letters. It was not a book that was going
to appeal to the public at large. The best that could happen was that it
would give him a reputation among the cognoscenti, men like Hutcheson,
Pope, and Des Maizeaux. Back at Ninewells in the summer of 1739,
Hume seems to have accepted that paid employment might be necessary
while he waited for his name to become more generally known. His first
thought was of a job as a private tutor and governor. In November 1739,
he wrote to a Borders neighbour, George Carre of Nisbet, asking for his
advice as to the possibility of going abroad with Carre’s cousins, the earl
of Haddington and his brother.2 Nothing came of this plan, however, nor,
for the moment, of any other, and Hume would remain at home with his
mother, brother, and sister until the spring of 1745. That meant that he
could continue with a life given over to reading and writing.
The most significant works to appear during this period were two vol-
umes of Essays, Moral and Political, the first published in June or July
1741, the second in January 1742. The essay had the potential to be
another, somewhat more direct route to literary fame. It was at the time a
143
very popular genre. The essays published by Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele in The Spectator and The Tatler had had when first published, and
continued to have, an enormous readership. They were brilliant combi-
nations of gentle wit and wholesome morals, written in a language that
seemed to their age the epitome of fine writing. Like many others, Hume
wanted to show that such ‘politeness’ was not completely impossible north
of the Tweed.3 He took as a model also the most effective party political
paper of the time, Bolingbroke’s The Craftsman. Addison had been care-
fully neutral and non-committal about the issues that factionalized British
politics in the reign of Anne. In the very first number of The Spectator,
Mr. Spectator averred that he was ‘resolved to observe an exact neutrality
between the Whigs and the Tories, unless I shall be forc’d to declare my
self by the hostilities of either side’.4 Bolingbroke, by contrast, was openly
and aggressively critical of the Whig government that had been in place
since Anne’s death in 1714. Hume did not share Bolingbroke’s politics,
but he did share his ambition of engaging closely and critically with the
most contentious political questions of the day. In the ‘Advertisement’
to the first volume of Essays, Moral and Political Hume declared that his
essays ‘were intended to comprehend the designs both of the Spectators
and Craftsmen’. He also said that he had written them with a view to
publishing them in a journal of his own. That plan was soon abandoned,
‘partly from laziness, partly from want of leizure’.5
There is evidence that Hume had been trying out as an essayist since at
least the summer of 1739. In June of that year he enclosed two ‘papers’ in
a letter to Kames, and said that he had ‘hints’ for two or three more. He
was, however, not just then in the mood for that kind of writing, ‘having
receiv’d news from London of the success of my philosophy, which is but
indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the books, & if I may believe my
bookseller’.6 Nevertheless he had completed two new essays a month later.
‘One of the papers will be found very cold’, he warned Kames; ‘& the other
be esteem’d somewhat sophystical’. Kames was in turn sending him essays
of his own. It is sometimes said, though without any evidence, that the
journal Hume thought of setting up was to be a joint effort with Kames.
Whether or not that is true, these letters make it clear that, to begin with,
Hume did not turn to the essay form in disappointment at the indifferent
success of the Treatise. The essays that Hume was sending Kames were
written before Book III of the Treatise was published. It is worth bearing
in mind also that the earliest of all of Hume’s surviving writings, the piece
Essayist 145
on chivalry and modern honour, is described in its title as an essay. Hume

had a long-standing interest in the essay form. There are some respects,
as we will see, in which the essays published in 1741 and 1742 developed
lines of thought opened up in the Treatise. Mostly, though, they broke
different intellectual ground. This might be why Hume described himself
as a ‘new author’ in the Advertisement.7 Probably he was keen that Essays,
Moral and Political be judged on its own terms, and that its fate not be
connected with and dependent upon that of the Treatise.
In this chapter Essays, Moral and Political is considered from a number
of points of view.8 Hume asked that his reader not look for any connection
at all between the essays. Each essay, he wrote in the Advertisement,
should be considered ‘as a work apart’. ‘This is an indulgence that is given
to all essay-writers’, he explained, ‘and is an equal ease both to writer
and reader, by freeing them from any tiresome stretch of attention or
application’.9 We will go some way towards respecting Hume’s wishes
by considering separately the essays in which Hume tried his hand at
Addisonian politeness and those in which he engaged with party political
questions of the kind discussed in Bolingbroke’s Craftsman. And we will
treat as different in kind from both of those groups of essays a number
of the pieces included in the volume published in 1742, which showed
Hume exploring various aspects of the comparison so often made in the
eighteenth century between the achievements of the ancient world and
the modern. Several of the political essays collected in Essays, Moral and
Political combined lessons in moderation aimed at both sides of the party
divide with more general reflections on the fundamental principles of
politics. The elaboration of general principles came first in these essays,
and the lesson in moderation was presented as an application of those
principles. Another goal of the present chapter is to characterize the more
systematic, philosophical theory of politics that seems to have underlain
Hume’s treatment of the politics of party. We begin, though, with a
manuscript text that gives some sense at least of the reading on political
and historical subjects that Hume had done by the time he turned from
the anatomy of the mind to the anatomy of politics.
Preparation for the Study of Politics

Among the manuscripts in Hume’s handwriting bequeathed to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh by Hume’s nephew David and currently on loan
to the National Library of Scotland, there are twenty-six loose pages of

what appear to be notes taken from reading, interspersed with a num-
ber of comments and reflections.10 They probably date from the early
1740s.11 None of them makes specific reference to works published after
1738. Different topics and different authors are jumbled up together. The
notes taken as a whole do not, in fact, look much like notes taken while
books were being read and digested for the first time. They look rather
more like memoranda, notes taken from notes, as if Hume was looking
through other notebooks and culling from them various discrete facts and
observations. The reading that was the basis for these memoranda had
probably been done some time previously, quite possibly during Hume’s
time in France, or even earlier. The notes are all brief, usually comprising
just a single sentence. One page, only about three-quarters filled, is titled
‘Natural Philosophy’. Five of the pages are grouped under the heading
‘Philosophy’. Both of these two collections of notes are strongly marked
by an interest in Baylean scepticism that was by the early 1740s at least ten
years old.12 The notes on ‘Natural Philosophy’ suggest that in his reading
he had been struck by instances of difficulties that natural philosophy met
with as it extended itself from Newtonian cosmology and optics into the
realms of what we would now call chemistry, meteorology, and biology.
One of the notes expresses a scepticism about modern natural science
more extreme than Hume himself endorsed: ‘A proof that natural philos-
ophy has no truth in it, is, that it has only succeeded in things remote, as
the heavenly bodys, or minute as light’.13
Prominent in the notes gathered under the heading ‘Philosophy’ is an
interest in the problem traditionally thought to be posed to theism by
the existence in the world of evil, both natural, in the form most notably
of physical pain, and moral, in the form of vice. Bayle had argued in
the ‘Pauliciens’ entry in the Dictionnaire that this problem is insoluble,
prompting replies from Leibniz, the Irish bishop William King, the natu-
ral lawyer Jean Barbeyrac, and others. Hume gave particular attention to
King’s arguments. With respect to moral evil, King had argued, first, that
man’s free will means that God cannot be held responsible for man’s sins,
and second, that God had good reasons to give man free will.14 A number
of Hume’s notes are indicative of his inability, as a result of his reading
of Bayle, to accept this solution. Several are directly attributed to ‘Baile’.
One reads: ‘God cou’d have prevented all abuses of liberty without taking
away liberty. Therefore liberty no solution of difficultys. Baile.’15 In the
Essayist 147
Philosophical Essays on Human Understanding, Hume would return to the

problem of evil, in a manner suggesting that Bayle remained his guide.
And as we saw in Chapter 116 there is evidence that Hume had early on
made a systematic study of the problem, in the form of a brief manuscript
fragment in Hume’s hand, probably written during the very late 1730s
or early 1740s, exploring the difficulties caused for the theist by evil in
respect of proofs of God’s benevolence.17 Again, Bayle may well have
been a principal source of inspiration. Even if appearances are deceptive,
Hume argued there, and good is in fact predominant over evil, it is surely
only slightly so, and therefore the balance of good and evil is no solid basis
for a proof of God’s benevolence. This fragment, tantalizingly, is headed
‘Sect. 7 Fourth Objection’. What it is the seventh section of can only be
guessed at. It is not impossible that the notes on ‘Philosophy’ were taken
down as part of the preparations for the writing of an extended treatment
of philosophical religion. If so, the project was abandoned at the same
time as the Treatise was abandoned, to be reconceived, like the Treatise,
in very different terms.
It is plain that the rest of the notes18 were once part of a yet larger
collection, for the first entry is a continuation from a previous page. This
group, by far the most numerous, mostly comprises notes and remarks on
topics in history, politics, and religion. The books that Hume had been
reading seem to have been, in large part, descriptions and analyses of trade,
particularly trade between England, France, and Holland, along with gen-
eral comparative accounts of the economic situations of these countries.
The novelty of political reflection on trade was underlined by one mem-
orandum in particular. ‘There is not a word of trade in all Matchiavel
[i.e., Machiavelli]’, Hume observed, ‘which is strange considering that
Florence rose only by trade’.19 For Hume, it would seem, Machiavelli
was not the inventor of modern politics that he has been for more recent
historians of political thought. In The Fable of the Bees Mandeville had
suggested that the entire basis of national security and prosperity in the
modern age needed to be rethought. Whereas it had been argued by
many inspired by the classical republican tradition, like Machiavelli, that
a nation prospered just as far as its citizens were animated by a spirit of
self-sacrifice and a general willingness to serve the state in whatever way
the state needed, including taking up arms for it, Mandeville had claimed
that the health of a nation is intimately bound up with the health of its
trade, and that therefore it was not the virtue of citizens that mattered,
but rather their commercial dexterity, their willingness to borrow and

invest, and, ultimately, their greed and ambition. This was not an entirely
new thesis. Similar ideas had been developed by writers reflecting upon
the distress of France at the end of the seventeenth century, and upon
the contrast between France, with its enormous military machine and
national obsession with honour and glory, and Holland, weak in military
terms and notably down to earth in its manners, but increasingly powerful
on account of its traders and bankers. The memoranda suggest that by
the early 1740s, Hume had read widely in these writers.
It might have been that this interest of Hume’s was piqued by a desire
to understand the world he had found when he moved away from familiar
Scotland, first to the vital commercial hub that was Bristol in the first half
of the eighteenth century, and then to a France vigorously debating how
to end decades of financial crisis. It is also conceivable that experiences in
early life excited an interest on Hume’s part in the workings of the economy
and of commerce.20 He grew up on a farm and would have been familiar
with the concerns of landowners and their tenants and employees. As late
as 1739 and 1740, there was the threat of famine in Scotland, and since the
late 1720s, concerted efforts had been made, through measures such as
the establishment of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufac-
tures, to improve the prosperity of the country. Bristol, where Hume spent
four months in 1734, was at the time the second largest city in England.
The merchant for whom he worked there was engaged in the business of
the owners of plantations in Jamaica, and in his offices Hume would have
become acquainted with customs duties and freight charges, with methods
for the provision of credit and the use of bills of exchange, with insurance,
and with the extraction of profit through percentages of commission. It is
perhaps evidence of an early interest in matters of commerce that Hume
bought a pamphlet published in 1735 by a former Barbados planter and
colonial administrator named John Ashley, entitled Some Considerations
on a Direct Exportation of Sugar from the British Islands and arguing that
the requirement that sugar from the Caribbean be traded through ports
on the British mainland severely limited its export market in the rest of
Europe.21 Several of the memoranda concern the sugar trade.
The memoranda suggest wide reading on Hume’s part in what at this
time was known as ‘political arithmetic’. The phrase had been coined
by Sir William Petty and used as a title for a book first published in
1690, the subtitle of which explained that it was a Discourse concerning
Essayist 149
the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings; Husbandry, Manufacture,

Commerce, Fishery, Artizans, Seamen, Soldiers; Publick Revenues, Interest,
Taxes, Superlucration [i.e., profit], Registries, Banks; Valuation of Men,
Increasing of Seamen, of Militia’s, Harbours, Situation, Shipping, Power
at Sea, &c. This is not a bad summary of the topics on which Hume
makes notes in the memoranda not grouped under the headings ‘Natural
Philosophy’ and ‘Philosophy’. Equally pertinent is Petty’s declaration, in
the rest of the subtitle, that his book details how these topics relate to every
Country in general, but more particularly to the Territories of His Majesty of
Great Britain, and his Neighbours of Holland, Zealand, and France. Petty’s
achievement was to introduce a hitherto unknown degree of precision
into the assessment of national prosperity: as he says himself, he took the
course of expressing himself ‘in terms of number, weight, or measure’,
and of using ‘only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes, as
have visible foundations in nature’.22 There is no reference to Petty in the
memoranda, but one of the notes suggests that Hume read, or was at least
familiar with, the writings of another exponent of political arithmetic,
Sir Charles Davenant. For Davenant, as for Petty, the crucial question
was how to assess the situation of England relative to its neighbours, and
especially to France, but also to Holland. Another early contributor to
this debate had been Sir William Temple in Observations upon the United
Provinces of the Netherlands, to which Hume referred in another note.
There are several notes also concerning an important work by the Dutch
writer John de Witt, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick
of Holland and West-Friesland, first published in 1669 and translated into
English in 1702, and other notes make reference to the État de la France
by Henri de Boulainvilliers, published (in London) in 1727 but written
twenty or thirty years earlier.
Hume’s exploration of political arithmetic was not restricted to the
modern world alone. Approximately half of the memoranda are drawn
from reading in a wide variety of ancient sources, principally works of
history and biography, such as Livy, Polybius, Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, and Plutarch. There are notes about the size of farms in
ancient Italy, the cost of a meal in Rome, the scarcity of horses in the
ancient world before the rise of Rome, the productivity of slaves in the
silver mines of Athens, the daily pay in the Athenian army, the number
of holidays in a year in Athens and in Tarentum, how much an Athenian
judge earned, the defectiveness of ancient navigation, and the contents of
the Athenian treasury at the time of Pericles. The seriousness of Hume’s

engagement with such questions is perhaps indicated by a note in which
Hume, having taken down from Demosthenes that ‘The census of the
Athenians was 6000 Talents’, asked himself ‘Whether was this the annual
or the whole stock’, since ‘If the latter, their forces must have been vastly
high, since the twelfth part was sometimes exacted’. To this there is added,
in a way that makes it plain that Hume returned to this question some
time later, ‘It was the whole stock as Polybius says expressly. Lib. 2. C.
63.’23 The population of the ancient world was as interesting to Hume
as the population of the modern world, and his reading of the relevant
sources would eventually enable the writing of a very substantial essay,
published in the Political Discourses of 1752, on the question of whether
or not the ancient world had been more populous than the modern. As
will be seen when we consider this essay in Chapter 5, the question of
the populousness of the modern world relative to the ancient was not of
purely antiquarian interest in the eighteenth century. Size of population
was taken as a key indicator of the health and prosperity of a nation, and
the common opinion that more people had lived in the ancient world was
part and parcel of the view that the story of European civilization since
the Roman era was a story of more or less continuous decline.24
Hume’s interest in the ancient world was never a matter of highlighting
the contrast between ancient glory and modern mediocrity. Twenty-one
entries in the memoranda are from Livy, more than from any other
author, but Hume had none of Livy’s nostalgia for a lost past. Taken as a
whole, the memoranda suggest that he simply regarded an understanding
of Athens, Rome, and the other city-states of the ancient world as an
essential component of an understanding of more recent times. One of the
memoranda begins with the observation that ‘There seems to be a natural
course of things which brings on the destruction of great empires.’ Hume
went on to summarize a very standard account of this ‘natural course of
things’, on which the acquisition of extensive colonies leads to luxury and
a softening of manners, such that, in the end, the soldiers used by the
imperial power to police the frontiers of the empire turn on their masters,
which inevitably leads to, in Hume’s words, ‘disorder, violence, anarchy
& tyranny, & dissolution of empire’.25 The question for Hume and his
contemporaries was whether modern empires were bound to follow suit.
In addition, but very closely related, to the question of how prosper-
ity was to be measured and how its fluctuations were to be gauged was
Essayist 151
the question of what could be done by a state, in the way of legislation,

to improve its financial situation relative to that of its neighbours and
competitors. Hume seems to have taken an early interest in the prac-
tical challenges and opportunities presented to small and undeveloped
countries, such as Scotland and Ireland, in an era of massively increasing
international trade. Some of the memoranda make reference, for example,
to John Law’s Money and Trade Consider’d, in which it was proposed that
Scotland might increase its wealth by increasing its supply of money, and
that the way to increase the supply of money was through the establish-
ment of a bank which would issue currency in paper, as opposed to silver,
backed by the value of land. The immediate context for Law’s proposal
was the debate, at an advanced stage by the time Money and Trade Con-
sider’d was published in 1705, about whether the solution to Scotland’s
depressed circumstances was a union of its parliament with the parliament
of England. The implication of Law’s view was that union was not nec-
essary. Such were Scotland’s natural advantages, he claimed, that ‘If the
same Measures had been taken in Scotland for encouraging Trade, as was
taken in Holland, we had been a more powerful and richer Nation than
Holland.’26 On the minds of many of his fellow Scots, however, was the
fate of Ireland at the hands of England when, at the end of the previous
century, it had been made anxious about the challenge posed to its man-
ufacturers by a nearby nation with considerably lower labour costs. The
situation of Ireland is explored in some detail in another book that Hume
read, Arthur Dobbs’s Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland.27
In most of the books from which Hume was taking notes, political arith-
metic was mixed up with political economy. The first chapter of Petty’s
book had been intended to prove ‘That a small country and few people, by
its situation, trade, and policy, may be equivalent in wealth and strength,
to a far greater people and territory: and particularly that conveniences
for shipping and water-carriage, do most eminently and fundamentally
conduce thereunto’.28 What Petty sought to prove was that a country such
as Holland, occupying an area an eightieth of the size of that of France,
might become one-third as rich and strong. From there he moved on to
a question that only became more pressing as the decades passed: How
might England learn from Holland and gain a definitive advantage over
its perpetual rival France? Temple had argued that Dutch frugality, or
‘parsimony’, had been a key factor in the rise of Dutch power.29 Man-
deville regarded this as the wrong kind of explanation. ‘The Dutch may
ascribe their present grandeur to the virtue and frugality of their ancestors
as they please’, he declared in The Fable of the Bees; ‘but what made that
contemptible spot of ground so considerable among the principal powers
of Europe has been their political wisdom in postponing every thing to
merchandise and navigation, the unlimited liberty of conscience that is
enjoyed among them, and the unwearied application with which they have
always made use of the most effectual means to encourage and increase
trade in general’.30 It was often said that Dutch economic success had
its roots not only in the priority given to ‘merchandise and navigation’ –
priority over agriculture in particular – but also in its system of politi-
cal liberty, including freedom of conscience. Interspersed among Hume’s
memoranda on political arithmetic and political economy are memoranda
on more purely political matters pertaining to the balance of power in
particular constitutions, and pertaining also to the influence of priests in
the ancient world. For writers such as De Witt and Jean le Clerc, whose
Histoire des Provinces-Unies des Pays Bas is also referred to in the memo-
randa, it was a pressing question, what the relation was between different
kinds of political constitution and different degrees of commercial success.
This was a question in which Hume, too, had a keen interest.
It is likely that Hume read widely in the French periodicals while in
Rheims and La Flèche, and that as a result he learned what was being
debated at the time by French writers on political and economic questions.
Their agenda had to a significant extent been set by Law, and by the
consequences of the adoption in France of the financial schemes he had
proposed to his fellow Scots in 1705. A combination of the idea of a
bank issuing paper money backed by its silver reserves and the idea of
selling shares in a company owning exclusive trading rights in the then
enormous province of Louisiana had generated a financial ‘bubble’ the
collapse of which had, as Joseph Pâris-Duverney put it, ‘left France more
exhausted than it had been by twenty-five years of war, and by continual
losses at the end of the reign of Louis XIV’.31 Pâris-Duverney is not
referred to in the memoranda, but Hume certainly read him at some
point, for he mentioned him in a footnote to the essay ‘Of Money’ in
the Political Discourses.32 Pâris-Duverney was writing in answer to an
author who is mentioned in the memoranda, Charles de Ferrère Dutot,
and Dutot was in turn writing in answer to Jean-François Melon, who
again is not mentioned in the memoranda, but who would be central to
the dialectical context of the Political Discourses as a whole, and whom it
would be remarkable if Hume did not read while in France in the 1730s.
Essayist 153
Melon had been secretary to Law’s American trading company. In

1734, he published, anonymously, his Essai politique sur le commerce, in
effect a defence of Law’s assignment of priority to the supply of money,
and a defence of commerce as a means of national aggrandisement superior
to the brute force of military power. ‘The spirit of conquest, and the spirit
of commerce, mutually exclude each other, in a nation’, Melon argued; but
the spirit of commerce is a more permanent source of power, since, unlike
the spirit of conquest, it ‘is always accompanied by the wisdom necessary
for preservation. Courage is exercised, and kept up, by dangers, to which,
long voyages are liable, although it be not agitated, by the unruly ambition
of invading its neighbours lands’.33 It was part and parcel of Melon’s
argument that luxury, under attack in France since the rise of Fénelon
and the fall of Colbert, should be recognised as ‘always . . . attendant,
upon every well-governed society’.34 Luxury was for Melon an incentive
to economic growth. It could be presumed that there was a universal desire
for more than simply the most basic necessities of life. That desire was no
other than the desire of luxury – for luxury is always a relative concept, a
name for the superfluities whose nature is ever changing as the wealth of
society as a whole increases. The appetite for luxury was, indeed, the motor
of commerce itself: commerce being definable as nothing other than ‘the
permutation of what is superfluous or superabundant, for what is necessary’.35
Mandeville appears to have been a strong influence on Melon’s thought.
In his Réflexions Politiques sur les Finances et le Commerce, published in
1738, Dutot, who had also worked for Law, criticized Melon’s monetary
ideas, arguing that ‘Money is the pledge or equivalent of our reciprocal
exchanges, and the measure which regulates the value of exchanged goods.
And therefore it ought to be kept as sacred and fixed, as any other standard
or common measure’.36 But Dutot was in agreement with Melon as to the
importance for France of the cultivation of the spirit of commerce. In the
international arena, he wrote, ‘it is the first reason of state’.37 Navigation
and commerce had raised both England and Holland: many arguments
could be given to show ‘that France would reap vast advantages from
commerce and navigation, if the taste for commerce could be further
promoted in France’.38 ‘To make peace, in order to procure ourselves all
the advantages of an extensive commerce’, Dutot concluded, ‘is to make
war upon our enemies. Let us have no more to do therefore with those
victories that are gained by ruinous means. Let glory sleep and be at rest’.39
The preface to the English translation of Dutot, published in 1739,
made it obvious that the confidence in France’s capacity for renewed
self-assertion, in the field of commerce rather than purely through military

strength, was a matter of considerable concern in Britain by the late 1730s.
The translator remarked, for example, that
The present ministry of France hath learned, from experience, to correct the bad
measures of former reigns; and by pursuing a course of sound politicks, hath
brought their trade, in all its branches, to such an advantageous footing, that it
flourishes and advances daily as fast as that of some of her neighbours is falling
into decay. When such is our situation with regard to our most dangerous rival
power, methinks, ’tis high time for the genius of Britain to awake.40
But what, exactly, was the genius of Britain to apply itself to? Dutot’s
translator was one of many who, contrary to what Dutot and Melon had
argued, regarded an ever-increasing taste for luxury as the cause of a
nation’s relative economic decline. ‘[I]t appears’, he claimed, ‘that we take
much more of the French commodities, arts and manufactures, than they
take of ours; by which, so far as it is unnecessary, we contribute to our own
undoing’.41 What the translator described as ‘true patriot zeal’ therefore
required a breaking of the addiction to ‘this mischievous luxury’, both
by means of enactment by the legislature of sumptuary laws, and by a
general ‘abstaining from the use of those foreign goods and commodities,
the importation whereof is so ruinous to their country’.42 At the time the
translation was published, this kind of language had a definite political
meaning. Despite his claim not to be intent on promoting ‘the sinister
views of a party’, Dutot’s translator was locating himself among those
opposed to the government of Sir Robert Walpole, a government closely
identified (by its opponents) with the interrelated financial instruments
– a national debt, paper credit, ‘stock-jobbery’, the giant trading com-
panies – that appeared to enable widespread conspicuous consumption.
The reading that Hume had been doing would have led him fairly directly
from matters of political arithmetic and political economy to the party
divisions that were the most notable feature of the British parliamentary
politics of the time.
Experiments in Addisonianism
One of the ‘papers’ that Hume sent Kames in the summer of 1739 was an
early draft of an essay that would be published in the second volume of
Essays, Moral and Political with the title ‘Of Moral Prejudices’. Like many
Essayist 155
of Hume’s essays, it was an attempt to negotiate a middle way between

extreme opposites.43 It began by setting out a contrast between two dif-
ferent ways of writing about moral topics, both intended to be recognised
as current, even fashionable. On the one hand there was cynical and licen-
tious mockery of what most people take to be sacred and venerable, the
libertine’s laughter at ‘[r]eason, sobriety, honour, friendship, marriage’, at
even ‘public spirit, and a regard to our country’.44 Hume may have had in
the mind the world-weary amoralism of the court culture of Restoration
England, epitomised in Rochester’s ‘Satyre against Reason and Mankind’,
and generally supposed to have been revived among the ‘Court Whigs’
who had been in government since the early 1720s.45 Those opposed to
the government certainly affected to believe that the consequence of Court
Whig cynicism would be that, as Hume put it in the essay, ‘a free constitu-
tion of government must become a scheme perfectly impracticable among
mankind, and must degenerate at last into one universal system of fraud
and corruption’.46 On the other hand there was what Hume called ‘that
grave philosophic endeavour after perfection, which, under the pretext of
reforming prejudices and errors, strikes at all the most endearing senti-
ments of the heart, and all the most useful byasses and instincts, which
can govern a human creature’.47 This was the ‘folly’ of the Stoics, and
also of ‘some of the more venerable characters in latter times’ who have
‘copied them too faithfully in this particular’. It is possible that Hume was
alluding to Shaftesbury here. And so it may be that we can understand
this essay as motivated at least in part by philosophical errors he had
himself made in early youth. We speculated in Chapter 1 that after leav-
ing college, Hume took up, precisely, a Stoic, and maybe Shaftesburyan,
philosophical endeavour after perfection. Having experienced for himself
the damage that kind of endeavour can do to the nerves and temperament,
he rejected wholesale the theory of human nature upon which ancient
philosophy was predicated, and proposed his own, properly scientific,
account in the Treatise. ‘Of Moral Prejudices’, like the Treatise taken as a
whole, proposes a compromise position between a purely sceptical view of
human beings as blind and selfish and an overly optimistic view of them
as able to transcend their limitations by means of rational self-discipline.
At the same time, ‘Of Moral Prejudices’ was quite different from any-
thing in the Treatise. The sketch of the two contrasting moral philosophies
was followed by a description of a man named Eugenius, who studied hard
when young, married when he turned thirty, had several children and then
lost his wife, and is now consoled not by philosophy but by his young fam-
ily, and in particular by a daughter who reminds him of his dead spouse.
Eugenius’s tenderness for his children is not regarded by him, as it would
be by a Stoic, as a weakness. It is not a source of shame. He accepts it as
entirely natural. It is also exactly what it seems to be, and so functions
as a refutation of the libertine’s argument that human beings are and can
only be self-interested, that every generous action or word is and can
only be hypocrisy. After this came a letter that the author of the essay
says he received from a friend in Paris, dated August 1737. It gave an
account of the measures taken by an unnamed ‘young lady of birth and
fortune’, a ‘philosophical heroine’, to get a son without having to commit
herself to a husband. She in effect seduced a man, got herself a child by
him, and then offered him money to leave her and the child alone. The
story is supposed to ‘serve as an example, not to depart too far from the
receiv’d maxims of conduct and behaviour, by a refin’d search after hap-
piness or perfection’.48 There was no more reason to think this letter to be
authentic than there was to think that ‘Eugenius’ was a real person. Nor
could it be supposed that the ‘I’ of the essay was to be straightforwardly
identified with Hume himself. Here we are a long way from Montaigne’s
pioneering use of the essay as a means of revealing the complexities and
contradictions of the self. ‘Of Moral Prejudices’ was very much closer to
the playful ventriloquism of the essays of Addison’s Spectator. Issues of
Addison’s daily paper were regularly filled with letters from imaginary
correspondents. They were also densely peopled with fictional characters
by means of whom Addison and Steele constructed the imaginary world of
Mr. Spectator’s club. And of course Addison’s and Steele’s ‘I’, Mr. Spec-
tator himself, was just as much a work of fiction as Sir Roger de Coverley
or Sir Andrew Freeport. ‘Of Moral Prejudices’ reads like a rather self-
conscious work of imitation.
The first issues of The Spectator had appeared in 1711, the same year
that Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks was published. In one respect Addison
and Shaftesbury can be understood as having shared an agenda. Both were
moralists who believed that there was nothing to learn about life and how it
is to be lived from what was being taught in the universities. Mr. Spectator
says that he is ambitious to have it said of him that he had ‘brought
philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in
clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses’.49 He compares
himself to Socrates, as described by Cicero the Tusculan Disputations: the
Essayist 157
Socrates who was ‘the first to call philosophy down from the heavens
and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes, and
compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and
evil’.50 Shaftesbury, too, was intent on reviving the ancient conception of
philosophy, and on making philosophical reflection central to the attempt
to be true to oneself in all the situations of life. But there were also
significant differences between the practical projects of the author of the
Characteristicks and the author of The Spectator. There was something
very rarefied about the world in which Shaftesbury’s reader was invited
to situate himself.51 It was not a solitary world, but nor was it the ordinary
world of family relations, business, and politics. It was a world of polite and
erudite conversation among friends in elegant rooms and beautiful parks.
It is easy to imagine someone who had immersed himself in that world
finding it hard to reconnect with the mundane matters of everyday life.
The Spectator, by contrast, was loud with the noise of the mundane and
the everyday. It was nothing if not polite – there was nothing awkwardly
immoderate about its morals, or its politics, or its religion – but the
politeness was that of people actively concerned with deciding legal cases,
winning elections, hunting foxes, and making money. Addison imagined
his readers to be men and women of ‘the middle condition’. They were,
this was to say, neither aristocrats nor of the manufacturing and labouring
classes. They were members of the gentry and owners of, and investors
in, commercial enterprises. They were lawyers and doctors, and holders
of offices in government and in the church. And they were the wives
and daughters of these men. ‘The middle condition seems to be the
most advantageously situated for the gaining of wisdom’, Addison wrote.
‘Poverty turns our thoughts too much upon the supplying of our wants,
and riches upon enjoying our superfluities’.52
In ‘Of the Middle Station of Life’ Hume presented his essays as aimed
at just the same element of society, and for the same reason. This was
presumably another self-conscious imitation of Addison. Those ‘plac’d in
the middle station’, he wrote, ‘form the most numerous rank of men, that
can be suppos’d susceptible of philosophy; and therefore, all discourses
of morality ought principally to be address’d to them’. ‘The great are
too much immers’d in pleasure’, he explained; ‘and the poor too much
immers’d in providing for the necessities of life, to hearken to the calm
voice of reason’.53 The neither great nor poor comprised a large and diverse
social group in eighteenth-century Britain. For Hume, as for Addison,
this group’s distinguishing characteristic was simply that, by virtue of

being in the middle between the extremes of wealth and of poverty, it had
a particular aptitude for acquiring both virtue and wisdom. The person
of the middle station was called upon to exercise the poor’s virtues of
‘patience, resignation, industry and integrity’ as well as the wealthy’s
virtues of ‘generosity, humanity, affability and charity’.54 He, or she, was
also the best suited to enjoy sincere and loving friendships. The very rich
must always be suspicious that their friends value them for how they can
benefit from the friendship, and the poor must always be in danger of
having their pride offended by being the objects of condescension. Those
situated in the middle station also had, Hume went on to argue, ‘a better
chance for attaining a knowledge both of men and things, than those of
a more elevated station’.55 They were immersed in every aspect of life,
but at the same time had the leisure ‘to form observations’, and had the
motive provided by ambition to acquire and cultivate the skills necessary
to rising to distinction and eminence. In this connection Hume broached
an issue to which we will return below. ‘There are more natural parts,
and a stronger requisite to make a good lawyer or physician’, he claimed,
‘than to make a great monarch’. Of the twenty-eight English kings and
queens who did not die as minors, eight are generally judged to have been,
as Hume put it, ‘princes of great capacity’. But no one thinks that as a
rule as many as eight out of twenty-eight men are fitted by nature to be
great lawyers or physicians. ‘In short’, Hume wrote, ‘the governing of
mankind well, requires a great deal of virtue, justice, and humanity, but
not a surprising capacity’.56 We will see that in other works Hume would
have more than this to say about what qualities are, and are not, requisite
in those occupying positions of political power.
Addison’s Mr. Spectator made a point of promising that ‘a considerable
share’ of his speculations would be written with his female readers in
mind. Women, he observed, ‘compose half the world, and are by the just
complaisance and gallantry of our nation the more powerful part of our
people’. He would ‘take it for the greatest glory of [his] work, if among
reasonable women this paper may furnish tea-table talk’.57 Once again
Hume followed Addison’s lead. In ‘Of Essay-Writing’ he remarked that
it was a great defect of ‘the last age’ that the learned and the conversible
worlds had been entirely separated from each other. History, poetry,
politics, and philosophy were ‘shut up in colleges and cells, and secluded
from the world and good company’, while the talk in drawing rooms and
Essayist 159
coffee houses was nothing but ‘a continued series of gossiping stories

and idle remarks’.58 Now things were different. Now men of letters were
sociable, and the talk of the fashionable was borrowed from books. And
the essay was perfectly suited to be the means by which communication
took place between the two realms. Hume declared that as an essayist
he considered himself ‘as a kind of resident or ambassador from the
dominions of learning to those of conversation’.59 As such, he was bound
to pay his respects to the sovereign of the state where he was commissioned
to reside – and the sovereigns of the empire of conversation were women.
Women seem, if anything, more important to Hume’s sense of his task
as writer of essays than they were to Addison. Mr. Spectator said he
would lead young women ‘through all the becoming duties of virginity,
marriage, and widowhood’.60 Hume was interested rather in the extent to
which women could help with the process of ‘importing into company’ the
choicest discoveries made by the learned. He was ‘of opinion, that women,
that is, women of sense and education (for to such alone I address myself)
are much better judges of polite writing than men of the same degree of
understanding’.61 Indeed, ‘all men of sense, who know the world, have a
great deference for their judgment of such books as ly within the compass
of their knowledge, and repose more confidence in the delicacy of their
taste, tho’ unguided by rules, than in all the dull labours of pedants and
commentators’.62 Any man of letters, therefore, who desired success with
the public at large must first win over his female readers. With this in mind,
in several of his essays Hume explicitly addressed himself to women. ‘Of
Love and Marriage’ explained to women ‘what it is our sex complains of
most in the married state’.63 ‘Of the Study of History’ recommended the
study of history to women ‘as an occupation, of all others, the best suited
to their sex and education’.64
Hume, like Addison, did not see ‘delicacy of taste’ as a matter purely of
reliable judgement about polite writing. It was not, to use a word not yet
current in English, a merely aesthetic matter. Delicacy of taste mattered for
its own sake, but not only for its own sake. There are pleasures, and pains,
peculiar to a refined taste, pleasures and pains that most people will never
experience. But there is also a connection between refinement of taste and
refinement of the passions in general. So Hume argued in ‘Of the Delicacy
of Taste and Passion’, the essay that opened the first volume of Essays,
Moral and Political, and that could be regarded as a sort of manifesto for
Hume’s particular way of framing moral discourses addressed to those in
the middle station, and to their wives and daughters. Hume’s first move
in this essay was to argue that susceptibility to the extremes of passion
is often cured by the cultivation of ‘that higher and more refined taste,
which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of compositions of
genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts’.65 A relish for the liberal
arts strengthens judgement, and enables us to form truer notions of life,
so that things which matter greatly to others will seem too trivial to be
concerned about. But then he recoiled from the idea that what matters
most is the extinction of passion – just as he recoiled from the ‘grave
philosophic endeavour after perfection’ in ‘Of Moral Prejudices’. A little
more reflection, he wrote, suggested that a cultivated taste does not deaden
the passions and cut us off from the feelings of the rest of mankind. Rather,
it ‘improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions; at
the same time, that it renders the mind incapable of the rougher and more
boist’rous emotions’.66 Study of the beauties of the various arts improves
the temper and produces ‘a certain elegance of sentiment, which the
rest of mankind are intire strangers to’. Also it makes us more open to
love and friendship, ‘by confining our choice to few people, and making
us indifferent to the company and conversation of the greatest part of
men’.67 It does not seem to have been part of Hume’s view that only a few
human beings are by nature able to improve themselves in this way. The
implication seems to be that anyone reading this essay is already on the
way towards delicacy of taste and passion.
Hume’s method as moralist was thus to appeal to the reader’s taste, to
invite the reader to endorse expressions of elegant sentiment, and make
him, or her, feel like a member of a group of like-minded friends. An essay
entitled ‘Of Impudence and Modesty’ did not simply argue that modesty
is preferable to impudence. Everyone knew that already. Instead, Hume
presented some ‘reflections’ that had occurred to him about impudence
and about modesty. Generally, Hume observed, virtue leads to prosperity,
and vice and folly to adversity. Yet impudence and modesty are exceptions
to the rule: impudent men rise to success, modest men are overlooked.
Impudence is an exception to the other vices in another respect: it is hard
to gain the courage to be impudent, while most vices are all too easy to
acquire, and grow stronger the more they are indulged. It is easier for a
very wealthy man to sustain his impudence than for a poor one. These
reflections were then given allegorical form, in a story intended to explain
the mistake people make when they mistake impudence for virtue and
Essayist 161
wisdom, and when they mistake modesty for vice and folly. No one, of
course, needed to be told that wealth and worldly success are not always
a reliable indicator of virtue, and that poverty and a lowly station are not
always a sign of vice and folly. Hume’s goal was to do no more than to find
a new and striking way of presenting a familiar truth. He adopted the same
strategy to the same end in ‘Of Love and Marriage’. The argument there
is that there should be no pretensions to superior authority in a marriage,
neither on the woman’s side nor the man’s. It would be better for both
parties if ‘every thing was carry’d on with perfect equality, as betwixt two
equal members of the same body’.68 This was not to be understood as a call
for a correction of the fundamental social, political, and legal inequalities
that structured relations between men and women in eighteenth-century
Britain. It was just a polite plea for greater politeness in the way men
and women treated each other, and, as such, was nothing new. In this
case the novelty lay in a summary of the account of the origins of love
given by Plato in the Symposium, followed by another allegory of Hume’s
own devising. Hume developed his thoughts on the subject of marriage,
defined as ‘an engagement enter’d into by mutual consent . . . having for its
end the propagation of the species’, in ‘Of Polygamy and Divorces’.69 He
argued that there are good arguments against both polygamy and divorce,
and that this by itself ‘sufficiently recommends our present European
practice, with regard to marriage’.70 Again, it was not that anyone at time
was seriously calling for reform of marriage law and the allowing of either
polygamy or voluntary divorce.71 The essay did no more than reinforce
the common sense of its time. The point was to do so in an interesting
and unusual way. The same motive was at work in ‘Of Avarice’, a vice
that, as Hume himself noted, had been attacked by almost every moralist
or philosopher ‘from the beginning of the world to this day’.72
Hume remarked in the essay ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement’ that the
idea that fine writing lies in a ‘just mixture’ of the natural and the surpris-
ing was itself very familiar.73 It had been given canonical expression in
Addison’s Spectator essays attacking ‘false wit’ and praising ‘the essential
and inherent perfection of simplicity of thought’ manifest in, for example,
the ballad ‘Chevy Chase’.74 ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement’ saw Hume
echo Addison’s warnings about the corrupting effect of an excessive inter-
est in wit and novelty. One of the three ‘observations’ he delivered in the
essay was ‘that we ought to be more on our guard against the excess of
refinement than that of simplicity; and that because the former excess is
both less beautiful, and more dangerous than the latter’.75 The other two
observations – that there is no one point marking the right balance between
simplicity and refinement, and that there is no rule to tell us when a writer
is guilty of an excess of either – were similarly unsurprising. Criticism,
Hume claimed, is usually instructive only when it descends from gener-
alities to particulars, that is, when it is ‘full of examples and illustrations’.
There was little originality also in ‘Of the Study of History’, an essay
which sounds from its title like it might contain the historiographical key
to Hume’s own history writing, but which in fact did not much more than
recommend historical study, principally to women, on the grounds that
it amuses the imagination, improves the understanding, and strength-
ens virtue.76 It is impossible to imagine Hume composing these essays
in the belief that he had something to say that had not been often said
before. Their significance, perhaps, lay in the fact that they functioned as
a reminder that for Hume the refinement of moral sentiment went hand
in hand with the refinement of literary taste, so much so that one was
not possible without the other. Morality is not, according to this way of
thinking, something wholly different and distinct from poetry and his-
tory writing. What we now call ‘ethics’ and ‘aesthetics’ were, according
to Hume and his age, intimately related to each other. A man’s moral
character revealed itself in his taste, and his taste revealed itself in his
marriage, his friendships, and his conduct in the wider world.
In the ‘Advertisement’ to the first volume of Essays, Moral and Political
Hume, as we have seen, presented himself to the reader as a new author.
Having given up on the idea of starting a journal, ‘and being willing to make
trial of my talents for writing, before I ventur’d upon any more serious
compositions, I was induced to commit these trifles to the judgment of the
public’.77 The persona that Hume was adopting had nothing to do with
the author of A Treatise of Human Nature. Because there is no evidence
that Hume gave up on the Treatise as early as mid-1741 – only six months
or so after the publication of Book III – there is no reason to take Hume’s
disingenuousness in the Advertisement as a sign that he was already
disowning his first book.78 It is more likely that he was simply trying out a
quite different style of writing, and did not, for the moment at least, want
his reader to read his essays with the Treatise in mind, as would have been
likely had they been presented as the work of ‘the Author of A Treatise
of Human Nature’. One imagines that, in particular, he did not want his
essays to be assessed simply in terms of the degree to which they were, or
Essayist 163
were not, consistent with positions he had adopted in the Treatise. Nor,
probably, did he want them to be read as mere popularizations of ideas
and arguments he had developed at length in the earlier book.
Even so, one essay, ‘Of the Dignity of Human Nature’, is very hard
not to read as a kind of supplement to the Treatise.79 It raised the question
that Hume had very carefully not raised in his anatomical study of human
nature. This was the question of what we are to think of human nature
on the whole: Should we be disgusted with ourselves and our limitations,
or should we regard ourselves as so blessed by our maker that we must
conclude that we were made in his image? Both points of view had of
course enjoyed their advocates. ‘Some exalt our species to the skies, and
represent man as a kind of demi-god, that derives his origin from heaven,
and retains evident marks of his lineage and descent’. Hume might have
had Shaftesbury in mind. ‘Others insist upon the blind sides of human
nature, and can discover nothing, except vanity, in which man surpasses
the other animals, whom he affects to despise’.80 This sounds like another
allusion to cynics such as Rochester, perhaps to moral sceptics such as La
Rochefoucauld and, quite possibly, to Mandeville as well. The way Hume
navigated between these two extremes owed much to a principle central
to his analysis of the passions in Book II of the Treatise. In all kinds of
judgements we are often more influenced by comparison than by fixed
and unalterable standards.81 Overall assessments of human nature are no
exception. An exalted notion of human capacities is usually – though
not always – helped along by a comparison between man and the other
animals. Comparison of human beings with the idea of God, on the other
hand, tends to lead towards emphasis on the weaknesses of human nature.
Comparison of the wise and virtuous few with the mass of humankind has
the same tendency – though in this case, Hume pointed out, the fallacy
is obvious, since ‘wise’ and ‘virtuous’ are, like ‘beautiful’, comparative
epithets that are by definition only applicable to uncommon cases. The
only kind of comparison worth making, Hume claimed, the only kind
that can settle the question of the dignity or meanness of human nature,
was a comparison of the various motives at work in human actions, with
a view to deciding whether or not it is true, as the cynics and sceptics
say, that selfish and vicious principles are plainly much stronger than
sociable and virtuous ones. This was not an issue Hume had examined in
the Treatise. Here in ‘Of the Dignity of Human Nature’ he was content
to assert that ‘several great moralists of the present age’, most notably
Shaftesbury in his ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit’, had ‘prov’d

beyond question . . . that the social passions are by far the most powerful
of any, and that even all the other passions receive their force and influence
from them’. It was, however, a subject that Hume said he might ‘treat
more fully . . . in some future speculation’.82 He was true to his word, and
discussed the extent of human selfishness in An Enquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals.83 As well as referring the reader back to the Treatise,
this essay thus pointed forward, to works that would be written in the
future.
Similarly Janus-faced was the essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’.
In part this was little more than another reiteration of an Addisonian
theme. ‘The two great errors into which a mistaken devotion may betray
us’, Addison had written in The Spectator of 20 October 1711, ‘are enthu-
siasm and superstition’.84 This, like many of the opinions expressed in
The Spectator, was an entirely conventional idea, with its roots in the
widely held view that what distinguished the Church of England was
the way it avoided the faults of both Roman Catholicism and Protestant
Dissent. Addison portrayed enthusiasm, the inflaming of the mind into
a state of crazed confidence that one is the recipient of special divine
favour, as the besetting vice of Dissenters unable or unwilling to regu-
late belief by reason. Catholicism, by contrast, ‘is one huge overgrown
body of childish and idle superstitions’.85 Hume characterized the two
‘corruptions of true religion’ in very similar terms. The source of super-
stition is the fear that human beings are apt to feel, ‘proceeding either
from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health,
from a gloomy and melancholy disposition, or from the concurrence of all
these circumstances’. These fears are exploited by priests, who encourage
‘ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or . . . any
practice, however absurd and frivolous, which either folly or knavery rec-
ommends to a blind and terrified credulity’.86 Enthusiasm, on the other
hand, has its origin in our occasionally being subject to ‘an unaccountable
elevation and presumption, proceeding from prosperous success, from
luxuriant health, from strong spirits, and from a bold and confident dis-
position’. In such a mood the imagination can excite itself to such a degree
that we can feel ourselves immediately inspired by God himself, as God’s
favourite, charged by God with a message for the rest of humankind. In the
process, Hume wrote, ‘human reason, and even morality are rejected as fal-
lacious guides: and the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly and
Essayist 165
without reserve, to the suppos’d illapses of the spirit, and to inspirations

from above’.87
Hume differed from Addison principally in his focus on the distinc-
tively political effects of these two species of false religion. Thus he
argued that a first efflorescence of enthusiasm was bound to be extremely
destabilizing, as was shown by the anarchical tendencies of the Anabap-
tists in Germany, the Camisars in France, the Levellers in England, and
the Covenanters in Scotland. But enthusiasm faded with time, and the
absence of a power structure within Protestant sects meant that there was
no one interested in maintaining orthodoxy of belief and practice within
each sect, so that in the end there was a general sinking into mutual tol-
eration and ‘the greatest remissness and coolness in sacred matters’. By
contrast, the passage of time only increased the power of priests in the
Catholic world, to the point where ‘the priest, having firmly establish’d
his authority, becomes the tyrant and disturber of human society, by his
endless contentions, persecutions, and religious wars’.88 One of the con-
clusions to be drawn from ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ would seem
to be that, contrary to what the British generally liked to believe, there
was no necessary connection between, on the one hand, Protestantism
and liberty, and, on the other, Catholicism and intolerance. It might
have been true at the time, in the mid-eighteenth century, that ‘super-
stition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it’, but it
was by no means a universal truth. History showed many cases where
enthusiasm had been just as much an enemy of liberty as superstition.
In ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’ Hume claimed that all ‘priests’ and
‘clergymen’ have a ‘propensity to despotic power’. In Scotland, Calvinist
Presbyterians might be able to pose as opponents of over-weaning state
interference, but in Holland the Presbyterian clergy were, as Hume put
it, ‘always profess’d friends to the power of the family of Orange’, while
the Arminians, despised by Calvin and Calvinists as Erastian stooges
for monarchical absolutism, were ‘zealous for liberty’.89 In other words,
Hume’s treatment of religion in the Essays was quite different in kind from
Addisonian dressing up of commonplaces in newly elegant forms. He was
already asking disturbing questions about the relation between religion
and politics, questions that would be pursued at length in The History of
England.
Several of Hume’s exercises in Addisonianism soon came to seem
to their author out of keeping with the main body of his philosophical
concerns, and untrue to the character of the man of letters he was turn-
ing himself into.90 The next edition of Essays, Moral and Political was
published in 1748, and did not contain ‘Of Essay-Writing’, ‘Of Moral
Prejudices’, or ‘Of the Middle Station of Life’. He wanted to drop ‘Of
Love and Marriage’ and ‘Of the Study of History’ too. They now seemed,
he told Adam Smith in 1752, ‘too frivolous for the rest, and not very
agreeable neither, even in that trifling manner’; but his new publisher
Andrew Millar ‘made such protestations against it, & told me how much
he had heard them praisd by the best judges; that the bowels of a parent
melted, & I preserv’d them alive’.91 In 1760, though, Hume had his way,
and got rid of ‘Of Impudence and Modesty’ as well. ‘Of Avarice’ was
removed in 1768. These essays too appeared in retrospect, as he put it in
a letter to William Strahan, like so many ‘bad imitations of the agreeable
triffling of Addison’.92 There were more serious, and more original, things
to be done with the essay form.
Party Politics from an Impartial Point of View

The epigraph from the Aeneid on the title page of the first volume of Essays,
Moral and Political – Tros rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo (‘Trojans,
Rutulians, they are all the same to me’) – had been used by Addison as
the epigraph for Spectator Number 126.93 The furious zealotry of party
spirit was Addison’s subject there, and Hume’s use of the same epigraph
may have been meant to suggest that he thought that little had changed
in thirty years. There was some reason to think so. British politics had
become partisan in a newly intense way since Robert Walpole had become
‘prime minister’ in 1722. It was the hallmark of Walpole’s ministry that it
made full use of the growing wealth of the Crown. Walpole ensured that
the policies of the King and his ministers were voted for in Parliament by
ensuring, through judicious use of the Crown’s powers of patronage, that
many Members of the Commons recognised it to be in their interests to
do as the ministry wished them to. The Commons, or at least the majority
of MPs that followed Walpole and did his bidding, had fully settled in
to a new role of being, not merely the critic of royal administration and
mouthpiece of the people’s grievances, but instead the implementer of
the king’s policy measures. As a result, a divide had opened up once
again between a ‘Court’ party and a ‘Country’ opposition. Now, though,
contrary to the usual state of affairs in the late seventeenth century, the
Essayist 167
Court party was made up of Whigs, and the Country party of Tories, along
with some old-fashioned Whigs who stuck to ‘Revolution Principles’
and were unable to accept the compromises Walpole was prepared to
make. The Country opposition found its most effective mouthpiece in
the writings of Henry St John, since 1712 Viscount Bolingbroke, an
ex-Jacobite who had had to seek exile in France after the uprising of
1715.94 From 1726 onwards, Bolingbroke was the principal author of the
anti-Walpole journal, The Craftsman. In The Craftsman he argued week
after week that under Walpole’s system of management, Parliament had
been corrupted by the Crown’s influence, to the point where the balance
between Parliament and Crown enshrined in the post-1688 constitutional
settlement had been completely subverted. It was no longer true that the
House of Commons represented the will of the people. It had become
instead a room full of commissioners for Walpole’s ministry. It therefore
fell to the opposition – a ‘Country party’, as Bolingbroke put it, ‘authorized
by the voice of the country’95 – to speak up for the real spirit of the British
constitution, and for the liberties that it conferred. Opposition politics was
the politics of patriotism, and could no longer be tarred with the brush of
treason.96
Walpole had replied to The Craftsman through the pamphlets and
journal articles of a number of paid journalist propagandists, all of whom
asserted that behind the pretended patriotism of Bolingbroke’s Country
party lay the old Toryism of divine right and support for the claim of
the House of Stuart, and that it was rather Walpole who represented the
cause of 1688 and the spirit of liberty.97 Just as loudly they claimed that
Walpole was as much interested in the future as in the past, and that
while the Country opposition wanted to drag Britain back to the conflicts
of the previous century, Walpole was focused on peace, regularization
of the nation’s finances, and policies designed to foster commerce and
increase the country’s wealth. What Bolingbroke called corruption was
nothing more than the king’s way of rewarding those who had supported
the Hanoverian settlement. It was also a means of protecting precisely the
constitutional balance that Bolingbroke claimed to value so much, given
the way that landed property had been accumulated by the Commons
and those they represented. This debate had reached an especially high
pitch at the time of the Excise Bill of 1733 and the general election that
followed the next year, but by the end of the 1730s there was no sign that
it had been resolved. The fact that Britain joined the War of the Austrian
Succession in 1739 was a defeat for Walpole. Yet motions in both Houses
of Parliament for the king to dismiss him were overwhelmingly rejected
in February 1741.
Complaint about the pernicious effects of the party divide was a com-
monplace of British political discourse in the early eighteenth century.98
The standard line was that the Revolution of 1688 had solved the problems
that had brought the distinction between Tory and Whig into being, and
that now a leader of a party was by definition more interested in his own
advantage than the nation’s, while being a member of a party amounted to
having renounced independence of thought and deed in return for reward
from the party leader. ‘The best party’, the marquess of Halifax wrote
in 1690, ‘is but a kind of a conspiracy against the rest of the nation’, for
‘party is generally an effect of wantonness, peace, and plenty, which beget
humour, pride, &c. and that is called zeal and publick spirit’.99 It was often
pointed out that, now that Britain had a constitution which placed clearly
defined limits on both royal prerogative and popular privilege, it was a
mystery exactly what each of the two parties stood for. ‘They are neither
the remotest foreigners, nor our nearer neighbours beyond the seas, who
alone are to seek for the meaning of our party-words and distinctions’,
wrote John Toland in 1717. ‘The natives even of our own islands are very
often at a loss, or which is of worse consequence, highly mistaken; as well
in the nature and tendency of our several parties, as in the names, civil or
religious, by which they are commonly distinguish’d’.100
Also in 1717, Paul Rapin de Thoyras published an explanation of the
British party system intended for foreigners, but which went through
several editions in English translation, and was later appended to his very
successful History of England.101 Rapin’s argument was that there was
no longer a real distinction between moderate Whig and moderate Tory.
This had been made clear by the unified response to the Jacobite uprising
of 1715, and would be just as clear were there to be any kind of revival
of republicanism. Tories continued to emphasize the Crown’s right to
executive power and Whigs the Crown’s obligation to respect the will
of the people, but since these were both principles of the constitution,
both parties could claim to be defending the British form of government.
According to Rapin – a Huguenot in exile – it was religion, and espe-
cially the persecution of Dissenters by Church of England Tories, that
was keeping party discord alive. In The Craftsman Bolingbroke adopted
Rapin’s analysis to his own agenda. ‘The Revolution’, he claimed, ‘was
a fire, which purged off the dross of both parties; and the dross being
Essayist 169
purged off, they appeared to be the same metal, and answered the same
standard’.102 After 1688, party conflict was no longer conflict over fun-
damental principles. Politics now was a struggle between a coalition of
patriots seeking to preserve the constitution along with the liberties it gave
all Britons and a degenerate faction interested only in money and power.
Condemnations of the politics of party were always like this: they were
always really attempts at a justification of the politics of the writer’s own
party. In the Essays Hume offered something new: a genuinely impartial,
‘scientific’ anatomy of party rage, conducted by someone who presented
himself as quite neutral when it came to the contest between the ministry
and the opposition.
Hume’s first step was an examination of party considered in the abstract.
‘Of Parties in General’ began conventionally enough, with the claim that
just as legislators and writers of constitutions ought to be honoured,
so ought the founders of sects and factions to be ‘detested and hated’.
The influence of faction was directly contrary to the influence of laws.
‘Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the
fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give
mutual assistance and protection to each other’.103 Hume went on to
make clear, however, that his view was that, even so, factions were an
inevitable feature of all political systems. Some parties were purely ‘per-
sonal’, unified by mutual friendship or shared animosity. Party division
in small republics was very often of this kind, and even in larger states,
such as the Italy of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, there had been cases of
factional conflict where what separated the parties was something entirely
trivial. But there were also, Hume argued, ‘real factions’, created either
by clashes between the interests of the different orders of society or by
disagreements about matters of principle. It was, of course, the role of a
constitution to balance the interests of different social groups against each
other, and to provide a peaceful means of resolving the tensions that any
society was bound to be subject to. Where a constitution was well devised,
all orders of society would recognise the constitutional settlement to be to
their advantage, and party conflict founded on contradictions of interest
would not exist. The problem, Hume observed, was that such a constitu-
tion was extremely hard to fashion, so much so that it was the opinion of
‘many philosophers’ that it was nothing more than a notional ideal, like
perpetual motion, possible in theory but impossible in reality.
At this point in the argument the standard move for a British, or at least
English, author to have made was to have claimed that the philosophers
were wrong, and that the constitutional settlement that had followed the
Glorious Revolution was a miraculous, surely providential example of
precisely such a perfect constitution. Hume made no such move. Instead
he went on to consider the second kind of real faction, the kind based on
disagreements of principle, focusing on the difference between conflict
caused by a clash of political principles and conflict caused by different
conceptions of religion. It was obvious why there might be unresolvable
disagreement between those who thought that one man or family had a
right to a throne and those who thought it the legitimate possession of
another man or family. It was much less obvious why violence should break
out between those of different religious beliefs – and this could only be
explained in terms of the intolerance and spirit of persecution that Hume,
as we have seen, was prepared to describe as endemic to Christianity as
such. Even more mysterious, Hume concluded the essay by observing,
was the tendency of countries to divide according to the affection felt for
families in competition for a throne. The vast majority did not know these
families at all, and could not expect to receive any favours from them.
We tend, Hume pointed out, to imagine our connection with our own
sovereign to be very much more intimate than it really is. Here was an
especially dangerous form of political irrationality.
‘Of Parties in General’ set the scene for the essay that followed, ‘Of the
Parties of Great Britain’. Here Hume explicitly took as his target Boling-
broke’s claim that, in Hume’s words, ‘the real distinction betwixt Whig
and Tory was lost at the Revolution, and that ever since they have continued
to be mere personal parties, like the Guelfs and the Ghibbellines’.104 There
was more to modern British politics, Hume argued, than a divide between
corrupt Court and patriotic Country. There had to be more if it was to be
explained why the party of the Court was made up of Whigs and why the
opposition Country party mostly comprised Tories. Whiggism, after all,
had had its origins in mid-seventeenth-century opposition to the Crown,
and the Tory party had from the first seen the foundation of political order
in England as being Crown prerogative. The present situation was only
comprehensible if it was accepted that there remained a real distinction
between Whigs on the one hand and Tories on the other. And the ground
of that distinction was the ‘affections of men towards particular families
and persons, whom they desire to rule over them’, that Hume had found
puzzling at the end of ‘Of Parties in General’.105 Hume was careful to
make it clear that there was no great matter of political principle dividing
Essayist 171
the parties. Bolingbroke was right about that much. Whigs might talk
much of liberty, but they were also lovers of monarchy in general; Tories
might talk much of monarchy, but they were also lovers of liberty. But
Bolingbroke’s conclusion – that factional division was caused merely by
the unprincipled way in which Walpole and his followers exploited the
favour they had found with the King – did not follow. Something else
had to be added to the explanatory story, and that was the sentimental
attachment of Tories to the House of Stuart and the equally sentimental
attachment of Whigs to the House of Hanover.
These attachments were not inevitable, but they were, as Hume put
it, ‘natural additions to the principles of the Court and Country parties,
which are the genuine parties of the British government’.106 They meant
that in present circumstances the party that was naturally the ‘court’ party
was the opposition party, and vice versa. In other words, Bolingbroke’s
opposition party was more fundamentally partisan than he was willing
to admit. It was a faction in the proper sense of the word. There was
further evidence for this in the natural alliance against Dissent formed
by the opposition and the Church of England, and in the equally natural
tendency of Bolingbroke’s Tories to favour France over Holland. By the
same token, of course, Walpole’s Court party was a genuine faction too,
the ally of Dissent and supporter of Holland rather than France. But, as
Hume surely knew, Walpole and his journalists had always admitted this.
In fact, they had insisted on it. Walpole’s reply to Bolingbroke, as we saw
earlier, was in essence that Bolingbroke’s country opposition was really
the old Tory party, and that his own party was the true heir of the group of
Whig heroes who had made the Revolution possible. Hume was in effect
endorsing the Walpolean view that party distinctions were real, while at
the same time offering a reinterpretation of their basis. Bolingbroke was
not a simple enemy of liberty, and Walpole was not liberty’s unalloyed
friend. Since 1688, Hume asserted, the Whigs had been betrayed, either
by their leaders or by their own ‘ignorance or frailty’, into taking ‘steps
dangerous to liberty, under the pretext of securing the succession and
settlement of the Crown, according to their views’.107
The impartiality of Hume’s analysis of British party politics was not the
impartiality of a wholesale rejection of all the principles of both parties. It
was instead an attempt to identify the acceptable elements of the positions
of both parties, the ways in which each party could be said to be right.
Thus Walpole was right to say that the Whig-Tory distinction was a real
one, but Bolingbroke was equally right to say that the distinction was no
longer one of grand principle. Walpole was right to say that the opposition
was Jacobite in tendency; Bolingbroke was right to say that the Court party
had infringed on British liberties. Another instance of this very studied
form of impartiality was attached to the end of the essay ‘That Politics
may be reduc’d to a Science’. Hume’s express concern there was the
drawing of ‘a lesson of moderation’ as regards the zeal for the constitution
expressed by both the Country opposition and the party of the Court, a
zeal expressed by the Country party in its abuse of Walpole on account
of his supposed subversion of the constitution, and by the Court party
in its praise of Walpole on account of his supposed religious care for
the constitution’s conservation. The fervour with which such arguments
were made was bound to ‘engender a most extraordinary ferment on
both sides, and fill the whole nation with the most violent animosities’.108
But the arguments of both parties were plainly self-contradictory. If the
constitution was perfect in itself, then Walpole would not have been able
to do the damage to it that Bolingbroke and the Country party said he
had done; and if Walpole had done terrible damage, then the constitution
was poorly devised anyway, and Walpole could not be accused of having
ruined it. By the same token, if the constitution was perfect in itself, then,
contrary to what the Court party claimed, it would not suffer from power
moving from the hands of Walpole to the hands of his opponents; but if
it was so feeble that it could be ruined by one administration, then there
was bound to be chaos, no matter how patriotic those in power were. Both
parties, Hume showed, made their claims untenable by pushing to absurd
extremes their estimations of the value of the constitution. The Country
party could combine respect for the constitution with an admission that a
government may be both in accord with the constitution and at the same
time less good than it might be. Then they could criticize Walpole without
making the inflated claim that he was an enemy to British liberty as such.
The Court party could defend Walpole without having to make out that
British liberty as such depended upon his continuing power.
The real questions in British politics were, according to Hume, ques-
tions of degree. It was false to claim, as Bolingbroke claimed, that the con-
stitution required an absolute separation of the Crown from Parliament,
such that Parliament could be said to be entirely independent of Crown
influence. For the Crown to have no influence at all in the Commons
would be for Britain to turn from a limited monarchy into a republic.
Essayist 173
Such influence could be condemned as ‘corruption’ and ‘dependence’,

but it was, even so, as Hume put it, ‘inseparable from the very nature
of the constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixt gov-
ernment’.109 The issue was not whether there should be any dependence
of Parliament on the Crown, but how much there should be, and of
what kind. Bolingbroke insisted on the fact that the role of Members
of the Commons was solely to represent the will of electors by taking
‘instructions’ from them, but, Hume pointed out, no one imagined that
a Member was obliged in every division to vote in conformity with the
wishes of his constituents. On the other hand, no one, not even the most
ardent ministerialist propagandist, pretended that a Member could com-
pletely ignore his constituents and submit himself entirely to the agenda
of the Court. Again, it was a question of degree, and the question would be
answered differently in different constituencies, and in different debates.
‘Ought the instructions of Totness to have the same weight as those of
London?’, Hume asked. ‘Or instructions, with regard to the convention,
which respected foreign politics, to have the same weight as those with
regard to excise, which respected only our domestic affairs?’110
What Bolingbroke and Walpole disagreed about was how to preserve
the liberty guaranteed by the post-1688 constitution. Each party claimed
that the other constituted a threat to established British freedoms. Hume
argued that both parties were wrong. There was, at present, no very
pressing danger to British freedoms. The fundamental maxim of the
study of politics was always, as Hume put it in ‘Of the Independency of
Parliament’, ‘that every man must be suppos’d a knave’.111 The function
of a constitution was to turn universal pursuit of self-interest to the good of
society as a whole. When the system worked well, as it was mostly doing in
Britain, the vices of particular politicians were irrelevant. The perspective
he adopted in his approach to politics thus allowed Hume to take the long
view, and to present his reader with a way of thinking about the British
situation that made party dispute look like a distraction – an inevitable
distraction perhaps, but not one that brought to light any problems that
desperately needed to be solved. It is possible that this way of thinking
about British politics had its roots in the reading of Mandeville that, so
we speculated in Chapter 1, Hume had immersed himself in ten years
earlier. In Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness,
Mandeville developed an analysis of British politics strikingly similar
to the one presented in Essays, Moral and Political. It was, he argued, or
should be, a source of national happiness that the British constitution freed
the country from reliance on the virtue and probity of its politicians. ‘To
expect ministries without faults, and courts without vices’, Mandeville
wrote, ‘is grosly betraying our ignorance of human affairs. Nothing under
the sun is perfect: Human life it self is a mixture of good and evil: No
mortal can be compleatly happy, and none are so miserable, but they might
still be worse’.112 The great enemy of happiness, Mandeville continued,
whether personal or national, was the desire for perfection. The British
constitution was not perfect. But attempts to make it more so were bound,
in fact, to make it worse. Hume did not cite Mandeville in the Essays, and
in ‘Of the Dignity of Human Nature’, as we have seen, he criticized ‘those
philosophers, that have insisted so much on the selfishness of man’.113
Nevertheless, in its basic political orientation, the Essays was closer to the
Free Thoughts than to any other text of the period.114
Towards the Reduction of Politics to a Science

A conclusion that some drew from the intensity and intractability of the
factional conflict of the Walpole years was that politics needed to be
reoriented away from matters of high principle, about which there was
unlikely ever to be consensus, and towards the more mundane question
of how to ensure efficiency and probity in the day-to-day running of
government. Pope gave expression to this view in a famous couplet in
The Essay on Man. ‘For forms of government let fools contest’, he wrote.
‘Whate’er is best administer’d is best’.115 The Essay on Man was dedicated
to Bolingbroke – ‘my St. John!’ – and here Pope was recommending to
his friend that he moderate his political fervour and not let Walpole upset
him so.116 Pope was confident that the important thing, in politics as in
religion, was that human beings take their places in ‘the chain of love’
that was God’s providential plan for humankind taken as a whole. Divine
providence manifested itself in the fact that goodness, in the form of
human happiness, could be extracted from any system of government and
laws – just as goodness, in the form of charity, could be extracted from any
form of religion, regardless of its dogmas. Hume took Pope’s couplet as his
point of departure in the essay ‘That Politicks may be reduc’d to a Science’,
and, as we have seen, the argument of that essay taken as a whole reaches
a conclusion similar in spirit to Pope’s advice to Bolingbroke. Hume
presented the essay as a ‘lesson of moderation’ both for Bolingbroke and
Essayist 175
the Country opposition and for the Court defenders of the Robinocracy.
But Hume’s route to that conclusion was by way of what looked like a direct
contradiction of Pope’s scepticism about the significance of differences
between forms of government. The essay, as its title suggested, made a
case for a scientific conception of political philosophy, aimed at uncovering
the fundamental forces at work in politics and at elucidating the different
ways in which different constitutional forms seek to contain and balance
those forces against each other. Here, and at other places in Essays, Moral
and Political, Hume indicated an interest in more fundamental political
questions than those at issue in the dispute between Whigs and Tories. In
some respects, we will see, the conception of a science of politics hinted
at in the Essays was continuous with arguments made in the analysis of
the basis of allegiance given in Book III of the Treatise. In other respects,
it built upon the ideas Hume explored as he did the reading on display in
the Early Memoranda. Hume never worked up his political thought into
a fully worked-out system comparable to Montesquieu’s De I’Esprit des
Lois or Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But both Political Discourses and The
History of England would be informed by general principles of politics
outlined in the Essays.
The two volumes of Essays suggest that, like many of his contempo-
raries, Hume regarded James Harrington as having been the first among
the moderns to set political philosophy on something like a scientific
footing. In Oceana Harrington had described an ideal republic meant to
represent what England could become in the wake of the defeat of Charles
I, but his republicanism was of an unconventional kind. Active civic par-
ticipation was unimportant in Harrington’s utopia, and the citizens of
Oceana do not give laws to themselves.117 Traditional republican – or
rather, Machiavellian – concepts such as virtú and fortuna were missing.
The need for them was obviated by a supposedly scientific thesis con-
cerning the relationship necessarily obtaining between landed property
and power. So long as there was a balance between property and power,
a state would be stable. Where that balance is broken, a state is bound to
be unstable. A monarchy in which the king does not own all or at least
two-thirds of the land, an aristocracy in which the nobility does not own
all or at least two-thirds of the land, and a democracy in which the people
do not own all or at least two-thirds of the land – in all such states there
must be what Harrington termed ‘privation of government’ in the form of
tyranny, oligarchy, or anarchy. Harrington’s fundamental principle was
that ownership of land conferred both power and authority. Those who
do not own land cannot be said to be free, in the sense that they are
inevitably dependent on those who do own land. ‘The man that cannot
live upon his own’, Harrington claimed, ‘must be a servant’.118 The man
that can live upon his own, on the other hand, cannot be a servant. He is
his own master, and the master also of those who depend upon him for
their subsistence. Where a king does not own at least two-thirds of the
land, he is not properly master of his kingdom, since it will not be the
case that the majority of his people live upon him. He will be reduced,
therefore, to attempting to assert his authority through brute force alone.
And, Harrington argued, he is bound to fail in the attempt. He will be
shown to be unable to govern.
This, on Harrington’s analysis, was exactly what had happened in
England in the first half of the seventeenth century. In Oceana Harring-
ton sought to explain the origins of the English Civil War in terms of a
change in the balance of property that had been initiated by an act passed
under Henry VII allowing the great feudal lords to sell off parts of their
lands. This had created a new class of freeholders, who, as Harrington
put it, ‘living not in a servile or indigent fashion, were much unlinked
from dependence upon their lords’.119 Such had been Henry’s intention.
He wanted to reduce the power of the lords, thereby to increase his own.
What he did not foresee was that the ‘middle people’, as Harrington called
them, would unlink themselves also from dependence upon their kings.
Elizabeth sped up the process by cultivating the love of the people and
neglecting the nobility, and so, in Harrington’s words, ‘by these degrees
came the house of commons to raise that head, which since hath been
so high and formidable unto their princes that they have looked pale
upon those assemblies’.120 ‘Nor was there anything now wanting unto
the destruction of the throne but that the people, not apt to see their
own strength, should be put to feel it’, which is what they began to do
under James I. Charles I’s defeat at the hands of the Parliamentarians was
inevitable. Oceana was published in 1656, and was dedicated to Oliver
Cromwell, ‘His Highness the Protector of England, Scotland, and Ire-
land’. It expressed Harrington’s belief that republicanism was England’s
natural form of government for the foreseeable future. Hume did not
share this belief, but he accepted the theory on which the prediction was
based. ‘’Tis evident to any one who considers the history of this island’,
he would assert in the 1748 essay121 ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, ‘that
Essayist 177
the privileges of the people have, during the two last centuries, been
continually upon the encrease, by the division of the church lands, by the
alienations of the barons estates, by the progress of trade, and above all,
by the happiness of our situation, which, for a long time, gave us suffi-
cient security, without any standing army or military establishment’.122
In ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ the ‘depression
of the Lords, and rise of the Commons in England, after the statute of
alienations, and the increase of trade and industry’ was put forward as a
perfect example of the kind of process that can be explained in terms of
‘general principles’.123
‘A noted author has made property the foundation of all government’,
Hume recognised in the essay ‘Of the first Principles of Government’, ‘and
most of our political writers seem inclin’d to follow him in that particu-
lar’.124 In the Characteristicks Hume would have come across Shaftesbury
endorsing the view that ‘dominion must naturally follow property’.125 A
more decisive influence on political argument in Scotland, however, was
the work of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Fletcher had played an impor-
tant role in the failed Scottish opposition to the Act of Union, but he was
not forgotten after 1707. His works were published in a new edition in
1732, which began with a ‘Discourse on Government’ strongly influenced
by Harringtonian ideas. Most European countries, Fletcher argued, had
seen an ‘alteration of government’ at the turn of the sixteenth century,
when the old feudal barons suddenly contracted an appetite for the luxury
goods beginning to be imported from the Americas and the East Indies,
and as a result plunged themselves into debts that could only be paid off
by selling their lands or turning their vassals into tenants.126 The signifi-
cance of this change in the distribution of property was insisted upon also
by George Turnbull, until 1726 a regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen,
and by Hutcheson. In The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy,
published in 1740, Turnbull used Harrington’s ideas as evidence that in
political events, as in the natural world, ‘effects may be with certainty
inferred from their causes; for in both cases, from a certain concurrence
of circumstances or causes, certain consequences necessarily result’.127
Harrington showed that ‘dominion is proportional to property, as gravity
to quantity of matter; so that all mutations in the orbs of civil government,
if one may so speak, are resolvable into that moral law of dominion, in
like manner as all the motions and variations in the celestial orbs are into
the natural law of gravitation’.128 Turnbull thus took Harrington to have
made a decisive case for ‘agrarian laws’, that is, laws that would limit
the amount of land that individuals could own and that would thereby
protect the distribution of property between crown, nobility, and people
upon which political stability in Britain depended.129 Hutcheson made
the same argument for agrarian laws in the summary of his moral phi-
losophy lectures published in Latin in 1742.130 Hutcheson sent Hume
a copy of the Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria soon after it
was published,131 but Hume would not have needed to read it to know
of the prevalence of Harringtonian principles among his contemporaries.
According to Bolingbroke, the ‘great alteration . . . in property and power’
effected since the fifteenth century had brought the English constitution,
‘by slow degrees, and through many stuggles and dangers, so near the
perfect idea of a free system of government, that nothing would be now
wanting to complete it, if effectual means were found of securing the
independency of Parliament against corruption, as well as it is secured
against prerogative’.132
‘That property has a great influence on power, cannot possibly be
denied; but yet the general maxim, That the ballance of the one depends
upon the ballance of the other, must be received with several limitations’.133
So Hume argued at the beginning of the essay ‘Whether the British
Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic’.
The critical question was how much influence property had, and how,
exactly, that influence was exerted. Harrington’s own conception of the
influence of property was too simple to be credible. Indeed, in its most
straightforward form it was very obviously falsified by the mere fact of
the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. On Harrington’s principles, this
was impossible to explain – even while, as Hume pointed out, Oceana ‘was
scarce published when the King was restored; and we see that monarchy
has ever since subsisted upon the same footing as before’.134 Hume’s
preferred ‘first principle of government’, as laid down in the essay with
that title, was that the foundation of government is opinion. Force, as
Hume pointed out, is always on the side of the governed. A government’s
ability to impose its will on the people is conditional on its being able
to shape their beliefs to its own advantage. In particular, Hume argued,
a government needs to be able to convince the people that its rule is in
interests of the public at large, and that it has the right to govern. Political
right is a complex concept, on Hume’s analysis. In part it is conferred
by ownership of property, as Harrington had argued. ‘’Tis sufficiently
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understood’, Hume wrote, ‘that the opinion of right to property is of

the greatest moment in all matters of government’.135 But there is also
the question of authority, of right to power, which can and often does
attach to a government just because it is longstanding. ‘Antiquity always
begets the opinion of right’, Hume pointed out.136 Hume had already
explored and explained this belief, along with a range of other factors
that give rise to belief in political legitimacy, in Book III of the Treatise.
His understanding of the centrality of opinion to politics may have been
taken from the writings of Sir William Temple.137 In his 1672 ‘Essay
upon the Original and Nature of Government’, Temple claimed that
‘Authority arises from the opinion of wisdom, goodness, and valour in
the persons who possess it’.138 ‘The ground upon which all government
stands’, he continued, ‘is the consent of the people, or the greatest or
strongest part of them; whether this proceed from reflections upon what
is past, by the reverence of an authority under which they and their
ancestors have been born and bred; or from sense of what is present,
by the ease, plenty, and safety they enjoy: or from opinion of what is to
come, by the fear they have from the present government, or hopes from
another’.139 And Temple had, from Hume’s point of view, precisely the
right kind of explanation of the Restoration. By 1660, Temple claimed,
the republican experiment ran plainly contrary to ‘the bent and current
humour of the people, in favour of their ancient and lawful government’.140
Hume, unlike Temple, was prepared to attach political significance to the
changing balance of property, but it was just one factor among several
shaping the beliefs of a people, their bent and humour, with respect to
the legitimacy of their government. The fundamental forces at work in
politics were psychological.141
It followed from this that the study of politics would have to be in
large part the study of opinion and its alterations. One example Hume
gave of the significance of opinion in the assessment and significance of
government concerned France. During the course of a comparison of
free and absolutist governments in the essay ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’,
Hume considered the question of whether commerce could prosper under
an absolute government such as France’s. In principle, according to Hume,
it could. France was not the tyranny it was standardly represented as being
by chauvinist British propagandists. Modern European monarchies were
‘civilized’ in the sense that property was just as secure in such countries
as it was in a republic. The absolute power of the French crown was now
exercised in conformity with the country’s laws, and there was no reason
why French merchants and investors should not feel as protected by the
law as did their counterparts in Holland or England. However, as a matter
of fact, trade did not flourish in France, and the reason for that, Hume
claimed, was the opinion that trade is not an honourable occupation. In
an absolute monarchy, as Hume put it, ‘[b]irth, titles, and place, must
be honour’d above industry and riches’, and while this was so, ‘all the
considerable traders will be tempted to throw up their commerce, in
order to purchase some of these employments, to which privileges and
honours are annex’d’.142 As we saw in the second section of this chapter,
the Early Memoranda suggest that Hume would have known that this was
precisely what French political writers like Dutot and Melon complained
about as being fatal to their country’s prospects in a modern Europe where
the balance of power increasingly turned on trading success rather than
on military strength. In the case of Britain, Hume noted in the essay
‘Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy,
or to a Republic’, ‘there has been a very sudden and a very sensible change
in the opinions of men within these last fifty years, by the progress of
learning and of liberty’.143 ‘Most people, in this island’, he went on, ‘have
divested themselves of all superstitious reverence to names and authority:
the clergy have entirely lost their credit: their pretensions and doctrines
have been ridicul’d; and even religion can scarce support itself in the
world. The mere name of king commands little respect; and to talk of him
as GOD’s vicegerent upon Earth, or to give him any of those magnificent
titles, which formerly dazzl’d mankind, wou’d but excite laughter in every
one’. ‘Had men been in the same disposition at the Revolution, as they
are at present’, Hume concluded, ‘monarchy wou’d have run a great risk
of being entirely lost in this island’. ‘[T]he kingly power’, as Hume put it,
was ‘no longer supported by the settled principles and opinons of men’.144
This was one good reason to think that the British government was moving
in a republican direction.
The case for the opposite point of view – that Britain was heading
towards monarchical absolutism – was built, according to Hume, on ‘that
immense property, which is now lodg’d in the king, and which is still
increasing’. He calculated that the crown had £3 million at its disposal,
‘a monstrous sum, and what may fairly be computed to be more than a
thirtieth part of the whole income and labour of the kingdom’.145 Since
1688 a series of compliant parliaments had allowed Britons to become the
Essayist 181
most heavily taxed nation in Europe, in order that the country engage
in what seemed like an endless succession of foreign wars.146 The level
of taxation had not diminished in the period of relative peace that came
between the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714 and the start
of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740. It had to be maintained to
pay for borrowing made necessary by the fact that, no matter how high
taxes were, they could not entirely finance the kind of wars that European
countries now fought. Hume’s estimate as to the crown’s income was in
fact very conservative. Revenue from taxation was closer to £6 million
by 1740. It is possible that by then Britain was the most intensely taxed
nation in Europe. Walpole was careful to do all that he could to placate
the landed interest by keeping the tax on land as low as possible. Customs
duties and excises made up around 80 percent of tax revenue. Here was
another reason why a Harringtonian analysis of the factors determining
the balance of power was no longer sufficient. In addition to landed
wealth there were to be taken into account the political consequences of
the new wealth of merchants, manufacturers, and traders. It was the tax
income from this form of wealth that was significantly altering the political
dynamics of Britain. When the income it generated was combined with
what Hume was prepared to call ‘the increasing luxury of the nation’
and ‘our proneness to corruption’,147 the future of Britain’s democratic
freedoms could be made to look bleak. It was by no means certain that
new habits of irreverence and disrespect for authority would be sufficient
to sustain and protect them. When tax income was combined with the
income from military and naval commissions, and from the increasingly
large civil list, the crown now had an income that could counter and, Hume
thought, in the long term overwhelm the political influence of the House
of Commons. This was one way of showing that trade could not be ignored
by anyone hoping to understand modern politics. The problem, though,
was that serious thought about the political implications of commerce had
barely begun. As Hume put it in ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, ‘Trade was
never esteem’d an affair of state, till within this last century; nor is there
any antient writer on politics, who has made mention of it’.148
In purely constitutional terms, as Hume acknowledged in the essay ‘Of
the Independency of Parliament’, the Commons had a share of power so
large ‘that it absolutely commands all the other parts of our government’.
Formally speaking, all the crown had at its disposal was the right to
veto legislation. And even this power was of little significance, given that
‘whatever passes the two Houses is always sure to be pass’d into a law’.
There had been no exercise of the royal veto since the reign of Anne.
The crown’s assent ‘is little bet[t]er than a mere form’.149 The crown’s
growing wealth, however, and the consequent increase of ‘corruption’,
had the potential to make the constitutional facts look irrelevant. The
rate of the increase of crown power was ‘very slow and almost insensible’,
Hume allowed, but still, the tide had turned, and now Britain was on
course for a reversion to absolute monarchy.
Indeed, it would arrive at absolutism in the end, even if in the short term
the transformation of ‘opinion’ had republican results. Less compliant
parliaments than Britain had known recently could strip the monarchy
of its right of veto, and even dispense with the monarchy altogether. But
what would happen then? Hume in the Essays, Moral and Political was
not the kind of political philosopher interested in the virtues of ‘any fine
imaginary republic, which a man may form a plan of in his closet’.150 The
question was whether it was plausible to think a republic could ever be
established in Britain. There were two options here. One was that a single
person could acquire the power ‘to take our constitution to pieces, and
put it up anew’. Recent history – the history, that is, of the Cromwellian
‘Commonwealth’ – suggested, though, that a person with that kind of
power ‘will never resign his power, or establish any free government’.
The other option was that the House of Commons would be charged with
both executive and legislative power. But then either there would be a
power vacuum every time parliament dissolved itself in preparation for
elections, or there would be no more elections, and the country would
suffer ‘all the tyranny of a faction, sub-divided into new factions’. Either
way there would be convulsions and civil wars, and, as had happened in
the case of Rome, an experiment in republicanism would end in absolute
monarchy. So it did not matter whether things continued in their current
course or a decisive move was made to check the growing power of the
monarchy by turning Britain into a republic. Regardless, the result was
bound to be absolutism. The question was whether that would happen
peacefully or violently.
In De l’Esprit des Lois Montesquieu would describe the British consti-
tution as the solution to the distinctively modern problem of squaring the
desire for personal liberty with the need for political authority. Freedom
for Montesquieu was to be equated with the absence of fear, and the
British had no reason to be frightened of their rulers, because of the way
Essayist 183
the constitution limited political power by dividing it and setting it against

itself. On Hume’s view, by contrast, the British constitution was deeply
and probably fatally unstable, largely because of complex and changing
economic dynamics. And the picture grew even darker when one took
into account the consequences of a growing public debt. All European
nations had taken advantage of the new supply of liquid wealth, and of
investors looking for a good return, by incurring debts of unprecedented
size. Between 1690 and 1740, Britain’s national debt rose from less than
£5 million to more than £50 million.151 Hume worried that this was
another respect in which the British constitution stood to be subverted by
economic forces. At the very end of the first volume of Essays, Moral and
Political, in the final pages of ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, Hume intro-
duced a line of argument intended to show that an absolute government
like France had a way of managing national debt that a free government
like Britain lacked. Ultimately it was always possible for the French crown
to declare itself bankrupt and to default on its obligations. Indebtedness
would therefore never force the French crown to tax the French people
so punitively as to cause serious and destabilizing unrest. In Britain, by
contrast, it was impossible for the state to decide unilaterally to default,
because its debt was held by the people, and, Hume added, ‘chiefly those
who have the highest offices’, and they would never agree to such a policy.
Unable to ignore the will of the people, the state had no choice but to
continue to pay its debts, which was only possible through further bor-
rowing, and ever higher taxes to pay ever higher interest bills. ‘And what
a strong motive is this’, Hume concluded, ‘to encrease our frugality of the
public money; lest, for want of it we be reduced, by the multiplicity of
taxes, to curse our free government, and wish ourselves in the same state
of servitude with all the nations that surround us’.152
A Humean science of politics, then, would be not only a study of the
formation, alterations, and effects of opinion on the relationship between
the balance of property and the balance of power, but also a study of
property itself, of its different forms, and of the consequences for politics
in particular of wealth generated by a growing commerce. The hints given
in the essay ‘That Politicks may be reduc’d to a Science’ as to the nature
of a scientific approach to politics would therefore seem to be slightly
misleading. There Hume answered those who maintain that the goodness
of all government consists in the goodness of the administration with an
assertion of the importance, in free governments at least, of constitutional
design. ‘So great is the force of laws’, he asserted, ‘and of particular forms
of government, and so little dependence have they on the humours and
temper of men, that consequences as general and as certain may be deduced
from them, on most occasions, as any which mathematical sciences can
afford us’.153 But according to Hume’s own arguments in other essays,
constitutional form was only one element of politics. The humours and
tempers of men mattered too, and so did the workings and mutations of
the economy. Furthermore, the significance of a country’s constitution
was a more complicated matter than this essay suggested. There was in
Essays, Moral and Political taken generally a striking scepticism as to the
ultimate importance of the distinction between ‘free’ governments and
absolute ones. Britain was nominally a free country, but was chronically
unstable, and was heading towards absolutism. France was nominally an
absolute monarchy, but was not endangered by indebtedness in the same
way Britain was, and, more importantly, was very different in character
from an oriental despotism. All kinds of governments have improved
much in modern times, Hume opined in ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, ‘yet
monarchical government seems to have receiv’d the most considerable
improvements. It may now be affirm’d of civiliz’d monarchies, what was
formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of laws,
not of men’. Civilized monarchies, he continued, ‘are found susceptible of
order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree. Property is secure;
industry encourag’d; the arts flourish; and the prince lives secure among
his subjects, like a father among his children’.154 Britain, of course, was
a unique combination of monarchical and republican government. To
many, both at home and abroad, including Montesquieu, this was its
strength. To Hume, it would appear, it was, on the contrary, all too
likely to be Britain’s fatal weakness. That, at any rate, was the message
that Hume seemed to want to convey at the end of his first collection of
essays.
Concern about the decay of the constitution, about increasing wealth
and influence of the crown, about Britain’s growing tendency towards lux-
ury and corruption, and about public debt were hallmarks of the rhetoric
of the Country opposition. Hume, however, did not identify these things
as prominent features of modern British politics as a means of making
party political points. He would grow increasingly alarmed about the
national debt as the years passed, but for now the tone of his observations
about Britain’s general condition was carefully calm and objective. He
Essayist 185
was not sounding alarm bells and calling for urgent action. In the final
piece of the second volume of Essays, a brief character sketch of Walpole,
he made it clear that he did not support, for example, those who wanted
Walpole impeached and tried for corruption. The country would be better
off without him, that was certain. His time in office was marked by all
the venality and expediency that his critics routinely accused him of. But
still, Walpole should be allowed ‘to retire to Houghton Hall, to pass the
remainder of his days in ease and retirement’.155 Hume was straining here
for the kind of detachment, moderation, and objectivity that one might
adopt in an analysis of the political situation of a foreign country or of the
fortunes of an ancient city-state. One model for this style of political writ-
ing might, as we have seen, have been the Mandeville of Free Thoughts on
Religion, the Church, and National Happiness. It is just possible that another
was the Montesquieu of Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur des
Romains et de leur Décadence. Montesquieu’s book on the rise and fall of
Rome had been published in 1734. There is no direct evidence that Hume
read it.156 What suggests that he did, and that reading it left a mark on
the Essays, is a striking similarity of tone. Montesquieu’s reader was sup-
posed to notice that a familiar story was being told without the moralizing
and didacticism that usually accompanied it. Montesquieu described the
internal conflicts that tore the Roman republic apart and opened the way
for imperial tyranny in a language that is drained of drama and emotion.
He made himself sound unsurprised even by the worst excesses of the
Caesars. He was more interested in the Roman people and their changing
manners and opinions than in the achievements and failings of partic-
ular individuals. The goal of the book was to make it clear that history
was reducible neither to the characters and actions of great men nor to
the workings of an inscrutable fortuna. ‘It is not chance that rules the
world’, Montesquieu observed in a rare theoretical aside. ‘There are gen-
eral causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating
it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled
by these causes’.157 For Hume too, the philosophical study of politics was
the search for general causes that, if they did not give much certainty to
predictions, at least conferred upon retrospective explanations a certain
amount of sometimes tragic inevitability.158
Montesquieu developed his analysis in the Considérations of the general
causes at work in politics into the comprehensive theory of politics laid out
in De l’Esprit des Lois. Hume moved on from Essays, Moral and Political in a
very different direction. Arguing that politics may be reduced to a science

was not a prologue to the construction of a science of politics.159 Hume
continued as an essayist in his further examination of the relationship
between economics and politics in Political Discourses, and his further
examination of the British constitution took the form of a narrative history.
However, even if he never articulated it in systematic fashion, Hume
undoubtedly retained an interest in general truths of politics, such as
are, to use the language of ‘That Politicks may be Reduc’d to a Science’,
‘invariable by the humour or education either of subject and sovereign’.160
‘Of all men, that distinguish themselves by memorable atchievements,
the first place of honour, in my view’, Hume wrote in ‘Of Parties in
General’, ‘is due to legislators, and founders of states, who transmit a
system of laws and institutions to secure the peace, happiness and liberty
of future generations’.161 It transpired that Hume himself was not entirely
without an interest in constitutional design. At some point he overcame
his scepticism about fine imaginary republics framed by philosophers in
their closets, conceived a plan for a perfect commonwealth, and wrote
it up for publication in Political Discourses. We will consider this rather
enigmatic text in Chapter 5.162
Philosophy Ancient and Modern

In two of the more substantial essays in the second volume of Essays,
Moral and Political, ‘Of Eloquence’ and ‘Of the Rise and Progress of
the Arts and Sciences’, Hume pursued the possibility of the explana-
tion, in terms of causes and laws, of phenomena that might be supposed
to be inexplicable because dependent upon the singular and mysterious
motions of artistic and scientific genius. In these essays, Hume explicitly
presented himself as pressing the philosophical agenda forward into new
territory. It was to ‘the censure and examination of the learned’ that the
observations made in ‘Of the Rise and Progress’ were submitted163 – not
to the judgement of women around the tea table, nor to the speculative
politicians of the coffee house. Hume was also keen to present himself as
a scholar. Footnotes, with quotations in Latin, Italian, and French, were
more numerous in these two essays than in the rest. The idea, it seems,
was to go some way towards a union of politeness with erudition. Breadth
and depth of learning were on display particularly in ‘Of Eloquence’,
where the question to be answered was why Britain had failed to produce
Essayist 187
orators to rival Demosthenes and Cicero. Hume was not disposed to

answer this question in terms of the general inferiority of the modern
world to the ancient. The essay’s premise was that it should have been
possible for a country with a free government, such as Britain, at least
to come close to achieving in political oratory what had been achieved in
Greece and Rome. France would have done so, for example, had it had
a different form of government. There were plenty of poets and plenty
of philosophers among the great men that had done honour to Britain’s
name, but not a single orator. The reason for this, Hume argued, was to
be found in ‘some circumstances in the English temper and genius’: in the
English people’s down-to-earth good sense and suspicion of high-flown
language, their antipathy to anything that sounds like arrogance, their
general coarseness of taste and insensibility to artistic refinement.164
Such style of explanation was applied yet more ambitiously in ‘Of the
Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’. This essay began with a
distinction between what must be ascribed to chance and what can be
explained in terms of causes. What is due to the character and actions
of only a very few individuals will very often remain mysterious and
appear inexplicable, but what was brought about by ‘general passions and
interests’, such as ‘operate on a multitude’, can be made sense of in terms
of general laws. As examples of more explanatorily tractable questions
Hume instanced two matters that he would return to in his later writings:
the fall of the House of Lords and the rise of the House of Commons
during the Tudor period, and ‘the rise and progress of commerce’. For
the moment, though, he took up the case for the explicability in terms of
general principles of the state of a country’s learning, and sought to make
a connection between progress in the arts and sciences and a country’s
form of government. The suggestion that he made in the process – again,
a suggestion that would be further developed in the years to come –
was that a form of government shaped more than the political and legal
culture of the nation. It also shaped the nation’s manners, and they in
turn shaped, among other things, its artistic and scientific achievements.
Study of the condition of the arts and sciences, in other words, was part
of the science of politics. This was not a new thought, of course. During
the Italian Renaissance, republicans and monarchists had argued over
the question of which form of government was most conducive to the
flourishing of learning. Was it during the republican period or under the
Caesars that Roman letters had reached their apogee?165 In the first half
of ‘Of the Rise and Progress’ Hume appeared to lean towards the former,
anti-monarchical, point of view. Focusing on the very first beginnings
of the arts and sciences, he argued that it was only in countries where
the power of magistrates was restrained by law that it was conceivable
that men might ‘aspire to any refinements of taste or reason’. Those living
under ‘barbarous monarchies’ could only be slaves, and slaves by definition
lacked the freedom from necessity to start out on the road towards learning.
Even under a barbarous republic, by contrast, and for reasons indicated
by Hume in ‘That Politicks may be reduc’d to a Science’, there was a
natural tendency towards the rule of law: and ‘From law arises security:
From security curiosity: And from curiosity knowledge’.166 Hume argued
further that the situation most propitious for the arts and sciences was
‘a number of neighbouring independent states connected together by
commerce and policy’, such as occupied Greece in the classical period.
Neighbouring states were bound to emulate and strive to outdo each other.
But more important, Hume claimed, was the fact that small countries
‘change naturally into commonwealths’, checking not only the power of
magistrates but also the authority of established artistic and philosophical
schools, and of received wisdom more generally.167
Halfway through the essay, though, Hume might be thought to have
changed horses, politically speaking. Certainly he was not interested in
trying to make it appear as though, once one moved on from the first
beginnings of the arts and sciences, it remained the case that letters could
only flourish under free governments. Given the artistic achievements of
modern France, in particular, this would have been an absurd thing to
claim. But how were France’s achievements to be explained, given the
connection that had been established between the arts and sciences and
the rule of law? The answer to this question had in a sense already been
given by Hume in the first volume of Essays, Moral and Political, with the
claim made in ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ that ‘civilized monarchies’ were
now governments of laws, not men. Now, in ‘Of the Rise and Progress’,
Hume further developed the concept of ‘civilized monarchy’, as distinct
from ‘barbarous monarchy’. The crucial development was a distinction
between the power of the king, which was absolute and unrestrained, and
the power of the inferior magistrates and ministers, which was limited
by general laws governing the whole of society, and forced the holder
of office to exercise his authority according to well-defined and publicly
promulgated rules. Most people lived most if not all of their lives without
Essayist 189
ever coming into contact with the king. There was usually no reason for
him to interest himself in them, and so his absolute power did not impinge
upon their everyday lives. Their experience, then, was of life lived under
the rule of law, not under despotism. The de facto absolute power of the
king was therefore no obstacle to curiosity and the gathering of knowledge.
Having made this point, Hume then observed that there were even so
important differences between monarchies and republics. In monarchies
power and office flowed downwards from the apex of society towards its
base, and this created manners of a certain kind, as men learned that success
and improvement lay in being witty, pleasing, or otherwise agreeable. Such
manners prompted attention to refinements of taste, and that in turn
made it natural that the polite arts flourished in monarchical societies.
In republics, by contrast, power and office flowed upwards from the
people, and this created manners of a different kind, as men learned that
success and improvement lay in industry, ability, or knowledge. Such
manners prompted men to cultivate their talents for the practical and
useful, and that in turn made it natural that under popular governments it
was the sciences that flourished. Thus Holland, known for the roughness
of its manners, could yet boast of its achievements in manufacturing
and industry. In line with his explanation of the limitations of British
political oratory, Hume remarked that the English ‘fall under the same
censure’ as the modern European republics. The monarchy that, so Hume
believed, had been absolute in England until 1688 had been barbarous
rather than refined. It was only very recently that England had started
making significant contributions to European culture. In ‘Of Liberty and
Despotism’ Hume remarked that the first polite prose in English was
written by Swift.168
Civilized monarchy was a distinctively modern achievement. So also
was Hume’s principal concern in the first volume of Essays, the limited
monarchy that had been instituted in England after 1688. In a further
manifestation of his lack of nostalgia for the world of the ancients, and for
ancient republics especially, Hume devoted a sizeable part of ‘Of the Rise
and Progress’ to an argument to the effect that the manners that prevailed
under modern monarchies were superior to those of the ancient Romans
and Greeks. The evidence suggests, he claimed, that ancient conversation
was scurrilous, boastful, and immodest. Delicacy of breeding, ‘or that
polite deference and respect, which civility obliges us either to express
or counterfeit towards the persons we converse with’, was clearly not
much valued, even by such men as Cicero and Cato.169 But, Hume knew,
it was often claimed that the causes of modern conceptions of civility
were modern notions of gallantry and honour such as amounted to a
deformation of morality. This was proof, it was said, that the ancients had
been right in their lack of concern for extreme refinement of manners. The
gallantry of exaggerated deference of men to women and the conception of
honour that made men fight duels at the slightest provocation were both, as
Hume put it, ‘the natural product of courts and monarchies’, and so were
grist to the mills of ‘some of the most zealous partisans of the antients’ –
whose zealousness was as much political as moral. The partisan of the
ancients that Hume had particularly in mind here was Shaftesbury,170
and this part of ‘Of the Rise and Progress’ saw Hume return to issues he
had first explored ten years earlier in ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and
Modern Honour’. He now argued in defence of gallantry, claiming that
it is natural and not the product of art and education, and that it is also
‘generous’, in the sense of being a laudable means whereby men ‘alleviate’
their intellectual and physical superiority over women. It was also clearly
to men’s own advantage not to treat women like slaves. ‘What better
school of manners’, Hume asked, ‘than the company of virtuous women;
where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind,
where the example of the female softness and modesty must communicate
itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts every
one on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency?’171 A
defence of the modern conception of honour, and of the duels to which
it gave rise, was another matter, and Hume did not follow Mandeville
in arguing for the value of honour as a means of artificially creating a
martial courage that would otherwise be lacking in Christian countries.
The ‘fantastic’ notions of modern honour were, he claimed, both useless
and pernicious. But Hume did not explain how it might be possible to have
gallantry without honour, and to that extent an echo of Mandeville could
be heard in this ‘digression’ from the main argument of ‘Of the Rise and
Progress’.172
Shaftesbury’s position was that the possibility of genuine virtue was
dependent upon a wholesale break with the ethical ideals characteristic
of the modern world and a return to the philosophical practices of the
ancients, and of the Stoics in particular. In those practices lay not only
the hope of real virtue but also, and by the same token, the hope of real
happiness. Hume, as we have seen, rejected this line of thought, and a
Essayist 191
general scepticism about the worth of ancient philosophy found further

expression at various points in the second volume of Essays. We have
seen that ‘Of Moral Prejudices’ criticized not just modern amoralism –
the idea that every display of friendship and public spirit was really
only concealed selfishness – but also the opposite extreme, the Stoic idea
that human beings were able completely to transcend their passionate
natures. And in ‘Of the Rise and Progress’ Hume appeared to welcome
the fact that the spirit of independent thought that took hold of Europe
after the Renaissance had caused ‘those sects of Stoics, and Epicureans,
Platonists and Pythagoreans’ to lose all of their credit and authority.173
Factionalism in philosophy, ‘slavish submission’ to the masters of the
ancient schools, was just as pernicious as factionalism in politics, or in
religion. But the most sustained development of Hume’s opposition to
modern revivals of ancient philosophy was in a sequence of four essays
in which he ‘personated’, in turn, the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonist,
and the Sceptic. In 1753, Hume added a footnote to ‘The Epicurean’
that indicated that these four essays should be read as a group. Their
intention, he said there, ‘is not so much, to explain accurately the sen-
timents of the ancient sects of philosophy, as to deliver the sentiments
of sects, that naturally form themselves in the world, and entertain dif-
ferent ideas of human life and of happiness’.174 These ‘sects’ just as
naturally looked to the philosophical schools of the ancient world, for
their names and also for their role models and their characteristic styles of
self-legitimation. The idea that philosophy might be of use in the search
for happiness was after all very deeply embedded in all of ancient thought.
It was that idea that Hume took as his target in these four exercises in
impersonation.175
The Epicurean, Hume told the reader in a footnote, was ‘the man of
elegance and pleasure’. Rejecting the ‘artificial happiness’ supposed by
‘the severe philosophers’ to be the result of reason and reflection, the Epi-
curean devotes himself to the pleasures of friendship, conversation, and
sexual love. These pleasures are transient, of course, but so is everything,
including life itself. There is no point in pretending that it will not be
soon before death annihilates us. The time we have is best spent enjoying
the particular pleasures that human beings, and human beings alone, were
created for. Hume’s Epicurean was not the Epicurean of hostile popular
caricature.176 Even so, he is criticized by the Stoic, ‘the man of action
and virtue’, on the grounds that the Epicurean conception of happiness as
pleasure derives from an inadequate vision of what human beings are able
to make of their lives and of themselves. According to the Stoic, what is
proper to us is the work of improving the powers and faculties we are born
with, including, crucially, the powers and faculties of the mind. We have
the capacity for a higher kind of happiness than the Epicurean allows,
a happiness that lies in the governing of brute appetite, in the subduing
of disruptive passions, in reflection, and in setting a just value on each
and every pursuit and enjoyment. Happiness, in other words, lies in the
pursuit of virtue. This happiness is not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of
fortune because it is to be found in, precisely, the pursuit of virtue. Each
and every one of us is always able to engage in that pursuit, in the work
of self-improvement. This work, Hume’s Stoic is careful to make clear,
is a matter of engagement with the world, as contrasted with Epicurean
retreat from the world into the private realm of friendship and love. It is
also a matter of the purification and enlargement of affection and sympa-
thy, not of the eradication of the passions, or of the denial of the social and
familial relations which the passions animate. Again, then, Hume avoided
crude caricature in his impersonation of the Stoic. The criticism directed
at the Stoic by the Platonist, ‘the man of contemplation and philosophical
devotion’, is not an expansion upon the charge that Hume himself had
made in ‘Of Moral Prejudices’, that Stoicism eats away at ‘all the most
endearing sentiments of the heart’. Rather, the Platonist’s claim is that
the Stoic’s wisdom is vanity and his search after virtue is pointless. There
is, again, more to be hoped for. ‘Thou seekest the ignorant applauses of
men’, he tells the Stoic, ‘not the solid reflections of thy own conscience,
or the more solid approbation of that being, who, with one regard of his
all-seeing eye, penetrates the universe’.177 The Stoic is right to say that
what is most valuable is order and beauty, but wrong in his belief that the
highest form of those things is to be found in the human mind’s pursuit
of virtue. Rather, they are to be found in nature, and in God, nature’s cre-
ator. Nothing that a human being can make, not even the most successful
exercise in self-fashioning, can rival what God has made, and study of
what God has made leads naturally to study of God himself. ‘The most
perfect happiness, surely, must arise from the contemplation of the most
perfect object. But what is more perfect than beauty and virtue? And
where is beauty to be found equal to that of the universe? Or virtue, which
can be compar’d to the benevolence and justice of the deity?’178
Essayist 193
Hume gave the Sceptic the last word in this argumentative conversation
about the proper means whereby human beings might make themselves
happy. And the Sceptic’s scepticism turns out to be scepticism about
the very idea of there being one proper means whereby human beings
might make themselves happy. His view is that we are too different in our
passions and pleasures for this to be plausible. Some of us, no doubt, are
natural Epicureans, while others are natural Stoics, and still others are
natural Platonists. There are better and worse ways of pursuing pleasure
and public applause and contemplative fulfilment, but there is no way of
deciding which, on the whole, is the best goal to seek in life. At least,
philosophy, the exercise of reason and reflection, is unable to give an
answer to that question. Reason cannot tell us which desires should be
satisfied, which passions should be acted upon, which appetites should
be indulged. Philosophy can offer no special form of practical wisdom.
If you come to philosophy to learn more than what is to be learned
from common prudence and discretion, you are, according to the Sceptic,
bound to be disappointed. It is true, he is prepared to allow, that ‘the
happiest disposition of mind is the virtuous’, the disposition which ‘leads
to action and employment, renders us sensible to the social passions, steels
the heart against the assaults of fortune, reduces the affections to just
moderation, makes our own thoughts an entertainment to us, and inclines
us rather to the pleasures of society and conversation, than to those of the
senses’.179 It is true, in other words, that it is best to be a natural Stoic, a
natural moderate Stoic. The problem is that if we happen not to be natural
Stoics, there is little to be done about it. Efforts of reflection and will are
not means of making us much more virtuous, in the Stoic sense, than
we are naturally disposed to be. In so far as philosophical reflection has
beneficial effects, it does so, the Sceptic says, ‘in an indirect manner’, as
just one element of application to ‘the sciences and liberal arts’. It is taste
and learning in general, not philosophical study by itself, that ‘softens
and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions, in which
true virtue and honour consists’.180 This was surely Hume’s own point
of view. Philosophy alone was not able to get you very far at all along
the journey towards the mortification of self-love and ambition, and the
refinement of sensibility. In fact, philosophy by itself was all too likely, as
the Sceptic puts it, to diminish and extinguish the virtuous passions at the
same time that it diminished and extinguished the vicious ones. It had the
effect of rendering the mind ‘indifferent and inactive’. This sounds like a
description of what happened to Hume himself in 1729–31, as described

in the letter to the anonymous London physician.
The Sceptic justifies his scepticism about philosophy by appeal to a
sentimentalist theory of value identical to the one Hume had developed
in propria persona in Book III of the Treatise. The most certain lesson that
philosophy teaches, the Sceptic claims, is ‘that there is nothing, in itself,
valuable or despicable, desireable or hateful, beautiful or deformed; but
that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of
human sentiments and affections’.181 This gives another reason to think
that through the Sceptic Hume voiced his own doubts about the very
idea of philosophy as, in the Sceptic’s words, ‘medicine of the mind’. The
idea of philosophy as ‘medicine of the mind’ had a source in Cicero,182
and what Hume staged by means of these four essays on human life
and happiness was perhaps something like a rerun of Cicero’s De Finibus
Bonorum et Malorum, a dialogue between representatives of the ancient
schools about the ends of life and how to achieve them. But the conclusion
of Hume’s dialogue was quite different from that of Cicero’s. There was
no dialectical progression towards a defensible view of the highest good
for human beings. On the contrary, the final word was given to a sceptic
about the very existence of a single highest good for mankind and about the
ability of philosophy to do much that could augment the happiness even
of those most inclined to take it seriously. This amounted to a decisive
rejection on Hume’s part of the idea that progress in moral philosophy lay
in a return to the wisdom of the ancients, an idea that had been popularized
by Shaftesbury, and taken up after him by Hutcheson, Butler, and many
others. It was also an amplification upon and justification of his decision,
announced in the correspondence to Hutcheson and then briefly alluded
to in the Conclusion of Book III of the Treatise, to follow Mandeville in
the pursuit of ‘anatomy’ instead of ‘painting’.183
It is not impossible that the position at which Hume arrived by the end
of his interrogation of the ancient conception of the connection between
philosophy and happiness had a Hobbesian provenance as well. In Hobbes
Hume would have found a clearly articulated scepticism about the very
idea of a highest good which it is the business of philosophy to help human
beings attain. In Leviathan Hobbes had declared that ‘there is no such finis
ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor summum bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken
of in the books of the old morall philosophers’.184 According to Hobbes,
the point of philosophy, properly understood, is to solve the problem
Essayist 195
created by the fact that, in a ‘state of nature’, each individual’s idea of

his own good must put him at odds with everyone else. The traditional
conception of moral philosophy, Hobbes thought, was bankrupt, rendered
hopeless by the facts of human nature. In so far as philosophy had a
use, a practical task to fulfil, it had to turn from ethics to politics, and
to the business of understanding the necessary conditions of peaceful
and prosperous coexistence. Hume might have found himself reaching
a similar conclusion as he considered the implications of what he had
achieved in the Treatise. He did no new work in moral philosophy after
1742. Much of what he would go on to write was political in its focus.
And for Hume, as for Hobbes, the central question of politics was always
how to ensure the right kind of balance between liberty on the one hand
and authority on the other.
Hume seems intentionally to have arranged the pieces collected in the

two volumes of Essays, Moral and Political in such a way as to prevent
the reader being given the impression that any single line of thought was
being developed. The abruptness of transition from one topic to another
encouraged the reader to follow Hume’s wishes and consider each essay
as self-contained and independent of the rest. And the brevity of most of
the essays prompted the reader to take each one as a point of departure for
his – or her – own reflections on the topic it raised. Full coverage of every
aspect of the issue was obviously not the author’s ambition. A question was
raised, a new way of thinking about that question was suggested, and it was
left to the reader to consider the matter more fully, to develop that way of
thinking further, to consider further historical examples, and to come up
with objections. There was learning on display, but it was worn lightly,
and there was no expectation of erudition on the reader’s part. Nor, as we
have seen, was there an expectation that the reader would be of a particular
political party. The idea was to present politics as a ‘polite’ subject matter,
as something anyone might be able to interest themselves in, as a topic
of conversations that anyone might be party to. And here ‘politeness’
was not the refined and aristocratic gentility on display in the writings
of the third earl of Shaftesbury. Instead it was the relatively democratic,
egalitarian spirit of Addison and Steele’s Spectator. It is also true, though,
that in his essays on politics Hume was certainly not pretending to be
a new Mr. Spectator. A comparison of Addison’s pieces on party and
Hume’s makes that perfectly clear. Hume – the scientist of politics – was
interested in analysing and explaining what Addison merely bemoaned.
Hume merely shared Addison’s interest in the cultivation of a style, a tone
of voice, that would appeal to a maximally wide range of readers, Whigs
and Tories both (or at least ‘the moderate of both parties’), women as well
as men. According to Hume, as we have seen, it was a fundamental truth
of politics that the foundation of all governments was opinion. It was an
equally fundamental presupposition of this kind of political writing that,
as Hume put it in the essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’, ‘it was in every
respect better to guide [the people], like rational creatures, than to lead
or drive them, like brutes’. Development of public opinion was the whole
point of the exercise. For it was to be hoped ‘that men, being every day
more accustomed to the free discussion of public affairs, will improve in
their judgment of them, and be with greater difficulty seduced by every
idle rumor and popular clamour’.185
The first volume of Essays, Moral and Political was published in Edin-
burgh, by the bookseller Alexander Kincaid.186 Occasionally in the Essays
Hume spoke as a Scot to Scots. There is a humorous reference to ‘our
Scottish ladies’ in ‘Of Love and Marriage’, and when Hume mentioned
a famous miser in ‘this city’, he presumably meant Edinburgh.187 In the
final paragraph of ‘Of the Parties of Great-Britain’, Hume observed ‘that
we never had any Tories in Scotland, according to the proper signification
of the word, and that the division of parties in this country was really into
Whigs and Jacobites’.188 But it could not be said that the book had anything
like a Scottish agenda. Hume wanted a British audience – and he found
one. ‘The Essays are all sold in London’, he told Kames in June 1742.
Joseph Butler, he had been informed, ‘has every where recommended
them’.189 A second, ‘corrected’ edition appeared later that year.190 The
second volume, also published in Edinburgh by Kincaid, appeared very
shortly before Walpole’s decision in February 1742 to leave the House
of Commons and take a peerage as Earl of Orford. This added greatly to
the piquancy of its final essay, ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, writ-
ten, so Hume informed his reader in the ‘Advertisement’, ‘some months
ago, when that great man was in the zenith of his power’.191 It was a
perfect expression of Humean impartiality and moderation. ‘Sir Robert
Walpole, Prime Minister of Great Britain’, it began, ‘is a man of ability,
not a genius; good natur’d, not virtuous; constant, not magnanimous;
moderate, not equitable’.192 ‘During his time trade has flourish’d, liberty
Essayist 197
declin’d, and learning gone to ruin’, it concluded. ‘As I am a man, I love

him; as I am a scholar, I hate him; as I am a Briton, I calmly wish his fall’.193
In the immediate aftermath of Walpole’s resignation of his office, Hume’s
‘Character of Walpole’ was reprinted, so it was said in The Gentleman’s
Magazine, ‘in most of the newspapers of Great-Britain’.194 The Newcastle
Journal printed it with a series of ‘remarks’ prompted by the fact that the
essay was ‘wanting that clearness and consistency which is so necessary in
history that without it the most labour’d performances become useless’.
Hume then favoured the editors of The Scots Magazine with his answers to
those queries, which were published in March 1742.195 The two volumes
of Essays were published anonymously, like the Treatise, so their success
was not exactly a matter of Hume making a name for himself in the literary
world. But it must have seemed proof nevertheless that there was a point
to continuing to follow where the passion for literature led. It must also
have suggested to Hume that essay form had the potential to find a wide
readership for philosophical argument and analysis.
4
The Achievement of
Independence
ntil the spring of 1745, Hume remained in Scotland, based at

U Ninewells, but also spending extended periods in Edinburgh. A
small number of letters survive from this period, and give us glimpses –
though no more than glimpses – of what Hume was reading and thinking
about. It would appear that politics remained a principal interest, and that
religion, too, was very much on his mind. He published nothing further,
though, and perhaps the time came when patience – Hume’s own, or his
family’s – ran out. Paid employment was eventually sought. In the summer
of 1744, Hume’s name was put forward as a candidate for the chair of moral
philosophy at Edinburgh, but it became clear that, for more than one
reason, he was unlikely to get the job. When the offer came of a position
as tutor and companion to a young English aristocrat, the Marquess of
Annandale, ‘along with a bill of 100£’, Hume felt unable to refuse. He
left Scotland for Weld Hall, near St Albans, before the business of the
professorship at Edinburgh was settled.1 His time with the Marquess was
not happy, and lasted barely a year, but it did mean that he was out of
Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. His first thought in April
1746 was to return to Scotland, but instead he accepted a post as Secretary
to General James St. Clair, a distant relation, on what was supposed to be
a military expedition to Canada to open up a new front against France in
the War of the Austrian Succession. In the event, bad weather prevented
a crossing of the Atlantic, and Hume found himself involved instead in
a rather unsuccessful attack on the coast of Brittany. He clearly enjoyed
his time with the army, welcomed the financial opportunities it offered,
and, so his letters suggest, considered trying to find a more permanent
position of some kind in it, perhaps even a commission. A brief period
back in Scotland in the second half of 1747 was followed by another term
in the employment of St Clair, this time at the courts of Vienna and
Turin.
198
The Achievement of Independence 199
Between 1742 and 1747, Hume published nothing but two pamphlets.
One, written during the attempt to secure the Edinburgh chair, and
worked up by Kames from a letter apparently without its author’s knowl-
edge, was intended to vindicate the philosophy of the Treatise. It suggests
that Hume had come to think that the scepticism of Book I of the Treatise
needed to be comprehensively reformulated. The other was written in
late 1747 to defend the conduct of his friend Archibald Stewart during
the Jacobite occupation of Edinburgh. But while in England with Annan-
dale, Hume found the time to begin work on a completely new version
of his account of the powers of the understanding, this time in the form
of a series of essays. What we know now as An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding was published in 1748, with the title Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding. Much of Book I of the Treatise, notably
Parts Two and Four, was almost completely absent from the Philosophical
Essays. Questions concerning the possibility of the rational justification
of religious belief, on the other hand, were much more prominent. In
the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, Hume wrote three new political
essays: ‘Of the Original Contract’, ‘Of Passive Obedience’, and ‘Of the
Protestant Succession’. Worried about possible consequences for himself
and his friends, he decided not to publish ‘Of the Protestant Succession’,
and, probably while in Turin, wrote ‘Of National Characters’ to replace
it in a third edition of Essays, Moral and Political. That edition appeared
in November 1748. It was the first of Hume’s works to have its author’s
name – ‘David Hume, Esq.’ – on the title page. This suggests a new
self-confidence on Hume’s part. He had by now seen ‘a variety of life’, as
James McCosh put it in his chapter on Hume in The Scottish Philosophy.2
He had also made some money, and believed that he would soon augment
his income still further with pensions that he was owed in return for his
service to the British state.
A Reputation in Scotland, and Its Consequences

In ‘My Own Life’ Hume says of the period between the publication
of the two volumes of Essays, Moral and Political and his departure for
England in 1745 only that ‘I continued with my mother and brother
in the country; and in that time, recovered the knowledge of the Greek
language, which I had too much neglected in my early youth’.3 The letters
that survive from this time give the sense that Hume was rather carefully
cultivating the persona, the self-image, of a sedentary man of letters, able

to make light of his pedantries and foibles, but all the same dedicated
wholly to his books. A letter to Kames contained a long and detailed
analysis of various of Cicero’s legal orations, and invited Kames to read
also two of Cicero’s philippics, his denunciations of the over-weaning
political ambitions of Mark Antony, ‘that you may judge of the manners
of those times, compar’d to modern manners’. As in the Essays, Hume’s
concern was to point to the considerable progress in manners that has been
made in modern times: Cicero gives vent to a scurrility and vilification
that would, Hume thought, ‘not now be generally admir’d’.4 A letter to
William Mure of Caldwell, by this time one of Hume’s closest friends,
showed Hume mocking his own obsessive concern that his writing contain
‘neither barbarism, solecism, œquivoque, redundancy, nor transgression
of one single rule of grammar or rhetoric’.5 A letter to Mure about William
Leechman’s sermon on prayer, to which we will return shortly, was half
taken up with recommendations as to how Leechman might improve his
prose style. In a further letter to Mure Hume again made fun of himself
and his literary pretensions, but was surely not only joking when he
described himself as having put his ‘chief confidence’ in his pen, trusting
to it alone for his fortune and fame, and thereby ‘relinquishing the sword,
the gown, the cassock, and the toilette’. He was, he told Mure to tell his
sister, ‘very deeply immerst in books & study’.6 In a letter to an Edinburgh
lawyer named Alexander Home, Hume (aged thirty-two) declared that he
thought it a good thing to enjoy the company of Homer and Xenophon:
‘It makes other company less necessary; & is a kind of treasure against old
age’.7
Hume’s letters make it plain that immersion in books and study was
compatible with a continuing interest in political developments in Lon-
don. Mure, seven years Hume’s junior, had been elected Member of Par-
liament for Renfrewshire in 1742. Hume wrote to tell him of his own views
concerning the main domestic issues discussed in the House of Commons
in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Walpole. In what seemed to many
a blatant dalliance with ‘republican’ popularism, the Tory opposition was
trying to reduce the term of parliaments to three years, to introduce a bill
regulating government disbursement of pensions, and to force a possi-
bly punitive investigation into Walpole’s conduct while prime minister.
Hume was opposed to all of these measures, and, pretending that Mure
might think of himself as his ‘disciple’ in politics as well as in ‘religion &
morals’, jokingly instructed him to vote against them.8 To Hume it mat-

tered particularly that there be no proceedings instituted against Walpole.
The brief ‘Character’ of the now Earl of Orford which had concluded
the second volume of Essays, Moral and Political was very much in tune
with the sentiments of those who believed that it was inevitable that more
harm than good would come of such proceedings. On the other hand,
Mure should vote in favour of the maintenance of a standing army, in
favour of ‘votes of credit’ authorizing the crown to contract further debt,
and in favour of the crown’s right to make treaties without first seeking
parliamentary approval. These were all measures that the opposition party
in the House of Commons repeatedly spoke against. Hume would have
found his opinions echoed in a pamphlet that he was trying to get hold
of at the end of 1743, Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts, published
anonymously, but written by John Perceval, an anti-Walpolean Whig who
later became the second Earl of Egmont.9 Perceval shared Hume’s view
that party dispute was an inevitable element of politics, but believed that
the current opposition was in truth merely a Jacobite ‘faction’, willing to
exploit any means, including dalliances with republicanism, to secure its
long-term aim of subverting the rule of the House of Hanover.10 Such an
analysis was of course in itself deeply factional, and it prompted a num-
ber of equally aggressive replies from opposition writers.11 If Hume knew
about and wanted to read Faction Detected, he was surely also reading other
similar pamphlets, and continuing to reflect on the issues that underlay
the party political disputes of his day. It was presumably in the spirit of
irony that Hume referred to William Mure as his ‘disciple in religion &
morals’. It is striking, nevertheless, that even at this time, before he had
published anything that touched directly on questions of religion, Hume
thought of himself as known for holding unusual, perhaps disreputable,
views on religious matters.
We should not take too seriously Hume’s representation of himself in
letters as hidden away in the country with only Homer and Xenophon for
company. He was a sociable man, was spending time in Edinburgh and
elsewhere in lowland Scotland, including Glasgow, and was as a result
gaining a name for himself, both as an author and a stylist, and as a man
of idiosyncratic and sceptical opinions. By early 1743, Hume could write
to thank Hutcheson for having sent him his Philosophiae Moralis Institutio
Compendiaria in terms which suggest that their relationship had contin-
ued and deepened into friendship over the past four years, despite the
fact that, as the letter makes perfectly clear, their opinions in moral phi-
losophy remained sharply different. Hume’s ‘reflections’ on Hutcheson’s
book were, he said, evidence of how obliged he felt to its author for the
pains he had taken over Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature. They
make it plain that Hume had in no way weakened his commitment to the
principles which set his moral philosophy in opposition to Hutcheson’s.
He continued to insist on the plurality and heterogeneity of the virtues,
and on the value attached in ordinary life to non-moral virtues such as
‘genius’ and ‘magnanimity’, and even ‘bodily accomplishments’. ‘I have
always thought you limited too much your ideas of virtue’, Hume told
Hutcheson; ‘& I find, I have this opinion in common with several that
have a very high esteem for your philosophy’. One of those who had,
implicitly at least, criticized Hutcheson on this score was Butler. In a
‘dissertation’ on the nature of virtue appended to The Analogy of Reli-
gion, Butler had argued that it was impossible to reduce all of morality, in
Hutchesonian manner, to modifications of benevolence.12 Hume claimed
that, if not on this score, then on another equally important one, Hutch-
eson had moved in the Institutio to narrow the distance between himself
and Butler. It looked like an amendment of his theory of a moral sense that
Hutcheson now claimed that among the ‘confused combination of jarring
principles’ that appeared to constitute human nature, there were ‘some
governing principles naturally fitted to regulate all the rest’. ‘To discover
this is the main business of moral philosophy’, Hutcheson claimed, ‘and
to shew how all these parts are to be ranged in order’.13 ‘You seem here
to embrace Dr. Butler’s opinion in his sermons on human nature’, Hume
commented; ‘that our moral sense has an authority distinct from its force
and durableness, & that because we always think that it ought to prevail’.14
What he went on to say is interesting because it was the only comment
he made on Butler’s view of the moral faculty, or ‘conscience’, as having
a natural authority over our other principles of action.15 Our sense of the
authority of conscience is, he claimed, ‘nothing but an instinct or princi-
ple, which approves of itself upon reflection’ – and such self-approval is
common to all instincts or principles. There was, in other words, noth-
ing special about the moral faculty’s self-approval such as might give it
a right to govern the other principles of action. This line of argument
was of a piece with the Treatise’s picture of the passions as regulated, not
by some superior faculty of mind, but by the various demands of social
existence.16
Through Mure Hume made other friends in Glasgow, including the

third Earl of Glasgow, and also William Leechman, formerly Mure’s tutor,
and from January 1744 Hutcheson’s colleague as Professor of Divinity at
the University. These friends would doubtless have known more about
Hume’s views, in religion, morals, and politics, than his published works
revealed, and they would have disagreed with him about a great deal, but
the disagreements do not seem to have been an obstacle in the way of
Hume’s acquiring the kind of reputation that led, in the summer of 1744,
to both his candidacy for the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair and his
being offered a position as ‘travelling tutor’ to the son of a Dumfriesshire
landowner.17 Even so, it may well have been that Hume was more candid
with some friends than with others about just how far he had gone in his
doubts about the rational justification of belief in the Christian religion.
Leechman had at one point asked for Hume’s opinion of his written
English, and in June 1743 Hume wrote to Mure about Leechman’s most
recent publication, a sermon entitled On the Nature, Reasonableness, and
Advantages of Prayer: With an Attempt to answer the Objections against
it. Having made numerous suggestions as to how its English might be
improved, Hume concluded that ‘Mr Leechman has a very clear manly
expression, but in my humble opinion he does not consult his ear enough,
nor aim at a style that may be smooth & harmonious; which, next to
perspicuity is the chief ornament of style’.18 In none of the several later
editions of Leechman’s sermon on prayer were any alterations made in
line with Hume’s suggestions, and Mure might have never mentioned
the letter to Leechman, since it also contained criticism of Leechman’s
argument that Mure may have decided Leechman should not know of.
The letter began:
I have read Mr Leechman’s sermon with a great deal of pleasure, & think it a
very good one; tho’ I am sorry to find the author to be a rank atheist. You know
(or ought to know) that Plato says there are three kinds of atheists. The first who
deny a deity, the second who deny his providence, the third who assert, that he
is influenc’d by prayers or sacrifices. I find Mr Leechman is an atheist of the last
kind.19
Such banter was alright in a letter between Hume and Mure, but could
easily have offended Leechman himself. In the second half of the letter,
Hume went on to make a more serious criticism of the argument of
Leechman’s sermon, raising an objection not just to ‘devotion & prayer’,
but also ‘to every thing we commonly call religion, except the practice of
morality, & the assent of the understanding to the proposition that God
exists’.20 In his letter to Mure Hume expressed the wish that Leechman
would answer this objection in the next edition of the sermon on prayer.
Leechman did not do so. But the objection is important, nevertheless, as
an indication of Hume’s thinking on religious matters at this stage of his
intellectual development.
Leechman’s sermon was intended to justify prayer even once it was
conceded that prayer cannot be conceived as an attempt to move the
affections or pity of God, nor as a means of giving God information. The
argument concerned the effects of prayer upon the person praying. ‘Prayer
only works its effect upon us’, Leechman observed; ‘as it contributes to
change the temper of our minds; to beget or improve right dispositions
in them; to lay them open to the impressions of spiritual objects, and
thus qualify us for receiving the favour and approbation of our Maker,
and all those assistances which he has promised to those who call upon
him in sincerity and in truth’.21 Having defined prayer in terms of the
cultivation of the passions proper to a Christian, Leechman proceeded
to elaborate upon its ‘reasonableness’ and ‘advantages’, and concluded
that it is a duty.22 Hume’s objection was that, because all passions and
affections must have an object, and because we can have no idea of God,
it is impossible for any of our passions and affections to have God as its
object; from which it followed that we cannot develop in ourselves the
affection towards God that Leechman thought to be the point of prayer;
from which it followed, since we cannot be under an obligation to do
what is impossible, that prayer cannot be a duty. People all too easily
delude themselves in their thoughts of the deity: what they take to be
devotion is at best ‘a forc’d & strain’d affection, which moves by starts
& bounds, & with a very irregular disorderly pace’, and is more likely
in fact to be hope or fear, or some other form of selfishness. Moreover,
even if devotion as Leechman defined it were possible, prayer in the
form of petition must remain a mere rhetorical figure of speech, since by
Leechman’s own admission nothing is really being asked of God, and it
was hard to see how deploying a figure of speech might be a duty. It was
hard also to see how it might not be entered into without the bringing
along with it the blasphemous and impious thought of the possibility of
influence upon God. After all, as Hume wrote, ‘Tis a natural infirmity of
men to imagine, that their prayers have a direct influence, & this infirmity
must be extremely foster’d & encouragd by the constant use of prayer’.23
Leechman’s sermon did not exhaust Hume’s interest in the question of
the point of prayer. In a postscript to the letter to Mure, he asked to be
sent a copy of A Dialogue on Devotion, a work first published in 1733 by
an English anti-Calvinist Presbyterian named Thomas Amory.24
It is not obvious to whom, exactly, Leechman was replying in his ser-
mon. In principle, he was addressing those who were sceptical of the value
and intellectual coherence of the practice of prayer. Hume’s letter to Mure
makes it plain that he was of their number. But one wonders how many
other such sceptics there really were, and whether any of them were voic-
ing their scepticism in public. Just as important to Leechman, perhaps
more so, was the fact that by implication he was at the same time engag-
ing with orthodox Calvinists who dismissed the whole idea of a rational
religion and of replying to sceptics on their own terms. The orthodox
Calvinists were quick to make it plain that they were not convinced. A
committee of the Presbytery of Glasgow published a condemnation, the
essence of which was that, contrary to the spirit and wording of the Con-
fession of Faith and of the Catechisms, Leechman had made no mention
at all of prayer in relation to ‘the merits and intercessions of our blessed
Saviour and Redeemer’.25 The party responsible for this condemnation
tried to prevent Leechman from being appointed to the Glasgow divinity
chair, just as they had earlier tried to prevent Hutcheson from becoming
Professor of Moral Philosophy.26 Despite his doubts about the success of
Leechman’s defence of prayer, Hume surely would have supported Leech-
man in his confrontation with the orthodox in the Glasgow Presbytery.
It mattered to Hume, as it mattered to Leechman, that the influence of
the enthusiasts upon public and private life be reduced. Hume was sin-
cerely interested in the success of the moderating, rationalizing project
that Leechman, Hutcheson, and others were engaged in, and he remained
interested in it until he died. In a number of his writings we will find him
continuing to think it through, testing its limits, teasing out its contra-
dictions. The problem, though, from the point of view of those actively
involved in the battle against the Calvinist enthusiasts, was that for Hume
himself it did not matter quite enough. For him there was too little at stake.
His concern appeared too cerebral, too dispassionate, too philosophical.
That meant that when another key Scottish university appointment, the
moral philosophy chair at Edinburgh, was being decided, Hutcheson and

Leechman could not support Hume’s candidacy, despite their friendly
relations with him.27
Since 1734, Edinburgh’s Professor of Moral Philosophy had been John
Pringle. Pringle’s main area of expertise was medicine, however, and
he had been on leave of absence from Edinburgh since 1742, first as
physician to Lord Stair, the commander of British forces in Europe,
then as Physician-General to the army and its hospitals in Flanders. By
May 1744, the Town Council, in charge of University appointments,
was losing patience with Pringle, and the Provost, John Coutts, set about
looking for a new Professor of Moral Philosophy. His first choice was
Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson turned the job down, and gave Coutts
the names of seven men who might be considered instead. Hume was
not among them. Apparently on his own initiative, Coutts contacted
Hume to see if he was interested. He was, and in a letter claims that at
this point the entire Council supported his candidacy.28 But there was
then a delay while Pringle’s resignation was sought, and in the meantime
opposition to the appointment of Hume began to coalesce. According to
Hume himself, ‘The accusation of heresy, deism, scepticism, atheism &c
&c &c. was started against me’. ‘[I]t never took’, he continued, ‘being
bore down by the contrary authority of all the good company in town’.29
At the same time, Hutcheson and Leechman in Glasgow heard about
Hume’s candidacy, and, to Hume’s professed astonishment, did what
they could to obstruct it, and talked up the qualifications of Pringle’s
substitute lecturer, William Cleghorn. But then there was another delay
while Pringle prevaricated. His resignation finally arrived in Edinburgh
only in March of the next year. By this time, Hume had left for England
to take up the position with the Marquess of Annandale. Once Pringle
had resigned, the Council tried once again to persuade Hutcheson to take
the job, and once again they failed. William Wishart, the moderate and
progressive Principal of the University, and for 1745 Moderator of the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, then offered himself as
a further candidate, in addition to Cleghorn and Hume. By this time,
as Hume wrote to his friend Matthew Sharpe on 25 April 1745, such a
clamour had been raised against him ‘that my friends find some difficulty,
in working out the point of my professorship, which once appear’d so
easy’.30 The difficulty became a practical impossibility when at the end
of May the ministers of Edinburgh voted twelve-to-three against Hume.
The ministers had no formal veto with respect to the Council’s appoint-
ments, but it was not likely that the Council would ignore their recommen-
dation, or avisamentum. On 5 June the Council decided nineteen-to-twelve
in favour of Cleghorn over Wishart.31
One explanation of Hume’s failure to secure the Edinburgh chair may
be given in terms of the Scottish politics of the time.32 Since the early eigh-
teenth century, two broadly Whig factions – the Squadrone, based in the
central Lowlands, and the Argathelians, based in the western Highlands –
had jostled for control of Scottish affairs on behalf of the London min-
istry, and university appointment was one of the many domains in which
their competition for power was fought out. In the first half of the 1740s,
the Squadrone faction was being run by the Marquis of Tweeddale, and
in 1742, after the fall of Walpole, Tweeddale became the Crown’s chief
Scottish agent. He replaced one of the leaders of the Argathelian interest,
the second Duke of Argyll, who had filled many of Scotland’s important
positions, in law and in the universities, with his supporters. The second
Duke died in 1743, to be succeeded by his brother Archibald Campbell,
Earl of Ilay, who eventually succeeded in unifying the party and gener-
ally reviving its spirit and fortunes. In 1744–5, though, Tweeddale was
having some success replacing Argathelians with his own people, and the
case of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair turned out to provide him
with the opportunity to test his influence within the ranks of Edinburgh’s
Town Council, and, hopefully, to make sure that the Argathelian interest
was still on the wane even despite the new Duke of Argyll’s efforts. John
Coutts, the Provost who first suggested Hume as a candidate, was an
Argathelian. In 1745, he was succeeded as Provost by Archibald Stewart,
an Argathelian also supportive of Hume’s candidacy. Coutts continued to
be closely involved in the attempt to replace Pringle with Hume. Kames,
very much of the Argyll party, was active on Hume’s behalf. There can
be no doubt that Hume would have been seen as the Argathelian candi-
date. Cleghorn, by contrast, like Pringle, was of a Squadrone family. In
the normal run of things, Tweeddale probably would not have interested
himself in such a decision, but divisions in the Argathelian party regarding
Hume’s suitability – Wishart was solidly Argathelian, as were Hutcheson
and Leechman – presented the Squadrone agents with an opportunity,
and they took it.
An additional impediment to Hume’s candidacy, of course, was Princi-
pal Wishart’s decision to stand himself in the spring of 1745. As part of his
campaign Wishart compiled a list of examples of sceptical and licentious

thought drawn from the pages of A Treatise of Human Nature, designed
to make it clear that the book’s author was not a fit and proper person to
be charged with the instruction of young men at university. This docu-
ment, published with the title A Specimen of the Principles of concerning
Religion and Morality, maintain’d in a Book lately publish’d, intituled, A
Treatise of Human Nature, very likely played a part in causing the city’s
ministers to give their avisamentum against Hume.33 A letter of one of
Tweeddale’s agents reported that the decision was made ‘on account of
[Hume’s] principles’.34 Once the ministers had expressed their opinion,
the chances of Hume getting the job were close to zero, regardless of
the party politics also at play. A month afterwards Hume wrote that his
‘affair at Edinburgh’ was lost ‘by the cabals of the Principal, the bigotry
of the clergy, and the credulity of the mob’.35 As Wishart was surely well
aware, in using the Treatise against Hume he took passages out of context,
making Hume appear much more radically sceptical than a fair account
of the book would allow. Yet Wishart himself was no bigot. Since the
late 1720s, when he had defended John Simson, the Glasgow professor
of divinity, from accusations of heresy levelled by reactionary Calvinists
in the Glasgow presbytery, Wishart had been at the forefront of the cam-
paign to introduce into Scotland a more humane and less intrusive form of
Christianity. When he was appointed Principal of Edinburgh University,
he had himself suffered maltreatment on the part of the orthodox, and
had had his writings misrepresented and his views traduced. In his pub-
lished sermons Wishart spoke in favour of Hutcheson’s philosophy, and
he was accused of being in fact an adherent of Shaftesbury’s notoriously
un-Christian scheme of morality.36 There is thus reason to think that he
would have reacted to Hume’s Treatise much as Hutcheson had done: in
other words, that he would have taken it seriously, even while disagreeing
with it. A defender of freedom of conscience, he would not for a moment
have favoured the punitive measures that the orthodox routinely tried to
inflict upon those with whom they disagreed. Why, then, did he sabotage
Hume’s candidacy for the Edinburgh chair, by putting himself forward
and by misrepresenting Hume’s writings? The answer may be that, along
with Hutcheson and Leechman, he did not have confidence in Hume’s
commitment to the ongoing struggle against the Calvinists. The job of
the professor of moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland was an
important one as regards the task of modernizing the country’s moral,
political, and religious culture.37 Men like Hutcheson, Leechman, and

Wishart knew from their own experience how difficult the task in hand
was, and they may well have regarded Hume as just too unpredictable and
too idiosyncratic to be trusted to play the part that needed to be played.
It seems that Hume fairly quickly took to his position with the Mar-
quess of Annandale, and that even before the meeting of the ministers
in Edinburgh he had decided to withdraw himself from the competition
for the moral philosophy chair. On 15 June he wrote to Kames to thank
him for doing his best on his behalf, and declared himself content at the
way things had turned out. ‘I never was very fond of this office of which I
have been disappointed’, Hume wrote, ‘on account of the restraint, which
I forsaw it wou’d have impos’d on me’.38 Hume surely knew well enough
what would have been expected of him had he got the job. Pringle’s
teaching had been mostly drawn from Pufendorf’s De Officio Hominis et
Civis.39 That is to say, it had been focused on questions of practical ethics,
formulated in the terms of natural law, and organized according to a three-
fold distinction between the duties of men to God, the duties of men to
themselves, and the duties of men to other men. Under the latter heading
the duties of men in making contracts and in acquiring property would
have been given special attention, along with the duties of parents and
children, masters and servants, and governors and governed. Hutcheson’s
teaching at Glasgow was also orientated around Pufendorf’s De Officio, as
was made clear in the Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendaria. At the
end of his letter to Hutcheson about this book, Hume wrote that he was
‘pleas’d to see such philosophy & such instructive morals to have once
set their foot in the schools. I hope they will next get into the world, &
then into the churches’.40 There is no particular reason to imagine this
to have been insincerity on Hume’s part, but he would, no doubt, have
found it a ‘restraint’ to have had to teach the Pufendorfian system himself,
without indulging in the kind of ‘anatomical’ analysis developed in the
Treatise. There is also the fact that an element of any course of moral
philosophy would have had to be, as an account of the Edinburgh arts
syllabus published in the Scots Magazine in 1741 put it, ‘natural theology;
or, the existence and attributes of God demonstrated from the light of
nature’, along with proofs from natural evidence of the immateriality and
immortality of the soul.41 It is pleasing to imagine Hume running through
the standard proofs, doing his best to present them in as strong a fash-
ion as possible and trying to keep his doubts to himself. Hume’s letters
make it obvious that he was not very good at being serious about religion.
It is perhaps understandable that Hutcheson, Leechman, and Wishart
thought him not the best person to mould generations of practical and
tolerant Scotsmen, self-confident in their use of reason, willing and able
to stand up against those who preached original sin, predestination, and
the absolute priority of faith over works.
Wishart’s summary of Hume’s supposed licentious and sceptical opin-
ions was sent on by Coutts to Hume, who was provoked by it into one of
his very few replies to a critic. It seems that Hume wrote out his response
to Wishart without any thought of its being published. He sent it to Coutts
in the first instance, who passed it on to Kames, who had it printed and
published before Hume knew anything about it, with the title A Letter
from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh.42 In the letter to Kames of
13–15 June, Hume wrote that the reply was ‘so hastily compos’d, that I
scarce had time to revise it’. He also wrote that
the charge was so weak, that it did not require much time to answer it, if the
matter had been to be judg’d by reason. The Principal [i.e., Wishart] found
himself reduc’d to this dilemma; either to draw heresies from my principles by
inferences & deductions, which he knew wou’d never do with the ministers & town
council. Or if he made use of my words, he must pervert them & misrepresent
them in the grossest way in the world. This last expedient he chose, with much
prudence but very little honesty.43
However hastily published, and however weak the charge to which it

replies, the Letter from a Gentleman is invaluable for the light it casts
on Hume’s developing sense of how his scepticism should best be char-
acterised. The fact that Hume began work on the Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding soon after he composed the Letter from
a Gentleman makes it difficult not to think of the latter as a stage on the
journey towards the former. Hume’s ‘affair at Edinburgh’ appears to have
helped him to see that his account of the understanding needed to be
comprehensively reframed.
The circumstances of its printing and publication mean that the Letter
from a Gentleman must be regarded as a kind of collaboration between
Hume and Kames. Kames presumably worked it up from Hume’s letter,
possibly inserting filler and connecting material where necessary. He
printed Wishart’s Specimen in full. Following the Specimen there is a ‘Sum
of the Charge’, which may have been Hume’s work, but may just as well
have been Kames’s. It listed six principal accusations made by Wishart

against the unnamed author of A Treatise of Human Nature.44 The first
charge was that of ‘universal scepticism’, backed up quotations from the
most extreme moments of the final section of Book I of the Treatise.
These passages were supposed to show that Hume ‘doubts of every thing
(his own existence excepted) and maintains the folly of pretending to
believe any thing with certainty’. The next charge was that Hume averred
principles ‘leading to downright atheism’, in so far as ‘he maintains, that
the necessity of a cause to every beginning of existence is not founded
on any arguments demonstrative or intuitive’. Hume was then charged
with ‘Errors concerning the very being and existence of a God’. The
fourth charge was that Hume had undermined the basis for believing in
God’s being ‘the first cause, and prime mover of the Universe’ because he
denied that we have any idea of causal power as such, let alone an idea of
a being endowed with infinite causal power. Next, Hume was said to be
‘chargable with denying the immateriality of the soul, and consequences
flowing from this denial’. And finally he was charged ‘With sapping the
foundations of morality, by denying the natural and essential difference
betwixt right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice; making
the difference only artificial, and to arise from human conventions and
compacts’. Wishart’s way of proceeding in all of these charges was simply
to present passages from the Treatise about the relevant subject matter,
and to let them speak for themselves, without any exegesis. In several
cases, the passages in question were drawn from several different sections
of the Treatise and joined together as if they constitute a single line of
argument. Yet Wishart always gave the page numbers of the passages he
used, and he transcribed those passages accurately.
Hume’s first move in his reply to these charges was to make it plain that
he did not endorse the Pyrrhonist argument that for every proposition
an argument can be given to show its contrary to be equally worthy of
belief. The passages from the final section of Book I of the Treatise which
seemed to tend in that direction – as when, for example, it was said that
‘the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general
principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evi-
dence in any proposition’45 – were never intended seriously, and had been
meant ‘as a mere philosophical amusement, or trial of wit and subtilty’.
All the principles cited by Wishart as evidence of Hume’s scepticism had
been, moreover, ‘positively renounced a few pages afterwards, and called
the effects of philosophical melancholy and delusion’.46 Hume had wanted

only ‘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’. Hume now sought
to make clear that it was his view that extreme scepticism is refuted by the
fact that it cannot be put into practice. Universal doubt is ‘impossible for
any man to support’ and is undone by ‘the first and most trivial accident
in life’. The fact that the extreme sceptic has to act, and that as he acts
he makes it plain that he takes some things to be more likely than others,
is sufficient to show that his scepticism is not as thoroughgoing as he
pretends. The only scepticism any one might reasonably endorse is of a
kind which enjoins ‘modesty . . . and humility, with regard to the operations
of our natural faculties’.47 Hume went on to take the fight to the enemy,
and argued that, far from being productive of heresy, scepticism is the
best antidote against it. The great errors of Arians, Socinians, and deists,
he claimed, have their origin in ‘too great a confidence in mere human
reason, which they regard as the standard of every thing, and which they
will not submit to the superior light of revelation’. To argue for scep-
ticism – for moderate scepticism, the only kind Hume endorsed – was
in fact an ‘essential service to piety’.48 As we will see when we consider
the Philosophical Essays concerning the Human Understanding later in the
present chapter, this would not be the last time that Hume would seek to
vindicate scepticism in this particular way.
The question of the status of the principle that whatever begins to exist
must have a cause is not addressed in the Philosophical Essays. What he said
about it in the Letter from a Gentleman is therefore particularly interesting.
He admitted that in the Treatises he had denied that this principle can
be shown to have either demonstrative or intuitive certainty. It cannot be
proved to be true from certain principles, and there is no contradiction in
asserting its contrary. But, Hume now explained, this was not to deny that
it had another kind of certainty – moral certainty, the kind of certainty
that is sufficient for the ordinary purposes of life. The causal principle,
he said in the Letter, ‘is supported by moral evidence, and is followed by a
conviction of the same kind with these truths, that all men must die, and that
the sun will rise to-morrow’.49 Experience, Hume seemed to be asserting,
provided all the evidence ordinarily necessary for belief in such truths.
The fact that no arguments can be given to provide ordinary belief with
rational justification did not mean that ordinary belief is unwarranted.50

Hume would have been aware that here he blurred a distinction that had
traditionally been regarded as essential. Isaac Watts, in his very popular
textbook Logick, had pointed out the difference between two kinds of
certainty, one ‘objective’, one ‘subjective’: ‘Objective certainty is when the
proposition is certainly true in it self; and subjective, when we are certain
of the truth of it. The one is in things, the other is in our minds’.51 Hume’s
claim seemed to be that subjective certainty, the feeling of confidence in
the truth of a belief, is all that matters. Or rather, his claim was that his
arguments did not impugn subjective certainty in the slightest. Of course,
the reflective person might well find their subjective certainty about the
causal principle damaged by Hume’s refutations of arguments purporting
to prove it, and Hume might have been acknowledging this when he went
on to claim that even if he had denied the truth of the principle in the
Treatise, still, this would not have been to set out on the high road to
atheism. ‘It would be no difficult matter to show, that the arguments a
posteriori from the order and course of nature, these arguments so sensible,
so convincing, and so obvious, remain still in their full force’, Hume wrote.
The only argument for the existence of God that would be affected was
‘the metaphysical argument a priori, which many men of learning cannot
comprehend, and which many men both of piety and learning show no
great value for’.52 Obviously enough, Hume was trading here on the fact
that his own proofs of the invalidity of the arguments a posteriori had
yet to be made public. But he was right to say that ‘the metaphysical
arguments a priori’ – the arguments, for example, of Samuel Clarke – had
by this time fallen into disrepute.
In the course of his reply to Wishart about the causal principle, Hume
quoted John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury under William and
Mary, to the effect that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated, and
is capable only of moral evidence.53 In the Letter from a Gentleman Hume
was much more explicit than he had been in the Treatise about how he
understood his ideas to stand in relation to those of the philosophical tra-
dition in general, and of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries
in particular. It had been part of the agenda of the Treatise that its author
should present himself as a solitary revolutionary, occupied with tasks
that no one before him had seen were there to be undertaken. Wishart’s
charges, however, put Hume under a certain amount of pressure to make
it seem as though, in fact, there was nothing especially extraordinary in
the conclusions he had reached. Thus the accusation that Hume in the
Treatise had denied the immateriality of the soul was met in the Letter
with the response that he had merely drawn out the consequences of argu-
ments – concerning our lack of a distinct idea of substance in general –
that had already been made by Locke and Berkeley.54 The scepticism
propounded but then renounced in the Treatise was no different from,
no more extreme than, that of Socrates, Cicero, ‘all the antient fathers,
as well as our first reformers’ – and ‘Monsieur Huet the learned Bishop
of Avranches’, who in his Traité Philosophique de la Faiblesse de l’Esprit
Humain, published posthumously in 1723, had endeavoured ‘to revive all
the doctrines of the antient Scepticks or Pyrrhonians’.55 Hume was most
copious in answer to the charge that his treatment of the idea of causal
power and necessary connection undermined the principle that God is the
first cause and prime mover of the universe. His argument, he claimed,
had to be seen in the context of a long-running dispute as to the nature
of the force or power responsible for the operations of the natural world.
His focus in the Treatise had been upon the view, developed by Descartes
and Malebranche, that matter had no force or power in it at all, and that
its every movement and alteration must therefore be seen as a result of an
exercise of power on the part of God himself. According to this doctrine
of ‘occasional causes’, as characterized by Hume, ‘a billiard ball did not
move another by its impulse, but was only the occasion why the Deity, in
pursuance of general laws, bestowed motion on the second ball’.56 It was
this doctrine, and this doctrine only, Hume continued, a doctrine that
had in any case never been popular among English philosophers, that was
criticized in a passage of the Treatise, quoted by Wishart, where it was
said that it is impossible to discover, or even imagine, an active principle
in God.
It was the last of Wishart’s charges, the charge that the Treatise sapped
the foundations of morality by making all moral distinctions merely artifi-
cial and conventional, that Hume acknowledged would be regarded as the
most serious. If the consequences of scepticism for practice were the most
important issue, then it might well seem that a philosophy which ques-
tioned the reality of the distinction between virtue and vice was dangerous
and needed to be suppressed. In this connection, then, it was even more
important that Hume be able to show that he was not in fact saying any-
thing dramatically new. So the first move he made was to point out that in
his moral philosophy he was merely following the lead of ‘Mr. Hutchison
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow’ (along with

‘all the antient moralists’). Hutcheson had denied that the moral propo-
sitions are the objects of reason alone, and had described them rather as
‘the feelings of our internal tastes and sentiments’.57 Hume had indeed por-
trayed some of the virtues as not natural but artificial, but he had gone to
some pains to make it plain that, on another definition of ‘natural’, justice
and promise-keeping and allegiance were perfectly natural virtues, since
human beings need to live in societies, and society is impossible where
these virtues do not exist. They are artificial in just the same way as speech
is: we have no conception of it or disposition towards it at birth, but have
to be educated into it as we grow up. And those who criticized Hutcheson
for giving too little work to reason and reflection in morals should surely
welcome a theory that founded such a considerable branch of morality on,
precisely, reason and reflection. Hume then reiterated the claim made in
the Treatise itself that his view was not that, outside of society, in a state of
nature, it is permissible for men to violate justice and to break contracts,
but is instead that in such circumstances, justice and contracts do not and
cannot exist, and so cannot be violated and broken.58
It is not very plausible that it was really only the occasionalist conception
of God’s causal efficacy that Hume had in his sights in the Treatise. And it
is no more plausible that Hume really thought of himself as strengthening
the argument for the existence of God, ‘as long as men are disposed to
trust to their experience rather than to mere human reasoning’.59 In light
of what he would argue in both the Philosophical Essays and the Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion, it is hard to know what to make of Hume’s
description of how ‘the same principle’ which led him to infer human
design and contrivance as the productive cause of a building led him also
‘to infer an infinitely perfect architect, from the infinite art and contrivance
which is display’d in the whole fabrick of the universe’.60 Perhaps we
should just say that, on the question of the implications of his scepticism
for religious belief, Hume for the moment was being cautious. Soon after
the Edinburgh affair, however, Hume turned to the task of completely
rewriting the Treatise, partly in order to make it as clear as he could that
the kind of scepticism he endorsed had no dangerous implications for the
practice of morality, or for practical life considered more generally. At the
same time, perhaps feeling in the end that there was nothing to be gained
from cautiousness, Hume decided to be rather more explicit as to the real
extent of his scepticism as regards the claims of both natural and revealed
religion. In a sense, he had predicted the failure of his candidacy for the
Edinburgh chair when, six years earlier, he had remarked in a letter to
Hutcheson that ‘except a man be in orders, or be immediately concern’d
in the instruction of youth, I do not think his character depends upon
his philosophical speculations, as the world is now model’d’.61 Hume had
seen how the philosophical speculations of Hutcheson himself, and of
Leechman and Wishart too, had been used against them when they had
sought to take on the responsibilities of an instructor of youth. Probably
he was not very surprised at how things turned out.
Casting Anew Treatise Book I

Hume took up the position of tutor and companion to the Marquess of
Annandale on 1 April 1745, with a salary of £300 a year. The Marquess
was twenty-five years old and already had a history of mental instability.
He suffered from depression, was prone to fits of violence, and would
eventually be judged lunatic and unable to manage his own affairs. In
fact, when this judgement came, it was backdated to 12 December 1744.
However, Hume’s first few months with the Marquess at Weld Hall near
St Albans seem to have passed pleasantly enough. On June 15 he wrote
to Kames that he would spend the winter in London, ‘& the summer
en famille with very agreeable people, & at such a distance from London
that I can be there once a week or fortnight, if I please’.62 He had by
this time already begun what he described in the same letter as ‘these
philosophical and moral essays’, meaning, presumably, the Philosophical
Essays concerning Human Understanding and, just possibly, also what would
be published in 1751 as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.63
‘I have leizure enough for reading but scarce for writing at present’, he
told Kames, but even so, and doubtless spurred on by the debacle of his
candidacy for the Edinburgh chair, he would continue with the project of a
new formulation of the ideas and arguments of the Treatise. It was not long,
however, before Hume’s sense of his situation changed completely. By
November he was complaining in letters of the ‘melancholy & unsociable’
way of life at Weld Hall, and of the lack of ‘society’ there. With the
Marquess becoming increasingly difficult to manage, and with only the
servants and neighbouring farmers to talk to, Hume tried to engineer a
move of the household to somewhere nearer London. This precipitated
an argument with one of those advising the Marquess’s mother as to how
the Marquess should be managed, an argument that became so bitter that

by the spring of 1746 Hume had little choice but to resign his position. He
left Weld Hall on 16 April, just over two weeks into a fifth quarter-year
of employment. The terms of his contract dictated that he should be paid
his salary for the entirety of that quarter. Hume claimed the money, but
the claim was disputed by the Annandale family. Hume refused to let the
matter rest, and was still pursuing his £75 fifteen years later.64
Hume’s next move left him with even less leisure for reading and
writing.65 By 23 May he was in Portsmouth as Secretary to General James
St Clair, waiting for weather that would make it possible for the fleet
assembled there to depart for an attempted invasion of the French colony
of Quebec. His principal motive in accepting St Clair’s offer of a job was
financial, and he was confident that he had not changed his situation for
the worse: ‘The office is genteel’, he wrote in a letter, ‘I have 10 sh. a-day,
besides perquisites, which may be considerable; and can be put to little
expense, because I live with the General’.66 In another letter he wrote that
he had been ‘askt, whether I wou’d encline to enter into the service’. It
is hard to be sure, but he appears to be serious when he relates that ‘My
answer was, that at my years, I cou’d not decently accept of a commission
in the army, except I got a company. The only prospect of working this
point, wou’d be to procure at first a company in an American regiment,
by the choice of the colonies: But this I build not on, nor indeed am I
very fond of it’.67 Hume never made it across the Atlantic to the British
colonies in America. Time passed, the right winds never came, and in
September St Clair was ordered to make use of the assembled forces in
an assault on the Britanny coast of France, with the aim of capturing the
port of Lorient, an important base for the French East India Company.
Hume would afterwards write to his brother John that ‘nothing cou’d be
a greater blow to the French trade than the destruction of this town, nor
what cou’d imprint a stronger terror of the English naval power, & more
effectually reduce the French to a necessity of guarding their coast with
regular forces, which must produce a great diversion from their ambitious
projects on the frontiers’.68 In the event, such a blow was not to be struck.
Lorient surrendered in the face of St Clair’s forces, but St Clair refused
the terms of the surrender, in large part because he had been told by his
engineers that they could easily destroy the town’s walls and magazine,
making it needless to grant terms of any kind at all. This turned out not
to be true, and when the town gathered what Hume terms ‘a garrison
of irregulars & regulars’ and began to fire its own cannon, and when
heavy rains induced sickness among the British troops, St Clair ordered
a retreat. The campaign petered out not long after and gained St Clair
and his co-commander Admiral Richard Lestock little but criticism and
mockery. Hume insisted to his brother that the army was not dishonoured
despite the expedition’s lack of success. In 1756, he would be pressed to
publish an account of the whole affair in reply to the ridicule poured upon
it by Voltaire in his Histoire de la Guerre de 1741.69
It is a striking feature of the political essays that Hume published in
1741 and 1742 that in them nothing at all was said of international affairs.
They were focused entirely on internal British politics, with no mention
even of one of the most contentious issues of the time, the cost of a
standing army and the inclusion in that army of regiments of Hanoverian
soldiers. Letters written before, during, and after the invasion of Britanny
suggest that time spent in the company of soldiers and sailors instilled
a certain confidence in Hume as regards his opinions about Britain’s
relations with its allies and enemies. From Portsmouth, waiting to leave
for Canada, Hume wrote to Kames speculating that a successful British
attack on Quebec might prompt France to content itself with territorial
gains in Flanders, and to ‘abandon her trade & colonies, which have never
been her chief concern’.70 The reading he had done in political arithmetic
over the past ten years or more would perhaps have made Hume sure
that this, if it happened, would be a mistake on France’s part, given
how plain it was becoming that it was trade and not territorial extent
that determined a country’s power vis-à-vis its rivals. Two years later,
however, after the fall to the French of the Dutch town of Bergen op
Zoom in September 1747, Hume’s optimism had deserted him. With the
tendency to the exaggeration of misfortune that is a constant feature of
his letters, Hume wrote to James Oswald that this was a disaster ‘almost
unparalleled in modern history’. ‘I hear the Dutch troops, besides their
common cowardice & ill discipline are seized with an universal panic’,
he continued; ‘This winter may perhaps decide the fate of Holland. And
then where are we? I shall not be much disappointed if this prove the last
Parliament, worthy of the name, we shall ever have in Britain’.71 Needless
to say, Hume was wrong about this. A year later the War of the Austrian
Succession ended with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, under the terms of
which the French resigned almost all of their gains in the Netherlands. But
Hume’s participation in the Britanny expedition, along with his journey
with St Clair to Vienna and Turin, surely helped to ensure that henceforth
he wrote about British politics with the European context much closer to
the front of his mind.
It helped also to turn his thoughts towards the writing of history. Or
rather, it would seem, it helped to confirm him in an intention already
formed of pursuing what, in letter to Kames of January 1747, he could refer
to as ‘historical projects’.72 Immediately after the retreat from Britanny
Hume was invited ‘to go over to Flanders with the General’, with ‘table,
tent, horses, &c.’ included in the invitation. He was very tempted to
accept: ‘Had I any fortune, which cou’d give me a prospect of leizure &
opportunitys to prosecute my historical projects, nothing cou’d be more
useful to me; and I shou’d pick up more military knowledge, in one
campaign, by living in the General’s family & being introduc’d frequently
to the dukes, than most officers cou’d do after many years service’.73
Worried about the expense, and about the likelihood of looking ridiculous
without having anything definite to do, Hume declined the invitation, but
just before leaving for Turin in January 1748 he wrote to Oswald in a
similar vein. ‘I shall have an opportunity of seeing courts and camps’, he
declared, ‘& if I can afterwards, be so happy as to attain leizure and other
opportunities, this knowledge may even turn to account to me, as a man of
letters, which I confess has always been the sole object of my ambition. I
have long had an intention, in my riper years, of composing some history;
& I question not but some greater experience of the operations of the
field, & the intrigues of the cabinet, will be requisite, in order to enable
me to speak with judgement upon these subjects’.74 Hume no doubt
hoped to ‘attain leizure’ by securing some kind of pension as a reward for
his services to St Clair. Already, having been in August 1746 appointed
Judge-Advocate to the forces under St Clair’s command, Hume had been
much occupied by a claim to be awarded half-pay once the expedition to
Britanny had ended.75 As in the case of his dispute with the Annandale
family, Hume was prepared to continue with his claim for as long as it
took, which in this case seems to have been at least sixteen years. He
was still writing to Oswald about it in 1763, remarking that ‘it will be
allowed to be singular and not a little remarkable, if I should be the only
commissioned office since the Revolution, who has not obtained half-pay,
which however will be the case if I be disappointed’.76
In the summer of 1747, back in London from Britanny, Hume was very
conscious of still not being able to tell Kames and his other friends that
he was, as he put it, ‘fixt in some way of life’. He could not decide what
to do in case he failed in his attempt to get half-pay. Should he remain in
London, and look for some other way of ‘pushing his fortune’, or should
he go back to his studies at Ninewells? ‘On the one hand’, he wrote to
Kames, ‘I consider that I am at a critical season in life; & that if I retire into
a solitude at present I am in danger of being left there, & of continuing a
poor philosopher for ever. On the other hand, I am not able to form any
distinct project of pushing myself in any particular profession; the law
& army is too late, the church is my aversion. A travelling tutor, some
better, but not agreeable. Any office, uncertain, & precarious. Mean-
while I lose my time, spend my money; fall into necessity, perhaps, &
dependance, which I have sought all my life to avoid’.77 The desire to
avoid ‘dependance’ appears in the end to have carried the day. By early
August he had returned to ‘books, leizure, & solitude in the country’.
We do not know for sure what he applied himself to before he left
Scotland again for London and then Turin in January of the next year,
but it seems reasonable to suppose that he returned to the manuscript
of the Philosophical Essays in order to prepare it for publication. In the
letter to Oswald in which he described his fears following the fall of
Bergen op Zoom, he wrote that he had ‘some thoughts of taking advantage
of this short interval of liberty that is indulged us and of printing the
Philosophical Essays I left in your hands’. Presumably it was with Oswald
that Hume had left the manuscript when he entered St Clair’s service a
year earlier. Kames opposed the publication of the Philosophical Essays,
but, Hume continued in the letter to Oswald, ‘I think I am too deep
engaged to think of a retreat’. Exactly what he meant by this is not
easy to decide; maybe he was referring to the business of the Edinburgh
professorship, and the project initiated in the Letter from a Gentleman of
explicating more clearly what did, and did not, follow from the scepticism
delineated in A Treatise of Human Nature. If that is what was on his mind,
what he went on to say in the same letter is more mysterious still. ‘I see
not what bad consequences follow’, he continued, ‘in the present age,
from the character of an infidel; especially if a man’s conduct be in other
respects irreproachable’.78 It might be imagined that he had learned from
his failure to gain the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair exactly what bad
consequences followed in the present age from the reputation of an infidel.
But, perhaps, Hume now had a sense of himself as a player on a British
stage, not just a Scottish one, and was merely expressing confidence that
a reputation for heterodoxy would not matter in that very much larger
context.
In ‘My Own Life’ Hume would describe the writing of the Philoso-
phical Essays concerning Human Understanding as a ‘casting anew’ of Book
I of the Treatise. The ‘matter’ was the same: all that was different was the
‘manner’.79 In view of some very obvious differences in the way of matter,
this was a curious judgement, but, still, it is certainly true that in the later
book there was a great alteration of manner. In a letter of 1754 Hume
wrote of the Treatise that ‘the positive air, which prevails in that book, &
which may be imputed to the ardor of youth, so much displeases me, that
I have not patience to review it’.80 The Treatise was an act of aggressive
self-assertion on the part of its author. It was intended to be recognised
as thoroughly novel, and was loaded with paradox, with self-consciously
virtuoso displays of argumentative ingenuity, and with pronouncements
designed to shock. The authorial voice of the Philosophical Essays was, by
contrast, engaging and solicitous, careful in its advertisements of respect
for reader’s sensibility and politeness, and intent on that reader’s entertain-
ment as well as his instruction. Indeed, the author of this book declared
that he was willing to be instructed by the reader, if, for example, the
reader knew of an argument to show that it is impossible that the course of
nature might be capable of change. After all, it was to be confessed ‘that
a man is guilty of unpardonable arrogance, who concludes, because an
argument has escap’d his own investigation and enquiry, that therefore it
does not really exist’.81 Hume presented himself as not offering complete
explanations, but as rather merely presenting ‘hints’ meant to excite the
curiosity of other philosophers. In the same collaborative vein he expected
that others would find analogies to his suggestions, and thus contribute
to the building of the properly comprehensive theory of mind that Hume
now ostentatiously refrained from offering. The ‘manner’, in other words,
and as the title of the book promises, was that of the essayist. As we saw
in Chapter 3, in the Advertisement to the first volume of Essays, Moral
and Political Hume claimed that it was ‘an indulgence that is given to all
Essay-Writers’ that the reader not look for a connection among essays
and that each essay be considered ‘as a work apart’.82 This, to a great
extent, was how the Philosophical Essays invited itself to be read. There
were few explicit connections drawn between the twelve essays that com-
prise the book. Essay V (‘Sceptical Solution of these Doubts’) related
itself to Essay IV (‘Sceptical Doubts concerning the Operations of the
Understanding’) with its title, but was largely self-standing as regards its
content. Only as much concentration was ever required of the reader as it
took to digest an essay of twenty or thirty duodecimo pages. There was,
in addition, much more use of examples taken from history and literature,
as if the intention were to meet the polite reader on his own ground, and
make him feel at home.83
Hume’s new mode of engagement with his reader was given explicit
articulation and justification in the first essay, ‘Of the different Species
of Philosophy’. At the beginning of this essay it was announced that
‘[m]oral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated
after two different manners’, one of which ‘considers man chiefly as
born for action; and as influenc’d in his actions by taste and sentiment’,
the other of which ‘treat[s] man rather as a reasonable than an active
being, and endeavour[s] to form his understanding more than cultivate
his manners’.84 The distinction was then expanded and elaborated upon,
and the provisional conclusion reached that since nature has given men a
relish for both kinds of philosophy – the ‘accurate and abstruse’ as well
as the ‘easy and obvious’ – it seemed reasonable to ‘allow every man to
enjoy, without opposition, his own taste and sentiment’.85 But Hume
was unable to leave the matter there, in light of the fact that there at
present existed a strain of thought which condemned out of hand the
more profound reasonings of abstruse and accurate philosophy, ‘or what
is commonly call’d metaphysics’, ‘not only as painful and disagreeable,
but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error’.86 It is tempting to
think of the defence that followed of the abstruse and accurate philosophy
as in some way a reaction to the failure to secure the Edinburgh moral
philosophy chair.87 Yet no one principally involved in that affair could
have been imagined by Hume as disposed to reject altogether the project
of cultivating of the true metaphysics (understood, as Hume defines it
here, as enquiry into the secret springs and principles at work in the
operations of the mind), and of destroying the false and the adulterate.
It is most unlikely, for example, that Hume had Hutcheson in mind in
his characterization of the easy and obvious philosophy – if only because,
in a long footnote, Hume gave as an example of successful metaphysics
Hutcheson’s own argument ‘that morality is nothing in the abstract nature
of things, but is entirely relative to the sentiment and or mental taste of
each particular being’.88 At any rate, Hume’s overall objective in this
opening essay was to make it plausible that the distinction he had set out
with was, in fact, a spurious one. It was possible that moral philosophy
could be both abstruse and accurate and, if not easy and obvious, then at
least elegant and appealing to the man of taste. ‘Happy’, Hume exclaimed,
‘if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by
reconciling profound enquiry, with clearness, and truth with novelty!’89
A better summary of Hume’s ambitions as an essayist, both here in the
Philosophical Essays and in the Essays, Moral and Political, is hard to
conceive. Then came a final flourish: ‘And still more happy, if, reasoning
in this easy manner, we can undermine the foundations of an abstruse
philosophy, which seems to have serv’d hitherto only as a shelter to
superstition and a cover to absurdity and error!’90 Hume did not stop to
explain which particular ‘abstruse philosophy’ he had in mind, nor which
superstitions, exactly, it had sheltered, and which absurdities and errors
it had covered.
In 1751, Hume would advise Gilbert Elliot to read only the Philo-
sophical Essays and to ignore the Treatise altogether. He believed that the
Essays ‘contain every thing of consequence relating to the understanding,
which you woud meet with in the Treatise’. ‘By shortening & simplifying
the questions’, he explained, ‘I really render them much more complete.
Addo dum minuo [I add by taking away]’.91 The shortening and simpli-
fication that he undertook while at Weld Hall was strikingly continuous
with the condensation of the argument of the Treatise already on offer in
the Abstract published in 1740. As in the Abstract, the focus of the Philo-
sophical Essays was very much upon the account of probabilistic reasoning
concerning matters of fact offered in Part Three of Book I of the Treatise,
in both its negative aspect (the argument to show that such ‘reasoning’ is
not the work of the faculty of reason, traditionally conceived) and its posi-
tive aspect (the argument to show that belief in probabilities is a matter of
a particular feeling attaching to certain ideas, and that what generates that
feeling is custom and habit). In the Philosophical Essays Hume reduced his
account of probable reasoning to its essentials, subtracting not only the
long and difficult sections of the Treatise given over to the details of how
probabilities are assessed and how ‘philosophical’ probability is distin-
guished from ‘unphilosophical’, but also the sceptical argument directed
at the maxim that every event must have a cause. The second half of the
Philosophical Essays considered, from a number of different angles, the
metaphysical and religious implications of Hume’s account of probable
reasoning.
In one key respect, it is plain, Hume had come to disagree with the
assessment made in the Abstract of his achievement in the Treatise. In
1740, he had claimed that it was the use he had made of the association
of ideas that was his chief claim to the title of a philosophical innovator.92
In the Philosophical Essays the role of the association of ideas in Hume’s
account of the understanding was downplayed. Essay III was entitled ‘Of
the Connexion of Ideas’ (later changed to ‘Of the Association of Ideas’),
and comprised a cursory division of the connecting principles of all ideas
into relations of resemblance, contiguity, and causation, followed by a
more lengthy consideration of ‘some of the effects of this connexion upon
the passions and imagination’, particularly in the composition of histories
and of epic poetry.93 Hume’s principal aim in this essay seems to have
been to establish preliminary links between his analysis of the powers
of the mind and the interests of gentlemen unused to the ways of the
metaphysician. In the essays that followed, the inventive and ambitious
deployments of the principles of association that filled most of Book I
of the Treatise were completely absent. The description of the formation
of probabilistic beliefs was pruned to exclude most of the mechanics of
judgement. In Part II of Essay V Hume did offer an outline sketch of the
nature of belief, and of the processes which produce it, but was at pains to
make it clear that the reader without a taste for ‘the abstract sciences’ could
pass directly on to Essay VI without missing out on anything important.94
In Essay XII he appeared willing to treat as a matter of ‘natural instinct or
prepossession’ our belief in the independent existence of the world that
is given to the external senses.95 The extraordinary, association-driven
explanation of the belief in an external world that had been developed in
Part Four of Book I of the Treatise was entirely missing. The same went
for Book I, Part Four’s association-driven explanation of belief in personal
identity.
If in some respects the Philosophical Essays demanded to be compared
and contrasted with the Abstract, in others it could be read as a full
elaboration of the argument of the Letter from a Gentleman. This was most
obviously so with respect to the question of the nature and consequences
of scepticism. At the beginning of Essay V, introducing his ‘sceptical
solution’ to the doubts raised about the capacity of the understanding
to generate probabilistic beliefs, Hume was at pains, first to identify his
scepticism as Academic, rather than as Pyrrhonist,96 and second to be clear
that it was not to be feared that such a scepticism ‘while it endeavours to
limit our enquiries to common life, should ever undermine the reasonings
of common life, and carry its doubts so far as to destroy all action, as well as
speculation’. ‘Nature will always maintain her rights’, Hume reassured the
reader, ‘and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever’.97
The same claim had been made at the end of the concluding section of Book
I of the Treatise, but not before the drama of the destruction of all reasons
for belief, in a sceptical crisis apparently generated by a recapitulation
of the arguments that had been developed earlier on in the book. In the
Philosophical Essays, as in the Letter from a Gentleman, Hume insisted that
the essence of his philosophy was represented in the final victory of nature
over extreme scepticism. In Essay XII, ‘Of the Academical or Sceptical
Philosophy’, Hume reiterated and expanded upon the contrast between
the scepticism he propounded and the excessive doubts of the Pyrrhonist.
It was said once again that what shows Pyrrhonism to be untenable is
‘action, and employment, and the occupations of common life’. It may be
difficult, if not impossible, to give a refutation of the arguments of the
extreme sceptic, but as soon as one leaves the darkness of ‘the schools’, and
is possessed once more by the passions and sentiments of everyday life,
sceptical doubts ‘vanish, like smoak, and leave the most determin’d sceptic
in the same condition as other mortals’.98 The encounter with Pyrrhonism
was not worthless, since it weans us off dogmatism and persuades us to
limit our enquiries ‘to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow
capacity of human understanding’. Above all, it was no threat to our
everyday prudential, moral, and political commitments, or to experimental
natural philosophy.
It was significant that Hume described ‘the schools’ as the only place in
which the extreme scepticism of the Pyrrhonist makes sense. A recurrent
theme of the Philosophical Essays taken as a whole was a contrast between
the kind of philosophy which is focused on what experience tells us
about the world and about ourselves, and which seeks to methodize and
correct the theories we formulate on the basis of experience, and the kind
of philosophy, in truth no more than an expression of a vanity endemic to
human beings taken as a whole, which sets itself against experience and
tries to rise above it. In the famous final peroration of the book, it was vol-
umes of ‘divinity or school metaphysics’ that appeared likely to be first to
be committed to the flames, because they were limited to neither ‘abstract
reasonings concerning quantity or number’ nor ‘experimental reasonings
concerning matters of fact or existence’.99 This perhaps explains what
Hume meant at the end of ‘Of the Different Species of Philosophy’, when
he expressed the hope that his preferred style of philosophizing would
undermine an abstruse philosophy that has given shelter to superstition
and cover to absurdity and error. Perhaps, that is, Hume meant scholastic
philosophy, and perhaps the superstition that he had in mind was the ratio-
nalist theology still being taught in the universities of Catholic Europe.
He might also have had in mind the rather different kind of scholasticism
that flourished also in Protestant Europe, and that he had had first-hand
experience of at Edinburgh in the early 1720s. However, the Philosophical
Essays could not be read as aimed only at the superstitions engendered
by scholastic philosophy. It was both a manifesto for experience-based
reasoning and also, and in large part, a critical examination of the limits of
experience-based reasoning. In particular, it was a critical examination of
the limits of experience-based reasoning as such reasoning applies itself
to questions of religion. Exposing the fallacies of rationalist, a priori nat-
ural religion was not one of Hume’s concerns here. Rather, he focused
upon the difficulties of a posteriori argumentation in religion, the kind of
argumentation that was thought by many of his contemporaries to have
replaced both scholasticism and the rationalism of men like Samuel Clarke
as the soundest basis for belief in the existence of God and the universality
of divine providence. It was something like the common sense of the age
that experience, in the form especially of experimental natural philosophy,
was the best foundation for rational religious belief. Hume had probably
been doubtful about this ever since he lost his faith, but he had mostly
kept his doubts to himself in the Treatise. Now the time had come when
he felt confident enough to put them in the public sphere.
The Philosophical Essays considered the relation between experience
and religious belief from three different points of view. Essay VIII, ‘Of
Liberty and Necessity’, raised the question of whether the experience of
evil, when taken in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity, is compat-
ible with belief in the existence of a God possessed of the attributes of
benevolence and omnipotence. Essay X, ‘Of Miracles’, raised the question
of whether our experience of uniformity of nature, including our expe-
rience of human nature, could ever make it reasonable to believe reports
of miracles. Essay XI – a dialogue, its title tells us, about ‘the Practi-
cal Consequences of Natural Religion’ – raised the question of whether
empirical investigation into the phenomena of nature licenses inferences
to both the existence of a perfectly intelligent and benevolent creator and
maintainer of the universe in toto, and a continued existence for human

beings after bodily death. These questions were not answered. Hume’s
model as he crafted these three essays was surely Bayle in the Dictionnaire
Historique et Critique. The point was to expose the limits of what reason –
experimental reason – could hope to achieve in the theological sphere.
As in the Letter from a Gentleman, scepticism was presented as directed,
not at faith as such, but at the pretensions of what he at one point in
the Philosophical Essays called ‘arrogant bigotry and superstition’.100 The
moral of a careful consideration of the problem of evil, Hume claimed, is
that philosophy must be ‘sensible of her temerity when she pries ino these
sublime mysteries’ and ‘return, with suitable modesty, to her true and
proper province, the examination of common life’.101 At the end of ‘Of
Miracles’, Hume declared that all he had shown was that ‘mere reason’
is insufficient to convince us of the veracity of the Christian religion, and
that the real basis of a person’s belief is a faith ‘which subverts the princi-
ples of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what
is most contrary to custom and experience’.102 ‘All the philosophy . . . in
the world’, concludes one of the participants in the dialogue described in
Essay XI, ‘will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experi-
ence, or give us different measures of conduct and behaviour, from those
which are furnish’d by reflections on common life’.103 If the Philosophical
Essays had an overall agenda, it was to fix the reader’s mind firmly on the
examination of common life, and so to effect a categorical differentiation
between the realm of experience on the one hand and the realm of religion
on the other.104
The influence of Bayle on the way this agenda was prosecuted in the
Philosophical Essays is especially obvious in the essay ‘Of Liberty and
Necessity’. For the most part this was a reiteration of the solution of the
free will problem offered in Book II of the Treatise. It was significant,
of course, that whereas in the Treatise this question was raised in the
course of an account of the passions, here it followed directly upon a
treatment of the idea of necessary connection. As in the Abstract, where
Hume had claimed that his analysis of the causal relation cast new light
on the controversy over liberty and necessity, in the Philosophical Essays
Hume wanted to make it more obvious than he had in the Treatise that his
approach to human freedom hinged crucially upon his novel definition
of necessity. Also, he was now more concerned than he had been in the
Treatise to establish that human liberty is compatible with the doctrine of
necessity. In the Philosophical Essays he characterized his approach as a

‘reconciling project’, whereas in the Treatise he had appeared dismissive
of the whole of the ‘fantastical system of liberty’.105 The most significant
difference between this account and the earlier one, though, was that
now he acknowledged that there was a distinctively theological dimension
to the question of liberty and necessity. The doctrine of necessity, the
doctrine that Hume had claimed to be no obstacle to human freedom
and moral responsibility, would seem to entail, for every human action,
a chain of prior causes that leads all the way back to God himself. It
thus generated a distinctly unpalatable dilemma for its defender, forcing
a choice between either denying that human actions can have any moral
turpitude whatsoever, since their first cause is perfect, or accepting that
God himself is not perfect, since he is the cause of evil actions. A consid-
eration of attempts to avoid the first horn of the dilemma gave Hume the
opportunity to give vent to the dissatisfaction – in fact, contempt seems
not too strong a word – he had in all likelihood felt for many years for
the claims made by ancient Stoics and their modern Christian apologists
concerning the possibility of denying the reality of evil when it is placed
in the larger providential scheme of things. ‘These enlarg’d views may,
for a moment, please the imagination of a speculative man, who is plac’d
in ease and security’, Hume remarked; but a fit of gout or being robbed of
a large sum of money are usually all that it takes to show such views to be
as insincere as the extreme scepticism of the Pyrrhonist.106 But, then, if
evil is real, and if God is the ultimate cause of all our actions, how can we
avoid the conclusion that God is the cause of evil? And how can God be
the cause of evil without being, in some respect at least, evil himself? This
was very close to the unnerving conclusion to which Bayle had come in his
article ‘Pauliciens’, and Hume did a very good imitation of Bayle when he
concluded that ‘These are mysteries, which mere natural and unassisted
reason is very unfit to handle; and whatever system it embraces, it must
find itself involv’d in inextricable difficulties, and even contradictions, at
every step it takes with regard to such subjects’.107
It was also in the manner of Bayle that Hume discussed miracles.
Hume’s initial framing of his discussion strongly suggests that his think-
ing about miracles was shaped by French treatments of the question,
and especially by sections of Arnauld and Nicole’s La logique, ou l’art du
penser.108 Arnauld and Nicole had argued that ‘external circumstances’, in
the form of evidence of the reliability of the person providing testimony
concerning a purported miracle, could outweigh the ‘internal circum-

stances’ of the antecedent improbability of the event in question.109 Locke
adopted Arnauld and Nicole’s approach in his treatment of, as he put it,
the one case ‘wherein the strangeness of the fact lessens not the assent
to a fair testimony given of it’.110 Hume, with Baylean ingenuity, turned
this argument on its head, and argued that there are events made so
antecedently improbable by our experience of the usual course of nature
that no testimony, regardless of the reliability of the person giving it,
could be strong enough to give one reason to believe it. For what was
at issue in ‘Of Miracles’ is not the possibility of miracles, but rather how
to balance experience of the uniformity of the laws of nature against the
reports of those who claim to have witnessed dramatic violations of those
laws. Hume’s intention was to show that the matter can be settled in a
quite general way, without need for case-by-case inspection of particular
reports of miracles – and to show that the matter can be settled against the
reasonableness of any and every miracle report. His argument built on the
theory of probability developed in Book I, Part Three, of the Treatise –
which may well have been where ‘Of Miracles’, or something very like it,
was originally intended to appear. ‘[I]n all determinations, where the mind
decides from contrary experiments’, Hume had written in the section ‘Of
Unphilosophical Probability’, ‘tis first divided within itself, and has an
inclination to either side in proportion of experiments we have seen and
remember’.111 Faced with any purported report of a miracle, the mind is
bound to find so many ‘experiments’ against the reliability of the report
that the balance of probability will be in favour of disbelief.
To begin with, in ‘Of Miracles’ Hume left open the possibility that
testimony might be of such a kind that its falsity would be more miraculous
than what is testified to. But he went on to argue ‘that we have been a great
deal too liberal in our concessions, and that there never was a miraculous
event, in any history, establish’d on so full an evidence’.112 In this part
of the argument one senses again the influence of Bayle and his general
scepticism, evident throughout the Dictionnaire, about the reliability of
historical testimony.113 Hume argued that once the limited intelligence
and education of reporters of miracles is taken into account, along with
the temptation to exploit the superstitious credulity of humankind in
general, and of primitive and ignorant people in particular, plus the way
in which the miracles laid claim to by one religion are contradicted by
the miracles laid claim to by all the others, the conclusion will be reached
that ‘no testimony for any kind of miracle can ever possibly amount to a
probability, much less to a proof’.114 The miracles of the New Testament
were not explicitly mentioned in the essay, but of course the argument
applied to them as well. Whoever is moved by faith to assent to the
Christian religion, Hume claimed in the final sentence of the essay, ‘is
conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the
principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe
what is most contrary to custom and experience’.115 This final twist in
Hume’s argument was one that his contemporaries would find especially
offensive.116
The dialogue described in the essay ‘Of the Practical Consequences of
Natural Religion’ was plainly fictitious – although it may have been the
business of the Edinburgh professorship that prompted Hume to reflect
further on the idea that religious belief was an essential condition of a rep-
utation for decency and trustworthiness. In a dialogue, of course, opinions
could be voiced and debated without it being possible safely to attribute to
the author any one particular point of view. It could have been prudence,
a desire to avoid controversy, that prompted Hume to treat the funda-
mental principles of natural religion in this indirect manner, first here,
then later in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Shaftesbury, after
all, had claimed that in a dialogue ‘the author is annihilated’.117 In Essay
XI, ostensibly at least, the main question concerned the consequences,
especially the political consequences, of religious scepticism. The friend
of the first-person narrator impersonates a defender of philosophies, such
as Epicureanism, ‘which denying a divine existence, and consequently a
providence and a future state, seem to loosen, in a great measure, the ties
of morality, and may be suppos’d, for that reason, pernicious to the peace
of civil society’.118 However, and for no very good reason if the main
question was the consequences of denying a divine existence, much of the
dialogue was in fact taken up with an exposition of the scepticism about
arguments for a providential designer that would be much more fully
developed in the Dialogues.119 The spokesman for atheism makes a virtue
of considering only what can, and cannot, be inferred from experience,
and the first-person narrator is willing to engage with him on those terms.
He argues that, for as long as experience alone determines what may be
believed and what may not be, there is no reason to place credence in a
moral order of the universe different and distinct from the one we see
daily actually to obtain in the world; and that this does not matter as far
as everyday practice is concerned, since it is a matter of plain experience

that the life of the virtuous is preferable to the life of the vicious.
The dialogue ends with what appears to be a concession on the part
of the narrator that his friend’s argument concerning the practical rel-
evance of the tenets of natural religion is a sound one. It is true that
scepticism about providence and a future state need have no deleterious
consequences. But still, he insists it does not follow that it will have no
such consequences, since ‘men reason not in the same manner you do, but
draw many consequences from the belief of a divine existence, and sup-
pose, that the deity will inflict punishments on vice, and bestow rewards
on virtue, beyond what appears in the ordinary course of nature’. Exco-
riators of supersitition may be good reasoners – ‘but I cannot allow them
to be good citizens and politicians; since they free men from one restraint
upon their passions, and make the infringement of the laws of equity
and society, in one respect, more easy and secure’.120 The spokesman for
Epicureanism was given no reply to this complaint. There was perhaps an
indecision here on Hume’s part about the relation between religion on the
one hand and the peace and stability of society on the other, an indecision
to which we will return in later chapters of this book.
Close to the end of the Philosophical Essays Hume claimed yet again that
the ‘best and most solid foundation’ of ‘divinity or theology, as it proves
the existence of a deity, and the immortality of souls’ is ‘faith and divine
revelation’.121 Even if it is true that there is no philosophical solution to
the problem of evil, even if there is no good reason to believe in reports of
miracles, even if experience is no basis for positing a providential moral
order, still, so Hume presented himself as asserting, the real ground of
religion is untouched. The idea that reason was not to be trusted in matters
of religion, and that the first-person experience of the mysterious accession
of faith was the real basis of Christianity, was a prominent element of the
rhetoric of Calvinism that had flourished in Scotland since the sixteenth
century. It was an idea still very much alive among the ‘orthodox’ element
of the Church of Scotland, which is to say, among those who had tried to
end the careers of William Leechman, Francis Hutcheson, and William
Wishart. Hume would have known this, and in giving voice to such
‘orthodox’ sentiments was doubtless mostly simply amusing himself, fully
aware that he would greatly annoy both the proponents of a moderate and
experienced-based religion of reason, by exposing the weakness of their
arguments, and also their Calvinist opponents. No one, after all, was
going to mistake the author of this self-consciously polite and literary

set of philosophical essays for a Calvinist. The Calvinists would have
recognised Hume’s parody of their language for what it was.122
Hume must have expected, then, that he would find himself in trouble
in Scotland as a result of the Philosophical Essays. However, this was not a
book written for a purely Scottish audience. Hume composed it confident
of his right to a place in a British, if not European, world of elegant
and sophisticated literary endeavour. The Philosophical Essays sought to
make the case for what was still a new kind of philosophy, an analysis
of the powers of the human mind based wholly on experience, and to
show that such a philosophy could instruct and please at the same time.
In Essay I Hume noted how much more enduring and popular the ‘easy
and obvious’ philosophy is than the ‘accurate and abstruse’: ‘The fame
of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decay’d.
La Bruyere passes the Seas, and still encreases in renown: But the glory
of Malebranche is confin’d to his own nation and to his own age. And
Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely
forgotten.’123 Hume’s aim was in effect to ensure that the essentials of
the philosophy of Book I of the Treatise would not be forgotten, by
showing that his own version of Lockeanism could be developed with
Addisonian concision and perspicacity, and to show in the process that
modern philosophy could be read with pleasure. The Philosophical Essays
was the work of someone who did not believe in the value of philosophy
for philosophy’s sake, or in the value of a philosophy written only for
other philosophers. It enacted the idea that philosophy is not a discipline
that is worth pursuing if it loses touch with the language and concerns of
the ordinary educated reader.
Lessons of a Jacobite Rebellion

In August 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, son of the ‘Old Pretender’ James
Stuart, landed with a tiny military force at Glenfinnan on the west coast of
Scotland, with the intention of regaining for his father first Scotland and
then England. For two years the Stuarts had been hoping for the French
support that would, so they and their advisors thought, give them a realistic
chance of putting an end to the Hanoverian regime. Charles Edward had
grown frustrated, and decided to force the hand of Louis XV. His early
successes were remarkable, and provided the clearest possible evidence of
the political and military weakness of post-Union ‘North Britain’. With

fewer than 3,000 men he had taken Perth by 4 September, and then
Edinburgh two weeks later. The first confrontation with government
troops resulted in an easy victory for Charles at Prestonpans, a few miles
east of Scotland’s capital, and this success inspired him with the confidence
to overcome the doubts of the more cautious among his supporters and to
press south into England. On 4 December, the Jacobites, now about 5,000
in number, reached Derby, 100 miles or so from London. Few had risen to
join them in England, but even so, the panic in London was considerable,
and a run on the Bank of England was only narrowly avoided. The major
cause of worry was not so much the rebels themselves as the possibility
that the French would finally make good on their promises to Charles
and open up a second front from the south coast. This never happened.
By early December the British military had brought regiments back from
the continental European theatre, in large enough number, at least so it
was rumoured, to annihilate the rebel army, and at Derby Charles’s nerve
failed him. The retreat to Scotland that followed was fast and relatively
orderly, however, and once over the border, the army did not merely
disperse. Another defeat of government troops took place at Falkirk on
17 January, and at this point the Duke of Cumberland, younger son of
George II, was sent to Scotland to show his mettle in bringing the rebellion
to a complete conclusion. There followed the destruction of the Jacobite
army at Culloden near Inverness on 16 April, two years of very violent
reprisals in the Highland areas which had supported the Stuart cause, and
many more years devoted to eradicating the social, cultural, and religious
bases of Jacobitism in northern Scotland.124
Hume, at Weld Hall with the Marquess of Annandale for all of the 45
apart from its bloody finale, appears to have decided that the best course
of action for one in his position was, in his letters at least, to say absolutely
nothing about it. It needs to be kept in mind, of course, that in all likeli-
hood there survives only a fraction of Hume’s complete correspondence
during the period, but it is noteworthy that not once in any surviving
letter does Hume discuss what was by far the most significant news of the
day.125 It is probable that any Scot living in England in the second half of
1745 was regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by the authorities,
and Hume may well have had reason to fear that his letters were being
opened and read by people other than their addressees. But Hume did
have his say about the rebellion, in a pamphlet he wrote while back in
Scotland in the autumn of 1747, entitled A True Account of the Behaviour

and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, Esq; Late Lord Provost of Edinburgh. We
have already encountered Archibald Stewart in this chapter. He became
Lord Provost of Edinburgh in October 1744, at the time when Hume was
a candidate for the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair; and, as a supporter
of the Argyll interest, he backed Hume for as long as the party line dic-
tated that he should. Stewart was then unfortunate enough to be chief
magistrate when Charles Edward Stuart and his army arrived outside the
gates of Edinburgh, and was instrumental in ensuring that the city did
not put up what would surely have been fatally weak armed resistance
to the Jacobite forces, thereby saving Edinburgh from being burned and
preventing pointless loss of life. Later, though, in the heightened atmo-
sphere after Culloden, Stewart’s motives for surrendering Edinburgh to
the rebels came to be questioned. He was arrested and imprisoned in the
Tower of London. Proceedings against him were scheduled to begin in
Edinburgh in March 1747, did not in fact start until August, and dragged
on into the autumn.126 Hume wrote his pamphlet – dated 20 October –
to bolster the case for Stewart’s innocence. Like the pamphlet occasioned
by Hume’s candidacy for the moral philosophy chair, it was written in the
form of an anonymous letter to an unnamed friend, putting ‘in a just light’
the cause of one to whom the author had, so he wrote, ‘great obligations’
and for whom he had ‘a great personal regard’.127
The True Account shows that Hume’s silence about the rebellion while
it was happening should not be construed as a lack of interest in its
particularities and outcome. The pamphlet reveals a detailed knowledge
of every stage of the fall of Edinburgh into Stuart hands, and of all the
circumstances pertaining to the defences and garrison of the city that
were at issue in the case. It also reveals Hume’s utter lack of sympathy
with the Jacobite cause. Success for Charles and James Stuart would have
meant, according to Hume, ‘slavery’ for the eight million inhabitants of
Great Britain.128 The British government – at the time unrestrainedly
revenging itself on the people of the Highlands –‘is surely the fullest of
mildness, equity, and justice in the world’.129 If the government was faulty
in anything, Hume continued, it was in failing to prosecute the obviously
guilty. ‘[W]e live in an acquitting age’, Hume declared.130 Throughout the
pamphlet Hume wrote, in a manner then typical of Lowland Scots, as if
the Highlands were a distant foreign country. The rebellion was framed in
terms of an opposition between commercial and polite civilization on the
one hand and rude and violent barbarism on the other. The Highlanders
were a throwback to the feudal past. Bound absolutely to their chieftains,
they knew nothing of discipline, and nothing of any other weapon but
the broadsword. They ‘value themselves upon military courage above all
endowments’.131 The Lowlanders, by contrast, lived in a modern world
shared with their English neighbours, and because of this it could not
have been expected that they would put up successful resistance when
Charles swept down from Lochaber along the military roads built after
the rebellion of 1715. ‘When men have fallen into a more civilized life,
and have been allowed to addict themselves entirely to the cultivation
of arts and manufactures, the habit of their mind, still more than that
of their body, soon renders them unfit for the use of arms, and gives a
different direction to their ambition’.132 In such societies, defence was to
be provided by professional soldiers, not by citizen militias such as had
been left to defend Edinburgh in September 1745. The initial success of
the rebels, then, was to be attributed wholly to failures on the part of the
British army.133
In the event, Hume was unable to do Stewart the service he intended
with the True Account. Stewart was unanimously acquitted of all charges
on 2 November, before Hume was able to get his pamphlet into print.
Curiously, this did not prompt Hume to drop the matter. He wrote a
brief Postscript, dated 4 November, and had the True Account published
anyway.134 The real point of the publication is likely to have been, in fact,
the Postscript, in which Hume set Stewart’s trial in its context in the
Scottish party politics of the day. The acquittal of Stewart was a defeat for
the man who had replaced him as Lord Provost, George Drummond, and
for the ruling Whig party in London as well. Hence, as Hume noted, ‘the
opposite party’, the Tories, made of it ‘a matter of infinite triumph and
rejoicing’.135 But, of course, Stewart was himself most definitely a Whig –
as the trial had made clear. So, Hume continued, a distinction needed to
be drawn between two sorts of Whig: the ‘political’ sort and the ‘religious’
sort. A political Whig could be defined as ‘a man of sense and moderation,
a lover of laws and liberty, whose chief regard to particular princes and
families, is founded on a regard to the publick good’. Religious Whigs, on
the other hand, identified themselves as such in virtue of their fanatical
commitment to Presbyterianism and the Westminster Confession. They
had had their day after the execution of Charles I – ‘and then there
was fine work indeed’.136 The entire business of Stewart’s trial, Hume
was suggesting, had been set up as a means of furthering the interests

of a party with a reactionary religious agenda, an agenda that George
Drummond, along with many others, undoubtedly had at this time.137
Thus it provided a perfect example of the way in which the politics of
faction, especially when fuelled by the religion of enthusiasts, had the
capacity to set the state at odds with itself. It is perhaps worth noting
that here in the True Account Hume did not appear to regard religion
and politics as an inevitably dangerous combination. His objection is to
extreme Protestantism in particular. ‘I know not how it happens’, he
writes, ‘but it seems to me, that a zeal for bishops, and for the Book of
Common Prayer, tho’ equally groundless, has never been able, when mixt
up with party notions, to form so virulent and exalted a poison in human
breasts, as the opposite principles. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, calumny,
selfishness are, generally speaking, the true and legitimate offspring of
this kind of zeal.’138
The Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was a reminder that the constitutional
revolution that had begun in 1688 had not yet succeeded in moving
Britain decisively beyond the political and religious problems of the sev-
enteenth century. The Hanoverian regime, and with it the new form of
limited monarchy that had been under development since the accession
of William and Mary, had been shown, especially in Scotland, to be vul-
nerable. While it was true that few had been willing to risk their lives and
property by openly declaring for the Stuarts, many were very far from
wholly committed to the rule of George II and would not have been dis-
pleased at a return of the House of Stuart – provided, of course, there was
no attempt to enforce Catholicism on the people of Great Britain. In Book
III of the Treatise, in the sections on allegiance, Hume had argued that the
Revolution had no secure foundation in clear moral principle. Its basis,
according to Hume, like that of any government, lay only in ‘opinion’ as
to the benefits it offered in the way of peace and prosperity. This sceptical
and pragmatic approach to the question of ‘the objects of allegiance’ had
been challenged by the recurrence in 1745 of fervent devotion to the House
of Stuart, and was challenged from the opposite direction in the aftermath
of the Rebellion by the kind of dogmatic and extremist Whiggery on dis-
play in the trial of Archibald Stewart. In Essays, Moral and Political Hume
had expressed bemusement at parties ‘founded on the different affections
of men towards particular families and men, whom they desire to rule
over them’.139 It was clear now that this phenomenon demanded a closer
examination. So, when back at Ninewells in the summer of 1747, and

in addition to adding the final touches to the manuscript of Philosophical
Essays concerning Human Understanding, Hume returned to the question of
political obligation, and wrote three new essays on the topic: ‘Of the Origi-
nal Contract’, ‘Of Passive Obedience’, and ‘Of the Protestant Succession’.
In a letter to Charles Erskine of February 1748, Hume described these
essays in the following terms: ‘One is against the original contract, the
system of the Whigs, another against passive obedience, the system of
the Tories: A third upon the Protestant succession, where I suppose a man
to deliberate, before the establishment of that succession, which family he
shou’d adhere to, & to weigh the advantages & disadvantages of each’.140
Hume was writing as a ‘political Whig’, ‘whose chief regard to particular
princes and families, is founded on a regard to the publick good’. More
precisely, he was writing in order to show that a regard for the public
good is the only principle that can coherently be applied to questions of
politics. It mattered that in the wake of 1745, British politics was not once
again consumed by a supposedly philosophical dispute between Whigs
and Tories as to the basis of the right to govern.
The germ of the arguments of all three essays can be found in the
sections on allegiance in Book III of the Treatise, and they are thus to be
seen as a part of the repackaging of the arguments of the Treatise in more
digestible essay form. In the case of the essay ‘Of the Original Contract’,
what is most noticeable in a comparison with the relevant parts of the
Treatise is the fact that Hume altered the structure of his argument, giv-
ing less space to a ‘philosophical’ refutation of the idea that government is
legitimated by consent (and also leaving it until last), and foregrounding
instead the manner in which that idea was contradicted by ‘the world’, or
by ordinary common sense. Of the eighteen pages of the essay as printed
in the third edition of Essays Moral and Political, only two and a half
were given over to the argument that, since both allegiance and the obli-
gation to keep promises had their origins in ‘the apparent interests and
necessities of human society’, there was no possibility of explaining the
former in terms of the latter. ‘But would we have a more regular, at least,
a more philosophical refutation of this principle of an original contract or
popular consent’, Hume wrote, ‘perhaps, the following observations may
suffice’.141 The argument was condensed almost to the point of perfunc-
toriness, so that it was made to appear that common sense was entirely
sufficient to establish the falsity and absurdity of contract theory. ‘Of the
Original Contract’ began by intimating that ‘philosophical or speculative’

systems of political principle, such as in the present age both Whig and
Tory factions attach such importance to, were inevitably incoherent and
incapable of proving any kind of practical conclusion concerning the right
of resistance, or lack thereof. Hume’s agenda in ‘Of the Original Contract’
was to remind the side that had been victorious in 1745–6 that defeat of
Charles Stuart did not amount to a vindication of the philosophical dimen-
sion of Whig ideology. The Lockean estimate of the importance of consent
in politics remained as groundless as it always had been. The only thing
able to settle disputes of right was, in the end, ‘general opinion’ – and
neither the people nor their governors had ever entertained the idea that
political authority derived from consent. Certainly the events of 1688 had
been no practical exemplification of establishment of a government by
means of an expression of the will of the people taken as a whole. The only
part of the government that had changed in 1688 was the succession of the
crown: ‘And ’twas only the majority of seven hundred, who determin’d
that change for near seven millions. I doubt not, indeed, but the bulk of
these seven millions acquiesc’d willingly in the determination: But was
the matter left, in the least, to their choice?’142
As in the political essays of the first two volumes of Essays Moral and
Political, Hume’s posture in the three essays written in 1747 was one
of studied impartiality. A ‘party’ philosophy, Hume suggests in ‘Of the
Original Contract’, is close to a contradiction in terms.143 These essays
can also be viewed, then, as a further stage in Hume’s definition of the
role of the philosopher in politics. In them Hume positioned himself
above the fray, and, looking down on it, identified logical incoherence and
refusals to acknowledge plain matters of fact, and also ways in which the
disagreement between the parties was more apparent than real. It was to
an extent true both that government has its origins in consent and that it
has its origin in the will of God. It was to an extent true both that resistance
is legitimate and that it is (usually) highly prejudicial to the interests of
society. Hume’s target remained political extremism and dogmatism of
any kind. It is striking, though, that he appeared much more concerned to
discredit the characteristic doctrines of the Whigs than he did those of the
Tories. In ‘Of the Original Contract’ the ‘speculative’ basis of the doctrine
of divine right was demolished in a single paragraph. The proponent of
that doctrine, Hume argued, must allow that not only the investiture of
authority in an English or French monarch but every event whatsoever is
part of the order of providence, so that ‘the greatest and most lawful prince’
has no more ability to plead the sacredness and inviolability of his office
than does ‘an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber
and a pyrate’.144 Divine right theory proved far too much, and failed to
provide a means of identifying what is special in the authority of a king.
In ‘Of Passive Obedience’ the doctrine’s supposed practical consequences
were discredited in a mere five pages. As was the case with the Whig
notion of the consent of the governed, what undid the idea that active
resistance to a monarch is never legitimate was, simply, the common sense
of the age, which was firmly committed to the view ‘that as government
obliges to obedience only on account of its tendency to public utility, it
must always, in extraordinary cases, when public ruin would evidently
attend obedience, yield to the primary and original obligation. Salus populi
suprema lex, the safety of the people is the supreme law’.145 Hume may
have given divine right and passive resistance much less attention than he
did contract theory because he regarded it as obviously the weaker of the
two doctrines, already discredited by Locke in his attack on Sir Robert
Filmer in Two Treatises of Government. Another explanation might lie in
the fact that the extent of the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 made
it look mostly irrelevant. The real question, Hume may have thought, lay
in the form that Whiggism would now take.
The form that he wanted Whiggism to take was evident in ‘Of the
Protestant Succession’. To Kames Hume wrote that he treated the ques-
tion of the succession ‘as coolly and indifferently, as I would the dispute
betwixt Caesar and Pompey. The conclusion shows me a Whig, but a
very sceptical one’.146 The scepticism lay in, precisely, Hume’s refusal to
subscribe to any claims to the effect that the claim to the British throne of
the (Protestant) House of Hanover was given legitimacy by a contractual
agreement between the people and their government. Hume’s Whiggism,
which is to say, his preference for William of Orange over James II, and
for George II over the Old Pretender, was strictly ‘political’, motivated
solely by a careful assessment of the interests of the nation taken as a
whole. And even there he was sceptical, fully aware of the potential disad-
vantages to Britain of the foreign dominions of a German sovereign, and
admitting the instability, in the form of plots and conspiracies and actual
rebellions, that was bound to be consequent upon a contested title to the
throne. There was, in addition, a more insidious and dangerous weakness
attendant on a ‘precarious establishment’ such as that of the Hanoverians.
In order to give itself strength and stability that it would otherwise have
lacked, the Hanoverian state had got into the habit of mortgaging its
finances, and of never paying off its debts. While it was true that all
European states had adopted ‘this pernicious practice of funding’, Hume
claimed, without explanation, that Britain ‘lay under less necessity than
other states’.147 A recalled Stuart king, Hume intimated, would feel more
secure, because a hereditary claim was by its nature more secure, at least
in the eyes of the people at large, than a claim derived from a decision of
parliament. And because he felt more secure, he would borrow less. He
would, for example, be willing to arm his subjects, which no prince with
a disputed title would dare to do, and so defence of the realm would be
less costly. Even so, Hume argued, the balance of considerations spoke in
favour of the settlement of 1688. The most important factor mitigating
against the Stuart claim was their Catholicism. Catholicism is expensive,
it is intolerant, ‘[a]nd not contented with dividing the sacerdotal from
the regal office, (which must be prejudicial to any state) it bestows the
former on a foreigner, who has always a separate, and may often have an
opposite interest to that of the public’.148 But there was also the fact that
‘the settlement in the house of Hanover has actually taken place’.149 It
could only be undone by means of civil war and rebellion; and even were
such a rebellion successful, the title to the throne would remain disputed,
from the other side.
Hume was aware that so ‘indifferent’ an endorsement of the Hanoverian
claim to the British throne was completely at odds with the atmosphere
of British politics in the wake of the 1745 rebellion. He wrote to several
friends in the winter of 1747–8 asking for their advice as to whether ‘Of
the Protestant Succession’ should be published in a new edition of Essays
Moral and Political. He expected Patrick Murray, the fifth Lord Elibank,
to find more boldness than prudence, and perhaps also ‘full as much
prudence as truth’, in his new essays: ‘In particular, I am afraid your
Lordship will differ from me with regard to the Protestant succession,
whose advantages you will probably rate higher than I have done. I have
gone as far as I think reason and experience will justify me’.150 ‘Some
people would frighten me with the consequences that may attend this
candour, considering my present station’, Hume wrote to Kames, ‘but I
own I cannot apprehend any thing’.151 Hume was, however, disposed to
be cautious. James Oswald had approved of the publication of the essay,
but this was not enough to settle Hume’s mind on the matter. ‘I hope
I have examin’d [the question of the Protestant succession] as coolly &

impartially as if I were remov’d a thousand years from the present period’,
he wrote to Charles Erskine, Lord Tinwald. ‘But this is what some people
think extremely dangerous, & sufficient, not only to ruin me for ever, but
also throw some reflection on all my friends, particularly those with whom
I am connected at present’.152 Hume asked that Erskine make the decision
for him; and Erskine’s judgement, it would seem, was that the essay should
not be published, at least not at that moment. It would appear in print
four years later, in the Political Discourses of 1752. It is striking that Hume
was so much more worried about ‘Of the Protestant Succession’ than he
was about, for example, ‘Of Miracles’. Again, the impression given is that
Hume now thought of himself as an actor on a stage much larger than the
Scottish one. ‘Of Miracles’ and the Philosophical Essays taken as a whole
would, perhaps, upset religious people in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and
no doubt elsewhere too, but that did not much matter. What mattered was
the British scene taken as a whole, where politics was, for the moment at
least, a more urgent concern than religious orthodoxy was. In the wider
British context in the late 1740s, the name of an infidel was of much
smaller significance than a reputation for secret sympathy for the Jacobite
cause.
Hume spent considerable time and energy in the autumn of 1747
pursuing the claim for half-pay. The claim was not settled, though, and
so Hume might have felt he had little choice but to accept the offer of a
further term of employment as St Clair’s secretary. This time St Clair’s
remit was to make an embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin, in an
attempt to increase Austrian and Italian (or, more precisely, Sardinian –
Turin then being part of the Kingdom of Sardinia) involvement in the
ongoing War of the Austrian Succession. As we have seen, Hume was able
to think of such a mission as good preparation for the writing of history,
but still, he left Ninewells with some regret. Over the past few months, he
wrote to Oswald, he ‘had treasured up stores of study & plans of thinking
for many years. I am sure I shall not be so happy as I should have been had
I prosecuted these’.153 He wrote to Kames also of ‘an inward reluctance
to leave my books, and leisure and retreat’.154 His books would remain
neglected until he was back in Scotland in early 1749. St Clair’s expedition
left the port of Harwich on 16 February 1748. Its three-month progress
through Holland, Flanders, and Germany, on to Vienna, and then to
Turin is described by Hume in another long letter to his brother John.
Like his correspondence from France in the 1730s, this letter shows Hume
to have been a careful observer of people and their manners, and also of the
make-up of cities and of the beauties of landscapes. He was particularly
impressed, and surprised, by the industriousness, prosperity, and fertility
he found in Germany along the Rhine and the Maine. Were Germany
united into one country, he wrote, ‘it would be the greatest power that ever
was in the world’. ‘There are great advantages, in travelling’, he continued,
‘& nothing serves more to remove prejudices’.155 Italy, by contrast, was a
disappointment. ‘The poor Inhabitant Starves in the midst of nature’s plenty
curst’, Hume wrote in Cremona, quoting Addison’s Letter from Italy: ‘And
in the loaded vineyard dyes for thirst. The taxes here are exhorbitant beyond
all bounds’.156 As it turned out, St Clair and his secretaries had little to
do when they got to Turin. Negotiations with the French were already in
progress, and an end of the War of the Austrian Succession was in sight.
The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed on 18 October, and, having
stayed in Turin rather longer than they wanted, the British embassy left
for home on 29 November.
Hume appears to have wholeheartedly entered into the social life of
Turin.157 But he did more there than enjoy the hospitality of counts
and countesses. Perhaps inspired by what he had seen on the journey to
Italy – for example, the differences he noted in his letter to his brother
between the people of the Tyrol, with their ‘air of humanity, & spirit
& health & plenty’, and their neighbours in Styria, ‘savage & deform’d
& monstrous in their appearance’158 – he also wrote a new essay, ‘Of
National Characters’. In the eighteenth century it was common for ‘men of
sense’ to believe, as Hume put it in the essay, ‘that each nation has a pecu-
liar set of manners, and that some particular qualities are more frequently
to be met with among one people than among their neighbours’.159 The
question was what determined the peculiar manners and particular qual-
ities of a nation, and whether the causes were environmental, or cultural,
economic, and political. In the Treatise, Hume had already declared in
favour of ‘moral’ causes and against ‘physical’ causes: sympathy, he had
argued, and not ‘any influence of soil and climate’, is responsible for ‘the
great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of
those of the same nation’.160 The new essay comprised a series of consid-
erations meant to reinforce the view that national characters have their
origin in the sympathetic and imitative dispositions of human beings, and
‘that physical causes have no discernible operation on the human mind’.161
The ‘moral’ causes Hume was especially interested in were ‘the nature
of government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury
in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its
neighbours, and such like circumstances’.162 In line with the argument of
the earlier essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Hume
gave particular attention to the influence of different forms of government:
‘Where the government of a nation is altogether republican, it is apt to
beget a particular set of manners. Where it is altogether monarchical, it is
more apt to have the same effect; the imitation of superiors spreading the
national manners faster among the people.’163 The mixed nature of the
British government, along with its great social variegation and liberty of
religion, made it not surprising that the country was a uniquely complex
mixture of manners and characters. Whether this meant that the British
had no national character, or that this very singularity was what the British
character amounted to, Hume left as an open question.
The case for the predominant role of physical causes was asserted in
a work that would be of great importance to Hume in years to come,
Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois, published in Geneva (in a very limited
unbound edition) at the end of October 1748. Part 3 of De l’Esprit des Lois
was devoted to a full explication of the manner in which laws, especially
laws of slavery and servitude, are related to the nature of climate and
terrain. The proximity in time of the writing of ‘Of National Characters’
and the publication of De l’Esprit des Lois has given rise to the suspicion
that Hume’s essay might be a kind of reply to the relevant chapters
of Montesquieu’s book. In a letter to Montesquieu, to which we will
return in the next chapter, Hume would say that he read De l’Esprit des
Lois in the autumn of 1748. This presumably meant during November,
and, given that Hume’s essay was published in London at the end of
that month, it seems unlikely that Hume wrote ‘Of National Characters’
after a reading of De l’Esprit des Lois. But perhaps Hume had acquired a
knowledge of Montesquieu’s position on the national character question
by some other means. It has been suggested, for example, that links
between Geneva and Turin, along with the relative geographical closeness
of the two cities, ensured that the central themes of De l’Esprit des Lois
could well have been known in Turin, and been under discussion there, for
several months before Hume arrived in May 1748.164 Hume had certainly
already read Montesquieu’s earlier Lettres Persanes, may well have read the
Considérations sur la Grandeur des Romains et de leur Décadance, and might
have been keen to learn what he could of another book by the same author.
The truth, however, is that there is no clear and decisive evidence, internal
or external, that Montesquieu’s ideas had anything to do with the writing
of ‘Of National Characters’.165 The question of the relative importance of
‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes in determining the character (and physical
appearance) of different nations was a popular one among the philosophers
of the eighteenth century, and among philosophers of earlier periods as
well. In the course of the essay Hume cited discussions of the issue by
Bacon, Sir William Temple, and Berkeley. The question had also been
canvassed by Dubos, and by John Arbuthnot in his Essay on the Effects
of Air. It is perfectly possible it was one or more of these writers who
had provoked Hume’s initial interest in the matter – and that it was his
travels through Europe that brought it to the front of his mind while he
was killing time in Turin.
In ‘Of National Characters’ Hume discussed the distinctive characters
of different professions as well as the characters of nations, dwelling in
particular on difference, remarkable ‘in all nations, and all ages’, between
a soldier and a priest. Several ‘moral’ causes explain the combination of
bravery, hedonism, gallantry, honesty, and thoughtlessness that make up
the character of a soldier. And the fact that all priests are ‘elevated above
humanity’ gives them a single character, regardless of their religion – a
character which, Hume observed, ‘is, generally speaking, not the most
amiable, that is to be met with in human society’.166 Attached to this
remark is a long and extraordinary footnote abusing – there is really no
other word for it – the character of the priestly profession. Hume allowed,
indeed insisted upon, the existence of exceptions to the rule, and also made
a distinction between the inherent virtues individual priests may have and
the effects upon them of their chosen profession, but the burden of the
argument of the footnote is that priests are more or less bound to be hyp-
ocritical, conceited, intolerant, humourless promoters of ignorance and
superstition. ‘Thus many of the vices of human nature are, by fixt moral
causes, inflam’d in that profession; and tho’ several individuals escape
the contagion, yet all wise governments will be on their guard against the
attempts of a society, who will for ever combine into one faction, and
while it acts as a society, will for ever be actuated by ambition, pride, and
a persecuting spirit’.167 It is not easy to understand why Hume allowed
himself this outburst of spleen. It might have been prompted by the
way his candidacy for the Edinburgh chair was obstructed by the minis-
ters of the city – but that was already two years ago when Hume wrote
‘Of National Characters’, and surely the thousand and more miles between
Turin and Edinburgh would have added to the sense of distance. Also
there were ministers who had supported Hume, and there were ministers
among his friends. A clue is perhaps to be found in a footnote to the essay
‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ in which Hume distinguished between
‘priests’, ‘the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanc-
tity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals’, and ‘clergymen’,
‘who are set apart, by the laws, to the care of sacred matters, and to the
conducting our publick devotions with greater decency and order’. ‘There
is no rank of men more to be respected than the latter’, Hume claimed.168
Maybe the footnote to ‘Of National Characters’ was written with Catholic
Italy, and not Presbyterian Scotland, in mind.169
The third edition of Essays, Moral and Political saw the beginning of
Hume’s long career as corrector and improver of his own works. The
most obvious difference between it and the edition of 1741–2 was the
omission of the three essays (‘Of Essay-Writing’, ‘Of Moral Prejudices’,
and ‘Of the Middle Station of Life’) that had come to seem to their author
to be merely exercises in ‘Addisonian trifling’.170 ‘A Character of Sir
Robert Walpole’ was missing from the table of contents, but it was still
included, now as a long footnote to ‘That Politics may be reduced to a
Science’.171 ‘The author is pleased to find’, Hume added at the end of the
note, ‘that after animosities are laid, and calumny has ceas’d, the whole
nation almost have return’d to the same moderate sentiments with regard
to this great man; if they are not rather become more favourable to him,
by the very natural transition, from one extreme to another. The author
would not oppose these sentiments towards the dead; tho’ he cannot
forbear observing, that the not paying more of our public debt was, as
hinted in this character, a great, and the only great, error in that long
administration’.172 Many of the alterations made to the earlier essays were
relatively minor. Some of them would appear to be the result of further
reading, especially in the classics: in 1741 and 1742, Hume had reported
Crassus’s fortune as having amounted to the equivalent of about £400,000,
but in 1748 the figure was changed to £1.6 million; a supporting quotation,
in Greek, from Xenophon’s Ways and Means was added to ‘Of Liberty and
Despotism’. An interesting footnote about China was added to ‘Of the Rise
and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, to explain how Hume’s comparison
of the different effects of monarchical and republican government could
accommodate the fact that despite its being the case that the Chinese ‘can
scarce form an idea of a free government’, they know happiness, riches, and
good administration.173 The title of ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement’ was

changed to ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing’. Among the more
substantial alterations were both subtractions and additions. A paragraph
was added to ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’ to substantiate
the (sceptical, anti-republican) claim that ‘The ages of greatest public
virtue are not always most eminent for private virtue’ – again, it would
seem, to make use of more extensive reading in the classics, in this case
Livy, who, according to Hume, made it very clear that the men of Rome’s
greatest years were very often nothing other than ‘deprav’d’ in their private
lives.174 Several of the political essays were shortened through being
stripped of paragraphs too closely related to the particular circumstances
of the early 1740s to be still relevant in 1748. An attack on the excessive
scurrility of ‘Court’ pamphleteers and journalists was removed from ‘Of
the Independency of Parliament’, for example.175 The last page of ‘Of the
Parties of Great Britain’, where it had been announced that in Scotland,
‘As violent things have not commonly so long a duration as moderate,
we actually find, that the Jacobite party is almost entirely vanish’d from
among us’, disappeared for obvious reasons.
The first two editions of Essays, Moral and Political had been published
in Edinburgh by Alexander Kincaid. The third edition was a joint venture
between Kincaid and Andrew Millar in London, a publisher who would
play a major role not only in the selling of many of the rest of Hume’s books
but also in the dissemination of the productions of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment more generally.176 In order to make it unnecessary for anyone who
already owned Hume’s Essays to buy the third edition as well, the three
new essays were at the same time published separately.177 These were the
first of Hume’s works not to appear anonymously. Philosophical Essays con-
cerning Human Understanding was published by Millar alone, in London in
April 1748. It was described as being by ‘the Author of Essays, Moral and
Political’. In ‘My Own Life’ Hume claimed that the Philosophical Essays
‘was at first little more successful than the Treatise of Human Nature’.
‘On my return from Italy’, he continued, ‘I had the mortification to find
all England in a ferment, on account of Dr. Middleton’s Free Enquiry,
while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected’.178 As with
Hume’s complaint about the reception of the Treatise, this was an exag-
geration. While Philosophical Essays seems not have to been reviewed in
any of the journals, it was the object of critical attention in a significant
number of philosophical and religious works published in the following
ten years.179 The first published response appeared as early as 1749, in the
form of Philip Skelton’s Ophiomaches: or, Deism Revealed. Then in 1751
came Thomas Rutherforth’s Credibility of Miracles Defended against the
Author of Philosophical Essays, and also Kames’s Essays on the Principles
of Morality and Natural Religion, which criticized both the Philosophical
Essays and the Treatise. Hume himself acknowledged in ‘My Own Life’
that at the time when the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals was
published, in 1751, Millar told him that his works – ‘all but the unfor-
tunate Treatise’ – ‘were beginning to be the subject of conversation; that
the sale of them was gradually increasing, and that new editions were
demanded’.180 Hume seems to have expected his books to have immedi-
ate and dramatic success. Impatience made anything else look like failure.
And when he looked back as he wrote ‘My Own Life’, it was the initial
disappointment that remained most salient, not the detailed and respect-
ful examination of his arguments by his contemporaries. Thus there was
no mention in ‘My Own Life’ of, for example, the extended discussions
of ‘Of Miracles’ by both George Campbell and Richard Price.181
Both the Philosophical Essays and the third edition of Essays, Moral
and Political were published while Hume was abroad on the Continent.
St Clair and his party, returning from Turin by way of France, were not
back in London until Christmas 1748.182 Hume would spend the next
few months in London, and then head north to Scotland in April. Part of
what kept him in London may have been ensuring that, this time, a proper
reward came his way in return for his services to the Crown. If so, he seems
to have been successful. He wrote in ‘My Own Life’ that by this time ‘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 pound’.183
This modest quantity of capital, which yielded an income of around £50
per annum, gave him the confidence to devote himself henceforth entirely
to the life of letters.
5
Two Years at Ninewells
etween april 1749 and July or August 1751, Hume lived once again
B with his brother and sister at Ninewells. Their mother had died in
1745, while Hume was at Weld Hall with the Marquess of Annandale.
What caused him to leave the family home and, at last, to find a house
of his own was his brother’s marriage in March 1751. In one of the very
few letters to have survived from this period, Hume described himself
as living a life of ‘leisure and solitude’.1 He also joked about appearing
like a ‘provincial’ seeking to ‘hook on a correspondence with a Londoner,
under pretext of friendship and regard’.2 His letters make it clear that
he kept in close touch with events in London’s literary scene, and that
he maintained an intimate, humorous correspondence with several of the
new friends that he had made during his time in the army with James St
Clair. To friends both old and new he directed requests for information,
and requests also for comments on new books and pamphlets. He wrote
to Gilbert Elliot in February 1751 to ask if he would try to persuade the
Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh to permit the loan of a copy of Strabo’s
Geographica, ‘either in the original language, or even in good translation’.
He was working on a ‘dissertation’ on the populousness of the ancient
world, and that had led him ‘into many disquisitions concerning both the
public & domestic life of the antients’. Since forming that plan he had ‘read
over almost all the classics both Greek and Latin’.3 Clearly Hume was
working hard. But his delight in jokes, especially at the expense of the
religious, did not desert him. ‘[A]t an idle hour’, he told Clephane on
the same day that he wrote to Elliot for a Strabo, ‘I wrote a sheet called the
Bellman’s Petition: wherein (if I be not partial, which I certainly am) there
was some good pleasantry and satire’.4 This was a piece of what seems now
rather cruel mockery of moves made by the Scottish clergy to have their
pitifully low wages increased, moves that were opposed by the nobility
and gentry whose responsibility it was to pay those wages.5 It is surprising
248
Two Years at Ninewells 249
that Hume had any ‘idle hours’ in which to write it. For these two years
at Ninewells were a period of extraordinary literary productivity.6
In ‘My Own Life’ Hume would say that during this period he wrote
Political Discourses and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.
Political Discourses was a new collection of essays that grew out of his
long-standing interest in political economy. In Chapter 3 we considered
the so-called early memoranda as evidence from the very early 1740s of
the reading that Hume had done in literature devoted to clarifying the
comparative financial situations of modern European states, and also in
the Roman and Greek texts that provided information concerning the
income, expenditure, and demographics of the ancient world. Political
Discourses saw Hume use such reading as the raw material for a series
of penetrating analyses of the monetary and fiscal basis of politics in the
mid-eighteenth century. A systematic study of the economic dimensions
of politics was not, however, his goal. He remained an essayist, inter-
ested, as in the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, in
bridging the gap between genuinely philosophical argumentation and the
world of polite letters. The Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
was originally intended as a series of essays as well. It was a ‘casting
anew’ of Book III of the Treatise that focused in upon and clarified just
one of the several lines of argument intertwined in Hume’s first formula-
tion of his moral philosophy. Like the Philosophical Essays, it was a text
that betrayed its author’s intense interest in the question of literary style.
In no sense, however, did it represent a move on Hume’s part to make his
moral philosophy less challenging and controversial. It was just as sub-
versive of the standard assumptions of eighteenth-century philosophy as
the Philosophical Essays was. The completion of two texts as intellectually
rich and carefully crafted as Political Discourses and An Enquiry concern-
ing the Principles of Morals would be remarkable enough. Yet during this
two-year period at Ninewells Hume also wrote the first draft of Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion, an examination of the rational foundations
for belief in an intelligent and benevolent creator of the universe that, as
it turned out, would not be published until after its author’s death. Nor
does this seem to have been the end of Hume’s productivity between the
spring of 1749 and the summer of 1751. There is reason to think that at
this time he also composed ‘The Natural History of Religion’, rewrote the
Treatise accounts of the passions and of our ideas of space and time, and
worked up a new essay on the pleasures of tragedy. It might be, then, that
as early as mid-1751 – only twelve and a half years since the publication of
the first two volumes of the Treatise – Hume’s philosophical oeuvre was
all but complete.7
Casting Anew Treatise Book III

When he went up to Scotland in April 1749, Hume was, we can sup-
pose, full of the excitement caused by a first reading of Montesquieu’s
De l’Esprit des Lois. He had got hold of a copy very soon after it was pub-
lished in Geneva in October 1748, and read it while still in Turin. It seems
that he saw immediately how relevant it was to the concerns he had artic-
ulated in Essays, Moral and Political. Montesquieu too was interested in
the idea that the study of politics might properly be turned into a science.
For him, as for Hume, the study of politics meant the study of consti-
tutions, not the study of the personalities of princes and their ministers,
and the ambition was to understand forms of government, and the laws
that defined them, in terms of their relations with physical causes, with
manners, with commerce, and with religion. Like Hume, Montesquieu
approached modern politics without nostalgia for the ancient world. And
like Hume, Montesquieu saw commerce as a fundamental determinant
of political affairs, and as a force for peace that made a nonsense of any
one country’s quest for dominance over all the rest. Hume’s judgement,
as recorded in the first edition of the Enquiry concerning the Principles of
Morals, was that De l’Esprit des Lois contained ‘the best system of political
knowledge, that, perhaps, has ever yet been communicated to the world’.8
But this was not to say that Hume agreed with every argument that
Montesquieu had made. The essay ‘Of National Characters’ made it plain
that he did not share Montesquieu’s sense of the importance of climate
and terrain in the determination of laws.9 And in a long, detailed letter
(in French) to Montesquieu, dated 10 April 1749, Hume made several
‘reflexions’ on the arguments of De l’Esprit des Lois, some of which were
intended as corroborations, others of which expressed doubts.10
The letter tells us that Hume disagreed with Montesquieu’s assessment
of the benefits of banks and the paper credit they supply. Banking does
raise the money supply, Hume accepted, but the truth is that there is no
advantage to an increase in money by itself. The British obsession with
acquisition of money through a favorable balance of trade was misguided,
because money, like water, finds its own natural level, a level which cannot
be artificially raised or lowered. Interestingly, in light of the anxiety about

national indebtedness that we have already seen Hume express on several
occasions, in this letter he suggested that there might be advantages as
well as disadvantages to public debts. Because debts themselves are a
form of currency, they serve the purpose of increasing the circulation
of money. These were issues Hume would think seriously about over
the next two years. Hume also expressed scepticism as to the supposed
virtues of Britain’s mixed form of government, portrayed by Montesquieu
as a constitution that ‘has political liberty for its direct purpose’.11 It was
true that all simple constitutions are vulnerable to corruption merely
because they contain no counterweight to their essential principle. A pure
monarchy easily turns into a despotism because there is nothing to check
the power of the king. But on the other hand, a mixed form of government
was as easily damaged as any complicated machine. It depended too much
on the precision of the balance of one power against the others, and was,
as Hume had argued in Essays, Moral and Political, inherently unstable as
a result. Hume’s letter to Montesquieu was the beginning of friendship
between the two men that lasted until Montesquieu died in February
1755.12
Montesquieu made a mark upon An Enquiry concerning the Principles of
Morals as well as upon Political Discourses. This is so despite the fact that
there is an obvious respect in which Hume’s moral philosophy was directly
opposed to Montesquieu’s. De l’Esprit des Lois began with a version of
what Hume, in a footnote to the Enquiry, called the ‘abstract theory of
morals’ that ‘excludes all sentiment, and pretends to found every thing on
reason’.13 This is the theory of morals that Hume, using arguments taken
largely from Hutcheson, rejected out of hand at the beginning of Book
III of the Treatise. However, what Montesquieu was mainly concerned
with in De l’Esprit des Lois was not the reduction of morality, law, and
politics to principles of reason, but rather the explanation of the diversity
of, especially, the various codes of law that human beings have devised
in different times and places. And diversity – not a prominent concern
of Hume’s in the Treatise – came squarely into focus as demanding an
explanation at the very end of the Enquiry, in a brief text called, simply,
‘A Dialogue’, in which mention is made of a man called Usbek. Usbek, of
course, was the name of one of the principal characters in Montesquieu’s
Lettres Persanes, and there were obvious resemblances of subject matter,
and tone between ‘A Dialogue’ and Montesquieu’s novel. ‘A Dialogue’
purported to be a report of a conversation between the author of the

Enquiry and a friend of his called Palamedes, ‘who is as great a rambler in
his principles as in his person, and who has run over, by study and travel,
almost every region of the intellectual and material world’.14 In a sense this
was a conversation between Hume and himself. It was an exploration of
the question of how an account of universal principles of moral blame and
approbation could be reconciled with the fact that the particular dictates
of morality are not the same at all times and places. Palamedes brings to
light ways in which the morals of ancient Athenians can be made to seem
very different, to the point of being directly contrary, to the morals of
modern Europe. Is the right conclusion to draw that, in fact, there are
no principles of morals that are universal and that a system of morality is
always particular to a single time and place?
This was a new question for Hume. The Treatise had been written in
apparently complete confidence that ‘human nature’ is a single thing, to be
characterized by means of a combination of introspection and observation
of the world around one, and there had been no trace there of anxiety as
to the extent to which an account of human nature written in Europe in
the first half of the eighteenth century might not be true to the nature of
human beings living in other places and at other times. Nor had historical
and cultural variation been a salient theme of Hume’s first volumes of
essays. But when the time came for him to rewrite his moral philosophy,
he had read Montesquieu, and been forced to think hard about these
things. By then, too, Hume had travelled, and had travelled, for a man
of his time, relatively widely. He had also read more extensively in the
literature and history of the ancient world. ‘A Dialogue’ can be seen as the
product of this adventuring in both space and time. It was Hume’s means
of combining acknowledgement of the multiplicity of schemes of morals,
and of manners, with a continued commitment to the idea that there are
universal principles at work in the production of the moral sentiments.
Reading De l’Esprit des Lois appears to have changed Hume’s sense of
how much could be achieved by an experimental science of human nature
in general. Such a science, it was now clear, needed to be supplemented
and deepened by more particular and localized histories of morals and
manners. Here Hume pointed out the direction moral philosophy now
needed to take. He himself would do no further work in this area. He
left the development of Montesquieu’s insight to friends such as Kames,
Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar.15
At the end of 1750, Hume sent a version of ‘A Dialogue’ to Gilbert

Elliot, apparently unsure of its merits. ‘It is pretty usual for people to be
pleas’d with their own performance, especially in the heat of composition’,
he wrote a few weeks later, ‘but I have scarcely wrote any thing more
whimsical, or whose merit I am more diffident of ’.16 But Hume came to
be confident of the value of ‘A Dialogue’, and of the Enquiry taken as a
whole. By 1753, a second edition of the Enquiry was called for, and Hume
wrote to the lawyer David Dalrymple to ask him for advice as to how its
language and argument might be improved. ‘Besides’, Hume wrote, ‘that
I am extremely anxious to obtain some degree of correctness in all my
attempts; I must confess, that I have a partiality for that work, & esteem
it the most tolerable of anything I have composd’.17 This judgement was
not altered by the books that Hume would publish subsequently. In ‘My
own Life’ he would describe the Enquiry as ‘of all my writings, historical,
philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best’.18 Explanation is needed
of this estimation of the value of the Enquiry on the part of its author.
Explanation is called for also by the one other thing that Hume would
say about the Enquiry in ‘My Own Life’: that it was ‘another part of my
Treatise that I cast anew’.19 For the differences between the Enquiry and
Book III of the Treatise are very obvious indeed, to the point where the
question must arise whether the ‘casting anew’ did not involve something
rather more substantial than a mere change in mode of presentation.20
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals was a very carefully struc-
tured text. It comprised nine sections: an introduction; three sections on
the virtues necessary to life in society; a central hinge section explain-
ing why it is that something’s being useful makes it an object of moral
approbation; three sections on virtues, or ‘qualities’, not necessary to life in
society but nevertheless useful or at least agreeable; and then a conclusion.
The impression given by the arrangement of the book was one of balance
and control. In the introductory first section Hume explained that what
he intended to do was to answer one apparently straightforward question
of empirical fact. He would consider every personal characteristic which
is generally approved of, along with every personal characteristic which
is the object of general blame, and, by taking into account what objects of
praise have in common, and what objects of blame have in common, ‘’tis
hop’d we may, at last, reach the foundation of ethics, and find those uni-
versal principles, from which all moral blame or approbation is ultimately
derived’.21 In Book III of the Treatise Hume had tried to answer a number
of different questions at once: questions concerning the history of moral-

ity, concerning the nature of the faculty of mind responsible for moral
judgements and how that faculty worked, and concerning the criteria used
in the making of moral judgements. The Enquiry, by contrast, appeared
intended to display from the first a singleness of purpose. Issues which
were not directly relevant to the main task at hand were now treated in
two appendices, one on the question of ‘how far either reason or sentiment
enters into all moral determinations’, another containing ‘Some farther
Considerations with regard to Justice’.22 There is reason to think that
Hume had initially intended to present this new elaboration of his moral
philosophy as a series of essays. At two points, both in a footnote, the
book was referred to as ‘these essays’, a locution that was corrected in the
Errata to ‘this enquiry’.23 Perhaps, on reflection, the concentrated focus
of the argument made ‘essays’, with its implication of miscellaneousness,
seem inappropriate.
In Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding Hume, as we
saw in Chapter 4, had engaged in a complex transaction with his reader.
Radical, unsettling arguments were presented in an elegant and graceful
manner, in the language not of abstruse philosophy but of polite literature
and history. The recasting of Book I of the Treatise was not a compromise
on Hume’s part. On the contrary, the central thesis of Book I (the sceptical
account of causal reasoning) remained intact. The Philosophical Essays
were intended to make sure that this thesis was not consigned to oblivion
along with the Treatise, and also to draw out some of its more significant,
and unsettling, implications. In the Enquiry Hume had similar ambitions.
The goal was certainly not to water down his moral philosophy to the
point where it would become anodyne enough to be generally acceptable
because wholly uncontroversial. It was, rather, to pare down his moral
philosophy to its most essential elements, and to find a way of presenting
it that would ensure that its radicalism did not prevent it from being
rejected out of hand. A principal means to this end was the care that
Hume now took to appear to dissociate himself from anything that had
the air of Mandevilleanism. It would seem that by the time he cast his moral
philosophy anew in the form of the Enquiry, Hume had come to believe
that suggestions of Mandevilleanism would obstruct the understanding of
what he really wanted to say. And so the very first thing Hume did in the
Enquiry was to distance himself from ‘[t]hose who have refused the reality
of moral distinctions’24 – as Mandeville had done, as Hobbes had done,
and as Hume, who had insisted on the ‘artificiality’ of at least some of

the virtues, could be read as having done. Having made this move, Hume
then sidestepped another vexed issue by blithely asserting that ‘reason and
sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions’,25
and relegating to an appendix a full consideration of precisely what is
the work of reason and what is the work of sentiment. That particular
question concerning ‘the general principle of morals’ would not be his
main concern. Instead, what Hume wanted to do in the Enquiry was to
focus upon the precise nature of the considerations we take into account
when we call one quality of mind or trait of character good and another
bad. And his claim would be that in many cases, the consideration that
matters most is ‘utility’ as regards the interests of society at large; and
that, where public utility is not the consideration at work, we make our
moral judgements according to our estimation either of the usefulness of
the trait to the person who has it or according to our sense of the trait’s
‘agreeableness’, either to its possessor or to others.
This, by the standards of the philosophy of Hume’s day, was a striking,
even subversive claim to make. For what it implied was that there was
no place in an analysis of moral goodness for the idea that some things –
some actions, or some intentions – are good in themselves, irrespective of the
consequences they happened to have. Hume had made this claim in the
Treatise too. We noted in Chapter 2 that it entailed a rejection of a crucial
concept of Stoic moral philosophy, the concept of the honestum, of that
which is good in itself even if no one actually finds it useful or agreeable.26
One consequence of Hume’s stripping down of his moral philosophy in
the Enquiry to an argument for the determination of moral judgement
by utility and agreeableness was to draw attention to the absence of the
honestum. Perhaps Hume had now come to think that the implications
of the significance he attached to the useful and the agreeable had been
obscured by the long analysis of justice, promise-keeping, and political
allegiance in Part Two of Book III of the Treatise – and by the argument
made there that these virtues are not ‘natural’, but rather ‘artificial’, in the
sense that they are not regarded as morally good as a function of innate and
spontaneous moral feeling, but rather as a matter of sympathetic reflec-
tion on the tendencies of conventions developed in order to make social
life possible. Book III of the Treatise had been given its structure by the
distinction between artificial virtues, discussed in Part Two, and natural
virtues, discussed in Part Three.27 That, along with the fact that artificial
virtues were discussed first and at greatest length, was likely to give the
impression that the thesis of the artificiality of these very important virtues
was the main thing that Hume was trying to impress upon the reader. In
the Enquiry the mode of presentation was significantly different. Imme-
diately after the introductory section came a discussion of benevolence,
in Treatise terms a natural virtue. The discussion began with a pointed
rejection by Hume of the idea that benevolence is always either mere
hypocrisy or actually impossible because every passion whatsoever is ‘a
modification of self-love’. The latter claim had been made by Mandeville –
and by many less disreputable philosophers and religious writers as well.
Hume had rejected philosophical egoism in the Treatise as well, but not
as explicitly or as lengthily.
Hutcheson had defined moral goodness as acting with the intention
to maximize the happiness of one’s fellow human beings, but he had
at the same time refused to say that such intentions are pleasing to the
moral sense because they increase happiness. On his analysis, approval
of benevolent motives is a brute fact of our nature, an instinct we are
fitted with by God. Benevolence is appreciated by the moral sense as
good in itself, quite apart from its consequences. This was Hutcheson’s
way of giving reality to the Stoic honestum. Hume, by contrast, argued
that ‘the UTILITY, resulting from the social virtues, forms, at least,
a part of their merit, and is one source of that approbation and regard
so universally pay’d them’.28 Another source would turn out to be the
agreeableness to the benevolent person himself of ‘the very softness and
tenderness’ of benevolent sentiment, ‘its fond expressions, its delicate
attentions, and all that flow of mutual confidence and regard, which enter
into a warm attachment of love and friendship’.29 The implications of this
emphasis on the useful and the agreeable did not need to be spelled out.
His contemporaries saw perfectly well what was going on, and dwelt in
their criticisms of the second Enquiry on the absence of a notion of the
good in itself. Hume must surely have anticipated this kind of response.
His way of drawing the sting of such criticism was to present his analysis
of the principles of morals as if it were dictated solely by the moral
sentiments of everyday life, and to suggest that it followed that a moral
theory at odds with his own must be driven by some form of prejudice,
or addiction to ‘system’. The idea of the good in itself, Hume insinuated,
was a philosopher’s or theologian’s hobbyhorse, not something that had
any basis in the moral life as ordinarily lived.30
In the Treatise discussion of justice Hume had first argued that justice
is not naturally regarded as a virtue, and then developed a two-stage
explanation of the origins of justice, beginning with an explication of
the ‘natural obligation’ to justice, and then proceeding to an account of
the ‘moral obligation’. The natural obligation to justice was said to be
provided by self-love, understood broadly enough to include concern
for one’s dependents and friends. Conventions regarding property were
devised as a means of preventing conflict between family or tribal groups
over possessions in conditions of relative scarcity. The story that Hume
had told in the Treatise about how these conventions develop was long
and complicated. The idea that there is a moral obligation to justice, over
and above a self-interested obligation, had then been explained in terms
of the operations of sympathy. Almost all of the developmental account
of the natural obligation to justice was missing from the Enquiry, as was
the entirety of the preliminary argument for the artificiality of justice.
What Hume emphasized in the Enquiry was that justice has its sole origin
in reflection upon considerations of utility. His arguments were devoted
to showing that in circumstances where rules about property would not
be useful, such rules would not exist, or would not be taken to have
normative force. What, exactly, the origins of the rules were, and how
they evolved, was not something that he went into in any detail. A brief
discussion of these matters was to be found in Appendix II. There Hume
gave the briefest of sketches of his theory of conventions, as distinct
and different from contracts – and there he said that the question of
whether justice is natural or artificial is ‘merely verbal’.31 One need not
conclude that Hume now disowned or disagreed with the argument for the
artificiality of justice. No attempt was made to show that justice is natural.
Rather, the whole issue was laid aside, as was the question of the extent
to which justice has its origins in self-interest. In a footnote to Appendix
II Hume claimed that his conventionalist sketch of the origins of justice
‘is, in the main, the same hinted at and adopted by Grotius’,32 but a
more substantial presence in the main body of the text was Montesquieu,
‘[a] late author of great genius, as well as extensive learning’, who has
illustrated the way in which ‘[t]he laws have, or ought to have, a constant
reference to the constitution of government, the manners, the climate, the
religion, the commerce, the situation of each society’.33 The implication,
perhaps, was that Montesquieu had provided a way of approaching the
history of morals superior to the kind of conjectural history essayed by
Mandeville in Part Two of the Fable, and by Hume in Book III of the
Treatise.
In addition to making the claim that the principles of moral approba-
tion and disapprobation are usefulness and agreeable to others and to self,
Hume in Part Three of Book III of the Treatise had presented sympathy
as the faculty of the mind by which moral judgements are made. This
was a crucial element of his critical response to Hutcheson. Hutcheson
had been right to say that moral ideas cannot be reduced to ideas of nat-
ural, or self-interested, good and evil, and Hume reiterated his endorse-
ment of Hutcheson’s argument in Section V of the Enquiry, in answer to
Mandeville and all those ‘sceptics, both ancient and modern’, who claim
that ‘all moral distinctions arise from education, and were, at first,
invented, and afterwards encourag’d, by the arts of politicians, in order
to render men tractable, and subdue their natural ferocity and selfish-
ness, which incapacitated them for society’.34 But, Hume had argued in
the Treatise, Hutcheson had not been right to postulate a special sense as
the means by which we have moral ideas. Sympathy is evidently a part
of the furniture of the mind, at work in the economy of the passions and
also in our responses to works of art, and, suitably corrected for bias by
the taking up of a general point of view upon matters, sympathy is all that
is needed to explain the origins of distinctively moral sentiments. Expli-
cation of the mechanism of sympathy was another thing that was missing
from the Enquiry, just as explication of the mechanism of the association
of ideas was missing from the Philosophical Essays. Again, the conclusion
to draw need not be that Hume now no longer believed in the capacity of
sympathy to do the job of moral judgement. There was no endorsement in
the Enquiry of a Hutchesonian moral sense, and there are plenty of places
in the Enquiry where Hume at least alludes to the workings of sympa-
thy. Hume’s account of why utility pleases in Section V gave prominent
place to locutions which functioned as a kind of shorthand for the theory
of sympathy elaborated in detail in the Treatise. But the detail no longer
seemed to matter. In a footnote Hume declared that ‘’Tis needless to push
our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling
with others. ’Tis sufficient, that this is experienc’d to be a principle in
human nature’.35 All that mattered for the purposes of the Enquiry was
the bare fact that humanity, or fellow-feeling, or sympathy, provides a
means whereby the obvious utility of the social virtues might explain their
moral approval.36
In September 1751, Hume wrote in a letter to the Edinburgh minister

Robert Wallace – to whom we will return later in this chapter – to say
that ‘There has been printed at London, but not yet publish’d an Enquiry
concerning the Principles of Morals of which I have order’d a copy to be
sent you; I hope you will not find my ethics liable to much exception,
on the side of orthodoxy, whatever they may on the side of argument &
philosophy’.37 By his ‘ethics’ Hume presumably meant the list of virtues
that he compiled as the book progressed, a list that was presented in full in
a description of the perfect son-in-law in the concluding Section IX. By
‘argument and philosophy’ Hume presumably meant his explication of
the means by which virtues are identified as such and differentiated from
vices: in other words, his appeal to utility and agreeableness. In this letter
to Wallace, then, there was an admission that, despite the emphasis upon
the falsity of the selfish hypothesis and the downplaying of the distinction
between natural and artificial virtues, there remained something poten-
tially objectionable about Hume’s philosophical principles. It is puzzling,
though, that Hume imagined, or pretended to imagine, that his definition
of virtue might be unexceptionable. For in the second half of the Enquiry
it was made clear that his ‘argument and philosophy’ had significant, and
unsettling, consequences for his ‘ethics’. Humean virtue, here as in the last
sections of Book III of the Treatise, turns out to be significantly different
from virtue as the philosophers of Hume’s day tended to describe it. It
is possible that the letter to Wallace betrayed a certain amount of naiveté
on Hume’s part as to how he would be read and understood by his con-
temporaries. Either that, or Hume was being disingenuous, pretending to
expect to be read in a way in which he knew he would not be.
‘Nothing is more usual’, Hume remarked at the beginning of Section
VI, ‘than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians;
and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling
controversies of the deepest importance and concern’.38 What followed
was an extended assault on the idea that there is a deep distinction to be
drawn between the moral virtues on the one hand and such things as good
sense, courage, temperance, industry, wit, and knowledge on the other.
In fact, Hume went even further than that, and argued that there is no
reason to distinguish between qualities of mind and bodily endowments
and goods of fortune, such as good looks and physical strength and wealth.
All of these things are useful to those who have them, and there was no
reason not to conclude that they are all valued because they are useful
to those who have them. This being so, there was no reason to postulate
some significant difference in kind between moral virtues, useful qualities
of mind, useful qualities of body, and useful accidents of birth. Such
distinctions as had been drawn between these things were a matter of
what Hume at one point termed the ‘caprices of language’.39 What was
to be trusted here are the sentiments we all have, and our sentiments
will remind us that, far from caring only about such things as our justice
or our benevolence, what we tend to value most is being known for
‘our bravery or learning, our wit or breeding, our eloquence or address,
our taste or ability’.40 Hume presented himself here as doing no more
than following in the footsteps of ‘the antients’. It was only ‘modern
philosophers’, working with a legalistic conception of morality according
to which it is definitional of virtue that it be rewardable and of vice that it be
punishable, who have insisted that the domain of the moral is coextensive
with the domain of the voluntary. Although Hume refrained from making
the point, ‘modern philosophers’ had in this respect been influenced by
the concerns of certain forms of Christian theology, such as characterized
God as primarily a source of punishments and rewards. Not by any means
all of Hume’s contemporaries thought of God’s moral character in that
way, but many did, and Hume could surely have predicted that this aspect
of his ‘ethics’ would be found objectionable – as indeed it was, by many
of his earliest critics.
There were other aspects of Hume’s definition of virtue in the Enquiry
that were bound to be hard for some to swallow. Hume claimed, for
instance, that there is no reason why pride should not be ‘either good
or bad, according as it is well or ill founded, and according to other
circumstances, that accompany it’.41 All things being equal, there was no
reason why we should not value ourselves when we find that other people
value us. Of course, we tend not to like signs of self-approval in others.
Wisdom lies in concealing one’s sense of self-worth, which serves as a
reminder of another truth that modern philosophers have not properly
acknowledged – that there was no way of drawing a sharp and principled
distinction between morals and manners. A full account of what it is to be
the kind of person that it is pleasing both to be and to contemplate must
include the ‘kind of lesser morality’ of etiquette and social grace. Social
virtues such as justice and benevolence matter too, needless to say. At the
very least, no one wants the reputation of being a person who flouts the
law and is indifferent to the needs and wants of others. Yet to be true
to ordinary sentiment was to acknowledge that the social virtues and

the virtues of the club and the drawing room were equally important.
Hume quoted the Epicurean Saint-Evremond: what we value is morality
without austerity, pleasure without effeminacy, a love of life without a
fear of death.42
Here again Hume was drawing attention to the ways in which moral
schemes deriving from at least some versions of Christianity got in the
way of a full appreciation of the ways in which life is lived well. It is
striking – it would have been striking to Hume’s contemporaries – that
there was no place in his analysis for virtue defined as love of God, nor
for virtue defined as fear of God.43 Practices such as fasting, penance,
and other forms of self-abasement, taken by some to be virtuous merely
because they are pleasing to God or because they manifest a proper fear
of His wrath, were judged by Hume to be no part of what the healthy
and uncorrupted moral sentiment tells us is admirable and pleasing. This
would not have been offensive to every religious person in the middle of
the eighteenth century. Hume probably expected modernizing moderate
Christians, intent as they were on redefining Christianity in terms of moral
practice, to agree with his attack on the ‘monkish virtues’. He probably
also expected them to be in sympathy with the way Pascal is depicted in ‘A
Dialogue’ as living an ‘artificial life’, driven by a pathological self-hatred
to austerities ‘embrac’d merely for their own sake, and in order to suffer
as much as possible’.44 What Hume all too easily forgot, or ignored – as
we have already seen, in the context of his joke about Leechman’s sermon
on prayer – was the extent to which the moderates remained committed to
practices, such as prayer and even an occasional fast, that he could make
no sense of and so was unable to take seriously.45
At the very end of the main part of the Enquiry, in Part II of Sec-
tion IX, Hume turned ‘to consider briefly our obligation to virtue, and
to enquire, whether every man, who has any regard to his own happi-
ness and welfare, will not best find his account in the practice of every
moral duty’.46 The way in which Hume framed the issue of the obli-
gation to virtue was noteworthy: he assumed, without argument, that
moral obligation was to be spelled out in terms of reasons provided by
considerations of happiness and welfare, rather than in terms of absolute
demands, or duties. Hume had reason to imagine he could be confident
that this was the right approach to moral obligation because of the way
he had defined virtue in the preceding sections of the Enquiry. As he
now put it, his analysis had been such as to ‘represent virtue in all her
genuine and most engaging charms, and make us approach her with ease,
familiarity, and affection’. ‘The dismal dress falls off, with which many
divines, and some philosophers had cover’d her; and nothing appears but
gentleness, humanity, benevolence, affability; nay even, at proper inter-
vals, play, frolic, and gaiety’.47 Constituted as it entirely is by usefulness
and agreeableness, virtue is nothing other than the means whereby we find
our interests realized, and not something that demands sacrifice and self-
denial.
Hutcheson had accused the Hume of the Treatise of lacking warmth
in the cause of virtue. In the Treatise Hume did not deign to answer the
charge, confident that it would be clear that an ‘anatomical’ analysis of
morality was not under an obligation to provide reasons why we should
choose virtue over vice. In the Enquiry Hume was an anatomist still,
but now he was willing to spend more time showing that once virtue was
properly analysed, it would be plain that there is every reason to prefer it to
vice. This was not the kind of anatomy, in other words, that found beneath
the skin things that were so repulsive and hard to look at that they might
shake one’s confidence in one’s natural beliefs and feelings. Mandeville
had been suspected of telling what he presents as the truth about morality
with the intention of disturbing ordinary moral commitment, and so had
the Hume of the Treatise – as the Letter from a Gentleman made clear. Now
Hume explicitly denied that this was his intention. It was only in the case
of justice that, at times, moral demands will be at odds with one’s natural
desires, as when the law requires a sacrifice that will be greatly to one’s
own detriment, and to no one else’s very obvious benefit. Presumably
Hume made this concession in order to foreground his rejection of the
idea that doing the right thing might have a value in itself, independent of
consequences, such as might provide a reason to be virtuous even where a
sacrifice is involved. Either one is disposed by one’s sentiments to obey the
law in such circumstances, or one is not, Hume claimed: reasons cannot
be provided to persuade you to do what you are not already inclined by
your nature to do. Here Hume returned to the theme of the four essays on
the ancient philosophical schools included in the 1742 volume of Essays,
Moral and Political. Philosophy is powerless to change your nature. But
that does not matter, because most people most of the time will find
morality to be a means of satisfying the inclinations with which their
nature has fitted them.48
Hume told Gilbert Elliot that in the Philosophical Essays he added to

his account of the understanding by taking things away from it. He might
have said the same about the Enquiry. Large tracts of argument from Book
III of the Treatise had been removed, in order to increase the clarity, and
so the force, of the main thesis. But Hume did more than subtract as he
cast his moral philosophy anew. At the same time he continued with the
project initiated in the Philosophical Essays of finding a way of expressing
challenging philosophical positions in an engaging and ‘polite’ manner.
What is particularly noticeable in the Enquiry is the quantity of references
to Greek and Roman authors: to Aristotle and Plato and Epictetus, to
Cicero and Plutarch and Livy and Polybius, and to many others besides.
There is in addition a significant number of references and allusions to
French writers: to La Rochefoucauld and St. Evremond and Fénelon
and Fontenelle, as well as to Montesquieu and Bayle and Pascal. When
Hume reached for an anecdote, it was an anecdote from the history of
the ancient world or of France. This would seem to have been of a piece
with the development on Hume’s part of a sense of himself as a member
of a European republic of letters, and of a concomitant desire not to be
seen as in any way parochial. There was thus little, other than the use
of the English language, to identify the author of the Enquiry as British.
But of course Hume knew that most of his readers would be, in the first
instance, British rather than French or Italian. The impression given is
that Hume intended to flatter his readers by giving them opportunities
to enjoy their own cultured worldliness. Quotations were given in Greek
without translation, for example. As in the Philosophical Essays, and as in
the Essays, Moral and Political, Hume addressed his readers as persons of
taste and sophistication, who had read widely in history and literature in
several languages.
In other words, Hume was again seeking to establish a kind of alliance
between himself and his readers, an alliance of the cosmopolitan and the
lettered, against the academic philosophy of the modern world. Repeatedly
in the Enquiry Hume set up an opposition between ‘philosophy’ and
‘common life’. It was characteristic of ‘philosophy’ that it was addicted
to the building of ‘systems’ on the basis of ‘hypotheses’ that meet with
no confirmation in experience. One such hypothesis was the idea that all
moral distinctions are made by reason, with no role for sentiment. Another
was the idea that human beings are and perhaps can only be selfish in their
concerns and motivations. Whereas in the Treatise Hume had appeared
to want to apply the explanatory methods and ambitions of Newtonian

natural philosophy to ‘moral subjects’, in the Enquiry he differentiated
between moral philosophy and ‘physics’. In natural philosophy it is not
unusual for a theory to be true even though it is dramatically at odds with
common sense and first appearances. But in all ‘enquiries concerning the
origin of our passions, and the internal operations of the human mind’,
the ‘simplest and most obvious cause’ is most likely the real one: ‘When a
philosopher, in the explication of his system, is oblig’d to have recourse to
some very intricate and refin’d reflections, and to suppose them essential to
the production of any passion or emotion, we have reason to be extremely
on our guard against so fallacious an hypothesis’.49 The notion that all
affections, even apparently benevolent ones, are really selfish was a perfect
example of this fallacy. This scepticism about transferring the methods of
natural philosophy to the study of the human mind was not, however, a
rejection of an ‘experimental’ approach to the mind as such. The ambitions
and rhetoric of experimentalism remained part of Hume’s project, in his
suspicion of ‘hypotheses’ and ‘systems’, and in his claims to be doing no
more than following ‘the rules of philosophy’ by extracting the principles
of morals from ‘fact and observation’.50 This added another dimension
to the Enquiry’s way of engaging with its reader: not only is that reader
supposed to be well read in the literature of the ancient and modern
worlds, but he is also figured as an ally of the new community of moral
scientists at work on the project of clearing away the errors of dogmatic
metaphysicians.
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals presented a clear and
simple yet radical thesis in a manner carefully designed to elicit consent
from the kind of reader it was most likely to have. It spoke to the reader
in the reader’s own idiom, made use of the reading that the reader could
be supposed to have done, and at the same time enlisted the reader into
new philosophical movements, into the project of an inductive science of
the mind, and into the sophisticated historicism of Montesquieu. It was
a further experiment in the combination of the two species of philosophy
described in the first section of the Philosophical Essays: the ‘easy’ and
the ‘accurate’. It may well have been Hume’s sense of his success in this
mixture of style and substance that caused him to think of the Enquiry as
the best of all his books. Hume may have felt that in the Enquiry, as not
in Book III of the Treatise, he was sufficiently in control of his argument
to ensure that his moral philosophy would be judged on its own terms,
and not dismissed as a reiteration of sceptical or licentious views from the

past or present. Taken as a whole, in fact, the Enquiry may be seen as an
attempt to make most previous moral philosophy look simply irrelevant to
the task of articulating the principles at work in the economy of the moral
sentiments. Despite his frequent use of quotations and episodes from the
literature of the ancients, Hume was not one of those seeking a revival
of the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans. When the narrator of ‘A
Dialogue’ describes Palamedes as ‘the only man I ever knew, who was well
acquainted with the antients, and did not extremely admire them’,51 it
may be imagined that Hume was, in an indirect way, describing himself.
By means of quotation and allusion Hume made it clear that he knew the
moral philosophy of the ancient world very well. But it could not have been
more obvious that the ancient conception, so influential among Hume’s
contemporaries, of ethics as a form of therapy, as, in Cicero’s phrase, a
medicine for the mind, was not one shared by Hume. That much of the
‘anatomical’ agenda of the Treatise remained in place. Hume’s hope, it
may be supposed, was that no one would now confuse that agenda with
the supposed licentiousness of Hobbes, Mandeville, and other modern
moral sceptics.
The Enquiry was in complete draft by the end of 1750. Fifteen hundred
copies were printed in London for Andrew Millar in July 1751, and it was
advertised for sale four months later, at a price of three shillings.52 Hume
continued to revise the text even after the book was published, adding a
final paragraph to Appendix II that is found in some but not all copies of
the first edition.53
Political Economy for a Commercial World

At the same time as he was casting anew his moral philosophy in the
form of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume was working
on a new series of essays on political topics. As with the Enquiry, Hume
sent drafts of parts of this work to friends in Scotland. In the summer
of 1750, for example, he sent James Oswald an early version of ‘Of the
Balance of Trade’. Oswald replied with detailed and critical comments,
to which Hume responded in turn.54 Earlier in 1750, he had written
to John Clephane to report that he had just finished ‘a very learned,
elaborate discourse, concerning the populousness of antiquity’.55 He sent
this ‘discourse’ to Robert Wallace a year or so later, and told him that
he would prefix to it a note acknowledging the significance of Wallace’s

own work on the same question. There would be twelve essays in the
new volume, he informed Wallace, ‘& the Subjects are Of Commerce, of
Luxury, of Money, of Interest, of the Ballance of Trade, of the Ballance
of Power, of Taxes, of public Credit, of some remarkable Customs, of the
Populousness of Antient Nations, of the Protestant Succession, an Idea of a
perfect Commonwealth’.56 Most of these are classified today as writings
on economics, but the discipline of economics as we know it now was a
largely nineteenth-century creation. As we saw when considering Hume’s
‘early memoranda’ in Chapter 3, the eighteenth century interested itself
in monetary and fiscal phenomena primarily from a political point of view.
The fundamental question was how by economic means a country might
increase its power over its rivals. In mid-century Britain this question was
a pressing one. The accession of William of Orange had involved England,
and after 1707 Great Britain, in a long series of wars against France and her
allies. Paying for these wars had given rise to an ever-larger national debt.57
But they had not created a stable balance of power in Europe. According
to Bolingbroke, the conflict over the Austrian succession had been ‘a war,
the least successful, and the most expensive, that this nation ever made’.58
No one believed that the peace concluded at Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748
would last. The principal task for the Whig administration formed under
Henry Pelham in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6 was how to
put the country’s finances in order, and how to restructure the national
debt quickly enough to ensure an advantage over France in the war that
was bound to break out again sooner rather than later. The political essays
that Hume wrote at Ninewells after his return from Vienna and Turin
were as naturally about what we now call economic questions as the essays
he had written in the final years of the Walpole ministry were about
faction.59
Commerce – what in eighteenth-century Britain was generally called
‘trade’ – had been generating a substantial literature for more than a hun-
dred years.60 Joseph Massie, to whose book on interest rates we will return
later, collected close to fifteen hundred books and pamphlets on trade pub-
lished between 1557 and 1763.61 By the 1730s and 1740s, important early
contributions to this literature were being republished, and French works
on trade were being translated into English. Though these pamphlets and
books did contain theoretical reflections on such things as the nature of
money, the determinants of interest rates, and the proper definition of
luxury, they were usually intended to persuade the reader of the wisdom
of particular practical measures to be taken, so it was claimed, for the ben-
efit of the nation considered as a whole. Sometimes they were prefaced
with what might be thought of as apologies for trade in general, demon-
strations that the interests of manufacturers and merchants coincided
with the interests of the rest of the nation: demonstrations that trade was,
in the words of Josiah Tucker, ‘a noble and interesting science; on which
the riches, the strength, and I may add, the morals and freedom of our
country, so essentially depend’.62 Special effort was taken to show that the
landed interest was as well served by commercial success as the moneyed
interest was. But the substance of most works on trade was the detail
of government policy and how it should be altered. Authors published
because they believed they saw more clearly than others which import
taxes and export bounties would secure trading advantage over France, or
how the national debt could be reduced without unduly slowing down the
economy, or how to reduce the economic and social burden constituted
by the unemployed, or what was to be done about the challenge posed to
English interests by the development of the Irish economy. They argued
for the relaxing of commercial legislation in some areas, and its tightening
in others. They argued for a variety of changes to the interest payable
to holders of national debt, and about the benefits of allowing the debt
itself to become a form of currency. They argued for the compulsory (and
unpaid) labour of the destitute on the repair of roads and the clearing of
rivers. They argued for the introduction of linen production in Ireland
in place of wool. In the jargon of the time, they wrote as ‘projectors’.
Tucker advocated the union of Britain with Ireland.63 Malachy Postleth-
wayt revived Commonwealth-era ideas of a union of Britain with the
United Provinces of the Netherlands.64
Underlying these disagreements about particular measures of policy
was a set of assumptions that, since Smith’s assault upon it in The Wealth
of Nations, has gone by the name of the mercantilist system. It is usual now
to point out that mercantilism was not in fact a system at all.65 Certainly
there was no attempt made on the part of writers on trade to create a
systematic body of doctrine such as might give an intellectual rationale for
the policies they backed. The basic assumptions on which their arguments
rested were taken to be uncontroversial, even truistic, and so not in need of
defence.66 Prominent among these assumptions was the idea that money,
in the form of gold and silver, was an important source of power for a
country, and that an increase in a country’s stock of money was therefore

an increase in its power. For a country that lacked silver and gold mines,
trade was an important source of money, though only to the extent that
the value of the country’s exports was greater than the value of its imports.
‘’Tis the balance of our trade, that supplies us with bullion’, John Cary
had written in a work reissued in a third edition in 1745. ‘[I]f that be in
our favour, it brings it to us, if otherwise, it must be carried away’.67 The
state of the balance of trade, with France in particular, was something like
a national obsession in Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Books and pamphlets in large numbers argued that the balance of trade
with France was against Britain, and that British trade therefore needed to
be protected better and stimulated more effectively.68 Tariffs and duties,
in some cases prohibitions, needed to be in place to order to shelter British
manufactures from foreign competition, along with consumption taxes to
dampen domestic demand for imported goods, and bounties to make
export more profitable. It was generally agreed that wages needed to be
kept as low as possible in order to boost the international competitiveness
of the price of manufactured goods. The case for such ways of furthering
the interests of manufacturers and merchants, or at least the interests
of those manufacturers and merchants large enough to be competing
on an international scale, had been successfully urged after the Restora-
tion of 1660, and had seen a new era of government acceptance under
Walpole.69
Not every writer on trade supported the steady increase in protectionist
taxes and excises and bounties. Many, on the contrary, presented them-
selves as advocates for freer trade. Isaac Gervaise claimed that ‘Trade is
never in a better condition, than when it’s natural and free’.70 Matthew
Decker argued that the present ‘difficulties and discouragements of our
trade’ would be remedied by freeing it of regulation, by the creation
of free ports in Britain and the destruction of trading monopolies, and
by the ending of export bounties. Tucker echoed Decker’s complaints.
Jacob Vanderlint proclaimed that ‘In general, there should never be any
restraints of any kind on trade, nor any greater taxes than are unavoid-
able’, for ‘no inconvenience can arise by an unrestrained trade, but very
great advantage’.71 The proponents of freer trade were not, however,
proponents of free trade. It was common for them to argue that revenue
lost by the relaxation of the regulatory structure could be replaced by
increased taxation of the consumption of luxury goods. They remained
fixated by the balance of trade, and thought that greater trading freedom
was a better means of ensuring a favourable balance than was protectionist
legislation.
Hume had been reading this literature since at least the late 1730s. At
one rather puzzling point in the essay on public credit he went so far as to
claim that he had been looking for the meaning of the word ‘circulation’
as applied to money ‘ever since I was a school-boy’.72 Political Discourses
was not, however, to be just another contribution to the debate about
the best way of ensuring an advantageous balance of trade with France.
Hume was careful explicitly to deny that he sought to be understood as a
‘projector’. Rather, he said, he assumed ‘the character of a philosopher’.
As such he addressed himself to what he termed ‘speculative politicians’,
different and distinct, presumably, from real politicians actually involved
in the business of government.73 In the first two paragraphs of the opening
essay he intimated that his concern as a philosophical writer on ‘commerce,
luxury, money, interest, &c.’ was with ‘general principles’ rather than with
particular schemes: with, that is, ‘those universal propositions, which
comprehend under them an infinite number of individuals, and include a
whole science in a single theorem’.74 This was to say that he was interested
in the assumptions underlying the literature on trade, and not in particular
items of commercial policy. Hume suggested that politicians – real ones,
presumably, not speculative ones – also had the general course of things as
their ‘chief business’, ‘especially in the domestic government of the state,
where the public good, which is, or ought to be their object, depends on
the concurrence of a multitude of causes’.75 Possibly, then, there were
practical lessons to be derived from the examination of general principles.
But it was not upon such lessons that Hume dwelled, and he accepted that
to many readers the book would seem so abstract and intricate as not to be
of any use at all. As at the start of both the Treatise and the Philosophical
Essays, Hume began by acknowledging, even insisting upon, the abstruse-
ness and difficulty of what was to follow. Yet the general principles that
Hume identified in the course of the Political Discourses were not, for the
most part, his own discoveries.76 What was novel in the book, and what
might have made it hard for his contemporaries to know what to make
of it, was primarily its dispassionate and speculative air, the impression
created of a writer taking a very long view, unconcerned for the most part
with local, temporary, and factional anxieties, and willing to consider the
politics of trade from a historical and markedly cosmopolitan perspective.
This tone and point of view would find its most perfect expression in
an essay added in 1758, ‘Of Jealousy of Trade’, in which Hume would
declare that ‘not only as a man, but as a British subject’, he prayed for
the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy – and even France.77
In the Political Discourses there was none of the exclusive and obsessive
concern with British interests alone that was usual in Anglophone writing
on trade.78
It would therefore not be right to think of Political Discourses as having
only a British intellectual context. Hume wanted his reader to notice
the differences between his essays and the usual approach taken to trade
by Anglophone writers, and part of what distinguished his treatment of
commercial subjects was its engagement with the French literature on
political economy. There were references in Political Discourse’s footnotes
to Dutot, Law, Melon, and Paris-Duverney. Hume’s engagement with
Melon was perhaps especially important to the unusual perspective he
took on trade.79 In the first chapter of the Essai Politique sur le Commerce
Melon had argued against the idea, influential in France under Louis XIV,
that war was the means whereby to correct the economic imbalances
inevitable among countries as diverse as those in Europe.80 The context for
the Essai was continued fear in France of English, or British, commercial
hegemony. Melon dismissed those who believed that France’s best policy
was to combine military might with an aggressive exploitation of Britain’s
dependence upon food imports from France. Much the better course of
action, Melon urged, was for France to try to defeat Britain at its own game,
by cultivating trade in the fruits of agriculture, and flooding the British
home market with French products. It was commercial, not military,
success that was the means whereby France should exploit her agricultural
superiority and gain herself a ‘tranquility . . . equal to her power’.81 It was
not that Hume agreed with the specifics of Melon’s agriculture-based
model of economic development and political hegemony. He did not.
For one thing, he shared with Montesquieu the view that no one nation
was ever likely to be able to maintain commercial hegemony for long.82
For another, so he argued in a footnote to the first essay in Political
Discourses, ‘Of Commerce’, Melon overestimated the proportion of the
French people that could devote itself to agriculture. In France, as in
England, as indeed in most parts of Europe, ‘half of the inhabitants live
in cities; and even of those who live in the country, a great number are
artizans, perhaps above a third’.83 The more sensible policy, therefore,
was to develop manufacturing, and to seek to achieve economic success

through the marketing of luxury goods. What Hume shared with Melon
was a point of view, sceptical of received wisdom, sceptical especially
of old ideas about the balance of power in Europe, and intent on using
discovery of the fundamental principles of economics as the basis for new
thought about the relation between commerce and politics.
In ‘Of Commerce’, then, Hume argued that it was not necessary to
choose between, on the one hand, the wealth of a state’s citizens and their
enjoyment of luxury, and, on the other, ‘the greatness of the sovereign’,
that is, the state’s capacity to assert its will in international affairs.84
Manufacturing and industry, Hume claimed, could be seen as just as
much a constituent of the ‘real riches and strength’ of the state as full
granaries, storehouses of clothes, and magazines of arms. Nor was foreign
commerce a cause for concern, in the sense of being somehow a drain on the
nation’s strength and vitality. By both its imports and its exports foreign
commerce increased the nation’s stock of labour, which the state could use
to its own purposes in times of war. Needless to say, Hume was not the
first to argue that encouraging the manufacture and consumption of goods
over and above those that were absolutely necessary for subsistence did
not in fact detract from the state’s power.85 Nor, of course, was he the first
to articulate the beneficial economic consequences of the production and
consumption of luxury goods, as he did implicitly in ‘Of Commerce’ and
explicitly in the second essay, ‘Of Luxury’.86 Refinement in manufactures
and in patterns of consumption, Hume argued, went along with an increase
in sociability and an improvement of science. The distinctive forms that
modern life took, and the sentiments that were formed and exchanged
and refined in clubs and societies and coffeehouses and drawing rooms,
were inconceivable without progress beyond a basic subsistence economy.
‘Thus’, as Hume put it in a luminous phrase, ‘industry, knowledge, and
humanity are linkt together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from
experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polish’d and
luxurious ages’.87 Hume had read Montesquieu making the same kind of
case for luxury as a softener of manners and refiner of customs.88 He had
read Melon arguing that, far from making a country effeminate and lazy
and unable to defend itself, luxury is ‘the destroyer of sloth and idleness’.89
He had also read Mandeville. But in this connection, as in the Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume mentioned Mandeville only in
order to distance himself from the more extreme conclusions reached in
The Fable of the Bees. Not all luxury is beneficial to the nation, Hume
argued. It is better, in the sense of being more useful, for the rich man
to educate his children and support his friends and relieve the poor than
to spend all his money gratifying his own appetites. Mandeville had been
wrong to argue that there is no such thing as vicious luxury. This, again,
was hardly a novel point to make. It might be that novelty was not Hume’s
goal in his essay on luxury, and that what he intended was simply a clear,
elegant, and condensed articulation of what he knew would be a familiar
line of argument. It should also be noted, though, that woven into the
argument was an emphasis on the distinctively political advantages of a
flourishing industry and commerce. Commerce was to be seen as a source
of liberty as well as of wealth, of national power, and of the refinement
of manners. Smith would claim in The Wealth of Nations that Hume was
‘the only writer’ who had taken notice of the link between commerce and
the liberty and security of individuals.90
The first aim of trade, from a political perspective, was standardly taken
to be an increase in the nation’s money, where money meant metal, in the
form of gold and silver. It was gold and silver that paid for armies and
ships and castles, that subsidized the foreign allies necessary to maintain
a balance of power in Europe, and that was paid out in the treaties that
brought wars to an end. It tended to be assumed by writers on trade that
money and wealth were the same thing: that in all circumstances, in other
words, the more gold and silver a nation had, the wealthier it was. More
reflective writers on trade, however, had questioned the identification of
metal with wealth, and had asked whether the accumulation of money
should really be thought of as what commerce was for. Berkeley, for
example, had asked in The Querist ‘Whether money be not only so far
useful, as it stirreth up industry, enabling men mutually to participate
in the fruits of each other’s labour?’91 Money, according to Berkeley,
was merely what made trade, as distinct from bartering, possible. It had
no value in itself. Its true idea, he suggested, was ‘that of a ticket or
counter’.92 Vanderlint also had conceived of money as a ‘counter’, ‘the
means by which commodities of all kinds are procured and transferred
from one to another’, the ‘medium’ of trade rather than trade’s objective.93
Montesquieu had made the same suggestion.94 When money was defined
in this way, it did not matter much how many ‘counters’ an economy
contained, so long as there were enough to facilitate the exchange of
goods from one person to another. Nor, some suggested, did it matter
much what money was made of.
As we will see, Hume thought that it did matter what money was
made of, but he did not attach significance to how much money a country
possessed. In the essay ‘Of Money’ he made it clear that he thought
this much was obvious. It was, he wrote, a ‘principle of reason, that the
quantity of gold and silver is in itself altogether indifferent’.95 An increase
in the quantity of money could do no more than inflate prices, something
that, far from being useful, ‘may even be a loss to a nation in its commerce
with foreigners’.96 Hume explored the circumstances in which it could
be a loss to a nation later in the Political Discourses. The bulk of the essay
was not a detailed account and defence of this approach to money, but
rather a consideration, for the benefit of ‘speculative politicians’, of two
apparent problems for that approach. It was a matter of historical fact that
the increase of money in Europe following the discovery of the gold and
silver mines of South America had stimulated the economies of Europe.
It was also a matter of historical fact that countries with limited amounts
of money tended to be the poorest countries. Hume’s solution was that
in both cases the determining factor was not the quantity of money,
but rather the amount of industry and trade, and the speed at which
money circulated as a result of that industry and trade. An increase in the
amount of money did encourage growth, but the crucial thing here was
the process of increase, not the amount of money added to the economy
at the end of the process, and what made growth possible was the extent
to which manufacturers and traders were willing to take advantage of the
short-term effects of a boost to the money supply.97 The usual cause of
poverty was not that money was short, but that money was not being put
to use. The strength of a state, Hume concluded, lay not in its stock of
money, but rather in its habits of industry and enterprise.
With respect to money, Hume took himself to have identified a confu-
sion of a collateral effect for a cause. Scarcity of money generally accom-
panied poverty, but was not its cause. The cause of both, rather, was
insufficient circulation. Another example of this kind of confusion was the
view, orthodox since at least Locke’s writings on money, that the quantity
of money was the key determinant of money’s price: that low interest rates
and cheap borrowing were caused by plenty of money, and high interest
rates and expensive borrowing by shortage of money.98 Hume’s view as
outlined in ‘Of Interest’ was that something else was needed to explain
how interest rates were fixed. Again, this was not an original suggestion. In
An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest, published
in 1750, Joseph Massie had claimed that the right place to begin in an
explanation of interest rates was with the question of what the reasons are
why people are prepared to pay interest in the first place.99 The answer to
that question was that interest is seen as a price paid for the opportunity to
make a profit with someone else’s money. People will allow others to make
a profit with their money when they cannot make more from their money
by investing it themselves. So the rate at which they will lend is bound
to be at least equal to the profitability of trade in general. Interest rates,
then, are linked closely to the rates of profit from trade. This raises the
further question of what determines profits from trade, and the answer to
this question is, simply, competition. An increase in competition squeezes
profit margins. What, then, determines the number of people wanting a
part of a trading market? Massie’s answer, in essence, was that political
considerations are the key factor. When there is confidence in the govern-
ment’s capacity to enforce contracts, protect shipping, and generally keep
the peace, people will take the risks inherent in trade.
Hume’s essay on interest replicated Massie’s argument so exactly that it
is hard not to conclude that he had read Massie and was influenced by him –
though, of course, it should be remembered that if Massie was capable of
thinking up his explanation by himself, so also, presumably, was Hume. In
any case, it was, again, a nation’s industriousness, its appetite for business
and profit, that mattered according to Hume. The habits and manners of
commerce were the cause both of the quantity of money in circulation and
of the prevailing rate of interest. The relatively low interest rates in the
Europe of the mid-eighteenth century were the effect not of the influx of
silver and gold from the American colonies of Spain and Portugal, but of
the general flourishing of manufactures, arts, and industry, of the appetite
for luxury among consumers, and of the habits of frugality among traders.
The moral for politicians, hinted at but not spelled out by Hume, was
that there was no shortcut to cheap money. Interest rates could not be
lowered, for example, by a legally mandated increase in the value of coins,
or by the introduction of paper money to supplement metal. Whatever
the short-term effects of such policies, it would not be very long before
interest rates reverted to the natural level determined by the amount of
activity in the economy taken as a whole.
The idea that there is a ‘natural’ state of an economy that cannot be

artificially improved by legislative activity had been formulated before
Hume by those ‘mercantilist’ writers on trade who were in favour of
a general relaxation of the system of tariffs and taxes and monopolies
that had grown up so quickly under Walpole and his successors. But
these writers remained attached to the idea that trade served the national
interest just to the extent that it resulted in a surplus of exports over
imports. They were as worried as the protectionists were about the extent
to which Britain was ‘losing’ money to France, for instance on account
of its self-destructive appetite for French luxury goods. In the essay ‘Of
the Balance of Trade’ Hume argued that the very notion of a ‘wrong’ or
‘harmful’ balance of trade was mistaken. The idea of a natural state of
the economy had not been taken far enough. The full implications of the
fact that industriousness, not the quantity of money, was the key deter-
minant of the facts of economic life had not been grasped. Money could
not be ‘lost’ to France because there was a determinate amount of money
that the British economy could make use of. The amassing of money
would result only in increased wage costs, increased prices, and the rise
of the price of exports to the point where they became uncompetitive.
Money at that point would be bound to start leaving the economy because
imports had become cheaper than domestic produce. This would trig-
ger a decline in the state of manufactures, jobs would be lost and wages
would fall, and in the end domestic industry would be competitive again,
both nationally and internationally. Money, being (in Berkeley’s image)
the oil that lubricated the wheels of trade, or (in Vanderlint’s image) the
water on which commerce floated, had, like any liquid, a natural level,
above or below which it could not be kept for long. The ‘innumerable
barriers and obstructions upon commerce’ that the British, in their jeal-
ousy and hatred of the French, had implemented were just so many
doomed attempts to raise the level of money above what was natural to the
British economy, given the amount of industriousness and enterprise that
animated it.
It was time, Hume suggested, to moderate jealousy and hatred. Man-
ufacturers of woollen goods should be allowed to export freely to France,
regardless of fears that this might foster a domestic market for woollen
goods from abroad, and so encourage woollen manufacture in, for exam-
ple, Ireland. Luxury goods, like French wines, should be allowed to
be imported without penalty. French wine production could only be
increased by giving over to it land currently used for staples such as wheat
and barley, and wheat and barley would then have to be imported from,
for example, England.100 ‘In short’, he concluded, ‘a government has great
reason to preserve with care its people and its manufactures. Its money,
it may safely trust to the course of human affairs, without fear or jeal-
ousy’.101 He was willing to accept protectionist measures – for example,
taxes on German linen and on French brandy – if they would help with
the preservation of people and manufactures. He was no advocate of com-
pletely free trade. The important point, though, was that the concern of
legislators should be understood to be the cultivation of industriousness,
not the draining of money from commercial rivals in the interests of a
‘favourable’ balance of trade.
The Political Discourses betrayed a deep scepticism on Hume’s part not
only about protectionism but also about the proclivity of politicians to
imagine they could increase wealth through the creation of new forms
of money, such as credit notes issued by banks, stocks in large trading
companies, and holdings of national debt. In ‘Of Money’ Hume dismissed
these things as ‘counterfeit money’.102 Paper money contributed to infla-
tion, would not be accepted in lieu of metal by foreigners, and its value
was dangerously vulnerable to fluctuations in confidence in the creditwor-
thiness of the issuers. Any form of serious bank disorder would reduce
its value to nothing. Hume doubtless found reason for such scepticism in
the fact that the rebellion of 1745 had so nearly caused a run on the Bank
of England. Hume regarded the British as especially susceptible to the
illusion that paper money provided a means of increasing national wealth.
The French had reacted to the financial crises of the 1720s by banning
banks and paper money and even (in theory, at least) lending at interest.
But the British appeared to be still under the spell cast by John Law and
his advocacy of creative finance as a means of general enrichment. Britain
had seen what has been termed a ‘financial revolution’ in the wake of
the revolution of 1688.103 Fortunes had been made in speculation on the
markets, and politicians had cultivated the trade in stocks and bonds as a
source of tax revenue. The problem, as Hume saw it, was that as paper
emerged as a substantial component of the money supply, gold and silver
would be bound to leave the domestic economy because paper would not
pass as currency abroad.
It might be wondered why this would matter if, as Hume held in ‘Of
Money’, money was a counter or token, the value of which was a matter
of convention.104 Wasn’t all money, in a sense, ‘counterfeit’? It mattered,

according to Hume, precisely because metal was what was needed in
international transactions of all kinds. The institutions were not (yet)
in place that would allow merchants and traders in one country to be
confident in credit notes issued in another. In theory, anything could
function as money, but in practice often only silver or gold would do.105
An abundance of money was of any use at all only in negotiations and
transactions with foreigners. In the domestic context it could only be
inflationary. By the rise of paper money, therefore, ‘we feel . . . all the
ill effects, arising from a great abundance of money, without reaping
any of the advantages’.106 A policy intended to raise money above its
natural level was in truth the only means of sinking it below that level.
There was one and only way of raising the level of money, and that was
a policy of ‘gathering large sums into a public treasure, locking them
up, and absolutely preventing their circulation’.107 Again, in principle,
Hume seems to have thought that this was good policy, but human nature
was such that the policy was bound to fail.108 Either another country
would invade to steal the hoard of money, or politicians would give in to
the temptation to dip into it and spend in ways that would make them
popular but would destroy what mattered most – ‘the industry, morals,
and numbers’ of the people.
In the essay on the balance of trade Hume identified a mechanism gov-
erning the flow of money between rich and poor countries that appeared to
make it impossible for a country with plenty of money, and so high labour
costs, to isolate itself for long from the threat posed to its manufactures
by a poorer country with significantly lower wages.109 Money, like water,
would naturally flow from the high to the low, and the ultimate result,
certainly where countries were close by each other, would be an approx-
imate economic equality. ‘[A]ny man’, Hume pointed out, ‘who travels
over Europe, at this day, may see, by the prices of commodities, that
money, in spite of the absurd jealousy of princes and states, has brought
itself nearly to a level, and that the difference betwixt one kingdom and
another is not greater in this respect, than it is often betwixt different
provinces of the same kingdom’.110 When shown an early version of the
essay, James Oswald had expressed scepticism about the levelling pro-
cess that it described. He argued there were reasons to think that a rich
country’s ability to buy and store food cheaply, and its capacity to attract
in a reliable flow of immigrant labour, gave it the capacity to preserve a
permanent competitive advantage over a poorer country. Writing in reply

to Oswald, Hume pointed out that he should not be taken to be saying
that the result of process was that countries ‘which communicate’ would
automatically end up with the same amounts of money. They would only
do so if they were equal in respect of ‘their people, industry, and com-
modities’. The analogy with water, in other words, was not to be taken
too literally. Hume conceded, and spelled out in detail in the essay on
money, that a gradual increase in money would, in the short term, stim-
ulate industry rather than simply cause wage and price inflation. But,
Hume insisted to Oswald, in the long term it was impossible for a rich
country to maintain an advantage over a poor neighbour. ‘The growth of
every thing’, he wrote, ‘both in arts and nature, at last checks itself ’.111
The only thing that protected Europe from China’s low-wage economy
was distance. Were China as near as France or Spain, ‘every thing we use
would be Chinese, till money and prices came to a level’.112 The question
of how long Britain could maintain its economic position would recur in
1758 in correspondence with Kames about Tucker’s Theory of Commerce.
There Hume would declare himself pleased at Tucker’s confidence in
England’s future and his prediction of the ‘continuance and even further
progress of the opulence of that country’. Even so, he admitted, he could
not but indulge himself ‘in the hopes that we in Scotland possess also
some advantages, which may enable us to share with them in wealth and
industry’.113 In the Political Discourses, however, Hume did not write as
a Scot, any more than he had in Essays, Moral and Political. He could
quite dispassionately observe that English fears about a drain of money to
Scotland following the Union of 1707 had proved to be groundless.114 He
described his fellow Scot John Law as as much a ‘foreign writer’ as Melon
and Dutot.115 He did not focus on the situation of his native country as
Law had done in Money and Trade Consider’d, or as Berkeley had focused
on Ireland in The Querist.116
The essay immediately following ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ was called
‘Of the Balance of Power’. This might look like a change of subject.117 It
was not. The state of trading relations between the countries of Europe
was intimately related to the European balance of power. The increasing
costs of war had made commercial success, and, more important still,
a nation’s ability to borrow on the basis of its economic strength, vital
components of international power and prestige. It was taken as more or
less axiomatic that Europe was under threat from France and her allies
of falling under a ‘universal monarchy’. ‘Europe has now, for above a

century’, as Hume put it, ‘remain’d on the defensive against the greatest
force, that ever, perhaps, was form’d by the civil or political combination
of mankind’.118 The vitality of the British economy, and the country’s
consequent military and naval capacity, was generally supposed to be
essential to countering that threat. Since 1688, Britain, so Hume asserted,
‘has stood foremost in the glorious struggle; and she still maintains her
station, as guardian of the general liberties of Europe, and patron of
mankind’.119 Hume’s essay was intended in part to show that ‘the maxim
of preserving the balance of power’ was not a new feature of European
politics. The leaders of the ancient world had followed the maxim even if
they did not explicitly formulate it as an item of policy. It was no more
than a matter of common sense that universal monarchy needed to be
prevented. In fact, Hume suggested, there was a danger for Britain in
making the balance of power an explicit political concern. The problem,
once again, was Britain’s obsessive and irrational antipathy to the French.
It was no more than natural that a country the size of France would
need to be contained by military force. But the British could not prevent
themselves from, so to speak, making the conflict personal. Wars with
France ‘have always been too far push’d, from obstinacy and passion’; the
British are always taken advantage of by allies in the conflict with France;
and ‘we are such true combatants, that, when once engag’d, we lose all
concern for ourselves and our posterity, and consider only how we may
best annoy the enemy’.120 There had been too little reflection on what a
balance of power involved, which was to say, not conclusive defeat of the
enemy, but the creation of an equal opposing force. Hume concluded the
essay by returning to the long view. History suggested that ‘enormous
monarchies, such as Europe, at present, is in danger of falling into’, could
not last very long. A Bourbon empire would collapse just as the Roman
Empire had, and for the same reasons.
The only indubitable consequence of British foreign policy was the
public debt. The debt was to a large extent serviced by taxation, and
in ‘Of Taxes’ Hume considered, and rejected, the idea that increases
in taxation were always beneficial to a country’s economy because they
encouraged people to work harder to make up for their loss in net income.
As often, Hume looked for the middle ground. Some taxes were beneficial
in this way, some were not. Like many writers on trade, he was in favour
of taxes on consumption, and especially on luxury goods. He reluctantly
accepted taxes on possessions, such as the land tax. He opposed uni-

versal poll taxes. By contrast when he turned to a direct consideration
of national debt, in ‘Of Public Credit’, he made no real effort to find
a middle ground.121 Hume regarded the mortgaging by a nation of its
future income as, quite simply, ‘ruinous, beyond the evidence of a hun-
dred demonstrations’.122 At a time when Britain showed every sign of
accommodating itself to permanent indebtedness, and when it was reg-
ularly argued that its creditworthiness was both a sign and a source of
power, this was a remarkably strong line to take.123 It sat uneasily with the
idea apparently promulgated in other essays that financial affairs could be
mostly trusted to look after themselves. As Hume himself pointed out,
in the ancient world, war was financed by the hoarding of money, and in
taking a stand against the very idea of national debt, Hume aligned himself
with a ‘country’ politics of nostalgia for which he usually had no time. It
brought him into agreement with Bolingbroke, for example, who argued
in Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation that ‘the future pros-
perity and safety of this country depend on the speedy diminution of our
national debts’.124 As he had indicated in his 1749 letter to Montesquieu,
Hume was prepared to allow that a national debt might have some posi-
tive effects. Debt itself being a form of currency, it increased the amount
of money in circulation, and the possibility of speculating on funds that
held debt prevented successful businessmen from finding reasons to sink
their money in land, thereby making trade more competitive. But these
benefits were overwhelmingly outweighed by the disadvantages felt by
a heavily indebted country. Debt caused an unnatural concentration of
both people and money in London. It was inflationary. The taxes needed
to service debt acted as a check on industry. Because a large proportion of
the holders of the debt were foreign, it decreased British autonomy. The
possibility of living off interest encouraged idleness.125
As if this was not bad enough, there was also to be taken into con-
sideration ‘the prejudice, that results to the state, consider’d as a body
politic, which must support itself in the society of nations, and have var-
ious transactions with other states, in wars and negotiations’.126 In this
connection, there was nothing positive to say about a national debt. The
idea – articulated, for example, by Melon – that a national debt was not
pernicious because in effect the nation owed money only to itself, so that
it was no poorer as a consequence than someone was when he transferred
money from his right hand to his left, did not deserve to be taken seri-
ously. Debt had very real, and very detrimental, effects on the economic
well-being of most of the population. And yet, Hume complained, even
so, people believed there was nothing that could be done about it, that the
best that could be hoped for was the kind of restructuring, the reductions
in interest on bonds and annuities and extensions of the life span of loans,
that had occupied Walpole and that was now the concern of Pelham. A
politician would always find reason to delay serious attempts to reduce
the debt, for example by the maintenance of taxation at the kind of level
it reached during wartime. It was not difficult to see, Hume claimed, that
the point would soon be reached when such supine acceptance of debt
would have to end. It was inevitable both that war would break out again
and that Britain would not be able both to fight the war and finance its
debt. A choice would then have to be made between ‘destroying’ the public
debt, by defaulting on it, and allowing the debt to destroy the nation, by
putting the country’s credit before its liberty. Perhaps more in hope than
expectation, Hume supposed that in such circumstances default would
be the preferred option. He allowed that were other ways forward out of
debt, for example the French practice, defended by Melon, of artificially
increasing the value of the coinage, which was bad for creditors but good
for debtors; or the Dutch policy of forcibly reducing the interest on the
national debt, without prior negotiation with their creditors. But these,
he thought, would not work in Britain. ‘[P]eople in this country are so
good reasoners on whatever regards their interest’, Hume remarked, pre-
sumably ironically, ‘that such a practice will deceive no body; and public
credit will probably tumble at once by so dangerous a trial’.127 It was likely,
then, that public credit would see what Hume termed a ‘natural death’.
Hume refused to see a default as a disaster. There were only about 17,000
holders of national debt. Why should their interests be put before the
interests of owners of land who comprised all of the House of Lords and
most of the House of Commons? Hume acknowledged that the ‘moneyed
interest’ was more influential than its numbers suggested. The worry was
that its influence would spread further and progressively weaken Britain’s
appetite for the wars necessary to maintain a balance of power in Europe.
French power would carry on growing, and eventually a time would come
when it was no longer possible to resist it. This would be the ‘violent
death’ of public credit. For the moment, there was a choice between these
two ways of putting an end to the national debt. Revising the essay in
1764, with the national debt larger still after the Seven Years War, Hume
would be rather more pessimistic.128
Hume began Political Discourses implying that he meant to write as
a ‘philosopher’, which was to say, in search of ‘universal propositions,
which comprehend under them an infinite number of individuals, and
include a whole science in a single theorem’.129 This was not quite the
kind of book Political Discourses turned out to be. It did not proceed
by the statement of ‘theorems’ and the deduction from them of ‘whole
sciences’. It was very different from the more properly scientific analyses
of the political dimensions of trade that would soon by published by,
for example, Cantillon, Tucker, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith.130
Hume underlined the unsystematic nature of his investigations in an
essay ‘Of Some Remarkable Customs’, which used examples of puzzling
and unexpected political phenomena to show ‘that all general maxims in
politics ought to be establish’d with great reserve, and that irregular and
extraordinary appearances are frequently discover’d, in the moral, as well
as in the physical world’.131 Hume best captured the spirit of his own
approach in the very first paragraph of the book, in his characterization
of ‘abstruse thinkers’ as ‘by far the most useful and valuable’ in so far
as ‘[t]hey suggest hints, at least, and start difficulties, which they want,
perhaps, skill to pursue, but which may produce very fine discoveries,
when handled by men who have a more just way of thinking’.132 Hume’s
project in the Political Discourses was, precisely, to ‘start difficulties’. And
the difficulties he started were not only difficulties for what has come to be
called ‘mercantilism’. In ‘Of Money’, for example, his concern was not so
much with the mistake of identifying money with wealth as with apparent
exceptions to the more plausible view that it was irrelevant how much
money a country possessed. In ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ the mechanism
whereby money was bound to flow between neighbouring economies,
regardless of protectionist attempts to prevent imports, was presented
as a threat to even the most industrious and enterprising society. Hume
had no particular doctrine or theory of trade to argue for. He wrote first
and foremost with the intention of stimulating surprise, puzzlement, and
reflection in his reader. Part of the point of calling the book a set of
discourses was, perhaps, to highlight the fact that topics are treated there,
as in a talk given to a club or society, in a manner intended to provoke
further discussion.133
Also, surely, he wanted a wider readership than was usual for books
on trade. Tucker had noted that trade had been represented as a dry
and unappealing subject, fit only for ‘the mercantile part of the world’
to take interest in. He had suggested that the almost complete lack of
agreement among writers on trade that made the subject so bewildering
for the general reader was a result of the fact that every writer on trade in
general was really seeking only to further his particular branch of trade.
It was possible, then, that ‘a person of liberal and learned education, not
concerned in trade, is better qualified to engage in the study of it as a
science, than a merchant himself ’.134 Hume wrote as a person of liberal
and learned education seeking liberal and learned readers. There were
no tables of figures in the Political Discourses, and nothing in the way of
detailed examination of the state of trade, or of the balance of imports
against exports, or even of the current amount and cost of the national
debt. What there was in their place was history, both modern and ancient.
Ancient history was especially plentiful. There was evidence all through
the book of the intensive reading and re-reading in the classics that Hume
had been doing since his return to Ninewells in early 1749. The ancient
world furnished Hume with many of his examples, and at times provided
him with a point of comparison and contrast with the policies of modern
Europe. Detailed references to classical works, including footnotes, are
much more common than references, let alone footnotes, to modern works.
Very little of the modern literature on trade is explicitly referred to by
Hume. Ancient literature was probably given more prominence as a means
of engaging the interest of general readers who could be expected to
pride themselves on their classical learning. This was the same strategy
as Hume employed in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. It
was an attempt to take the subject to the reader, instead of asking the
reader to adapt himself – or herself – to an unfamiliar subject matter. The
erudition on display in the ‘very learned, elaborate discourse, concerning
the populousness of antiquity’ that Hume boasted of to John Clephane was
little short of ostentatious. Part of the point, one imagines, was for Hume
to be able to stake his claim to be not only a popular essayist but a scholar
as well.
The history was not mere window-dressing. Hume, as we have seen,
returned repeatedly to the claim that the principal determinant of a coun-
try’s economic state of health was its manners and customs. It was the
habits of industry and enterprise that mattered, habits that in countries
like Holland and England had both fostered and been reinforced by the
emergence of political liberty, and that been engrained also by the spread
of a taste for refinement and luxury. Economic development, in other
words, had a social and cultural underpinning, and all of the factors
involved needed to be understood in a historical framework. Manners and
tastes developed and altered through time. They could not be presumed
to be permanent features of a country or a people – especially once the
idea of ‘physical’ causes of national character had been dispensed with.
To an extent, the literature on trade did incorporate a historical perspec-
tive, but the history, so it looked to Hume, was both extremely crude
and fundamentally mistaken. As part of its argument that something or
other needed to be urgently done in order to rectify Britain’s commerce,
a book or pamphlet on trade would often locate itself in that part of early
modern opinion which supposed that the modern world was inferior to
the ancient, that things were generally in a state of decline, and that one
clear instance of decline, and of crisis in commerce, was the emptiness of
Europe, its palpable loss of population in the modern era. In 1685, Isaac
Vossius, a Dutch classical and biblical scholar, had asserted that the pop-
ulation of Rome at its height was 14 million, and that its area was twenty
times as large as modern London and Paris combined. A similar view was
expressed by Rhedi and Usbek in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, and
in De l’Esprit des Lois Montesquieu argued in propria voce that Europe
was more populous in the time of Charlemagne than at present.135 In a
manuscript that Hume read in the late 1740s Wallace dismissed these as
exaggerations, but argued instead that a decline in population had begun
before the rise of Rome.136 How many people lived in the ancient world
might now sound like a question of purely antiquarian interest, but to
Hume and his contemporaries it was, in Hume’s own words, ‘the most
curious and important of all questions of erudition’.137 It mattered because
to undermine the view that the world’s population was in decline was at
the same time to undermine the view that there was cause for concern
about the course that history was taking in European politics generally.
‘[I]f every thing else be equal’, after all, ‘it seems natural to expect, that
wherever there are most happiness and virtue and the wisest institutions,
there will also be most people’.138 The population question needed to be
examined closely by someone who was largely complacent about the state
of the modern world, and Hume gave it more than a third of the three
hundred pages of the Political Discourses.139
In ‘Of the Populousness of Antient Nations’ Hume first compared the

political and moral differences between the ancient and modern worlds
and argued that the differences made it very unlikely that the world’s pop-
ulation was in decline. He then turned to a survey of the available evidence
for the actual population of the ancient world and argued that there was
insufficient evidence for the claims made by Vossius, Montesquieu, and
Wallace. Thus he did not himself seek to reach a definite conclusion on
the matter. His aim, as he told Clephane, lay in ‘starting some doubts, and
scruples, and difficulties, sufficient to make us suspend our judgment on
that head’.140 What was unusual given the proclivities of the time, but not
surprising given the tenor of his moral philosophy, was Hume’s ability to
immerse himself in the study of the ancient world without succumbing to
nostalgia for its values and institutions. When considered in terms of their
politics, and not in terms of their literature, classical Athens and Rome
do not appear to have held many attractions for him. What was salient
as he examined the ancient world was its dependence upon slavery, its
perpetual and destructive wars, and the undeveloped state of its manufac-
tures and commerce. The ancient republics were fond of liberty, Hume
remarked, but did not understand it very well. Such liberty as was achieved
was hopelessly unstable, because, ‘In those days, there was no medium
betwixt a severe, jealous aristocracy, over discontented subjects; and a tur-
bulent, factious, tyrannical democracy’.141 That is, there was no class of
medium-sized landowners and prosperous manufacturers and merchants
to act as a counterweight to the pendulum swing of power from the few
to the many and back again. Violence and inhumanity were endemic to
political life. Violence and inhumanity were endemic to domestic life as
well. The number of slaves used in the ancient world, Hume claimed,
and the way in which they were treated, meant that ‘to one, who con-
siders coolly of the subject, it will appear, that human nature, in general,
really enjoys more liberty at present, in the most arbitrary government of
Europe, than it ever did during the most flourishing period of the antient
times’.142
This was an unambiguous rejection of the idea that modern politics
might be improved by a return to the ideals of the ancients. It confirmed
the claim made in the essays on commerce and on luxury that there was
nothing to be said in favour of a reversion to ‘the maxims of antient policy’.
The modern world was infatuated with the acquisition of wealth, and with
social status and the conspicuous consumption that it conferred. But all
of that was inextricably bound up with the modern world’s widespread

and relatively liberty, and with its more refined and humane manners. In
the recent Political Discourses taken as a whole Hume argued that, putting
the question of national debt aside, there were no reasons for ‘specula-
tive politicians’ to wish things very different from how they were. The
essay ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, publishable now that Jacobitism
was somewhat less of a worry than it had been in 1748, supplemented
this argument with a reflection on the harm always done by revolution-
ary attempts. The case for the Protestant succession was in large part
the simple fact that Hanoverian monarchs had been on the throne since
1714.
It is surprising, then, that Hume chose to conclude the Political Dis-
courses with a consideration of the potentially unsettling question of which
form of government should be considered most perfect.143 As he himself
remarked at the beginning of ‘Idea of a perfect Commonwealth’, ‘’Tis not
with forms of government, as with other artificial contrivances; where an
old engine may be rejected, if we can discover another more accurate and
commodious, or where trials may safely be made, even tho’ the success be
doubtful’.144 Even so, Hume claimed, it would be advantageous to know
what the most perfect possible form of government is, ‘that we may be
able to bring any real constitution or form of government as near it as pos-
sible, by such gentle alterations and innovations, as may not give too great
disturbance to society’.145 From the outset it is clear that the ‘real consti-
tution or form of government’ that Hume had his eye upon was the British
one. His perfect commonwealth was roughly the size of a combination of
Great Britain and Ireland, and its capital was called London. Most of the
essay was taken up by a description of a republican form of government
loosely modelled on Harrington’s Oceana.146 Harrington’s notion of an
ideal state was worthy of consideration, Hume claimed, because, unlike
Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, it did not ‘suppose great reformation
of manners’.147 The question, then, was how best to frame a constitution
for a more or less real country populated by real people. Hume’s answer
had two principal parts. The first was a legislature divided into a hundred
component county assemblies, each elected by the parishes of the county
in question, and making its decisions according to the majority view of the
hundred country assemblies taken as a whole. This arrangement would
allow even a large people to make decisions en masse, by dividing the
people into many separate bodies, so that there could be proper debate
without disorder and confusion. The second principal part of Hume’s
perfect commonwealth was an executive senate, comprising one hundred
senators each also elected by the parishes of his country, charged with
the management of state affairs, and functioning in addition as the court
of final appeal. The dependence of the senate upon its electors and no
one else provided a remedy, Hume argued, to the problem of factional
division. There would in addition be what Hume called ‘a court of com-
petitors’, charged with inspecting all public accounts, and able to accuse
before the senate any member of the legislature or executive for malfea-
sance. In line with Machiavelli’s dictum that a constitution needs to be
regularly returned to its first principles, the first year in every century was
set aside for correction by the legislature of ‘all inequalities, which time
may have produc’d in the representation’.148
The virtue of such a constitution, according to Hume, was that it
had the capacity to combine the transparency and accountability of gov-
ernment in small city republics with the power and stability of a large
monarchy. Hume’s intention was to sever the traditional connection –
recently reaffirmed by Montesquieu in Book VIII of De l’Esprit des Lois –
between a republic’s freedom and its smallness of size. Here was a
commonwealth where ‘every thing lyes under the eye of the rulers’ but
which, being large, need not be constantly liable to being ‘subdu’d by great
force from without’.149 There was no inherent absurdity then, to the idea of
a large state, ‘such as France or Britain’, becoming a republic. Indeed, there
was reason to think that an extensive republic would be better able to pre-
serve its freedoms ‘without tumult and faction’ than a small one.150 Would
Hume’s perfect commonwealth last forever? Of course not. Nothing made
by human beings lasts forever. Hume had not been converted to belief in
the possibility of a constitution so perfect that it could not be destroyed
by one or other of the ‘consuming plagues’ that human society is liable
to – by ‘enthusiasm’, for instance, or some other ‘extraordinary motion of
the human mind’. But one measure that could be taken to prolong the life
of a perfect commonwealth was a ban on ‘extensive conquests’, which –
as the example of the Roman republic had shown – ‘must be the ruin of
every free government, and of the more perfect governments sooner than
of the imperfect’.151 This was the note on which Hume brought Political
Discourses to an end. It was a warning, surely, to the British politicians of
his own day. It was a warning that disaster would follow if Britain suc-
cumbed to the temptation to use its military and, especially, naval might
to the end of acquiring an empire.
Political Discourses was in press by September 1751.152 Hume claimed
in ‘My Own Life’ that it was ‘the only work of mine that was successful
on the first publication’.153 It was successful enough to be reissued in a
second (identical, bar minor corrections) edition in the same year. It was
a copy of this second edition that Hume asked his friend John Stewart,
a wine merchant, to ‘transmit’ to Montesquieu in 1753.154 Montesquieu
apparently formed a plan to have Wallace’s Dissertation on the Numbers
of Mankind, published in 1753, translated into French, and the translator
suggested that a rendering of Hume’s essay on the population question
should be included in the volume. A year later the Abbé le Blanc wrote
to Hume to tell him that he had himself translated all of the Political
Discourses into French.155 According to Le Blanc, the translation sold
‘comme un roman [like a novel]’.156 Like many translations of the time, his
was an attempt not only to turn a book into another language but also
to insert the book into a discourse, in this case the political discourse,
of another nation.157 Melon’s Essai Politique sur le Commerce had been
translated into English in 1739 by an Irish translator who added several
notes reflecting on the book’s relevance to the Irish situation. Le Blanc in
turn emphasized the affinity (and sometimes also the differences) between
Hume and Melon on economic questions, and added a series of notes
intended to highlight the way Hume added support to Melon’s case for
commerce as equally in the interests of the state as military prowess. ‘The
soldier, the magistrate, the merchant, all serve the state equally well’, he
wrote in the preface.158
Le Blanc chose to include with the Political Discourses a translation of
Bolingbroke’s Reflections on the Present State of the Nation. Hume might
not have welcomed this. He had written to Smith in 1753 that his curiosity
was ‘not much rais’d’ by the publication of the posthumous volume in
which the Reflections first appeared.159 A year later he told Le Blanc that
‘Lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous productions have at last convinc’d the
whole world, that he ow’d his character chiefly to his being a man of quality,
& to the prevalence of faction. Never were so many volumes, containing
so little variety & instruction; so much arrogance and declamation’.160 Le
Blanc could surely be forgiven, though, for having associated the author of
‘Of Public Credit’ with Bolingbroke’s kind of pessimism. At any rate, this
translation was the beginning of Hume’s success in France. And there was
something fitting about its having been made by Le Blanc, the author of
Lettres d’un François concernant le gouvernement, la politique et les mœurs des
Anglois et François, a book, published in 1749, that articulated precisely
the kind of cosmopolitan worldliness that Hume made his own in the
Political Discourses. ‘I found in your Discourses a political philosopher,
and a philosopher citizen’, Le Blanc wrote to Hume, flattering himself
that the same could be said of his own performance in the Lettres d’un
François.161 He told Hume that Political Discourses would have the same
effect in France as had De l’Esprit des Lois.162 This, at least, must have
delighted Hume.
Philosophical Religion, Philosophical Friendship

The course of reading in the classics that Hume undertook once he
returned to Ninewells in 1749 made it possible for him to contribute
to the debate concerning the populousness of the ancient world. It con-
tributed to the comparative dimension of the Political Discourses taken as
a whole, and it added to the ways in which Hume was able, in An Enquiry
concerning the Principles of Morals, to repackage his moral philosophy in
polite form. It also prompted him to make a historical study of the earliest
stages of religious belief and practice, a study that draws heavily on a
very wide variety of ancient sources. There is, it must immediately be
acknowledged, no solid evidence that ‘The Natural History of Religion’
was written at this time. All there is to go on is Hume’s remark in a letter
to Andrew Millar of 1755 that he had composed it ‘some years’ before.163
But it could not have been written before Hume’s intensive study of
ancient Greek and Roman sources, and after 1751 he was immersed in
the writing of The History of Great Britain. In the same letter to Millar
Hume intimated that three other works were written at roughly the same
time as the ‘Natural History’: a recasting of the account of the passions
given in Book II of the Treatise; an essay proposing a solution to the prob-
lem of why pleasure is given by the representation of human suffering in
tragedies; and a further piece, now lost, containing ‘some considerations
previous to geometry & natural philosophy’.164 Also, by the spring of
1751, Hume had finished a first draft of the Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion. There is a sense in which this is a kind of companion piece to
the ‘Natural History’. The ‘Natural History’ opens with the declaration
that with regard to religion ‘there are two questions in particular, which
challenge our principal attention, to wit, its foundation in reason, and that
concerning its origin in human nature’.165 The Dialogues answered the
first question, and the ‘Natural History’ answered the second. Like the
‘Natural History’, furthermore, the Dialogues may be seen as a product of
Hume’s reading in the classics. It was modeled on Cicero’s dialogue on
the same theme, De Natura Deorum, and it contained references to a wide
range of ancient sources. A full treatment of the Dialogues will be offered
in Chapter 7. It will be considered here chiefly in terms of the context in
which Hume wrote it.
Hume’s project in ‘The Natural History of Religion’ of determining the
‘origin of religion in human nature’ suggested a contrast with a history
of religion which would locate its origin in divine revelation. The title
may also have been an allusion to Hobbes’s description of a sort of history
‘which is the history of such facts, or effects of nature, as have no depen-
dance on mans will; such as are the histories of metalls, plants, animals,
regions, and the like’.166 There may in addition have been intended the
implication that Hume’s account would be true to experience rather than
fancifully inventive: where others pretended that religion might have its
first beginnings in reason, Hume would rest his history on a consideration
of what a ‘barbarous, necessitous animal’ man was on at the start of the
human story, and would determine what kind of religious sentiments were
most likely to well up in such a creature in such a situation.167 Hume was
not the first to apply ‘natural history’ to religious topics. In 1709, John
Trenchard had published The Natural History of Superstition. Before that,
in 1690, there had been Sir Robert Howard’s The History of Religion. Both
works purported to show, as Howard put it,
How religion has (from the beginning) been managed by priest-craft of the hea-
thens, to mislead the vulgar and prophane (as they are pleased to term them) into
a blind implicit obedience, to their inspired and divine authority; teaching the
belief of many gods, or divine powers, and appointing so many various ways of
superstitious devotions: such as the worshipping of idols, of pillars and columns
consecrated by them, adoration of sepulchres and dead men; all artificially calcu-
lated and contrived so, as they found would most easily make impression upon
the minds of men.168
In other words, they were contributions to the late seventeenth- and

early eighteenth-century deist project of distinguishing rational and nat-
ural religion from the idolatrous and superstitious religion of the people.
According to Howard, Trenchard, and other deists, the history of reli-

gion, including the history of Christianity, was a history of corruption of
natural belief and natural morality. Hume, on the other hand, depicted
the source of superstition and idolatry as being not power-hungry priests,
but rather human nature itself, and the combination of curiosity, igno-
rance, hope, and fear that was endemic to early human existence. This
made the deists’ way of distinguishing between pure and corrupt religion
untenable. It was impossible that the former had preceded the latter, that
a rational monotheism might have gone before a superstitious polytheism.
Human nature dictated that polytheism must have been the first religion.
Religion had been corrupt from the beginning. Resemblances between
Hume’s ‘Natural History’ and the texts of the deists were therefore mis-
leading. The truth was that Hume’s argument undercut the whole idea of
there being a historical dimension to the priority of rational religion over
priestcraft and idolatry.169
Nevertheless, a contrast between a genuinely rational religion and
popular superstition was deployed by Hume in the ‘Natural History’.
He refrained from drawing the conclusion that religion as such could
be nothing other than corrupt and idolatrous. Indeed, at the start of the
dissertation, in answer to the question of the foundation of religion in rea-
son, he declared that ‘The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent
author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflexion, suspend his
belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine theism
and religion’.170 ‘Genuine theism and religion’ was in the first instance
belief in a single ‘invisible, intelligent power’ responsible for the creation
and ordering of the universe. What Hume went on to argue was that it
had been possible for human beings to arrive at such belief only relatively
recently. It was necessary first that man’s needs became less pressing, and
that his understanding of the world around him became more sophis-
ticated. A conception of the universe as law-governed and uniform in
its operations had to be developed. So also did a conception of the uni-
verse as having a first and single beginning. Not even the philosophers
of Rome – not Marcus Aurelius, nor Plutarch, nor the other Stoics and
Academics – could properly be said to have had such a conception.171
It might be wondered how seriously Hume could expect his affirmation
of the principles of natural religion to be taken, given the scepticism
about its rational basis expressed, albeit in a highly indirect manner, in
Section XI of the Philosophical Essays. The important thing, however,
for understanding the ‘Natural History’ is not whether Hume himself
can be supposed to have sincerely believed in an invisible, intelligent

power, but the distinction he drew between a pure and genuinely rational
theism, whatever that might have amounted to, and the corrupt forms
that theism has actually taken in the world. This was the heart of the
‘Natural History’. Where the deists had dwelled upon the corruption of
monotheism and its transformation into polytheism, Hume was interested
in the way popular monotheism developed by way of the corruption of
polytheism.
Religion may have begun with polytheism, but most people are
monotheists. Indeed, monotheism has prevailed for a very long time. ‘The
doctrine of one supreme deity, the author or nature’, Hume observed, ‘is
very antient, has spread itself over great and populous nations, and among
them has been embraced by all ranks and condition of person’.172 There
was no contradiction here with the claim that not even Marcus Aurelius
and Plutarch counted as genuine theists, because the monotheism that
Hume was now talking about was very far from being of the philosophical
kind. The monotheism of the masses is built on irrational and superstitious
principles, not on any process of argument. In the central sections of the
‘Natural History’ Hume described how polytheism turns into monothe-
ism: how one god is singled out from many to be especially praised and
placated, how that god comes to be defined as possessed of all the qualities
of the sublime and infinite, and so elevated above human comprehension
that it becomes necessary that there be, in Hume’s words, ‘inferior medi-
ators or subordinate agents, which interpose betwixt mankind and their
supreme deity’.173 The tolerant and rather easy-going gods of polytheism
vanish, and there emerges a single jealous god who insists on absolute
obedience, and who can only be pleased by adherence to a single set of
incomprehensible doctrines and by dedication to a specific set of doctrines
and observances which must be interpreted and regulated by priests. Like
the deists, Hume drew his examples of the absurdities of monotheistic
belief and practice from Judaism, Islam, and Roman Catholicism, all of
which were presented as being not only less tolerant, but also more ridicu-
lous than polytheistic paganism. Again like the deists, Hume had a lot of
fun at the expense of Catholics in particular, but the mockery was quite
general. ‘Survey most nations and most ages’, Hume enjoined the reader
close to the end of the dissertation. ‘Examine the religious principles,
which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarce be persuaded,
that they are other than sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them
more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the

serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies him-
self with the name of rational’.174
How far did Hume’s ridicule extend? Did it include Protestant Chris-
tianity as well as Catholic? The ‘Natural History’ makes it reasonably clear
that Hume regarded popular Protestantism as being just as far from true
and genuinely rational religion as popular Judaism, Islam, and Catholi-
cism. He presented as corrupt and degenerate any religion which repre-
sents God as so infinitely superior to human beings as to have a tendency
‘to sink the human mind into the lowest submission and abasement, and
to represent the monkish virtues of mortification, pennance, humility and
passive suffering, as the only qualities which are acceptable to [God]’.175
He objected particularly to religions that elevate God’s power over his
goodness, and that effect a separation of religion from virtue as ordinarily
understood. That is, he condemned both the idea that God himself is
not to be conceived of in terms of everyday morality, and the idea that
what God demands of human beings is something other than ‘a manly,
steddy virtue, which either preserves us from disastrous, melancholy acci-
dents, or teaches us to bear them’.176 It is difficult not to take all this as
having been meant as criticism of precisely the kind of Christianity that
remained powerful in countries, like Scotland, where the Reformation had
been animated by Calvinist principles. And this difficulty becomes a near
impossibility when, in a long footnote, Hume quotes the Chevalier Ramsay
on the doctrines of predestination and eternal punishment that were cen-
tral to the theology and practice of the Scottish Covenanters and their
eighteenth-century descendants in the ‘Popular’ party. Such doctrines,
according to Ramsay, turn the God of the Jews, the God also worshipped
by the Christians, into ‘a most cruel, unjust, partial and fantastical being’.
The proponents of predestination ‘have confounded the nature of good
and evil; transformed the most monstrous passions into divine attributes,
and surpassed the pagans in blasphemy, by ascribing to eternal nature,
as perfections, what makes the most horrid crimes amongst men’.177 By
quoting Ramsay on these topics Hume surely meant to tar traditionalist
Calvinist Protestantism with the same brush he used in his depictions of
Judaism Catholicism and Islam. But just as surely he did so knowing that
he was not the only one in the Scotland of the time to detest the religion
that put faith before works. So also did men like Hutcheson, Leechman,
and Wishart, and men of the younger generation such as Blair, Ferguson,
and John Home.178 They regarded the essence of true Christianity, the
real imitation of Christ, as being a life of virtue, and shared the belief that,
in Hume’s words, ‘the most genuine method of serving the divinity is by
promoting the happiness of his creatures’.179
The passions of hope and, especially, fear were central to Hume’s
examination of the origins of religion in human nature, and this might
explain one of the more obvious alterations made in his recasting of his
theory of the passions in the dissertation ‘Of the Passions’. This began
with the direct passions, such as joy, grief, hope, and fear, and then
moved on to consider the indirect ones, such as pride, humility, love,
and hatred. Book II of the Treatise had proceeded in the opposite direc-
tion. Another obvious difference was in respect to size. The recasting
was much shorter than the original treatment. Unlike Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles
of Morals, it was far too short to have been a candidate for publication
as a self-standing work. And its purpose, vis-à-vis the first formulation
of its themes in the Treatise, is harder to characterize than that of the
Philosophical Essays and the Enquiry. Those two works had translated
the language of the Treatise into the more polite and literary language of
the essay form. They had been very carefully crafted exercises in dis-
tillation and in transmutation, deploying artful changes in mode of pre-
sentation in order that Hume’s principal innovations might be discerned
more clearly. The rewriting of ‘Of the Passions’ was crude by comparison.
About three-quarters of the text was taken more or less verbatim from
Book II of the Treatise.180 It looks as if Hume proceeded simply by cutting
away what he now regarded as irrelevant to the main argument and then
rearranging what was left behind. He did not deploy very many of the
literary and historical examples and allusions that were such a prominent
feature of the Enquiry. The language of the revised theory of the passions
was comparatively austere. It took its examples and imagery from natural
philosophy rather than from literature and history, as in the comparison
of the composition of passions with the composition of light as revealed
by a prism, or the analogy drawn between the ways passions mix with
each other and the interactions of alkali and acid, or oil and vinegar.181
‘It is sufficient for my purpose’, Hume concluded by declaring, ‘if I have
made it appear, that, in the production and conduct of the passions,
there is a certain regular mechanism, which is susceptible of as accurate a
disquisition, as the laws of motion, optics, hydrostatics, or any part of

natural philosophy’.182
These differences between ‘Of the Passions’ and the Philosophical Essays
and Enquiry notwithstanding, this third recasting has in common with the
other two a refusal to conceal the most unsettling aspects of the Treatise’s
theory of human nature. The deployment of the language and explanatory
ambitions of natural philosophy highlights this fact, by drawing attention
to Hume’s continuing lack of interest in the question of how an individual’s
passions might best be governed. This was what writers on the passions
usually concerned themselves with – and it was what Hume had nothing
to say about. There remained a glaring absence when it came to the
evaluation of the passions, a loud silence when it came to how they might
be restrained and properly directed by reason. ‘It seems evident’, Hume
wrote, ‘that reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth
and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have
no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection’. ‘What
is commonly, in a popular sense, called reason’, he continued, ‘and is so
much recommended in moral discourses, is nothing but a general and a
calm passion, which takes a comprehensive and distant view of its object,
and actuates the will, without exciting any sensible emotion’.183 As in
the Treatise, then, what philosophers had hitherto described in terms of
a conflict between reason and passion was more properly conceived of
in terms of interactions between the passions. What was generally called
reason was in this context really a passion that was calm rather than
turbulent. ‘Strength of mind’, supposedly a matter of mastery of passion
by reason, was in fact ‘the prevalence of the calm passions above the
violent’.184 Hume proceeded to ‘enumerate some of those circumstances,
which render a passion calm or violent’, but, as in the Treatise, he did
so in the manner of an anatomist of mind, and not in the manner of one
teaching lessons as to how to make the passions less violent and more calm.
Yet there was still a difference in the way these claims were made in ‘Of
the Passions’. The startling rhetoric of the Treatise was altogether absent.
The reader was not told that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions’, or that ‘’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction
of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’.185 Hume’s language
remained sober and matter of fact as he dismissed the way philosophers
since Plato had described the fundamental problem of human existence.
All in all, this dissertation on the passions was a plain and unshowy affair.
It did not excite much comment from Hume’s contemporaries, and has
not attracted much attention since.186 Its purpose, we may imagine, was
to preserve the main elements of Hume’s analysis of the passions from
oblivion – and to do so in a manner that made evident the connections
between that analysis and Hume’s treatment of other questions discussed
in the volume in which it would be published.
In his discussion of the way the passions interact with each other Hume
noted that an opposition of passions by itself generates a disturbance in the
mind which intensifies the violence of the predominant passion. This was
why something’s being forbidden can make it all the more pleasurable,
and why jealousy or absence can increase the intensity of love.187 He
also noted that ‘Nothing is more capable of infusing any passion into the
mind, than eloquence, by which objects are represented in the strongest
and most lively colours’.188 These remarks set the scene for a treatment
of the paradoxical pleasures of tragedy.189 The puzzle of why pleasure is
taken from the dramatic representation of human misery was, of course,
already an old one.190 It was a problem that was especially pressing for
a theory of mind such as Hume’s, which attached special importance
to ‘sympathy’. In the Treatise Hume had observed that, by virtue of
sympathetic emotional contagion, ‘A spectator of a tragedy passes thro’
a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections, which the
poet represents in the persons he introduces’.191 How could such an
experience be enjoyable? ‘[H]ow comes it to pass’, Addison had asked in
The Spectator, ‘that we should take delight in being terrified or dejected by
a description, when we find so much uneasiness in the fear or grief which
we receive from any other occasion?’192 As he felt his way towards an
answer to this question, Hume located himself in the French tradition of
philosophical criticism. The right approach had been indicated by Dubos
when he had claimed that the sheer tumult of mind and heart caused by
tragedy is essential to its pleasure.193 Of course what is pleasurable in a
play is often rather less so in real life. Fontenelle had recognised this when
he had claimed that ‘a certain idea of falsehood in the whole of what we
see’ is sufficient to convert potential pain into actual pleasure.194 But, as
well-written histories showed, representations of human suffering can be
pleasurable even when they are representations of things that have really
happened. What makes distress pleasurable to experience would seem,
then, to be ‘that very eloquence, with which the melancholy scene is
represented’: ‘The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the

art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment
displayed in disposing them; the exercise, I say, of these noble talents,
along with force of expression, and beauty of oratorial numbers, diffuse
the highest satisfaction on the audience, and excite the most delightful
movements’.195
If ‘Of Tragedy’ was written between 1749 and 1751, it was contem-
poraneous with a discussion of the same question by Kames. Kames’s
Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion was published in
1751, and opened with an examination of ‘Our Attachment to Objects of
Distress’. Like Hume, Kames took the weaknesses of Dubos’s solution of
the paradox of the pleasures of tragedy as his point of departure. Kames
detected in Dubos a commitment to the thesis that selfishness motivates
all human actions. He rejected that thesis and, following Butler, posited
instead a heterogeneous plurality of active principles, one of which is a
‘sympathetic principle’ that gives us a lively interest in the fortunes of
other people. That principle does not stop the suffering of others being
painful, but its exercise is something we approve of in ourselves, and the
pleasure taken in tragedy is thus explained as a pleasure taken reflexively
in the propriety of our responses to the pain of others.196 Hume did not
refer to this very different approach to tragic pleasure, but it is possible,
perhaps even likely, that he discussed it with Kames while he was writing
his essay. By this time Hume and Kames had been discussing each other’s
ideas for more than a decade.197 Nor, as we have seen, was Kames the
only man with whom Hume felt able to share his ideas. He had circulated
among his friends drafts of parts of both the Enquiry concerning the Princi-
ples of Morals and the Political Discourses. He clearly felt at ease discussing
his ideas with men such as Gilbert Elliot and James Oswald. He was able
to debate openly and freely with Montesquieu and Robert Wallace. It is
possible that the last of the works that Hume wrote during these two years
at Ninewells, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, was animated at least
in part by Hume’s sense of what stood to be achieved by conversation
about fundamental questions, even where those party to the conversation
differed deeply about the answers that should be reached.
Letters that he wrote both before and immediately after his move
to Edinburgh in 1751 suggest that Hume was always on the lookout
for signs of the realization of an ideal of dispassionate inquiry that he
took to have been one of the few valuable bequests of the ancient world
to the modern. The conversation that constituted Section XI of the

Philosophical Essays began with the narrator’s admiration of ‘the singular
good fortune of philosophy, which, as it requires entire liberty, above
all other privileges, and flourishes chiefly from the free opposition of
sentiments and argumentation, receiv’d its first birth in an age and coun-
try of freedom and toleration, and was never cramp’d, even in its most
extravagant principles, by any creeds, confessions, or penal statutes’.198
For Hume, the free opposition of sentiments and argumentation found
its literary representation most perfectly in the philosophical dialogues
of Cicero. In a letter of 1753 Hume wrote of reviving the ‘happy times’
when being a man of letters among other men of letters was more impor-
tant than being a member of a sect or the devotee of a system, ‘when
Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the
Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were
insensible to all these distinctions, except so far as they furnished agree-
able matter to discourse and conversation’.199 Cicero depicted a society in
which searching examinations of ethical questions could be made without
those involved in the discussions being accused of wanting to subvert the
moral principles by which people lived their lives. He also described a
discussion of the nature of the gods that made it look as though philo-
sophical examination of religious principles was not, in itself, regarded as
a threat to ordinary religious practice. These were the kinds of discussions
that Hume wanted to believe were possible in his own time and place.
One of the ways the Dialogues can be read is as an imagined modern-day
realization of the Ciceronian libertas philosophandi.
Hume took his relationship with Wallace as a perfect instance of friend-
ship that was able to survive, even thrive upon, deep disagreement.200
Wallace had been upset by the attack on the character of the clergy that
Hume had made in ‘Of National Characters’, and wrote a reply vindi-
cating his profession from Hume’s charges of hypocrisy, ambition, and
intolerance.201 But he did not let this matter get in the way of dialogue
about the populousness of the ancient world, and about other matters as
well, including, as we have seen, the ‘ethics’ of Hume’s second Enquiry.
‘Why cannot all the world’, Hume asked Wallace, ‘entertain different
opinions about any subject, as amicably as we do?’202 Hume would write
to thank Wallace for his ‘civilities, which are so far beyond what I have
any pretensions to’. ‘But authors have so often faild in this particular’,
Hume continued, ‘even in controversies, the least interesting, that you
are resolv’d, I see, to strain the point on the other side, and to set a new
example of politeness’.203 In 1753, Wallace finally published his own

work on the populousness question, with a long appendix on Hume’s
essay which began with Wallace declaring himself ‘much pleased with
that gentleman’s uncommon ingenuity, and struck with the brilliancy of
his arguments’.204 It was precisely the ‘politeness’ of the debate between
Hume and Wallace that struck Montesquieu: ‘The public that admires
these two works’, he wrote to Hume, ‘will not admire any less two friends
who concede in such a noble fashion the small interests of the mind to the
interests of friendship’.205 What is noteworthy in Hume’s correspondence
with Wallace is the self-consciousness of this politeness, the way in which
Hume congratulated both himself and his interlocutor for their ability to
remain friends despite their differences. Hume addressed his side of the
correspondence to ‘The Revd Mr Robert Wallace Minister of the Gospel
at Edinburgh’. Surely implicit in Hume’s occasional commentary on the
correspondence was admiration for Wallace’s ability to ignore Hume’s
growing reputation for scepticism about the claims of religion. Hume
believed that discussion should be able to proceed without the matter of
personal beliefs in such things as religion and politics being so much as
raised. Reflective people were bound to disagree about those things. They
needed therefore to be temporarily forgotten if rational argument about
more fundamental issues was to be possible.
Hume’s invocation of the happy times described by Cicero came in a
polite and complimentary letter addressed to the anonymous author of a
critique of the second Enquiry entitled The Delineation of the Nature and
Obligation of Morality. Written by James Balfour, who would be appointed
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1754, this was an attempt
to rescue morality from Hume’s apparent Epicureanism and to put it back
on a religious foundation. Hume’s only complaint about it, so he said in
this letter sent to its unknown author via the publisher, was its readiness
to assume that the views expressed in ‘A Dialogue’ were Hume’s own.206
This tactic made little sense, Hume pointed out, since in the course of
his criticism he imputed to Hume the sentiments of both the narrator
and his friend Palamedes. ‘In every dialogue’, Hume observed, ‘no more
than one person can be supposed to represent the author’207 – which
was not to say, of course, that in every dialogue one of the participants
had to be supposed to represent the author. The compliments Hume
paid to the author of the Delineation did not imply that he accepted the
force of the book’s criticisms.208 What Hume admired, rather, was their
tone.
Balfour was not the only critic among his Scottish contemporaries
whom Hume was to compliment on the degree to which he approximated
a properly philosophical style of criticism. In 1762, he would write to
George Campbell, Professor of Divinity at Marischal College, Aberdeen,
and author of a book-length examination of his treatment of miracles, to
thank him for the ‘civil and obliging manner’ in which he had pursued a
philosophical controversy ‘on so interesting a subject as that of miracles’
without making a ‘personal quarrel’ of the issue.209 Hume had seen an
earlier manuscript draft of Campbell’s book and had complained in a letter
to Hugh Blair of occasional passages in which Campbell had slipped into
the guise of ‘a controversial writer’ willing to augment his argument by
slighting references to Hume’s character and other books.210 To Campbell
himself he expressed his pleasure that these ‘symptoms of vehemence’ had
been ‘either removed or explained away, or atoned for by civilities which
are far beyond what I have any title to pretend to’.211 Also in 1762, Hume
had sight of part of the manuscript of another book-length critique of
his ideas from Aberdeen, Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind
on the Principles of Common Sense. He told Blair that he had ‘read it over
with pleasure’, but noted ‘one particular insinuation’ which he would not
take notice of ‘because I could not properly reply to it without employing
a style, which I woud not willingly use towards one for whom I have
otherwise a great regard and who has the honour of bearing the name
of your friend’.212 This was, presumably, an insinuation on Reid’s part
concerning Hume’s own religious beliefs, or lack thereof.213 Hume’s way
of expressing himself here is revealing. What was to be regretted in ad
hominem attacks on an author was the fact that the only possible kind of
reply was one which was bound to compromise the conversational ideal
that Hume sought to be true to. Hume ended his letter with a joke. ‘I
wish the parsons wou’d confine themselves to their old occupation of
worrying one another’, he wrote; ‘& leave philosophers to argue with
temper, moderation, & good manners’.214 Blair, of course, was himself
both a parson and a philosopher. In February 1763, Hume wrote to Reid
directly about the Inquiry. ‘It is certainly very rare’, he told Reid, ‘that a
piece so deeply philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so
much entertainment to the reader’. ‘I beg my compliments to my friendly
adversaries, Dr. Campbell and Dr. Gerard, and also to Dr. Gregory,
whom I suspect to be of the same disposition’, Hume wrote at the end of
the letter.215 ‘Your friendly adversaries Drs Campbel & Gerard as well as
Dr Gregory return their compliments to you respectfully’, Reid wrote in
reply. ‘A little philosophical society here [i.e., in Aberdeen] of which all the
three are members, is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your
company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable
than that of Saint Athanasius’.216
Hume’s relationship with Richard Price also would be cause for this
kind of mutual congratulation. Price sent Hume a copy of his Four Dis-
sertations, which included a sophisticated reply to ‘Of Miracles’, in 1767.
‘I am not, I hope’, he wrote, ‘inclin’d to dislike any person merely for
a difference in opinion however great, or to connect worth of charac-
ter and God’s favour with any particular set of sentiments. It is one of
my most fix’d and favourite principles . . . that nothing is fundamental
besides a faithful desire to find out and to practise truth and right’.217 In
the dissertation on ‘The Importance of Christianity, its Evidences, and
the Objections which have been made to it’ Price described Hume as ‘a
writer whose genius and abilities are so distinguished, as to be above any
of my commendations’.218 In his reply to Price, Hume remarked that ‘to
the reproach of learning, it is but too rare to find a literary controversy
conducted with proper decency and good manners, especially where it
turns upon religious sentiments, in which men often think themselves
at liberty to give way to their utmost rancour and animosity’. ‘But you
like a true philosopher’, he continued, ‘while you overwhelm me with the
weight of your arguments, give me encouragement by the mildness of
your expressions: and instead of rogue, rascal and blockhead, the illiberal
language of the Bishop of Glocester [i.e., William Warburton] and his
school, you address me, as a man mistaken, but capable of reason and
conviction’.219
The Dialogues might be taken as an expression of hope on Hume’s part
that this is how he would be read by his contemporaries. It is a represen-
tation of an idealized intellectual community, a demonstration of how it
was in the present age that philosophical argument could be conducted
with temper, moderation, and good manners, even about so ‘interesting’ a
subject as the attributes of the creator of the universe. Despite the Cicero-
nian overtones of the text, Hume was not merely recreating the achieve-
ments of the classical past. Where the dialogue about religion staged in
Essay XI of the Philosophical Essays had been presented as an imitation of
Epicurus and his Athenian critics, the Dialogues was set in modern times,
even if the participants were given rather un-modern names. The three
main interlocutors, Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea, can in fact be seen
as representatives of the principal currents of thought flowing through
the religious life of Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Especially interesting is Hume’s depiction of the relationship between
the ‘careless sceptic’ Philo and the ‘accurate philosopher’ Cleanthes, and
the way that relationship is contrasted with the behaviour of ‘the rigid
inflexible orthodoxy’ of Demea.220 For much of the Dialogues Demea is
shown to be largely in agreement with Philo as he criticizes what he and
Demea both regard as the unwarranted anthropomorphism of Cleanthes’s
natural religion. Cleanthes is subjected to round after round of relentless
argumentation. But in the end it is Demea, and not Cleanthes, who loses
both his temper and his appetite for philosophical discussion, and who
takes occasion, ‘on some pretence or other’, to leave the company.221 He is
dismayed by the fact that in his sceptical treatment of the problem of evil
Philo seems to be ‘running into all the topics of the greatest libertines and
infidels; and betraying that holy cause, which you seemingly espoused’.222
Cleanthes, by contrast, has seen perfectly well since the beginning of the
discussion that Philo ‘has been amusing himself at both our expence’,223
but – and this is the important point – is not in slightest bit put out by it. At
the opening of the final part of the Dialogues the reader’s attention is drawn
to the warmth of relations between Philo and Cleanthes. Philo describes
himself as living ‘in unreserved intimacy’ with Cleanthes despite their
differences of opinion.224 What they have in common is more important
than what divides them, and, so it would seem, what they have in common
is an enjoyment of the pursuit of argument, a willingness to engage with
scepticism on its own terms, and to let the discussion run through to
its conclusion. It was precisely such a willingness that Hume admired in
Wallace, in Balfour, in Campbell, in Reid, and in Price. In the second
volume of The History of Great Britain, commenting on the royalist Sir
William Davenant’s protection of Milton after the Restoration, Hume
wrote that ‘Men of letters ought always to regard their sympathy of taste
as a more powerful band of union, than difference of party or opinion as
a source of animosity’.225
After these two extraordinary years at Ninewells Hume moved to Edin-

burgh. As we will see in the following two chapters, he spent most of the
next ten years writing a history of England. The first thing he did, though,
was to assemble a collected edition of all of the philosophical works so
far published that he wished to preserve and acknowledge as his own.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects was published in four duodecimo

volumes in 1753.226 This was a cheap format that would ensure a rel-
atively wide readership. We do not know very much about the origins
of this very significant event in Hume’s literary career. The letters that
Hume must have exchanged with the publisher, Andrew Millar, and the
printer, William Strahan, do not survive. There is no record, for exam-
ple, of how much Hume received from Millar for the copyright. The
first volume of the Essays and Treatises was a fourth edition of the Essays,
Moral and Political, ‘corrected, with additions’. The second volume was
the 1750 edition of the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understand-
ing, unaltered except for a new title page. A second edition, with some
significant alterations, of the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
made up the third volume of the Essays and Treatises. The fourth volume
was the second edition of the Political Discourses, no different from the
first except for changes made in accord with the list of errata. Despite its
title, then, Hume’s collected works had no place for his first book, the
Treatise of Human Nature. The distinction between ‘essays’ and ‘treatises’
was the distinction, simply, between shorter and more extended pieces of
writing.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects was a summing up of Hume’s
achievements so far, a tidying up, and a presentation of what he had written
in a uniform format, to be bound as the purchaser wished, and to give
Hume a substantial presence on the library shelves of his contemporaries.
It was an act of self-assertion on Hume’s part, and an attempt to control
how he was read.227 For example, it mattered to Hume that it not be
obvious to his readers that he was a Scot. What he wanted from Dalrymple
in the letter about the Enquiry, and from other correspondents as well,
was reassurance that he wrote ‘good English’. He was constantly on the
lookout for distinctively Scottish usages in his prose, and had had a list of
‘Scotticisms’ printed up to be bound with the first edition of the Political
Discourses.228 Also, it would seem that Hume wanted to show himself to
be up to date in the way he allowed his books to be printed. Capitalization
of nouns other than proper names is absent from both the new editions
of the Essays and the Enquiry. And he continued to want to impress his
classical erudition upon the reader: many of the additions made to this new
edition of the Essays consist mostly in the adding of footnotes providing
the textual sources for references to Tacitus, Suetonius, Polybius, and
so forth, and in supplementing existing footnotes with further material
from ancient historians. One very learned new footnote, for example,
contested Machiavelli’s claim that ancient Persia had no nobility, with
supporting citations from Arrian, Diodorus Siculus, and Xenophon.229
The ‘several subjects’ in the title of Essays and Treatises was perhaps
intended to underline the breadth of Hume’s philosophical agenda. Here
was a book with provocative and unsettling yet elegant and polished
discussions of everything from the operations of the understanding to
the balance of trade, from the British politics of party to the freedom
of the will, from the populousness of the ancient world to the role of
utility in moral judgement. This was philosophy that was both precisely
and rigorously argued, and also engaged with the business of the world,
determined, in the language of Essay I of the Philosophical Essays, to make
additions to our stock of knowledge in subjects of importance.230 Each
of the four volumes was an essential part of Hume’s case for philosophy
as a means of understanding the world that human beings fashion for
themselves. Turning to history did not mean leaving philosophy behind.
Rather, it meant applying to a subject riven with factional dispute precisely
the style of reasoning on display in the Essays and Treatises.
6
The Start of a History of

Great Britain
ad his brother not married, Hume might never have left Nine-
H wells, and for a time he thought of moving only as far as Berwick.
But he changed his mind, and made a home with his sister Katherine
in Edinburgh. The city was after all, as he put it in ‘My Own Life’,
‘the true scene for a man of letters’.1 The year 1751 was in many ways
a propitious moment for Hume’s removal to Scotland’s capital. Adam
Smith was completing a series of lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence
begun three years earlier, at the instigation of Kames, lectures that were
quite possibly at least partially Humean in inspiration, and that were
attended by many of those who would soon dominate Scotland’s literary
life.2 Kames was in the midst of publishing an impressive series of books
on the historical and philosophical dimensions of the law, one of which
owed something to principles elaborated in A Treatise of Human Nature,
others of which explicitly, and respectfully, engaged in critical dialogue
with central elements of Hume’s philosophy.3 Kames would be elevated
to the Court of Session in 1752. Hugh Blair had been minister of the
Canongate since 1743, and would move from there to Lady Yester’s in
1754. In 1751 Blair, along with William Robertson, Alexander Carlyle,
and John Home, asserted the right of the General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland to resolve disputes between presbyteries and patrons about
who had the right to appoint ministers. In so doing they brought into
being the ‘Moderate Party’ of the Church.4 The professoriate of the
University was relatively undistinguished in the wake of the death of
Colin Maclaurin in 1746, but in 1749 Edinburgh could again boast a
private discussion society devoted to scientific and historical questions,
the Philosophical Society, which after some years of decline had been
revived largely through Kames’s efforts.5 The rules of the Philosophical
Society were designed to ensure precisely the kind of politeness that
Hume valued. As was usual in such clubs at the time, ‘religious or political
305
disputes’ were not allowed – though philosophical discussion of natural

religion was. Members were given notice that ‘[i]n their conversations, any
warmth that might be offensive or improper for philosophical enquiries
is to be avoided’.6 Soon after his arrival in Edinburgh Hume was elected
one of the Society’s two secretaries.7 This was a sign of his being welcome
among the literati of Edinburgh, despite what some were saying about his
attitude towards the Christian religion.
At about the same time that he became Secretary to the Philosophical
Society, Hume was involved in another attempt to make him a university
teacher, this time at Glasgow.8 Smith had been elected Professor of Logic
and Metaphysics there in early 1751, and had moved from the east to
the west once he had finished his Edinburgh lectures on rhetoric and
jurisprudence. The chair in moral philosophy soon fell vacant, Smith was
given it, and someone, perhaps the Professor of Medicine William Cullen
or the Professor of Civil Law Hercules Lindsay, had the idea that Hume
might be the right man for logic and metaphysics. Gilbert Elliot was asked
to sound Hume out. Smith, it would seem, though he declared in a letter
to Cullen that he ‘should prefer David Hume to any man for a colleague’,
never thought that Hume was a plausible candidate. The ‘public’ could
not be expected to share his admiration of a man with Hume’s reputation
for heterodoxy, ‘and the interest of the society [i.e., the University] will
oblige us to have some regard to the opinion of the public’.9 Smith’s letter
to Cullen suggests that Elliot was also sceptical about the plan. Elliot, at
this point a much closer friend of Hume’s than anyone at Glasgow, might
have been doubtful as to whether this was a job Hume would actually
want even if the city politics, managed very closely by the third Duke
of Argyll, allowed for his election. Certainly there is no evidence that
Hume himself supported the move to have him appointed a professor
at Glasgow. James Wodrow reported to Samuel Kenrick that ‘it is said
that Hume himself has recommended Mr. George Muirhead as the fittest
person in Scotland’.10 In a letter to John Clephane Hume wrote of how
‘my friends in Glasgow, contrary to my opinion and advice, undertook to
get me elected into that College; and they had succeeded, in spite of the
violent and solemn remonstrances of the clergy, if the Duke of Argyle had
had the courage to give me the least countenance’.11 Hume was doubtless
flattered that he was thought by people he admired to be a candidate, but
it does not seem as though he was very much disappointed by the project’s
failure. He wrote to Cullen that what he regretted particularly was the
The Start of a History of Great Britain 307
opportunity of cultivating a friendship ‘which had so happily commenced

by your zeal for my interests’.12 Glasgow and Edinburgh were at this
time very different cities, and, even putting aside the many ways in which
he was not suited to university life in eighteenth-century Scotland, it is
not easy to imagine Hume as comfortable in the former as he quickly
became in the latter. Cullen would move to Edinburgh in 1755. Smith left
Glasgow in 1763.13
Hume believed that his income of £50 a year would be sufficient for
an independent, if frugal, life in the city. But he was not yet, to use the
phrase he had used in a letter to Kames four years earlier, ‘fixt in some
way of life’.14 He felt the need of a job, not only for financial reasons but
also on account of a desire to have a position, a role, in the life of the city.
He was, therefore, delighted when very soon after it had become clear
that the bid to install him at Glasgow had failed, he was elected Librarian
to Edinburgh’s Faculty of Advocates, ‘a genteel office’, as Hume put it,
‘though of small revenue’.15 Once again, it was not Hume himself who
made the first move. His name was put forward by his friends without
his knowing anything about it. As Hume told the story to Clephane,
what happened next followed a by now familiar pattern: those opposed to
Hume’s candidacy exploited the antipathy to Hume felt by ‘the bigots’,
the business became a factional one, and became public as well. ‘Nothing
since the Rebellion has ever so much engaged the attention of this town,
except Provost Stewart’s trial’, Hume told Clephane, perhaps with his
tongue in his cheek.16 This time, though, the Humean cause prevailed,
thanks in large part, according to Hume, to the efforts of ‘the ladies’ on
his behalf. Hume took up the position on 6 February 1752. It boosted his
income by £40 a year. It was, we may be certain, much more to his taste
than a professorship at Glasgow. He was now, he told Clephane, ‘master
of 30000 volumes’.17 According to William Maitland’s 1753 History of
Edinburgh, the library predominantly consisted of books relating to law.
But, Maitland also observed, ‘as books in other sciences are requisite to
the study of the law, this library abounds with a number in divinity,
physick and mathematicks, but especially in history, antiquities, medals,
&c. of the best editions . . . [t]ogether with a compleat collection of the best
editions of the fathers, without mentioning a vast number of other rare
and curious books’.18 Charge of such a library was the ideal situation for a
man about to commence writing a history of Great Britain. By September
1752, Hume had a view as to where such a history should begin, and had
started writing. But before we proceed to the first volume of The History of
Great Britain, it will be useful to sketch its historiographical context and
relate it to ideas about English history already on display in Hume’s essays
on politics. It will be useful also to have sense of the stylistic problem that
English history writing needed to solve.19
Contexts for Hume the Historian

Hume began historical research with a keen awareness of the fact that, as
he put it in a letter to John Clephane, ‘there is no post of honour in the
English Parnassus more vacant than that of history’. ‘Style, judgement,
impartiality, care’, he wrote, ‘everything is wanting to our historians’.20
This was a conventional enough opinion. It was in fact almost a cliché
that the furiousness of English party politics had made it impossible for a
properly detached and objective account to be given of the country’s his-
tory.21 The infelicities of English history writing were, Hume told James
Oswald, ‘notorious to all the world’.22 Voltaire had declared in Letters
concerning the English Nation that ‘the English genius, which is either lan-
guid or impetuous, has not yet acquir’d that unaffected eloquence, that
plain but majestic air which history requires’. ‘Possibly, too’, he added,
‘the spirit of party which exhibits objects in a dim and confus’d light, may
have sunk the credit of their historians. One half of the nation is always
at variance with the other half . . . Thus the English have memorials of
the several reigns, but no such thing as a history’.23 In De l’Esprit des
Lois Montesquieu claimed that in a free state such as England, historians
were bound to betray the truth ‘because of their very liberty, for, as it
always produces divisions, each one becomes as much the slave of the
prejudices of his faction as he would be of a despot’.24 Hume’s French
contemporaries believed that the only English history worthy of the name
had, in fact, been written by a Frenchman – by Paul Rapin de Thoyras.
Thomas Gordon’s translation of Tacitus suggested to Voltaire that there
was at least one man in England capable of writing the history of his
own country, ‘but Rapin de Thoyras got the start of him’.25 The Abbé
le Blanc agreed. ‘Except the French, except Rapin de Thoyras’, he wrote
in his own letters on the English nation, ‘the English have not yet had
any general history of their nation, that deserves to be read’.26 Rapin’s
first effort at an impartial analysis of English history had been made in
his Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys.27 The opening installment of the
Histoire d’Angleterre was published in eight volumes in 1723. Two further

volumes appeared two years later. In 1725, Nicholas Tindal published the
first of what would turn out to be fourteen volumes of translation. It was
an immediate success. Another translation was undertaken in the 1730s,
and there were also several continuations and schoolbook adaptations.28
By the 1720s, history had been central to English political argument
for a hundred years, since the Parliamentarian opposition to the early
Stuarts had begun to use the idea of an immemorial constitution, and
of an immemorial Commons within it, as the basis of their case for the
inherently limited nature of the royal prerogative.29 Royalists standardly
ridiculed the very notion of an ancient constitution. Whatever England
had been like prior to 1066, they argued, the Norman conquest and the
institution of feudalism had completely changed the basis of English
politics. Henceforth all authority was a gift from the monarch, and the
process by which a House of Commons emerged as a component of
the constitution had to be understood in terms of successive grants of
privileges on the part of the crown. The Commons owed all its rights to
the monarch, who could redefine them or annul them at will. The only
limits on the royal prerogative were those imposed by God when he gave it
to his earthly representatives. But just as the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81
was the occasion for Locke to comprehensively re-examine the intellectual
coherence of the Tory model of monarchical authority as formulated by
Robert Filmer in Patriarcha, so also it had prompted a Whig return to
history as a mode of political argumentation.30 Thus William Petyt, in The
Ancient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680), had renewed the
effort ‘to prove, that during the British, Saxon, and Norman governments,
the Freemen or Commons of England, as now called and distinguished
from the Great Lords, were pars essentialis et constituens, an essential
part of the Wittena Gemot, Commune Concilium, Baronagium Angliae, or
Parliament, in those ages’.31 Contrary to what was asserted by ‘our English
modern authors’, Petyt argued, that did not change with the Norman
invasion, which was not such an absolute conquest as was sometimes
claimed. The Magna Carta ‘was but a restitution and declaration of the
antient common law and right of the kingdom’, not a violation on the part
of the barons of their oaths to King John.32 By the same token, Henry
III’s recognition of the place of the Commons in parliament in the forty-
ninth year of his reign was not a matter of royal concession, but rather a
confirmation of an ancient principle.
Petyt was answered by a massive and devastating display of erudition on

the part of Robert Brady, drawing upon earlier developments in the study
of the medieval period on the part of Henry Spelman.33 In An Introduction
to Old English History (1684) and A complete history of England (1685) Brady
asserted it to be obviously false, as a matter of historical and legal fact,
that the Norman invasion had made no difference to English law. The
Normans had indeed conquered England, and had put English law on
an entirely new basis. Feudalism meant that there was every difference
between ‘British’ and Saxon times on the one hand and the Norman and
post-Norman period on the other. In a feudal society, property rights were
entirely in the gift of the king, which was the same as to say that parliament
itself, an assembly of property holders, owed its existence and advisory
role to the king’s pleasure and wisdom. There were, in other words, no
ancient rights of freeborn Englishmen for the king to violate. The English
constitution was modern, in the sense of being something progressively
fashioned by kings since 1066. The Magna Carta and 49 Henry III were no
more than ‘relaxations’ of the rigour of feudal law. The liberty Englishmen
currently enjoyed was the result of ‘time, and the concessions of our
kings’. History, properly understood, so Brady asserted, ‘will appear an
impregnable rock against the pretended soveraignty and power of the
people in this nation, which the republicans can never climb over’.34
The Glorious Revolution was a victory for Petyt over Brady, as it
was a victory for Locke over Filmer. Whig historians quickly moved to
completely destroy Brady’s authority as an expert on feudalism and its
political consequences. In An Introduction to the History of England (1694),
William Temple concentrated almost entirely on the Norman invasion and
the rule of William I, and argued that William left intact England’s name,
its language, and ‘our forms of government, our laws and institutions,
which have been so much celebrated by ancient writers, and have been
so obstinately defended by our ancestors’.35 Nothing important, consti-
tutionally speaking, had then happened until the seventeenth century.
The constitution, and the succession of the crown, had been ‘since that
time, so fixed and established, as to have lasted for the space of above six
hundred years, without any considerable alteration from so long a course
of time, or such variety of events, as have since arrived in the world’.36
Rather more detailed in its argument was James Tyrrell’s General History
of England (1697), which got no further than Richard II, but still made
an all-out assault on Brady and his reading of English history. Tyrrell
held that the government of the Anglo-Saxons was not monarchical but
‘aristocratical’, that succession was at that time not lineal but elective,
that there was no reason to think that there were no representatives of
the people in the Witena Gemot, that William was not a conqueror and
that therefore his right to govern was not a right of conquest, that the
Normans did not substantially alter English government or laws, and that
under the Normans succession remained elective. Tyrell was prepared to
fight Brady on his own ground, and rejected Brady’s reading of the basis
of property after the Norman invasion. He devoted a 250-page appendix
to proving that Petyt had been right about the antiquity of the place of
the Commons in Parliament.
Tyrell’s General History was later used as the basis of the pre-Stuart part
of the Whig propagandist John Oldmixon’s Critical History of England,
Ecclesiastical and Civil (1724–8). For Oldmixon the target was Laurence
Echard, author of the first complete general history of England. Echard’s
first volume, as reissued in 1718,37 might have begun with a dedication to
George I and an encomium upon ‘a revolution, the most wonderful and
providential that ever happen’d to the British dominions’,38 but, accord-
ing to Oldmixon, any pretence of impartiality was dropped when Echard
reached the Stuarts. What Echard intended was in fact a complete vindi-
cation and extenuation of the Stuart invasion of the rights and liberties of
the English people.39 Echard’s agenda was thus the same as Brady’s, and,
examined closely, his account of the medieval period was the same as that
given in Brady’s General History. It was necessary, therefore, to tell once
more how the rights and liberties affirmed by the Revolution were the
same rights and liberties that Englishmen had enjoyed under the Gothic
constitution, how the Normans had conquered Harold but not England’s
laws, how subsequent kings owed their title to election and not to lineal
descent, how, far from being introduced by Henry III, ‘there had been
many conventions of the Lords and Commons during the Saxon Hep-
tarchy, and the English Monarchy’,40 and so on.41 Oldmixon’s Critical
History was straightforwardly partisan. It was easily recognised as such,
and was summarily dismissed by Tory writers as, in the words of Zachary
Grey, ‘so mean and trifling a performance, that to allow it the title of an
history, and so set the author above the level of a common hackney-writer,
would . . . much depreciate the credit of history’.42
Rapin saw that a new kind of Whig history was needed, of a kind that
could be made to seem to elevate itself above the party divide, and examine
the key historical cruxes afresh.43 Tindal’s translation of the Histoire

de’Angleterre was prefaced with a dedication to the Prince of Wales. Fred-
erick’s attention was drawn to the ‘fair and impartial narration’ of the
lives and actions of his predecessors, ‘originally penned by a foreigner,
who had no party to serve, or interest to promote’.44 Rapin’s success lay
in the way he portrayed himself as applying a finely balanced and mea-
sured approach to many of the events over which Whigs and Tories had
fought. So, for example, he failed to come down on either side with regard
to the question of whether William I was justly called ‘the Conqueror’,
comparing William to Augustus Caesar, ‘of whom it is said, that he came
to the empire neither by conquest nor usurpation, nor inheritance, nor
election, but by a strange mixture of these rights’.45 In his account of
William’s reign, Rapin cited Brady approvingly, arguing that after 1079
William endeavoured to abolish the Saxon laws, and establish Norman
ones in their place; but at the same time he did not rule out altogether
the continued existence of ‘the Saxon Wittena-Gemot’.46 Rapin refused
to paint the usual black picture of John, insisting that John had good
reasons to refuse the demands of the (Norman) barons, and allowing only
that Magna Carta reveals ‘what oppressions the English had been liable
to since the Conquest’.47 On the other hand, the text of Edward II’s coro-
nation oath made it plain that ‘far from supposing the great charter to
be the original title of privileges, granted by King John to the people of
England, it was considered only as a confirmation of the antient liberties
of the nation’.48 Rapin ‘dared not undertake to determine’ whether it was
by permission or right that deputies of the people were present in the
parliament of 49 Henry III, but all the same owned himself ‘of their opin-
ion, who believe this to be the first time representatives of the Commons
were admitted to sit in Parliament’.49 In his treatments of the Stuarts,
Rapin amplified the show of judiciousness and impartiality, repeatedly
criticizing previous historians for the ways in which they had succumbed
to party prejudice. Before beginning on the Civil War, Rapin presented a
critical analysis of the various authors who had written before him on the
events of the 1640s, noting that here there were no indisputable facts, and
that the documents upon which the historian had to depend, full as they
were of snares laid for the reader, had all to be used with extreme care.50
The Parliamentarian side was far from guiltless on Rapin’s account, and
Charles I was ‘endued with many virtues and noble qualities’.51 Even
so, Rapin told the story of the Civil War from an essentially Whig point
of view. He never doubted, and never allowed his reader to doubt, that
Charles self-consciously planned to establish arbitrary government on the
ruins of the English constitution. ‘Never were the liberties of the people in
more danger of being destroyed than in the reign of Charles I’, he claimed,
‘notwithstanding Magna Charta [sic], and the laws of the land’.52
Even though his was a manifestly Whig point of view, Rapin allowed
the reader at least to feel impartial, by presenting arguments pro et contra,
and appearing to make it clear where and how in the previous histories
mere party prejudice had decided the important questions. Also, he gave
his reader an analytical key to the puzzle of English history, by imposing
a dialectical structure on a thousand years of events: the whole story,
Rapin suggested, was to be understood as a struggle to find a balance
between the privileges of the people and prerogatives of crown. The fun-
damental principle here was, again, a Whig one: there was such a thing
as the free and ancient constitution of the Saxons, and in the terms of
that constitution, monarchy was the result of an agreement between king
and people. Subsequent history saw the people repeatedly asserting their
ancient liberties in the face of what they took to be royal aggression. But the
original constitution, according to Rapin, affirmed a union between king
and people. The English model was in fact from the first neither republi-
can nor purely monarchical, but a unique blend of the two. The problem
was that there was no well-defined structure to such a government, and
no precisely determined limits to the powers of each component. Hence
the endlessness of conflict between those components, each accusing the
other of violations of the constitution. It followed that it had been a ter-
rible mistake for the victorious Parliamentarians to abolish the monarchy
altogether in 1649. Post-1688, though, there was nothing constitutionally
significant for the parties to fight about. A translation of Rapin’s Disser-
tation sur les Whigs et les Torys was appended to Tindal’s edition of the
Histoire d’Angleterre, and there the reader found it asserted that moderate
Tories and Whigs make ‘but one and the same party, by the common
name of Whigs’. When moderates join together, Rapin claimed, ‘they
form a party which nothing could resist, if religion did not interfere in
the dispute’.53 Rapin looked at religion in England from the perspective
of the Huguenot in exile. As in politics more generally, what was needed
was moderation, and toleration. On the one hand, the Church of Eng-
land should not regard itself as in mortal danger from Dissent. On the
other hand, Dissenters needed to recognise the Church’s traditional role
in English public life. Rapin’s considerable success in English translation

suggests that all this was what many in England wanted to hear.
Hume read Rapin early in his career as a man of letters. He asked
Michael Ramsay to send him ‘the last volume of Rapin’ in 1730.54 Yet it
seems unlikely that he was ever fully convinced by the kind of Whiggism
on display in Rapin’s History of England. As an acute student of the politics
of the Walpole era, Hume would have known that, at the same time that
Rapin was appearing in English, the role of history in British political
argument was becoming significantly more complicated than it had been
before. For Bolingbroke had seen an opportunity for a brilliant reversal of
tactics. Part of his campaign against Walpole in The Craftsman during the
late 1720s and early 1730s was a reading of English history meant to show
that Walpole’s ministry had deprived Britons of their ancient rights and
liberties. Bolingbroke the leader of the Tory opposition, in other words,
was prepared to use the arguments of Whigs like Petyt and Tyrrel against
a Whig government.55 Bolingbroke took it upon himself, in what was later
published as Remarks on the History of England, to defend the ‘spirit of
liberty’ against the ‘spirit of faction’. In the Remarks Bolingbroke used
English history to show that faction was not new, and that Walpole was
just the most recent of a long series of enemies of the freedoms that the
people had had a right to since the days of the Saxons. Thus Bolingbroke
enthusiastically bought into the idea of an ancient and ‘very democratical’
original constitution.56 And he went on to bring before the reader all
the shibboleths of Whig historiography. It may be disputed, he claimed,
whether William I was ‘strictly’ a conqueror, ‘any more than several other
princes, who have supported their titles by their swords’.57 Under John,
‘the spirit of liberty prevail’d and that of faction vanish’d before it’.58 It
was no wonder, therefore, that John signed the Magna Carta and that
the charter was endorsed by Henry III. The two and a half centuries
after 1215 saw ‘the present constitution of government’ taking shape,
as ‘our fathers’ fought kings, barons, and the clergy to secure liberties
that were not the grants of princes, but rather ‘original rights, conditions
of the original contract, coequal with prerogative, and coeval with our
government’.59 The process was always in danger of being reversed by
kings, such as Richard II, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Henry VII, whose
only means of asserting royal power was to divide their opponents into
factions. But the English people, not yet enervated by luxury, were up
to the task of preserving a balance between executive and legislature.
Bolingbroke repeatedly cited Rapin, the historian of moderate Whiggism,

in support of his vision of English history. With his assertions of absolute
power, James completely misunderstood the constitution, and his sense
of being at odds with his subjects made it inevitable that the spirit of
faction would return in his reign. The spirit of liberty re-awoke as well,
however, and Bolingbroke’s description of resistance to James gave him
the opportunity to make a general case for the legitimacy of opposition,
such as was obviously meant to apply also to the opposition he himself
was mounting against Walpole.60 And, of course, it was at the same time
made easy for Bolingbroke’s reader to find ways of comparing Walpolean
and Stuart abuses of power.
The reaction of Walpole and his journalists and pamphleteers to
Bolingbroke’s switching of historical weapons was to pick up the weapon
that Bolingbroke had dropped, and to use the argumentative strategies of
Tory history against the predominantly Tory opposition. They decided to
dispense with the pre-1688 past altogether, conceding to Brady the impor-
tance of feudal tenure to the nature and extent of the rights of the English
people in the wake of the Norman invasion, and resting the constitution
squarely on the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. Opposition talk
of ancient British liberties was nonsense, they argued, because prior to
1688 there had been no such thing as liberty in Britain. The year 1688 was
not a renewal of liberty, but rather its creation. What had never existed
could not be renewed.61 ‘To bring the government of England back to
its first principles’, it was claimed in The London Journal in 1733, ‘is to
bring the people back to absolute slavery’.62 ‘The modern constitution’,
the same journal declared a year later, ‘is infinitely better than the ancient
constitution in any point of time, from the Saxons down to that glorious
period of the Revolution’.63 The Craftsman’s description of the English
past, according to The Daily Gazetteer in 1735, was a set of tales ‘more
idle and romantic than those of [Rabelais’] Gargantua’.64 Those moments
in English history supposed by the opposition, and by Whig historians
hitherto, to be evidence of the people’s resistance to overextensions of the
royal prerogative were systematically drained of their significance. The
‘so much boasted of and celebrated Magna Charta’, for example, was ‘no
contract with, nor grant to, the people. It was only some concessions to the
churchmen and barons, which the power of their swords wrested out of
the hands of the king’.65 Hervey’s Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and
Compar’d provided a slightly (but not much) more extended statement
of this new Whig history. The possibility of genuine liberty dawned with
the Restoration, according to Hervey, for the Restoration marked the com-
prehensive defeat of a republican idea of liberty, supposed by its advocates
to be an inheritance from the Saxon period, that was in truth no more than
anarchic licentiousness. The republican idea had had, in any case, no his-
torical reality after the Norman conquest. Whatever alterations had been
made to the structure of government from 1066 to 1660 ‘were nothing
more than [changes] from one tyrant, or one kind of tyrant, to another’.66
True liberty – that is, modern liberty, the liberty that makes it possible for
men to act as they wish and to lead lives of their own choosing – had had a
legal basis only since the Revolution. Such liberty was not undermined by
a strong monarchy. On the contrary, it depended for its very possibility
on the protecting and preserving power of the executive.
Walpole’s propagandists were only too happy to admit that their history
was Brady’s history. To wish a return to the ancient constitution, The
London Journal asserted, ‘is wishing for but one freeholder, and that was
the King, he was the only freeman, the only unconditional, independent,
and absolute freeholder’.67 They were also prepared to use Harrington’s
property-based analysis of the rise of the Commons in their explanation of
the origin of modern liberty, but to a purpose different from Bolingbroke’s.
Bolingbroke used it to highlight the achievement of Elizabeth, and thereby
to define an ideal with which the Stuarts could be compared and found
wanting. Hervey started his account of Elizabeth by declaring that her
‘great and glorious reign’ can be unjustly praised only ‘when it is call’d a
reign, where the people enjoy’d the least shadow of liberty’.68 Elizabeth
was no less a tyrant than her father. She was simply clever enough to give
the people what they wanted, so that they never thought to complain,
or even to think about whether or not they were free under her rule.
The London Journal claimed that ‘The government of this kingdom, since
the Revolution, and under the present royal family, excels hers, almost as
much as a government by laws does a government by arbitrary power’.69 It
followed that there was no possibility of drawing a stark contrast between
Elizabeth and the Stuarts. In fact, Hervey argued, Elizabeth was ‘the
cause of most of the misfortunes that befel either them or their people’.70
James I and his successors imagined they had a right to the same kind of
absolute power that Elizabeth had enjoyed, but they did not understand
that the increase of the strength of the Commons meant that the opinions
of the people needed to be taken account of, and that, in particular, the
people needed to be able to see that royal power acknowledged itself to be

limited by the law. Walpolean history did not downplay the oppression
and despotism of Stuart rule. What it did was to place the Stuarts in a
large-scale context, and to portray them as unsuited in their upbringing
and character to the management of the political consequences of the
economic and social changes that had begun with Henry VII’s alteration
of the nature of feudal tenure.
This conception of how the Tudor and Stuart periods should be related
to each other was developed at greater length by William Guthrie in
A General History of England. Like the Walpolean Whigs, Guthrie did not
accept the idea that Elizabeth had contained those effects by constructing
a perfect balance between liberty and authority. Elizabeth was, according
to Guthrie, a wise and benevolent despot. ‘Perhaps no woman, and no
set of men’, he wrote, ‘had ever more arbitrary notions of government
than Elizabeth and her counsellors had; and had she been succeeded by
those who had equal abilities, and fewer virtues, the liberties of England
must have been irretrievably ruined’.71 As it was, she was succeeded by
a king whose abilities were certainly inferior, but who had in addition to
his ‘political demerits’ a number of ‘great personal virtues’.72 James used
his prerogative to extend measures taken by Elizabeth to boost England’s
trade, and commerce and manufactures increased significantly during his
reign. Where he went wrong was in failing to see that these very achieve-
ments served only to strengthen the position of his people and to weaken
the position of the king. ‘The ignorance, and consequently the tame-
ness of the English was now vanished; they were resolved to defend with
courage, what they had acquired by industry; the whole system of prop-
erty amongst them was now altered; their minds were enlightened with
reading and reflection; their principles of government rested on liberty
and moderation; their notions of religion were averse to violence and
bigotry; their thoughts were now turned to maintain foreign commerce
and domestic freedom; oppressive precedents in former reigns were by
them no longer admitted for present times; and the doctrine of resistance
was preached and understood in parliament, but with such restrictions as
might have left a king of England both great and happy.’73 James under-
stood none of this, and nor did his son. Charles was not only educated
into principles diametrically opposed to those of his people, but on his
accession found himself, as Guthrie put it, ‘caught in the net, that had
been woven by his father’s craft, and his favourites’ ambition’:74 he was
committed to an unpopular foreign policy he could not afford, and so was

forced to appeal to Parliament for money that it had the confidence to
refuse to grant him. The tragedy that followed, according to Guthrie, was
not really Charles’s fault. If it was anyone’s fault, it was the fault of his
advisors. But mostly, Guthrie intimates, it was the inevitable result of the
situation in which England found itself in the early seventeenth century.
That situation, Guthrie argues, had been well explained by Harrington in
terms of the consequences of Henry VII’s property legislation. He attached
to his History a dissertation ‘Concerning the alienation and accession of
property, with the great effects they have had upon our constitution since
the reign of Henry VII’.75
Guthrie’s History was published between 1744 and 1751. There is no
evidence that Hume read it, but there is a striking similarity between its
perspective on English history, especially Tudor and Stuart history, and
the perspective that Hume would take in The History of England. Hume’s
History, then, did not come from nowhere. His very radical challenge to
Whig history had antecedents. At various points in his essays, moreover,
he betrayed attitudes and assumptions that were, at the very least, more
evocative of the Court Whig reply to Bolingbroke than they were of
the more straightforward, albeit moderate and measured, Whiggism of
Rapin. In ‘That Politics may be Reduc’d to a Science’, for example,
Hume remarked, parenthetically, that England’s was ‘in a great measure’
an absolute government ‘till the middle of last century, notwithstanding
the numerous panegyrics on antient English liberty’.76 Before the Civil
War, he noted in ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, the English constitution
‘had lain in a kind of confusion; yet so, as that the subjects possess’d many
noble privileges, which, tho’ not, perhaps, exactly bounded and secur’d by
law, were universally deem’d, from long possession, to belong to them as
their birth-right’.77 Privileges grounded in ‘long possession’ are different
altogether from privileges grounded in an immemorial constitution – such
as was never so much as mentioned by Hume in his essays, except in so
far as it was mocked in ‘Of the Original Contract’. ‘In vain, are we sent
to the records for this charter of our liberties’, he wrote there. ‘It was
not wrote on parchment, nor yet on leaves or barks of trees. It preceded
the use of writing, and all the other civiliz’d arts of life’.78 Thus there
was no ancient standard to be used, as by Bolingbroke, as an ideal against
which to measure the present and find it wanting. In his essays Hume
displayed no ‘Old Whig’ anxiety about the current state of English liberty,
of the kind appropriated by Bolingbroke in his writings against Walpole.

On the contrary, he tended towards accepting that British politics was
characterized by an excess of liberty that needed, as Walpole and his
advocates argued it did, to be restrained and limited by the influence
of the crown. The greatest danger to peace and order was in fact the
Bolingbrokean idea of a straightforward balancing of the power of the
Commons against the power of the king. The Commons was at present so
much wealthier than the king that the result could only be a republic, and,
as the seventeenth-century Commonwealth had made clear, an attempt to
introduce a republic was bound to result in first chaos then tyranny. Just
as the Walpoleans claimed it did, Bolingbroke’s kind of liberty inevitably
collapsed into dangerous licentiousness.
The essays, as we saw in Chapter 3, suggest that Hume too accepted
the Harringtonian analysis of the rise of the Commons in the wake of the
property legislation of Henry VII. It is striking that even before he began
work on the History, Hume paired this conception of the importance
of Henry VII’s laws with a willingness to downplay the responsibility
of the Stuarts for the crisis of the seventeenth century. Charles I was
described in ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’ as an ‘ambitious, or rather an
ignorant, prince’ who failed to understand why it was that his Parliament
were so confident of their privileges.79 In ‘Of the Protestant Succession’
Hume claimed that the extent of the changes that had taken place in
the previous century made it ‘nothing extraordinary, that some of our
British sovereigns mistook the nature of the constitution, and genius of
the people; and as they embrac’d all the favourable precedents left them
by their ancestors, they overlook’d all those which were contrary, and
which suppos’d a limitation in our government’. In a footnote to this
passage Hume remarked that the fact that notions of absolute sovereignty
were endorsed by bishops and nobles at home and by rival princes abroad
made James I and Charles I ‘the more excuseable for their mistake’.80 In
the first published version of this essay Hume went on in the same note
to say that ‘Rapin, the most judicious of historians, seems sometimes to
treat them with too much severity upon account of it’.81 In ‘Of Passive
Obedience’ Hume described Charles I as ‘imprudent’ rather than vicious.
Charles mistook the nature of the constitution and attempted to ‘engross’
the whole legislative power – but this could be explained by the fact that
he was a limited and not an absolute monarch. An absolute monarch
would not feel the need to assert his power aggressively and so provoke
opposition. And, ‘if we may now speak truth, after animosities are laid’,
the same excuse could be granted to James II.82
In the essays Hume thus appeared disinclined to the standard Whig
extreme hostility to the Stuarts and standard extreme reverence for those
who stood up to them. He described the 1688 Revolution as ‘an event of
mighty consequence, and the firmest foundation of British liberty’,83 but,
for Hume as essayist, the immediate causes of that event were less impor-
tant than what followed it. Hume argued in ‘Of the Original Contract’
that there was no need to look for a justification of the Revolution in a
right of resistance deriving from the very first origins of government as
such. In reality the Revolution was a much less morally elevated business
than was often claimed. ‘’Twas only the succession, and that only in the
regal part of the government, which was then chang’d: And ’twas only
the majority of seven hundred, who determin’d that change for near ten
million’.84 The only thing that could prove the Revolution to have been
justified was its consequences. In 1688 and in the years that followed,
things could have gone either way, chaos and civil war had remained a
possibility, and had that been what in fact ensued, it would have been
plain that the Revolution was not, in fact, justified. Whatever might be
said in favour of a right to resistance possessed by all citizens, such a
right was nullified if the result of rebellion was likely to be chaos. Here
again Hume’s conception of recent history was notably similar to that of
Walpole and his defenders. Faced with Bolingbroke’s charge that they had
betrayed the spirit and principles of the Revolution, they were prepared
to cast aspersions on the politics of the rebels and to tar them with the
brush of republicanism. They were prepared also to give up the cause
of toleration and the rights of Dissenters. The ideals of the 1680s were
not a proper basis for government. What mattered in government was
stability, order, and the protection of rights of property. Those, then,
were the things that justified the Revolution settlement, and the placing
of the succession upon the House of Hanover. This was also the attitude
on display in Hume’s ‘Of the Protestant Succession’. The proper form of
decision making, Hume said there, was to put all relevant circumstances
on the scale, and to consider the ‘mix’d and vary’d’ consequences that
may be foreseen to flow from the measure in question. A philosophical
politician is a politician without passion, save, perhaps, ‘that of derision
and ridicule against the ignorant multitude’.85
Hume’s scepticism with regard to several of the features of orthodox

Whig history – the kind of history written by Petyt and Tyrrell and
Oldmixon, and, at bottom, by Rapin as well – was not the scepticism of
a Tory. His purpose was the justification of the Revolution settlement,
but, like the Court Whigs, he believed that such a justification was to be
found in the present, and not in the past. Modern politics, in other words,
had no need of the kind of support from history that both Whigs and
Tories usually supposed it to need. We may suppose Hume in the early
1750s to have realized that such a separation of the politics of the present
from the politics of the past opened the way to a new kind of historical
impartiality. Historians had always laid claim to the virtue of impartiality.
It was entirely conventional for the writer of a history to assert his refusal to
bend truth to party ends, and his intention to do no more than let the facts
speak for themselves. A historian standardly began his work by drawing
attention to the difference between his impartiality and the faction-driven
agenda of his predecessors. The editors of Clarendon’s History of the
Rebellion, for example, had declared the ‘the equal reader’ would in The
History of the Rebellion ‘meet with none of malice, nor any but such as the
author, upon best information, took to be impartially true’. ‘We doubt
not’, they had continued, ‘but through the whole progress of this history,
he will be found to have given no occasion of suspecting his writings
guilty of partial favour or unjust enmity; and we hope that representing
the truth, without any mixture of private passion or animosity, will be
so far from giving offence to any ingenuous man of this time, that it will
be received rather as an instruction to the present age, than a reproach
to the last’.86 ‘An historian’, according to Echard, ‘ought never to be of a
party but in one respect; that is, he ought always to be of the same side
with truth’.87 Oldmixon agreed with him in this if in nothing else. If his
History of England seemed partial, ‘’tis the truth that is partial, and not the
historian’.88 Rapin’s supposed impartiality we have already taken note of.
These authors, however, were found by their critics to be partial all the
same. Hume’s belief, it would seem, was that he had found a historical
perspective sophisticated enough to make it impossible for the charge of
partiality to be laid against him.
There was more, though, to Hume’s sense of what was necessary to
filling the vacant post of honour in the English Parnassus than impartiality
as to politics. In addition, there was the issue of style, of how a history
was to be written. In the first instance, Hume thought, what needed to be

avoided was, as he put it in a letter to Le Blanc in 1754, ‘the prolix, tedious,
style of some modern compilers’. ‘I have inserted no original papers’, he
told Le Blanc, ‘and enter’d into no detail of minute uninteresting facts’.89
English histories written since the Revolution had been, for the most
part, multi-volume works in folio. Clarendon, Echard, and Guthrie ran
to three volumes each containing six hundred or more double-columned
pages. So did the Complete History of England edited by White Kennett
(1706). Thomas Carte’s General History of England (1747–55) comprised
four folio volumes. Rapin’s (in the second edition of Tindal’s translation)
comprised two. Each of these volumes was a large, heavy book that could
only be read at a lectern or library desk. Clarendon’s three volumes covered
a period of only about thirty years, and was bound to be full of ‘minute
facts’. Rapin covered much more ground, but impeded his narrative with
the full texts of speeches, petitions, remonstrances, articles of treaties,
legal arguments, and so on. He made great use of published collections
of documents, notably Thomas Rymer’s Foedera in his account of the
medieval period,90 and also John Rushworth’s Historical Collections and
Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Memorials in his account of Charles I, and he
tended to present what he culled from such sources in undigested form,
as if paraphrase would impugn his claim to impartiality. This did not get in
the way of commercial success, but it might explain the appetite there was
for abridgments, and for summaries such as John Lockman’s New History
of England by Question and Answer, Extracted from the most celebrated English
historians, particularly M. Rapin de Thoyras (1734). Hume intended his
history to be brief and fast-moving. In the same letter to Le Blanc he said
that he made his work ‘very concise, after the manner of the ancients’.
In 1758, Horace Walpole objected to Hume’s omission of references
to the sources he had used in the writing of the History of Great Britain.
Modern historians usually provided marginal notes indicating who their
authors were, and sometimes they gave page numbers as well. In his
account of the Stuarts Hume did this only very sparingly. His reply to
Walpole explained that he had been ‘seduc’d by the example of all the best
historians even among the moderns, such as Matchiavel, Fra Paolo [Sarpi],
Davila, Bentivogli’.91 Hume’s understanding of how history should be
written was, in other words, taken to some extent from the Italian histori-
ans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The books Hume alluded
to in his letter to Walpole were all, indeed, published without references.
They were also fairly short – none in its English translation took up more
than 800 folio (single-column) pages. Hume had been reading Italian
history since at least the 1730s. Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia
was referred to in Book II of the Treatise, and Hume quoted from it (in
the original) in one of his 1739 letters to Hutcheson.92 It is possible that
he found Sarpi’s account of the Council of Trent especially congenial,
depicting as it does men signally unable to understand and manage the
events in which they find themselves caught up, at the mercy of forces
outside their control, and not responsible for their own success or fail-
ure.93 But it is not necessary to insist on Hume’s having been influenced
by the particular ideas and arguments to be found in the Italian historians.
They were perhaps more important simply in so far as they had become
part of the reading that any educated European had to do. They were all
translated into several languages, and translations were being reprinted,
in some cases made anew, in England in the middle of the eighteenth
century.
This, we may imagine, was the kind of success Hume wanted for his own
history. ‘[W]hat must foreigners do to get some notion of our history?’,
he asked Walpole. ‘What must posterity, after these monuments [i.e., the
historical sources] have farther multiply’d upon us? What must the far
greatest part of ourselves, who have neither leizure nor inclination for
such a laborious and disagreeable study?’94 Hume did not seek to be, so to
speak, a historian’s historian. He wanted his history to be read not just in
the study but also in the wider world of drawing room and the coffee house.
There is this much of a similarity between the History and the Philosophical
Essays Concerning Human Understanding and the Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Morals. Like them, the History would be an attempt to bridge
the gap between the worlds of scholarship and of conversation. This can
be said without it being implied that a large and general readership was
all that Hume desired. He is critical, for example, in letters to William
Robertson of the very popular digests of ancient history being published
by Charles Rollin. Being ‘well wrote with respect to style’, possessing ‘a
certain facility and sweetness of narration’, was not sufficient.95
Another historian unconcerned with the labour of filling out references
indicating his sources, and whom Hume surely read before he began work
on the History of Great Britain, was Voltaire. In Letters concerning the
English Nation Voltaire had said that ‘Both the English and we [i.e., the
French] came after the Italians, who have been our instructors in all the
arts’.96 He added that the French had now surpassed the Italians in some
of the arts, and it may be supposed that history, as written by himself,
was one of the arts he had in mind. The book by Voltaire which has the
greatest affinity with Hume’s History taken as a whole, the Essai sur les
Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations, was published in the same year as the first
volume of The History of Great Britain, and so cannot be supposed to
have influenced it. But in 1751 and 1753 Voltaire had published the bulk
of his Siècle de Louis XIV. In a letter to the Abbé le Blanc Hume says
that his History ‘was plan’d, & in a great measure compos’d, before the
appearance of that agreeable work’.97 It is, however, hard to believe that
Hume would not have read the Siècle de Louis XIV as soon as it came out.
And a preliminary instalment, in the form of an Essai sur l’Histoire du Siècle
de Louis XIV, had been published as long ago as 1739. There Voltaire had
distinguished his project from that of ‘annalists’ concerned with detailing
‘the almost numberless wars carried on in this [i.e., the seventeenth]
century’. ‘My design in this Essay’, Voltaire declared, ‘is to dwell upon
such particulars only as merit the attention of all ages, may be descriptive
of the genius and manners of mankind, may contribute to their instruction,
and promote the love of virtue, the arts, and one’s native country’. His
‘chief object’ was ‘the history of the human mind’.98 It is conceivable
also that Voltaire’s first important historical work, L’Histoire de Charles
XII, Roi de Suède, published in 1732, had been of interest to Hume.
There, again, Voltaire had distinguished between the brevity and focus
of the historian and the compendiousness of the annalist. ‘The history of
a prince is not to tell all that he ever did, but what he did deserving to
be known to future ages’.99 Voltaire also emphasized the mutable nature
of national characters. ‘The English are now no more like the fanaticks
were in Cromwel’s time, than the monks and monsignori, that fill the streets
of Rome, are like the ancient Scipio’s’, he reminded the reader. ‘We are
apt to say of a man, that he was brave at such a time; and so we may say
of a nation, that they were so and so in such a year, or under such an
administration’.100
The kind of history that Hume admired did not simply identify the
characteristic perspective of the historian with what in the essay ‘Of the
Study of History’ he called the ‘general abstract view’ of the philosopher.
History, he said in that essay, finds a middle way between the coldness of
philosophy and the partiality of everyday life. ‘The writers of history, as
well as the readers, are sufficiently interested in the characters and events,
to have a lively sentiment of blame or praise; and at the same time, have
no particular interest or concern to pervert their judgment’.101 This is
what is to be found in Machiavelli’s Istorie Florentine, in Tacitus, and
in Appian, but not in Suetonius, nor in ‘many of the Greek historians’,
who talk ‘with a provoking coolness’ of the barbarisms they describe.102
When Tacitus describes the way men condemned by Nero met their
fate, Hume says in the Enquiry, ‘What sympathy then touches every
human heart! What indignation against the tyrant, whose causeless fear
or unprovok’d malice, gave rise to such detestable barbarity!’103 This is
the context in which to understand Hume’s assertion, in a letter of 1754
to William Mure, that ‘The first quality of an historian is to be true &
impartial; the next is to be interesting’. He went on: ‘If you do not say,
that I have done both parties justice; & if Mrs Mure be not sorry for
poor King Charles, I shall burn all my papers, & return to philosophy’.104
‘Interesting’ here means something like ‘emotionally engaging’.105 What
Hume’s remark shows is that he believed that he could combine political
impartiality with a willingness to acknowledge, indeed emphasize, the
tragic and pathetic aspect of the events he described, of which Charles’s
fate was bound to be the most important. Interestingness would not
compromise truthfulness. Hume could combine judicious, dispassionate
political analysis with descriptions that would give release to natural moral
sentiments. The pleasures of reading Hume on the Civil War would
be the same as the pleasures of reading Machiavelli on Florence under
the Medici, or Tacitus on Rome under Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero.
There would be instruction and moral edification – but nothing of use to
squabbling party politicians.106
The Errors of the Stuarts

It is impossible to reconstruct the way in which Hume researched the
History of Great Britain. We do not have the notes that he must have
taken as he read. We do not know for sure what he read, or when he
read it. The speed with which the History was written makes it unlikely
that Hume began his historical research in the spring of 1752 when he
took up his position at the Advocates’ Library. A footnote to the essay on
the Protestant succession about the absolutist pretensions of the Stuarts,
dating from 1748, gave quotations from a 1711 biography of Edmund
Waller, Walter Raleigh’s history of the world, and Edmund Spenser’s
account of the state of Ireland. As he worked on the History, Hume

was surely re-reading as well as reading for the first time. In a letter to
Smith he mentioned ‘the great number of volumes I peruse’,107 and it is
possible that there is a distinction to be drawn between what was read
carefully and what was only ‘perused’. Even so, the notes to the first
editions of 1754 and 1757 suggest that Hume worked hard as he put the
History together. Approximately two hundred books are referred to in
those notes. More notes were added in the edition of the Stuart volumes
prepared for the collected History of England published in 1762, but these
were principally intended to give more precise references to the accounts
of James I and Charles I than had been given previously, and do not
much broaden the range of books cited. The additional notes confirm
what is suggested by a count of numbers of citations in the first editions,
that the books Hume relied on most for the early Stuarts included: The
Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, the Journals of the
House of Commons, and Thomas Salmon’s Compleat Collection of State-
Tryals; and collections of documents and memoirs by, on the one hand,
the Parliamentarians John Rushworth (secretary to the Parliamentary
general Thomas Fairfax), Bulstrode Whitelocke (a lawyer and Member of
Parliament under Cromwell’s Protectorate), and Thomas May (a member
of the Great Tew circle but later a propagandist for the Parliamentary
cause), and, on the other hand, the Royalists Clarendon, William Dugdale
(a herald during the Civil War), and Thomas Frankland (an antiquary,
and author of a relatively scholarly account of James I and Charles I).108
The notes to the Interregnum and the later Stuarts were less detailed, but,
taken together with the notes to James I and Charles I, they suggest that
Hume worked exclusively from printed sources – and that almost all of
the books that he used were available for consultation in the Advocates’
Library.109
Clarendon, Whitelocke, Rushworth, and the rest were standard sources
for the writing of seventeenth-century history. There was nothing unusual
in giving them priority. What was unusual, though, was Hume’s almost
complete silence with respect to the general histories that had gone before
his own. It was standard practice for a history of England to begin with a
preface in which earlier histories were abused and denounced as instances
of gross party prejudice. A history was in fact often presented as primarily
motivated by the desire to correct the errors of another history. Thus
Oldmixon’s History of England was a systematic rejection of claims made
by Clarendon and Echard, and North’s Examen was a detailed engage-

ment with Kennett. Carte took it upon himself to correct Rapin, as was
evident simply in the fact that he advertised himself on the title page
as ‘Thomas Carte, an Englishman’. Guthrie, too, took Rapin as his tar-
get, ascribing Rapin’s popularity to the ascendancy of the Whigs and to
‘the ridiculous prepossession that a foreigner was best fitted to write the
English history’.110 Guthrie began his account of the Interregnum with
a critical discussion of the relevant sources, in which ‘general authori-
ties’ like the parliamentary history and the state trials were described as
the most reliable sources, even though it could not be denied that ‘The
very men who composed the state papers were interested to represent the
facts as they wished them to be, and to state disputes according to their
meanings or intentions’.111 James Ralph’s History of England commenced
with a letter from the author to his subscribers in which ‘Kennet, Echard,
Oldmixon, North, Burnet, &c. &c.’ were said to be mostly erroneous, and
Rapin was said to have ‘nothing new in matter or manner’ to atone for
either his own imperfections or the imperfections of those he followed.
State papers, again, were what Ralph put his trust in. They were ‘the very
chart and compass of history; while we sail by their direction, we sail with
certainty as well as safety; and when those lights fail us, we are forc’d in
a great degree to grope and guess our way, and to content ourselves with
probability only’.112 Hume did not attach a preface to his History of Great
Britain, and made little mention elsewhere in the book of other historians
and how he related himself to them.113 He wanted it to look as though
he was making a fresh start. We know from letters that he had come to
dislike Rapin intensely, and that he regarded Burnet as ‘very careless &
inaccurate’,114 but his views of these and other historians were not adver-
tised in the published work. He clearly did not want his History to look
like it was just another move in an ongoing political argument. That was
not how Hume wanted himself to be read.
Hume gave vent to his views of his predecessors only at the very end
of the book. In the closing pages of the second volume of the History of
Great Britain he appeared to dismiss all of Whig history as having done
no more than cloud and obscure the events of the Stuart era. ‘No man
has yet arose’, he wrote, ‘who has been enabled to pay no regard but to
truth, and has dared to expose her, without covering or disguise, to the
eyes of the prejudiced public’.115 Hume was willing to admit that seventy
years of almost continuous Whig government had been ‘advantageous to
the state’. But, he claimed, it had also been ‘destructive to the truth of
history’, and had ‘established many gross falsehoods, which it is unac-
countable how any civilized nation could have embraced with regard to
its domestic occurrences’. ‘Compositions the most despicable, both for
style and matter’, he continued, ‘have been extoled and propagated; as if
they had equalled the most celebrated remains of antiquity’.116 No names
were named. In the final, posthumous edition of 1778, however, he was
prepared to be explicit, adding a note indicating that those he had in mind
were ‘Rapin Thoyras, Locke, Sidney, Hoadley, &c.’.117 Rapin was the
only historian in this group, and the note suggested a general repudia-
tion of Whiggism in all its forms, whether contractarian, as with Locke,
republican, as with Sidney, or latitudinarian, as with Hoadly. That he
found Locke and Sidney unpalatable is not surprising, for in their differ-
ent ways, both had given voice to the radical Old Whiggism that Hume,
like Walpole and his defenders, indeed like most Whigs of the first half of
the eighteenth century, found distasteful, unsuitable to an age of moder-
ation and politeness. Hoadly had sought to reinvigorate Lockean politics
in the first decade of the century, but was perhaps objectionable mostly
in so far as he represented the age of the Sacheverell trial, the Bangorian
controversy, and the rage of party. Like Hoadly, Rapin seems to have
been for Hume a throwback to the doctrinaire Whig politics of an earlier
age. The Walpolean reaction to Bolingbroke had made Whiggism con-
siderably more sophisticated in its history. Brady had been learned from,
and so had Harrington. Hume shared Guthrie’s sense that this was the
only plausible perspective on English history, but he made no reference
to Guthrie, and nor did he advertise his affinity with the point of view of
the Court Whigs. Making a new start in the writing of a history of the
seventeenth century involved presenting himself as if he had nothing in
common with any previous author.
The first important decision that Hume had to make was where to start.
The usual point of departure for general historians was the first Roman
invasion in 55 BC. Rapin had begun there, and so had Brady, Echard,
Carte, and Guthrie. But Hume conceived of himself as a historian who
would speak to the concerns of the age in which he lived, and, as we have
seen, his essays suggest that at this point he shared the belief of Court
Whigs like Hervey and Squire that most of the English story was simply
irrelevant to understanding the age of liberty that had begun in 1688.
There had been little but oppression and brutality until the country’s
deliverance at the hands of William of Orange. Talk of ancient liberties,

and of a timeless constitution which guaranteed them, was nonsense.
Even if the Saxon constitution had been a free one, everything had been
changed by the Norman invasion and the institution of feudalism. The
rights of parliament had been from that time grants of the crown, and
were therefore such as the crown might legitimately revoke at any time.
Englishmen had been no more free under good monarchs, like Edward
III and Elizabeth, than they had been under bad. The only significant
question was when the feudal system had begun to break down, and that,
according to the Court Whigs, had been with the property legislation of
Henry VII. Here, as we have seen, the Court Whigs followed the analysis of
Bacon and Harrington, who saw in Henry’s desire to counter the effects of
the enclosure of land the origins of a shift of power away from the nobility
and towards the ‘middle people’, in Bacon’s phrase, who made up the
House of Commons.118 Hume wrote to Adam Smith in September 1752
that he had once thought that ‘about Henry the 7th’ was the best period to
begin an English history. But the changes that began then were slow and
largely invisible. It was not until the reign of James I, Hume continued, in
a phrase taken from Harrington, ‘that the House of Commons began first
to raise their head’.119 The great quarrel between Parliament’s privileges
and the king’s prerogatives started then: ‘The government, no longer
opprest by the enormous authority of the crown, display’d its genius; and
the factions, which then arose, having an influence on our present affairs,
form the most curious, interesting, & instructive part of our history’.120
This, then, was where to begin a history which had an obvious bearing
upon the present, a history able to make sense of the party politics that
Hume had analysed in his essays. It was also the obvious place to begin a
history intended to be recognised as having achieved the impartiality that
previous writers had aimed at but had not been judged to have realized.
For in that regard there could be no greater challenge than the one posed
by the reigns of the early Stuarts.
As we have seen, remarks made in the essays provide an idea of the
perspective on seventeenth-century English history that Hume had on
setting out. They suggest that from early on Hume had been sceptical
of the standard Whig view of the Stuarts as tyrannical usurpers. He was
disposed instead to see the situation at the start of the Stuart era as one
of constitutional confusion. Parliament, inspired by its consciousness of
its growing wealth and of the relative poverty of the crown, was pressing
for statutory affirmations of its rights. Had it been successful, the result
would not have been, as parliamentarians claimed, merely the recovery of
traditional liberties, but would rather have been the institutionalization of
a novel, ‘almost entirely republican’, political arrangement.121 James and
Charles were correct to deny that the privileges claimed by Parliament
had precedent in established practice, and made an ‘excuseable’ ‘mistake’
in believing England to be an absolute monarchy. Whatever the truth
might have been in principle, however, parliament was as a matter of
fact increasing in power, and assertions of an obligation on the part of
all subjects to submit perfectly to the will of the sovereign were, at the
very least, imprudent. The fundamental problem was a lack of fit between
what the past made it reasonable to believe and the realities of the present.
Civil war was more or less inevitable in such circumstances: the system of
government had in effect dissolved, and as Harrington put it in Oceana,
it was this that caused the war, not vice versa.122 But what an eighteenth-
century historian had to explain was how Harrington had been wrong in his
belief that England was now ‘not capable of any other permanent form than
that only of a commonwealth’.123 An attempt, not very wholehearted, at a
commonwealth had been followed by the restoration of a Stuart monarchy
in 1660, and further conflict between crown and parliament had ended
only with the constitutional regularization of a system of limited monarchy
in 1688. The first volume of The History of Great Britain, covering the
reigns of James I and Charles I, was therefore bound to be incomplete.
Hume came to regret the fact that he published it before he had finished
with the Interregnum, Charles II, and James II. By itself, it made Hume’s
history look unduly Tory. It focused attention on the Civil War and on
Charles’s execution, but the truth was that these were not, from Hume’s
perspective, the most important events of the seventeenth century. For
Hume, the Revolution of 1688 was considerably more important. For this
reason the two volumes of The History of Great Britain, though initially
published separately, need to be treated as constituting a single line of
historical and political argument.
The Stuart period was not presented by Hume as beginning in a rupture
with the past. There was in the History of Great Britain none of the
Old Whig contrast between Elizabethan respect for English liberty and
Jacobean encroachment upon it. According to Hume, Elizabeth had been,
and had been generally acknowledged to have been, an absolute monarch.
James thought of himself in the same way. The difference was that he did
not have Elizabeth’s gift for making Englishmen feel free, or for making
them not mind their powerlessness. He came to England with a fully
formed theory of absolute monarchy, and he was not reluctant to share
that theory with his subjects. This kind of thing was, as Hume put it,
‘not very grateful to English ears’, and it stimulated reflection on the
part of the House of Commons as to the status of the privileges they
had been accustomed to imagine themselves to possess. The Commons
regarded itself as having the right to manage its business without royal
interference. It was not willing to accept that right as having its origin
in a grant on the part of the crown, and resented the occasions on which
James attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to force the Commons to do
his bidding. To begin with, the Commons had no very well articulated
theory of what the basis of its privileges actually was. The Commons
certainly did not self-consciously take it upon itself to alter the constitution
in favour of principles of liberty. The independence of the Commons
was, according to Hume, more practical than speculative, a matter of
piecemeal complaint in the form of bills seeking to end one or another
of the crown’s supposed abuses of its executive power, bills which the
Lords then prevented from having any legal force. The result was an
increasingly acrimonious relationship between James and his parliaments,
and eventually, in 1621, there was a crisis, when parliament ventured
explicitly to condemn James’s refusal to act on behalf of the Protestants
of the German state of the Palatine, lately brought under the aegis of the
Catholic Austrian and Spanish Habsburg monarchies.124
For a number of reasons James did not want to get involved in the
Palatine, but what he objected to most of all was the idea that the Com-
mons might take, and express, a view on matters of international policy,
matters which he believed were for an English king to conduct as he
saw fit, and which were none of the Commons’ business. Here, James
believed, the Commons was guilty of attempting fundamentally to alter
the nature of English government. He responded by reasserting his view
that every one of the rights of the Commons was ‘derived from the grace
and permission of our ancestors’, and made it clear he believed that if
these privileges were abused, they might be forfeited. The Commons was
not cowed by this. On the contrary, it was provoked into a ‘protestation’,
belligerently asserting as a matter of ‘antient and undoubted birthright’
its rights to freedom of speech and to manage its own business.125 Two
contradictory visions of the English constitution and its past were thus
given explicit formulation. The question was now which of them the
English people at large would be persuaded to accept. It would take sixty-
seven years, and wars involving not only England but also Scotland and
Ireland, the execution of a king, and two invasions from abroad, for that
question to be given a decisive answer.126
In this first edition of the Stuart volumes of his History, Hume adopted
a very self-consciously balanced approach to the dispute between the
Commons and James and then Charles. Revisions made for the 1762
edition, and retained in all subsequent editions, would alter the balance
somewhat, and make it appear as though Hume’s considered judgement
was that, laudable though their principles of liberty certainly were when
considered with the benefit of hindsight, it was the Commons that had
been the innovator and aggressor in the run-up to the Civil War.127
Hume’s original position was expressed when he wrote to James Oswald
in June 1753 that ‘The truth is, there is so much reason to blame and praise
alternately King and Parliament, that I am afraid the mixture of both in
my composition, being so equal, may pass sometimes for an affectation,
and not the result of judgement and evidence’.128 In September 1754,
with the first volume printed and about to be published, he wrote to John
Clephane that he ‘alternately’ gave precedence to the principles of Whigs
and Tories.129 Such remarks capture very well the rather disconcerting
way in which the History of Great Britain at some times reads like an
apology for the Stuarts and at others like a vindication of the Commons.130
On the one hand, in addition to condoning James’s absolutist con-
ception of the authority of the crown, Hume sought to downplay the
weight and importance of James’s surrender of the cautionary towns to
the Dutch in 1616; he assembled no fewer than seventeen arguments jus-
tifying James’s treatment of Sir Walter Raleigh, and affirmed that ‘during
no period of English history, was there a more sensible increase, than
during the reign of this monarch, of all the advantages, which distinguish
a flourishing people’. On the other hand, Hume defended the Commons
against the charge that its concern for public liberty amounted to an
encroachment upon the privileges of the crown; described as ‘dangerous’
and ‘exorbitant’ the royal prerogative in matters civil and religious; and
affirmed that the ‘noble principle’ of freedom of action asserted by the
Commons in a 1624 bill against monopolies ‘has, at last, thro’ many con-
tests, produced that singular and happy government, which at present we
enjoy’.131 Hume’s account of the first fifteen years of Charles I’s reign, up
to the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640, was marked by

the same kind of studied even-handedness. By 1627, England was being
‘treated like a conquered province’, and Charles was seeking systemati-
cally to replace government by law with government by brute power.132
But Hume also argued that precedent could provide a case for the prerog-
ative powers which the Petition of Right sought to abolish, and presented
the Commons as the innovator when it came to the issue of tonnage and
poundage. There was, furthermore, something to be said for Ship Money:
it was both a violation of liberty and the means whereby England once again
acquired a powerful navy. The problem, for Charles as for his father, was
that there were now in play in English politics two very different ideas
of the constitution, one traditional and absolutist, the other new and lib-
ertarian, and both could be given justification: it was true both ‘that the
appearances were sufficiently strong in favor of the King to apologize for
his following such maxims, and that public liberty must be so precarious
under this exorbitant prerogative as to render an opposition, not only
excusable, but laudable in the people’.133
Charles had been forced to call another parliament in 1640 because war
against Scotland, provoked by the attempt to impose episcopacy north
of the border, had gone very badly. He desperately needed money, and
parliament was the only possible source. But the Commons would only
consider granting Charles what he needed if he would first attend to the
grievances that had been accumulating during the eleven years that he had
ruled without parliament. The Commons was in a position of strength,
and knew it. The Lords no longer sought to restrain it. The Commons
immediately impeached Charles’s most important and powerful ministers,
including the hugely unpopular Earl of Strafford and Archbishop William
Laud. The king was unable to protect his own supporters, and thus, in
Hume’s words, ‘A new jurisdiction was erected, in the nation; and before
that tribunal all those trembled, who had before exulted most in their credit
and authority’.134 What immediately followed was a kind of revolution.
The government ‘without any seeming violence or disorder, changed in a
moment, from a monarchy, almost absolute, to a pure democracy’.135 To
the modern reader this might sound like a good thing, but according to
Hume, the new system of government was fatally flawed. It was flawed first
by the very fact of its purity, by being ‘entirely consistent and uniform’. An
element of arbitrary authority was necessary to all government, according
to Hume, and would be found in a democracy even if it contradicted
democratic principle. It was certainly to be found in the actions of the

Long Parliament, which were, as presented by Hume, at times as violent,
tyrannical, and unjust as those of Charles during his years of ‘personal
rule’. The new system was flawed also by the suddenness with which it
came into existence. It happened too quickly to carry the people with it.
The result was a deep division of public opinion, vividly described by
Hume in the national debate about the Grand Remonstrance of 1641.
This division turned into the basis of civil war once the parliament issued
the Nineteen Propositions in 1642. This amounted, Hume says, to a ‘total
abolition of monarchical authority’.136 It was taken by Charles, and Hume
does not contest the interpretation, as a declaration of war on the part
of the parliament. There was no way in which the parliament could be
said to have waged war solely in self-defence. And once war had broken
out, the parliament avoided all chances of a negotiated peace. Throughout
his account of the Civil Wars, Hume remained on the side of the king,
this prince whose virtues ‘predominated extremely above his vices, or,
more properly speaking, his imperfections’, and included precisely the
‘probity and honour’ that Charles was constantly accused by his enemies
of lacking.137
The administration that put Charles on trial and sentenced him to
death was, according to Hume, ‘usurped and illegal’. It was hated by the
whole nation – in fact, by three whole nations, the English, the Scottish,
and the Irish. It claimed to be animated by the principles of liberty, but
in fact it was as tyrannical as any despotism recorded in history. Such a
verdict may seem to be at odds with Hume’s balanced assessment of polit-
ical affairs up to the opening of the Long Parliament, but the Commons
had undergone a transformation by the end of the First Civil War, as the
Independents distinguished and separated themselves from the Presby-
terians. The Independents, as Hume presented them, were a group of
religious fanatics who ‘abolished all ecclesiastical government, disdained
all creeds and systems, rejected every ceremony, and confounded each
rank and order’.138 Among the Independents the religious inspiration of
the soldier, the merchant, and the mechanic was as valid as that of the
priest or bishop, and this religious pluralism had a political analogue, in
the form of a desire for ‘an intire equality of rank and order, in a republic,
quite free and independent’.139 The Independents had disguised them-
selves as Presbyterians at the beginning of the conflict between king and
parliament, but had then staged a coup which divided the anti-royalist
cause against itself, and set the army, which the Independents controlled,
against the majority of the parliament. The story of the rule of this group
of self-appointed saints after Charles’s execution was a perfect exemplifi-
cation of how, in Hume’s words, ‘illegal violence, with whatever pretexts
it may be covered, and whatever object it may pursue, must inevitably
end at last in the arbitrary and despotic government of a single per-
son’.140 That single person was, of course, Oliver Cromwell, presented
by Hume as a hypocrite who throughout sought power with exactly the
same single-mindedness as he claimed to seek religious inspiration. Yet
in his account of the Interregnum, Hume’s sense of the impossibility of
a one-sided assessment of seventeenth-century history returned. It may
have been true that with the rule of the Major Generals ‘[a]ll reasonable
men, now concluded, that the very masque of liberty was thrown aside’,
but, at the same time, it had to be acknowledged that the Protector ‘in
his civil and domestic administration, displayed as great regard both to
justice and clemency, as his usurped authority, derived from no law, and
founded only on the sword, could possibly permit’.141 Cromwell’s charac-
ter, as described by Hume, was no more or less mixed than that of James
or Charles. He had both virtues and vices, and his vices could be given
exculpatory explanation.
Hume portrayed the Interregnum as a wild aberration fuelled largely
by religious fanaticism. With the Restoration, or at least not long after it,
English politics returned to its normal seventeenth-century state, which is
to say, a state of permanent tension in the relations between a king unable
to live upon his own resources and a House of Commons unwilling to
render the king financially independent, and to ongoing and dangerous
disagreement as to how to combine the authority of the king with the
liberty of his subjects. The Civil War, in other words, had achieved
nothing, and changed nothing. The problems that the country had faced
under James I and Charles I had yet to be solved. The major difference was
that, as a result of a general reaction against the excesses of the 1640s and
1650s, the spirit of religious enthusiasm was no longer a driver of English
politics. It was replaced, Hume claims, by ‘party zeal’. Party politics
developed as elements of the Cavalier Parliament turned against Charles,
on account of his excessive sympathy for Catholics and his (apparently
related) refusal to engage England on the side of the Dutch in their war
with France. Charles responded by tarring his critics with the brush
of religious dissent, republicanism, and the principles of 1642, and by
assiduously cultivating a connection in the public mind between affection

for the Church of England – an extremely powerful sentiment in English
public life after the Interregnum – and loyalty to the crown. The divide
between ‘court’ and ‘country’, which dated back to the reign of James I,
was as a result straightforwardly transformed, for the moment at least,
into a divide between ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’. The two parties then devoted
themselves to a competition for popular support, and the latter part of
Charles’s reign was dominated by extreme swings of public opinion away
from and back towards support for the court and king. The Popish Plot
of 1678 was presented by Hume as a total fabrication on the part of
deranged simpletons, and not, as some had suspected, the work of Whig
grandees; but those grandees seized upon it and milked it vigorously for
party political purposes, drawing it into the controversy concerning the
succession of Charles’s openly Catholic brother James, and using it to
generate support for their proposal that James be excluded in favour of
Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. But there was then a
reaction against the severity of the measures taken against the supposed
plotters, and that, according to Hume, left Charles’s position shortly
before he died ‘more eligible than it had ever been since his restoration’.142
Charles’s position was all the more ‘eligible’ because by the final years of
his reign the crown had at last achieved a significant measure of financial
independence from the House of Commons. This was a direct result
of England’s growing commercial success. ‘The commerce and riches
of England did never, during any period’, Hume claims, ‘encrease so
fast as from the restoration to the revolution’.143 Charles’s neutrality as
regards the Franco-Dutch war helped this along, since it enabled English
merchants and traders to steal business from their Dutch rivals. A vigorous
commerce provided the crown with customs and excise revenue, and
thereby freed the crown from its debilitating need for subsidies from the
Commons. This meant that, according to Hume, it was very far from
inevitable that the accession of James in 1685 would shortly be followed
by a revolt which put an end to Stuart rule and replaced a monarchy
with absolutist pretensions with one that, in theory at least, accepted
a strictly limited prerogative and the existence of inalienable rights of
parliament and people. Once English politics was put in commercial –
which was by now to say, international – context, it could be seen that
English history after the Restoration was anything but an irresistible
progress towards the Glorious Revolution. ‘Never King mounted the
throne of England with greater advantages than James’, Hume declared,

‘nay possessed greater facility, if that were any advantage, of rendering
himself and his posterity absolute’.144 In 1685, it was still an open question
which of the century’s two competing visions of the English constitution
would prevail. That James was popular at least to some degree was made
obvious by the complete failure of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion a
few months after James’s accession. No one of any significance rose to back
Monmouth. James’s Catholicism was not popular, of course, but could be
lived with while it was possible to believe that he would be succeeded by
his Protestant daughter Mary. What turned the tables against James was
the birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688, but Hume went so far as
to suggest that even a permanently Catholic monarchy might have been
accepted in the end. Hume says (citing Burnet) that one of the things
that prompted William to invade was that ‘[h]e knew, that the men of
education in England were, many of them, retained in their religion more
by honor than by principle; and that, tho’ every one was ashamed to be
first proselyte, yet, if the example was once set by some eminent persons,
interest would every day make considerable conversions to a communion,
which was so zealously promoted by the Sovereign’.145 Moreover, James
had at his disposal a standing army which he was able to pay. There was
no chance at all that his policies, no matter how unpopular they were,
would be countered by a re-run of the events of 1642.
Hume’s account of the Revolution was quite different from the inter-
pretation that would be enshrined in the nineteenth-century histories of
Macaulay and Trevelyan. It did not develop naturally out of the English-
man’s innate love of liberty, it was not made inevitable by Stuart tyranny,
and it did not leave everything of importance unchanged. It was not
merely a matter of the protection of the ancient English constitution and
the post-Reformation English church from abuse and innovation. It was,
rather, genuinely a revolution, a replacement of one political order with
something quite different, and it could easily not have happened at all.
What explained it was, in the first instance, the international political situa-
tion, and William of Orange’s appreciation of the role that a newly wealthy
English crown might play in resistance against French universal monarchy
and the preservation of a balance of power in Europe. ‘The great object of
his ambition’, Hume wrote, ‘was to be placed at the head of a confederate
army, and by his valor to avenge the injuries, which himself, his country,
and his allies has sustained from the haughty Lewis [i.e., Louis XIV]’.146
But William did not want to be seen to take the English crown by force.
He wanted to be offered it, and Hume’s account of the process by which
the offer was made is in effect the climax of the story he had been telling
about how the English came to understand liberty, and not authority, to
be the fundamental principle of their constitution.
It was therefore startling that Hume’s carefully modulated description
of the deliberations of the Convention in early 1689 portrayed the end of
this story as a fudge. Hume had no time for the Tory view that William’s
accession to the crown was a matter of conquest and brute assertion of
de facto power. But nor did he vindicate the Whig view that James’s
flight to France had effected a dissolution of government and reversion
of power to the people. Both parties, he claimed, in their debates about
hereditary succession and the status of the Stuart claim to the throne,
forsook ‘consistence and uniformity’, and ‘warped their principles from
regard to their antagonists’.147 The Whigs did not, according to Hume,
make the arguments that they could have made for their view that in
these circumstances the people had the right to choose its monarch. No
clear decision was arrived at about what James had done when he had
left England, or about the legal position of James’s son. The result was
a compromise. James was agreed to have ‘abdicated’, the crown was said
to have passed to Mary as a result, and William would be invited to
be not king but regent. This compromise was then itself compromised
when William made it clear that he would accept only the offer of a
crown. Hume saw it as obvious that something dramatic and quite novel
happened in 1688–9. The Revolution, he wrote, ‘forms a new epoch in
the constitution’, it ‘made a new settlement’, and it did so in so far as it
established a new precedent, that of ‘deposing one King, and establishing
a new family’, thereby ‘put[ting] a period’ to the principle of hereditary
succession.148 What exactly the significance of that precedent would be
for the future, however, was left unclear. Hume’s History of Great Britain
ended with the stage set for decades of debate about what the principles
of the Revolution were, and about exactly what kind of basis English, and
after 1707 British, politics now had.
The History of Great Britain concluded with a transcription of the Con-
vention’s Declaration of Rights. Once this became law, in the form of the
Bill of Rights passed by parliament in December 1689, England could be
said to enjoy, as Hume put it, ‘the most entire system of liberty, that ever
was known amongst mankind’.149 But even as he delivered this judgement,

Hume made a distinction between perfect liberty and ‘the best system of
government’. The best system of government balances authority against
liberty. It does not abolish authority altogether. Liberty without author-
ity – that is, without an executive power able to enforce law and to protect
the people from external aggression – is no different from anarchy. Hav-
ing definitively limited the prerogative of the crown, then, the English
had to ensure that they had not at the same time so weakened the crown
as to prevent it being able to function effectively as a locus of authority
and executive power. The History of Great Britain was conceived by its
author as having a bearing on the present, as being ‘instructive’, just in
so far as it provided resources with which this issue might be thought
through carefully and thoroughly. It was designed to frustrate complete
identification on the part of the reader with either the party of liberty or
the party of authority. The reader, as we have seen, is constantly pulled
from the parliamentary perspective to the royalist perspective and then
back again, and is thereby forced to confront the plausibility of both points
of view. In a letter of 1754 about the History Hume told the Abbé le Blanc
that ‘The philosophical spirit, which I have so much indulg’d in all my
writings, finds here ample materials to work upon’.150 The philosophical
spirit expressed itself most clearly of all in those passages in which Hume
sought to reduce political debates to their most essential and abstract prin-
ciples, by balancing the best case that could be made on one side against
the best that could be made on the other, and then presenting a con-
sidered judgement as to the strengths and weaknesses of each argument.
Examples include Hume’s description of the debate that followed the
parliamentary ‘protestation’ in 1621 and James’s violent reaction to it;
the debate in 1628 about the Petition of Right; the debate in 1641 about
the Grand Remonstrance; the 1680 debate about the exclusion of James
from succession to the throne; the 1685 debate about whether or not James,
now king, should be granted revenue for the entire duration of his reign;
and the debate of the post-Revolution Convention. These were all crucial
moments in seventeenth-century English history, but Hume’s approach
to them was not to recount in detail what was actually said in the House
of Commons or in the pamphlets and sermons that such controversial
episodes always generated in profusion. Sometimes, in fact, he presented
arguments that were not made on one or other of these occasions, but
that might have been made had the parties been more reflective than they
actually were.151
The intention, it would seem, was to encourage ‘the philosophical
spirit’ in the reader, to get him or her thinking in terms of the funda-
mental principles that underlay and animated the events portrayed in the
narrative, and to encourage recognition of how finely balanced the argu-
ments were in favour of, on the one hand, the partisans of liberty, and, on
the other, the partisans of the crown. The intention was also to make clear
the connection between the political debates of the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury and those of a hundred years before. In significant part The History
of Great Britain was a history of party politics, an explanation of how pol-
itics in England, and after 1707 in Britain, had assumed its characteristic
form. Thus the parliament of 1621 is described by Hume as having been
‘remarkable for being the epoch, in which were first regularly formed, tho’
without acquiring these denominations, the parties of Court and Coun-
try; parties, which have ever since continued, and which, while they often
threaten the total dissolution of the government, are the real causes of its
permanent life and vigor’.152 The approach to party politics that Hume
had laid out in the Essays, Moral and Political was in the History put in
historical perspective. In his essays Hume had argued that the politics of
party was not a pathology, not a corruption of the constitution, but was
rather inevitable given the informal and ill-defined way in which the con-
stitution balanced authority against liberty. In the History the deep roots
of party division were brought to light, by means of Hume’s reconstruc-
tions of crucial political debates, debates which Hume usually presented as
‘national’ rather than as merely the squabbling of parliamentary factions.
‘In all mixt governments, such as that of England, the bulk of the nation
will always incline to preserve the entire frame of the constitution’, Hume
wrote; ‘but, according to the various prejudices, interests, and dispositions
of men, some will ever attach themselves with more passion to the regal,
others to the popular part of the government’.153 Neither party could be
said to be misguided, except in so far as they pushed their principles to
extremes. There was no sense to using party labels – ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’,
for example – as terms of abuse. It was therefore inevitable that even in
a situation as remarkable as that of early 1689, party divisions ‘resumed,
in some degree, their former authority’.154 There was no other way to
conduct a debate such as the Convention had to have than in terms of
the opposition between monarchical authority and popular liberty. It was

historically inconceivable that the Revolution might have, as Bolingbroke
claimed it had, brought party division to an end.
Hume’s project, then, was not to vindicate one party perspective at the
expense of the other, but rather to begin to look beneath the surface of
political debate for an explanation of why politics in England took the
form that it did. An additional aspect of the exercise of the philosophical
spirit was to reveal the underlying conditions that determined political
events, so as to make clear the extent to which everyone involved was in
the grip of processes beyond their control. Hume opined that ‘nothing
will tend more to abate the acrimony of party-disputes, than to show men,
that those events, which they impute to their adversaries as the deepest
crimes, were the natural, if not the necessary result of the situation, in
which the nation was placed, during any period’.155 Hume’s general sense
of the situation of the nation in the seventeenth century we have already
summarized: he shared the view of Harrington and Bacon that England
was feeling the long-term results of the decline of feudalism, as the balance
of property, and so also of power, shifted inexorably away from the nobility
and towards the House of Commons. But the process was, crucially for
Hume, cultural and intellectual as well as financial and economic. Right at
the beginning of the History Hume wrote of ‘an insensible revolution’ that
‘the minds of men, thro’out all Europe, but especially in England, seem
to have undergone’ at the turn of the seventeenth century. The revival of
letters and learning was spreading; the mechanical and liberal arts were
being improved; the globe had been circumnavigated, travel was becoming
safer; and as a result of this ‘universal fermentation’, people across Europe
were thinking in larger, more expansive, more ambitious terms. On the
continent of Europe the mercenary armies employed by monarchs kept
things in check. But in England, where the crown had very limited real
power at its disposal, the love of freedom gained increased strength, and
diffused itself more and more extensively among the people. Elizabeth
found ways of managing the situation. The Stuarts did not. One of the
most striking features of the History of Great Britain for its first readers
would have been the sense it gave that it would have been no particularly
bad thing had England followed the continental norm and progressed
directly from feudalism to absolutism. Hume was uninterested in the
business of extolling English liberty at the expense of French or Spanish
or Austrian tyranny. Instead, he wrote as if he saw England as a special

case, in need of explanation, but not obviously more admirable than any
other country in its particular way of reconciling the essential political
principles of liberty and authority. That was how far Hume was prepared
to take a philosophical approach to the history of England.
Hume sought to shed additional light on the distinctive features of
the English case in a number of ‘disquisitions’ on the economic, social,
and cultural background of the political events that were the main focus
of his narrative. In the first published versions of Hume’s history of the
Stuarts, these were included in the main body of the text as chapters (or
parts of chapters) following the reign of James I, ending the Interregnum,
and concluding the book as whole after the account of the Revolution.
‘It may not be improper’, Hume wrote introducing the first of them, ‘at
this period, to make a pause; and, departing a little from the historical
style, take a survey of the state of the kingdom, with regard to govern-
ment, manners, finances, arms, trade, learning. Where a just notion is
not formed of these particulars, history can be very little instructive, and
often will not be intelligible’.156 ‘The chief use of history’, he was pre-
pared to say in the second, ‘is, that it affords materials for disquisitions
of this nature; and it seems the duty of the historian to point out the
proper inferences and conclusions’.157 It was presumably because of this
attention to manners, finances, arms, commerce, arts and sciences that
the History was called, as Hume reported to Le Blanc, an ‘imitation’ of
Voltaire’s account of the age of Louis XIV.158 What was proper to ‘the
historical style’ was in any case changing, and Hume was among the earli-
est of British writers to supplement the doings of princes and their courts
with attention to changes taking place in the manners and circumstances
and interests of the population taken as a whole. It is indicative of Hume’s
own proclivities as regards the arts that more attention is given in the
disquisitions to literature, understood broadly to include poetry, history,
and philosophy both natural and moral, than to anything else. Here we
have Hume’s judgements on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Dryden,
on Bacon, Boyle, and Newton, on Hobbes, Harrington, Clarendon, and
Temple. Hume’s concern was with the performances ‘which engage the
attention of posterity’. These were to be distinguished from the ‘number-
less productions’, sermons and pamphlets and theological tracts, which
excited interest when published but which ‘have long ago sunk into silence
and oblivion’.159
Posterity as Hume imagined it – or, perhaps, as he pretended to imagine

it – would find the religious dimension of the conflicts of the seventeenth
century difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Prominent in the dis-
quisition that closed the account of the Interregnum was an account of
Quakerism, intended for a readership that supposedly was bound to be
puzzled by ‘[t]he gloomy enthusiasm, which prevailed among great num-
bers of the parliamentary party’. The sects which flourished in the 1640s
and 1650s constituted what is ‘surely the most curious spectacle presented
by any history; and the most instructive, as well as entertaining, to a philo-
sophical mind’.160 A further dimension of the philosophical spirit at work
in the History of Great Britain was a remarkably disengaged, dispassionate
approach to the role played by religion in the progress of England towards
the realization of a perfect system of liberty in 1688–9. In sketches of
the Protestant Reformers of the previous century and of Roman Catholi-
cism, Hume treated matters of religion with ruthless impartiality, as if
describing nothing more emotionally engaging than some bizarre belief
systems so long extinct as to be bound to be all but unintelligible to
the reader. ‘History addresses itself to a more distant posterity than will
ever be reached by any local or temporary theology’, he remarks; ‘and
the characters of sects may be studied, when their controversies shall
be totally forgotten’.161 Religion as it featured in the History was always
extreme and perverted, an example of either, to use the terminology of
Hume’s essays, enthusiasm or superstition. All manifestations of religion
were therefore equally pernicious. The controversies described were all
equally pathological perversions of the religious spirit, and they issued in
doctrines which events showed to be all equally fatal to both the morals of
the individual and the peace and stability of the state. Hume would surely
have known that this was likely to offend some of his readers, especially
perhaps readers in Scotland who still looked back to the first Reformers
as having providing their mode of religion with its inspiration, and to
English Dissenters whose hopes of full religious toleration owed much,
as Hume himself admitted, to the era of the ascendancy of the Indepen-
dents. These were, perhaps, not constituencies which Hume conceived of
himself as needing to placate. The majority of likely readers in England,
certainly, would have shared Hume’s lack of concern for their sensibil-
ities. But when complaints did arise about the sketch of the religion of
Reformers, Hume was prepared to drop it from the ‘corrected’ edition of
The History of Great Britain published in 1759.162 Impartiality, however,
entailed that he also had to drop the sketch of ‘the Roman catholic super-
stition’. It would not do to suggest that Catholic extremism was any more
objectionable, or absurd, than Protestant.
The fact that Hume was prepared to excise a passage objectionable to
some readers on religious grounds provides some evidence that he did
not want the History to be read as a work antagonistic to religion as such.
He assured John Clephane in September 1754 that he had been ‘toler-
ably reserved’ about religion. ‘I composed it ad populum, as well as ad
clerum’, he explained, ‘and thought, that scepticism was not in its place
in a historical production’.163 But why, then, was it the case that the
role of religion in Hume’s narrative was always destructive, and Hume’s
judgement on it always negative? Hume composed a draft preface for the
second volume of the History of Great Britain that explained why. ‘The
proper office of religion’, he wrote, ‘is to reform men’s lives, to purify their
hearts, to inforce all moral duties, and to secure obedience to the laws and
civil magistrate. While it pursues these salutary purposes, its operations,
tho’ infinitely valuable, are secret and silent, and seldom come under the
cognizance of history. That adulterate species of it alone, which inflames
faction, animates sedition, and prompts rebellion, distinguishes itself on
the open theatre of the world, and is the great source of revolutions and
public convulsions. The historian, therefore, has scarce occasion to men-
tion any other kind of religion; and he may retain the highest regard for
true piety, even while he exposes all the abuses of it’.164 Hume went on
to claim that this meant that nothing in the way of irreligion in an author
should be inferred from his dwelling on adulterate forms of religion at the
expense of the true. He decided not to print the preface, but included the
bulk of it as a lengthy footnote to the ‘account of the state of the finances,
arms, trade, manners, arts, between the restoration and the revolution’
that closed the volume, following a reference to ‘abuses in the former
age, arising from overstrained pretensions of piety’.165 Hume’s historical
predecessors had generally taken it upon themselves to display the work-
ings of divine providence as manifest in English history, and as manifest
especially in the country’s deliverance from Stuart tyranny in 1688. The
analysis of the Revolution presented in the History of Great Britain meant
that here also, the historian had no occasion to mention religion. There
was a sufficient explanation to be found in the European situation, and in
William’s conception of the role he might play in that situation. This did
not mean that the Revolution was not providential. It merely meant that
the historian had no need to raise the question, let alone settle it one way
or the other.
Hume’s sense of the significance of large-scale explanatory forces for
the unfolding of events in England in the seventeenth century enabled him
to separate, as no Whig historian had done before, the story of progress
towards a perfect system of liberty from the story of the triumph of the
Church of England over both Popery and Dissent. As Hume presented
it, the achievement of liberty, in the form of constitutional restrictions on
the royal prerogative, had no religious dimension. Harrington and Bacon
had provided the concepts in terms of which the dynamics of the early
Stuart era were to be explained, and international affairs, commercial and
political, were likewise the proper explanatory context for the second half
of the century. Seen from this perspective, religion looked epiphenomenal,
barely relevant to the historical process – except, of course, where it
inflamed faction, animated sedition, and prompted rebellion. It was part
and parcel of Hume’s novel version of Whiggism that it did not come laced
with outrage at the ‘abuses’ and ‘innovations’ introduced by Laud with
Charles I’s blessing, that it did not express much concern as to whether or
not Charles II was really a Catholic in disguise, that it dismissed the Popish
Plot as an ‘instance of popular frenzy and bigotted delusion’,166 and that
it presented James II as not a Nero or Domitian, but, rather, as ‘a prince,
whose chief blame consisted in imprudences and misguided principles’.167
Whig history, and indeed Whig politics, after 1688 had turned from the
radicalism of Locke and Sidney to the Church of England triumphalism
of Hoadly and his ilk. It was, it was commonly claimed, the religious
dimension of the Revolution that mattered most. Revolution principles
became Church of England principles, opposed equally to Catholicism
and to Dissent. Hume shows every sign of having had as little time for
this interpretation of the Revolution as for the radical one. The properly
philosophical historian would note the role of religion when to do so was
essential to explanation, but otherwise would remain silent about religious
questions.
The result of such an approach to the role of religion in historical change
was that religion was bound not to be properly integrated into the historical
process.168 Hume wrote that ‘’tis an observation, suggested by all history,
and by none more than by that of James [I], and his successor, that the
religious spirit contains in it something supernatural and unaccountable;
and that, in its operations upon society, effects correspond less to their
known causes than is found in any other circumstance of government’.169

Religion interposed itself in history from outside, as a disruptive force.
No sense was made, then, of, for example, Laud, nor of the opposition
that Laud generated. To Hume, and to the impartial reader he implied
that he was writing for, it was obviously absurd, and inexplicable, that
it could matter what clothing a minister wore during a church service,
or whether the altar stood in the centre of a church or at its far eastern
end. By 1640, such were the issues which, as Hume says, ‘tended chiefly
to enflame the parliament and nation, especially the latter’: it was on
account of such issues that the Royalist and Parliamentary parties were
‘contented to throw the government into such violent convulsions’.170
But why that was so is left wholly mysterious. This had a particularly
deleterious effect on Hume’s treatment of Scotland in The History of
Great Britain, since Scotland figures in the narrative almost exclusively
as a hotbed of fundamentalist Presbyterian fervour. Ireland, too, was
portrayed as a land of religious extremism, never more so than during
the Catholic revolt of 1640, the worst excesses of which are explicitly
attributed by Hume to ‘the sacred name of Religion’.171 Why religion
might have taken the forms that it did in Scotland and Ireland, why it
mattered in those places in the ways that it did matter, was not explained.
In the same way the extraordinary proliferation of sects in England during
the 1640s and 1650s was left looking wholly unaccountable. Hume had
much to say about the effects of fanaticism, the ‘strange corruptions’ that
resulted, the eluding and loosening of the ties of morality, the sanctioning
of selfishness and ambition,172 but nothing about its causes. The whole
episode was a boiling over of human irrationality that, when brought to
an end in 1660, stopped quite suddenly and left no trace. After that, as we
have seen, party zeal replaced religious zeal as the engine of politics.
It would be a mistake, however, to understand Hume’s ‘philosophical’
historical method as being wholly a matter of guiding the reader towards
a dispassionate and disengaged point of view on the seventeenth century.
Hume did indeed seek to cultivate a perspective from which questions
of politics and, especially, religion would fail to have their usual effects
on the passions of the observer. But just as important to the style of
Hume’s History of Great Britain was a quite different kind of rhetorical
strategy, whereby the reader’s emotions were manipulated in ways that, in
a fundamentally Whig narrative, were unexpected and quite possibly also
unwelcome. Hume’s more moderate predecessors in the Whig tradition
had been prepared to tone down earlier depictions of the Stuarts, and
in particular to concede that Charles I had been unjustly murdered at
the hands of fanatical rebels. Hume went much further, and used every
device at his disposal to excite sympathy for the fate Charles suffered. He
depicted the whole train of events in January 1649 as a tragedy, putting
the best possible gloss on Charles’s deportment during his trial and prior
to his execution, and giving the worst possible construal of the motives
and behaviour of those who put him to death. Charles’s last interview
with his children was described in emotion-drenched detail. The reader
was told that Charles slept soundly to the end, ‘tho’ the noise of work-
men, employed in framing the scaffold, and other preparations for his
execution, continually resounded in his ears’.173 Hume even reported,
without comment, that it was said that, such was the ‘grief, indignation,
and astonishment’ in the nation at large when news spread of Charles’s
death, women suffered miscarriages – or, rather, ‘cast forth the untimely
fruit of their womb’. This was the stuff of Tory, even Jacobite, history.
There were resemblances between the emotional tenor of Hume’s descrip-
tion of Charles’s death and what was to be found in the narrative of the
Jacobite Thomas Carte.174 Without acknowledging the fact, Hume bor-
rowed heavily throughout from a variety of Royalist texts.175 The deaths
of other victims of Puritan extremism were given similar treatments. We
learn that as the condemned Strafford passed beneath the window of the
imprisoned Laud, ‘The aged primate dissolved in tears; and having pro-
nounced, with a broken voice, a tender blessing on his departing friend,
sunk into the arms of his attendants’. Strafford, meanwhile, ‘still superior
to his fate, marched on with an elated countenance, and with an air even
of greater dignity, than what usually attended him’, to give an address
from the scaffold that was ‘full of decency and courage’.176 When Laud’s
came to die at the hands of the Long Parliament, he too ‘behaved during
his trial with great spirit and vigor of genius’, and even though he was
harassed on the scaffold by ‘a furious zealot of the reigning sect’, he died
confident that he was leaving this world for a better place.177
In ‘My Own Life’ Hume would complain of the general opprobrium
visited upon ‘the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for
the fate of Charles I, and the Earl of Strafford’.178 In fact, his tears were
shed not just for Royalist and Jacobite heroes, but rather indiscriminately,
more or less whenever there was an untimely death to be described. Hume
was being misleading when he wrote to Clephane in 1756 that ‘My views
of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations

of persons to Tory prejudices’,179 as if he was unremittingly critical of
those who opposed the Stuarts, and described the ends they met with in
tones of stony objectivity. He was generous, for example, in his account
of the character of the Parliamentary leaders John Hampden and William
Fairfax, and, when the tables had been turned on Charles I’s executioners
after the Restoration, described the death of Henry Vane in terms scarcely
less generous than those employed in the cases of Strafford and Laud. ‘Lest
pity for a courageous sufferer should make impression on the populace’,
Hume wrote, ‘drummers were placed under the scaffold, whose noise,
as he began to launch out in reflections on the government, drowned his
voice, and admonished him to temper the ardor of his zeal’. But to no avail.
‘In all his behavior, there appeared a firm and animated intrepidity; and he
considered death but as a passage to that eternal felicity, which he believed
to be prepared for him’.180 Hume went into unremitting detail when it
came to the retribution exacted in the West Country of England after
Monmouth’s failed invasion. A certain Colonel Kirke was portrayed as
ordering music to accompany the ‘dancing’ of those whose feet shook in the
agonies of death, and as first debauching a young woman in return for her
brother’s life, and then killing the brother anyway. ‘The whole country’,
Hume reported, ‘was strowed with the heads and limbs of traitors. Every
village almost beheld the dead carcass of a wretched inhabitant’.181 Most
extreme of all was Hume’s account of the Irish rebellion of 1641. ‘No age,
no sex, no condition, was spared. The wife, weeping for her butchered
husband, and embracing her helpless children, was pierced along with
them, and perished by the same stroke. . . . Even children, taught by the
example, and encouraged by the exhortation of brutal parents, essayed
their feeble blows on the dead carcasses of defenceless children of the
English’182 – and so on. Here again Hume used a dubious source without
acknowledging it, this time an inflammatory eyewitness account of the
rebellion by John Temple. Temple was infamous for accusing Charles of
having given the rebellion his support.
In these various ways Hume’s reader was encouraged, coerced even,
into a sympathetic emotional engagement with the victims of history, both
small and great. This was as prominent an aspect of Hume’s style as the
coolness with which he dissected the political illusions of both Whigs and
Tories, and the mockery with which he treated the religious principles
of both Puritans and their Church of England opponents. Perhaps Hume
believed that success as a historian could not be the result of intellectual

appreciation alone. Possibly he thought that the reader needed to have
his emotions stirred as well. Or perhaps Hume really was aiming at two
different kinds of reader: not only William Mure but also his wife. The
result, in any case, was to blur the distinction between history on the
one hand and fiction on the other. This is not to say that Hume was
guilty of making things up. Rather, it is to say that the response he seems
to have sought to excite in the reader was a complicated mixture of the
sense of having been instructed usually associated with history, and the
sense, usually associated with poetry and the novel, of having had one’s
capacity for sympathy engaged and heightened. This was not exactly a new
strategy. Something similar had been done by Clarendon. But Hume’s
contemporaries were quick to see the possibilities inherent in his way of
combining the didactic and the pathetic. It is not surprising that when a
group of London booksellers formed a plan to rush out a general history
of England before Hume’s History was able to find an English market, the
author they commissioned was the novelist Tobias Smollett.183
The first volume of The History of Great Britain was published in Novem-
ber 1754. Hume had worked very quickly indeed. The final draft had been
sent to the printers in the spring of 1754, eighteenth months after Hume
had begun on the reign of James I. Hume had contracted for the first
volume to be published by the Edinburgh bookseller Gavin Hamilton.184
Hamilton would print 2,000 copies, to be sold both in Edinburgh and in
London at a shop rented by Hamilton especially for the purpose. Hume
would be paid £400, but retained the copyright. Hamilton had in fact been
willing to offer Hume a contract for all projected volumes of the book, but
not on terms that Hume was prepared to accept. Hume’s caution turned
out to have been wise when the London booksellers combined to frus-
trate the commercial ambitions of the interloper from Edinburgh.185 The
History sold well in Scotland, to the tune of 450 copies in five weeks,
but, to Hume’s frustration, very poorly in England. In December, Hume
noted in a letter that his book had gained the attention of the weekly papers
in London, and that it was being said that he was ‘as great an atheist as
Bolingbroke; as great a Jacobite as Carte’186 – but if this was an obstacle
to his book’s selling well, it might have been expected to have been more
of an obstacle north of the border than south. Hume therefore did not
believe Hamilton’s claim that the reason for the History’s lack of success
was that ‘the cry of the clergy’ had been raised against it. By April of the
next year he had decided that the second volume should be published
by Andrew Millar, who was selling the Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects, and who, though a Scot, was well established in London. Hume
sold Millar the rights for £700, and it would be published in March 1757.
Though he was very concerned that he be a success as a historian in
Britain, Hume seems to have been equally interested in the international
fortunes of the History of Great Britain. Just as soon as he had copies of the
first volume to give away, he sent one to Le Blanc, the translator of the
Political Discourses, hoping that he would see fit to turn another of Hume’s
works into French. ‘The great curiosity of the events’, he wrote, ‘related
in this volume, embellish’d by your elegant pen, might challenge the
attention of the public’.187 Le Blanc accepted the invitation – though he
would later change his mind. Hume wrote in November 1755 that he was
‘extremely oblig’d’. Le Blanc would see that the History ‘was not intended
to please any party; & it has here been extremely run down by faction, but
it has met with such indulgence by good judges, that I have no reason to
repent of my undertaking’.188 Hume asked Le Blanc to send on a copy to
Voltaire. The History of Great Britain, we may imagine, was written with
such readers in mind.
With the second volume of the History published, Hume was left
uncertain what to do next. The original plan had been a three-volume work
that took the English story up to the accession of George I in 1714.189
Hume wrote to William Mure that he was aware that ‘going forward’
would give him a subject ‘much more interesting to us, & even . . . [to]
posterity, than any other I coud chuse’. But, Hume asked, could he be
sure that ‘there are materials for composing a just & sure history of it’?190
This was a curious question, for of course there were plenty of materials
for a historian of the period from the Revolution to the Hanoverian
succession. Hume’s worry was probably that there was in fact too much
such material, and that it had not yet been digested by other historians so
as to provide Hume with the printed sources from which he liked to work.
Going forward would therefore require time spent in the collections of
state and family papers only to be found in England, while he could go
backwards at home in Edinburgh, using the resources of the Advocates’
Library. He decided to go backwards, to the Tudors. There may have
been, in fact, more to explain this decision than the unwillingness of a
man in his late forties to change his place of habitation. In the letter of
1752 in which he explained to Smith why he had decided to begin with
James I despite the fact that the reign of Henry VII constituted the great
caesura in English history, Hume imagined that ‘The preceding events or
causes may easily be shown in a reflection or review, which may be artfully
inserted in the body of the work’.191 It is possible that Hume had come to
believe that what was responsible for the confused and contradictory state
of British politics at the start of the seventeenth century demanded more
than a ‘reflection or review’. The decay of feudalism, and the concomitant
increase of the political power of the Commons, stood to be explored in
detail, as did the related matter of the effects, intellectual, spiritual, and
material, of the English Reformation. Nor would that in the end prove
to be sufficient. It would come to seem to Hume that the Tudor period
itself required explanation, and that the story needed after all to be taken
all the way back to where English history was usually thought to begin, to
the Roman invasion of 55 BC.
7
The Completion of a History

of England
ume’s situation in edinburgh in the 1750s was a peculiar one. On

H the one hand, he had close friends among the ministers, professors,
and lawyers who were in the process of rescuing Scotland’s capital from
the fate of becoming, in the wake of the Union of 1707, just another town
in the provinces of Great Britain. They were turning it instead into a
major contributor to the European Enlightenment. And the clubs and
societies at which the Edinburgh literati discussed the latest books, and
formulated plans for the further improvement of everything from taste
to linen manufacture, generally had a place for Hume. As we saw in the
previous chapter, shortly after moving to Edinburgh in the summer of
1751, Hume was made a secretary of the Philosophical Society. In 1754, he
was one of the founding members of a new venture, the Select Society, the
purpose of which, as Adam Smith explained at its first meeting, was ‘the
pursuit of philosophical inquiry, and the improvement of the members
in the art of speaking’.1 Anything could be proposed as a subject of
debate at the Select – apart from revealed religion and Jacobitism. A year
later Hume could tell the painter Allan Ramsay, another of the founding
members, that the Select Society ‘has grown to be a national concern.
Young and old, noble and ignoble, witty and dull, laity and clergy, all
the world are ambitious of a place amongst us’.2 Hume was involved also
in the establishment in 1755 of the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging
Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture. When the Poker Club
was formed in 1762 as part of the agitation for a Scottish militia, Hume
would again be involved from the outset.3 He was an early member of
the Literary Society of Glasgow, founded in 1752, and, as we have seen,
would be told in 1763 by Thomas Reid that at the Aberdeen Philosophical
Society his company, ‘though we are all good Christians, would be more
acceptable than that of Saint Athanasius’.4
On the other hand, Hume was regularly sniped at by people who
found him intolerable because of his reputation for moral and religious
352
The Completion of a History of England 353
scepticism. In June 1754, for example, he discovered that three books

he had ordered for the Advocates Library, all French and including an
edition of La Fontaine’s Contes, had been removed from the shelves ‘as
indecent books & unworthy of a place in a learned library’.5 Hume wrote
to the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Robert Dundas of Arniston, to
tell him that this could only be ‘an insult on me’. In the same letter he
told Dundas that ‘if every book not superior in merit to La Fontaine be
expelled from the Library, I shall engage to carry away all that remains in
my pocket’.6 But Dundas sided with the Curators who had objected to the
books, and Hume came close to resigning his position as Librarian to the
Faculty in outrage at this instance of the insolence of office, ‘a particular
kind of insolence which is more provoking as it is meaner than any other’,
and which, Hume reminded Dundas, Shakespeare describes ‘as sufficient
to make those who are so unhappy as to suffer by it, seek even a voluntary
death rather than submit to it’.7 In the end, however, he decided to keep
the position, along with easy access to the books he was using for his
history of Great Britain, and saved his honour by giving the salary to his
friend, the blind poet William Blacklock.8
Part of the problem here was the fact that during the election to the
librarianship, as during the election to the Edinburgh moral philosophy
chair in 1744–5, Hume had been caught up in Scottish party politics. As
he told John Clephane at the time, Hume was the candidate of the Duke of
Argyll’s party, and the Dundas family was a power in the rival Squadrone
faction.9 The reputation Hume had for holding unconventional, if not
straightforwardly licentious, opinions meant that he could always be used
as a means of discrediting those who associated with him. This happened
again in 1755, when Hume found himself caught up in the increasingly
bitter conflict within the Church of Scotland between the ‘Moderate’
party of modernizers and the ‘Popular’ party of Calvinist traditionalists.
During the General Assembly of May 1755, Hume, along with Kames,
was proposed for censure, and possibly even excommunication, because of
writings containing ‘impious and infidel principles’ subversive of religion
and dangerous to morals. Hume’s friends among the Moderates succeeded
in fighting off this attack, and they succeeded again when the attack was
renewed the following year. Here also the real target was probably not
so much Hume himself as the party with which he was identified. The
Popular faction doubtless thought they could weaken the Moderates by
attacking Hume, for the Moderates were likely to come to Hume’s defence,
and that would make it easy to pretend that the Moderates shared, or at
least did not object to, the principles for which Hume was notorious.
It may have been the fact that he found himself caught up once more in
the conflict between the forces of modernization and the forces of reaction
that prompted Hume to choose this moment to publish ‘The Natural
History of Religion’. The ‘Natural History’ might well have seemed like
just the weapon to aim at the Calvinist enthusiasts of the Popular party.
Four Dissertations, containing the ‘Natural History’, ‘Of the Passions’,
‘Of the Standard of Taste’, and ‘Of Tragedy’, eventually came out in
early 1757. It had taken eighteen months to get the volume ready for
publication, and that had the accidental consequence of making it even
more obviously relevant to current circumstances in Scotland. For by
the winter of 1756–7 the Popular party had moved on from Hume and
Kames to John Home and his tragedy Douglas. Their campaign against
the propriety of a play written by a minister of the Church of Scotland,
and applauded by many of his friends in the Moderate party, prompted
Hume to break the habit of a lifetime and dedicate his new book to Home.
All of this must have been distracting for Hume, but it did not get in
the way of the timely completion of The History of Great Britain, nor
did it persuade him to leave Edinburgh and seek a home elsewhere. He
resigned his position at the Advocates Library in January 1757, perhaps
because the next appointee, Adam Ferguson, needed the job more than he
did.10 He continued to have access to the Library’s books, however, and
over the next four years wrote four further volumes of history, beginning
with the age of the Tudors, and then moving back to the long period from
the first Roman invasion in 55 BC to 1485. He gave these works the title
The History of England. That seemed the right title also for a collected edi-
tion of his histories, published in 1762. By then Hume was so famous, and
so rich, that he did not need to worry about what religious traditionalists
in Scotland thought of him.
Among the Moderates

In the summer of 1755, the bookseller Andrew Millar wrote to Hume
inviting him to play an unspecified role in a projected new weekly journal.
Hume declined, on the grounds that he had ‘another work in hand, which
requires great labour & care to finish’.11 The second volume of The History
of Great Britain would not be completed for almost another year. Even
so, Hume did not wholly disappoint Millar. ‘There are’, he wrote in the
same letter, ‘four short dissertations, which I have kept some years by me,
in order to polish them as much as possible’. These were ‘The Natural
History of Religion’, a rewrite of the Treatise book on the passions, the
essay ‘Of Tragedy’, and a now lost work on ‘some considerations previous
to geometry & natural philosophy’ – all of which, as we saw in Chapter 5,
may have been written at Ninewells between 1749 and 1751.12 Hume told
Millar he could have these four pieces for 50 guineas, a price sufficiently
low to ensure that there would be no long period of negotiation between
author and bookseller. The manuscript was in a good enough state for
Hume, careful though he always was about his books, to be willing to
send it to London to be printed there. Hume appears to have wanted
these ‘dissertations’ to be printed and published as quickly as possible.
He told Millar that he would like the volume to be out by the end of the
year. But why did Hume want the dissertations, written four or five years
ago, published now, in the midst of his continuing work on the history
of the Stuarts? And what was the rush? The answer to these questions is
perhaps to be found in developing tensions within the Church of Scotland,
and so also within Scottish society more generally, between the orthodox
‘Popular’ party and the modernizing faction of ‘Moderates’.13 In 1755,
Hume found himself once again caught up in this conflict, and it may
be that Hume’s decision to publish these essays should be seen as an
intervention in it, an intervention intended to further the cause of the
Moderates, several of the most prominent of whom were his friends, and
whose general approach to the problems facing contemporary Scotland
was one that Hume supported.
A month before Hume wrote to Millar about the four dissertations, the
‘Popular’ wing of the Church had launched an offensive against Hume
himself, and also against Kames, another close associate of the Mod-
erates.14 On 23 May, John Bonar, minister of Cockpen in Midlothian,
published An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments contained in
the Writings of Sopho [i.e., Kames], and David Hume, Esq. Drawing on
all of Hume’s published writings, Bonar claimed that Hume intended to
subvert moral distinctions, reduce justice to public advantage, encourage
adultery, condemn all religion as either superstition or enthusiasm, attack
the very idea of divine revelation, and encourage Popery by presenting
the Reformation as ‘only the work of madmen and enthusiasts’.15 The
Analysis was published in Edinburgh on the second day of the annual
session of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. It was meant

to inspire the Assembly to take action against Hume and Kames. Both,
Bonar concluded, ‘deserve the very highest censure of the church’16 – that
is, they deserved excommunication.17 Hume’s and Kames’s friends in the
Church succeeded in watering the censure down to a general announce-
ment of the Assembly’s ‘utmost abhorrence of those impious and infidel
principles which are subversive of all religion natural and revealed and
have such pernicious influence on life and morals’.18 Bonar and his allies
made it clear that this was not the end of the matter. Their campaign
against infidel writings would continue, and it may be that it was knowing
this that prompted Hume to think of publishing an attack on precisely the
kind of religion that animated such persecution. ‘The Natural History of
Religion’ was far too short to appear by itself, and the other three disser-
tations were probably in the first instance a means of bulking the volume
out – though, as we will see, the piece on tragedy would in the end also
be relevant to the circumstances of the volume’s publication.19
Hume was more amused than anything else by the events of May 1755 –
‘my damnation is postponed for a twelevemonth’, he wrote to Ramsay20 –
and it is not clear what formal condemnation would have meant for him,
apart from some social awkwardness.21 But he would have known that
prosecuting him was not the most important thing so far as the Ortho-
dox were concerned. He and Kames were symptoms of a larger and even
more pernicious problem. They had acquired their reputations as writ-
ers through the encouragement of a Moderate party that was growing
increasingly active and increasingly powerful. Attacking them was a way
of discrediting those who had feted their books. It was an assault upon
‘Moderatism’ in toto. The Orthodox had been making it clear for some
time how much they detested Scotland’s new culture of politeness and
literature. The year 1753 had seen the publication of John Witherspoon’s
satire on the principles of moderation, Ecclesiastical Characteristics, and
also George Anderson’s first attack on Kames and Hume, An Estimate of
the Profit and Loss of Religion, Personally and Publicly Stated. Anderson –
in Hume’s words, ‘the godly, spiteful, pious, splenetic, charitable, unre-
lenting, meek, persecuting, Christian, inhuman, peace-making, furious
Anderson’22 – was one of the leaders of the Popular party’s campaign
against Moderatism in the following years. In June 1755, Hugh Blair
replied to Bonar’s Analysis, defending ‘freedom of inquiry and debate’
as the means by which the Church of Scotland had originally been
established, and arguing that the proper object of the clergy’s concern
was ‘not freedom of thought, but licentiousness of action’.23 In May of
the next year, just as the General Assembly gathered again in Edinburgh,
Anderson responded in turn with Infidelity a Proper Object of Censure,
rejecting Blair’s ‘pompous encomium upon freedom of enquiry’ along
with his defence of ‘conceited little sceptics’24 , and arguing that Scrip-
ture was the proper determinant of what is and is not the proper object
of church censure. The Church was required by Scripture to exert its
utmost efforts against erroneous speculation, ‘and the rulers thereof are
themselves pronounced criminal, if they do not inflict the highest degree
of censure upon such false teachers, as betrayers of the trust committed
to them, and becoming thereby art and part [sic] in the destruction of
immortal souls, which may perish thro’ their negligence’.25
The whole idea of making Edinburgh, along with the rest of Scotland, a
participant in the European project that we now call ‘The Enlightenment’
was regarded with suspicion by the Popular party. In the summer of 1755,
there had appeared a new journal called The Edinburgh Review, intended
‘to lay before the public, from time to time, a view of the progressive state
of learning in this country’ by giving ‘a full account of all books published
in Scotland within the compass of half a year’, along with ‘some notice of
such books published elsewhere, as are most read in this country, or seem
to have any title to draw the public attention’.26 Only two issues of the
journal appeared, and the number of distinguished Scottish publications
reviewed was not large. In the first issue Hutcheson’s System of Moral
Philosophy was considered at length, and so also was a history of Peter
the Great by Alexander Gordon of Auchintoul. Sermons and summary
accounts of laws and statutes took up the rest of the space, along with a
review of A New and Easy Method of Cookery by Elizabeth Cleland, and
also a critical discussion of Johnson’s Dictionary. The most notable item
in the second issue was an anonymous letter to the editors of the Review,
written by Adam Smith, enjoining them to take notice also of publications
in Europe that ‘have yet a chance of being remembered for thirty or forty
years to come, and seem in the mean time to add something to that stock
of literary amusement with which the world is at present provided’.27
Smith showed especial interest in ‘the late Discourse upon the origin
and foundation of the inequality amongst mankind by Mr. Rousseau
of Geneva’, and provided a detailed analysis of Rousseau’s argument,
including its debts to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.28 Hume does not
seem to have been involved in The Edinburgh Review.29 It was the work
principally of Hugh Blair, John Jardine, William Robertson, James Russel,
Alexander Wedderburn, and Adam Smith. And it was not welcomed
by the orthodox. A sermon by Edward Johnston, minister at Moffat in
Dumfriesshire, had been reviewed in the second number, and dismissed
as riddled with ‘obscurity and affectation’.30 Johnston replied with A View
of The Edinburgh Review, Pointing out the Spirit and Tendency of that Paper,
published, like Anderson’s Infidelity a Proper Object of Censure, just as the
General Assembly met in May 1756. His overall judgement was that the
design of the authors of the Review appeared ‘rather to be detrimental than
subservient to the interests of learning and religion’, in so far as the authors
dared ‘to dictate, and advise, nay even to admonish and rebuke; which
things they have always done with very great appearance of authority, but
seldom, or ever, with either long-suffering or doctrine’.31 The allusion was
to 2 Timothy 4:2: ‘Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season;
reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.’
It must have seemed to Hume in 1755–6 that much of what he val-
ued about life in Edinburgh was under attack. Freedom of debate and
refinement of taste, the opening up of Scotland to English and Euro-
pean ideas – a general and steady move away from the narrow religious,
moral, and political obsessions hitherto endemic to Scottish culture – all
of this was being maligned by men whose wish seemed to be to drag the
country backwards to the dark days when all that mattered in Scotland
was the intensity of one’s commitment to the supposed covenant between
nation and God. Publishing ‘The Natural History of Religion’ might have
seemed to Hume a way of taking the fight to the enemy. It turned the
charge of immorality against men like Bonar and Anderson. It deplored
many of the doctrines of the orthodox, most obviously the doctrine of pre-
destination, but also the whole idea that there could be something other
to true religion than virtue and good works. In the context of Scotland
in the mid-1750s, it could be expected to be read as an argument that
so-called orthodoxy was in fact just another form of corruption of ‘true
religion’. Of course, the orthodox themselves would take it to be merely
one more impious assault on religion as such from the pen of one who was
supposed to hold that religion was always and everywhere morally and
intellectually degenerate. But converting the orthodox was not Hume’s
intention. The point of publishing the ‘Natural History’ might rather
have been to give the public at large a new way of looking at the conflict
between the two parties. Hume may also have intended to provide the
Moderates themselves with a means of setting their current situation in
long-term historical perspective. It was surely not meant to offend every
reader with sincere religious beliefs. It is more probable that it was meant
to sharpen the contrast between absurdity and depravity on the one hand
and a religion of virtue and minimal doctrinal commitment on the other.
Hume’s desire to have his volume of dissertations published at the
beginning of 1756 was to be frustrated. In a letter to Strahan written in 1772
Hume would recount that while it was being prepared for publication,
he was convinced by the mathematically gifted Lord Stanhope that there
was a problem with the dissertation on ‘the metaphisical principles of
geometry’ so serious that it could not be published.32 The three pieces
that remained were too short to make up a volume, and in order to make
publication worthwhile for Millar, Hume decided to add two essays which,
so he told Strahan, ‘I had never intended to have publishd’. These were
essays entitled ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’. We do
not know when they were written. There exists a copy of the Dissertations
with these essays bound in the form in which they were to be printed, as
the fourth and fifth items in the volume.33 Reading them in this context
makes it easier to discern ways in which they might have been, not only a
way of bulking out the book, but also an extension of the argument of ‘The
Natural History of Religion’. Superstition and the way it increases human
unhappiness was the main concern of ‘Of Suicide’.34 ‘One considerable
advantage, that arises from philosophy’, the essay began, ‘consists in the
sovereign antidote, which it affords to superstition and false religion’.35
‘All other remedies against that pestilential distemper are vain, or, at least,
uncertain’, Hume continued, including plain good sense, experience, and
even gaiety and sweetness of temper. If it is correct to read the ‘Natural
History’ as identifying the religion of the Scottish Popular Party as a form
of superstition, then here in ‘Of Suicide’ Hume was in effect presenting
himself, qua philosopher, as a means whereby religion in Scotland might
be purified. The prohibition against suicide was a prime example of the
way in which religion can be perverted so as to turn morality against
nature. For it was obvious that nature has given us the means to end
pain and sorrow when they grow too great to bear. It is only superstition
that prevents us from making use of an ability that we have, and that
animals, for example, lack. What philosophical argument was able to do
was show that there is no means of giving the prohibition against suicide a
reasoned justification: that, in other words, there is no sense in which it is

a transgression of our duty to either God, our neighbour, or ourselves.36
Hume must have known that this kind of thing would enrage his oppo-
nents in the Popular Party, and that it would be represented as positively
encouraging people to commit suicide whenever life grew difficult.37 He
would have known also that it would make his friends and apologists
among the Moderates nervous at the very least. A defence of suicide
pushed at the boundaries of what even the most liberal Scottish minister
could have allowed as the right to freedom of thought and expression.
Hume’s decision to publish the essay in the aftermath of the fuss in the
General Assembly of May 1755 looks like a further example of his lack of
sensitivity as regards what was called for in the way of tact and delicacy by
the circumstances in which his Moderate friends found themselves. The
topic of ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ was also the role of philosophy
in religious matters, and the boundary between what reasoned argument
can establish and what it cannot. In this case, though, the important
distinction was not between philosophy and superstition, but between
philosophy and the domain of revelation and faith. Most of the essay was
taken up with a comprehensive refutation of all purported proofs that the
soul survives the death of the body, whether those proofs were metaphys-
ical, and derived from the supposed impossibility of thought belonging
to a material substance, or moral, and derived from God’s justice and the
need to punish the vicious and reward the virtuous. Neither metaphysics
nor the morality of ordinary human sentiment provided reasons to believe
in the immortality of the soul. The only real basis for argument on the
topic was the ‘physical’ question of what is suggested by ‘the analogy
of nature’. ‘Nothing in this world is perpetual’, Hume observed. ‘Every
being, however seemingly firm, is in continual flux and change: The world
itself gives symptoms of frailty and dissolution: How contrary to analogy,
therefore, to imagine, that one single form, seemingly the frailest of any,
and subject to the greatest disorders, is immortal and indissoluble!’38
As in the treatment of miracles in the Philosophical Essays, a very brief
final paragraph represented itself as drawing the sceptical sting from the
essay’s argument. ‘Nothing could set in a fuller light the infinite obli-
gations, which mankind have to divine revelation’, Hume wrote, ‘since
no other medium could ascertain this great and important truth’.39 This
was less blatantly controversial than the conclusion of ‘Of Suicide’, but it
was provocative none the less. Five lines on our obligations to revelation
were balanced against fifteen pages on the impossibility of rational belief

in a fundamental principle of the Christian religion. It would be very easy
indeed for Hume’s reader to take those final five lines as rather less than
sincere.
In 1772, Hume told Strahan that in the end he suppressed the essays on
suicide and the immortality of the soul ‘from my abundant prudence’.40
We can be fairly sure that, had they known of Hume’s plan to publish
them at this juncture, Hume’s friends among the Scottish Moderates
would have done their best to persuade him to come up with another
way of satisfying Millar’s need for a longer volume. There appears to
have been still another reason not to publish them in the form of the
threat of the prosecution of Millar for blasphemy in London. Millar no
doubt circulated pre-publication copies of Five Dissertations, and one of
them got into the hands of someone – possibly the Attorney General,
William Murray – who told Millar that he would face legal proceedings if
he published Hume’s new book. Exactly what form this threat took, how
serious it was, and what was Millar’s response to it, is unknown.41 Millar
had published Bolingbroke’s posthumous works and was probably not
much disposed to be frightened by the prospect of controversy. It is not
likely, though, that Hume would have wanted the two essays published if
they were likely to cause serious difficulties for his main bookseller. And,
in general, he was not disposed to seek trouble over religion for the sake
of it. At what must have been almost exactly the same time, in early 1756,
Hume was criticized in print by a member of the Popular Party, Daniel
Macqueen, for his representation of the Reformation in the first volume
of The History of Great Britain. This was a prime example, Macqueen
asserted, of ‘impiety covered with a thin veil’, ‘an attempt, a weak and
foolish one indeed, to resolve all piety into superstition or enthusiasm, that
it may thus be exposed to reproach and ridicule’.42 Hume’s response, as
we saw in the previous chapter, was simply to cut out the passage that had
given most offence from the second (1759) edition of the History – along
with his equally acerbic summary of the principles of Roman Catholicism.
He was well aware of the capacity of religious dispute to prevent proper
consideration of the full extent of what he wanted to say.43
In May 1756, the Popular party tried and failed again to persuade the
General Assembly to prosecute Hume for blasphemy.44 This no doubt
strengthened Hume’s resolve to have the ‘Natural History’ published.
But now there was once more a need to add to the length of the volume
in which it would appear, and Hume wrote the essay ‘Of the Standard of
Taste’ in order to supply this need.45 It developed naturally out of some
remarks in the dissertation ‘Of the Passions’ on the definition of wit. ‘It
is by taste alone we can decide concerning [wit]’, Hume asserted, ‘nor
are we possest of any other standard, by which we can form a judgment
of this nature’. But what is taste? ‘It is plainly nothing but a sensation of
pleasure from true wit, and of disgust from false, without our being able
to tell the reason of that satisfaction or uneasiness’.46 And, Hume claimed,
philosophy tells us that ‘all sentiment is right’ – ‘because sentiment has
a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man
is conscious of it’.47 The natural conclusion to draw was that it is true
that, as the cliché has it, there is no arguing about matters of taste. Yet
this is not what we generally believe. While it might be accepted that,
to use an example that Hume himself showed an interest in, there is
no way of settling whether or not claret is better than port,48 whoever
claimed that in the same way there is no difference in quality between
writers, or painters, or composers, would fly in the face of common sense.
Someone who asserted that a very minor poet such as John Ogilby was as
good as Milton would, in Hume’s words, ‘be thought to defend no less
an extravagance, than if he had maintained a molehill to be as high as
Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean’.49 What Hume set out to
do, then, in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ was explain how it is that there
are universally accepted to be means of distinguishing between good taste
and bad even though, strictly speaking, there is no way of judging any
sentiment right or wrong in respect of its cause. Hume’s explanation was
couched in terms of rules which good art obeys, and gives us pleasure as
a result, and which bad art flouts, and so causes us pain. Of course, it is a
matter of common experience that people are not equally sensitive to all
the ways in which the rules may be followed or violated. But, Hume
argued, it is equally obvious from experience that we accept there to
be some individuals so delicately sensitive that they are able to register
differences of merit that the majority do not discern. In the sensibilities
of these ‘true judges’ lies the ultimate standard of taste.
Taste would in all likelihood have been a major concern of the projected
but unwritten book of the Treatise of Human Nature on criticism. What
got him thinking about it again was probably a prize for the best essay on
taste offered for the first time in 1755 by the Edinburgh Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, and Manufactures, and Agriculture.
As we have seen, Hume was involved in the setting up of this offshoot
of the Select Society, and it is likely that he was involved also in the
judging of submissions for the prize. There was no winner in 1755, but
the next year the judges gave it to Alexander Gerard, Professor of Moral
Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Gerard’s Essay
on Taste was published in 1759 – having been seen through the press by
Hume.50 Gerard’s theory of taste is confessedly influenced by Hutcheson’s
Inquiry, and, like Hutcheson, he anchored a distinction between correct
and incorrect taste in the fit between taste and properties actually possessed
by the object approved of. ‘[T]rue taste’, according to Gerard, ‘always
implies a quick and accurate perception of things as they really are’.51
Good taste, in other words, necessarily involved judgement in addition to
delicacy of sensation. ‘Correctness of taste’, Gerard argued, ‘preserves
us from approving or disapproving any objects, but such as possess the
qualities, which render them really laudable or blameable; and enables us
to distinguish these qualities with accuracy from others, however similar,
and to see through the most artful disguise that can be thrown upon
them’.52 Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ can be understood as an
argument to the effect that this was the wrong way of developing the
Hutchesonian theory of taste. To appeal to an internal sense as the source
of our ideas of beauty was, according to Hume, to have to give up on the
possibility of understanding correctness of taste in terms of the match
between sensations of pleasure and pain and what causes them. The right
place to look for a means of distinguishing between good and bad taste was
not among the qualities possessed by the objects that excite the pleasures
and pains of (what we would now call) aesthetic appreciation, but rather
in those pleasures and pains themselves, or rather, in the sentiments
that a general survey of human response to art shows to be rooted in
human nature as such. We understand taste, according to Hume, when
we understand ‘the durable admiration, which attends those works, that
have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of
caprice and envy’.53 The standard of taste lay in the ‘sound’ state of the
human mind, identifiable in terms of the ‘entire or considerable uniformity
of sentiment among men’ concerning beauty and deformity.54 The ‘true
judge’ was one whose mind is unclouded by prejudice, and who is able
to consider a work of art ‘as a man in general’, forgetful of his ‘individual
being and . . . peculiar circumstances’.55
The circumstances in which ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ was composed
make it less than surprising that the essay ended with a reflection upon
how the religious sentiments expressed in works of art are sometimes
so perverted by bigotry and superstition as to overcome the convention

that in art ‘speculative errors’ are generally excusable. While it is possible
for a work to be so morally outrageous as to be impossible to enjoy,
Hume noted, it is usually the case that the religious principles expressed
by literary characters, no matter how absurd, do not get in the way of
artistic appreciation. So much was made obvious by the modern age’s
susceptibility to the poetry of the ancients. But there were some tenets of
religion that could not but disfigure a work of art. The example Hume
gave was the violent intolerance of Catholicism, its tendency to ‘represent
all pagans, mahometans, and heretics as the objects of divine wrath and
vengeance’.56 He left it to the reader to consider whether other kinds of
Christianity, the Protestantism of the Popular party for instance, might
not be animated by the same bigotry, and whether works of art that
expressed the spirit of those kinds of Christianity would not be as plainly
disfigured as some recent French tragedies. This sounds like a plea on
Hume’s part for recognition of a certain amount of independence for the
sphere of art from that of religion, and it may have been made out of a
premonition that trouble was brewing in Scotland about the new proclivity
for the polite arts, and for drama in particular. In October 1754, Hume
had read a draft of a tragedy by John Home in which, Hume claimed,
the author ‘appears a true disciple of Sophocles and Racine’, so much so
that there was hope that he would ‘vindicate the English stage from the
reproach of barbarism’.57 The play was to be titled Douglas.58 Early the
next year Home went to London to try to get David Garrick to put it on
in his theatre there. Garrick was not interested. Home then rewrote it and
in the spring of 1756 tried Garrick again. For the second time Garrick
turned it down, and so Home decided to stage Douglas in Edinburgh.
Home’s friends among the Moderate faction of the Church of Scotland
enthusiastically took up the project. Drafts of the play were discussed at
the Select Society, and, so the story goes, there were rehearsals where
the actors included Hume, Home himself, Robertson, and Ferguson, and
where among the audience were Lords Kames, Elibank, Monboddo, and
Milton. It was inevitable that the backing by the Moderates of the staging
of a play in Edinburgh by one of their own number would provoke a
response from the Popular party. The men of the Popular party regarded
theatre as such as irreligious. Back in 1733 George Anderson had argued
that the stage was an ‘unchristian diversion’, condemned as sinful in the
Gospel by St Paul in his general prohibition of ‘revelling’.59 Douglas thus
presented another opportunity for an organized confrontation between

two visions of Scottish culture and the place of religion within it, one
which sought to be true to the values of the Covenanting past, another
which looked forward to a more complete integration of Scotland into a
polite and tolerant Great Britain.
This development may have caused Hume to see his collection of dis-
sertations, which had, after all, from the first included a discussion of
tragedy and which in its final version also comprised a discussion of liter-
ary taste, as even more relevant to the Scotland of the day. Douglas had its
first performance on 14 December 1756, and was a great success. It played
to a packed house even on a Sunday, and ministers were among those who
thronged to see it. The Popular response was immediate and aggressive.
The Edinburgh Presbytery ordered an ‘admonition and exhortation’ to
be read in every church, in which it was demanded that teachers, parents,
and masters of families should ‘walk worthy of the vocation wherewith
they are called, by shewing a sacred regard to the Lord’s Day, and all the
ordinances of divine institution; and by discouraging, in their respective
spheres, the illegal and dangerous entertainments of the stage’.60 One
minister was suspended for three weeks for having gone to see Douglas,
and moves were made to discipline others, including Alexander Carlyle.
John Home himself was put under particular pressure, though his friends
in the Edinburgh Presbytery were able to prevent the active taking of mea-
sures against him. Hume’s Four Dissertations was ready for publication by
early January 1757, and the circumstances prompted him to dedicate the
volume to the author of Douglas. The dedication Hume composed – the
only one he ever wrote – was further testimony to the value he attached
to freedom of thought, and to freedom of discussion among those who,
like this author and his dedicatee, disagreed in their ‘speculative tenets’.
‘These differences of opinion I have only found to enliven our conversa-
tion’, Hume declared; ‘while our common passion for science and letters
served as cement to our friendship’.61 Hume affirmed his esteem and
affection for Home, as well as his approval of Home’s play, the success
of which proved ‘that you possess the true theatric genius of Shakespear
and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licen-
tiousness of the other’.62 ‘I am sure I never executed any thing’, Hume
boasted to Mure, ‘which was either more elegant in the composition, or
more generous in the intention’.63 Home welcomed his friend’s support,
but, perhaps not surprisingly, some among the Moderates worried that
such backing from someone with Hume’s reputation among the Popular
party was not likely to remedy Home’s situation, nor aid the cause of the
Moderates in general. They persuaded Hume to withdraw the dedication.
Hume then changed his mind, but not before eight hundred copies of the
Dissertations had been sold, ‘without that dedication, whence, I imagin’d,
my friend wou’d reap some advantage, & myself so much honor’. ‘I have
not been so heartily vexd at any accident of a long time’, he admitted.64
The dedication was reinstated, and also printed in a number of the weekly
papers. The Popular party was not slow to capitalize on the connection
between the minister and the sceptic. The climax of Douglas saw the sui-
cide of the hero’s mother. One of the many pamphlets which attacked
the play gleefully drew attention to the way Home ‘sets forth, not for
caution, but rather for example, the cursed principles and doctrine of
his intimate acquaintance and beloved friend, David Home [sic] the
Infidel, concerning the warrantableness of self-murder’.65 Somehow,
clearly, Hume’s essay on suicide had become fairly widely known despite
being suppressed by its author.
Argument about Douglas continued in Scotland for several months,
ending in victory for the Moderates at the General Assembly of 1757, in
the form of the passing of only the mildest of injunctions that ministers
should not attend theatrical performances in the future.66 The play had
by this time already been put on successfully in London as well, and
Home would soon resign his position at Athelstaneford, to become private
secretary to the Earl of Bute and tutor to the Prince of Wales. Hume saw
the reception of Douglas in London as a triumph for the neo-classicism
he took Home’s work to be imbued with. ‘Simplicity of fable and style’
would be ‘novelties’ on the English stage, he wrote to Strahan, ‘but they
must prevail, I think, at last’.67 The ‘reproach of barbarism’ that had been
levelled at English drama was a French reproach, and in part what Hume
celebrated was the victory of French literary principles over English. He
told Smith that he believed Douglas ‘will be esteemed the best; & by
French critics, the only tragedy of our language’.68 Hume also felt that
with Douglas Scotland was at last coming into her own as a cultural force
in Britain. In May 1757 he wrote to Millar and Strahan about ‘a new epic
poem that is to be published this week in Edinburgh’, The Epigoniad by
the minister William Wilkie. ‘It is a production of great genius’, he told
them.69 Two months later he wrote to Elliot expressing the hope that
Wilkie’s poem ‘will soon become a subject of conversation in London’.
In the same letter Hume mentioned that William Robertson’s History of

Scotland would be published the next winter. ‘[R]eally it is admirable how
many men of genius this country produces at present’, he continued. ‘Is it
not strange that, at a time when we have lost our princes, our parliaments,
our independent government, even the presence of our chief nobility,
are unhappy, in our accent & pronunciation, speak a very corrupt dialect
of the tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in
these circumstances, we shou’d really be the people most distinguish’d
for literature in Europe?’70
As often in his letters, Hume was surely and self-consciously exaggerat-
ing for ironic effect here. He is most unlikely to have thought that in 1757
Scotland was more distinguished in its literature than France. Neverthe-
less, he was giving voice to a sentiment that would soon become familiar,
even if never uncontroversial, not only in Scotland but in England too. On
the same day that Hume wrote to Elliot about Wilkie, Alexander Wed-
derburn wrote to a friend in London that ‘The most agreable prospect in
this country arises from men of letters’, instancing the achievements, past
or imminent, of Robertson, Home, Ferguson, Wilkie, Smith, Kames, and
Hume.71 A year later Horace Walpole declared that Scotland was ‘the most
accomplished nation in Europe; the nation to which, if any one country
is endowed with a superior partition of sense, I should be inclined to give
the preference in that particular’.72 Home’s success with Douglas, and the
ensuing general access of Scottish literary self-confidence, set the scene
for the cause célèbre that would go by the name of ‘Ossian’. It was now
possible to believe that Scotland had an epic poet to rival Homer – and in
1759 James Macpherson set out to convince his countrymen the works of
such a poet, named Ossian, were general knowledge among the people of
the Highlands.73
In February 1757, when Four Dissertations was published, Macpherson
was still only the obscure tutor to the son of the laird of Balgowan. Hume’s
letters of the time make it clear that, despite the difficulties met with by
the Dissertations, his main concern was the History of Great Britain, and
especially with transferring the copyright from Hamilton to Millar, so as
to clear the way for a new edition of the first volume that would not be
encumbered by the hostility of London booksellers to Scottish incursions
on their trade. The Dissertations was published in London, but it does not
seem that Hume was much concerned with its reception there. ‘I wont
trouble you to send copies of such a trifle to any body in London’, he wrote
to Millar.74 He called it a ‘trifle’ again when he sent a copy to Smith.75

The Dissertations was a book for an Edinburgh audience, occasioned by
Edinburgh controversies. The letters that survive suggest that, in the
circumstances of the furore over Douglas, Hume regarded the dedication
as the most important thing about the book. But this did not mean that
its contents were ephemeral and without significance for the development
of Hume’s philosophical oeuvre. In the spring of 1758 Strahan printed
up a new edition of the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, this time
as a single quarto volume, and all of the four pieces published in the
Dissertations were included, albeit separated from each other, and out of
order. ‘Of Tragedy’ and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ were now included in
Part I of Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. The ‘Dissertation on the
Passions’ was put between An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,
as the Philosophical Essays was now called, and the Enquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals. It took up a mere twenty pages, and in the table
of contents its title was no more prominent than that of the ‘Dialogue’
that came after the second Enquiry. The ‘Natural History of Religion’
ended the volume, and it would remain the final piece of all subsequent
editions of the Essays and Treatises. The last word of Hume’s collected
philosophical works thus became the contrast set up in the conclusion
of the ‘Natural History’ between the quarrelling of different species of
superstition, and ‘the calm, tho’ obscure, regions of philosophy’.76
On Tudor Despotism
In September 1757 Hume asked Andrew Millar how soon there might be
a new edition of The History of Great Britain.77 Six months later Hume
wrote to say that, despite the success of Smollett’s recently published
History of England, he was hoping there would be a new edition of his his-
tory of the Stuarts by the autumn.78 An agreement was reached between
author and bookseller during the early summer. Hume would receive
800 guineas (£840) for the rights to the new edition. He sent William
Strahan, Millar’s printer, a corrected copy of the second volume in June.
The alterations were, he told Strahan, ‘not very considerable’. Those that
would have to be made to the first volume were more so, ‘particularly in
the reign of James’, which needed to be changed in many places in order
to ‘adjust’ it to the new book that Hume was writing on the history of
the Tudors.79 Even so, the corrections to the first volume were sent to
Strahan in August.80 Hume later told William Robertson that in this new
edition of his history of the Stuarts he had removed what he had come to
think of as an excess of ‘digressions and reflections’.81 One digression and
reflection dropped from the new edition was the passage characterizing
the Protestant reformers that had been criticized by Daniel Macqueen
in his Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain.82 Another was a
description of how ‘protestant fanaticism’ had delayed the improvement
of the arts and sciences in sixteenth-century Scotland.83 In other places
Hume turned his more analytical passages into footnotes. This was the
fate of the exercise in ‘the philosophy of government’ prompted by the
dissolution of parliament in 1640,84 and of the claim that the parliamentary
leaders of 1642 were ‘generally speaking, the dupes of their own zeal’.85
The same desire to separate out the narrative proper from Hume’s reflec-
tions upon the nature of underlying political principles was presumably
responsible for the decision to turn the final chapter of the account of
the reign of James I, with its general assessment of civil and ecclesiasti-
cal government, and of manners, finances, commerce, and so on, into an
‘Appendix’.86 Another important alteration was the adding of some of the
‘authorities’ that he had usually refrained from citing in the first edition,
in imitation, so he told Horace Walpole, of the modern Italian histori-
ans.87 Even now, however, Hume was apparently determined to wear his
learning lightly. Footnotes identifying his sources remained few and far
between. Many were references to the collections of documents edited
by Rushworth, Rymer, and Whitlocke. The extent of Hume’s debt to
Clarendon – a history, as Hume himself put it, ‘composed in vindication
of the King’s measures and character’88 – was made more explicit. A full
acknowledgement of the sources used would, however, have to wait until
the new edition prepared for the complete History of England published
in 1762.
In ‘My Own Life’ Hume would claim that the alterations that further
reading, study, and reflection had prompted him to make to his account
of the early Stuarts were ‘invariably to the Tory side’. He added that ‘It
is ridiculous to consider the English constitution before this period as a
regular plan of liberty’.89 In 1763, Hume told Gilbert Elliot that in the
second edition he had corrected at least some – though not all – of the
mistakes and oversights arising from ‘the plaguy prejudices of Whiggism,
with which I was too much infected when I began this work’.90 Immersion
in the Tudor period had strengthened Hume’s sense of the continuities of
the ideas of the Stuart kings with how England had actually been ruled in
the sixteenth century. Thus he added to a footnote early on in the reign of
James I the assertion that ‘They were the princes of the house of Tudor
chiefly, who introduced that administration, which had the appearance
of absolute government’.91 Absolutism was a Tudor, not a Stuart, inno-
vation. In 1754 Hume had claimed that when Charles I appealed to ‘the
pretext of ancient precedents’ to justify his financial measures after the dis-
solution of parliament in 1626, ‘the veil could not possibly be thiner [sic]
and more transparent’.92 In the second edition Hume’s position was that
ancient precedents ‘considering the great authority commonly enjoyed by
[Charles’s] predecessors, could not be wanting to him’.93 A reference on
the next page of the 1754 edition to Charles’s ‘speculative despotism’ and
‘civil tyranny’ was removed. Charles was no longer described as having
treated England ‘like a conquered province’. Instead he was ‘instigated
by anger and necessity’.94 The courtiers and ecclesiastics who supported
Charles in 1727 were no longer ‘prostituted’ and ‘bigotted’. A paragraph
on ‘these mighty stretches of prerogative, which tore and disjointed the
whole fabric of government, and exhausted all the force of [Charles’s]
authority’ was excised.95 Yet it is not true that every alteration made was
to the Tory side. Hume’s toning down of his treatment of Protestant
enthusiasm could be seen as a partial mitigation of his support for the
Stuarts, or at least as a mitigation of his hostility to their opponents. In
‘My Own Life’, and in his letters, Hume had a tendency to exaggerate
the anti-Whig tendencies of his history, presumably to emphasize his
independence from the party that was, as he put it in ‘My Own Life’, ‘in
possession of bestowing all places, both in the state and in literature’.96
Impartiality remained his guiding principle in the second edition of The
History of Great Britain. It was put on sale by Millar in 1759.
Work on the Tudors, meanwhile, had begun in early 1757. 97 By August
of that year he was able to tell Gilbert Elliot that he was ‘some years
advanc’d in Henry the 8th’ and was about ‘to begin the Reformation’.98
Less than a year later, in May 1758, he informed Elliot that he was ‘come
within sight of land, & and am drawing near the period of that volume
which I had undertaken’.99 In June he was ‘nearly finishd’, and in July
he was negotiating with Millar about the sale price of The History of
England, under the House of Tudor.100 The manuscript was sent to Strahan
for printing on 15 September. Hume followed it to London a few weeks
later, and did the checking of the proofs there. The book was ‘nearly
printed out’ by the middle of January 1759, and went on sale in March.
At this point The History of England and The History of Great Britain were
different works in Hume’s mind, but still he conceived of the former as, in
part at least, a means of substantiating the argument of the latter. We saw
in the previous chapter that when he first thought seriously of writing an
English history, he had entertained the idea of beginning with the reign of
Henry VII, and in 1757 he was already wishing that that was what he had
done. The accession of the House of Tudor ‘is really the commencement
of modern history’, he told Strahan; ‘and I shoud have obviated many
objections to my history of the Stuarts, by taking matters so high’.101 He
felt the same way when the new book was finished. ‘You will see what
light and force this history of the Tudors bestows on that of the Stuarts’,
he wrote in a letter to Robertson. ‘Had I been prudent I should have
begun with it. I care not to boast, but I will venture to say, that I have now
effectually stopped the mouths of all those villainous Whigs who railed at
me’.102
What Hume thought would silence his Whig critics was a complete
demonstration of continuities aligning the government of the early Stuarts
with the government of the Tudors, continuities as regards both exercises
of prerogative on the part of monarchs and general opinion concerning
the legitimacy of those exercises of royal prerogative. The theories of
James I and Charles I concerning the extent of royal authority really were
in accord with the practice of their Tudor antecedents. And given how
acquiescent people and parliament had been under the Tudors, the early
Stuarts had no reason to expect that their actions would offend their
English subjects. Hume’s account of the reign of Elizabeth was especially
important to establishing these continuities. It was generally accepted that
Henry VII and, especially, Henry VIII were tyrants. The reign of Edward
VI had been too brief to change things for the better, and the reign of Mary
was stained with the blood of Protestant martyrs. But under Elizabeth, as
Rapin had put it, the English ‘were the happiest people under the sun’,
for ‘[t]hey saw no designs upon their liberties, nor any infringements
upon their privileges encouraged’.103 Bolingbroke had adopted the Whig
view of Elizabeth when he had discerned in her reign the beginnings of
an independent House of Commons and of a limited monarchy. ‘Thus
were we brought back’, Bolingbroke claimed, ‘in times very different and
in circumstances very different, to the principles of government, which
had prevail’d amongst our Saxon ancestors’.104 Hume, by contrast, like
Hervey and William Guthrie, characterized Elizabeth as no less a tyrant

than her father and grandfather. It could be said that hers was an age of
felicity of glory, but not that it was an age of liberty. A ‘tender regard
for the constitution, and . . . concern for the liberties and privileges of her
people’ was ‘a quality which, of all others, she was the least possest of’.105
On the contrary, ‘the most absolute authority of the sovereign’ was visible
in ‘above twenty branches of the prerogative, which are now abolished,
and which were, every one of them, totally incompatible with the liberty
of the subject’.106 Under Elizabeth, according to Hume, the English were
no more than well-treated slaves.
What was more, they, or at least their representatives in the Commons,
were slaves who failed to want to be anything other than slaves. Elizabeth’s
parliaments were so tame and submissive that their language could be
said to be, so Hume said in an ostentatiously memorable phrase, ‘more
worthy of a Turkish divan than of an English house of commons’.107
Time and again Elizabeth made it clear that in her opinion parliaments
had no business discussing matters either of state or of religion. It was
an established rule that parliament might not abridge, or even so much
as question, the prerogatives of the crown. The office of parliament had
to do with such things as ‘directions for the due tanning of leather, or
milling of cloth; for the preservation of pheasants and partridges; for the
reparation of bridges and highways; for the punishment of vagabonds or
common beggars’.108 Parliament was also, of course, expected to grant
subsidies, and to comply with the royal will in passing bills of attainder
against those who had fallen out of the queen’s favour. Such treatment of
parliament did nothing to reduce Elizabeth’s popularity, because, as Hume
put it, ‘the maxims of her reign were conformable to the principles of the
times, and to the opinion which was generally entertained with regard
to the constitution’.109 Hume emphasized the servility of parliaments
not just under Elizabeth but in the Tudor period taken as a whole. The
accession of Henry VII was properly regarded as ‘a kind of epoch in the
English constitution’.110 Henry sought systematically to shift power away
from the nobility and towards the crown. This removed the traditional
counterweight to royal power, and left the people with no barrier between
them and the king. The feudal system was in the process ‘turned into
a scheme of oppression’.111 The ultimate result of the Tudor assault on
the nobility would be another epoch in the constitution, in the form of
1688’s transfer of powers from crown to people, but there was little sign
of such a thing for the entirety of the sixteenth century. In the interval
between the fall of the nobles and the rise of the commons, ‘the sovereign
took advantage of the present situation, and assumed an authority almost
absolute’.112
Hume’s account of the Tudors, and of Elizabeth in particular, was
thus a corroboration of the claim, made in both the political essays and
The History of Great Britain, that it was a matter of more or less universal
opinion in the pre-Stuart period that England was a more or less absolute
monarchy. To present things in this way was to do much to explain and
extenuate the beliefs and conduct of James I and Charles I. In a footnote
about the treatment inflicted by parliament itself upon the MP Peter Went-
worth on account of his defence of the principle of free speech, Hume
made the point explicit, asking ‘whether it be not sufficiently clear from
all these transactions, that in the two succeeding reigns it was the people
who encroached upon the sovereign; not the sovereign who attempted, as
is pretended, to usurp upon the people?’113 The praise bestowed on the
men of the seventeenth century who won for the people their privileges,
Hume remarked in his summing up of Elizabeth’s reign, ‘ought to be given
with some reserve, and surely without the least rancour against those who
adhered to the ancient constitution’.114 If this was meant to provoke the
Whigs of Hume’s day, ‘[t]he party amongst us who have distinguished
themselves by their adherence to liberty and popular government’, and
who ‘have long indulged their prejudices against the succeeding race of
princes, by bestowing unbounded panegyrics on the virtue and wisdom of
Elizabeth’,115 it had the intended result. In the Postscript to his Moral and
Political Dialogues Richard Hurd was duly incensed by Hume’s ‘insulting’
questions about who was and who was not an usurper, and by his wilfully
perverse construal of the character of the ancient constitution.116 Another
Warburtonian, Owen Ruffhead, complained in The Monthly Review that
the concluding question of Hume’s footnote about Wentworth ‘comes
with an ill grace, from a writer of our author’s liberal cast of mind’.117
Hume’s account of Elizabeth signally failed, according to Ruffhead, to
clear her successors of the charge of having usurped upon the people.
A long line of Whigs, including John Millar, William Belsham, George
Brodie, and Francis Jeffrey would later castigate Hume for his portrait of
Elizabeth as Turkish despot.118
Nineteenth-century Whigs made much of similarities between Hume’s
narrative in the History of England and the approach taken by the
Jacobite Thomas Carte, and there was indeed something in Hume of

Carte’s portrayal of Elizabeth as a distinctly Machiavellian politician,
whose ‘prudence was in many cases the effect of low cunning, and of the
diffidence or jealousy of her nature’, and whose measures ‘were often such,
as morality could not approve, however politicks might represent them as
necessary’.119 Carte showed no interest in presenting Elizabeth as a friend
of the people’s privileges. More striking, however, are the affinities
between Hume’s analysis of Elizabeth, and of the Tudors more gen-
erally, and the picture sketched by Hervey in his Court Whig pamphlet
Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared. ‘Never were the reins
of prerogative held with a stricter hand, or the yoke of slavery faster bound
upon the people’s necks than at this period of time’, Hervey had written;
‘and tho’ the people were driven where they ought to have chosen to go,
yet they were still driven; and the same power that forced them into for-
eign glory and domestick prosperity, might in the hands of a less skilful
or worse-disposed driver have forced them into the paths of contempt
abroad, and destruction at home’.120 The same method of government
was pursued in the reigns that followed, Hervey noted, and led, precisely,
to contempt abroad, and destruction at home.
In The History of England, Under the House of Tudor, as in The History
of Great Britain, Hume deployed the historical perspective of the Court
Whigs while at the same time seeking to sever it from its connection with
the policies of a particular political party. The idea, again, was to present
the reader with a history that was not Whig, at least not conventionally
so, but that was not Tory either. From Hume’s own point of view, the
differences between him and Carte would have been as significant as the
similarities. His assessment of men like Wentworth provided a case in
point. According to Hume, Wentworth’s speeches both amounted to an
encroachment on the rights of the sovereign and contained ‘the first rude
sketch of those principles of liberty which happily afterwards gained the
ascendant in England’.121 Hume gave a fairly careful exposition of the
contents of Wentworth’s case against Elizabeth’s conduct with respect to
her parliaments. Carte, by contrast, saw Wentworth simply as a Puritan,
one of a turbulent sect that was overly indulged by Elizabeth, and that,
because of Elizabeth’s leniency, was ‘enabled to distress her successor,
throughout his reign, and, in that of his son, to subvert monarchy, as well
as the episcopacy, liturgy, and the whole constitution of the church of
England’.122 As in The History of Great Britain, Hume’s intention appears
to have been to pull his reader back and forth between views characteristic
of the Whigs and views characteristic of the Tories, and, by taking up

alternately the doctrines of both parties, to show himself to be of no party
at all. It was inevitable that those with unshakeable commitments to one
party or the other would not be pleased. In fact, it is hard to imagine any
eighteenth-century reader being pleased by all of Hume’s Tudor history.
Humean impartiality was a matter of being willing to offend everyone. It
can be usefully compared and contrasted with the impartiality adopted by
Smollett in the history of England (from 55 BC to 1748) that was written
in fourteen months between 1755 and 1757 and dedicated to William
Pitt. In the ‘Plan’ of his book Smollett claimed, along with almost all
British writers of history in the eighteenth century, to ‘value himself upon
being entirely free of all national jealousy and prejudice; and altogether
uninfluenced by that illiberal partiality which has disgraced the works of
many English historians’. He was, he said, ‘soured by no controversy in
religion: . . . inflamed by no faction in politics’. Truth alone was the object
of his enquiry.123 But in so far as he realized these ambitions, Smollett
did so by being superficial and trite. His book was a success, in that it sold
well, but this, according to Hume, was only a sign of the bad taste of the
reading public. Hume, of course, wanted to be a success too. He wanted
public applause, but not at the price which Smollett had paid.124
In some respects, however, Smollett’s ‘Plan’ could have been a sum-
mary of the project of Hume’s History of England. Had Hume been in the
habit of writing prefaces, he might also have said that he ‘[did] not pretend
to have discovered any authentic records which have escaped the notice
of other historians’, and that his aim was ‘to retrench the superfluities of
his predecessors’ and give the public a history ‘which will be more easy in
the purchase, more agreeable in the perusal, and less burthensome to the
memory, than any work of the same nature, produced in these kingdoms’.
He might have cast aspersions on ‘the enormous bulk and prolixity of
every other English history that stands in any degree of reputation’, and
advertised both his avoidance of ‘all useless disquisitions, which serve only
to swell the size of the volume, interrupt the thread of the narrative, and
perplex the reader’ and the fact that he had not ‘literally transcribed every
treaty of alliance, and each single degree of parliament, so as to form of
a monstrous medley of the highest enterprises of power, and the lowliest
precautions of civil oeconomy’.125 One of the most remarkable features
of Hume’s history of the Tudors, when compared with other eighteenth-
century accounts of the period, was its brevity, the fact that it was only 700
quarto pages long. Rapin and the more recent Carte and Guthrie had in
their massive folio volumes aimed for overwhelming comprehensiveness.

Each had sought to provide the reader with more information than had
previously been available. Their histories sought to legitimate themselves
by way of completeness of detail and documentation. Hume’s project was
quite different. Hume wrote to Gilbert Elliot in August 1757 that he
thought he would be able ‘to make a tolerable smooth, well told tale of
the history of England during [the Tudor] period’, but, he added, he was
not sure he would be able ‘to throw much new light into it’.126 In May
of the following year he was more optimistic. ‘I believe that this volume
will contain some novelty’, he told Elliot, ‘as well as greater accuracy of
composition, than is employ’d by our ordinary historians’.127 Elegance,
readability, correctness of language: these continued to matter more to
Hume than to any previous historian writing in English. But they were not
the only things that mattered. Novelty was surely more important than
Hume admitted to Elliot, not the novelty that came with the discovery of
new documentary evidence, but the novelty of displaying familiar scenes
and persons in an unfamiliar way. Hume’s treatment of Peter Wentworth –
herald of English liberty as well as would-be usurper of royal prerogative –
was novel in this way. So also was his presentation of the case of Mary,
Queen of Scots.
In 1757, Hume told John Clephane that, had he begun with the Tudors
and ‘been able, without making any digression, by the plain course of nar-
ration, to have shown how absolute the authority was, which the English
kings then possessed, and that the Stuart kings did little or nothing more
than to continue matters in the former tract’, he would have been able
to escape ‘the reproach of the most terrible ism of them all, that of Jaco-
bitism’.128 Presumably what he meant was that such a narrative could
provide a straightforward historical justification of the claims made in The
History of Great Britain concerning the extent of the royal prerogative
rightfully enjoyed by the House of Stuart. As should have been obvious
anyway from Hume’s political essays, those claims had no basis in princi-
ples of divine right and passive obedience. The criticisms Hume had made
of the doctrines of Whiggism did not entail commitment to principles at
odds with the settlement of 1689 and the Hanoverian succession. The
story of Mary Stuart provided Hume with the opportunity to make this
perfectly clear. It allowed Hume to show that he gave no credence to the
view that as a divinely ordained sovereign Mary could not legitimately be
put on trial by anyone, least of all by the sovereign of another country.
Nor, as Jacobites and Catholics claimed, was it true that the principles of
hereditary succession, in the same way as they supported the pretensions
of the Stuarts after 1714, gave Mary the right to claim the English throne
as well as the Scottish. The Jacobite view was that Mary was a martyr to
the cause of the God-given rights of kings, a victim at once of the furious
sedition and terrible calumnies of the Scottish reformers and the cun-
ning, hypocrisy, and cruelty of Elizabeth. ‘The patience, the constancy,
and firmness, with which she endured all the hardships and indignities
put upon her during her captivity’, wrote Carte, ‘cannot sufficiently be
admired; the Christian manner of her death was not unworthy of the best
of men; and the intrepidity with which she met that king of terrors, the
genuine effect of innocence, was not surpassed by any of the heroes of
antiquity’.129 Hume, by contrast, was convinced of Mary’s guilty involve-
ment both in the murder in 1567 of her husband Lord Darnley and the
Babington plot against Elizabeth in 1586. In a long footnote he provided
no fewer than sixteen reasons to believe in the authenticity of the ‘Casket
Letters’ implicating Mary in Darnley’s murder. But she was, according
to Hume, belied just as much by her behaviour as by the letters: ‘her con-
duct was so gross as to betray her to every body; and fortune threw into
her enemies hands, papers by which they could convict her. The same
infatuation and imprudence, which happily is the usual attendant of great
crimes, will account for both’.130 Further long footnotes carefully argued
the case for her awareness and approval of Babington’s conspiracy.
At the same time, however, Hume sought to distinguish his case against
Mary from standard arguments made in favour of the same conclusion by
virulently anti-Catholic Whigs. He wanted the reader to notice that no
circumstance of his narrative account of the death of Darnley and Mary’s
subsequent marriage to his murderer the Earl of Bothwell was taken from
Knox, Buchanan, Melville, or any of the writers whom Whig historians
normally relied upon, and whom Tories and Jacobites standardly con-
demned as utterly unreliable. With some reservations, Rapin had accepted
Buchanan and Melville as his ‘guides’ in his account of events which had
been ‘rendered obscure’ as much by ‘religious prejudice’ as by the desire
of some contemporary historians (notably William Camden) to please
James I, who was, after all, Mary’s son.131 Oldmixon had rejected Rapin’s
reservations, arguing vociferously against ‘the Prelatists in Scotland’ and
defending the trustworthiness of Buchanan, ‘the glory of their country
for genius and learning’.132 To Whigs such as Rapin and Oldmixon there
was nothing good to say about Mary, and no question of her innocence
with respect to the two principal charges against her. Those who sought to
extenuate her did so, they argued, for reasons that were blatantly political
and religious. But, of course, their own reasons for condemning Mary
appeared to her apologists to be just as blatantly political and religious.
Hume’s goal was to show himself to have risen above this thoroughly
intractable controversy and to have shown what the case of Mary Stuart
looked like when considered as nothing more than a historical puzzle. So
even though he was sure that Mary was guilty as charged of Darnley’s
murder and of plotting against Elizabeth, he was prepared to admit her
virtues. Hume presented Mary (‘this amiable princess’) in sympathetic
light as she struggled against the bigotry and sedition of men like Knox
(‘this rustic apostle’) and the general insolence of both the nobility and
people of Scotland. He presented Elizabeth as an ‘excellent hypocrite’
in her dealings with Mary, and especially in her conduct immediately
before and after Mary’s execution. And when it came to summing up
Mary’s character, he was scarcely outdone by Carte in his estimate of her
great accomplishments, the beauty of her person and air, her loftiness of
spirit and loveliness of figure, combined with politeness and affability and
gentleness. ‘[S]he seemed to partake only so much of male virtues as to
render her estimable’, Hume rhapsodized, ‘without relinquishing those
soft graces which compose the proper ornaments of her sex’.133 Moreover,
her execution gave Hume the opportunity to deploy the same rhetorical
tactics used in his description of the death of Charles I. The case for her
guilt was balanced against her heroism in the face of gross mistreatment.
This was how Humean impartiality manifested itself in respect of Mary.
She was guilty. But so were those who condemned her.
Mary provided Hume with an opportunity to display his impartiality
in another way, in so far as his treatment of her showed that a Scottish
historian could write about her without writing from the point of view
either of her Jacobite apologists or of Knox, Buchanan, and her Presbyte-
rian enemies. Once again Hume was not, and did not want to be seen to
be, writing as a Scot. He self-consciously distanced himself from myths
the Scots had about themselves, notably from the myth that, thanks to
the efforts of the Reformers, Scotland was a land of political freedom
long before England. Scotland during the sixteenth century was, in fact,
according to Hume, barely a state in the proper sense of the word at all.
It was, he said, ‘rather to be considered as a confederacy, and that not
a close one, of petty princes, than a regular system of civil polity’.134 It

had ‘little connexion with the general system of Europe’.135 Hume was
not alone among Scottish writers in seeing Scotland prior to 1603 and the
Union of Crowns as little more than a battleground for the competing
ambitions of overly powerful, lawless feudal barons. This was also the
view of William Robertson in the History of Scotland that he would pub-
lish just a few weeks before Hume’s History of England in early 1759.136
Scotland according to Robertson was cursed by the weakness of its kings
and the consequent loss of a balance of power between the crown and
the nobility. The resultant instability was only compounded by the con-
duct of the Scottish reformers. Robertson applauded the principles of
the Reformation, including the doctrine of resistance (‘so just in its own
nature, but so delicate in its application to particular cases’137 ) articu-
lated by men like Knox and Buchanan, but abhorred the fact that in the
event no proper compromise was reached between liberty and author-
ity. His criticisms of the Reformers were similar to Hume’s, and like
Hume, Robertson sought to demonstrate his impartiality and moderation
by combining condemnation of the actions of the Reformers with a critical
account of the behaviour of Mary Stuart.138 He shared Hume’s view that
Mary was guilty of involvement in Darnley’s murder. However, he did
not accept she was complicit in the Babington plot. This disagreement
was the occasion of another of Hume’s celebrations of the possibility of
intelligent and amicable dissension among the moderate and philosoph-
ical. The two historians exchanged several letters about the Babington
plot, but the dispute failed to endanger their friendship. Their histories
of the sixteenth century could not but be in commercial competition with
each other, and there was bound to be debate about whose was better.
‘I am diverting myself with the notion how much you will profit by the
applauses of my enemies in Scotland’, Hume wrote to Robertson from
London in February 1759, after the publication of Robertson’s book and
before that of his own. ‘Had you & I been such fools to have given way
to jealousy, to have entertaind animosity & malignity against each other,
and have rent all our acquaintance into parties; what a noble amusement
shoud we have exhibited to the blockheads, which now are likely to be
disappointed of’.139
Those Hume thought of as his enemies in Scotland, ‘the blockheads’,
were the members of the Popular Party of the Church of Scotland, the
traditionalist Calvinists whom Daniel MacQueen had spoken for in his
objections to the way the Reformers had been portrayed in The History
of Great Britain. Hume may have removed the passage that had given
most offence from the 1759 edition of The History of Great Britain, but
this did not mean that he was willing to make concessions to Protestant
sensibilities in his treatment of the Reformation in The History of England.
The standard position on the Reformation, at least among English Whigs,
was the one laid out in Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation, where
it was argued that reform, having been initiated by Henry VIII, had been
taken as far as it needed to go by his son Edward VI, then reversed under
Mary Tudor, to be restored to its Edwardian perfection by Elizabeth.
Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and his Forty-Two Articles (reduced
in number to thirty-nine by Elizabeth) brought worship and doctrine, as
Echard put it, ‘to such perfection, that since that time there have been
very little alterations made in either’.140 Opponents of further reform
standardly represented Edward as having had the potential to be the per-
fect monarch. ‘There was reason to hope extraordinary things from this
young prince’, Rapin wrote, ‘had it pleased God to bless him with a longer
life’.141 The contrast between his reign, short as it was, and that of Mary
and her husband Philip of Spain was the contrast between day and night.
Hers was a reign of bigotry, tyranny, and persecution. According even to
Carte, ‘Every year of her inglorious reign was blackened by remarkable
disasters, and by such acts of injustice, rapine, violence, and oppression,
and tyranny, as Spanish councils only could have suggested’.142 Hume,
though, was unimpressed by the supposed contrast between Edward and
Mary. Edward had many virtues, but also he ‘contracted from his educa-
tion and from the age in which he lived, too much of narrow prepossession
in matters of religion, which made him incline somewhat to bigotry and
persecution’. Persecution was the inevitable result of trying to enforce
uniformity of belief and practice. The fact that fewer died under Edward
than under Mary was attributable merely to the fact that ‘the bigotry of
protestants, less governed by priests, lies under more restraints than that
of catholics’.143
It was common among English historians to try to find ways of under-
standing the bloodshed of Mary Tudor’s reign in terms of wise and
benevolent dispensations of divine providence. It was possible that her
persecutions of Protestants were God’s ways of punishing the English for
their backsliding and weakness of faith. It was also possible that the perse-
cutions were God’s means of strengthening the resolution of Protestants
and deepening the country’s commitment to Reform. ‘[A]ll those fires’,
Burnet wrote, ‘did not extinguish the light of the Reformation, nor abate
the love of it. They spread it more, and kindled new heats in mens minds:
so that what they had read of the former persecutions under the heathens,
seemed to be now revived’.144 And then, as a sign of his mercy, God
punished Mary, and saved England from further torment, by giving her,
as Echard put it, ‘a barren womb, and an untimely death’.145 Hume was
struck merely by the sheer ghastliness of it all. Once Mary granted oppo-
nents of religious toleration the upper hand, ‘England was soon filled with
scenes of horror, which have ever since rendered the catholic religion the
object of general detestation, and which prove, that no human depravity
can equal revenge and cruelty, covered with the mantle of religion’.146
‘Human nature’, he declared, ‘appears not, on any occasion, so detestable,
and at the same time so absurd, as in these religious persecutions, which
sink men below infernal spirits in wickedness, and below the beasts in
folly’.147 And he made sure to point out that the spirit of persecution was
just as prevalent among the Reformers, especially in Scotland, as among
their Catholic opponents. The ‘dismal fanaticism’ of Knox and his sup-
porters ‘rendered them uncapable of all humanity and improvement’.148
The ecclesiastical court set up in 1584 by Elizabeth to harass Catholics
‘was a real inquisition; attended with all the iniquities, as well as cruel-
ties, inseparable from that horrid tribunal’.149 It is worth noting, though,
that Hume’s even-handedness in his treatment of the religious disputes
of the Tudor period extended to sympathetic, even moving accounts of
the deaths of Protestant martyrs, to be balanced against, for example, the
naked sentimentalism of his relation of the death of Mary, Queen of Scots.
His descriptions of the final moments of Lady Jane Grey and of Cranmer
are cases in point.150
Hume was willing to describe the Reformation as ‘one of the greatest
events in history’,151 but his explanation of its origins and success was
unconventional.152 He presented it as obvious that the origins of the
Reformation did not lie in the plausibility of the arguments of the reformers.
History provided no instance, he asserted, ‘where argument has been able
to free the people from that enormous load of absurdity, with which
superstition has every where overwhelmed them’. There was the further
fact ‘that the rapid advance of the Lutheran doctrine, and the violence,
with which it was embraced, prove sufficiently, that it owed not its success
to reason and reflection’.153 Much more relevant to an explanation of the
spread of Luther’s ideas was a combination of the impact of ‘the revival of
learning’ and the recent invention of the printing press. The Renaissance
had ‘somewhat’ awakened men’s minds from a sleep of centuries, and

as a result people were hungry for novelties of any and every kind. The
English adoption of the principles of reform might have had something to
do with the still flickering sparks of true religion being kept alive in secret
by Lollards and other Wycliffites, but it had rather more, as critics of the
English Reformation had always argued, to do with the financial situation
that Henry VIII found himself in by the late 1520s, along with, of course,
his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. In
another striking combination of views, Hume joined this disenchanted
analysis of the origins of English Reformation with an argument to the
effect that, even so, the Reformation was a force for good in English
history.
Hume’s discussion of the Reformation began with a ‘Digression con-
cerning the ecclesiastical state’ in which it was argued that an established
religion – that is, a single national religion enforced and protected by
law – was necessary to the peace and stability of the state. Toleration of
religious diversity is bound to breed violent intolerance, as every ‘ghostly
practitioner’, every priest or minister, sought to maximize the number of
his ‘customers’ by inspiring abhorrence for every other sect. Better, Hume
concluded, to ‘bribe the indolence’ of the priests, ‘by affixing stated sallar-
ies to their profession, and rendering it superfluous for them to be farther
active, than merely to preserve their flock from straying in quest of new
pastures’.154 The problem in sixteenth-century England was that it had
become obvious that Roman Catholicism was unable to perform the polit-
ical function that a state church needed to perform. It was in a number
of ways a destabilizing and unsettling force in English politics. And so,
Hume’s argument continued, when the Reformation came to England, it
was a force for good:
The acknowledgment of the King’s supremacy introduced there a greater sim-

plicity into the government, by uniting the spiritual with the civil power, and
preventing disputes about limits, which never could be exactly determined by
the contending parties. A way was also prepared for checking the exorbitancy of
superstition, and breaking those shakles, by which all human reason, policy, and
industry had so long been incumbered. The prince, it may be supposed, being
head of religion, as well as of the temporal jurisdiction of the kingdom, tho’ he
might sometimes employ the former as an engine of government, had no interest,
like the Roman pontiff, in nourishing its excessive growth; and, except when
blinded by ignorance or bigotry, would be sure to retain it within tolerable limits,
and prevent its abuses. And on the whole, there followed from these revolutions
very beneficial consequences; tho’ perhaps neither foreseen nor intended by the
persons who had the chief hand in conducting them.155
Where previous historians, from Foxe to Burnet to Echard, had seen

providence in the progress of the Reformation in England, Hume saw
chains of unforeseen and unintended consequences. The most obvious
irony was that Henry VIII himself – ‘Defender of the Faith’, and keen
student of Aquinas – had had no intention whatsoever of turning England
into a Protestant country. ‘Separate as he stood from the catholic church,
and from the Roman pontiff, the head of it’, as Hume put it, ‘he still valued
himself on maintaining the catholic doctrine, and on guarding, by fire and
sword, the imagined purity of his speculative principles’.156 Henry was
a tyrant in his every move, according to Hume, and liberty of religious
belief and practice was the farthest thing from his mind as he broke from
Rome. Nor was the spirit of freedom given any more encouragement by
his successors. The much-vaunted connection between the Reformation
and political liberty was another historical accident, born of the efforts of a
group of men and women mocked and persecuted throughout the Tudor
period. The ‘precious spark of liberty’, Hume noted, ‘had been kindled,
and was preserved, by the puritans alone; and it was to this sect, whose
principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English
owe the whole freedom of their constitution’.157 The Tudor constitution
had to be first questioned by men like Wentworth, and then entirely
overturned by their descendants, ‘the Hambdens, the Pyms, the Hollises’,
before English Protestantism expressed itself in terms of principles of
liberty.
The question of the ability of historical agents to shape the conse-
quences of their actions was raised also by the measures taken by Henry
VII to weaken the power of the nobility, measures which, as Hume saw
things, were essential to the Tudor period’s claim to mark the commence-
ment of modern history. Bacon, in his history of Henry’s reign, had com-
bined recognition of the significance of Henry’s anti-feudal legislation
with aspersions on his estimate of long-term effects. ‘His wisdom’, Bacon
wrote, ‘by often evading from perils, was turned rather into a dexterity to
deliver himself from dangers when they pressed him than into a provi-
dence to prevent and remove them afar off’.158 Hume appeared to contra-
dict Bacon when he argued Henry probably ‘foresaw and intended’ that
the barons, once allowed to break entails and alienate their estates, would
dissipate their fortunes and increase the property of the commons.159 But
at the same time he added ‘the beginning luxury and refinements of the
age’ to the explanation of how the nobility undermined its traditional posi-
tion in English society. And he returned to ‘the manners of the age’ right
at the end of The History of England, describing them as ‘a general cause,
which operated during this whole period, and which continually tended
to diminish the riches, and still more the influence of the Aristocracy,
anciently so formidable to the crown’.160 He had refined his understand-
ing of the changes that had begun under Henry VII. ‘Whatever may be
commonly imagined, from the authority of lord Bacon and from that of
Harrington, and later authors’, Hume now asserted, ‘the laws of Henry
the seventh contributed very little towards the great revolutions which
happened about this period in the English constitution’.161 The forces at
work in England in the sixteenth century were as much cultural, changes
in what Montesquieu had termed moeurs, as they were political. People
began to value things in new ways – the nobility began to want to be able
to buy luxury goods more than to keep retainers, the ‘middle rank of men’
began to want independence more than the security of feudal tenanthood –
and over the course of time these changes produced a dramatic, yet at the
end of the Tudor period still invisible, shift in power away from the nobil-
ity and towards the people. Such a style of historical explanation received
further support from the fact that while it was true that England grew
wealthier during the century, and while it was true that Tudor monarchs
sought to make the country wealthier, almost everything they did to that
end betrayed the period’s complete lack of understanding, as Hume saw
it, of how trade was best encouraged. England’s enrichment was despite,
not because of, all the regulations that were imposed on commerce, all the
import tariffs and export restrictions, all the monopolies and patents. A
‘general revolution in human affairs’ was under way, regardless of what
kings and queens did.162
This revolution in human affairs was European rather than exclusively
English.163 Hume set the Tudor period in the context of Columbus’s
voyage to America and Vasco de Gama’s passing round the Cape of Good
Hope, and an ‘enlargement of commerce and navigation’ that stimulated
industry and manufacturing everywhere. There were also to be taken into
account the consequences of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, the spread of ancient Greek culture to western Europe, the move
to purify Latin and revive the study of antiquity, and a near-universal

regeneration of literature in all its forms. There was the invention of the
printing press and of gunpowder, and changes in religion not only in the
countries that embraced the Reformation but also in those that opposed it.
England was caught up in a massive, all-encompassing process of change,
such as made it necessary for the historian of England to take into account
everything that was happening in continental Europe. There was much,
much more to be said about England’s involvement in Europe than the
usual story about her role in preserving the balance of power between
France and Spain. In conceiving of a country’s history in this way Hume
was following the lead not only of Montesquieu but also of Voltaire,
whose Essai sur l’Histoire Générale et sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations
depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos Jours had been published in full in 1756.
‘I know that author cannot be depended upon with regard to facts’, Hume
wrote to Elliot in 1760, ‘but his general views are sometimes sound, &
always interesting’.164 Voltaire adopted a comparative approach to national
history, interweaving the history of each country with that of every other,
attending not to detail but to large-scale processes of change. Necessarily
he had to be brief in his accounts of particular reigns, but, even so, he
attended to developments in culture and commerce in addition to the
doings of kings and their ministers. For Voltaire, as for Hume, changes in
manners – alterations of religious sensibility, the acquisition by a country
(or its loss) of an aptitude for trade, the cultivation (or decline) of a
proclivity for invention and discovery – were both cause and effect of the
relative rise and fall of nations. In the sixteenth century, Voltaire wrote,
navigation and trade gave the English ‘a new kind of grandeur’. ‘They
understood their real element; and this alone rendered them more happy
than all the foreign possessions, and victories of their ancient kings’. Under
Elizabeth, they thus became ‘a powerful nation, policied [sic], industrious,
laborious, and enterprising’.165
Hume’s goal in The History of England was to make plain the superfi-
ciality of the usual Whig approach to the history of the modern period.
The conflicts of the seventeenth century could not be blamed upon the
evil machinations of royal despots, but were rather the all-but-inevitable
result of pressures upon the English polity that had built up during the
Tudor era. The History of England, though about an earlier period, was a
completion of the narrative of The History of Great Britain. This was why
Hume came to wish that he had begun with the Tudors. He had been right,
after all, in his original view, expressed in a letter to Smith of February

1752, ‘that the best period to begin an English history was about Henry
the 7th’.166 Hume’s argument concerning the seventeenth century was
therefore complete only once the Tudor volumes were finished. Tudor
practice made it clear that James I and Charles I were not innovators.
They had taken their conception of kingship from their forebears. The
obsequiousness of parliament during the Tudor period made the same
point. An absolutist theory of monarchical power had been a matter of
prevailing opinion in the sixteenth century, and there was no reason to
think that opinion suddenly altered in 1603. Not even by 1642 and the
outbreak of civil war was opinion clearly against the Stuarts and their
way of ruling. The country was divided then, and it remained divided
throughout the 1640s and 1650s. After 1660, opinion swung back behind
the Stuarts, and it took another twenty-five years for it to swing decisively
against them. When this happened, the result, as Hume saw it, was an
entirely new form of government. The limited monarchy post-1688 was
not a recovery of a liberty that had been taken away by the Stuarts. Rather,
it was a dramatic innovation, a step forward into the unknown, and as such
a move that was, at the time it was made, without conclusive justification.
Whether or not it had been the right step to take would only be shown by
the passage of time.
At the same time as he was completing The History of England and revis-
ing The History of Great Britain, Hume composed a new essay designed
to make it absolutely clear how his historical argument was to be under-
stood. This was ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, in which Hume portrayed
himself as ready to believe that in the final years of the reign of George II
there were signs of a desire to abolish the factional politics that had been
responsible for more than a hundred years of debilitating instability at the
heart of government.167 Hume declared that ‘this tendency to a coalition
affords the most agreeable prospect of future happiness, and ought to
be carefully cherished and promoted by every lover of his country’.168 A
sure way of promoting the politics of coalition was to attack the causes
of belligerent party spirit and thereby to encourage moderate opinion, by
making it plain that neither party had a monopoly on truth. Praise and
blame were deserved equally by both. The essays on the contract and pas-
sive obedience had shown this to be true with regard to the ‘philosophical’
controversies between Whigs and Tories. ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ was
intended to show it to be true with regard to their historical disputes. Its
argument was ‘that there were on both sides wise men who meant well
to their country, and that the past animosity between the parties had no
better foundation than narrow prejudice or interested passion’.169 And
this argument was made by means of a summary of the interpretation of
English history since 1485 offered by Hume in his histories. Parliamen-
tary opposition to James I and his son was vindicated in the essay, as ‘a
recovery of the just rights of the people’; but so also was the royalist claim
that Charles and James asserted no prerogatives that were not already
firmly established by their Tudor forebears. Hume knew that most of his
readers would find it much harder to accept a vindication of the Stuarts
than a vindication of parliament, so he gave two paragraphs to the latter
and twelve to the former. It mattered just as much, however, that Tories
and Jacobites could be persuaded that parliament had had right on its side
as that Whigs could be persuaded of the legitimacy of Stuart opposition
to parliament’s encroachment upon their privileges. Hume devoted the
essay’s final paragraph to a summary of the ‘invincible arguments, which
should induce the malecontent party to acquiesce in the present settle-
ment of the constitution’.170 The message for Tories was the same as in
the essay ‘Of the Protestant Succession’: the Hanoverian regime was well
established, peace and prosperity prevailed, and there was no possible jus-
tification for any further complaint, let alone resistance. ‘Of the Coalition
of Parties’ was thus a guide to how Hume wanted his history writing to
be read: as the work of one who was a member of neither party, and who
was therefore able to identify the faults, as well as the merits, of both.
The Irrelevance of the Ancient Constitution

Hume closed his account of the reign of Henry VII by declaring that
the fifteenth century, with the revival of interest in antiquity, the inven-
tion of printing and gunpowder, and ‘mighty innovations’ in religion,
marked the beginning of ‘the useful, as well as agreeable part of modern
annals’. ‘Whoever carries his anxious researches into preceding periods’,
he asserted, ‘is moved by a curiosity, liberal indeed and commendable;
not by any necessity for acquiring a knowledge of public affairs, or the
arts of civil government’.171 This was surely intentionally provocative.
Hume well knew that the Tudor period was not supposed by his con-
temporaries to mark the point where it was profitable for a historian
to begin. The freedom that, so it was thought, England attained under
Elizabeth was, as Bolingbroke had put it in his recycling of the clichés of
Whig history, a matter of being ‘brought back, in times very distant and
in circumstances very different, to the principles of government, which

had prevail’d amongst our Saxon ancestors, before they left Germany’.172
Tudor England was to be understood not as a new start, but rather as a
return to the country’s original state. The significance of what took place
after 1485, therefore, could only be appreciated to the extent that one
appreciated how Englishmen had lived before the long political winter
that began with the Norman invasion in 1066.
Hume’s claim was that England under the Tudors was not free at all,
not even under Elizabeth. He had presented Elizabeth as no less a tyrant
than her father. During her reign the condition of the English people could
be compared to that of the Turks under their sultans. There were Whigs
who were willing to concede this much. William Guthrie was one,173 and
Richard Hurd, in his Moral and Political Dialogues (1759), was another.
Hurd’s third dialogue, ‘On the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth’, had a
distinctly sceptical conclusion. In a postscript, however, Hurd took issue
directly with Hume’s claim that pre-Tudor history was an irrelevance.
The warning ‘will hardly be taken by those for whose sake it is intended’,
Hurd wrote, ‘the friends of liberty knowing very well . . . that the English
constitution was formed and even fixed on immoveable principles of
public freedom long before the accession of the house of Tudor. So that
to interdict our researches into the remoter parts of our history is, in effect,
to bid us shut our eyes, and swear against day light’.174 According to Hurd,
as according to Bolingbroke, researches into the remoter parts of English
history were essential to knowing what English freedom really was. The
Saxons, Hurd claimed, had no word for ‘country’ that did not imply
government by laws, not men: thus the spirit of liberty ‘possessed the
very language of our forefathers’.175 It was Saxon freedom that England
had acquired for itself in 1688.
The two volumes on English history ‘From the Invasion of Julius Caesar
to the Accession of Henry VII’ that Hume began in the summer of 1759
and finished two years later were intended to show Hurd, Bolingbroke,
and the general wisdom of the age to be wholly mistaken. There had been
no freedom worth the name in the Saxon period, Hume argued; and,
anyway, the Saxon constitution had been annihilated by the imposition
of Norman law by William I. William had turned England into a feudal
society in which all property and all jurisdiction derived ultimately from
the will of the monarch. The traditions of the common law, along with
the customary freedoms enjoyed by Saxon Englishmen, henceforth had
no political or legal significance. The slow development of an idea of

popular liberty in the late medieval period was to be explicated in terms
of the internal dynamics of feudalism, and the way a weakening crown
looked to the commons as a natural ally in the struggle against the violent
pretensions of the nobility. There was no connection between the eventual
full flowering of English freedom in 1688 and the age of the Anglo-Saxons.
As we have seen, Hume, like the Court Whigs who were Bolingbroke’s
target in his Remarks on the History of England, regarded the constitution
established after the Glorious Revolution as entirely new. It made no sense,
therefore, to talk in terms of the English form of government. Rapin had
sought to characterize the ‘essence’ of the English constitution,176 but
there was no such thing. That is, there was no such thing as the English
constitution. There had been instead a succession of English constitutions,
or forms of government, each of which had instantiated a different and
distinct balance of power among the monarchy, the nobility, and the
people. English history was a story of continual change, not of a return
to first principles. Hume made this explicit in the final pages of his study
of English medieval history, pages that were, in effect, the conclusion of
the History taken as a whole. Those who appealed to an ‘original’ state of
the constitution would always have to acknowledge a still more ancient
period, ‘where every circumstance, by reason of the greater barbarity of
the times, will appear still less worthy of imitation’. The English, ‘who
have happily established the most perfect and most accurate system of
liberty, that ever was found compatible with government’, had nothing to
learn from distant times – nothing, that is, apart from why they should
cherish their present constitution, and how much its development was a
matter of pure accident.177
To attach the significance that Hume did to William I’s introduction
of feudal law, to see it as having caused a fundamental rupture in the
constitution, was to follow the lead of seventeenth-century antiquarians
such as Henry Spelman and William Dugdale, and in particular Robert
Brady. According to the Whig James Tyrrell, William I left intact most of
Anglo-Saxon law, municipal as well as criminal,178 and subsequent Whig
history usually followed Tyrrell in downplaying the importance of feudal
law. Very little was said about it by, for example, Echard and Rapin. By
the middle of the eighteenth century, though, Whig history, in the form
at least of works by Guthrie and Hurd, was willing to take feudalism more
seriously. Guthrie and Hurd depicted the feudal law as a transformation,
but not an eradication, of the Anglo-Saxon common law. According to

Guthrie, feudal innovations were so many ‘servile engraftments’ on pre-
Norman practices.179 Hurd was more positive. He saw feudalism as inher-
ently malleable and adaptive. A central element of feudalism, the system of
military service in return for grants from the crown, in fact pre-dated the
Norman invasion. And the conversion of allodial land into feudal tenures
benefited all smaller property holders, who as a result were no longer
completely at the mercy of greater nobility. Hurd argued ‘that the feudal
system was rather improved and corrected by the duke of Normandy,
than originally planted by him in his kingdom: that the alteration made
in it was favourable to the public interest; and that our Saxon liberties
were not so properly restrained, as extended by it’.180 Hume’s point of
departure in the medieval volumes of The History of England was that,
while Brady’s politics had been invalidated by the 1688 Revolution and its
long-term consequences, his historical arguments remained unanswered.
The innovation effected by William I was much more comprehensive than
Guthrie and Hurd were prepared to admit.
Among the general historians, it was Thomas Carte who provided
Hume with an argument that he could adapt to his own purposes. In a
rare comment on one of his contemporaries, Hume described Carte as ‘an
author whose diligence and industry has given light to many passages of
the more antient English history’.181 For his part, Carte regarded Brady
as the only writer who had so much as attempted a proper ‘civil’ history
of England, ‘an history of our constitution, laws, usages, customs and
manners, with the various, sudden, or gradual alterations which these
have undergone in the course of time, and the effects thereof on the
nation’.182 Rapin had had the disability of being a foreigner, meaning that
he was ‘utterly unacquainted with our constitution, laws, and customs, any
farther than he could learn in conversation, or pick up in coffeehouses’,
and ‘his reasonings or reflections upon the passages of former times are too
often founded upon the modern notions which he had thus imbibed’.183
By ‘modern notions’ Carte meant Whig notions, and especially the notion
that the liberties that England was famous for in the eighteenth century
were Saxon in character and origin. Carte was a Jacobite – but this was not
relevant to Hume’s purposes. What Hume found in Carte was Brady’s
perspective on English history written up in engaging narrative form,
without the massive weight of erudition that made Brady’s own history,
as Carte put it, ‘a dry performance’.
Carte echoed Brady’s claims concerning the significance of the impo-

sition of feudal law. The result of feudalisation was that ‘[t]he English
nobility and gentry were dispossessed of all their allodial lands and estates
of inheritance; which were given away to the Norman and other foreign
adventurers; the utmost favour allowed to any of the natives being to
hold in vassalage of their new lords, on condition of rents and services,
part of what they had enjoyed before as their own absolute property’.184
The English common law as it presently existed had developed out of the
feudal law, not out of Anglo-Saxon custom. The losses sustained by the
English as a result of the Norman invasion also included ‘the extinction
of the ancient Saxon race of just, mild and pious princes, who governed
according to a well tempered constitution’, the ‘extirpation of all the con-
siderable families among the English nobility’, and ‘an unhappy change
in the customs, manners, and temper of the commonalty’.185 In all these
respects English history began anew with the reign of William I. The slow
growth of the liberty of the commons was, as Brady had argued, due to
grants made by the crown, not to assertions of rights guaranteed by an
ancient constitution. Hume made this narrative scheme his own. He also,
as his Whig critics were not slow to point out, borrowed from Carte in
smaller matters. His account of how Henry I seized the throne after the
death of William II, for example, copied Carte almost word for word.186
Writing in The Edinburgh Review in 1831, Henry Hallam remarked that,
in the medieval volumes of The History of England, ‘Hume appears to
have written with Carte always open before him, and to have followed
him, generally speaking, not only in his arrangement of events, but in the
structure of his exposition of them’.187 This was an exaggeration. John
Whitaker was fairer when he remarked in his History of Manchester (1773–
5) that ‘Mr. Hume appears to have judiciously compacted what had been
said by Mr. Carte, and to have given us his argument in better form’.188
Hume wrote his medieval history at a time of a revival of Scottish
interest in the feudal law. In 1757, John Dalrymple had published An Essay
towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, and a year
later Kames had come out with his Historical Law-Tracts. Dalrymple’s
book was inspired by the thought that
a system of law, once so universal, and still so much revered; during the progress
of which, men arrived from the most rude to the most polished state of society;
a system which has been the cause of the greatest revolutions both civil and
military; a system connected equally with the manners and with the governments
of modern Europe; deserved an enquiry in the republick of letters, independent
of the present and particular use of that enquiry, in any particular kingdom.189
Kames was no less sure of the importance of his subject. He declared that
‘The feudal customs ought to be the study of every man who proposes
to reap instruction from the history of modern European nations’.190
Both Dalrymple and Kames took their lead from Montesquieu, and the
revolutionary suggestion in Book 30 of De l’Esprit des Lois that feudalism
was German, not Roman, in its origins.191 They examined particular
elements of the law and sought to map out their history in terms of a
conjectural account of the stages of the development of civil society.
Dalrymple’s book, in particular, seems to have been useful to Hume,
but closer to the spirit of his treatment of feudalism was what was to be
found in the opening pages of William Robertson’s History of Scotland.192
Robertson was more interested in what he called ‘the genius of the feu-
dal law’ – here ‘genius’ was presumably a translation of Montesquieu’s
‘esprit’ – than in the details of medieval jurisprudence. And in the summary
he provided of the genius of feudal law he laid out an idea that was at the
heart also of Hume’s account of the English middle ages. This was that,
despite its concentration of power in the crown, feudalism was in reality a
‘purely aristocratical’ system of government. ‘The king, who at a distance,
seemed to be invested with majesty and power’, Robertson wrote, ‘appears,
on a nearer view, to possess none of these advantages, which bestow on
monarchs their grandeur and authority. His revenues were scanty; he had
not a standing army; and he enjoyed no proper jurisdiction’.193 Also like
Robertson, Hume saw feudalism as a pan-European phenomenon, and
this enabled him to present medieval England as part of a pan-European
process of change. This was to pick up on the insight at which he arrived at
the end of the Tudor volumes, that before the seventeenth century English
history could not be understood in English terms alone. Not only did the
Norman invasion cause a wholesale revolution in English politics and law;
it also connected Europe’s largest island with what was happening on the
continent. ‘The conquest’, as Hume put it, ‘put the people in a situation
of receiving slowly from abroad the rudiments of science and cultivation,
and of correcting their rough and licentious manners’.194 There is a sense
in which the medieval volumes of the History can, like the Tudor volumes,
be read as a filling in of some of the detail of the grand vision of European
history sketched by Voltaire in the Essai sur les Moeurs.195
During the middle ages, England was of course also connected to

Europe by its religion. Hume’s treatment of religion in this second instal-
ment of The History of England was, however, positively conventional
when compared and contrasted with his treatment of feudalism. All Whig
historians deplored the destabilizing effects of the pretensions of the
papacy on English affairs during the medieval period. Like Hume, they
routinely complained about the obstacles placed in the way of proper
history by ‘monkish writers’. Like Hume, they were generally appalled
by the waste of money and life occasioned by the Crusades. What is
distinctive in Hume’s discussions of religion is his tendency to show
himself more amused by absurdity than filled with the authentic spirit
of Protestant antipathy to all things popish. He has a lot of fun, for
example, with Anselm’s campaign against long-pointed shoes, and with
the self-deceptions of Thomas Becket. There is something unmistakably
Humean in the lament, prompted by Becket’s canonization, at how ‘the
wisest legislator and most exalted genius, that ever reformed the world,
can never expect such tributes of praise, as are lavished on the mem-
ory of a pretended saint, whose whole conduct was probably, to the last
degree, odious or contemptible, and whose industry was entirely directed
to the pursuits of objects pernicious to mankind’.196 On the other hand,
Hume was restrained, surprisingly so perhaps, in his brief account of
John Wycliffe and the Lollards. Wycliffe, he wrote, though undoubt-
edly ‘strongly tinctured with enthusiasm’, ‘has the honour of being the
first person in Europe, who publickly called in question those doctrines,
which had universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many
ages’.197 He did not blame the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 on the Lollards.
Hume was restrained also when he got to Joan of Arc, though no doubt
mostly because he knew that what the English reader wanted at this point
was at least a hint that Joan was indeed, as those who burned her claimed,
an instrument of the devil. Hume described her instead as an ‘admirable
heroine, to whom the more generous superstition of the antients would
have erected altars’.198 The overall impression given by the way religion
figures in these volumes is that Hume did not regard religion as a very
important component of the story he had to tell about feudalism’s rise
and fall. It was not essential in the way that it was to the breakdown of
the Tudor-Stuart constitution. In his account of the reign of Henry III,
in fact, Hume presented religion as a kind of much-needed political
glue. ‘Tho’ the religion of that age can merit no other name than that
of superstition’, he argued, ‘it served to unite together a body of men
[i.e., the clergy and prelates] who had great sway over the people, and
who kept the community from falling to pieces, from the factions and
independant power of the nobles’. It also ‘threw a mighty authority into
the hands of men, who by their profession were averse to arms and vio-
lence’.199
Prior to the Norman invasion and William I’s determined effort to
subject the English church to his authority, England had been continu-
ally and increasingly vulnerable to the papacy’s appetite for money and
political influence. On Hume’s account this began to be an especially
acute problem during Dunstan’s ascendancy over the English kings of
the early tenth century. Even Edgar, with his ‘excellent capacity in the
administration of affairs’, and whose ‘reign is one of the most fortunate,
which we meet with in the antient English history’, was compelled to ‘pay
court’ to his archbishop of Canterbury, thereby strengthening pretensions
which ‘proved very dangerous to his successors, and gave disturbance to
the whole civil power’.200 There were great lawmakers among the Anglo-
Saxon kings, notably Alfred, whose merit in both private and public life
‘may with advantage be set in opposition to that of any monarch or citi-
zen, which the annals of any age or nation, can present to us’,201 but the
executive powers of the monarchy were never great, and were weakened
further by the incursions of the Danes, to the point where the Anglo-
Saxon constitution was best understood as having been, as Hume put it,
‘very aristocratical’. Such a judgement contradicted the Whig view that
the council that advised the Saxon kings, the Wittenagemot, had had a
place for the representatives of the boroughs, ‘or what we now call the
commons’, as well as prelates, abbots, aldermen, judges, and the more
considerable proprietors of land.
Hume was aware that this was a highly politically charged question that
divided ‘our monarchical faction’ from ‘the popular party’. But his view
was that arguments put forward by Brady against the boroughs having had
representatives in the Wittenagemot were conclusive. The language used
to describe the members of the council was aristocratic. The boroughs
were still small and poor, and dependent on the nobility. The commons
had no share in government in the other nations of Europe that had
inherited the political traditions of Germany. Carte had been right to draw
the conclusion that there was ‘no doubt’ that the Wittenagemot had had no
place for the common people.202 But even if it had, the people clearly had
no weight in the government, and the king had not much more. It was the
nobility that had the power and the wealth, and that as a result ‘controlled
the authority of the kings’. What historians described as the freedom of
the Saxon constitution was really only the weakness of royal authority
in the face of the strength of the nobles. And the nobles were uninterested
in imposing law themselves. Saxon freedom was the freedom of anarchy
and chaos. Thus, Hume argued, ‘the great body of the people, in these
ages, really enjoyed much less true liberty, than where the execution of
the laws is the most severe, and where subjects are reduced to the strictest
subordination and dependance on the civil magistrate’.203 Considered
generally, the Anglo-Saxons were ‘a rude, uncultivated people, ignorant
of letters, unskilful in the mechanical arts, untamed to submission under
law and government, addicted to intemperance, riot, and disorder’.204
There was little or nothing to the pre-Norman period that could be looked
back to as an ideal for modern politicians to emulate. It was nonsense to
say, as Montesquieu had in Book 11 of De l’Esprit des Lois, that the modern
English system of liberty was found in the forests of ancient Europe.205
In a sense, though, it did not matter what Anglo-Saxon England had
been like, since the Norman invasion led to the complete obliteration of the
laws and government of the previous age. It was undeniable that William
I was a conqueror, and that England was what he conquered. The view
that, as Matthew Hale had expressed it, ‘the conquest of King William I
was not a conquest upon the country or the people, but only upon the king
of it, in the person of Harold, the usurper’,206 was quite implausible. Nor
was it plausible that William’s title to the throne lay in his election by the
English people. Here again Hume followed Brady and Carte, in rejecting
the idea, popular among Whigs, that the English crown had always been
elective in principle, and had remained so even after the Norman con-
quest. On the other hand, it was not obvious, as Brady and Carte claimed it
was, that the Normans had brought with them a conception of succession
as based purely on primogeniture. To Brady and Carte, for example, John
was plainly an usurper. According to Hume, by contrast, the legitimacy
of John’s claim was impossible to decide, because primogeniture had yet
to be established as the only basis of right to the crown. John was Richard
I’s brother, and the ‘principle of representation’ meant that, as such, he
could plausibly claim that he had a stronger claim to their father’s throne
than did Richard’s son. Other cases, especially after Henry IV’s wresting
of the crown from Richard II, were more complicated still. What always
mattered when it came to the question of right to the crown was opinion,
and opinion, as Hume had argued in the Treatise, was shaped by a complex
of considerations that, in addition to hereditary succession, included elec-
tion, long possession, present possession, conquest, and decisions of pos-
itive law.207 ‘The English’, Hume declared at the start of his account of
the reign of Edward I, ‘were as yet so little trained to obedience under a
regular government, that the death of almost every King, since the Con-
quest, had been attended with disorders’.208 It was repeatedly possible for
the crown to be usurped by someone with little or no hereditary claim.
There was very often disorder during reigns as well, as pretenders to the
throne pressed their rival claims to the current occupier. What kept the
crown on the head of a king was strength of will, political craft, and a will-
ingness to imprison and execute without regard for legal process. Where
those things were lacking, the authority of the crown was unlikely to be
great.
The papacy remained a significant problem for English kings during the
Norman and Plantagenet periods, but the weakness of the crown was made
critical, and often fatal, by the problem that William Robertson identified
in his account of the ‘genius’ of the feudal system. In principle feudalism
concentrated property and legal authority in the hands of the king, but in
practice it left the king at the mercy of the barons who held in feu enormous
tracts of English land, and who did all they could to weaken the obligations,
financial and military, that they supposedly owed the king in return.
The result was a constant power struggle between the barons and the
crown, and equally constant conflict among the barons themselves. The
Normans between whom William divided the country that he conquered
were, Hume wrote, ‘so violent and licentious a people, that they may be
pronounced incapable of any true or regular liberty; which requires such a
refinement of laws and institutions, such a comprehension of views, such
a sentiment of honour, such a spirit of obedience, and such a sacrifice of
private interests and connexions to public order, as can only be the result
of great reflection and experience, and must grow to perfection during
several ages of a settled and established government’.209 It took a long
time for government to become settled and established. For 150 years, the
English were subject to a tyrannical and oppressive aristocracy: ‘all was
confusion and disorder; no regular ideas of a constitution prevailed; force
and violence decided everything’.210 Under John, some regularity and
form was at last given to the constitution. The ‘great charter’ he granted
at Runnymede in 1215 introduced a species of civilized monarchy. But,
Hume argued, it needed to be understood that this was essentially an

arrangement between the barons and the crown. The barons may have
been possessed by what Hume, in Bolingbrokean phrase, was prepared
to call ‘the spirit of liberty’, but the liberty they cared about was their
own, not that of the people at large. Magna Carta was by no means
a codification of ancient English liberties. Its principal articles ‘tended
to increase the power and independance of an order of men, who were
already too powerful, and whose yoke might have become more heavy on
the people than even that of an absolute monarch’.211 At this particular
juncture, though, the barons needed the support of the people. The whole
idea of extracting rights from the king was so novel that the barons had
reason to fear that the people might side with the king against them. So they
were forced into ‘comprehending, together with their own, the interests
of inferior ranks of men’, and the unintended result was provisions which
ensured the free and equitable administration of justice for all.212
Magna Carta, on Hume’s reading, was but an instance of the general
truth that in the period between 1066 and 1215, royal power was checked
not by the liberties of the people, but by ‘the military power of many
petty tyrants, who were equally dangerous to the prince and oppressive
to the subject’.213 This was another self-conscious contradiction of Whig
orthodoxy. Hume had not followed Hervey who, in Ancient and Modern
Liberty Stated and Compar’d, had pushed the Court Whig argument about
the modernity of English liberty so far as not to mention Magna Carta
at all. But he had shown himself unable to take seriously, for instance,
Rapin’s claim that it signified ‘the re-establishment of the privileges of
the English nation’,214 or Guthrie’s assertion that it was ‘a nobler, a more
express and more extensive, instrument of constitutional freedom, than
any people ever could boast of’.215 Guthrie described Magna Carta as
having been obtained by the English people as a whole. It was, he wrote,
‘perhaps the only instance on record, when a king talked and treated
with the whole body of his subjects’.216 From Hume’s point of view,
this was pure fantasy. The people were no more than accidental ben-
eficiaries of the deal done between the barons and the king. Carte had
been right to say that the barons made use of talk of a revival of ancient
laws ‘as a pretence to gull the common people, and draw them into their
party’.217 In so far as Magna Carta did make an appreciable difference to
the lives of the people, it did not do so for some time. There was, Hume
noted, a ‘considerable interval’ between 1215 and the ‘full establishment’
of Magna Carta’s clauses.218 But even when that establishment took place,
the result was less than revolutionary. Magna Carta, according to Hume,
‘contained no establishment of new courts, magistrates, or senates, nor
abolition of the old. It introduced no new distribution of the powers
of the commonwealth, and no innovation in the political or public law
of the kingdom. It only guarded, and that merely by verbal clauses,
against such tyrannical practices as are incompatible with civilized gov-
ernment, and, if they become very frequent, are incompatible with all
government’.219
In the summary account of ‘The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Govern-
ment and Manners’ that closed volume one of The History of England,
from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII Hume
summarized his arguments for Brady’s thesis that feudalism amounted to
a complete transformation of the Saxon constitution. Feudal government,
he claimed, was wholly destructive of the independence and security of
the people. Most inhabitants of the country had the status of serfs, ‘and
lived in a state of absolute slavery or villainage’; the rest paid their rent
in arbitrary services, and ‘could expect no redress of injuries in a court of
barony from men who thought they had the right to oppress and tyrannize
over them’. Things were no different in the towns. ‘The languishing state
of commerce kept the inhabitants poor and contemptible; and the polit-
ical institutions were calculated to render that poverty perpetual’.220 It
could be no surprise, therefore, that the evidence suggested that the feu-
dal parliament had at first no place for representatives of the counties and
boroughs. This had once been a matter of controversy, Hume accepted,
but now ‘[i]t is agreed that that the commons were no part of the great
council, till some ages after the conquest; and that the military tenants
alone of the crown composed that supreme and legislative authority’.221 In
another knowing sally against the received wisdom of Whiggery, Hume
went on to suggest that the inspiration for the first moves towards the
representation of the English people in parliament was taken not from
the customs of the Anglo-Saxons, but from France. It was probably the
example of the Norman barons that emboldened the English natives to
demand greater independence from the king. It was also likely that the
establishment of boroughs and corporations with rights that freed them
from the authority of the barons was carried out in imitation of the French
‘communities’. ‘It may, therefore, be proposed, as no unlikely conjecture’,
Hume concluded, ‘that both the privileges of the peers and the liberty of
the commons were originally the growth of that country’.222 Here, once
again, Hume was following Brady, who in his Historical Treatise of Cities,
Burghs, and Boroughs (1690) had argued for the importance of French,
not Saxon, precedent in the creation of boroughs. Hume did nothing to
undermine the claim that mattered most to Brady: that towns and cities
owed their rights to kings acting, as Brady put it, ‘to cheque the insolencies
of their great vassals, and to protect them [i.e., the towns and cities] from
their [i.e., the barons’] over-grown dominion and extravagant power over
them’.223 Medieval liberties, in other words, were gifts of the crown, not
reclamations of pre-Norman custom.
Hume’s second volume of medieval history told the story of the break-
down of English feudalism, and of the slow development of popular
representation in parliament. Hume was careful to make it clear that in
no sense was the latter cause of the former. Popular liberty was rather a
collateral effect of the declining influence of the crown, evidence that the
crown was losing the power struggle against the barons. For representa-
tives of the commons were only invited to parliament by the crown when
it began to seem plausible that they might act as counterweights to the
influence of the nobility. Whigs like Petyt and Tyrrell claimed that the
people’s supposedly traditional right to a place in parliament remained
intact during the Norman period. Hume was not alone in finding this
impossible to believe. By the middle of the eighteenth century it was gen-
erally accepted even among the Whigs that there was no decisive evidence
of a place in parliament for representatives of the shires and boroughs
until 1265, the forty-ninth year of the reign of Henry III. Rapin had
considered the evidence for representatives of the commons prior to that
date and found it inconclusive. Nor was there reason to think that the
new members of the 1265 parliament were there as a matter of right. It
was true, though, that ‘to the troubles which distracted this reign, the
English are indebted for the liberties and privileges they still enjoy at this
day’.224 Guthrie likewise saw in the parliament of 1265 ‘the first plain and
evident out-lines of an English representation as it is now modelled, none
prior to this being extant on our records’.225 Hume was more circumspect
about the significance of 49 Henry III. It was certainly ‘the first time, that
mention is made by historians of any representatives sent to parliament
by the boroughs’, and did indeed, in a sense, mark the birth of the House
of Commons.226 But Hume asked his reader to consider the detail of
the circumstances. The parliament in question was summoned not by
the king, but by the earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, who had by
then made himself more or less master of the country in the king’s place.
And Leicester had invited in representatives of the boroughs to win him-
self the support of the people of London in particular. This new model of
parliament was a means of crushing his rivals among the rest of the barony.
As Carte had emphasized, it was an assembly ‘convened by the arbitrary
will of a rebel; modelled so as might best serve his purposes, and composed
only of his own partisans; none else being summoned thither’.227 Even so,
Hume allowed, it was a fatal blow to the feudal system, which was ‘totally
incompatible’ with the liberty and influence of the commons. The people
naturally favoured the innovations introduced by Leicester. So did the
king, who found the commons to be rather more submissive than were
the barons to the authority of the crown.
What the commons signified to Henry III’s successors was a reliable
source of income. The first instance of a summons of representatives of
all the boroughs to parliament by a legitimate ruler of England came in
1295, in the twenty-third year of the reign of Edward I. Edward’s wars in
Wales, Scotland, and France had dangerously impoverished the crown,
in large part because the feudal obligation of the large land holders to pro-
vide the king with soldiers had completely broken down. The crown had
already begun cultivating the support of the minor nobility, the knights
and lesser barons, but it needed more money than they could provide.
By now the boroughs, industrious and ingenious as they were, had grown
wealthy enough to seem worth cultivating too. Thus, 23 Edward I, not
49 Henry III, was ‘the real and true epoch of the house of commons, and
the first faint dawnings of popular government in England’.228 This was
one more instance of Hume following Carte’s, and ultimately Brady’s,
lead. The year 1295, Carte had claimed, saw ‘a great alteration in the
old constitution’.229 It was, according to Brady, ‘[t]he first time we find
any burgesses or citizens summoned to parliament’.230 Yet, as Hume
reminded the reader, at first these new members of parliament played
a very insignificant role in proceedings. Thus ‘they had so little idea of
appearing as legislators, a character extremely wide of their low rank and
condition, that no intelligence could be more disagreeable than to any
borough, than to find that they must elect, or to any individual than that
he was elected, to a trust from which no profit or honour could possibly be
expected’.231 They were there simply to give the consent of those they rep-
resented to taxes, and once they had done that, they left, and the business
of parliament continued without them. Later they became more assertive

and came to parliament with petitions expressing grievances which they
expected the king to address in return for they money they gave him, but
even then they played no part in the legislative process. The arrival of gen-
uine popular government remained a very long way off. Under Edward
II, according to Hume, parliament ‘was nothing but the organ of present
power’.232 The England of Edward III was merely a ‘barbarous monar-
chy’.233 Under Henry IV the influence of the commons increased, because
of Henry’s political weakness and want of money, but this was merely ‘a
temporary advantage arising from the present situation’.234 Henry IV
reminded the commons that they were only petitioners and had no proper
legislative authority.235 Nothing had changed by 1485. Nothing would
change until the final decades of the sixteenth century.
Foreign war remained a preeminent concern of English kings dur-
ing the late medieval period. Wales having been fairly easily subdued,
Scotland and France were the principal objects of English ambition. As
a means, perhaps, of signalling his distance from Scottish prejudices,
Hume defended Edward I’s idea of a forced unification of the Scottish
and English crowns. Success would have been ‘very advantageous to
England’ and ‘perhaps in the end no less beneficial to Scotland’ – even
if it had to be conceded that Edward’s aggression was ‘extremely unjust
and iniquitous in itself’.236 ‘[T]he advantage was so visible of uniting the
island under one head’, Hume argued in his summing up of Edward’s
reign, ‘that those who give great indulgence to reasons of state in the mea-
sures of princes, will not be apt to regard this part of his conduct with much
severity’.237 This was to go even further than William Robertson, who in
his History of Scotland had given a balanced account of the controversy
over the English crown’s supposed feudal authority over the Scottish, and
then concluded that the whole issue could only be of antiquarian interest
in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union.238 Hume was so keen not to give
his English critics the opportunity of using his Scottishness against him
that he qualified a generally admiring account of William Wallace with an
acknowledgement that Wallace’s exploits ‘have been much exaggerated
by the traditions of his countrymen’.239 He was also as triumphalist as
any English patriot could wish about Edward III’s victories at Crecy and
Poitiers, and about Henry V’s at Agincourt. He did make it plain, however,
that he regarded the English claim to the French throne as unintelligible
to the point of being self-refuting.240 Under Henry V there was for a brief
interval a chance that England could take France by sheer military force,
but after that there was no possible outcome but the eventual complete
expulsion of the English from French territory. What made this inevitable
was money, and England’s lack of it. In fact, every European country of
the time was economically crippled by what Hume termed Europe’s ‘gen-
eral want of industry, commerce, and police’.241 England was no worse off
than France in this regard. No European king could afford to keep an army
in the field for more than a few summer months each year. But during the
Hundred Years War this was much more of a problem for the English than
the French, simply because France was fighting on home territory. Hume
suggests that the pressing of the English claim was by the end much
more obviously a sign of weakness than of strength. Successive kings
saw war in France as largely a means of preventing the barons from
causing trouble at home.
Already by the reign of Richard II, Hume claimed, the English crown
was so weak that it was unable effectively to check the greed and aggression
of the greater nobility. ‘The laws were so feebly executed . . . that no
subject could trust to their protection. Men openly associated themselves,
under the patronage of some great man, for their mutual defence.’ Conflict
between these ‘confederacies’ was continual. It was plain to see ‘that the
whole force of feudal system was in a manner dissolved, and that the
English had nearly returned to the same situation in which they stood
before the Norman conquest’.242 In other words, they had nearly returned
to a state of nature, where law did not exist, and where disputes could only
be settled by the sword. Henry IV deposed Richard II and usurped his
throne, giving rise to the Yorkist challenge to Lancastrian rule, and the
internecine bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses. Henry VI, ‘that empty
of shadow of a king’, ‘utterly incapable of exercising his authority’,243 was
deposed by his own son, Edward IV. The war between Lancastrians and
Yorkists revealed itself to history as ‘a scene of horror and bloodshed,
savage manners, arbitrary executions, and treacherous and dishonourable
conduct’.244 The manner in which the ‘bloody and treacherous tyrant’
Richard III took the throne was an entirely fitting conclusion to the
narrative of this second volume of medieval history. ‘Never was there an
usurpation in any country more flagrant . . . ’, Hume observed, ‘nor more
repugnant to every principle of justice and public interest’.245 Hume had
now ceased to follow Carte’s lead. Carte, keen as ever to insist on the
claim of every English king to the obedience of his subjects, portrayed
Richard III as the victim of historians who had sought to court Tudor
favour by reporting as fact all the ‘vile calumnies’ loaded on him by
Henry VII. Richard, according to Carte, ‘distinguished himself, by his
courage in the field upon all occasions, and by the prudence, as well as the
justice of his administration’.246 His one parliament passed several laws
‘for the good of the people, for the security of their liberties and properties,
for the redress of grievances, and for the due administration of justice’.
‘Laws so full of equity and humanity’, Carte commented, ‘so evidently
tending to the public good, so well adapted to preserve the quiet, ease,
and rights of the subject, passed in all the confidence of power and pride
of conquest, in a juncture too often employed, by usurpers to trample
arbitrarily on the liberties of a nation, and by ministers, to gratify their
revenge and avarice, were very proper means to recommend [Richard’s]
government’.247 Hume was not prepared to violate the conventions of
Whig history to that extent.248
Nor, on the other hand, was he willing to endorse the idea that Henry
VII’s accession to the crown was given its legitimacy by the consent of
the people. Bolingbroke had, as usual, parroted received Whig wisdom in
claiming that the first Tudor was made king ‘by the universal concurrence,
which a spirit of liberty and a regard to the public good, independent of
party, inspired’.249 In truth, Henry VII, like William I, owed his crown
principally to conquest and present possession. If the battle of Bosworth
Field spelled the end of feudal aristocracy, it also, as Hume saw it, ush-
ered in the despotism of the Tudors. The end of feudalism was not the
beginning, let alone rebirth, of English liberty. England was caught up in a
large-scale process of change, a process that would take two hundred more
years to work itself out and reach the provisional conclusion represented in
the post-1688 constitutional settlement. The balance of property, which
had been with the nobility during the ‘aristocratical’ middle ages, was
slowly shifting towards the gentry and the House of Commons, a change
that would eventually decisively alter the dynamics of English politics. In
the concluding remarks that follow the reign of Richard III, Hume indi-
cates that this process of change had to be understood in terms of a still
larger process that was not distinctively English or simply economic. All
of Europe had experienced the lowest point of its history in the eleventh
century. And, so Hume claims, the gradual progress from darkest night
to the ‘full morning’ of the fifteenth century was driven as much by ideas
as by the necessities of politics. ‘The rise, progress, perfection and decline
of art and science, are curious objects of contemplation, and intimately

connected with a narration of civil transactions’, he asserted. ‘The events
of no particular period can be fully accounted for, but by considering the
degrees of advancement, which men have reached in those particulars’.250
Especially important, the reader was then told, was the accidental redis-
covery of the Roman civil law in Amalfi in 1130. ‘[P]erhaps there was no
event’, Hume writes, ‘which tended farther to the improvement of the
age’.251 It was significant in England because of the imperfections of the
country’s jurisprudence, and because it taught Englishmen how freedom
was to be found in the rule of law. Yet, so it would seem from Hume’s
own narrative, this was a lesson that took some time to be learned. Ideas
derived from the corpus iuris civilis did not play a notable role in the history
of medieval England as Hume told it. Here was another event, like Magna
Carta and like the summoning of representatives of the common people
to parliament, the fruitful consequences of which would take centuries to
become apparent.
This second and final instalment of Hume’s History of England was
dated 1762 on its title page, but was in fact published by Millar on
17 November 1761.252 Hume must have worked hard to have been
able to finish his medieval history in two years. As we have seen, it is
likely that he took the shape of his narrative, organized as it is around
the implementation and collapse of English feudalism, from Brady and
Carte. Their perspective on the early English history provided the per-
fect means of debunking the Whig story of the endurance through the
centuries of the freedoms of the Anglo-Saxons. When it came to the crit-
ical historiographical-cum-political questions – the composition of the
Wittenagemot, whether William I had conquered England as well as
Harold, the significance of Magna Carta, whether the commons were
represented in parliament prior to 1265 – Hume sided with Brady and
Carte against the Whig historians, and did so in a manner that implied
that it was only fanatics who resisted the evidence that Brady and the
seventeenth-century antiquarians had amassed. It is impossible to know
whether, before he came to these judgements, Hume had worked through
any of the relevant primary documentary material. His footnotes, which
as usual refer almost exclusively to printed sources, suggest not. It is
probably fair to say that he had none of Carte’s anxiety about the impos-
sibility of writing history ‘without painful searches into antiquity, and a
large correspondence with learned men who have made it their study, nor
without travelling through an infinite number of old records, not easy to

be read, nor always to be understood and applied to their proper uses,
without a constant attention and careful observation’.253 He certainly read
all the important sources, but one feels that he did so knowing what he
wanted to find in them, looking for the facts and anecdotes that would
serve his purposes. As with the histories of the Stuarts and the Tudors,
the single most remarkable feature of Hume’s medieval history was its
brevity. At 900 quarto pages, it was a feat of elegant compression. It took
Rapin 650 double-columned folio pages to cover the same period. The
pre-Tudor parts of Guthrie’s and Carte’s general histories of England take
up 1,800 and 1,700 folio pages respectively. Hume’s method was not to
pile up evidence in favour of a particular interpretation of English history.
Nor was he interested in minutely dissecting interpretations that differed
from his. His ideal reader had already read Rapin, Carte, Guthrie, and the
rest, and was familiar with the questions that divided them. What Hume
wanted his reader to be impressed, and amused, by was the way he played
his predecessors off against each other, making Tory points against Whig
orthodoxy, but doing so in order to make an argument that, so Hume
continued to believe, could not be read as Tory in its motivations.
By March 1762, Andrew Millar was running low in copies of the revised
History of Great Britain and the four volumes of The History of England,
and proposed a new, collected edition. Hume was delighted. ‘I always
intended, that the whole six volumes should be printed and shoud read as
one continued work’, he told William Strahan.254 The new edition’s title
would be The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the
Revolution in 1688. Continuity between the six volumes would be assured
by changing the numbering of the chapters of the Tudor and Stuart
volumes, so that the first chapter of ‘the antient history’ was the first
chapter of the whole work. The account of William of Orange’s landing
at Torbay in 1688 and of James II’s flight to France thus became chapter
71. Hume made corrections to all six volumes. They were light in the case
of the first two, which had only just been printed in their first edition.
They were not much more substantial in the case of volumes three and
four. In line with Hume’s case for constitutional continuity between the
Tudor and early Stuart periods, a footnote was added containing a passage
from Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England that made it clearly appear
that during the reign of Henry VIII, ‘the people had then little notion of
being jealous of their liberties, were desirous of making the crown quite
independent, and willed only to remove from themselves, as much as
possible, the burthens of government’.255 Hume refined his case against
the innocence of Mary Queen of Scots in the death of her husband Lord
Darnley,256 but also further underlined the barbarity of her execution.257
The most important alteration was the addition of a footnote to a reference
to ‘the antient constitution of England’ in Hume’s summary account of
government, manners, commerce, arts and learning during the reign of
Elizabeth. ‘By the antient constitution’, Hume explained,
is meant that which prevailed, before the settlement of our present plan of liberty.
There was a more antient constitution, where, tho’ the people had perhaps less
liberty than under the Tudors, yet the King had also less authority: The power
of the barons was a great check upon him, and exercised great tyranny over them.
But there was still a more antient constitution, viz. that before the signing of
the charter, where neither the people nor the barons had any regular authority;
and the power of the government was almost wholly in the King. The English
constitution, like all others, has been in a state of continual fluctuation.258
By this means Hume sought to drain any trace of absolutist politics

from his endorsement of Brady’s and Carte’s emphasis upon the changes
wrought by William I. Just as post-1688 liberty did not rest on a pre-
Norman constitution, so also it did not rest on a feudal one. There
was no single, essentially English, English constitution against which the
country’s other systems of government stood to be measured. There was,
instead, just a story of endless constitutional change.259
Here Hume broke altogether with the tradition of English historiogra-
phy. He was asserting, in effect, that the past had no political significance.
It could not be used to argue either for or against an absolutist conception
of royal power. Politically speaking, it was the present, and the future,
that mattered. History should be left to historians.260 It followed that
Hume had to be extremely careful not to make his History look as if it
were making a party political point. He continued to worry about how he
had presented things in the Stuart volumes. The changes he had made
in the second edition did not seem sufficient. There were further ‘plaguy
prejudices of Whiggism’ to be corrected. ‘As I began the History with
those two reigns’, he told Elliot in March 1763, ‘I now find that that they,
above all the rest, have been corrupted with Whig rancour, and that I
really deserv’d the name of party writer, and boasted without any founda-
tion of my impartiality’.261 Hume went on to draw Elliot’s attention to the
further alterations to be found in the new, 1762 edition: James I’s exercise
of his prerogative in 1610 in imposing new customs was no longer said to
be without precedent, and instead it could be justified ‘according to the
principles and practices of that time’;262 Hume now questioned whether
James could properly be said to be a persecutor of the Puritans;263 he
found a precedent for Charles I’s levying of tonnage and poundage in the
reign of Henry VIII.264 He was also, he told Elliot, more explicit in his jus-
tification of James II’s use of the dispensing power, ‘which was intimately
interwove with the constitution & monarchy’.265 This was something of
an exaggeration. What Hume had in fact done was to drop the suggestion
that there was as much to be said against James’s interpretation of the
dispensing power as there was to be said for it, and to point out instead
that it was a vain hope that this traditional royal prerogative ‘could, in any
degree, be rendered compatible with those accurate and regular limita-
tions, which had of late been established’.266 The declaration that the 1688
revolution ‘happily put an end to all these disputes’, and that henceforth
‘to their mutual felicity, King and people were finally taught to know their
proper limits and boundaries’, remained in place. Eradicating traces of
the supposed Whig rancour of the first edition of The History of Great
Britain did not mean switching sides and adopting a Tory point of view
instead. Impartiality remained the overriding objective. Millar brought
out a six volume quarto edition of the complete History of England in 1762,
and a less expensive eight-volume octavo edition the following year. ‘[A]
cheap edition may contribute to its dispersion’, Hume remarked, ‘and
may forward its reputation, which, I see, has not yet entirely prevaild over
all prejudices’.267
8
Paris, London, Edinburgh
ume made a lot of money from The History of England. Having

H earned £1,100 from the first edition of The History of Great Britain,
he had then sold the copyright to the second edition to Millar for 800
guineas (£830). Millar gave him £700 for the rights to the Tudor volumes,
and £1,400 for the medieval history. Thus the History netted Hume more
than £4,000 in total.1 In the summer of 1762, Hume used some of this
money to buy a tenement flat in James’s Court just off the High Street in
Edinburgh’s Old Town.2 He was no longer, he wrote to Gilbert Elliot, a
wanderer on the face of the earth.3 But what was he to do now? A rumour
was circulating that he intended to write a history of the Christian church
from its beginnings, but, so he had told Andrew Millar earlier in the
year, that rumour was false. ‘I am beginning to love peace very much’,
he had added, ‘and resolve to be more cautious than formerly in creating
myself enemies’.4 It was more likely that he would continue his account
of the history of England, to include the reigns of William and Mary,
Anne, and possibly also George I. But this could not be done properly
in Edinburgh. It would be necessary to consult papers held in private
collections in England, and Hume was unsure that the owners of those
collections would be willing to open them to someone who had trampled
so violently on the principles, religious as well as political, of both Whigs
and Tories. Factionalism in England would need to die down before he
could begin serious historical work again. An additional problem was the
fact that the general English antipathy to Scots intensified in the early
1760s as a result of the influence on George III of the Earl of Bute. The
Bute ministry that began in 1762 signalled the end of forty years of Whig
hegemony, and Whigs who suddenly found themselves out of office did
all they could to foster popular hatred of Scots and all things Scottish.
Several of Hume’s friends, including Elliot and James Oswald, rose to
power under Bute, but even so, Hume thought, the new ministry was
408
Paris, London, Edinburgh 409
more likely to be a hindrance than a help to the writing of further volumes

of The History of England.
There is some reason to think that he considered publishing the
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion at this time. But it seems that his
friends talked him out of it.5 So he remained idle, as he admitted to his
correspondents, filling his time with the endless business of re-reading
and correcting what he had already published. Then, unexpectedly, in
the summer of 1763, he received an invitation, ‘accompany’d with great
prospects and expectations’, so he told Adam Smith, to go to Paris as de
facto secretary to the new British ambassador there, the Earl of Hertford.
He hesitated before accepting – but not for very long. He had nothing to
tie him to Edinburgh, and it was surely a relief no longer to have to worry
about what he would write next.
This was, as it turned out, in one sense the end of Hume’s career as
an author. He wrote only a handful of short and minor pieces during
the remaining thirteen years of his life. He was in Paris for more than
two years, and became friends with many of the great men and women
of the French Enlightenment, but nothing there inspired him to write
anything new. Towards the end of his time in France he got to know
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and brought him back to England with him in
January 1766. The catastrophic end of their friendship consumed all of
Hume’s energy and attention for months afterwards, as he hesitated about
whether to tell his side of the story, and then decided to do so with a work
published first in Paris, and a month later in London. In the spring of
1767, just as the Rousseau affair was dying down, Hume received another
invitation from the Earl of Hertford, this time offering him a position in
the Northern Department in London, under Hertford’s brother, General
Conway. Again Hume seized the opportunity to leave Edinburgh and his
books behind him. This time the British state required his services for less
than a year. Ministries did not last long in the 1760s, and Conway resigned
even before the general election of 1768. That election was followed by
unprecedented public disorder in London, and Hume, who stayed on in
the capital for more than a year after the end of his time at the Northern
Department, was there to witness it. He became as a result even more
sceptical about the balance struck between liberty and authority by the
post-1688 constitution, and, as he continued correcting the Essays and
Treatises and the History, he made numerous alterations registering the
intensification of his doubts. In his letters he also commented extensively
upon the worsening state of affairs in Britain’s American colonies. It seems

to have been politics that principally occupied his thoughts after he finally
returned to Edinburgh in August 1769. Thanks to the money made from
the History and the pensions he received on account of his government
service he was now a very rich man. He had, so he told William Strahan,
‘fully determind never to continue my History’.6 In the spring of 1775,
he fell seriously ill with a bowel disease, which killed him in August of the
following year. But shortly before he died he returned to the Dialogues.
He made several significant additions to the manuscript, and did his best
to ensure that it would be published soon after his death.
A Sceptic in the Company of Dogmatists

Between 1756 and 1763, Britain and France had been at war. In fact,
peace had never properly broken out following the 1748 treaty of Aix-
la-Chapelle. There had been clashes between the two countries in India
and North America in the early 1750s, and full resumption of hostilities
had seemed likely long before the Seven Years War formally began. War
became inevitable with two sets of treaties. In January 1756, a defensive
alliance between Britain and Prussia, France’s old ally, was announced,
motivated from the British point of view by the need to secure Hanover
against Austrian aggression. Then, in May 1756, France ended its long
enmity with Austria with the signing of the First Treaty of Versailles.
The French knew that Britain, not Austria, was now its principal rival,
and the Austrians wanted to take Silesia back from Prussia. In August,
Frederick of Prussia invaded Saxony with the intention of moving on into
Austrian Bohemia, bringing France into the war as Austria’s ally. Things
began well for the Bourbon alliance, but after 1757 the tide turned in
favour of Britain and Prussia, and by 1759 France appeared to be facing
disaster. With British help, Frederick humiliated the French army in
Europe, guaranteeing Hanover’s safety, and Britain crushed the French
navy in the Atlantic, gaining as a result a decisive advantage in the war in
North America. In 1759, France surrendered Canada to British control,
and also all territory in America east of the Mississippi. There were also
major gains in the Caribbean, including the island of Guadeloupe. By
1761, Britain had taken the vital trading stations of Fort Louis in Senegal,
and Pondicherry in India. Not even an alliance with Spain in August 1761
was able to swing the war back in France’s favour. Spain entered the war
on France’s side on 1 January of the next year, only to find itself also at the
mercy of the British navy, and was soon compelled to surrender Havana
in the Caribbean and Manila in the Philippines. By now, however, British
appetite for further conflict was flagging. George III had succeeded to the
throne in 1760, and he and his first prime minister, the earl of Bute, had a
keen sense that this was not their war. It was William Pitt’s war, and after
Pitt resigned in 1761, its staggering cost was increasingly dwelled upon
as a reason to bring it to a speedy end. Yet Pitt’s war, expensive though it
certainly was, massively increased the size of Britain’s overseas interests.
It turned a miscellaneous collection of colonies and trading posts into
an empire. The Peace of Paris, signed in February 1763, entitled Britain
to retain Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi, to take Florida
from the Spanish, to keep Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago
in the Caribbean, and to regard itself as the ruler of Bengal in India. The
British, according to Voltaire in a supplement to the Essai sur les Moeurs,
were ‘conquerors in all the four parts of the world’.7
For France, and especially for the French crown, the Peace of Paris
was a catastrophe. The diplomat the Comte de Vergennes would say that
its terms were ‘engraved on my heart’, and claimed that its ‘harsh and
most unjust stipulations’ were plain evidence of the British desire to see
France humiliated.8 The main task of Louis XV’s principal minister in all
but name, the Duc de Choiseul, was to redeem the honour of the state.9
He had given his cousin, the Duc de Praslin, the ministry of Foreign
Affairs in 1761, and between them they set out to do what they could
with the terms of the Peace of Paris. The man chosen by George III to
implement the peace treaty as his ambassador to France, and so to deal
with Choiseul and Praslin, was the Earl of Hertford, Francis Seymour
Conway. It remains unclear why Hertford invited Hume to accompany
him to Paris in October 1763. There was no prior personal connection
between them. Hertford had refused to accept the royal appointee to the
post of Secretary, Charles Bunbury, and was unable to give Hume the title
of Secretary, along with the full salary, until Bunbury formally resigned
the position in July 1765. ‘The decorum and piety of Lord Hertford
occasioned men to wonder, when, in the room of Bunbury, he chose for
his secretary the celebrated free-thinker David Hume, totally unknown to
him’, Walpole wrote in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George III; ‘but
this was the effect of recommendations from other Scots, who had much
weight with Lord and Lady Hertford’.10 Bute had resigned the ministry
in April 1763, but the influence of Scots on affairs in London remained

significant.
Hume told Smith that he hesitated before accepting Hertford’s invita-
tion, thinking it ‘ridiculous, at my years, to be entering on a new scene, and
to put myself in the lists as a candidate of fortune’. ‘But’, he continued,
‘I reflected, that I had in a manner abjur’d all literary occupations, that I
resolvd to give up my future life entirely to amusements, and that there
coud not be a better pastime than such a journey, especially with a man
of Lord Hertford’s character, and that it wou’d be easy to prevent my
acceptance from having the least appearance of dependance’.11 Hertford
had a reputation for piety, but religion was not an obstacle to the devel-
opment of a close relationship between the ambassador and his assistant.
Hume’s letters make it clear that living in close quarters with Hertford
and his wife and son was one of the chief pleasures of his time in Paris.
Hertford in turn trusted Hume sufficiently to leave him chargé d’affaires
in Paris when he was moved on to Ireland in the summer of 1765. The
affairs that Hume was charged were part of the ongoing business of imple-
menting the terms of the Treaty of Paris in the face of the machinations
of Choiseul and Praslin: seeing to the dismantling of the fortified port of
Dunkirk, trying for a fair settlement for British merchants in Canada seek-
ing to redeem French paper money for metal, and keeping the French
to the agreed limitations on their right to the fisheries off the coast of
Newfoundland.12
In June 1764, Hume wrote to William Mure that ‘What between public
business, the company of the learned and that of the great, especially of
the ladies, I find all my time fill’d up, and have no time to open a book,
except it be some books newly publishd, which may be the subject of
conversation’.13 Some among the learned, of course, he had already been
in contact with for some time – for instance, Helvétius, who in 1759 had
written to him about the translation of the History of Great Britain by the
Abbé Prévost, regretting the fact that the first two volumes had already
been done, but assuring him that the revisions he had made in the sec-
ond edition would be printed in an appendix.14 The war seems to have
mattered to Helvétius mainly because it prevented him from crossing the
Channel to meet Hume in person. In the summer of 1763, Hume made
moves to establish further links with the world of French letters. He sent
copies of works to Mirabeau and to d’Holbach, and doubtless to others as
well. In his letter of thanks, Mirabeau told him that his History, like the
histories of Thucydides and Tacitus, was ‘for all times and all places’.15
D’Holbach told him that reading his works ‘not only inspired me with the
strongest admiration for your genius and amiable parts, but gave me the
strongest desire of getting acquainted with one of the greatest philoso-
phers of any age, and of the best friend to mankind’.16 Once in Paris,
Hume met and got to know the philosophes at the salons of d’Holbach,
Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, and the Marquise du
Deffand. ‘The men of letters here are really very agreeable’, Hume told
Hugh Blair in December 1763, ‘all of them men of the world, living in
entire or almost entire harmony among themselves, and quite irreproach-
able in their morals’.17 He went on to say that he liked best d’Alembert,
Buffon, Marmontel, Diderot, Duclos, Helvétius, and Hénault. As time
passed, he developed friendships also with Turgot, Morellet, Grimm,
and Suard. Hume seems to have developed a close relationship with
d’Alembert, with whom he was at one point planning a trip to Italy, and
to whom he would leave £200 in his will.18 He never met Voltaire, but
did send a letter to Ferney, ‘in which I expressed the esteem which is
undoubtedly due to his talents’.19 An especially intense friendship devel-
oped between Hume and Hippolyte de Saujon, the Comtesse de Boufflers.
She had written Hume an admiring letter in March 1761, and had come
to London two years later, apparently in the hope of meeting Hume in
person. Hume was not in London at the time, however, and they met
for the first time early in Hume’s first winter in Paris, in November or
December 1763. It was at her behest, as we will see, that Hume first
interested himself in the predicaments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.20
Hume was forcibly struck by the differences between the situations of
men of letters in England and in France. In London there was no literary
society to speak of. ‘The little company, there, that is worth conversing
with’, he wrote to Blair in April 1765, ‘are cold & unsociable or are warmed
only by faction and cabal; so that a man, who plays no part in public affairs,
becomes altogether insignificant and if he is not rich, he becomes even
contemptible’. This was why the English – and Hume surely meant the
English, as distinct from the Scots – ‘are relapsing fast into the deep-
est stupidity, Christianity & ignorance’. In Paris, by contrast, ‘a man
that distinguishes himself in letters, meets immediately with regard and
attention’. Hume on his arrival in Paris was immediately claimed by the
great, especially the ladies, but, so he told Blair, the attention he received
from that source was agreeable ‘neither in expectation, possession, nor
recollection’. It was only once he ‘contracted the circle of [his] acquain-

tance’ that he began to enjoy life there. He enjoyed it so much that he had
‘even thoughts of settling at Paris for the rest of my life’.21 Yet there is
no sign that even among the more contracted circle of his friends Hume
found anything in Paris to make him reconsider any of his philosophy or
history. He does not seem to have thought new thoughts there. He wrote
nothing in answer to the opinions that he heard aired in the salons and that
he discussed in the more intimate gatherings that he preferred. What little
evidence there is suggests that there was in fact little genuine intellectual
affinity between Hume and the philosophes. They wanted him to be more
of a radical, especially as regards religion, than it was possible for a sceptic
to be, and they seem to have been amused, perhaps even frustrated, by his
unwillingness to do more towards the complete and final destruction of
Christianity. They were keen that he continue with the History of England,
but were even keener that he begin work on the rumoured ecclesiastical
history. There are letters from Helvétius, d’Alembert, and Grimm all
encouraging him to pursue this project, described by Helvétius as ‘le plus
beau projet du monde’, and by Grimm as ‘un des plus importants ser-
vices rendus à la philosophie et à l’humanité’.22 In a letter of 1773 about
Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonny Prince Charlie’, Hume described how it
was generally thought that the Pretender had ‘learned from the philoso-
phers at Paris to affect a contempt of all religion’. Helvétius and Hume’s
friend George Keith thought that was an excellent thing. ‘[B]oth of them’,
Hume wrote, ‘used to laugh at me for my narrow way of thinking in these
particulars’.23 Mockery of ‘all religion’, apparently, was not to Hume’s
taste. In his autobiography Gibbon would recount how, in their ‘intoler-
ant zeal’, ‘the philosophers and Encyclopaedists the friends of d’Olbach
and Helvetius . . . laughed at the scepticism of Hume, preached the tenets
of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists and damned all believers with
ridicule and contempt’.24
Hume’s lack of sympathy for much of what animated the philosophes
and Encyclopaedists might explain why the most substantial intellec-
tual exchange of which record has survived from this period was with
Turgot on, in Hume’s words, ‘the method of laying on taxes, whether it is
better to impose them on landed possessions or on consumption’.25 This
was perhaps the kind of thing that Hume preferred to talk about. It was,
Turgot remarked, ‘a subject that we have argued about many times’.26
Hume had been interested in the ways the French tax system might be
reformed since at least 1741. In the essay ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’,
retitled ‘Of Civil Liberty’ in 1758, Hume had argued that improvement
of the way taxes were levied in France was perfectly possible, and that
once it was done, ‘the difference betwixt [French] absolute government
and our free one, would be more nominal than real’.27 Hume was sure,
however, that Turgot was wrong to believe that the best way to maximize
tax revenue without either crippling the economy or generating debilitat-
ing social unrest was by means of a direct tax on income from land rents.
It was not true that indirect taxes on consumption, taxes such as were
bound to fall heavily on the labouring classes, would in the end be paid
by landowners anyway because of the rise in wages that were bound to
result. Tax rises did not always and everywhere produce wage increases.
And, regardless, a modern economy comprised more than owners of land
and the labouring poor. There were also merchants, and shopkeepers,
and master tradesmen, and it was, Hume argued, ‘very just, that these
shoud pay for the support of the community, which can only be where
taxes are lay’d on consumptions’.28 As he had pointed out in ‘Of Taxes’ in
the Political Discourses, taxes on consumption ‘seem to be, in some mea-
sure, voluntary . . . : They are paid gradually and insensibly: And being
confounded with the natural price of the commodity, they are scarcely
perceiv’d by the consumers’.29 Turgot’s reply to Hume made it clear that,
while he accepted the principle of the économistes, or ‘Physiocrats’, that
properly speaking land rent was the only taxable form of income, and that
the incomes of manufacturing and commercial classes were in the end paid
for by agriculture, he had a sophisticated conception of the workings of the
economy ‘in a country where commerce and industry are free and ener-
getic’.30 It is possible, in fact, that discussions with Hume had a place in the
genesis of Turgot’s main contribution to economics, the Réflexions sur la
Formation et la Distribution des Richesses, written in 1766 and published in
1769–70.31
In a letter to Turgot written in June 1768, after the start of the ‘Wilkes
and Liberty’ riots, Hume joked about his friend’s ‘laudable, if not too san-
guine hope, that human society is capable of perpetual progress towards
perfection, that the encrease of knowledge will still prove favourable to
good government, and that since the discovery of printing we need no
longer dread the usual returns of barbarism and ignorance’.32 Hume did
not doubt that progress had been made in modern Europe, in science of
course, but also in manners, and in the understanding of the nature of
political liberty. What he resisted was the confidence of some in Paris –

voiced most memorably by Condorcet in his Esquisse d’un Tableau His-
torique des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain – that this progress would never
be reversed, that there were laws of history which demonstrated that
society would carry on moving closer and closer to its ideal state. Hume
shared this inability to be optimistic about the future of humankind with
Rousseau, whose fame had begun with his realization in the summer of
1749 that he did not believe that progress in the arts and sciences went
hand in hand with progress in morals and politics. It is tempting, there-
fore, to suppose that it was a sense of common cause that prompted Hume
to respond enthusiastically when the Comtesse de Boufflers mentioned to
him the possibility that Rousseau, after the condemnation of Émile in both
Paris and Geneva in 1762, might be persuaded to seek asylum in Eng-
land. Hume told the Comtesse that ‘there is no man in Europe of whom I
have entertained a higher idea, and whom I would be prouder to serve’.33
To Rousseau himself he wrote that ‘of all men of letters in Europe,
since the death of President Montesquieu, you are the person whom I
most revere, both for the force of your genius and the greatness of your
mind’.34
Hume must have known, however, that a shared scepticism about some
of the principles of the philosophes – about the idea of progress, about
the dogmatic metaphysics upon which their dogmatic atheism rested –
went along with some very deep differences. Most important of all, Hume
had none of Rousseau’s overwhelmingly tragic sense of the modern human
condition. We do not know what Hume made of the Discours sur l’Origine
et les Fondements de l’Inégalité Parmi les Hommes, but it was probably
among the books that made him believe, as he put it in another letter to
the Comtesse de Boufflers, that Rousseau ‘chooses his topics less from
persuasion, than from the pleasure of showing his invention, and sur-
prizing the reader by his paradoxes’.35 As Adam Smith recognized in his
discussion in The Edinburgh Review of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Inégalité,
Mandeville’s concept of ‘self-liking’ provided Rousseau with the funda-
mental tool for the analysis of human sociability – just as it had Hume.
But what Hume had pulled apart with the calm and objectivity of the
anatomist, Rousseau saw as the cause of acute psychological damage, the
source of the ‘living outside of oneself’ that made impossible the very
freedom that was every human being’s most fundamental need. Hume
had accepted the connection between pride and the appetite for luxury,
and had gone on to argue in ‘Of Luxury’ ‘that the ages of refinement and
luxury are both the happiest and most virtuous’.36 Rousseau claimed that
luxury ‘corrupts rich and poor alike, the one by possession, the other by
covetousness; it sells out the fatherland to laxity, to vanity; it deprives the
state of all its citizens by making them slaves to one another, and all of
them slaves to opinion’.37
Nor did Hume share Rousseau’s belief that the modern age was beset
by fundamental problems that could be solved only either by dramatic
political change or by the development of a wholly new approach to the
education of children. Rousseau’s republican politics were anathema to
Hume. He condemned the ‘seditious purpose’ of Rousseau’s Lettres de la
Montagne,38 and must have regarded Rousseau’s single-minded focus on
freedom from external authority as betraying a deep misunderstanding
of the conditions of the possibility of peace and order in society. Hume
had described the English form of government as ‘the most entire sys-
tem of liberty, that ever was known among mankind’.39 ‘The English
people think they are free’, Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract; ‘it is
greatly mistaken, it is free only during the elections of Members of Par-
liament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing.’40 True
freedom, he argued, was incompatible with any form of political represen-
tation. It depended on the sovereignty of the people itself. Rousseau told
Hume that he thought The Social Contract was his best work, and Hume
thought this ‘as preposterous a judgment as that of Milton, who preferd the
Paradise Regaind to all his other performances’. To Hume’s mind it was
Julie that was Rousseau’s masterpiece.41 Hume, moreover, seems to have
had no interest at all in the philosophy of education. He could not take
Émile seriously. He told the Comtesse de Boufflers that it gave him ‘rather
less pleasure than [Rousseau’s] former writings’. He also observed to her
that it was not surprising that the ‘Confession de Foi du Vicaire Savo-
yard’ had caused such offence. Rousseau ‘has not had the precaution to
dissemble his contempt of established opinions; and as he scorns to dis-
semble his contempt of established opinions, he could not wonder that all
the zealots were in arms against him’.42 Hume had himself experienced
the fury of zealots, and he was willing to help to shelter Rousseau from
them, but not even in this respect was there the possibility of felt affinity
between the two men. For Hume was acute enough to see that underneath
Rousseau’s contempt of established opinions lay a deep and sincere reli-
giosity. It was remarkable, Hume told Blair in February 1766, ‘that the
philosopher of this age, who has been the most persecuted, is by far the
most devout’.43
At first these philosophical and political differences were no barrier
between them. In October 1765, Rousseau was forced to leave his final
places of sanctuary in Switzerland, first the Isle Sainte-Pierre in Berne
and then Bienne, and by the end of the month he was back in French
territory, en route to Paris. He was ready to take up Hume’s offer to help
him find sanctuary and a pension in England. By this point the changeover
of ambassadors was almost complete, and Hume’s time at the embassy in
Paris was coming to an end. When he left Paris for London in early Jan-
uary 1766, he did so in Rousseau’s company. There is no reason to doubt
that Hume genuinely sympathized with the situation in which Rousseau
found himself. Rousseau may have been imprudent, but his fierce commit-
ment to personal independence resonated with Hume. Back in July 1762,
Hume had told the Comtesse de Boufflers that he revered Rousseau’s
‘greatness of mind, which makes him fly obligations and dependence’.
‘I have the vanity to think’, he had continued, ‘that through the course
of my life I have endeavoured to resemble him in those maxims’.44 For
his part Rousseau was persuaded to go with Hume to England partly by
England’s reputation, despite its representative form of government, as ‘la
terre de liberté’, and partly because he was flattered by the idea of personal
acquaintance with David Hume, despite their lack of intellectual affinities.
‘I imagined for myself a kind of glory’, Rousseau wrote to Hume, ‘in show-
ing to the men of letters a beautiful example of sincere union between two
men whose principles were so different’.45 Rousseau was a great success in
London in early 1766. ‘I never saw a man who seems better calculated for
good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it’, Hume wrote
to Blair.46 Yet Rousseau soon tired of London and wanted a quieter life.
With Hume’s help he moved to Chiswick, then a village outside the city.
He still came in to London regularly, though, in part to have his portrait
painted by Allan Ramsay. Hume paid for the portrait, and at the same
time sat for Ramsay himself for the second time. Later the two pictures
hung together in Hume’s house on St. Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh,
and now they hang together in Edinburgh’s National Portrait Gallery.
It is difficult not to conclude from them that Ramsay was well aware
of the differences between the two men. They look like rather unlikely
friends.47
Rousseau did not stay in Chiswick long. Again with Hume’s help
he moved from there to Wootton Hall on the desolate border between
Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Hume thought this was a mistake. He
worried about the effects of such isolation on one who was so sensitive
that he was, as Hume described it to Blair, ‘like a man who were stript
not only of his cloaths but of his skin, and turn’d out in that situation
to combat with the rude and boisterous elements, such as perpetually
disturb this lower world’.48 This acute delicacy of feeling – such as was
bound, Hume recognized, to make Rousseau unhappy wherever he lived –
caused Rousseau to be extremely quick to take offence and conclude that
behind friendly and generous appearances lay malice and laughter at his
expense. He was not at Wootton Hall very long before he found reasons
to suspect that Hume was in truth ‘un traitre’ whose goal was to dishonour
him. Rousseau was from the beginning as keenly aware of the contrast
between their sensibilities as he was of the differences between their
principles. In a letter to the Comtesse de Boufflers written in August
1762 he had noted that where he, Rousseau, had passionately denounced
despotism and intolerance, ‘Mr. Hume said: here is what intolerance does
and what despotism does: he examined from all sides what passion left me
able to see only in one way’.49 Things went wrong between them as soon
as Rousseau, meditating on his experiences in London, came to believe
that there was with Hume, as there had proved to be with Diderot and
Grimm and his other former friends among the Parisian philosophes, a gap
between the appearance of friendship and reality.50 Such a gap revealed
itself when Hume proved unable to be sufficiently emotionally intense in
his reassurances after one of Rousseau’s episodes of doubt and suspicion.
It can have been no surprise to Rousseau that Hume failed this test. By
now Rousseau expected to be disappointed by his friends, and Hume’s
detached, analytical cast of mind made it especially unlikely that he would
be able to give Rousseau the empathy that he needed. And if Hume was
not a friend, he must be an enemy, part in fact of a pan-European plot
against him concocted by Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Horace Walpole. A
central element of this supposed plot was a satirical letter written by
Walpole pretending to be from Frederick of Prussia to Rousseau, which
had Frederick telling Rousseau that he would be happy to supply him with
the persecution that he seemed to enjoy so much. Rousseau had become
convinced that Hume had had a hand in the writing and circulation of
this letter. He first articulated his suspicions about Hume in a letter to

Mme de Verdelin dated 9 April.51 He then let more than two months pass
before accusing Hume directly. ‘Vous vous étes mal caché’, he wrote out
of the blue, ‘je vous connois, et vous ne l’ignorez pas’.52 In response to
Hume’s completely baffled reply53 he composed a very long letter (dated
10 July) describing in full, and in the third person, Hume’s assault upon
his honour. All of Hume’s efforts on Rousseau’s behalf, to find him a place
to live and to secure him a pension from the king, had been merely so
many means of concealing his real intentions.54
Hume’s reaction to Rousseau’s accusations was, in its way, also extreme
to the point of being hard to understand. Immediately on receiving
Rousseau’s first letter he wrote to Richard Davenport, the owner of
Wootton Hall, to ask for help ‘in the most critical affair, which, dur-
ing the course of my whole life, I have been engaged in’.55 A few days later
he described Rousseau to Blair as ‘surely the blackest and most atrocious
villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world’.56 He seems also
to have written in the same tone to d’Holbach, in two letters, now lost, that
he meant to be circulated among his Parisian friends and acquaintances.
One of Hume’s correspondents in Paris alluded to his having referred to
Rousseau in one of these letters as ‘the blackest and most atrocious villain
that ever disgraced human nature’.57 It is not easy to see why Hume,
aware as he was of Rousseau’s morbid over-sensitivity and quickness to
take offence, was unable on reflection to adopt a more objective and com-
passionate attitude towards his obviously tortured state of mind. He was
well aware that if he published Rousseau’s letters, he would, as he put it in a
letter to the Comtesse de Boufflers, ‘utterly ruin this unhappy man’.58 And
yet that is what he decided to do. The only explanation of Hume’s decision
to make the affair public would seem to lie in his worry that Rousseau
intended to do the same. Rousseau’s long second letter appeared to Hume
to have been written with a public audience in mind. Also Hume knew
that Rousseau was writing up his memoirs, and he knew how detailed and
explicit those memoirs were. He may well have worried that he would
find a place in the Confessions alongside Mademoiselle Lambercier and
Mademoiselle Galley and ‘Maman’.59 So, ignoring the advice of several
of his friends in Scotland, including Blair and Smith, and with the help in
Paris of Diderot and Suard, Hume assembled for publication in October
1766 the Exposé Succinct de la Contestation qui s’est élevée entre M. Hume
et M. Rousseau, avec les pièces justificatives. An English translation was
published in London the next month. It comprised a narrative inter-

spersed with letters that had passed between Hume and Rousseau before
and after June 1766, along with further letters from Horace Walpole
establishing that Hume had not been involved in the spoof letter from
Frederick the Great. In an editorial preface Diderot and Suard sought to
justify Hume’s decision to publish, and advised the reader that this was
Hume’s last word on the subject: ‘The facts are all laid before the pub-
lic: and Mr. Hume submits his cause to the determination of every man
of sense and probity’.60 It may have been, however, that Hume came to
regret the publication of the Exposé succinct. His maxim, so he would say in
‘My Own Life’, was never to reply to anybody. ‘[N]ot being very irascible
in my temper’, he continued there, ‘I have easily kept myself clear of all
literary squabbles’.61 Perhaps the Rousseau affair was not exactly a literary
squabble. It did show, though, that Hume was capable of irascibility. It
did not fit with the image he drew of himself in ‘My Own Life’, and was
not so much as alluded to there.
Wilkes and America

Hume stayed in London until the end of September 1766. He then went
up to Scotland, stopping first at Ninewells, and after that moving on
to Edinburgh. His letters of the late summer and autumn of 1766 are
dominated by the Rousseau affair and the publication and translation of
the Exposé Succinct. Only by October was he able to tell his bookseller
Andrew Millar that he was ‘returning to my old habits of study and retreat’.
Millar was still urging him to continue with the History of England – and
Hume was still prevaricating. ‘I woud fain see the prejudices of faction a
little abated’, he explained, ‘in order to smooth the way for my access to the
cabinets of the great’.62 It was ‘probable’, though, that he would ‘sketch
out the outlines of the two or three subsequent reigns’ (subsequent, that
is, to James II), and that he would then finish them off when conditions
in London allowed.63 In February of the next year, still in Edinburgh, he
told the Comtesse de Boufflers that ‘my former passion for study, derived
both from nature and habit, has seized me with greater violence, by reason
of so long an interruption, and I am so occupied with present things, that
I form no distant resolution’ – no resolution, for instance, about the move
back to Paris that the Comtesse was encouraging and that he seems at
this time to have thought perfectly possible.64 When he next wrote to the
Comtesse, however, it was a move from Edinburgh to London that he had

to announce. The Earl of Hertford had been in touch again, this time to
urge him to accept the office of Deputy Secretary of State in the Northern
Department under his brother General Conway. And, as in the summer
of 1763, Hume seems to have leapt at the opportunity to desert his study
in favour of the distractions offered by immersion in public affairs. Once
in London, he wrote to the Marquise de Barbentane that he was now
‘from a philosopher, degenerated into a petty statesman, and am entirely
occupyed in politics’.65 ‘Upon trial’, he wrote to Turgot, ‘my situation
appears far from disagreable, and I find, that to a man of a literary turn,
who has no great undertaking in view, business, especially public business,
is the best ressource of his declining years. . . . After the course of hard
study in which I have been engaged, business is rather a relaxation than a
labour to me’.66 The state of British politics in the late 1760s meant that
Hume could be confident that his position would not last long. So it turned
out. Conway resigned his position in the Chatham ministry in January
1768, and that was the end of Hume’s stay in the Northern Department.
In the meantime, he helped to manage England’s relations with countries
north of France – including Scotland – while finding time, as he put it in
a letter to Blair, ‘to take up a book, or write a private letter, or converse
with any friend that may call for me’.67 Among the things that he read
at this time was the manuscript of Gibbon’s aborted history of the Swiss
revolution. He wrote a complimentary letter to its author but advised him
to write in English, not French. ‘Our solid and increasing establishments
in America’, he wrote, ‘ . . . promise a superior stability and duration to
the English language’.68
Hume stayed in London for more than eighteen months after his posi-
tion in the Northern Department ended. There is no evidence that he did
so in order to do research on English history after the Glorious Revolu-
tion. He needed to make sure of the pension that was supposed to come
with the Under Secretaryship. He also needed to decide where it was that
he would spend the final years of his life. The Comtesse de Boufflers and
other friends in Paris continued to urge him to return to them, and it took
Hume some time to decide that that was not what he would do – and some
more time still to find a way of telling the Comtesse of this decision. France,
and the difference between France and England, was certainly much on
his mind during this period. In May 1768, when London appeared to be
threatened with a complete breakdown of law and order by the mob that
supported John Wilkes, Hume told the Marquise de Barbentane that he

was sure that most Frenchmen must return home from London glad that
they were born under a government not liable to such ‘inconveniences’.69
Hume’s time in Paris had not weakened his sense of the baselessness of
England’s overweening confidence in the superior merits of its form of
government. He told Trudaine de Montigny that ‘It will never be in my
purpose, and I believe, still less in my power, to enter into the prejudices
entertained by the vulgar part of my country-men, and to feel an antipathy
against the French nation: I know them too well to be capable of such a
sentiment’.70 The ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ mob was greatly excited by such
prejudices. So were the mob’s supporters in the world of letters. To one
of them, the historian Catherine Macaulay, Hume had written in 1764 to
explain that he ‘look[ed] upon all kinds of subdivision of power, from the
monarchy of France to the freest democracy of some Swiss Cantons, to be
equally legal, if established by custom and authority’.71 This was why the
form of government inherited by James I and Charles I from Elizabeth
was, as Hume had argued in his history of the Stuarts, a lawful form of
government deserving of obedience and allegiance. It was also why, in
the face of what he described to the Comtesse de Boufflers as English
‘licentiousness’,72 returning to France was an attractive idea for Hume in
the late 1760s.
It was ‘a melancholy reflection’, Hume remarked to de Montigny, what
‘trivial matters’ were sufficient to set Britain and France quarrelling,
and fighting. The Seven Years War, he continued, ‘proceeded from the
most frivolous causes: it arose not surely from any spirit of ambition in
you, tho’ we imagined so on our side of the water: it proceeded as little
from ambitious views in us, tho’ our success in the war has made that the
established wisdom in Europe. It was fomented by some obscure designing
men, contrary to the intentions of the two kings, the two ministries, even
the generality of the two nations’.73 Here Hume returned to the theme of
an essay that he had written early on in the Seven Years War and given
the title ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’.74 In 1758, Kames had passed onto
Hume some papers by Josiah Tucker discussing whether it was true, as
Hume had argued in Political Discourses, that a rich country was bound in
the end to have its wealth drained from it by the competitive advantage
of poorer countries with lower wages.75 Hume did not find Tucker’s case
against his view convincing, but he told Kames that, nevertheless, Tucker
was absolutely right in his criticisms of the whole of idea of (in the words
of the title of a pamphlet Tucker would publish in 1763) going to war

for the sake of trade.76 Hume was so pleased with the ‘hint’ thrown out
by Tucker that he would ‘make it the subject of a political discourse’;
for Tucker had added to Hume’s confidence in the general principle
that there was nothing more absurd than ‘the narrow malignity and envy
of nations, which can never bear to see their neighbours thriving, but
continually repine at any new efforts towards industry made by any other
nation’.77 ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ made the case that the logic of war
was dangerously at odds with the logic of trade.78 Trade was not a zero-
sum game. No country could gain from destroying the commerce of its
neighbours and reducing them to poverty. On the contrary, a country
stood only to gain from the prosperity of its neighbours. Commercial
ambition and spirit of emulation ensured that a country’s manufactures
would be improved by the achievements of its international rivals; and
those rivals would in turn provide a market for manufactures not absorbed
by the home market. Nor was there a danger that a general improvement
in arts and manufactures among neighbouring countries would threaten
exports: ‘Nature, by giving a diversity of geniuses, climates, and soils to
different nations, has secured their mutual intercourse and commerce, as
long as they all remain industrious and civilized’.79 Trade, then, could
be left to take care of itself, just as, so Hume had argued in ‘Of the
Balance of Trade’, could money. Neither needed to be ‘protected’ by
aggressive government intervention. When it came to the wars that self-
styled patriots liked to engage in, victory was supposed to lie in reducing
Britain’s neighbours to poverty, in bankrupting them and taking from
them their colonies. But who, then, would buy British manufactures?
And what would inspire and instruct Britain’s domestic industries? ‘I
shall therefore venture to acknowledge’, Hume concluded, ‘that not only
as a man, but as a British subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of
Germany, Spain, Italy, and even France. I am at least certain, that Great
Britain, and all these nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns
and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards
each other’.80
‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ provided additional support for Hume’s
claim in ‘Of the Balance of Power’ that Britain should moderate the
ardour of its response to the threat of universal monarchy that France
was imagined to pose. The truth was that there was no such threat in an
age of unrestrained international commerce.81 Any country that directed
military aggression at its neighbours would lose more than it gained. In

the end, as Tucker put it, the question for any country would always be,
not how many territories it had conquered, but what the price was of its
commodities, and whether it could find a market for them.82 And the
very worst policy of all for those who imagined themselves endangered
by a country’s pretensions was to respond in kind, and to think that
safety lay in the acquisition of empire. The Treaty of Paris was not a
cause for celebration to one who looked at international politics in this
way. In addition to the needlessness of the Seven Years War, there was
the issue of its cost, the fact that it had caused the national debt nearly
to double, from £74 million to £133 million.83 This increased Hume’s
pessimism as to the political consequences of the practice of mortgaging
future tax income to pay for present expenditure. In the original version
of ‘Of Public Credit’ Hume had imagined that voluntary bankruptcy on
the part of the British state might be compatible with preservation of
the nation’s liberty. In additions to the essay made in the 1764 edition
of Essays and Treatises, he was much more pessimistic.84 He predicted
that were debt to increase to the highest amount that the country’s tax
base could support, wealth, and hence power, must inevitably drain away
from the landed classes and the merchants who provided most of the tax
revenue. The result would be the inability of ‘the middle power between
king and people’ to play its traditional role of checking the tendency of
monarchy towards despotism. The crown’s only source of income would
be the owners of debt, and since it was unlikely that they would be willing
for long to pay the interest on their own loans, the crown could not but be
tempted to assume absolute power and to take what it needed by force. A
choice between the two options Hume had laid out in 1752 had thus
become even more urgent: either the nation must act now and default on
its debts, or the debt would destroy the nation. Of course, and as Hume
himself fully expected, Britain’s politicians refused to heed the warning.
In 1771, Hume would write to Strahan that he could ‘forsee nothing but
certain and speedy ruin either to the nation or to the public creditors’.85
Here was a further reason to be sceptical of jingoistic celebrations of the
virtues of British liberty.
For a while in the early 1760s, Hume had been able to maintain the belief
that government would be different under George III. In November 1762,
he told David Mallet that ‘the factions now seem to be almost entirely
appeas’d’.86 Six months later he was more precise, but still optimistic.
‘Faction is in a manner extinguished’, he wrote to Mallet, ‘at least the

factions of Whig and Tory’. It still seemed reasonable to hope that ‘truth’,
in the form of Mallet’s projected history of the life and career of the
Duke of Marlborough, and in the form also of Hume’s own History,
would from now on meet with a favourable reception from the public.87
But by the mid-1760s faction was back. And there was conflict not only
between Whigs and Tories, but also, once again, between Whig and
Whig. For ejection from government at the opening of the new reign,
and deep-rooted hostility to Bute, prime minister after the elections of
1761, did not bring the Whigs closer together. The party fractured under
the pressure of continuing hostility between Newcastle, now in alliance
with the marquess of Rockingham, and Pitt, from 1766 in the Lords
as earl of Chatham. Return to government in the middle of the decade
after Bute’s fall from favour did still less to foster Whig unity. Chatham
once more set himself up as less interested in party connections than in
bringing into government anyone and everyone who would support his
favoured policies. To the Newcastle-Rockingham Whigs this was a prime
instance of ‘the cant of Not men, but measures’ dismissed by Burke in his
great attack on Bute’s style of government, Thoughts on the Cause of the
Present Discontents.88 In his letters while in the Northern Department
Hume argued that constant changes of ministry were only to be expected,
given how little real power ministers possessed, and how much abuse they
received from the public – and given also the checks that prevented them
from making money from their posts. Those who achieved the highest
offices almost immediately regretted it. ‘Why then’, Hume asked Elliot in
September 1767, ‘shoud a man of birth, fortune, and parts, sacrifice his
fame and peace to an ungrateful public? Such is the defect that arises from
the perfection of the most perfect government’.89 Instability, vacillation,
and short-sightedness were built into a political system which prided
itself on the limits to government power imposed by the liberties of the
subject.
Events in 1768 strengthened Hume’s confidence in this diagnosis. This
was the year of the general election which saw John Wilkes first elected to
represent Middlesex in the House of Commons and then expelled from
Parliament on grounds of outlawry.90 Four years earlier he had failed to
appear in court to be tried for obscenity on account of a poem called An
Essay on Woman and for sedition on account of his anti-Bute political
journal The North Briton. Wilkes had already served a prison sentence
on account of the latter. He went on trial in 1764 for causing it to be

republished in book form. The main problem was the journal’s final issue,
number 45, in which Wilkes had appeared to insinuate that George III
was a liar in so far as he pretended to be author of a speech – the King’s
Speech at the opening of Parliament – that everyone knew was written by
his prime minister, in the present case the hated Bute. The measures that
were taken against Wilkes enabled him to present himself as a martyr to the
cause of English liberty, and he had a large backing among the merchants
and tradesmen and apprentices of London, who enthusiastically endorsed
the idea that their freedoms were under threat from a cabal of self-seeking
Scots who had effectively made a prisoner of young king George. After
the 1768 election and his expulsion from parliament, Wilkes submitted
to trial for outlawry, with the result that London and its environs were
convulsed by rioting for weeks. At a disturbance outside Wilkes’s prison
on St. George’s Fields on 10 May the Riot Act was read and soldiers
opened fire on the crowd. Twenty people were killed and many others
wounded. A new election in February 1769 Middlesex saw Wilkes re-
elected amid more scenes of mob violence. In the month that followed
Wilkes was expelled from Parliament and then re-elected a further three
times. The farce only came to an end when the Commons declared that
the government placeman Henry Luttrell ‘ought to have been’ returned
Member for Middlesex. There followed a season of vigorous but fruitless
petitioning of the king by Wilkes’s supporters for relief from government
corruption and despotism. The petitions were signed by a total of around
60,000 country freeholders and city burgesses.
Hume, still in London, saw all of this as further evidence of the weakness
of the British system of government. He had known and been friendly
with Wilkes when he had spent time in Scotland in the 1750s, and so
resented the violent anti-Scottishness of The North Briton. It came ‘with
a bad grace’, he wrote to Andrew Millar, ‘from him, who conversed so
much with our countrymen’.91 But it was not Wilkes himself that Hume
complained about in his letters of the late 1760s. It was, rather, Wilkes’s
supporters, ‘the rascally mob’. Wilkes’s cause provided a vent for a
wide range of grievances concerning pay and working conditions among
London tradesmen, but, so far as we know, Hume never expressed sym-
pathy for any of these causes. Nor is there evidence that he regretted the
loss of life at St. George’s Fields on 10 May 1768. He wrote two weeks
afterwards that ‘these mutinies were founded on nothing’.92 ‘Here is a
people thrown into disorders (not dangerous ones, I hope)’, he wrote to

Turgot in June, ‘merely from the abuse of liberty, chiefly the liberty of the
press; without any grievance, I do not only say, real, but even imaginary;
and without any of them being able to tell one circumstance of govern-
ment which they wish to have corrected: They roar liberty; tho’ they
have apparently more liberty than any people in the world; a great deal
more than they deserve; and perhaps more than any men ought to have’.93
Hume seems to have regarded the new government’s response to the
Wilkes riots as unduly lenient. The ministry’s ‘remissness or ignorance or
pusillanimity’, he told Elliot, ‘ought to make them ashamd to show their
faces’.94 They had behaved ‘scandalously’, he told Mure, at a time ‘when
the laws, and constitution and the king and the whole legislature were
openly insulted with impunity’.95 He wrote to the Comtesse de Boufflers
that ‘licentiousness, or rather frenzy of liberty, has taken possession of
us, and is throwing everything into confusion’.96 ‘Every event here fills
me with indignation, which I cannot command nor care to conceal’, he
wrote to Robertson; ‘and yet to a philosopher & historian the madness and
imbecility & wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events’.97
By March 1769, with its multiple elections and expulsions, he had come
to think that the ‘absurdity’ of the whole business exceeded that even of
the Popish Plot.98
The years 1768–70 saw the development of three broad lines of thought
as to why the post-1688 constitutional settlement was, as it seemed, already
breaking down.99 The government argument was that popular unrest was
the manifestation of a change of manners inevitable in a nation surfeited
on prosperity and general good fortune. Avarice and luxury had made the
people impatient of the restraints and restrictions necessary to a peaceful
and orderly society. And opposition politicians, it was said, with Pitt and
Newcastle in mind, were weak and unscrupulous enough to exploit and
further foment this baseless discontent for party ends. The opposition
view, by contrast, was that mobs and riots were an understandable reaction
against corruption in the government. Something had gone wrong in the
early 1760s with the relationship between the Crown and the House
of Commons. The Commons, the nominal function of which was to
represent the will of the people, had lost its ability to act as an effective
check on the power of the Court. So much wealth and power was now
concentrated in the hands of the Crown that the Commons was filled
with placemen who were completely dependent on the ministry and who,
as a result, paid no attention to the wishes of those they represented.

The Middlesex election of 1768 could on this view be portrayed as a
symbol of the disenfranchisement of the people – or at least of those of
the people entitled to vote. And, with the Commons wholly surrendered
to Court influence, it was up to the people to make it plain that things
had to change. There were similarities here, of course, to the discourse
of the ‘Country’ opposition of the first half of the century, the discourse
exploited by Bolingbroke in his struggle against Walpole, but there were
important differences as well. The opposition Whigs of the late 1760s,
a relatively small group centred around Rockingham after Newcastle’s
death in 1768, argued that salvation lay not in the wisdom and patriotism
of the landed gentry, but in a return to, precisely, Walpole’s style of
government. This was the essence of the case made in Burke’s Thoughts
on the Causes of the Present Discontents. What was needed was an ‘honest
combination’ of Whig grandees to take back power from the cabinet
operating in secret ‘behind the curtain’. Others who opposed the status
quo, including Catherine Macaulay, wanted to go much further towards
meeting the specific demands of the Wilkites, which meant adopting not
only such ‘Country’ policies as more frequent parliaments and a place and
pensions bill (both of which Burke explicitly rejected) but also a wholly
new system of political representation. The voting class, they argued,
needed to be expanded in ways undreamt of by the Country party of the
past.100
There is no evidence that Hume endorsed any of these arguments. He
evidently had some sympathy with the government’s willingness to blame
things on the Wilkite rioters, and he rejected completely the demands of
the radicals. While he must have found himself able to agree with some
parts of Burke’s Thoughts, it is unlikely he accepted the conspiracy theory
that was supposed to motivate a return to the old Whig way of doing
things. But it does seem that Hume accepted the view, shared by most
if not all participants in the debates of the late 1760s, that the Wilkite
riots were evidence of a fundamental change in the shape and dynamics
of British politics. Times had changed dramatically. Some revision to
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects had therefore become necessary.
The ‘Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, since 1748 a footnote to the essay
‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’, was dropped altogether from
the new edition of the Essays and Treatises that appeared in 1770. The
virtues and vices of Walpole, Hume must have felt, were no longer of
interest to philosophical politicians. Also it now seemed to Hume appro-

priate to moderate some of his applause for British achievements in the
Hanoverian era. Cuts to ‘Of the Protestant Succession’ seem especially
significant. Wilkes had shown that it was no longer possible to believe
that ‘[a]n incroaching tyrant or deluded bigot alone, by his misconduct,
is able to enrage the nation’.101 Also dropped was the claim that liberty
is ‘so invaluable a blessing in society, that whatever favours its progress
and security, it can scarce be too fondly cherished by every one who
is a lover of human kind’.102 A significantly more qualified view of the
blessings conferred on society by liberty was presumably responsible also
for the cutting of several paragraphs from the end of ‘Of the Liberty
of the Press’. This essay now concluded abruptly with the remark that
the ‘the republican part of our government . . . will naturally be care-
ful to keep the press open, as of importance to its own preservation’.
Hume no longer went on to argue, as he had in all earlier versions, that
the liberty of the press ‘is attended with so few inconveniencies, that it
may be claimed as the common right of mankind’.103 His worries about
the breakdown of law and order even prompted him to modify his pes-
simism about the national debt. It remained the first disadvantage of
the public debt that it caused a concentration of people and wealth in the
capital. And, Hume now added, the great size of London ‘renders the
people factious, mutinous, seditious, and even perhaps rebellious’. But
to this, it had to be admitted, the national debt itself provided a kind
of remedy. For all stockholders would see it as in their interest to do
all they could to support the government in its measures against disor-
der, whether the threat was posed ‘by Jacobitish violence or democratical
frenzy’.104
The next and final edition of Essays and Treatises, published posthu-
mously in 1777, saw the addition of an entirely new essay, entitled ‘Of the
Origin of Government’. This was finished by March 1774,105 and, while
it was devoid of reference to particular historical events, it reads like a
further response on its author’s part to the political circumstances of the
time. Its argument was that government had its origins in some of the
most fundamental needs that human beings have, the need for society,
and the need for justice as a means of ensuring the peace and stability of
society. And it concluded with a reminder that, no matter what form they
take, the way governments maintain order in society is by curtailing the
freedoms that human beings would have in a state of nature. Freedom
was indeed best defined in terms of the rule of law. Yet even where gov-
ernment is by laws and not by men, the human desire for freedom is
such that the balance struck between liberty and authority is bound to
remain perpetually contested. ‘In all government’, as Hume put it, ‘there
is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and
Liberty; and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest’.106
There was nothing contentious in any of this, and Hume was surely per-
fectly self-aware in the way he constructed the essay largely out of truisms
of political thought. The point, it would seem, was to try to bring back to
their senses those – presumably Hume had the Wilkite radicals in mind –
who demanded liberty and nothing but liberty. It was true that liberty
is ‘the perfection of civil society’. But it was just as true, and needed to
be remembered, that authority was essential to society’s very existence.
And this suggested that in contests between liberty and authority, it was
usually authority that deserved to win. In the final sentence of the essay,
however, Hume qualified this last claim, admitting that it could be said
‘with some reason’ that there was more reason to be concerned about what
was merely society’s perfection (liberty) than about what was necessary to
society’s existence (authority).107 Here was the desire to look even-handed
and ‘philosophical’ that always took possession of Hume when he wrote
for a public audience. In his letters, as we have seen, he was unequivo-
cal in his belief that it was authority that was currently in need of being
shored up.
Hume had explored the theme of this new essay in earlier writings.
Book III of the Treatise had a section entitled ‘Of the origin of govern-
ment’, and the essay ‘Of the Original Contract’ had seen Hume return
to the question of how political society was first brought into existence.
There were continuities between these three texts on the beginnings of
government, but also some important differences. Hume’s scepticism as
to the possibility of grounding the duty of allegiance to government in the
consent of the governed did not prevent him, in the Treatise and in the
essay on the original contract, from looking to consent for an explanation
of the manner in which human beings originally created a power able to
remedy their natural tendency towards theft and reneging on agreements
to cooperate. There was nothing other than rationally self-interested con-
sent to provide the exit route from the primordial state of nature. This
was because each man in the state of nature is, more or less, as strong as
every other man, and so no one could enforce someone else’s obedience
without the help of others, and that help, on pain of vicious explana-
tory circularity, had to be freely given.108 In the essay ‘Of the Origin of
Government’ Hume began by reprising the consent-based story, but now
compared and contrasted it with a rather different account that was meant
to seem more plausible as a story of how government actually came into
existence.109 For human beings are just not rational enough to make it
likely that, while still in the state of nature, they saw that government
was necessary, and agreed together to make it possible. The truth was
very likely more ‘casual’ and ‘imperfect’. The truth was probably that
government had its origin in the wars that must have been perpetual in
the state of nature. One man would have distinguished himself by his
courage and intelligence, and his fellows would have developed the habit
of submitting to his will. Then they would have got used to accepting
his authority not only in war but also in times of peace, when he became
the arbiter of differences and the settled of quarrels. There was, in other
words, no sudden transition from the state of nature to political society.
The move was gradual, and probably took place without anyone knowing
that that was what was happening. And the driving force was a need for
authority, not the desire of a free individual to maintain what he valued
most in his freedom. Again one senses here the effect on Hume of his
experience of the London mob in the late 1760s. The argument of ‘Of
the Original Contract’ had to be modified in light of ‘Of the Origin of
Government’, and in the 1777 version there was a new paragraph empha-
sizing that original consent to the will of another ‘was very long imperfect,
and could not be the basis of a regular administration’.110 Another new
paragraph insisted that neither individuals nor legislatures have a right to
make ‘violent innovations’, since the almost uniform lesson of history is
that political innovation does more harm than good.111
This last amendment to ‘Of the Original Contract’ goes some way
towards explaining why Hume reacted as he did to the civil unrest occa-
sioned by the expulsions of Wilkes from the House of Commons. It is
tempting to understand both his intemperate condemnation of the mob
and the alterations he made to the last editions of the Essays and Treatises
in terms of an authoritarianism only to be expected in a man enter-
ing old age, and to be expected especially in a man who had achieved
wealth, fame, and government patronage only quite late in life. It must
have seemed to Hume’s critics among the more radical Whigs that the
Toryism of his political and historical writings was at last being allowed
more forthright expression. However, it remained as wrong as it had

always been to assume that Hume’s condemnation of enthusiastic demands
for liberty entailed an uncritical reverence on his part for the crown and the
aristocracy. Hume’s reaction to Wilkes and liberty was motivated, rather,
by his conviction that in Britain disaster was the only possible result of the
political imaginings of republicans. The attempt at a republic had been
made before, in the 1640s and the 1650s, and the consequence had been
not liberty but its very opposite. A weakening of political authority had
produced anarchy, and out of anarchy had arisen despotism. There was,
Hume thought, every reason to think that the same thing would happen
again. In December 1775, he wrote to his nephew David Hume that, while
David’s professor at Glasgow John Millar was right to call republicanism
considered in the abstract the best possible form of government, it was
also a form of government ‘only fitted for a small state’. ‘[A]ny attempt
towards it can in our country’, Hume continued, ‘only produce anarchy,
which is the immediate forerunner of despotism.’112 More liberty than
the current constitution allowed – more frequent elections, for example,
or the passing of measures to restrict the crown’s influence in parliament,
or the extension of the franchise – would so weaken government as to
leave it unable to perform its function of imposing peace and order on
society.
By the time of Hume’s letter to his nephew, another protest movement
had arisen to challenge the constitutional arrangements that had been in
place since the Revolution of 1688. On the other side of the Atlantic armed
conflict was breaking out in 1775 between the British army and those who
believed that Parliament had no right to impose its will on the thirteen
American colonies. The first provocation had been the passing of acts
intended to raise new tax revenue from the colonies in the mid-1760s.
Resistance had been so vigorous that the most obnoxious of these acts, the
Stamp Act, was soon repealed. Hume was among those who welcomed
repeal. If the motion for repeal had been rejected, he wrote in a long
letter to the earl of Hertford on the parliamentary debate on the question,
Rockingham’s generally pro-American ministry would have fallen, and
then the Americans ‘would have been reduced to despair, and would
probably have made an obstinate resistance, attended with the most fatal
consequences’.113 But fatal consequences followed anyway, because few
in England were prepared to join Pitt in accepting that there was a genuine
question of principle as to whether or not the English Parliament had any
kind of right to tax the colonies without their consent – consent that could
not be given because the colonies had no parliamentary representatives.
At least that was what Pitt said he accepted during the debate about repeal
of the Stamp Act. As soon as he, as the earl of Chatham, took over as
prime minister from Rockingham, his support for the Americans cooled,
and he allowed his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend,
to devise alternative ways of increasing the tax burden of the Americans.
Again the Americans resisted, and again the government backed down, and
repealed all the Townshend duties except the duty on tea. For Hume these
‘fine doings in America’ were a further manifestation of the ‘remissness
or ignorance or pusillanimity’ that had characterized the government
response to the Wilkes riots.114 A few years of relative peace followed in
the colonies, a peace shattered on 16 December 1773, when the people
of Boston emptied a cargo of East India Company tea into the city’s
harbour. A series of ‘Coercive Acts’ followed, which in turn provoked
further opposition, and in the end caused the outbreak of armed resistance
on Lexington Green in April 1775. ‘Blood has been shed’, Burke wrote
the following month; ‘The sluice is opend. – Where, when, or how it will
be stopped God only knows’.115
In a parliamentary speech given the month before Lexington Green,
Burke argued that a peaceful settlement that would keep America sub-
servient to the British crown was still possible.116 Four years earlier,
Hume had decided that, on the contrary, it was ‘in the nature of things’
that Britain’s union with America ‘cannot long subsist’.117 But when,
exactly, was the union to be ended? In February 1774, Hume was of the
opinion that while the Americans were no longer in their political infancy,
and so were beyond the age when it was proper for them to be whipped into
obedience, they were ‘still in their nonage’, and the desire for full eman-
cipation from the mother country, as argued for by Benjamin Franklin,
was premature.118 By October 1775, however, he was sure that the time
had come for the colonies to ‘be left entirely to themselves’. In a letter to
Strahan Hume wrote that had he been present at cabinet discussions of
the situation in America, he would have pointed out that it simply made
no financial sense for the British to continue to seek to impose their will
by force on a country so far away and so openly hostile. An army of 30,000
soldiers would not be sufficient to keep the colonies in order without the
cooperation of the colonists themselves, and who would pay for such an
army? Not the colonists, obviously, and not the British either, given the
‘totally ruin’d state of our finances’. Moreover, there was no decisive finan-
cial advantage in maintaining the trading monopolies that were supposed
to provide the fundamental rationale for a colonial relationship between
Britain and America. The monopolies brought in at best an income of six
or seven million pounds, and there was every reason to think that most
British trade with America would continue even if American ports were
open to all.119 In February 1776, he wrote to Smith that, while British nav-
igation might suffer from American independence, because it would no
longer be only British boats that conducted North Atlantic trade, British
manufacturing would probably be less badly affected, because there would
still be demand in America for British goods. Hence the whole American
question was ‘not so important as is commonly imagind’.120 The best
thing would be for the two countries to lay aside their weapons, shake
hands, and part as friends.121
‘I am an American in my principles’, Hume declared in another letter,
‘and wish we woud let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as
they think proper’.122 But of course Hume was not really an American in
his principles, any more than Burke was. He had not had a late conversion
to the republicanism that he utterly rejected in his criticism of the Wilkite
mob just a few years earlier. We have seen that in the letter to his nephew
of December 1775 he was certain that republicanism could not work in
a country as large as Britain – and the thirteen colonies occupied an area
many times larger than that. This made his position on the American
question an unusual one. Most of those who supported American inde-
pendence in Britain did so out of conviction that the cause of the American
rebels was right and that the very idea of continued British governance
of the colonies was wrong. Richard Price argued in his 1776 pamphlet
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty that the contest with America
‘is a contest from which no advantages can possibly be derived’: ‘Not a
revenue, for the provinces of America, when desolated, will afford no rev-
enue, or, if they should, the expence of subduing them and keeping them
in subjection will much exceed that revenue. Not any of the advantages
of trade, for it is a folly, next to insanity, to think trade can be promoted
by impoverishing our customers and fixing in their minds an everlasting
abhorrence of us’.123 He argued also that it was not a war that Britain
that was likely to win. Price’s primary objection to the war, however, was
that it was fundamentally unjust. It was nothing other than an exercise of
tyranny. For ‘all civil government, as far as it can be denominated free, is
the creature of the people. It originates with them. It is conducted under

their direction, and has in view nothing but their happiness’. Govern-
ment by laws and not by men was insufficient as a definition of freedom:
it mattered who the laws were made by. The Americans should be free
to live under laws they made for themselves.124 Thomas Paine’s Common
Sense made the same point, in more colourful language. If Hume had
a view as to whose side right was on, it is not expressed in the letters
that have survived. His ‘Americanism’ appears to have been purely prag-
matic and economic. There was a similarity between his approach to the
question and Josiah Tucker’s. Tucker held that the only feasible plan
of action for the British was to grant the Americans independence, not
because they had a natural right to it, but simply because that was the
only course of action that was in Britain’s interests. There was no reason
to think Britain would lose its American trade; a huge sum of money
would be saved by bringing home all British administrators and soldiers;
Americans would have to become better at paying their British debts; emi-
grations to America would stop; and so on.125 There was a similarity also
with the view expressed by Smith in the final paragraph of The Wealth of
Nations. Like Smith, Hume thought that if a province of the British empire
could not be forced to contribute to the cost of the empire as a whole,
Britain should ‘free herself’ from the cost of defending that province in
times of war and of supporting its civil and military establishments in
times of peace. It was time for Britain, as Smith put it, to ‘endeavour to
accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her
circumstances’.126
As Smith did not fail to point out, war in America was bound to be
enormously expensive,127 and Hume’s worries about the political conse-
quences of an even larger national debt appear to have intensified yet fur-
ther in his last years. More sanguine perspectives on British indebtedness
were being adopted at this time. Isaac de Pinto, for example, whom Hume
had known in Paris, and to whom he gave assistance while employed at the
Northern Department,128 argued in his Traité de la Circulation (1771) that
it was not true that either Britain must destroy its debt or the debt would
destroy Britain. De Pinto argued that the British national debt ‘far from
being an oppressive burthen, has enriched the kingdom, and encouraged
commerce’.129 Government payment of interest on its loans increases the
amount of money in circulation, and that increase in circulating money
acts as a stimulus to manufacturing. The health of the economy provides
evidence of the creditworthiness of the nation, making it possible for the

government to raise new loans, thereby further increasing circulation. Of
course, this virtuous circle depended on the government’s always being
able to make its interest payments (repayment of the principal, according
to de Pinto, was never going to be necessary), and there were a variety of
measures to be taken to ensure that interest could always be paid. While
in Paris, Hume had sight of de Pinto’s first formulations of this argument,
but he remained unpersuaded. Among his final revisions to the History of
England was a footnote to his general assessment of government during
the Tudor period, contrasting the moderation of Elizabeth’s expenditures
with the extreme prodigality of modern politicians, a prodigality all the
more objectionable given how ‘frivolous’ recent wars had been compared
with the fight for national survival in which Britain had been involved in
the second half of the sixteenth century. ‘[O]ur late delusions have much
exceeded any think known in history’, Hume wrote, ‘not even excepting
those of the Crusades. For, I suppose, there is no mathematical, still less
an arithmetical demonstration, that the road to the Holy Land was not
the road to Paradise, as there is, that the endless encrease of national
debts is the direct road to national ruin’. ‘It will be found in the present
year, 1776’, Hume continued, ‘that all the revenues of this island, north
of Trent and west of Reading, are mortgaged or anticipated for ever’.
And there was no imaginable situation which might see Britain’s cred-
itors relinquish their claims on the country’s future income, nor one in
which the state might be willing to default on its debt. ‘So egregious
indeed has been our folly’, Hume concluded, ‘that we have even lost the
title to compassion, in the numberless calamities that are awaiting us’.130
The republican radicals took such pessimism as grist to their mill. In
1778, Price described the new footnote as ‘a kind of dying warning from
Mr. Hume to this kingdom’.131
An apocalyptic note was fairly regularly struck by Hume in his letters
of the late 1760s and 1770s. Even before the situation in America became
a war, he had a very vivid sense of the calamities that awaited a heavily
indebted British state. In fact, at times he seemed rather to enjoy envis-
aging the disaster to come. ‘I am delighted to see the daily and hourly
progress of madness and folly in England’, he wrote from Edinburgh in
October 1769. ‘The consummation of these qualities are the true ingredi-
ents for making a fine narrative in history; especially if followd by some
signal and ruinous convulsion, as I hope will soon be the case with that
pernicious people’.132 ‘Notwithstanding my age’, he wrote a week after-

wards, ‘I hope to see a public bankruptcy, the total revolt of America, the
expulsion of the English from the East Indies, the diminution of London
to less than a half, and the restoration of the government to the king,
nobility, and gentry of this realm’.133 Six years later he was still claiming
to be sure that Britain would soon lose all its possessions in America, that it
would also lose its East Indian trade, and that the country’s credit would be
completely destroyed.134 Of course, the extremism, and anti-Englishness,
of such letters was meant to amuse their readers, but they nonetheless
contained more than a grain of seriousness as well. Hume really did think
that it would not be long before Britain faced major economic and political
catastrophe. Britain’s problems, he seems to have believed, were much
more serious than any other European country’s. Here, needless to say,
he was proved by subsequent events to be completely wrong. But a credit
crisis was about to engulf France, to be followed by precisely the cycle of
first anarchy and then despotism that Hume most feared.135
Natural Religion Revisited

In August 1769, Hume left London for Scotland.136 Two months later he
wrote to Gilbert Elliot that he was in Edinburgh ‘body & soul, without
casting the least thought of regreat to London or even to Paris’.137 In
‘My Own Life’ he declared that he was by now ‘very opulent (for I pos-
sessed a revenue of 1000 l. a year), healthy, and though somewhat stricken
in years, with the prospect of enjoying long my ease and of seeing the
encrease of my reputation’.138 For the moment he remained in his apart-
ment in James’s Court, but soon he would buy a plot of land on St.
Andrew Square in the recently developed New Town, and he moved in
to a newly built, and very grand, house there on Whitsuntide in 1772.
The Old Town apartment was, he wrote in the same letter to Elliot, ‘too
small to display my great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend
to addict the remaining years of my life’.139 He had left Elliot in London,
but many others among his oldest friends lived, or spent a good part of
the year, in Scotland’s capital, and now he devoted himself to enjoying
their company. There was now no more talk, not even in letters to the
Comtesse de Boufflers, of taking a house in the City of Light. ‘There
are some people conversible enough’, he explained to the Comtesse in
January 1772: ‘their society, together with my books, fills up my time
sufficiently, so as not to leave any vacancy’.140 Probably once Hume was

back in Edinburgh, he realized that he was at home there in a way he could
not be anywhere else. This was not to say that even among his intimates he
was among the perfectly like-minded, for of course he had many thoughts
that his contemporaries never had, and felt differently from them about
important matters, such as religion, and death. But these were things that
he did not like to talk about, and we may presume that in Edinburgh
nobody forced him to talk about them – nobody, that is, apart from the
shameless James Boswell, who made it his business in July 1776 to find
out for himself whether Hume ‘persisted in disbelieving a future state
even when he had death before his eyes’.141 It would seem, to judge by
his letters, that even among his closest friends Hume preferred talking
politics to talking philosophy. In Scottish society at large he was free to
indulge the side of his nature which was, as Henry Mackenzie put it,
‘simple, natural, playful, which made his conversation delightful to his
friends, and even frequently conciliated men whose principles of belief
his philosophical doubts, if they had not the power to shake, had grieved
and offended’.142 In the Paris of the philosophes and the salonnières, by
contrast, Hume was doubtless always being forced to discuss precisely
the kinds of metaphysical and religious questions he had little inclina-
tion to broach in public, and asked to pronounce on issues he thought
were too difficult and complicated to be made the subject matter of witty
conversation.
Though Hume wrote virtually nothing after returning to Edinburgh,
he remained too much a man of letters to let a busy social life prevent him
from devoting several hours of the day to reading. The classics remained
his chief pleasure. It is no surprise that a few days before he died he was
reading Lucian.143 But nor is it a surprise that when Boswell called, he
found Hume with George Campbell’s recently published Philosophy of
Rhetoric open in front of him. In his last years Hume seems to have made
a point of keeping up with everything published by Scottish authors. He
seems to have been sure, too, that much – though certainly not all – of
what he read by his contemporaries was proof of the superiority of Scot-
tish letters over English, especially when it came to history.144 ‘I believe
this is the historical age and this the historical nation’, he wrote to Strahan
in August 1770.145 He had been very pleased by Robertson’s History of
the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), even though, as he told Hugh
Blair, the truth was that neither Charles’s character nor his life was very
interesting in itself. He hoped for even more from Robertson’s next pro-
jected work, the history of America that would not in fact be published
until 1777. He was prepared to allow that James Macpherson’s Introduc-
tion to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1772) ‘contains a great deal
of genius and good writing’.146 He was also willing to do what he could
to ensure the success of new Scottish authors. In 1770, Robert Henry,
minister at New Grey Friars in Edinburgh, had advertised that he was
seeking a publisher for a history of Great Britain ‘written on a new plan’.
The narrative account of events from the first Roman invasion to the
present day would be divided into ten books, and each book would be
divided into seven chapters. The chapters would, as Henry put it, ‘run
parallel to one another, and end together: each chapter presenting the
reading with the history of one particular object’.147 By this means Henry
would augment civil and military history with histories of religion, of
the constitution, of learning, of the arts, of commerce, and of manners.
In August 1770, Hume told Strahan that he had read what Henry had
written so far and had a very good opinion of it. Hume recommended
few authors to his publisher – ‘but I cannot refuse doing justice to his
work’.148 Two years later Hume’s approval of Henry’s History of Great
Britain was unabated, and he wrote a review of the second volume for
a new Scottish literary journal, the Edinburgh Magazine and Review.149
In this volume Henry covered the period from the arrival of the Saxons
in 449 to the Norman invasion of 1066. This is a period, Hume noted,
‘which has formerly been regarded as very obscure’. ‘It is, indeed, won-
derful’, he continued, ‘what an instructive, and even entertaining book,
Dr. Henry has been able to compose from such unpromising materials!
Tantum series juncturaque pollet [of such great strength have system and
connection]!’150
Hume’s sense of the inferiority of English letters to Scottish caused
him to tell Gibbon that he was surprised that the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire had been written by an Englishman.151 It might also have
been what prompted him to want it to be settled once and for all whether
the Fragments of Ancient Poetry that James Macpherson had presented to
the world in 1760 as translations from Gaelic were genuine or forgeries.152
Hume had been doubtful at first. He told Sir David Dalrymple that he
was ‘surprised at the regular plan which appears in some of these pieces,
and which seems to be work of a more cultivated age’.153 But his scruples
were overcome, partly by John Home, and partly by a patriotic desire to
believe that Scotland really could have had its own Homer. In February
1761, he wrote a letter of introduction for Macpherson to his own printer,
William Strahan, presenting Macpherson as the translator of ‘some frag-
ments of Highland poetry, which have been extremely well receivd by the
public’, and as translator also of ‘a larger poem, a narrative poem of great
antiquity, which lay in obscurity, and woud probably have been bury’d in
oblivion, if he had not retrieved it’.154 By 1763, however, Hume’s scru-
ples had returned, mostly because of Macpherson’s refusal to produce
the manuscripts from which his translations were supposedly derived.155
And at some point after 1765, Hume’s scepticism about Macpherson’s
trustworthiness as to the existence of Ossianic manuscripts turned into a
conviction that he was lying. It was for the good of Scotland’s reputation,
Hume may have come to think, that the imposture be generally admit-
ted in Edinburgh. Among the few surviving unpublished manuscripts in
Hume’s hand is an essay ‘Of the Poems of Ossian’, written in or after
1773.156 Most of the essay – perhaps written to be read to an audience –
concerned itself with the various ways in which both the form and content
of Macpherson’s supposed translations from the Erse spoke against their
authenticity. Hume returned to his former worries about the regularity of
the poems. It ‘betrays a man without genius, that has been acquainted with
the productions of civiliz’d nations, and had his imagination so limited
to that tract, that it was impossible for him even to mimic the character,
which he pretended to assume’.157
Even more strikingly unconvincing were the generosity and gallantry of
the manners on display in the poems, the absence of giants and monsters
and magic, the absence also of any trace of religion, and the implication
of manufacturing arts developed enough to have produced houses of
stone. Macpherson’s depiction of his characters was nothing like their
representation in Irish tradition. His claim that his very detailed stories
were all common knowledge in the Highlands contradicted the fact that
nobody else who had sought to collect ‘Scotch fabulous history’ had copied
them down. Hume then turned to the ‘external positive evidence’ upon
which Blair had rested his case for the authenticity of the poems in his
1763 Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, and argued that it was
incredible that so long and so bland a poem could be transmitted for
1,500 years without being written down, especially given the miserable
and violent conditions in which the Highland Scots had always lived.
‘The only real wonder in this whole affair’, Hume wrote, ‘is that a person
of so fine a taste as Dr Blair shou’d be so great an admirer of these

productions; and one of so clear and cool a judgement collect evidence of
their authenticity’.158 Hume was quoting from the essay when he wrote in
a letter to Gibbon that ‘It is, indeed, strange, that any men of sense could
have imagin’d it possible, that above twenty thousand verses, along with
numberless historical facts, could have been preserved by oral tradition
during fifty generations, by the rudest, perhaps, of all European nations;
the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled’. ‘Men
run with great avidity’, he added, ‘to give their evidence in favour of what
flatters their passions, and their national prejudices’.159 He was perhaps
speaking from experience. National prejudice had led him to believe
Macpherson in the beginning. Now it was leading him in the opposite
direction.
Even so, Hume did not acquire Samuel Johnson’s intensely personal,
and intensely moralistic, dislike of the self-styled translator of Scotland’s
own Homeric epic. He was willing to countenance Macpherson’s history
of Britain and Ireland, as we have seen, and seems to have been at least
half serious in recommending him to Strahan as a ‘continuator’ of his own
History of England.160 For Hume, it remained the case that intellectual
disagreement was not a personal matter. Provided that a dispute was,
as Hume had put it in a 1767 letter to Richard Price about miracles,
‘conducted with proper decency and good manners’, without ‘rancour
and animosity’,161 it did not matter to Hume how trenchant was the
criticism of his own views. William Warburton had long been in Hume’s
eyes the perfect example of someone who failed to conduct literary dispute
in the proper way. In 1770, he was joined by James Beattie, professor of
moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College Aberdeen, and author of
An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth; in Answer to Sophistry
and Scepticism. The Essay was full of rancour and animosity, at almost of
all of modern philosophy, but at Hume in particular.162 Beattie presented
Hume as a would-be demolisher of the everyday beliefs of ordinary people,
and as a subverter of virtue and religion. Hume’s philosophy, in other
words, was dangerous, and its influence on those who paid attention to
reputation rather than to truth was thoroughly malign. And because so
much was at stake in countering Hume’s scepticism, it was, as Beattie saw
it, perfectly acceptable to use every weapon at one’s disposal, including
ridicule, ad hominem arguments, and personal abuse. ‘A little scepticism
introduced into science will soon assimilate the whole to its own nature’,
he claimed in the Essay’s final chapter, ‘the fatal fermentation, once begun,
spreads wider and wider every moment, till all the mass be transformed
into rottenness and poison’.163 It was, therefore, impossible not to express
oneself with warmth when what one had to counter were ‘the enemies
and plagues of mankind’. The only consolation to be found in the current
state of philosophy lay in the fact that the fashion for scepticism would
soon change:
Those unnatural productions, the vile effusion of a hard and stupid heart, that
mistakes its own restlessness for the activity of genius, and its own captiousness
for sagacity of understanding, may, like other monsters, please for a while by their
singularity; but the charm is soon over; and the succeeding ages will be astonished
to hear, that their forefathers were deluded, or amused, with such fooleries.164
The Essay was a great success in England, particularly among the cir-
cles of Johnson and Warburton, which can only have intensified Hume’s
anger at its author. Beattie had completely, and wilfully, misunderstood
the nature of Humean scepticism. Unsettling everyday common sense
had never been its aim. Rather, explaining common sense, why we believe
what we ordinarily believe, had been Hume’s goal. He had tried to make
this clear in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and was con-
sequently particularly annoyed that Beattie had quoted so extensively
from the Treatise. Reid had done the same in his Inquiry into the Human
Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense. This prompted Hume to com-
pose an ‘Advertisement’ for Volume II of the next edition of the Essays
and Treatises, reminding the reader that the ‘juvenile’ Treatise had never
been acknowledged by its author.165 Henceforth, Hume hoped, the two
Enquiries and the Dissertation on the Passions would ‘alone be regarded as
containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’.166
Beattie’s Essay sold well, going through six editions in eight years, but it
received a cold welcome in Edinburgh. Beattie was told by John Gregory,
the Edinburgh’s Professor of the Practice of Physic, that ‘Edinburgh is
perhaps the only spot in Britain where you might be said to be in an
enemy’s country’.167 Hume had every reason to think of the Edinburgh of
the 1770s as a realization of his long-held, and deeply cherished, ideal of
the freedom to philosophize. It was a place where friendship proved itself
compatible with disagreement in matters speculative, political, and reli-
gious. It was, perhaps, proof that the kind of intellectual world depicted
in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion did not exist only in Hume’s
imagination. The Church of Scotland was no longer a threat to this ideal.

Though the Kirk remained divided and occasionally disrupted, especially
over the question of patronage, Robertson’s election as Moderator for
the year 1763–64 had confirmed the ascendancy of the Moderate party,
and his considerable skills as a manager of church politics, though fre-
quently tested, ensured that the Popular party remained for the moment
an impotent minority. In 1770, Carlyle, who had been prosecuted by the
Presbytery of Dalkeith for attending performances of Douglas, was in turn
elected Moderator. In a sermon that was in part an answer to Hume’s
criticism of the clergy in ‘Of National Characters’, Carlyle had in 1767
claimed that, far from being a threat to Scottish letters, the clergy were
become ‘the chief depositaries of general learning’ in Scotland, so much
so that ‘our universities borrow many of their fairest ornaments from
the Church’.168 Blair had been Edinburgh’s Professor of Rhetoric since
1760; Robertson had been elected Principal two years later; and Fergu-
son had secured the Moral Philosophy chair in 1764. ‘It is happy for the
inhabitants of this metropolis’, Hume wrote in the unpublished review of
Henry, ‘which has naturally a great influence on the country, that the same
persons, who can make such a figure in profane learning, are entrusted
with the guidance of the people in their spiritual concerns’.169 This was
a very different Edinburgh from the one in which Hume had been a stu-
dent. It was significantly different too from the Edinburgh of the 1740s
and 1750s. It was calm when London was in uproar over Wilkes, it was
focused on the business of how to improve the lives people lived in this
world, it was justly proud of its literary achievements. It was an Edinburgh
in which Hume felt completely at ease.
And yet the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion remained unpub-
lished. ‘Is it not hard & tyrannical in you’, he had asked Elliot in 1763,
‘more tyrannical than any Act of the Stuarts, not to allow me to publish
my Dialogues?’170 He suggested that perhaps ‘a proper dedication’ might
make the book more palatable, and joked to Blair that he might dedicate
it to him. Blair’s view, presumably shared by Elliot and others among
Hume friends, was that the Dialogues should be published posthumously
at the earliest, and preferably not published at all.171 Hume then left the
manuscript alone, so he later told Smith, for fifteen years.172 The next
mention of it in the letters is not until May 1776. In his will Hume had
left all of his papers at Smith’s disposal. All papers older than five years
were to be destroyed, except for the Dialogues, which he requested Smith
to publish. It would seem that Smith hesitated, and asked that Hume
supply an ostensible letter making it plain that publication of the Dia-
logues was not Smith’s own choice, but a matter of compliance with the
terms of Hume’s will.173 Smith’s worries must have intensified still fur-
ther, because in early June, while still in Bath, Hume wrote to Strahan to
tell him that he would have 500 copies printed as soon as he got back to
Edinburgh.174 One hundred would be given away as presents, and Strahan
would be given the remainder, ‘together with the literary property of the
whole, provided you have no scruple, in your present situation, of being
the editor’.175 Strahan agreed to these terms.176 Hume must have quickly
realized he was not well enough to see the Dialogues through the press,
and left it for Strahan to publish the book after his death. But Strahan
did not do so. When the Dialogues was eventually published, in 1779, it
was at the behest of Hume’s nephew David, whom Hume, in his final
emendation of his will, had charged with making sure the book came out
if no one else had published it within two years of his death.177 Smith
was a cautious man, but Strahan’s unwillingness to publish the book is
harder to understand. All that has survived in the way of explanation is
his judgement that ‘the work will probably make some noise in the world,
and be considered in various lights by different readers’.178 It is tempting
to suppose that Strahan was in fact involved in the 1779 publication, and
that he played it safe by keeping his name off the title page. In any case,
the irony in all of this is that, in the event, very little stir was caused
by the appearance of the Dialogues. Blair wrote to Strahan in August
1779 to say that he was ‘surprised that though they have been published
for some time, they have made so little noise’.179 Much more trouble, for
Smith in particular, was caused by the posthumous publication of Hume’s
short autobiography, ‘My Own Life’.
The dialectical dynamic of the Dialogues might, as was seen in
Chapter 5, have had a source in the situation in which Hume found
himself in Scotland by the late 1740s. It seems unlikely that it was a sheer
coincidence that Hume delineated so carefully the situation of a sceptic
caught between strict orthodoxy and philosophically inclined modera-
tion. But this does not, of course, mean that the Dialogues had, or was
understood by its author to have, relevance only to Scotland in the middle
of the eighteenth century. Though it is made clear that the conversation
is taking place in modern times, after ‘the ages of stupidity and igno-
rance’, there are no references in the text that tie it to Scotland, or even to
Britain. The Greek names of the participants in the conversation – Philo,

Cleanthes, and Demea – helped to rid the text of geographical speci-
ficity. They also underlined the connections between Hume’s text and
Cicero’s dialogue De Natura Deorum: Philo was the name of the teacher of
Cicero’s spokesman for Academic scepticism, Cotta; and Cleanthes was
the name of one of the masters of Cicero’s Stoic, Balbus. Hume could have
expected his reader to know Cicero’s dialogue well, and, as a result, to
read the Dialogues as a sort of updated version of De Natura Deorum, as a
new treatment of an old question, motivated by recent advances in natural
philosophy. For what was at issue most prominently in the Dialogues was
the extent to which inductive study of the natural world serves to give
theism – belief in an intelligent and benevolent creator of the universe – a
rational basis. This was an issue with which all of Europe was grappling
in the eighteenth century – though more often in the context of debate
about the wisdom of abandoning traditional proofs of the existence of
God than of giving an answer to scepticism. The Dialogues can be seen,
then, like the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and the Political
Discourses, both also composed between 1749 and 1751, as part of Hume’s
claim to a place in a genuinely European, cosmopolitan world of letters.
References to French authors, to Malebranche, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole,
and Bayle, were as prominent as references to British ones like Bacon,
Milton, and Locke. And the text was permeated with Hume’s concern
for style, for the union of philosophy with the polite virtues of clarity and
novelty.
The Dialogues could also be seen a return on Hume’s part to his early
enthusiasm for Shaftesbury. In The Moralists Shaftesbury had explained
the absence of the dialogue form from modern philosophy in terms of the
superficiality and dogmatism of ‘the genius of our age’. ‘Men love to take
party instantly. They can’t bear being kept in suspence. The examination
torments ’em’. The spirit of dialogue, by contrast, lies in doubt and
questioning, and is sustained by a willingness to hold a question open for
as long as possible.180 Also, Shaftesbury claimed in Advice to an Author,
in so far as the ancient writers of dialogues concerned themselves with
making their characters look real, ‘they not only taught us to know others;
but, what was principal and of highest virtue in ‘em, they taught us to know
our-selves’.181 The dialogue form was useful for a discussion of religious
subjects because it enabled Hume to put some distance between himself
and the sceptic Philo. It was a means of doing what Rousseau had failed
to do in the ‘Confession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard’: a means, that is,

of ‘throwing a veil’ over the author’s own sentiments. It might also have
been a means of allowing Hume to be true to his own experience of the
loss of faith, described to Elliot in 1751 in terms of the onset of relentless
waves of doubt, of a ‘perpetual struggle’ between common opinion and
the ingenuity of a restless imagination.182 Here was a difference between
Hume’s use of the dialogue form and Shaftesbury’s, for where the author
of the Characteristicks meant in the end to represent the victory of reason
over doubt, Hume gave doubt the last word. The point of the Dialogues was
not for Hume to establish a position of his own, for, properly speaking, he
had no position to advocate. It was, rather, to present the best possible case
for theism, and to show how it crumbles almost into nothing under rational
examination. In the introduction to the Dialogues Hume had Pamphilus,
Cleanthes’s pupil, say that ‘Any question of philosophy . . . which is so
obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination
with respect to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally
into the style of dialogue and conversation’. For in a dialogue it is not
necessary that any final conclusion be reached: ‘Opposite sentiments, even
without a decision, afford an agreeable amusement: and if the subject be
curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company,
and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and
society.’183
It is not clear exactly how many dialogues on natural religion Hume’s
book contains. The first eleven parts appear to report a single conversa-
tion between Philo, the ‘accurate philosopher’ Cleanthes, and the ‘rigidly
inflexible and orthodox’ Demea. The subject matter of the conversation
is, we are assured, not the existence of God, but rather his nature. Two
of God’s attributes in particular are under discussion: his intelligence (in
Parts II–VIII), and his goodness (in Parts X–XI). And the principal thesis
considered, propounded by Cleanthes, is that experience provides ratio-
nal grounds to conclude that God, the creator and maintainer in existence
of the universe, possesses intellectual and moral attributes comparable
to the intellectual and moral attributes of man. Philo calls this thesis
‘anthropomorphism’. This was the name of a heresy in early Christianity,
but by the middle of the eighteenth century it could be represented, as
it was by Hume, as a matter of mere common sense. At times, in fact,
Cleanthes’s way of presenting it was reminiscent of the way in which
Beattie replied to Hume in the Essay on Truth. Thus Cleanthes tells Philo
that his objections ‘are no better than the abstruse cavils of those philoso-
phers, who denied motion; and ought to be refuted in the same manner,
by illustrations, examples, and instances, rather than by serious argument
and philosophy’.184 He asks Philo to consider the example of the human
eye. ‘Survey its structure and contrivance’, he says; ‘and tell me, from
your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in
upon you with a force like that of sensation’.185
We are told that, after Cleanthes’s full development of this line of
thought, ‘Philo was a little embarrassed and confounded’.186 As he recov-
ers himself and argues back, it becomes clear that his intention is prin-
cipally to show that Cleanthes’s ‘idea of a contriver’ is a good deal less
determinate than he, Cleanthes, likes to think. Philo argues that there is
no way of establishing that God is intelligent, or benevolent, in anything
like the sense in which human beings are intelligent, or benevolent. Philo
has no rival thesis of his own. He does not make a case for atheism. That
is, he does not make the case for an explanation of the universe that does
without an intelligent principle of order. In Part VI he tells Cleanthes that
if he ‘were obliged to defend any particular system’, he would choose ‘that
which ascribes an eternal, inherent order to the world; though attended
with great and continual revolutions and alterations’.187 But he does not
in fact defend that system, and is well aware that its core thesis is also too
indeterminate to be satisfactory. All it amounts to, really, is a rejection of
the idea that the creation and history of the universe might be a matter of
pure chance – and chance, Philo says, ‘has no place, on any hypothesis,
sceptical or religious’. There has to be ‘an original, inherent principle
of order’ somewhere.188 Everything surely is governed by steady, invio-
lable laws. Yet what the nature of that original and inherent principle is,
whether it is a transcendent intelligence or something immanent to matter
as such, we have no idea.189
In Part VIII Philo introduces ‘the old Epicurean hypothesis’, and
argues that it is at least possible that after many ages of chaos and disorder,
the universe might, ‘from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter’,
‘settle at last . . . so as to preserve an uniformity of appearance, amidst the
continual motion and fluctuation of its parts’.190 But his motive in doing
so is merely to show that such a hypothesis is no worse off, evidentially
speaking, than ‘anthropomorphism’. It cannot explain everything; but
then, the analogy on which anthropomorphism trades is itself far from
perfect. This sets up the conclusion reached at the end of the discussion
of a posteriori, probabilistic natural religion: that the only proper attitude

is that of the sceptic who holds that ‘no system ought ever to be embraced
with regard to such subjects: For this plain reason, that no absurdity ought
ever to be assented to with regard to such a subject’.191 The reader of the
first eleven parts of the Dialogues appears to be invited to endorse Philo’s
view that ‘we have no data to establish any system of cosmogony’, and that
‘[a] total suspense of judgement is here our only reasonable resource’.192
God’s nature, as Bayle had argued, is completely beyond the reach of
human reason.193
The core of Philo’s critique of anthropomorphism was already worked
out in Part XI of Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, where Hume,
in another dialogue about natural religion, had insisted that philosophical
theology had to be ‘suited to the present appearances of nature’. But there
the argument had focused on whether the present scene of things licensed
inferences concerning the distribution of punishments and rewards in
a future state. In the Dialogues Philo focuses relentlessly on the more
general claim that there is an analogy to be drawn between the works
of human beings and the works of God. His target here is something
like a climate of opinion, a general view that it was simply obvious that,
just as design, especially the fitting of means to ends, is visible in human
artefacts, so also is it visible in the world around us. There was no carefully
elaborated formulation of this view for Philo to attack. Instead there were
numerous texts in which the claim was made that the new science of
Newton and Boyle provided irrefragable evidence of the truths of natural
religion. Hume drew from some of them in the way he constructed Philo’s
argument in the Dialogues. It seems reasonable to suppose that as he
composed the Dialogues he was especially interested in what was to be
found in Colin Maclaurin’s Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical
Discoveries, published in 1748. ‘The plain argument for the existence
of the Deity, obvious to all and carrying irresistible conviction with it’,
Maclaurin had claimed, ‘is from the evident contrivance and fitness of
things for one another which we meet with throughout all parts of the
universe. There is no need of nice or subtle reasonings in this matter:
a manifest contrivance immediately suggests a contriver. It strikes us
like a sensation; and artful reasonings against it may puzzle us, but it
is without shaking our belief’. ‘No person’, Maclaurin continued, ‘that
knows the principles of optics and the structure of the eye, can believe
that it was formed without skill in that science’.194 Hume was surely also
familiar with the position being developed by Kames at the time of the
composition of the first draft of the Dialogues. In Essays on the Principles
of Morality and Natural Religion, published in 1751, Kames insisted that
‘The Deity hath not left his existence to be gathered from slippery and
far-fetched arguments. We need but open our eyes, to receive impressions
of him almost from everything we perceive. We discover his being and
attributes in the same manner as we discover external objects, namely by
the evidence of our senses’.195 Neither Maclaurin nor Kames, nor anyone
else, thought that there was a need to spell the argument out. Cleanthes’s
development of it in response to Philo’s criticisms may well have been the
first attempt to make the logic of anthropocentrism clear.196
In his devastatingly ingenious and thorough case against anthropocen-
trism, Philo is constantly supported by Demea, who from the first declares
his commitment to the view that the nature of God is, ‘from the infirmities
of human understanding . . . altogether incomprehensible and unknown
to us’.197 Demea is appalled by Cleanthes’s willingness to put theology
on a probabilistic footing. He is sure that we can be absolutely certain
that God exists, and equally sure that we know nothing of his nature.
Hence his favoured strategy in natural religion is ‘that simple and sublime
argument a priori, which, by offering us infallible demonstration, cuts off
at once all doubt and difficulty’.198 His style of a priori reasoning is similar
to that developed by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X, of the Essay concerning
Human Understanding and by Samuel Clarke in the Demonstration of the
Being and Attributes of God. Its virtue in Demea’s eyes is that it both pro-
vides certainty as to God’s existence and places emphasis on the ‘infinity’
of God’s attributes. It attaches no importance to the idea that there might
be a kind of analogy between the human mind and the divine. After all,
Demea asks, ‘What is the soul of man? A composition of various faculties,
passions, sentiments, ideas; united, indeed, into one self or person, but still
distinct from each other.’ As Hume himself had observed in the Treatise,
introspection reveals only change and diversity as opinions and passions
swirl around inside our minds. ‘How is this compatible’, Demea asks,
‘with that perfect immutability and simplicity, which all true Theists
ascribe to the Deity?’199 Demea acts as a kind of chorus for Philo’s
assault on Cleanthes’s position, encapsulating its achievements, occasion-
ally expressing alarm, prompting Philo to spell things out yet more clearly.
And yet when Philo and Cleanthes together attack the a priori argument
in Part IX, Demea is not put out. He makes no attempt to defend the
argument against Philo’s rather cursory attempt at a refutation. This is

because philosophical religion is not in fact his main concern. He shifts
ground quickly, and moves on to the claim that the real ground of religion
is not reasoning but feeling, a ‘consciousness of . . . imbecility and misery’
which leads human beings to seek divine protection. ‘[W]hat resource for
us amidst the innumerable ills of life’, he asks, ‘did not Religion suggest
some methods of atonement, and appease those terrors, with which we
are incessantly agitated and tormented?’200 What Demea wants above all
is certainty. It does not matter to him what the source of that certainty is,
whether it is rational or a matter of emotional attachment. The important
thing is to show religious belief to be invulnerable to the questions of
the sceptic. There is, surely, something deeply Calvinist about Demea’s
cleaving finally to inward awareness of unhappiness and guilt as the source
of religious conviction.
Philo seizes upon Demea’s expatiation upon the miseries of life as a
means of discrediting the idea that human experience provides reasons to
believe in divine goodness. Everywhere one looks in the natural world,
Demea claims, one sees not the regularity and elegant fitting of means to
ends that so impress Cleanthes, but instead a perpetual war of every crea-
ture against every other creature, as all fight to keep themselves alive in
circumstances of necessity, hunger, and want. Human beings join together
in society to protect themselves, but such a remedy is little better than the
disease. ‘Man is the greatest enemy of man’, Philo declares. ‘Oppression,
injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treach-
ery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other: and they would
soon dissolve that society which they had formed, were it not for the dread
of still greater ills, which must attend their separation’.201 And then there
are the ills which arise from within, diseases of the body and diseases of
the mind. If God could prevent all of this, why doesn’t he? If he cannot
prevent it, what has happened to his supposed omnipotence? Hume’s
writings, from the Early Memoranda and the ‘fragment on evil’ onwards,
are marked by a general refusal to accept the usual ways of explaining away
the existence of evils natural and moral. In the History of England there is
unspoken contempt for the idea that the horrors he often describes admit
of some kind of providential explanation. Unnecessary pain and suffer-
ing is a real and undeniable feature of the human condition. In this, too,
perhaps, there is something Calvinist, a trace of the religion Hume had
been brought up in. The point he made through Philo in Part XI of the
Dialogues was that it is not enough to show the compatibility of theism with
the existence of evil. The real issue for the theist is what the existence of
evil tells us positively about God’s moral character. If the theist persists in
wanting to give a moral characterization of God considered as a cause of
evil, Philo intimates, it is hard to see how he can avoid the conclusion that
the cause of evil is, qua cause of evil, evil himself. At this juncture in the
argument Demea suddenly realizes that the argument from evil has got
out of his control, expresses horror at the way Philo is now ‘running into
the topics of the greatest libertines and infidels’, and soon after, ‘on some
pretence or other’, leaves the conversation.202 The lesson to be learned,
Philo and Cleanthes agree, is that, while emphasis upon the vanity and
misery of human life might have served the cause of religion in ‘ages of
stupidity and ignorance’, it will not do so now that people are given to
reasoning and argument.
The question that mattered, then, was the question that divides Philo
and Cleanthes: Is there such a thing as a rational religion, grounded solely
in what the study of nature, including human nature, tells us about the
divine mind? This was the question that divided Hume from Maclaurin
and Kames, from Hutcheson and Leechman, and also from the younger
generation who dominated Edinburgh life by the 1770s. It is to this
question that Philo and Cleanthes return in Part XII of the Dialogues.
This might be thought of as a new dialogue altogether, since Demea has
now left. Certainly it begins in a way that is difficult to square with what
has happened hitherto. Philo tells Cleanthes that he has allowed himself
to give vent to so much sceptical argumentation only because he knows
that it is impossible for scepticism to ‘corrupt the principles of any man of
common sense’, and because anyone who is man of common sense knows
that, regardless what Cleanthes calls his ‘spirit of controversy’, ‘no one has
a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound
adoration to the divine being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the
explicable contrivance and artifice of nature’. ‘A purpose, an intention, a
design strikes every where the most careless, the most stupid thinker’, he
continues; ‘and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times
to reject it’.203 Suddenly, and surprisingly, Philo is describing himself as
being in fundamental agreement with Cleanthes. His target all along, it
seems, has been vulgar superstition, not natural religion as such. There
is, after all, a sense in which the divine being ‘discovers himself to reason’.
There is a sense in which one cosmogony, the theistic one, is preferable
to others. Hume’s reader cannot but be reminded of the Introduction to

The Natural History of Religion and its claim that ‘The whole frame of
nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after
serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary
principles of genuine theism and religion’.204 One possibility is that in
both places, Hume intentionally sowed seeds of confusion so as to make
it possible for him to deny that the plain tendency of his treatment of
religion was – as Beattie for one claimed it was – to unsettle the beliefs
of the ordinary reader. But it is also possible that Hume was serious in
his claim that the dispute between Cleanthes and Philo is ‘somewhat of a
dispute of words’. For a religion of reason turns out not to be religious at
all, in any usual sense of the word.
Hume wrote to Elliot in 1751 that he wished Cleanthes’s argument
‘coud be so analys’d, as to be render’d quite formal & regular’. It was not
enough that there be merely a ‘propensity of the mind’ towards theism.
‘We must endeavor to prove that this propensity is somewhat different
from our inclination to find our own figures in the clouds, our face in
the moon, our passions & sentiments even in inanimate matter’.205 This,
Hume might have thought, was the problem with the natural theology
Maclaurin raised on Newtonian foundations, and with the position that
Kames laid out in the Essays. Kames was explicit that we do not discover
God’s existence ‘by any process of reasoning’. Instead, we are guided ‘by
the light of nature’.206 The theist, Hume seems to have thought, can do
better than that. It is not necessary for the theist to postulate a similarity
between belief in God and, for example, belief in the uniformity of nature,
in the existence of an external world, in the continuing existence of the
self through time. Belief in God was not the kind of belief that nature
forces upon us even though reason gives it no support. The theism that
Philo says he accepts is rational. ‘[T]he existence of a DEITY is’, he
tells Cleanthes, ‘plainly ascertained by reason’. ‘That the works of Nature
bear a great analogy to the productions of art is evident’, he says; ‘and
according to all the rules of good reasoning, we ought to infer, if we argue
at all concerning them, that their causes have a proportional analogy’.207
But of course we also have to admit – what Philo has insisted on up until
this point in the argument – the disanalogies between the works of nature
and the productions of art. In particular we have to admit that the cause
of the works of nature must far exceed the human mind in ‘power and
energy’. Therefore, when it comes to trying to say something about that
cause, we must concede that there has to be a ‘vast difference’ between

it and the intelligence of the human mind, a difference so vast, in fact,
that we do not know what we mean when we talk about the intelligence
of God.
It was this last point that Hume sought to clarify when he returned
to the manuscript of the Dialogues in the spring of 1776. He wrote two
new paragraphs expanding upon the idea that the difference between
scepticism and philosophical theism is merely verbal.208 In both the central
idea was that a religion that has been purged of all trace of superstition,
that is purely rational, ‘true’ in the sense of the ‘true religion’ invoked
in the Natural History, is almost completely empty of content. Such a
religion was reduced to the bare assertion that it is more likely that there is
some ordering principle in the universe than that there is none. The
universe does not reveal itself to inspection as chaotic and random. There
are many respects in which it is true that it looks as though intelligence
must have been at work in the establishment of the order of things.
Philo speaks of ‘the coherence and apparent sympathy in all the parts
of this world, in every situation and in every age’. There appears to be
design everywhere, in the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal,
the way the human mind works. Isn’t it, he asks an imaginary atheist,
‘probable, that the principle which first arranged, and still maintains
order in this universe, bears not . . . some remote inconceivable analogy
to the other operations of Nature, and among the rest to the œconomy of
human mind and thought’?209 The only disagreement between the theist
and the sceptic concerns how to describe the degree of similarity. The
theist insists that God’s mind is like the human mind; the sceptic denies
this. But both parties have to accept that there is no precise means of
measurement available here. It all depends on how you define ‘similar’,
and that is an arbitrary matter. Upon close examination, the subject of
the dispute between theists and atheists disappears. ‘The Theist allows,
that the original principle of order is very different from human reason:
The Atheist allows, that the original principle of order bears some remote
analogy to it’.210 ‘True religion’, then, reduces to mere assent to ‘one
simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined, proposition,
That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote
analogy to human intelligence’.211 True religion, in other words, was no
more than a combination of the assertion that there must be some kind of
explanation of why the universe is as it is – it cannot be the result of pure
chance – with the acknowledgement that we know nothing at all about

what that explanation might be.212
Such a ‘religion’, plainly enough, had nothing to it in the way of piety
and worship as normally understood. As in the Natural History of Religion,
it looked as though any religious practice at all must be superstitious, a
form of corruption. In 1776, Hume underlined this, having Philo say that
the natural theology he accepts ‘affords no inference that affects human
life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance’.213 And it turns
out that this is the issue that divides Philo and Cleanthes most deeply. It
appears that Cleanthes is willing to accept Philo’s claim that there is only
a verbal difference between their positions as regards whether or not there
is an analogy between the divine and the human mind. But Cleanthes is
not willing to accept that religion has no practical role to play in human
life. ‘Religion’, he says, ‘however corrupted, is still better than no religion
at all’.214 What he means by religion here is belief in a life after death
where virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Such a belief is so strong
and necessary a ‘security to morals’ that the very existence of society
depends upon it. This of course remained a thoroughly conventional
view in the eighteenth century, and of course it was a view with which
Hume disagreed. Philo’s comprehensive attack upon it is followed by
a shift on Cleanthes’s part towards a different position: that belief in a
future state is necessary as ‘the chief, the only great comfort in life, and our
principal support amidst all the attacks of adverse fortune’.215 Again, Philo
disagrees, arguing in reply that the reality is ‘that the terrors of religion
commonly prevail above its comforts’.216 Cleanthes is not represented as
convincing Philo about either the political or the emotional need of belief
in something more than true religion. While trying to persuade him to take
on the publication of the Dialogues, Hume claimed to Strahan that Philo
‘is indeed refuted, and at last gives up the argument, nay confesses that
he was only amusing himself by all his cavils’.217 This was a disingenuous
way of representing where the argument about divine intelligence ends
up, but it was a blatant lie as regards the question of the relation between
religion and the conduct of life. That question, Part XII of the Dialogues
suggests, is not resolvable in a general way. It was, as Hume surely knew
even before he began work on the History of England, a question that
had to be answered in different ways in different historical and political
circumstances, and also in consideration of the different temperaments
and predicaments of different human beings.
It seems unlikely that Hume imagined that he would convert any of

his contemporaries, whether modern and moderate in their theism like
Cleanthes, or traditionalist like Demea, to the opinion that the distinction
between theism and scepticism was ‘merely verbal’. Hume knew that it was
even harder for his contemporaries to consider religion from a detached
and purely philosophical point of view than it was for them to reflect in
that way on politics, economics, or history. Religion, quite simply, mat-
tered more than anything else did. It was so intimately bound up with
the concerns of ordinary life that the detached perspective of genuinely
philosophical reflection was all but impossible for almost everyone. The
practical role of religion – the need for religious belief – was very power-
fully felt. It may have been that, as Philo puts it close to the end of Part
XII, ‘when a man is in a cheerful disposition, he . . . thinks not of religion’,
but, as Hume was well aware, his contemporaries were for the most part
of a disposition such as made them think of religion almost constantly.
The Dialogues taken as a whole, like all of Hume’s works, was an attempt
to help the reader to stand back from everyday practical concerns, and
to consider the matter at hand in terms of its general principles. Hume
wanted his reader to resist what he accepted was considerable psycholog-
ical pressure to believe in the existence of God regardless of the evidence,
and to consider what, exactly, the content of that belief might be, in so far
as it has a basis in reason. The very fact that he bowed to pressure not to
publish the Dialogues until after his death may be taken as an admission
on Hume’s part of how few were the readers who were going to be able to
join him in such an exercise.
New editions of the Essays and Treatises and the History of England
appeared at regular intervals throughout the 1760s. Andrew Millar died
in 1768, and after that Hume’s books were published in London by the
man who had taken over Millar’s business, Thomas Cadell. Only one let-
ter from Hume to Cadell survives. Hume was much closer to the printer
William Strahan, to whom many of his dissections of English politics were
addressed, and who was the recipient also of Hume’s endless instructions
as to the minute improvement of his works. When a further printing
of the Essays and Treatises was called for in 1770, Hume, as usual, took
the trouble to correct the proofs very carefully indeed. He identified, for
example, ‘a notable error’ in the first sentence of Appendix III of the
Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals: the compositor had changed

‘Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the
province of grammarians’ to ‘Nothing is more useful than for . . . ’.218
Hume received copies of the new edition in late 1770 – and on 5 January
1771 wrote to Strahan noting ‘some few unavoidable errors’ and enclos-
ing a list of errata.219 Just over two weeks later he wrote again, correcting
an error in that list of errata. Hume promised Strahan he would read
the new edition over ‘several times’ and send a corrected copy ‘by some
safe hand’.220 Hume also wanted there to be a wholly new edition of the
History of England. Cadell was still trying to get rid of copies of the 1763
octavo edition, which Hume detested. With his customary penchant for
exaggeration, he told Strahan that he supposed ‘you will not find one
book in the English language of that size and price so ill printed’.221 In
preparation for a new edition that he thought he might not live to see, he
had prepared a copy ‘corrected in many places, especially in the first four
volumes’.222 In March 1771, he told Strahan that he was even considering
having a new edition printed in Dublin, where British copyright law did
not apply.223 What was especially remarkable about Hume’s desire for
a new edition of the History, as Hume did not fail to point out to Stra-
han, was that he had fully alienated the rights to the book to Millar and
his company, and so it made no difference to him, financially speaking,
how many copies Cadell sold. Hume cared about correctness for its own
sake. The very idea of Cadell continuing to sell an edition that Hume
believed to be seriously flawed seems to have been sufficient to make him
uncomfortable.
By the summer of 1771, it looked like a new edition of the History was
on the way. Hume told Strahan he had taken ‘incredible pains’ over cor-
rections of both style and matters of fact,224 but Strahan was unlikely to
have believed Hume when he wrote, in July 1771, to say that he done with
his works ‘for ever, and never shall any more review them, except in a cur-
sory manner’.225 The copyediting and proofreading took several months,
so Hume had time to write ‘a passage to be inserted in the reign of Henry
VIII’ – containing ‘a short extract from an Act of Parliament, concerning
the marriage of the King with Jane Seymour’.226 ‘I shall scarcely ever think
of correcting any more’, Hume declared in February 1772. Ten days later
he wrote again, this time with a more significant change of mind. Hume
had been ‘so disgusted with the licentiousness of our odious patriots’ –
presumably he meant the Wilkes mob – that he had turned a reference to
‘that singular and happy government which enjoy at present’ to, simply,
‘that singular government which we enjoy at present’. On reflection, how-
ever, it seemed that ‘as the English government is certainly happy, though
probably not calculated for duration, by reason of its excessive liberty’, it
was as well to restore the deleted words. Though if it was too late, and
the sheets in question already printed, it did not much matter. ‘I am as
well pleas’d that this instance of spleen and indignation should remain’.227
Because Cadell still had copies of the 1763 edition on his hands, the new
edition of the History did not come out until 1773. In January of that
year Hume realized that a substantial correction was needed to a note to
the account of Henry VII detailing information provided about Tudor
life by a ‘house-hold book’ from the period recently published by the
Duke of Northumberland. The Duke and his family were offended by
the way Hume used the book as evidence for his claim ‘that, as much as
an industrious tradesman is both a better man and a better citizen than
one of those idle retainers, who formerly depended on the great families;
so much is the life of a modern nobleman more laudable than that of an
ancient baron’.228 In March, Hume requested another note be added, this
time to the account of James II. When, by October 1775, there was the
prospect of a further edition of the History, Hume was ready with further
corrections to be made. He told Strahan in November that he was glad
there was to be a new edition, and that ‘[a]bout six weeks hence’ he would
send off corrected copies of the first four volumes. Corrections to the
final four volumes would ‘follow at leizure’.229 Nor did Hume neglect the
Essays and Treatises. When he travelled to consult doctors in London in
April 1776, he took with him a corrected copy, which, he told Strahan,
‘will be safe, whether I dye by the road or not’.230 Cadell brought out the
final edition of the Essays and Treatises in 1777, and the final edition of the
History of England in 1778.
More than once in his letters to Strahan Hume referred to a saying of
the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, ‘that one half of a man’s life is too little to
write a book, and other half too little to correct it’.231 His correspondence
with Strahan made it plain that the fact that Hume published no major
new work after 1762 did not mean that at the point he gave up altogether on
the life of letters. Hume devoted an enormous amount of time to reading
and re-reading successive editions of his books, to noting corrections that
needed to be made, to ensuring that corrections were properly made, and
then to compiling lists of errata for the next edition. The passion for
literature that Hume declares in ‘My Own Life’ to be the ruling passion
of his life was, in important part, an obsession with correctness and with
style. Both were essential means to the end that had interested Hume at
least since he had begun writing essays in the late 1730s, and that he had
explicitly announced as his own at the beginning of Philosophical Essays
concerning Human Understanding. This was the project of bridging the
divide separating ‘the easy and obvious philosophy’ from ‘the accurate
and abstruse’, of showing that, as a writer, one did not have to choose
between being a Cicero or an Aristotle, a La Bruyere or a Malebranche, an
Addison or a Locke. It was possible, Hume believed, to reconcile profound
enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty. But it was the work of a
lifetime.
Afterword: Death and
Character
y the beginning of 1776, Hume knew he was very seriously ill.

B In February, he told Smith that he had lost ‘five compleat stones’.1
In early January he had had a new will drawn up, with £1,200 and ‘all
my English books’ to go to his sister Katherine, and almost everything
else to his brother John. Of his friends he singled out Ferguson and
d’Alembert for gifts of £200 each. He made Smith his literary executor,
with power over ‘all my manuscripts without exception, desiring him
to publish my Dialogues on natural religion . . . but to publish no other
papers which he suspects not to have been written within these five years,
but to destroy them all at his leisure’. He was confident that he could trust
‘that intimate and sincere friendship, which has ever subsisted between
us, for his faithful execution of this part of my will’.2 Like everything
Hume wrote, his will was subject to significant alteration and revision.
On 15 April, he added a codicil stipulating that, if he died in Scotland, he
should be buried on the south side of the churchyard on Calton Hill in
Edinburgh, ‘and a monument be built over my body, at an expence not
exceeding one hundred pounds with an inscription containing only my
name, with the year of my birth and death, leaving it to posterity to add
the rest’.3 He changed his mind about leaving all his ‘English books’ to
his sister, and gave her instead a hundred volumes of her choice.4 As we
have seen, in the face of Smith’s worries, he had to change his instructions
regarding the publication of the Dialogues.5 By late April he was so unwell
that he was persuaded to travel to Bath to take the waters there. But after a
brief rally he continued to decline, and in July he returned to Edinburgh,
as he told Strahan, ‘in a very shattered condition’.6 On 13 August, he
wrote to his brother to say that his doctors had told him that he would die
soon, ‘which was no disagreeable news to me’.7 A week later he told the
Comtesse de Boufflers that he saw death approaching ‘without any anxiety
or regret’.8 The last letter that survives, dictated by Hume to his nephew
461
462 Afterword
David, is to Smith, regretting the passing of a fever ‘which I hoped might

put a quicker period to this tedious illness’.9 Hume died three days later,
on Sunday, 25 August 1776, at four in the afternoon.
From London, en route to Bath, Hume had written to Smith to tell him
that among the papers of which he had been put in charge would be found
‘a very inoffensive piece, called My own Life, which I composed a few
days before I left Edinburgh, when I thought, as did all my friends, that
my life was despaired of’.10 ‘My Own Life’ was dated 18 April 1776.11
Hume’s idea was that it should be ‘prefixed’ to future editions of Essays
and Treatises on Several Subjects and The History of England. It was very
short, containing, as Hume put it, ‘little more than the history of my
writings’.12 Most of the principal episodes of his life were mentioned,
including the unsuccessful trip to Bristol to learn the trade of a merchant,
the time spent in France writing the Treatise, the year with the Marquis
of Annandale, the journeys made as secretary to General St Clair, the
librarianship at the Faculty of Advocates, and the periods of government
office in Paris and in London. The Rousseau affair, though, was omit-
ted completely, as were the two occasions on which Hume’s name was
unsuccessfully put forward for a university chair, and also the attempts
in the mid-1750s at the excommunication of Hume, along with Kames,
from the Church of Scotland. Nothing was described in any detail. Hume
alluded to his friendships several times, but never said who his friends
were. So there was no mention of Smith, Blair, Elliot, or Oswald, nor of
d’Alembert, d’Holbach, or Turgot, nor of the Comtesse de Boufflers. The
focus of ‘My Own Life’ was almost exclusively on the shaping of a life
by two ruling passions, the love of literary fame, and the desire of finan-
cial independence. ‘[A]lmost all my life’, Hume wrote, ‘has been spent
in literary pursuits and occupations’.13 He had resolved early ‘to regard
every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in
literature’.14 The publication and reception of each of Hume’s works was
carefully recounted. So was their author’s progress from a ‘very slender
fortune’ to the achievement of financial security, and on to serious wealth.
The detail that Hume went into in ‘My Own Life’ about his financial
success is striking. It provides a theme that runs, so to speak, in coun-
terpoint to the other principal element of the narrative, the story of how
Hume’s books were received by his contemporaries. That story begins
with the falling dead-born from the press of the Treatise, and continues
on through the entire overlooking of the Philosophical Essays concerning
Afterword 463
Human Understanding, the coming into the world unnoticed and unob-
served of the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, the miserable
disappointment that was the first volume of the History of Great Britain,
the obscurity of the public entry of the Natural History of Religion, the
clamour against the history of the House of Tudor, to end in the ‘tolerable,
and but tolerable’ success of the medieval volumes of the History. Only
three of Hume’s works, on this account, were anything like successes: the
first two volumes of Essays, Moral and Political, the Political Discourses,
and the second volume of the History of Great Britain. The rest were either
almost universally ignored or almost universally condemned.15 The first
volume of Stuart history was first condemned by everyone, ‘English,
Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker
and religionist, patriot and courtier’,16 and then ignored. It ‘seemed to
sink into oblivion’, Hume says.17 Not all the money that Hume made
was from his books. There were in addition the pensions he was awarded
after his work for St Clair, Hertford, and Conway, and also the fruits of
various investments. But still, the reader of ‘My own Life’ cannot help
but wonder how Hume became so wealthy, given the reception his books
generally met with – and also why such an unsuccessful author was chosen
to fill fairly important government positions in the 1760s. One feels that
less than the whole story is being told.
Like the reign of a king or queen in a history, ‘My Own Life’ ended
with a description by Hume of his own character. ‘I am, or rather was . . . ’,
Hume wrote, ‘a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an
open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little sus-
ceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions’.18 Hume
was prepared to say no more about himself than that. Taken all together,
this was an autobiography very different from those written by contempo-
raries such as Rousseau, Gibbon, and Franklin.19 Rousseau’s Confessions
was admittedly an extreme case, an extraordinary exploration and recre-
ation of self that, as its author knew, had no precedent in European letters.
Its project was so novel that, so Rousseau claimed, it required a new lan-
guage: ‘for what tone or style should I adopt to unravel that immense chaos
of feelings, so diverse, so contradictory, often vile and sometimes so sub-
lime, by which I was ceaselessly agitated?’20 Gibbon’s heavily reworked
but incomplete memoirs went into much less detail about the inner life
of the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but that inner
life was still there, just below the surface, and occasionally allowed to
464 Afterword
come into view, as with the ‘delicate subject’ of his early love for Suzanne
Curchod.21 There were no such moments in ‘My Own Life’. Franklin’s
Autobiography was in its way as impersonal as Hume’s.22 But it did not
give the impression that anything important was being hidden. The story
was, relentlessly, the story of actions, of invention and organization, of a
man turning himself into what he, and everyone else, needed to be in the
new world that was America. The Benjamin Franklin that was the result
of that process of identification of self with world was, it might be said,
as large as life. Hume’s ‘My Own Life’, by contrast, saw the author seek
to conceal himself behind his works. Only the bare minimum was said
about the man who wrote the books to which it was intended to serve as a
preface. The books, it implied, were what the reader should be interested
in. It was only slightly more revealing than the tomb on Calton Hill.23
Even so, Hume clearly meant ‘My Own Life’ to do more than recount
the history of his writings and describe the stages of his journey towards
opulence. Just as important, surely, was to make it clear that a sceptic
about almost all of the principal doctrines of the religion of his day was
able to face death and annihilation with equanimity. It was ‘strange’, Hume
admitted, but true nevertheless, that during a year of increasingly serious
illness he had ‘never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits’ –
‘insomuch, that were I to name the period of my life, which I should most
choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period’.
‘I possess the same ardour as ever in study’, he went on to explain,
‘and the same gaiety in company’.24 It mattered that his state of mind
be made public, for, inevitably, there would be widespread and intense
curiosity about how Hume had died. In March 1777 a writer in the The
Monthly Review would observe that ‘When men of such parts, and such
principles, as those which distinguished the character and writings of
Mr. Hume, come to face the immediate terrors of death, the world is
always curious to learn in what manner they support the trying conflict’.25
Hume was well aware that his contemporaries took seriously the ancient
idea that a man’s philosophical principles could be shown to be unworthy
of serious attention if his life did not put them into practice.26 Nothing said
more about a man’s life than his manner of dying. The philosophy of the
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects and The History of England – the
commitment to dispassionate, disengaged analysis, even with respect to
the most vital moral, political, and religious beliefs – risked being revealed
to be no more than a pose if there were any suspicion that, at the last,
Afterword 465
Hume had succumbed to ordinary terror when death drew near. This was
not to say, though, that Hume wanted to show himself to be about to die
the death of a Socrates or a Cato. His confidence in the inapplicability
of ancient philosophy to modern life did not desert him at the end. So
‘My Own Life’ did not see Hume assert, in Socratic or Stoic manner, the
dominion of the rational self over bodily and worldly concerns. His good
humour here at the end of his life was not depicted in terms of autonomy
and self-command. ‘I have suffered very little pain from my disorder’,
he told the reader. In the final paragraph of ‘My Own Life’ Hume went
on, as we have seen, to emphasize his good fortune in the mildness of
his temper, the cheerfulness of his humour, and the moderateness of his
passions. The point was that, with a ‘speedy dissolution’ in immediate
view, his natural dispositions had not deserted him. This was one more
piece of good luck, not the fruit of years of learning, in the manner of
Cicero or Montaigne, how to die.27
Hume would have known that ‘My Own Life’ was bound to infuri-
ate those already disposed to believe that his intention had ever been, in
Beattie’s words, ‘to overturn the only durable foundation of human hap-
piness’.28 He would have known also that its depiction of a sceptic staring
at death unmoved was likely to be met with disbelief. When Johnson was
informed by Boswell that Hume had told him that ‘he was no more uneasy
to think that he should not be after this life, than that he had not been before
he began to exist’, Johnson’s response was that Hume must be either a
madman or a liar.29 The likelihood of this kind of reaction to ‘My Own
Life’ gave Hume reason to accede to a request by Smith to ‘add a few lines
to your account of your own life; giving some account, in my own name,
of your behaviour in this illness’. ‘You have in a declining state of health’,
Smith continued, ‘under an exhausting disease, for more than two years
together, now looked at the approach, or what you at least believed to be
the approach of death with a steady chearfulness such as very few men
have been able to maintain for a few hours, tho’ otherwise in the most
perfect health’.30 Smith had told Alexander Wedderburn on 14 August
that Hume was dying ‘with great chearfulness and good humour and with
more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining
Christian ever dyed with a pretended resignation to the will of God’.31 A
description of how Hume had comported himself at the very end would
confirm that the man who had argued that there are no rational grounds
to believe in a life after death had not finally sought the consolations of
466 Afterword
religion. In his final letter to Smith, Hume gave his friend ‘entire liberty’
to add to ‘My Own Life’ as he pleased.32
The result was the supplementation of Hume’s brief autobiography
with an ostensible letter from Smith to William Strahan, dated 9 Novem-
ber 1776, giving ‘some account of the behaviour of our late excellent
friend, Mr. Hume, during his last illness’.33 The dominant theme of the
letter was Hume’s ‘cheerfulness’ during his last weeks. The word was
used six times. As an illustration of Hume’s good humour even when
enduring acute pain and discomfort, Smith recycled a story he had first
told Wedderburn in the letter quoted from above. This was the story of
Hume reading Lucian and casting about for excuses that he could give
Charon in order to gain himself extra time before having to cross the Styx
and enter the underworld. The problem, Hume had told Smith, was that
he had done everything that he had ever intended to do. Moreover, being
as wealthy as he now was, in dying he would be able to benefit his relations
and friends, and there was no reason to expect that by living longer he
would be able to benefit them more. Therefore, he had ‘all reason to die
contented’.34 As Smith told the story to Wedderburn, Hume had finally
hit upon the idea of saying to the boatman, ‘Good Charon, I have been
endeavouring to open the eyes of the 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, he knew, Charon would only reply that
that would not happen ‘these two hundred years’, and would order him
to get into the boat immediately.35 In the published letter to Strahan,
Smith toned the anecdote down slightly. Hume’s excuse to Charon was
that he had been ‘endeavouring to open the eyes of the public’, and that,
if he lived a few years longer, he might ‘have the satisfaction of seeing
the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition’. Charon’s
answer was that ‘that will not happen these many hundred years’.36 Smith
also added another delaying tactic that Hume had dreamed up: that he
had been correcting his works for a new edition and wanted to see how
the public received the alterations. But, Hume knew, Charon’s answer
would be that when he had seen the effect of those alterations, he would
want to make still others. ‘There will be no end of such excuses’, Charon
would say, ‘so, honest friend, please step into the boat’.37 In the letter’s
final paragraph Smith summed up, allowing that people would ‘judge
variously’ Hume’s philosophical opinions, but denying that their could be
disagreement as to his character and conduct. ‘Upon the whole’, Smith
Afterword 467
reported in conclusion, ‘I have always considered him, both in his lifetime

and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise
and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.38
Strahan took Hume’s wish that ‘My Own Life’ be prefixed to future
editions of his works to be compatible with its publication, along with
Smith’s ‘Letter’, as a self-standing work.39 Smith encouraged him in
this because he was worried that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
would come out before new editions of the History and Essays and Treatises,
and because the last thing he wanted was for his ‘Letter’ to be prefixed
to the Dialogues – a work, he told Strahan, ‘tho’ finely written I could
have wished had remained in manuscript to be communicated only to a
few people’.40 Strahan hesitated on account of the shortness of a volume
containing only ‘My Own Life’ and Smith’s letter, and proposed that it be
bulked out by some of Hume’s letters to him on political topics.41 Smith
replied that this would certainly be contrary to Hume’s will, which, as
Smith interpreted it, made clear that everything was to be destroyed apart
from the Dialogues and ‘My Own Life’. ‘His life will not make a volume’,
he told Strahan; ‘but it will make a small pamphlet’.42 The pamphlet
appeared in March 1777, entitled The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written
by Himself. It quickly went through three editions.43
A pamphlet containing only Hume’s life written by himself would
certainly have excited comment, but the inclusion with it of Smith’s
‘Letter to Strahan’ guaranteed controversy. Three years afterwards Smith
told a correspondent that ‘[a] single, and as I thought a very harmless sheet
of paper, which I happened to write concerning the death of our late friend
Mr. Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent
attack I had made [in The Wealth of Nations] upon the whole commercial
system of Great Britain’.44 Given that the ‘Letter to Strahan’ portrayed
Hume making a joke about a barely concealed desire to see the downfall
of Christianity, it is surprising that Smith was surprised. One imagines
that Strahan was not – that, in fact, controversy was exactly what, as
publisher of the pamphlet, and of Hume’s History, he had hoped for.
‘Without doubt you have read what is called The Life of David Hume,
written by himself, with the letter from Dr. Adam Smith subjoined to
it’, Boswell wrote to Johnson on 9 July 1777. ‘Is not this an age of daring
effrontery? . . . [Y]ou might knock Hume’s and Smith’s heads together,
and make vain and ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous. Would
it not be worth your while to crush such noxious weeds in the moral
468 Afterword
garden?’45 It would seem that Johnson judged it not to be worth his

while. George Horne, on the other hand, then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University, rushed out A Letter to Adam Smith LL.D. on the Life, Death,
and Philosophy of his Friend David Hume, Esq. By one of the people called
Christians. ‘The enemies of religion are awake’, he declared; ‘let not her
friends sleep’.46 In a work straining but usually failing to echo the tone of
Hume’s banter with Charon, Horne portrayed Hume as ‘possessed with
an incurable antipathy to all that is called religion’, as having ‘strained
every nerve to suppress, and extirpate the spirit of it among men, that its
very name, if he could effect it, might no more be had in remembrance’.47
Horne’s Letter went through several editions, and was still in print in 1799.
Johnson’s death in 1784 prompted another Oxford man, William Agutter
of Magdalen, to preach and publish 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. Johnson was all his life terrified
by death, in constant anxiety about his salvation, and, Agutter argued, this
was as it should be for every Christian. ‘[T]he confidence or the tranquility
of the infidel are no arguments in his favour’.48 ‘After playing so idly with
the darts of death’, John Wesley asked Hume in a sermon preached in
1790, ‘do you now find it a laughing matter? What think you of Charon
now? Has he ferried you over the Styx? At length he has taught you to
know a little of your own heart!’ According to Wesley, Hume as portrayed
by Smith was worse than either the unregenerate Robert Walpole or the
‘right honourable wretch’ Lord Chesterfield.49
Smith’s estimate of Hume’s character did not go undefended. In early
1777, Samuel Pratt, an out-of-work actor trying to make a living by his
pen, published Supplement to the Life of David Hume, Esq. Containing
Genuine Anecdotes, and a Circumstantial Account of his Death and Funeral.
Pratt was living in Bath at the time and had presumably established some
kind of connection with Hume, or with Hume’s friends, while Hume was
there in May and June 1776. The Supplement was an attempt to cash in
on the notoriety of The Life of David Hume. It was mostly gossip and
hearsay, and had to be eked out with a ‘certified copy’ of Hume’s will.50
More substantial was another effort by Pratt, An Apology for the Life and
Writings of David Hume, Esq, a reply to Horne intended as a ‘confirmation’
of Smith’s characterization of Hume, ‘as well as a philosophical plea for
the justice on which it is founded’.51 What exactly this ‘philosophical
plea’ was meant to establish is not clear. Pratt was careful to say that he
Afterword 469
did not intend to vindicate Hume’s philosophical principles. Rather, he

dwelled on the consistency of Hume’s life and death with those principles,
and contrasted that consistency with the hypocrisy of nominal Christians
who failed to practise what they preached. Moreover, the example of
Hume showed, Pratt claimed, ‘that it is possible even for sceptics, to
be more worthy members of society, more reverend to a first cause,
whatever it may be, and more essentially the friend of mankind, than
the most illustrious persons who have never ventured so far into the
recesses of enquiry’.52 A rather different elaboration on Smith’s theme
was published by Henry Mackenzie in his journal The Mirror in June 1779.
‘The Story of La Roche’ was purportedly an account of relations between
a Swiss Protestant clergyman (the eponymous La Roche), his daughter,
and ‘an English philosopher’ driven abroad by ‘some disappointments
in his native country’. The philosopher appears to be meant to be easily
recognized as Hume. He ‘has been censured by some as deficient in his
warmth and feeling; but the mildness of his manners has been allowed
by all’. He is ‘not a Christian’ – yet is ‘the best of unbelievers’. ‘Of all
men I ever knew’, the narrator remarks, ‘his ordinary conversation was
the least tinctured with pedantry, or liable to dissertation’.53 The heart of
the story is the difference between the way the religious La Roche looks at
life, and at death, and the frame of mind of the philosopher-sceptic – and
the moral is that this difference matters very little. La Roche recognises
the philosopher’s virtue. His scepticism is no barrier to the sincerest of
friendships.54
Smith and Hume’s other early apologists thus sketched the outlines of
the now familiar picture of Hume as the epitome of cheerful sociability
and virtuous atheism. This picture shows Hume as living disproof of the
claim, frequently made in the eighteenth century, that religious belief
is necessary to good humour and good morals. A man who rejected the
consolations of the idea of divine providence and a life after death in
which the good were rewarded and the evil punished, so it was generally
thought, was bound to despair of the world he lived in, and to lose his
sense that virtue was worth striving for. Human beings might be naturally
good, but natural goodness was not sufficient to sustain cheerfulness
and benevolence in the face of adversity, nor in the face of complete
annihilation at the time of death. So much was affirmed by Smith himself
in the account ‘Of the Character of Virtue’ that he wrote for the 1790
edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The very idea of ‘a fatherless
470 Afterword
world’, Smith claimed, must appear to the benevolent person ‘the most
melancholy of all reflections’. Virtue joins with happiness only when a
man is ‘thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe,
the meanest as well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and
protection of that great, benevolent and all-wise Being, who directs all
the movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable
perfection, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of
happiness’.55 The extraordinary thing about Hume, then, was that he was
good, and cheerful, and yet lacked this conviction.
Smith had gone so far as to say that, while lacking religious belief,
Hume had come as close to moral perfection as it was possible for a
human being to come. It was a remarkable assertion to make, but it was
especially remarkable in light of the fact that Smith had chosen to portray
this paragon of virtue and wisdom as self-confessedly having made it his
purpose to rid his fellow human beings of the religious belief that was
their chief consolation and support. This could only confirm the view of
Hume taken by his more intolerant critics. It would be bound to suggest
that Warburton and Beattie had been right to think of Hume as having
been motivated by a desire to do what he could to hurt the cause of
religion. Warburton had been justified in claiming Hume to have been, as
he put it in a letter to Millar, ‘bent on public mischief’.56 Beattie had been
correct when he had claimed that Hume was attempting to ‘violate the
last refuge of the miserable, and to rob them of the only comfort that had
survived the ravages of misfortune, malice, and tyranny’.57 Hume was not
only the great infidel who was even so le bon David. He had also made
it his business to do as much as he could to undermine religion, and the
Christian religion in particular, and to weaken its hold on the people at
large. There was, therefore, some would be bound to think, good reason
for Joshua Reynolds, in his portrait of Beattie, to have depicted Hume
and Voltaire together as being vanquished by the author of the Essay
on Truth. For Hume had shared Voltaire’s desire to obliterate altogether
l’infâme that was Christianity. This, at any rate, was what the ‘Letter to
Strahan’ was likely to suggest. It is something of a puzzle why Smith
wanted to make public a witticism that inflammatory, and also why Hume
was content to let him do so.58
It is possible that Hume permitted Smith to make public a joke that
he would have known would cause outrage precisely because, in causing
outrage, it would perfectly complement the story told in ‘My Own Life’
Afterword 471
of a literary career that, where it had not met with indifference, had
met with the hostility of bigots. Hume says in ‘My Own Life’ that he
inflexibly maintained an inflexible resolution ‘never to reply to any body’,
and that not being very irascible in his temper, he was easily able to keep
himself clear of literary squabbles.59 But what his autobiography made
clear, and made public, was that the fact that he did not answer his critics
did not mean that he paid his critics no attention. Indeed, it strongly
suggests that he was rather more sensitive as regards hostile criticism than
he was as regards praise. Twice he mentioned rough treatment at the
hands of Warburton and his ‘school’. All through his career, he claimed
when summing up, he had ‘wantonly’ exposed himself to the rage of
zealots and their factions, both political and religious. He told Strahan in
a letter written in early June 1776 that the only kind of satisfaction that his
writings had ever afforded him was his success in bringing them closer,
in every successive edition, to perfection of style and expression. ‘For
as to any suitable returns of approbation from the public, for the care,
accuracy, labour, disinterestedness, and courage of my compilations’, he
explained, ‘they are yet to come. Though I have reached a considerable
age, I shall not live to see any justice done to me.’60 There seems to
have been something in Hume that prevented him from acknowledging,
perhaps even to himself, the success he undeniably had. Hume allowed
in his letter to Strahan that it was possible that his belief that justice had
not been done to him was due to ‘self-conceit and prepossessions’. ‘My
Own Life’ began and ended with an acknowledgement of the vanity of,
as Hume put it, making a funeral oration of oneself. And there might
well have been vanity also in, precisely, this refusal to acknowledge that
what he had achieved had not, in fact, gone completely unrecognized. For
Hume to have been more complacent, and more honest, in ‘My Own Life’
might have been, as he saw things, for him to risk weakening the reader’s
belief in the purity of his passion for literature.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that there was no direct acknowledge-
ment in ‘My Own Life’ of the fact that even though he was savagely
attacked by some, and even though he had no disciples and propagated
no school, Hume died one of the most famous and widely respected men
of letters of his day. Hume admitted that here at the very end of his life,
there were ‘many signs of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last
with additional lustre’ – but immediately sought to make it plain that
this was not something that would please him much even if he were not
472 Afterword
gravely ill, since whatever happened, he ‘could have but few years to enjoy
it’.61 The reader of ‘My Own Life’ was not told that the list of those who
had engaged critically but seriously with Hume’s works was a long one,
including as it did, at a minimum, Lord Kames, Robert Wallace, Adam
Smith, Thomas Reid, and George Campbell in Scotland; Richard Price,
Josiah Tucker, and Horace Walpole in England; and Voltaire, Turgot,
and Isaac de Pinto in France. Hume had received the respect accorded an
equal from Montesquieu and Diderot, Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and
Franklin. In 1767, a friend had told him that ‘What you say of your being
detested as a Scotsman & dispised [sic] as a man of letters is melancholy
nonsense. It is not flattery when I assure you that you are more universally
loved by all ranks of people than any man I ever knew, & I never met with
any person who could pretend to any degree of taste & sense who did
not look upon your work to be as entertaining & as instructive as that of
almost any other author which the world has ever produced’.62 ‘Is there
a man of letters in Europe unacquainted with the works of Hume?’ Carlo
Denina had asked in his Discorso sopra la Vicende della Letteratura.63
Shortly after his death, someone wrote to The London Chronicle from
Aberdeen, home of James Beattie, to declare that ‘No modern has been
more read, or has commanded a larger share of the public approbation than
the late Mr Hume. If he was not the greatest philosopher, he possessed
at least the singular merit of having put into motion more philosophical
genius than any other writer of his time’. Furthermore, ‘In an age abound-
ing with historians, he maintained a distinguished, and almost unrivalled
pre-eminence; and his reputation as an historian, almost eclipses that of
the philosopher’.64 The truth, surely, was that the literary dreams that
Hume dreamed at Ninewells as a young man had, in the end, all been
fulfilled.
Notes
Introduction
1. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, p. 140.
2. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, p. 145.
3. Very little is known about Ritchie, other than that he was Barrack Master at
the Belhaven Barracks in Dunbar. His only other publications were a translation
of an account of Napoleon’s 1796–7 campaign in Italy (1799), and Political and
Military Memoirs of Europe, During the Year 1799 (1800–2). An advertisement
in The Morning Chronicle of 22 January 1801 indicates that at one point Ritchie
intended to compile a multi-volume Lives of Eminent and Learned Scotsmen, During
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. ‘Lives of Scotsmen, who have attained
celebrity in the Republic of Letters, will probably engross the larger portion of
every volume’, the advertisement declares. The Scots Magazine of February 1803
announced that Ritchie’s life of Hume was being prepared for the press and would
be the first volume in the series. It seems also to have been the last. Ritchie died
in 1809. For information about Ritchie I am grateful to Janet Brown.
4. See extracts from reviews printed in Fieser, Early Responses to Hume, vol. x,
pp. 293–4. ‘Of original composition, the portion is small’, the Monthly Review
observed, ‘and had it been still less, the writer’s fame and the value of the work
would not have suffered’. In a brief prefatory note, Ritchie says that he felt it
incumbent upon him as a biographer to go into two incidents unmentioned in
‘My Own Life’: the attempted prosecution for blasphemy of Hume and Kames
in 1755–6, and the dispute with Rousseau.
5. Ritchie, Life and Writings of David Hume, pp. 303–4.
6. Ritchie, Life and Writings of David Hume, pp. 325–6.
7. Ritchie, Life and Writings of David Hume, p. 329.
11. Stewart, Dissertation, in Works, ed. Hamilton, vol. i, p. 431.
12. Stewart, Dissertation, in Works, ed. Hamilton, vol. i, pp. 437–8.
13. Stewart, Dissertation, in Works, ed. Hamilton, vol. i, p. 449.
14. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i, p. 395.
15. For a more detailed account of the reception of Hume’s epistemology and meta-
physics in nineteenth-century British philosophy, see Harris, ‘The Reception of
Hume in Nineteenth-Century British Philosophy’. Jones (ed.), The Reception of
473
474 Notes to Pages 4–11
Hume in Europe contains accounts of how Hume was read right across Europe,
from France to Russia, from Sweden to Italy.
16. Allen, ‘Review of Lingard’s History of England’, p. 3. Edinburgh Review 42 (1825):
3–7.
17. Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters of the Time of George III, vol. i, p. 196.
18. Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters of the Time of George III, vol. i, p. 200.
19. Here I follow Spencer and Smith, ‘Canonization and Critique’.
20. Brodie, History of the British Empire, vol. i, pp. iii–iv.
21. Mill, ‘Brodie’s History of the British Empire’, p. 3.
22. Jeffrey, ‘Review of Brodie’s History of the British Empire’, Edinburgh Review 40
(1824): 93.
23. Mill, ‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’, pp. 134–6.
24. Quoted in Spencer and Smith, ‘Canonization and Critique’, p. 312.
25. McCosh, in The Scottish Philosophy, was at pains to point out that in the Exami-
nation, Mill ‘has reproduced to a large extent the theory of Hume, but without so
clearly seeing or candidly avowing the consequences’ (p. 133).
26. Pringle-Pattison, The Scottish Philosophy, pp. 66–71.
27. Stirling, ‘Kant Has Not Answered Hume’.
28. Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 57.
29. Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 57–8.
30. Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 179.
31. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, p. 121.
35. Grose, ‘History of the Editions’, pp. 75, 76.
36. Grose, ‘History of the Editions’, p. 36.
37. Mill, ‘Bentham’, p. 80 fn.
38. Huxley, Hume, pp. 52, 11.
39. Selby-Bigge, Introduction to Hume’s Enquiries, p. xii.
40. See Wright, ‘The Scientific Reception of Hume’s Theory of Causation’,
pp. 345–7.
41. Mill, ‘Bentham’, p. 80.
42. Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 57.
43. Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume, p. 45.
44. Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume, pp. 527–8, 538.
45. Kemp Smith, Philosophy of David Hume, p. 538.
46. Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, p. 10.
47. Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, p. 247. Laird thought that the tight
connection between Hume’s philosophy and his history explained the manifest
weaknesses of the latter. Hume was not a philosophical historian, like Voltaire,
but ‘only a philosopher turned historian – a very different being’ (p. 266).
48. Ernest Campbell Mossner, for example, declared in 1941 that it was simply false
that Hume deserted philosophy for history. ‘In turning to history he was not
Notes to Pages 11–13 475
leaving philosophy’, Mossner argued, ‘but merely enlarging the empirical data
of philosophy over the conclusions’. History for Hume ‘is . . . not an entity in
itself, but is in general part-and-parcel of the larger subject of ethics, the study
of human conduct; it is the foundation of all the social studies’ (‘An Apology for
David Hume, Historian’, p. 666). In The Life of David Hume, Mossner claimed
that for Hume history and philosophy are ‘closely akin because the development
of the human mind, which it is the historian’s task to trace, provides the materials
from which the philosopher derives the very principles of thinking and conduct’
(p. 301). John Passmore, in Hume’s Intentions (1952), also denied that Hume ever
gave up philosophy. It was true that Hume moved on from ‘the study of logic or
metaphysics or epistemology for its own sake’, but these subjects did not define
philosophy as Hume understood it. For Hume, politics, economics, and history
were all philosophy: that is, they were all part of the science of man, or ‘moral
science’, ‘the science which concerns itself with the human mind and human
relationships in society’. And so it could be said that ‘[h]is original plan he at no
time abandons’ (pp. 4, 17). John B. Stewart, in The Moral and Political Philosophy
of David Hume (1963), denied that Hume’s post-Treatise writings were ‘radically
new undertakings’: ‘instead, they can best be understood as applications and
extrapolations of the principles set forth in the Treatise’ (p. 17). Hume’s essays
‘are most easily understood when treated as extensions and applications of the
tenets set forth in “Of Morals”’ (i.e., in Book III of the Treatise). Both ‘The
Natural History of Religion’ and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion ‘rise out
of the Treatise’. And the History of England, ‘when examined closely’, is found by
Stewart ‘to be inspired by an argument drawn directly from the third book of the
Treatise’ (p. 19). For Stewart, as for Laird (see previous note), the philosophical
character of Hume’s history is the reason why it was a failure. The Treatise was
‘anti-historical’, and so, consequently, was the History of England. Nowhere did
Hume display ‘the true historian’s love for the past’ (p. 298).
49. Stroud, Hume, p. 222.
50. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, p. 25.
51. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, p. 280.
52. Stroud, Hume, p. ix.
53. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, p. viii.
54. Norton, ‘History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought’, pp. xxxvii–viii.
55. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. 214, 238.
56. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History, esp. pp. 1–11.
57. See, for example, David Fate Norton’s ‘Introduction to Hume’s Thought’ in the
Cambridge Companion to Hume, p 30: ‘In a number of respects Hume’s Essays and
his History of England constitute continuations of his earliest work. They are, of
course, further manifestations of his attempt to extend the experiment method of
reasoning into moral subjects. They are also further manifestations of his attempt
to gain understanding by means of an examination of origins or beginnings’. See
also Robison, ‘Hume’s Other Writings’.
58. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. ix–x.
59. It could not be said that Forbes succeeded in convincing all students of Hume’s
political thought of the importance of focusing on historical context instead of on
‘internal lines of communication’ between Hume’s politics and his philosophy:
see, e.g., Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, and Whelan,
Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy.
60. In Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, it is true, Hume claimed
that the ‘chief use’ of history is ‘only to discover the constant and universal
principles of human nature, by shewing men in all varieties of circumstances
and situations, and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our
observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action
and behaviour’ (Philosophical Essays [1748], p. 134). I take this to be Hume rather
opportunistically using a cliché of the age to support his case for general belief in
the uniformity and predictability of human actions. I do not think that it tells us
much about Hume’s own conception of the goals of history writing.
61. The value of a historical and developmental approach to Hume’s thought is
questioned by another common approach to Hume’s writings taken as a whole.
‘All of Hume’s philosophy, all of his history’, Nicholas Phillipson claims in a
study of Hume as historian first published in 1989, ‘was to be directed towards
the goal of teaching men and women to seek happiness in the world of common
life, not in the life hereafter, and to pay attention to their duties to their fellow
citizens rather than to a suppositious god’ (David Hume, p. 14). Many of Hume’s
readers, both his critics and admirers, have taken it to be so obvious as barely to
need mentioning that Hume’s career is to be understood as in its every aspect
hostile to religion in general, and to the Christian religion in particular. For a
sophisticated version of this reading, see Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s
Moral Philosophy, and also Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume, ch. 2.
The apparent lack of interest in religion displayed in the Treatise is usually
explained, by those who see Hume in this way, in terms of a self-censorship
on the part of a young Hume keen to gain the approval of influential men of
letters like Joseph Butler. Paul Russell, however, has argued that, appearances to
the contrary, the Treatise is very much part of Hume’s anti-religious campaign.
According to Russell, ‘The core of Hume’s philosophy is constituted and guided
by his fundamental irreligious commitments and objectives, as first laid down
and developed in the Treatise of Human Nature’ (The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise,
p. 300). But again, if everything that Hume wrote is ‘constituted and guided by
his fundamental irreligious commitments’, then it would seem likely that there
is little of interest to say about how Hume’s ideas changed through time. For, ex
hypothesi, they did not change through time. Hume’s career is to be understood
along the lines of a filling in of the detail of a vision that he had right at the
beginning.
62. It is, of course, not the case that every previous book on Hume has foreshortened
Hume’s career by attaching primary importance to A Treatise of Human Nature
and its science of man. There has been some resistance to that way of reading
Hume, especially among those who believe that An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding is in significant respects different from, and possibly even superior
to, Book I of the Treatise: see, e.g., Craig on Hume’s diminishing commitment
to the theory of ideas, in The Mind of God and the Works of Man, ch. 2; Millican
on the Enquiry as containing Hume’s ‘mature philosophy’, in ‘The Context,
Aims, and Structure of Hume’s First Enquiry’; and Buckle’s stated desire to
study the Enquiry ‘on its own terms’ in Hume’s Enlightenment Tract. Others have
focused on the particularities of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals: see
esp. Taylor, ‘Hume’s Later Moral Philosophy’. A recent collection of essays on
Hume’s political economy is meant to challenge the ‘subordination’ of Hume’s
economic thought ‘to political and philosophical considerations’ (Wennerlind
and Schabas [eds.], David Hume’s Political Economy, p. 1). The most thorough
questioning of the assumption that the Treatise provides the key to all that Hume
subsequently wrote is to be found in Moritz Baumstark’s PhD dissertation, ‘David
Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian’, esp. the introduction. Hume
studies would benefit greatly from the publication of more of Baumstark’s work.
63. Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 2, 4, 6, 7, 15, 16, 32, 33.
64. Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, ‘Literature’.
65. Life of David Hume (1777), p. 31.
66. On the centrality of breadth of learning to the identity of the eighteenth-century
man of letters, see Chartier, ‘L’Homme de Lettres’. Chartier takes as his point of
departure Voltaire’s Encyclopédie article ‘Gens de Lettres’. ‘On ne donne point ce
nom’, Voltaire wrote there, ‘à un homme qui avec peu de connaissances ne cultive
qu’un seul genre’ (quoted p. 159).
67. Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 5, 2, 30.
68. For a detailed study of this aspect of Pope’s career, see Foxon and McLaverty,
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade. The importance of Pope’s
achievement to the emergence of the man of letters in Britain is stressed by Beljame
in Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century and by Collins
in Authorship in the Days of Johnson. Beljame’s and Collins’s rather Whiggish
accounts are subjected to sceptical scrutiny by Griffin in Literary Patronage in
England and Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century.
69. Texts such as James Ralph’s The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated
(1758) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in
Europe (1759) are responses to this kind of anxiety.
71. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, p. 224.
72. I do not find convincing the claims made about Hume’s desire of the patronage
of the duke of Argyle in Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment, pp. 124–9.
73. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 113.
74. On Johnson’s early life, for the most part not dwelled upon by Boswell, see Martin,
Samuel Johnson, Parts I–III. The differences between Hume and Johnson seem
to me to be in general very much more marked than is allowed in Potkay, The
Passion for Happiness.
75. Griffin divides eighteenth-century men of letters into ‘authors by profession’ and
‘gentlemen authors’: see Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century, pp. 84–8, and
ch. 11. But he also admits that it is not possible to distinguish cleanly between two
different kinds of literary careers. Hume does not fit neatly into either category. It
is impossible, for example, to imagine gentlemen authors like Walpole or Gibbon
openly proclaiming how much their books had made them. Hume may never have
been desperate, but money mattered to him. It mattered more to him, in fact,
than it did to Johnson, who, according to Boswell, ‘had . . . less attention to profit
from his labours than any man to whom literature has been a profession’ (Life of
Samuel Johnson, ed. Womersley, p. 579).
76. Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson’, p. 104.
77. The importance of ‘improvement’ to the definition of the Scottish Enlightenment
has been a central theme in the work of Roger Emerson. See, e.g., ‘What is to
be Done About the Scottish Enlightenment?’, and, for a detailed case study, An
Enlightened Duke: The Life of Archibald Campbell, esp. pp. 345–60.
78. The second was ‘Hypothesis or system upon which natural effects are explained’.
The third was ‘Reasoning; argumentation’. And the fourth was ‘The course of
sciences read in the schools’. See Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language,
‘Philosophy’.
79. Proctor, et al., Modern Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ‘Philosophy’.
80. Harris, Hermes, pp. 8, viii.
81. Burke, Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. i–ix.
82. Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748), pp. 2–5.
83. Political Discourses (1752), pp. 2–3.
84. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 233, 235, 250, 304, 315, 330.
86. See Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 51–2.
87. History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), p. 116.
88. Smollett, review of Hume’s History of England, under the House of Tudor, in The
Critical Review 7 (1759): 289–303: Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. vii,
pp. 184–5. Three years earlier, in a review of vol. ii of The History of Great Britain,
Smollett was less sure about the proclivity for reflections on the part of modern
historians. ‘This rage of reflecting’, he complained, ‘and even of dogmatizing,
seems to have possessed all the late compilers, in this as well as in other countries
of Europe. Histories are metamorphized into dissertations; the chain of events is
broken; the reader’s attention is diffused’ (The Critical Review 2 [1756]: 385–404:
Fieser [ed.], Early Responses to Hume, vol. vii, p. 146).
89. It is of course possible that Hume’s conception of history was shaped, not by
Voltaire himself, but by the same authors who shaped Voltaire’s conception
of history. Brumfitt (in Voltaire, Historian, ch. 2) argues for the influence on
Voltaire of, especially, Fontenelle, Fénelon, and Boulainvilliers, all of whom we
can presume Hume knew well.
90. Voltaire, review of the 1762 History of England in La Gazette Littéraire de
l’Europe for 1764, in Articles Extraits de la Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe, pp. 451,
456.
91. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Womersley, p. 290. Hume, Johnson conti-
nued, ‘is an echo of Voltaire’.
92. What John Gray says of Voltaire, that ‘his life’s work was to set European
life on a new foundation by constructing a successor to Christianity’, and that
philosophy was for him ‘an instrument of emancipation’ (Voltaire, pp. 1, 2),
could not possibly be said of Hume.
93. Michael Graham does not justify his claim that Thomas Aikenhead’s execution
for blasphemy in Edinburgh in 1697 ‘cast a long shadow over the eighteenth
century’ (The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead, p. 147). Indeed, Graham’s own
account of the ‘aftermath’ of the Aikenhead case suggests that it was more or
less forgotten after the Union of 1707, until it was vividly revived by Macaulay
in the mid-nineteenth century.
94. As A. E. Taylor, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh at the time when
Kemp Smith was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, pointed out in his Leslie
Stephen Lecture of 1927, ‘It is as certain as anything can be that Hume was, in
point of fact, no anticlerical zealot, but an amiable and easy-going man of the
world whose chosen social circle consisted largely of the “moderates” among the
Edinburgh Presbyterians. The members of that circle, to be sure, were not men
of the faith which removes mountains and conquers the world. But they valued
established beliefs as a bulwark of comfort, peace and social order, and would
have been the last persons to sanction a violent and wanton attack on any set of
doctrines which serve to keep the “vulgar” in their place and to guarantee the
“thinking” minority against disturbers of their ease and leisure’ (David Hume
and the Miraculous, pp. 2–3).
95. Pope, Preface to the 1717 edition of his Works: Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 3.
96. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 173. The critic in question was the
author of A Delineation of the Nature and Obligation of Morality (1753), whose
name ( James Balfour) Hume did not yet know: see below, p. 299.
97. Griffin is right, I think, to see the ‘public sphere’ discerned by Jurgen Habermas
in the Tatler and Spectator as having been, in the eyes of eighteenth-century
writers, more an imaginary ideal than an accurate representation of actual social
practice: see ‘Fictions of Eighteenth-Century Authorship’, p. 191.
98. On the ‘tight and systematic’ coherence of Reid’s moral thought, see Haakon-
ssen’s introduction to his edition of Reid’s Practical Ethics, esp. pp. xxxv–lxxvi.
99. For an account of Smith’s ‘lifelong love of intellectual systems and the esprit
systématique he associated with true philosophical thinking’, see Phillipson, Adam
Smith: An Enlightened Life.
100. I am not the first to recognise the importance of taking seriously Hume’s descrip-
tion of himself in ‘My Own Life’ as a man of letters: see also, e.g., Buckle, Hume’s
Enlightenment Tract, pp. 13–16; Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, pp. 3–17;
and Richetti, Philosophical Writing, ch. 4 (‘Hume sought to avoid the specializa-
tion that undermines the freshness and pertinence of philosophical writing; he
wished to act not so much as a reviser of systems and perennial problems as a
repudiator of them and a founder by radical transformation of a new tradition,
which would turn from books to experience and speak to a broad if discerning
audience’ [p. 184]).
101. Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 31–2.

102. Mossner’s account of Hume’s career is predicated on the assumption that almost
everything in ‘My Own Life’ is to be taken at face value. Every chapter has an
epigram taken from it. At the beginning of The Life of David Hume, he writes
as follows: ‘Although today Hume is generally recognised as the most authentic
voice of the Enlightenment, that age itself would hardly have been in agree-
ment. The Age of Enlightenment read his History and his Essays widely enough
to ensure the outward success of his career, but remained unreceptive to his
philosophy. Yet philosophy, including “religion, which is only a species of phi-
losophy,” was always his dominant interest. In England he suffered frustration
and humiliation because he was a Scot in a period of strong anti-Scottish feeling
and because he was the proponent of unpopular ideas. In his native Scotland he
was frequently snubbed socially and constantly attacked by the ultra-orthodox.
Only within the small circle of Edinburgh intellectuals was his genius fully
appreciated, though not fully approved, and of that intimate group only his
closest friend Adam Smith gave the nod of whole-hearted approval. If he was
ultimately acclaimed in France as Britain’s leading man of letters, not even there
was his philosophy completely understood. Society is wont to deal unkindly with
those it does not fully comprehend. Hume’s life was a constant struggle against
odds – against financial straitness, poor health, family ambitions; against the
power of names, the inertia of ideas, the forces of superstition and intolerance’
(pp. 4–5). As should already be clear, I disagree with almost every single claim
made in this passage. Mossner’s approach to Hume’s relationship with his age
appears to have been an important inspiration for both Gerhard Streminger in
David Hume: Sein Leben und Sein Werk and Roderick Graham in The Great
Infidel: A Life of David Hume. Annette Baier uses ‘My Own Life’ as the point
of departure in The Pursuits of Philosophy, her brief ‘introduction to the life and
thought of David Hume’.
1 Pursuits of Philosophy and General Learning

1. In ‘My Own Life’ Hume wrote that he was born ‘the 26th April 1711, old
style’ (Life of David Hume [1777], p. 2). In 1752 Britain moved from the Julian
calendar to the Gregorian. Because it had too many leap years, the old calendar
was significantly out of step with the new one, so that, according to the Act of
Parliament which changed the start of year from 25 March to 1 January, the day
after 2 September 1752 was 14 September 1752. Thus 14 September 1752 ‘new
style’ was 3 September 1752 ‘old style’, and 26 April 1711 ‘old style’ was 7 May
1711 ‘new style’.
2. In 1738 it was reported in the minutes of the College’s Senatus Academicus as
something of a novelty that ‘some students of philosophy’ – five in total – ‘were
willing to print and defend theses publicly in order to their receiving the degree
of M.A.’ (Grant, Story of the University of Edinburgh, vol. i, p. 277). Three of
the graduands we will meet below: Hugh Blair, William Cleghorn, and John
Witherspoon. Grant suggests (vol. i, pp. 279–80) that the General Assembly
discouraged making graduation compulsory for those entering the ministry in
order to reduce the importance of the universities.
3. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p. 17.
7. Stewart speculates that Ramsay might have been Hume’s tutor: see ‘Hume’s
Intellectual Development, 1711–1752’, p. 43. For Ramsay’s somewhat mixed
reputation among his contemporaries, see Mossner, Life of David Hume, pp. 60–
1, and also Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day, p. 76. The friendship
lasted into the 1760s at least. Ramsay’s son told Hume’s nephew David that he
did not believe ‘there ever were two companions upon earth, more respectable
for their constancy, & mutual esteem for one another’ (quoted in Mossner,
Life of David Hume, p. 61).
8. For a close study of the ‘letter to a physician’, see Wright, ‘Dr. George Cheyne,
Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to a Physician’; and see also Brandt,
‘Beginnings of Hume’s Philosophy’.
9. NLS MS 23151, item 30. The manuscript is a fair copy with almost no alterations,
presumably made by Hume for his records.
12. In what follows I draw heavily on the account of Hume’s early years presented
in Stewart, ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711–1752’. Like Stewart, I have
been influenced by Brandt, ‘The Beginnings of Hume’s Philosophy’. I have also
learned much from the first chapter of John P. Wright, Hume’s A Treatise of Human
Nature: An Introduction, and from Wright’s studies of the ‘letter to a physician’
and of ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’. Stewart’s account
of Hume’s early intellectual development is usefully supplemented by Emerson,
‘Hume’s Intellectual Development: Part II’. The best short account of Hume’s
life as a whole is Robertson, ‘Hume, David (1711–1776)’.
14. Mossner, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 32.
15. Stewart (‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711–1752’, pp. 15–16) quotes the
Glasgow regent John Loudon, according to Stewart a more progressive teacher
than Drummond, on Le Clerc’s Logica as an example of a modern logic text
‘industriously stuff ’d with doctrines of a very dangerous tendency’.
16. John Boswell, James Boswell’s father’s younger brother, took Drummond’s class
three years after Hume. In his journal he reported that ‘Mr Drummond was a
pious man, & of some learning, & was mighty civil & kinde to all his scholars,
even to the poorest of them’ (Pitman, ‘The Journal of John Boswell’, p. 69).
17. Probably Exercitationes Rationales de Deo Divinisque Perfectionibus, published in
Utrecht 1685, with a second edition, including an attack on innate ideas, ten years
later.
18. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 382 [I.iv.iii: SBN 219].
19. John Boswell reports that although Steuart ‘was call’d an universal scholar’, ‘you
would have thought that in his class he was more at pains to make you laugh
than to teach you N. Phyl. He took his head much up about church affairs, &
was said to have been realy a pious man’ (Pitman, ‘The Journal of John Boswell’,
pp. 69–70). In his Autobiography Carlyle says that ten years or so later Steuart’s
natural philosophy class ‘was very ill taught, as he was worn out with age, and
had never excelled’ (p. 52).
20. [Anon.], The Physiological Library begun by Mr. Steuart. For a detailed discussion,
see Barfoot, ‘Hume and the Culture of Science’.
21. In ‘Hume and the Culture of Science’, esp. pp. 168–90, Barfoot explores ways in
which Hume’s treatment of space and time in Book I of the Treatise might have
been shaped by natural philosophy texts such as Steuart’s library contained.
22. Mackie kept a class register, and Hume’s name is not to be found in it: see Stewart,
‘Hume’s Intellectual Development’, p. 23.
23. This, the earliest known manuscript in Hume’s hand, is currently held in a
private collection, but a photocopy is kept by the National Library of Scotland
(Acc. 11333).
24. See Stewart, ‘Introduction’ to Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, pp. 8–9. Stewart notes that the manuscript is understood to have been sold
by ‘a titled household to which Hume was distantly related and with whom he
tried unsuccessfully to obtain his first employment in 1739’ – that is, presum-
ably, the Haddington family (see letter to George Carre of Nisbet, 12 November
1739: Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 35–6). It is possible that the
transcription is evidence that Hume had already performed services for the family.
25. See Zachs, David Hume 1711–1776, p. 59, where a letter is transcribed giving
a brief account of Hume’s family and a sketch of his character and appearance.
The letter recounts that ‘Mr. Hume never carried his law education farther than
attending the lectures of the professor of the University’.
27. That is, Voet’s Compendium juris juxta seriem pandectarum, adjectis differentiis juris
civilis et canonici, and Vinnius’s Institutionum seu Elementorum D. Justiani. There
was a copy of the former in the Hume library sold in 1840 (see Norton and Norton,
The David Hume Library, p. 135), but, being a copy of the 1731 edition, it cannot
have been the book used by Hume while a reluctant student of law in the 1720s.
28. Ritchie, Account of the Life and Writings of David Hume, p. 5.
29. See Cairns, ‘The Origins of the Edinburgh Law School’, pp. 341–2.
30. See Haakonssen, ‘Natural Jurisprudence and the Scottish Enlightenment’,
pp. 261–4.
31. Hugonis Grotii De Jure Belli ac Pacis Librorum III Compendium (Edinburgh, 1707).
32. Stewart, Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political
Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe, in Collected Works, ed. Hamilton,
vol. i, p. 93.
33. It seems likely that there was a 1667 edition of De Iure Belli ac Pacis in the Hume
library sold in 1840: see Norton and Norton, The Hume Library, p. 49. No trace
has survived, though, of any books by Pufendorf that Hume may have owned.
34. To David Hume the younger, 20 May 1776: Kozanecki, ‘Dawida Hume’a
Nieznane Listy’, p. 138.
36. See Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), pp. 218–19.
39. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 337.
42. Hume’s copy is owned by the University of Nebraska. I have not been able to
consult it, but I am assured that it contains no annotations in Hume’s hand.
43. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. i, p. 205 fn.
44. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. i, p. 181.
45. Hume’s relationship with Shaftesbury’s writings has not been the subject of
intensive study. But see Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, vol. ii, ch. 4; and
Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature, esp. ch. 18. Rivers notes (vol. ii,
p. 241) that over the course of his philosophical career, there is a ‘process of
distancing’ in Hume’s references to Shaftesbury.
46. According to Rivers, Shaftesbury was ‘the key influence on Scottish moral phi-
losophy in the 1720s and 30s’ (Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol ii, p. 241).
50. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. iii, p. 23.
52. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. i, pp. 76–7.
53. Brandt, ‘The Beginnings of Hume’s Philosophy’, has an especially perceptive
discussion of what Hume’s ‘new scene of thought’ may have been.
54. It is striking that this episode, described in such detail in the letter to the London
physician, is barely mentioned in ‘My Own Life’. All Hume says there is that his
health was ‘a little broken by my ardent application’ (Life of David Hume [1777],
p. 5). He seems to downplay its significance also in a late letter to his nephew
David Hume, in which he warns of the dangers of ‘too assiduous study’: ‘When I
was of your age’, he writes, ‘I was inclind to give in to excesses of the same kind’
(Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 305).
55. For this and the other quotations from the letter to the physician in this and the
following paragraph, see Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 13–17.
56. Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin of Modern Honour’, p. 205. There is perhaps an
echo of this criticism of Stoic philosophy in words that Hume later gave to the
Epicurean in his essay with that title. ‘[O]f all the fruitless attempts of art’, Hume’s
Epicurean says, ‘no one is so ridiculous, as that which the severe philosophers
have undertaken, the producing of an artificial happiness, and making us be pleased
by rules of reason, and by reflection’ (Essays, Moral and Political, vol ii [1742],
p. 102).
57. Confession of Faith, and the Larger and Shorter Catechism (1717), p. 4.
60. Boswell, Boswell in Extremes, p. 11.
61. [Allestree], The Whole Duty of Man, pp. 412–25. It is a little strange that Hume
was given The Whole Duty of Man to read. It was, as Isabel Rivers remarks,
an anti-Calvinist text (Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, vol. i, pp. 22–3). It might
be evidence that the Hume household was not perfectly in tune with Scottish
religious orthodoxy, which may be part of the explanation of why Hume was able
to float free of the religion of his contemporaries.
64. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. ii, p. 40.
65. Addison et al., Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. iv, p. 442 [no. 543].
66. Derham, Physico-Theology, p. 38.
68. Boswell, Boswell in Extremes, p. 11.
69. It is also possible that Locke and Clarke were more direct helps to unbelief in at
least one of the central doctrines of orthodox Christianity. Hume may well have
known that in Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) the deist John Toland had used
Lockean arguments against the coherence of Trinitarianism; and he may well
have known also that the doctrine of the Trinity had been attacked on scriptural
grounds by Clarke in Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1719). On Arianism in
Locke and Clarke, see Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, ch. 4.
70. See Harris, ‘Answering Bayle’s Question’, and also Ahnert, ‘Religion and
Morality’.
73. It seems unlikely, though, that Hume should not have read Spinoza’s major works
at some point. On ‘peculiar doctrines’ that Hume and Spinoza share, see Baier,
‘David Hume, Spinozist’. Wim Klever (‘Hume Contra Spinoza?’, p. 89) points
out that even if Hume did rely on Bayle, it is still the case that Spinoza is ‘the only
figure from the history of philosophy to be explicitly and extensively discussed
by Hume’ in Book One of the Treatise.
74. ‘No author [during the Commonwealth] was more celebrated both abroad and a
home than Hobbes’, Hume wrote: ‘In our times he is much neglected . . . Hobbes’s
politics are fitted only to promote tyrannny, and his morals to encourage licen-
tiousness. Tho’ an enemy to religion, he partakes nothing of the spirit of scep-
ticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in
particular, could attain a thorow conviction on these subjects’ (History of Great
Britain [1754–7], vol. ii, pp. 126–7; History of England [1762], vol. vi, pp. 127–
8).
75. Hume’s engagement with Mandeville is discussed extensively in Tolonen, Man-
deville and Hume, ch 4. See also Castiglione, ‘Considering Things Minutely’,
pp. 479–84; Goldsmith, ‘Regulating Anew the Sentiments of Mankind’, pp. 601–
3, 604–6; and Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, ch. 6.
76. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 39 [‘Introduction’].

77. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 150 [‘Remark O’].
79. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 39 [‘Introduction’].
80. Mandeville, Enquiry into the Origin of Honour (1732), p. 6.
81. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 230 [‘Remark T’].
82. This is the edition of The Fable of the Bees that was in the Hume library sold in
1840: see Norton and Norton, The Hume Library, p. 112.
83. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 324 [‘Search into the Nature of
Society’].
Society’].
Society’].
Society’].
87. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 41 [‘Enquiry into the Origin of
Moral Virtue’].
Moral Virtue’].
89. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, pp. 46–7 [‘Enquiry into the Origin
of Moral Virtue’].
90. Tolonen remarks that ‘upon comparison The Fable of the Bees and Part II do
not appear to have that much in common apart from the title and the author’
(Mandeville and Hume, p. 134). Tolonen’s book is the best study so far of the
differences between the two ‘volumes’ or ‘parts’ of The Fable of the Bees.
91. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. ii, p. 20 [‘Preface’].
92. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. ii, p. 129 [‘Third Dialogue’].
93. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. ii, p. 130 [‘Third Dialogue’].
94. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. ii, p. 149 [‘Fourth Dialogue’].
95. NLS MS 23159, item 4. According to Stewart (‘The Dating of Hume’s
Manuscripts’, pp. 270–6), the handwriting suggests that ‘the best conjecture’
for the date of composition of the ‘Historical Essay’ is 1731. Mossner, on no
evidence at all, dates it to ‘Hume’s college days’, and suggests it might have been
‘prepared for Professor Mackie’s history class’ (Life of David Hume, p. 46) –
which Hume did not take. For a reliable transcription of the essay, see Wright,
‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”’, pp. 204–9. In that paper Wright
offers of the reading of the essay on which I am reliant in this and the following
paragraphs. I have also benefited from Hanley, ‘David Hume and the Modern
Problem of Honor’; Siebert, ‘Chivalry and Romance in the Age of Hume’, and
Susato, ‘The Idea of Chivalry in the Scottish Enlightenment’.
97. Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”’, p. 206.
99. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), pp. 86–95. See below, p. 190.

102. Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”’, pp. 206–7.
Moral Virtue’].
105. Elements of the argument of the ‘Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’ are
discernible in the account of medieval manners in the first volume of The History
of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII (1762,
vol. i, p. 423). There Hume claimed that ‘the ideas of chivalry’ seem to have
been ‘imported by the Normans’.
106. See Wright, Sceptical Realism of David Hume, pp. 190–1, 236–7.
107. See below, p. 79.
108. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, pp. 3–4 [‘Preface’].
110. Mandeville, Free Thoughts (1731), p. xix.
111. Mandeville, Free Thoughts (1731), pp. xix, xx.
112. See Mijers, ‘Intellectual Exchanges and Scottish Authors Abroad’, pp. 208–9. I
am grateful to Nicholas Phillipson for alerting me to this new piece of information
about the Scottish reception of Bayle.
113. There was a copy of the 1725–7 edition of Bayle’s Oeuvres Diverses in the
Hume library sold in 1840: see Norton and Norton, The David Hume Library,
p. 74.
114. On Bayle’s importance to Hume, see Popkin, ‘David Hume: and the Pyrrhonian
Controversy’ and ‘Bayle and Hume’. Popkin believed that ‘Hume is more Bayle’s
successor than any French Enlightenment figure can claim to be’ (‘Bayle and
Hume’, p. 150). For the importance to Hume of the Bayle of the Oeuvres Diverses
in particular, see also Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, ch. 6.
115. Mandeville, Free Thoughts (1731), p. 20.
117. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. ii, p. 610 [‘David’, Remark I].
118. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. v, pp. 205–6 [‘Spinoza’].
119. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. v, p. 811 [Explanation I].
120. Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, pp. 329–30 [§161]. Clear evidence of an interest
on Hume’s part in Bayle’s hypothesis concerning a society of atheists would
seem to be provided by the ‘Early Memoranda’, discussed in Chapter 3. One
of the memoranda reads: ‘Atheists plainly make a distinction betwixt good
reasoning & bad. Why not betwixt vice & virtue? Baile’ (Mossner, ‘Hume’s
Early Memoranda’, p. 500).
121. Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, p. 274 [§136].
122. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. iv, p. 653 [‘Pyrrho’].
123. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. iv, p. 657 [‘Pyrrho’].
124. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. iv, pp. 653–4 [‘Pyrrho’, Remark B].
126. See Russell, Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, ch. 4. I disagree with some of Russell’s
reconstruction of Hume’s relations with the philosophers of the Borders, but I
am indebted to his research.
127. It is often said that Hume and Kames were related. So far as I know, there is
no evidence that this was so, and nowhere in their correspondence is there any
reference or allusion to a family connection.
128. At the beginning of ‘Observations upon Prescription’ Kames noted the prov-
idence of God’s having ‘implanted in out natures the remarkable affections to
property and society’ (Essays upon Several Subjects in Law, p. 100). He went on
to argue against those writers, including Grotius and Pufendorf, who argued
that prescription (i.e., acquisition of property by duration of use) ‘is a creature
only of positive law, not at all founded in the law of nature’ (p. 102).
129. The correspondence between Kames and Clarke is held by the National Archives
of Scotland, GD24/1/548.
130. Kames’s view, as explained in the Essays concerning the Principles of Morality and
Natural Religion of 1751, was that the principle that every event must have a
cause is founded not upon argument, but rather ‘upon conviction derived from
the light of nature’ (ed. Moran, p. 190).
131. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, p. 17.
132. Hume did see Berkeley as a sceptic, but only in the sense that Berkeley illumi-
nated the inability of sound philosophical argumentation to have an impact on
ordinary human life. In a footnote in Essay XII of Philosophical Essays concerning
Human Understanding Hume wrote that, even though Berkeley wrote against the
sceptics as well as against atheists and free thinkers, ‘all his arguments . . . are,
in reality, merely sceptical’ because ‘they admit of no answer and produce
no conviction’: ‘Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and
irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism’ (Philosophical Essays
[1748], p. 240 fn.).
133. Another possible means whereby Hume might have become interested in Berke-
ley was the Edinburgh-based Rankenian Club, founded in 1717 and still active
while Hume was a student. On Berkeley’s importance to the Rankenian’s mem-
bers, see Stewart, ‘Berkeley and the Rankenian Club’.
134. The main issue between Kames and Baxter concerned, as Kames put it, ‘the
necessity of a continuall cause in order to sustain the continuance of motion’.
Baxter refused to accept that Newtonian mechanics required anything in addition
to the initial impulse that started the motion of the material world, and came
to the conclusion that Kames was really only ‘bamboozling & jesting’ him. The
correspondence is held by the National Archives of Scotland, GD24/1/547. See
also Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day, pp. 63–6.
135. For the little that is known about Dudgeon, see Russell, ‘Dudgeon, William
(1705/6–1743)’.
136. Minutes of the meeting of the Chirnside Presbytery on 29 August 1732: National
Archives of Scotland, CH2/516/3/307. In the end, the Chirnside Presbytery
referred Dudgeon to the May 1733 meeting of the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland, which in turn referred him to a ‘Commission’ for a final

decision. See NAS CH2/265/2/299–303, and CH1/3/22/204, 412, 495.
137. Dudgeon, State of the Moral World Considered, p. 6.
140. On early eighteenth-century deployments of the concept of moral necessity, see
Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, esp. chs. 2 and 3.
141. This text is transcribed in Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’, pp. 165–8.
The passages quoted here are on p. 167. See also below, pp. 146–7.
142. The ‘Early Memoranda’, discussed in Chapter 3, contain evidence of a sustained
critical engagement with Leibniz’s style of theodicy: see Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early
Memoranda’, pp. 500–3.
143. See Skoczylas, Mr. Simson’s Knotty Case. Skoczylas concludes (pp. 341–54)
that the controversies to which Simson gave rise were significant factors in the
enabling of a Scottish Enlightenment.
144. For an account of Hutcheson’s election to the Glasgow chair, see Scott, Francis
Hutcheson, pp. 54–6.
145. Hutcheson, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’, ed. Moore and Silver-
thorne, pp. 193–4.
thorne, pp. 194–5.
thorne, pp. 199, 201.
148. On Carmichael and the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Moore and
Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition
in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’.
149. The Hume library sold in 1840 contained a 1726 edition of An Inquiry into the
Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: see Norton and Norton, The Hume
Library, p. 105.
150. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 134 [Intro. to Illustrations].
151. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ed. Leidhold, p. 112 [Treatise II, sect. II, § ix].
152. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, pp. 75–6 [‘Remark C’].
153. See, e.g., Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. ii, p. 50.
154. Hume says there, citing Butler’s Sermons, that ‘It has been prov’d, beyond all
controversy, that even the passions commonly esteem’d selfish, carry the mind
beyond the self, directly to the object’ (Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding (1748), pp. 15–16 fn).
155. Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748), p. 15 fn.
156. See esp. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ed. Leidhold, pp. 154–5 (Treatise II, sect. V, § v).
157. See Costelloe, British Aesthetic Tradition, p. 21.
158. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ed. Leidhold, pp. 26–7 (Treatise I, Sect. I, § xvii).
159. Addison et al., Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. iii, p. 537 [no. 411], and pp. 535–82
[nos. 411–21].
161. Addison et al., Spectator, vol. i, p. 268 [no. 62]. I owe this reference to Wright,
‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”’, pp. 197–8.
162. There were works by Bouhours, Boileau and Segrais in the Hume library sold
in 1840: see Norton and Norton, The Hume Library, pp. 76, 77, 112, 127.
163. Dubos’s Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture had been published in
1719 and was, according to Jones, ‘[f]or at least fifty years the most influential
work of its kind’ (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 93). There was a 1732 edition in the
Hume library sold in 1840: see Norton and Norton, The Hume Library, p. 88.
For suggestions as to Dubos’s influence on Hume, see Jones, Hume’s Sentiments,
ch. 3. See also below, p. 141.
164. The positive and substantial influence of Hutcheson upon Hume is a princi-
pal theme of Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume. Norton, in David
Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician, argues that Hume’s
moral philosophy is largely Hutchesonian in character. That thesis has been
forcefully challenged by James Moore: see especially ‘Hume and Hutcheson’.
For an assessment of the Norton-Moore debate, with references to other relevant
texts, see Turco, ‘Hutcheson and Hume in a Recent Polemic’.
166. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 17–18.
167. Mossner argues that the addressee of the letter was Arbuthnot in ‘Hume’s Epistle
to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734’. The evidence against Mossner’s thesis, and in favour of
Cheyne, is persuasively marshalled in Wright, ‘Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier
Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to a Physician’.
168. See Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment, pp. 143–52.
169. Cheyne, The English Malady (1733), pp. 52–4.
170. According to Guerrini, Cheyne and Ramsay had been friends since around 1705.
Cheyne ‘shared his spiritual crises’ with Ramsay, as Guerrini puts it, throughout
his life: ‘the two men shared views on the preexistence of souls, the importance
of free will, and the present fallen state of humankind’ (Obesity and Depression in
the Enlightenment, pp. 20, 182).
171. Emerson notes that in going to France after time at college, Hume was following
a path trodden by many Scots in earlier times: ‘La Flèche . . . had had many
Scots before him and Rheims was a degree mill for MDs including some Scots’
(‘The World in which the Scottish Enlightenment Took Shape’, p. 11).
2 Anatomist of Human Nature

1. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 375, 398.
2. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 22. No real friendship developed
between Ramsay and Hume, however. Ramsay was later very critical of Hume’s
philosophical abilities: see the 1742 letter about Hume quoted in Mossner, Life of
David Hume, pp. 94–5. Laird suggests that Hume may have ‘borrowed’ from the
Voyages de Cyrus, via Andrew Baxter’s Enquiry into the Human Soul, the threefold
distinction between knowledge, proofs, and probabilities deployed in Treatise
I.iii.x: see Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, p. 90 fn; see also Henderson,
Chevalier Ramsay, pp. 122–3.
3. This is the subtitle of Pluche’s work in its English translation, originally published
in 1733. In 1973, Michael Morrisroe published an article (‘Did Hume Read
Berkeley? A Conclusive Answer’) with what purported to be a transcription of a
letter, dated 29 September 1734, sent by Hume from Rheims to Michael Ramsay,
establishing, not only that Hume read Berkeley, but also that Ramsay’s letter of
recommendation was to Pluche. The manuscript of the letter was never produced,
however, and the consensus among Hume scholars now is that Morrisroe’s article
was a hoax. There is scope for scepticism also, therefore, about another letter, this
time about Hume’s preparations for writing an ecclesiastical history, published
by Morrisroe in 1972 (‘Hume’s Ecclesiastical History: A New Letter’).
7. See Tolonen, ‘Politeness, Paris, and the Treatise’, and also Mandeville and Hume,
pp. 194–202.
9. Tolonen, ‘Politeness, Paris, and the Treatise’, p. 25; Mandeville and Hume, p. 195.
10. Mossner, ‘Hume at La Flèche’, p. 32.
11. For an account of the complicated relationship between the Jesuits and Carte-
sianism, see Sortais, Le Cartésianisme chez les Jésuites Français.
12. See Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. 6–7; Gopnik, ‘Could David
Hume Have Known about Buddhism?’, p. 9; and, especially, Rochemonteix, Un
Collège de Jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, vol. iv, pp. 79–106. For further
information about Hume’s time at La Flèche, see Perinetti, ‘Hume at La Flèche’.
I regret that I had sight of this important piece of research too late to incorporate
its findings into my narrative.
13. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. [i–ii] [SBN xii]. Because there
was only one edition of the Treatise, there is little scope for confusion in giving
references to both the eighteenth-century text and the best modern edition. ‘SBN’
indicates the page number in the edition of the Treatise by Selby-Bigge, as revised
by Nidditch. For reasons why this edition is preferable to the newer one by David
Fate Norton and Mary Norton, see Harris, ‘Editing Hume’s Treatise’.
17. Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy was not published until 1755.
18. ‘The Design’ of The Essay on Man: Pope, Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 239.
19. Strong claims about the influence of Hobbe’s Elements on the ‘plan’ of the Treatise
are made by Russell in The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, ch. 6. Scepticism about
Russell’s reading is expressed by Serjeantson, ‘Hume’s General Rules’, pp. 191–
2, and 192fn.21.
20. ‘Of all the human sciences, the science of man is the most worthy’, Malebranche
wrote in the Preface to The Search after Truth (transl. Lennon and Olscamp,
p. xxxix). Hume’s apparent debts to Malebranche were first traced in detail

by Laird in Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature. They are explored further
in Wright, Sceptical Realism of David Hume; and McCracken, Malebranche and
British Philosophy, ch. 7. See also James, ‘Sympathy and Comparison’; Kail,
‘Hume’s Ethical Conclusion’ and ‘Hume, Malebranche, and “Rationalism”’; and
Le Jallé, ‘Hume, Malebranche, and the Self-Justification of the Passions’.
21. Kozanecki, ‘Dawida Hume’a Nieznane Listy’, p. 133.
22. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 6, fn [SBN xvi–xvii].
23. See Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 23 [I.i.ii: SBN 8], and vol. ii,
p. 2 [II.i.i: SBN 275–6].
24. It is to be admitted, though, that there are places in the Treatise where Hume
does deploy what appear to be the language and explanatory strategies of the
physiological element of Malebranche’s science of man. For example, in his
account in Part Two of Book One of why we believe we have an idea of a
vacuum, Hume says that he is compelled to have recourse to ‘an imaginary dis-
section of the brain’ in order to explain how the imagination confuses two quite
different ideas of distance: see vol. ii, p. 111 [I.ii.v: SBN 60]. See also refer-
ences to ‘the spirits’ at, e.g., vol. ii, p. 172 [II.ii.viii: SBN 373–4] and vol. ii,
p. 256 [II.iii.iv: SBN 420]. According to Wright, these passages are evidence that
Hume’s theory of the associative production of natural belief was backed by a com-
mitment to Malebranchean psycho-physiology: see Sceptical Realism, pp. 209–
21.
25. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (ed. Nidditch), p. 43 [I.i.2].
26. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 7–8 [SBN xxi].
27. On the question of how well acquainted Hume really was with the details of New-
tonian natural philosophy see, e.g., Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, pp. 11–19; Noxon,
Hume’s Philosophical Development; Force, ‘Hume’s Interest in Newton and Sci-
ence’; and Schliesser, ‘Hume’s Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism’. I do not
myself think that Hume had a serious and deep interest in (what we would now
call) the scientific culture of his day. The evidence – both in his published works
and in his letters – suggests that his interests in history and in politics, for example,
were much more intense. There was more explicit engagement with Newtoni-
anism in George Turnbull’s The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy
(1740) – a work intended, according to its author, to apply the method of natural
philosophy to the mind, and thereby to ‘delineat[e] the general laws to which the
principal phenomena of the human system are reducible’ (ed. Broadie, p. 19). Like
Books One and Two of the Treatise, Turnbull’s Principles was published by John
Noon.
28. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 30 [I.i.iv: SBN 12–13].
29. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, pp. 66, 73.
30. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 10 [Introduction: SBN xxiii].
31. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 13 fn [I.i.i: SBN 2 fn].
32. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 12 [I.i.i: SBN 2]. The distinction
between impressions and ideas seems to owe something to Malebranche, who
differentiated between ‘strong and lively sensations . . . that startle and forcefully
rouse the mind’ and the ‘weak and languid’ ideas of imagination and memory
(Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscam, pp. 57, 261). See Laird, Hume’s
Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. 32–3, and also Wright, Sceptical Realism, p. 213.
Another anticipation of Hume’s distinction is to be found in Berkeley’s differen-
tiation between ideas of sense and ideas of imagination – though it is possible that
Berkeley himself was influenced by Malebranche here.
33. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 252 [II.iii.iii: SBN 417].
34. This is the argument of Section Six of Part One, ‘Of Modes and Substances’:
Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 35–8 [SBN 15–17].
35. See Locke, Essay, ed. Nidditch, p. 301 [II.xxiii.10].
36. Bayle at times sounds rather like Locke in his understanding of the implications
of scepticism for scientific investigation. In the Dictionary article on Pyrrho he
denied that scepticism was dangerous to natural philosophy: ‘There is no harm in
saying, that the souls of men are too narrow to discover any thing in natural truths,
in the causes which produce heat, cold, the flux of the sea, &c. It is enough for us
to endeavour to find out some probable hypotheses, and to make a collection of
experiments; and I am sure that there are very few good natural philosophers in
our age, but are convinced, that nature is an impenetrable abyss, and that it’s [sic]
springs are known to none, but to the maker and director of them’ (Dictionary,
vol. iv, p. 653 [‘Pyrrho’, Remark B]).
37. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 38 [I.i.vii: SBN 17]. The case for
seeing Berkeley as a key influence on Hume in the Treatise is powerfully made by
Ayers, ‘Hume and Berkeley’, and by Waxman, Hume’s Theory of Consciousness,
esp. pp. 19–20, 85–95. In ‘Berkeley and the Rankenian Club’, Stewart describes
several early readers of the Treatise who took it to be Berkeleyan in spirit, includ-
ing John Carre, and George Wallace, who in his System of the Principles of the
Law of Scotland (1760) described Hume has having ‘pushed the principles of
the ingenious, the virtuous, the pious Bishop of Cloyne to their most distant
consequences’ (quoted by Stewart, p. 41).
38. Berkeley sets out his anti-abstractionism in the Introduction to A Treatise Con-
cerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. He then goes on, in Part One, to argue
against the possibility of ‘the absolute existence of unthinking things’, claiming
early on that the opinion that such things exist ‘will, perhaps, be found at bottom
to depend on the doctrine of abstract ideas’: ‘For can there be a nicer strain of
abstraction than to distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being
perceived, so as to conceive of them existing unperceived?’ (Philosophical Works,
ed. Ayers, p. 78 [§5]).
39. The importance of understanding Treatise I.ii in the larger context of Hume’s the-
ory of mind is stressed by Waxman, ‘The Psychologistic Foundations of Hume’s
Critique of Mathematical Philosophy’, and Falkenstein, ‘Hume on Manners of
Disposition and the Ideas of Space and Time’. Hume’s debt to Bayle and to
Berkeley in this part of the Treatise is explored in Jacquette, Hume’s Critique of
Infinity, pp. 22–39, and by Baxter, ‘Hume’s Theory of Space and Time’ (which
also connects I.ii with Hume’s general philosophical scepticism).
40. See Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, §§125–32 (Philosophical Works, ed.
Ayers, pp. 117–19; and also An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, §54:
‘whatever may be said of extension in abstract, it is certain sensible extension
is not infinitely divisible’ (Philosophical Works, ed. Ayers, p. 23). A copy of the
New Theory of Vision with Hume’s bookplate has recently been discovered in the
Hewitson Library of Knox College at the University of Otago.
41. See Raynor, ‘“Minima Sensibilia” in Berkeley and Hume’. Unextended minimal
points of experience provided Hume with a means of avoiding the trilemma that
Bayle, adapting Zeno, had set up in connection with the divisibility of space and
time: see Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, transl. Popkin, pp. 359–61; and
Baxter, ‘Hume’s Theory of Space and Time’, pp. 127–36.
42. See Baxter, ‘Hume’s Theory of Space and Time’, p. 137.
43. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 123 [I.ii.vi: SBN 67–8].
44. Berkeley, Philosophical Works, ed. Ayers, p. 78 (Principles I.5).
45. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 40 [I.i.vii: SBN 18].
46. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 143 [I.iii.iii: SBN 79].
47. Hume did not make the point himself – perhaps he did in the first version of Book
I, and then excised it in order to try to minimize the offence the Treatise would
cause – but of course to question the justification of the maxim that every event
has a cause was to question a crucial premise of some influential arguments for the
existence of God. For a reading of Treatise I.iii.iii that draws out its full irreligious
implications, see Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, ch. 10. In a 1754 letter to
(probably) John Stewart, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, Hume
says that ‘I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that any thing might arise
without a cause’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 187). But this is
not incompatible with scepticism as to the possibility of proving that every event
must have a cause. The Humean position is that we have no metaphysical insight
such as might establish whether or not a cause is always necessary. The sceptic
withholds assent from both the claim that a cause is always necessary and the
claim that a cause is not always necessary.
48. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 379 [I.iv.ii: SBN 217].
49. Here – that is, in Treatise I.iv.v – the influence of Bayle on Hume is plain. Hume’s
discussion of Spinoza is beholden to the article ‘Spinoza’ in the Historical and
Critical Dictionary, and at various points in the section’s argument, other articles
(‘Leucippus’ and ‘Dicaearchus’, for instance) seem to be being drawn upon as
well.
50. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 434 [I.iv.v: SBN 250]. Hume went
on to claim that the impossibility of an a priori proof of the immateriality of the
soul – upon which proof of the immortality of the soul was usually supposed
to rest – ‘takes nothing’ from the arguments for religion, because ‘the moral
arguments and those deriv’d from the analogy of nature’ remain intact.
51. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 439 [I.iv.vi: SBN 252]. This was
in a sense a Berkeleyan conclusion: in his notebooks (which of course Hume can
have had no knowledge of ), Berkeley at one point appears to entertain the view
that ‘Mind is a congeries of perceptions’: ‘Take away perceptions’, he continues,

‘& you take away the mind put the perceptions & you put the mind’ (entry
580, Philosophical Works, ed. Ayers, p. 307). In Three Dialogues Between Hylas
and Philonous Hylas, the spokesman for materialism, argues that according to
Philonous’s (Berkeleyan) way of thinking, ‘it should follow that you are only a
system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them’ (Philosophical
Works, ed. Ayers, p. 185). Philonous does not agree.
52. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 440 [I.iv.vi: SBN 253].
53. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 319–20 [I.iv.i: SBN 182].
54. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. v, p. 830 (‘Explanation III’).
55. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 320 [I.iv.i: SBN 183].
56. Pascal, Pensées, transl. Levi, p. 41 [§164]. On one way of understanding Hume’s
engagement with Pascal, see Neto, ‘Hume and Pascal: Pyrrhonism vs. Nature’.
58. Hume’s account was stripped also of Malebranche’s obsession with the errors that
human beings are constantly prone to, an obsession described well in Moriarty,
Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion, ch. 5.
60. Abstract (1740), pp. 7–8.
61. Leibniz, Theodicy, transl. Huggard, p. 92. Hume may have been led to this text
of Leibniz’s by the fact that he was himself interested in the problem of evil from
early on in his career: see above, p. 68.
62. Bayle, Dictionary, vol. iv, p. 656 [‘Pyrrho’, Remark C].
63. As Lipton points out, part of what was revolutionary in Hume’s treatment
of induction was his sense of its sheer ubiquity: see ‘Waiting for Hume’, esp.
pp. 65–70.
64. The truth, according to Malebranche, is that God is the cause of all that happens
in the world. A ‘true cause’, he wrote, ‘is one such that the mind perceives a
necessary connection between it and its effect’ – and we only perceive such a
connection in the relation between God and what he wills (Search after Truth,
transl. Olscamp and Lennon, p. 450 [6.2.3]). Our disposition to believe that other
things, including we ourselves, can be causes is a prime example of human error.
Hume argued in the Treatise that the Malebranchean (or ‘Cartesian’) position
is unsustainable, and leads to the ‘absurd and impious’ conclusion that God is
as impotent as matter (Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 281–2
[I.iii.xiv: SBN 160]). In Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding he
subjected the view that ‘every thing is full of God’ to withering mockery (‘We are
got into fairy-land long ere we have reach’d the last steps of our theory’ (p. 117)).
It is obvious that even so Malebranche’s negative arguments had a major impact
upon him: see McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy, pp. 257–69.
65. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, p. 669 [IV.vii.2].
66. The interpretation of Hume’s treatment of causal reasoning offered here owes
much to the work of David Owen: see ‘Hume’s Doubts About Probable Reason-
ing: Was Locke the Target?’, and, especially, Hume’s Reason, esp. chs. 6 and 7.
67. Popkin suggests that Bayle’s opponent ‘the late seventeenth-century Calvinist
fanatic, Pierre Jurieu’, might have been one source for Hume’s new theory of
belief: see ‘Hume and Jurieu’.
68. Hume makes this point in one of the passages in the Appendix intended to be
inserted in the never-to-be-published second edition of the Treatise. ‘The force of
our mental actions’, he says there, ‘ . . . is not to be measur’d by the apparent agita-
tion of the mind’ (Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iiii, p. 297 [SBN 636]).
69. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 174–5 [I.iii.vii: SBN 97–8]. Does
this tell us something about the state of the novel at the time when Hume wrote the
Treatise? Richardson’s Pamela, often called ‘the first English novel’, was not pub-
lished until 1740. Or does it tell us something of Hume’s lack of interest in the novel
as a literary form? There are very few references to novels in his works and let-
ters, and there is no evidence that he ever read, for example, Richardon’s Clarissa,
Fielding’s Tom Jones, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, or even Smollett’s Expedition
of Humphry Clinker. He did read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It was, he opined in a
1773 letter to William Strahan, ‘[t]he best book . . . writ by any Englishman [sic]
these thirty years . . . , bad as it is’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p.
269). He also read Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloise, and judged it to be the Genevan’s
‘master-piece’ (to Blair, 25 March 1766: Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii,
p. 28). When Hume read purely for pleasure, he usually read in Latin or Greek.
70. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 208 [I.iii.ix: SBN 117].
71. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 288 [I.iii.xiv: SBN 164]; and
Abstract (1740), pp. 11ff. Hume may have taken the example from Locke (Essay
II.xxi.4) Malebranche: see Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, p. 660
[Elucidation 15] (‘When I see one ball strike another, my eyes tell me, or seem to
tell me, that the one is truly the cause of the motion it impresses on the other . . . ’).
72. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 182–3 [I.iii.viii: SBN 102].
73. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 183 [I.iii.viii: SBN 103].
74. ‘[H]owever philosophers and the vulgar may differ in their explication of the
contrariety of events’, Hume wrote ‘their inferences from it are always of the
same kind, and founded on the same principles’ (Treatise of Human Nature
[1739–40], vol. i, p. 234 [I.iii.xii: SBN 132]).
75. It was, of course, a deeply sceptical note to sound, and very likely provides
another instance of Bayle’s influence upon Hume. In the ‘Rorarius’ article of the
Dictionary, Bayle subjects to devastating criticism both Cartesian and Scholastic
attempts to differentiate between human and animal cognitive capacities.
Hume’s ‘touchstone’ is taken properly seriously by Waxman in Hume’s Theory
of Consciousness. See also Kail, ‘Leibniz’s Dog and Humean Reason’.
76. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 309 [I.iii.xvi: SBN 176–7].
77. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 274, 290–1 [I.iii.xiv: SBN 156,
165–6].
78. See, e.g., Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, pp. 235–
6 [II.xxi.4–5]. Hume takes notice of the purportedly introspective account of
the origin of the idea of necessary connection only in a passage in the ‘Appendix’
intended to be added to a second edition: see vol. iii, pp. 298–300 [SBN 632–3]. He
does not attribute it to Locke. The characteristically Lockean position, according
to Hume – a position criticized in both the Treatise and the Philosophical Essays –
is the ‘more popular than philosophical’ claim ‘that finding from experience, that
there are several new productions of matter, such as the motions and variations of
body, and concluding that there must be somewhere a power capable of producing
them, we arrive at last by this reasoning at the idea of power and efficacy’ (Treatise
of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. i, p. 276 [I.iii.xiv: SBN 157]).
79. The language of the mind’s spreading itself on the world seems to have been
taken by Hume from Malebranche: see Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and
Olscamp, p. 657 (‘Ever since the sin of man, the mind constantly spreads itself
externally . . . ’ [Elucidation 15]). Exactly how to interpret Hume on causality
as it is in the objects themselves has become an extremely vexed issue: see the
papers collected in Read and Richmond (eds.), The New Hume Debate. My
own view is that Hume had no opinion at all about what, if anything, connects
causes and effects as they are in themselves. He did not commit himself to
the existence of conceivable but unknowable causal powers, but nor did he
think that he had reasons deriving from his empiricism to conclude that,
metaphysically speaking, there is nothing but regularity ‘all the way down’.
However, the language that Hume used to characterize his conclusions on this
matter, both in the Treatise and in the Philosophical Essays, is neither precise nor
unequivocal.
80. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, p. 395 [II.xxxiii.3].
In his worries about the cognitive consequences of associations of ideas, Locke
was prefigured by Malebranche, and followed by Hutcheson.
81. This is a prominent theme in Peter Millican’s work on Hume’s account of
induction. Millican lays emphasis on the fact that, as he puts it, ‘someone who
is sceptical about the rational basis of inductive inference need not be sceptical
at all – in the sense of dismissive or critical – about the practice itself’ (‘Hume’s
“Scepticism” about Induction’, p. 57).
82. There is some similarity, surely intended, between these rules and Newton’s
‘rules of philosophizing’ as listed at the beginning of Book Three of the Principia:
for discussion, see the works cited in note 27 to this chapter.
83. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 306 [I.iii.xv: SBN 175].
84. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 462 [I.iv.vii: SBN 266].
86. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 464–5 [I.iv.vii: SBN 267–8].
91. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 2 [II.i.i: SBN 275–7].
92. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 30 [I.ii.i].
93. See McIntyre, ‘Hume’s “New and Extraordinary” Account of the Passions’.
94. See Harris, ‘The Government of the Passions’, for a general survey of treatments
of this topic in eighteenth-century British philosophy.
95. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 110 [I.vi].
96. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 9: see above, pp. 42-3.
97. See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, transl. King, pp. 338–43 [IV.vi].
98. Malebranche, Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, p. 375 [5.7].
99. Malebranche, Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, pp. 391–2 [5.9].
100. Malebranche, Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, p. 396 [5.10].
101. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 53 [I.iii.ii].
103. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 65 [I.iii.vii].
104. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 134 [II Intro.].
105. See Maurer, ‘Self-Interest and Sociability’, pp. 301–7. Maurer’s chapter pro-
vides a full bibliography of works relevant to this debate.
106. See Fieser, ‘Hume’s Classification of the Passions and its Precursors’, and McIn-
tyre, ‘Hume’s Passions: Direct and Indirect’.
107. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 4 [II.i.i: SBN 276–7]. Later in
Book II the class of direct passions is said to comprise ‘desire, aversion, grief and
joy, hope and fear, along with volition’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40],
vol. ii, p. 290 [II.iii.ix: SBN 438].
108. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, pp. 44–5 [‘Enquiry into the Origin
of Moral Virtue’].
109. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 64 [Remark C].
110. Mandeville, Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, p. 13.
111. See Moriarty, Disguised Vices, and Herdt, Putting on Virtue, chs. 8–9.
112. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 135 [II.ii.iv: SBN 352].
113. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 151 [Remark O].
114. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 8 [II.i.ii: SBN 279].
115. See below, pp. 135–6.
116. See Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 259 fn [II.ii.v: SBN 357],
where Hume says that ‘esteem and contempt are to be consider’d as species of
love and hatred’; and also vol. iii, p. 259 fn [III.iii.iv: SBN 608 fn], where he
says that ‘[l]ove and esteem are at the bottom the same passions, and arise from
like causes’, and then explains that where the pleasure occasioned by a quality is
‘severe and serious; or where its object is great, and makes a strong impression; or
where it produces any degree of humility or awe’, the passion arising is properly
called esteem, not love.
118. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 35 [II.i.vii: SBN 295].
119. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 155 [II.ii.v: SBN 361–5].
121. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 162–3 [II.ii.vi: SBN 368].
122. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 254 [‘Essay on Charity and
Charity-Schools’].
123. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 169 [II.ii.viii: SBN 372].
124. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, p. 95 [I.v.v].
125. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 163–4 [II.ii.vii: SBN 369].
126. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 72–3 [II.i.xi: SBN 316].
127. For the immediate historical background, see Turco, ‘Sympathy and Moral
Sense’. See also Hanley, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context of Sympathy from
Spinoza to Kant’, which argues for the importance of Spinoza to sympathy
theory in the eighteenth century.
128. See Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, for a full account of the many uses
this ‘metaphor for existence’ has been put to.
129. Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. Gaskin, p. 58 [‘Human Nature’, ch. ix].
130. Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. Gaskin, p. 53 [‘Human Nature’, ch. ix].
131. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 66 [Remark C].
132. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 236 [III.iii.ii: SBN 594].
133. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 157 [II.ii.v: SBN 365].
134. Hutcheson, Essay and Illustrations, ed. Garrett, pp. 17 [I.i.i], 122 [I.vi.iv].
135. Malebranche, Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, pp. 114 [2.1.7],
161 [2.3.1].
136. See James, ‘Sympathy and Comparison’.
137. Malebranche, Search after Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, p. 378
[5.7].
138. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 29–30 [II.i.vi: SBN 291].
139. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 175 [II.ii.viii: SBN 375].
140. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 178 [II.ii.viii SBN 377].
141. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 290 [II.iii.ix: SBN 438].
142. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 14 [II.i.iii: SBN 282].
143. Passmore, in Hume’s Intentions, calls Book II ‘the most Newtonian section [sic]
of the Treatise’ (p. 45).
144. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 230 [III.i.i: SBN 399].
145. See Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, ch. 3.
146. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 241 [III.iii.ii: SBN 411]. See
Russell, Freedom and Moral Sentiment, esp. chs. 8–9.
147. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 234–5 [III.ii.ii: SBN 407–8].
148. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 244–5 [II.iii.iii: SBN 413].
150. Mandeville claimed in An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour that ‘All human
creatures are sway’d and wholly govern’d by their passions, whatever fine notions
we may flatter ourselves with’ (p. 31). The bondage of reason to the passions was
a recurrent theme in The Search after Truth, often elaborated in contexts where
Stoicism is being criticized. A comparison is made between Malebranche and
Hume on this issue is made by James, ‘Sympathy and Comparison’, p. 110 and
fn. The first to talk explicitly of the slavery of reason to passion may have been
Jacques Esprit, who in the preface to La Fausseté des Vertus Humaines discusses
philosophy’s ‘ignorance of the true state of the heart of man’: philosophers, he
says, ‘did not know how its springs are dispos’d, and never suspected that strange
alteration in him, which hath made reason a slave to the passions’ (Discourses on
the Deceitfulness of Humane Virtues, Preface [no page number]). I am grateful to
Aaron Garrett for pointing me to this passage in Esprit. Bayle discussed it in the
Dictionary article ‘Ovid’, remarking that ‘All he [i.e., Esprit] observes upon the
weakness and slavery of reason is very true’ (Dictionary, vol. iv, p. 440 [‘Ovid’,
Remark H]).
152. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. [i] [SBN xii].
153. For reflections on the larger historical and political implications of this idea, see
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. As Force notes, there is for Hume no
distinction between passions and interests as such – though Force seems to me
to misrepresent Hume’s theory of the passions when he says that this is because,
according to Hume, ‘greed is the over-arching passion’: see Self-Interest before
Adam Smith, p. 213.
154. See Moore, ‘Social Background of Hume’s Science of Human Nature’, and also
Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, ch. 2.
155. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp.153–4 [II.ii.v: SBN 363].
156. Thus Malebranche argued that the ‘contagion’ of sympathy ‘ties men to one
another much more closely than charity founded upon reason, because such
charity is very rare’ (Search After Truth, transl. Lennon and Olscamp, pp. 161–2
[II.iii.i]).
157. In ‘“A Compleat Chain of Reasoning’”, I called Hume’s theory of sociability
sympathetic sociability. I now think that that was to neglect the role that Hume
gives in that theory to the principle of comparison.
158. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Mossner and Klibansky, p. 1.
163. See Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, passim, for a determined effort to
find ‘irreligion’ on almost every page of the Treatise. In ch. 11, Russell argues
that Butler’s Analogy of Religion was a principal target of Hume’s account of
probabilistic reasoning in the Treatise.
164. NLS 23159, item 4.
166. This is the translation, apparently William Wishart’s in his Specimen of Hume’s
religious and moral principles, used in the 1745 Letter from a Gentleman to his
Friend in Edinburgh (p. 4).
167. On the possible significance of Hume’s use of the epigraph from Tacitus, see
Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, ch. 7.
168. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. 9. It is worth noting, though,
that the liberty Hume has in mind in this essay is that ‘of openly censuring
every measure which is enter’d into by the king or his ministers’, rather than
the complete libertas philosophandi that Spinoza says is the hallmark of a free
commonwealth.
170. Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 7–8. The quotation is from Pope’s Epistle to the
Satires: ‘All, all but truth, drops dead-born from the press,/Like the last gazette,
or the last address’ (Dialogue II, ll. 226–7: Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 422).
171. See Norton and Norton, ‘Historical Account’, p. 494. The Nortons note that
‘George Turnbull’s Principles of Moral Philosophy, for example, a work of a
similar sort published by John Noon in 1740, was not reviewed in any of the
periodicals that published notices or reviews of the Treatise’. In The Monthly
Review for March 1777, a reviewer of The Life of David Hume commented: ‘We
remember, however, that [the Treatise] was distinguished by the reviewers of
that time, though not in a manner suitable to the expectations or wishes of the
author’. The reviewer for March 1777 number of The London Review noted
that the Treatise had ‘not . . . dropped so dead-born from the press but that it was
severely handed by the reviewers of those times’ (Fieser [ed.], Early Responses
to Hume, vol. 9 [Life and Reputation I], pp. 268, 269). Hume himself, in a letter
to Hutcheson dated 4 March 1740, relates that John Noon had told him ‘that
the sale of the first volumes, though not very quick, yet it improves’. Noon,
therefore, was ‘very willing’ to publish Volume Three: Letters of David Hume,
ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 36–7. Turnbull’s lack of success was real where Hume’s was
mostly imagined. In The Scottish Philosophy, published in 1875, James McCosh
remarks that he was probably the first person to have read Turnbull ‘as a whole’
for a hundred years (p. 95).
172. Abstract (1740), p. [ii]. The Abstract pretends on its title page to have been
published by ‘C. Borbet’, when it fact it was brought out by John Noon, the
publisher of the Treatise itself (see Norton and Norton, ‘Historical Account’,
p. 467, using as evidence the ledgers of the printer, William Strahan). The
confusion intentionally generated by the Abstract ensured that it was for some
time believed that its author really was someone other than Hume. In March
1740, Hume wrote in a letter to Hutcheson that ‘My bookseller has sent to
Mr. Smith a copy of my book [i.e., the Treatise], which I hope he has receiv’d,
as well as your letter. I have not yet heard what he has done with the abstract’
(Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 37). Assuming that the ‘he’ in the
second sentence refers to ‘Mr. Smith’, not to the bookseller, Burton argued that
the ‘Smith’ in question must be Adam Smith (Life and Correspondence of Hume,
vol. i, pp. 116–17). Many after him accepted this hypothesis. It is now established
that in fact Hume was referring to William Smith, one of the publishers of the
Bibliothèque Raisonée des Ouvrages des Savans de l’Europe: see Moore and Stewart,
‘A Scots-Irish Bookseller in Holland’.
173. Abstract (1740), p. 6.
174. Abstract (1740), p. 7.
175. Abstract (1740), pp. 24–5.
176. Abstract (1740), p. 31.
177. Abstract (1740), p. 17.

178. Abstract (1740), p. 23.
179. Abstract (1740), p. 24.
180. Abstract (1740), pp. 28, 31.
181. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 35 [II.i.vii: SBN 295].
182. Hume presents the main question for moral philosophy in a slightly different
way in a passage in Book III itself. ‘There have been many systems of morality
advanc’d by philosophers in all ages’, he says; ‘but they may be reduc’d to two,
which alone merit our attention. Moral good and evil are certainly distinguish’d
by our sentiments, not by reason: But these sentiments may arise either from the
mere species or appearance of characters and passions, or from reflexions on
their tendency to the happiness of mankind, and of particular persons’ (Treatise
of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. iii, p. 228 [III.iii.i: SBN 589]).
183. Before the Inquiry, rationalists (like Clarke) wrote in reply to Hobbes and
Spinoza, not in reply to sentimentalists. There are intimations of moral sense
theory in Shaftesbury, but, again, he is responding to moral sceptics (including,
as he sees it, Locke), not to rationalists. For an account of the genesis of moral
sense theory, see Turco, ‘Sympathy and Moral Sense: 1725–40’; and also Harris,
‘Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and the Moral Sense’.
184. Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”, p. 205.
185. Ross, ‘Hutcheson on Hume’s Treatise’, pp. 71–2.
188. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 32–3. Mikko Tolonen has pointed
out that in the manuscript of this letter, there is a deletion which indicates that
Hume’s initially expressed this point in an even stronger fashion. Hume first
wrote: ‘When you pull off the skin, & display all the minute parts, there appears
something trivial, if not hideous, even in the noblest attitudes’ (emphasis added).
See Tolonen, ‘Politeness, Paris, and the Treatise’, pp. 32–3; and NLS MS 23151,
item 55.
189. See Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, pp. 3–4.
190. See Norton and Norton, ‘Historical Account’, pp. 477–88; and also Moore,
‘Hume and Hutcheson’, pp. 38–9.
192. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 33 (‘I have never call’d justice
unnatural, but only artificial’).
193. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 25–6 [III.ii.i: SBN 484].
196. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 39–40. The fact that Hume describes
the reasoning in question as having been ‘concluded’ by this passages is perhaps
evidence that the very final paragraph of the section ‘Moral distinctions not
deriv’d from reason’ was an even later addition to the text. This is the paragraph
containing Hume’s notorious ‘observation’ about the difficulty in understanding
how philosophers infer claims about what ought and ought not to be the case from
claims about what is and is not the case. As I read it, this paragraph only reiterates
Hume’s (Hutchesonian) view that moral ‘judgments’ are not inferences.
197. James Moore has argued that there are significant differences of emphasis
between Hutcheson’s and Hume’s cases against moral rationalism: Hume’s
argument ‘derived from more sceptical considerations, from an appreciation
of the limitations of human reason as exercised in human understanding and in
conduct, themes elaborated in the two earlier Books of the Treatise’ (‘Hume and
Hutcheson’, pp. 39–44, p. 40). Darwall notes that the similarity between Book
III, Part One, and Hutcheson’s sentimentalism ‘is striking indeed’: ‘Hume and
Invention of Utilitarianism’, p. 64, and pp. 64–7.
198. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 26, 28 [I.i.ii: SBN 471]. Hume
continues: ‘We go no farther; nor do we enquire into the cause of the satisfaction.
We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: But in feeling
that it pleases, we in effect feel that it is virtuous. The same is the case as in
our judgments concerning all kinds of beauty, and tastes and sensations’. The
analogy with taste turns out to be significant: see below, p. 137.
199. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ed. Leidhold, pp. 185–6 [II.vii.vi].
200. Here Hume may have been following the lead of Butler, who, in a ‘dissertation’
on the nature of virtue appended to The Analogy of Religion, had noted that
‘benevolence and the want of it singly considered, are in no sort the whole of
virtue and vice’ (p. 316).
202. ‘If by obligation we understand a determination, without any regard to our
own interest, to approve actions, and to perform them’, Hutcheson says in the
Inquiry; ‘which determination shall also make us displeas’d with our selves, and
uneasy upon having acted contrary to it; in this meaning of the word obligation,
there is naturally an obligation upon all men to benevolence’ – an obligation, he
emphasizes, which does not depend upon consideration of ‘any law whatsoever,
or any external advantages lost, or disadvantages impending from its sanctions’
(ed. Leidhold, p. 176 [II.vii.i]).
203. See Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol ii, p. 18 [‘Inquiry’, I.ii.iii]:
‘So that if a creature be generous, constant, compassionate: yet if he cannot
reflect on what he himself does, or sees others do, so as to take notice of what is
worthy or honest; and make that notice or conception of worth or honesty to be an
object of his affection; he has not the character of being virtuous’.
204. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 48 [III.ii.i: SBN 483].
205. For details, see Norton and Norton, ‘Editors’ Annotations’, pp. 902–11. See also
Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, chs. 1 and 2; and Buckle, Natural Law and
the Theory of Property, ch. 5.
206. See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, ch. 9; and Moriarty, Disguised Vices, ch. 11.
207. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 63 [III.ii.ii: SBN 492].
209. Hume was to be disappointed on this score. The only known review of Book III
of the Treatise, in the Bibliothèque Raisonée des Ouvrages des Savans de l’Europe
(vol. 26, April–June 1741, pp. 411–27), claims that Hume’s theory of justice
is ‘le système de Hobbes habillé dans un goût nouveau’ (‘Hobbes’s system
clothed in a new fashion’): see Norton and Perinetti, ‘The Bibliothéque Raisonée
Review of Volume 3 of the Treatise’, p. 27. The same charge would be leveled
against Hume’s moral philosophy by William Wishart in his 1745 Specimen of the
Principles concerning Religion and Morality Maintain’d in . . . A Treatise of Human
Nature: see below, pp. 211, 214–5.
210. Hume’s scepticism with regard to the foundational principles of natural jurispru-
dence, even while he shared the interest of the natural jurists in the history of
property, has been a constant theme of work by James Moore: see especially
‘Hume’s Theory of Justice and Property’, ‘Natural Law and the Pyrrhonian
Controversy’, and ‘Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’.
211. It is an important part of Hume’s scepticism about natural law (discussed in
detail by Moore in the articles listed in the previous note) that, on his view,
insight into the need for some rules about property is not the same thing as
insight into what form those rules must take. Most of the rules we generally use,
Hume argues in Treatise III.ii.iii, have their origins in trivial propensities of the
imagination.
212. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 33. On the uses made of this tag from
Horace, see Rosen, ‘Utility and Justice’.
213. See Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, ed. Tuck, p. 93 [‘Preliminary Discourse,
§XVII], where this passage from Horace is described as an expression of the
scepticism of Carneades, the answer to which is that ‘the mother of natural law
is human nature itself, which, though even the necessity of our circumstances
should not require it, would of itself create in us a mutual desire of society’.
215. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 119 [III.ii.vi: SBN 526].
216. See Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property, chs. 1–2.
217. Wishart, in the Specimen, noted that in his argument for the artificiality of the
virtue of promise-keeping Hume went one further than Hobbes: ‘Mr. Hobbs,
who was at pains to shake loose all other natural obligations, yet found it necessary
to leave, or pretended to leave, the obligations of promises or pactions; but
our author strikes a bolder stroke . . . ’ (Hume, Letter from a Gentleman [1745],
p. 16).
218. On Hume’s treatment of promises in relation to the natural law tradition, see
Pink, ‘Promising and Obligation’, pp. 396–8. See also Haakonssen, Science of a
Legislator, pp. 29–30; and Baier, ‘Promises, Promises, Promises’, esp. pp. 165–6.
219. The difference for Hume between small and large societies is a major theme of
Tolonen, Mandeville and Hume, ch. 4.
220. Also, in a large society, the interest each of us in the preservation of the laws of
property is, as Hume puts it, ‘more remote’; ‘nor do men so readily perceive,
that disorder and confusion follow upon every breach of these rules, as in a more
narrow and contracted society’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. ii,
p. 75 [III.ii.ii: SBN 499]).
221. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 148 [III.ii.viii: SBN 543].
222. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 144 [III.ii.viii: SBN 541]. Hume
emphasizes that this is not the only ‘beneficial influence’ of government. It also
overcomes the difficulty people have in agreeing about, and acting on, what is
in the long-term interests of society taken as a whole. Our governors have both
the ability and the motivation to execute large-scale projects: ‘Thus bridges are
built; harbours open’d; ramparts rais’d; canals form’d; fleets equip’d; and armies
disciplin’d’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. ii, p. 140 [III.ii.vii: SBN
539]).
223. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 145 [III.ii.viii: SBN 541].
224. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 155 [III.ii.viii: SBN 547]. An
appeal to ‘popular authority’ against philosophical theory was legitimate here,
Hume claimed, because ‘the opinions of men, in this case, carry with them a
peculiar authority, and are, in a great measure, in fallible’ (Treatise of Human
Nature [1739–40], vol. ii, pp. 153–4 [III.ii.viii: SBN 546]). Our moral sentiments,
and our moral sentiments alone, inform us of our obligations. There is nothing –
nothing at all – that might be able to correct them. And so from the fact that
no one’s sentiments tell them that they are bound to allegiance by a promise it
follows that it is true that no one is bound to allegiance by a promise.
225. This is not to say that Hume was the first to think about politics in this way.
There are similarities, for instance, between Hume’s account of the origin of
government in the Treatise and Sir William Temple’s ‘Essay upon the Original
and Nature of Government’: see below, p. 179.
226. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 145 [III.ii.viii: SBN 542]. There
are grounds for scepticism as to how much significance really was attached by
the government Whigs of the Walpolean era to ideas of social contract and a
consequent right of resistance. Those ideas were more likely to be deployed by
disaffected self-styled ‘True Whigs’ and by Tories such as Bolingbroke than by
Walpole’s ‘Court Whigs’: see, e.g., Kenyon, Revolution Principles, who argues
that by as early as around 1720, ‘the Revolution of 1688 was as much of an
embarrassment to the Whigs as it was to the Tories’ (p. 200); and, for a complex
overview, see Pocock, ‘Varieties of Whiggism’, esp. pp. 239–53. For the view
that revisionism about the status of Lockean ideas in the early eighteenth century
has been carried too far, see Goldie, ‘The English System of Liberty’, pp. 47–50.
It is possible that Hume’s talk of contract as the basis of ‘our fashionable system
of politics’ merely shows how out of touch he was at this time with the current
state of British political thought.
227. Hume’s distinctively sceptical approach to the politics of his age was already
well developed by the time he wrote Book III of the Treatise. In his account of
allegiance, he defended the characteristically Whig (or at least characteristically
‘True Whig’) doctrine of a right of resistance, but severed it from its supposed
root in an original contract. Then, in a brief discussion of 1688 – ‘that famous
revolution, which has had such a influence on our constitution, and has been
attended with such mighty consequences’ – he allowed that there was no con-
clusive justification of resistance to James II at the time of the Revolution, and
argued that its legitimacy was made clear only after the fact, once it was it clear
that it had, in the end, turned out to be beneficial for the country as a whole. He
implied, in fact, that at first the power of William and Mary ‘was founded only
on injustice and violence’. The authority of the Hanoverian line was a function of
‘[t]ime and custom’. See Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 182–8
[III.ii.x: SBN 563–7].
228. In The Fable of the Bees Mandeville argues ‘that the modesty of women is
the result of custom and education . . . and that notwithstanding this, the most
virtuous young woman alive will often, in spite of her teeth, have thoughts and
confus’d ideas of things arise in her imagination, which she would not reveal
to some people for a thousand worlds’ (ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 65 [Remark C]).
The origins of ‘every woman’s real actual chastity’ are traced by Mandeville in
salacious detail in A Modest Defence of Public Stews (1724).
229. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 194 [III.ii.xii: SBN 570]. Hume’s
explanation of the fact that women are held to much higher standards of sexual
propriety than are men hinges on the fact that a woman needs the trust of her
husband if her husband is to provide for the maintenance and education of her
children. Such trust is much better secured by the certainty of ‘bad fame or
reputation’, ‘a punishment which has a mighty influence on the human mind’,
than by the threat of proceedings in a court of law. See Treatise of Human
Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 194–9 [III.ii.xii: SBN 570–73]. In fact this is
a distinctively Mandevillean line of argument: see Garrett, ‘Human Nature’,
p. 209.
231. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 209 [III.iii.i: SBN 578].
232. See Tolonen, Mandeville and Hume, ch. 4, esp. pp. 173–80.
233. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ed. Leidhold, pp. 72, 99 [I.vii.iii, II.i.vii].
234. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 209 [III.iii.i: SBN 578].
235. Such a reading of Hume’s moral philosophy is implicit in the work of David
Fate Norton. See, especially, ch. 3 of David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist,
Sceptical Metaphysician, which, in seeking to portray Hume as a ‘realist’ in his
moral philosophy, systematically downplays not only Hume’s argument for the
artificiality of justice but also the difference between Hume’s sympathy-based
account of moral judgment and Hutcheson’s moral sense account.
236. The importance of the difference between these two elements of Hume’s treat-
ment of the artificial virtues is characterized well in Gill, The British Moralists
on Human Nature, pp. 237ff.
237. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 75 [III.ii.ii: SBN 499].
238. Hume stressed the moral neutrality of sympathy when, in a letter to Adam
Smith commenting on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he made the point that
sympathy is not in itself ‘agreeable’. Sympathizing with others is agreeable if
their feelings are agreeable, but not if not. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig,
vol. i, p. 313. Apparently in light of Hume’s letter, Smith altered his argument so
as to make it plain that it is higher-order reflection on the possibility of sympathy
that is morally significant, not sympathy itself: see Theory of Moral Sentiments,
ed. Raphael and Macfie, p. 46 [I.iii.i.9].
239. There is a good account of Hume’s understanding of the point of view from
which distinctively moral evaluations are made in Baier, Progress of Sentiments,
pp. 181–8. Baier emphasizes that it is a human point of view, not a view from
nowhere: ‘It aims not at detachment from human concerns but at impartiality,
and interpersonal agreement’ (p. 182). Baier is sensitive also to what she terms
‘the limited practicability of Humean morality’ (p. 187).
240. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 75 [III.ii.ii: SBN 499].
241. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 239–40 [III.iii.ii: SBN 596].
242. This, presumably, was why Hutcheson put a crucial passage about the honestum
from Cicero’s De Officiis [I.iv (14): On Duties, transl. Miller, pp. 14–17] on the
title page of the Inquiry.
243. See Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 331 [‘Search into the Nature
of Society’].
244. See Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol. ii, pp. 297–300; and also, for
background, Heydt, ‘Practical Ethics’.
245. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 245 [III.iii.ii: SBN 600]. See
Herdt, Putting on Virtue, ch. 11; and also Taylor, ‘Hume on the Dignity of
Pride’.
246. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 261–2 [III.iii.iv: 609].
248. Moore remarks that ‘Some of Hume’s more notable differences with Hutcheson
turned upon their different readings of Cicero’ (‘Hume and Hutcheson’, p. 26).
249. No one has been clearer and more convincing about this than Pàll Àrdal in his
Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, esp. ch. 6.
250. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 202–3 [III.iii.i: SBN 575].
251. All sentiments of blame and praise are variable, Hume noted, ‘according to our
situation of nearness or remoteness, with the regard to the person blam’d or
prais’d, and according to the present disposition of our mind’. This is inevitable
given the fact that the moral sentiments are products, in the first instance, of
sympathy. But in our ‘general decisions’ we make judgments ‘as if we remain’d
in one point of view’: ‘Experience soon teaches us this method of correcting our
sentiments, or at least, of correcting our language, where the sentiments are more
stubborn and inalterable’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. iii, p. 215
[III.iii.i: SBN 582]). On the next page Hume suggested that it is the demands
of ‘society and conversation’ that cause us to try to seek an objective standard of
merit and demerit.
252. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 222 [III.iii.i: SBN 586].
253. The published text reads: ‘Thus self-interest is the original motive to the estab-
lishment of justice: but a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral
approbation, which attends that virtue’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40],
vol. iii, p. 76 [III.ii.ii: SBN 499–500]). For more about this copy of the Treatise,
see below, note 267.
254. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 76–8 [III.ii.ii: SBN 499–500].
See also p. 113 [III.ii.v SBN 523], and p. 153 [III.ii.viii: SBN 546].
255. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 276, 278 [III.iii.vi: SBN 618,
619].
256. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 37. What may well be the text
that Hume sent Hutcheson is the only surviving part of the manuscript of
the Treatise: NLS MS 23159, item 15, reproduced in facsimile in Norton and
Norton, ‘Editing the Texts’, pp. 664–7.
257. Hutcheson’s rationalist critics had pointed out that the moral sense is unable
to approve of itself. The moral distinctions it draws were therefore bound to
appear arbitrary from a moral point of view. What Hume argued – in a single
very compressed paragraph – in the ‘Conclusion’ was that on the sympathy
theory, the ‘sense of virtue’ may be approved of, since ‘extensive sympathy
with mankind’ is itself something morally pleasing. Furthermore, the principles
from which the sense of virtue is derived, utility and agreeableness, are morally
pleasing as well: ‘So that nothing is presented on any side, but what is laudable
and good’ (Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], vol. iii, p. 278 [III.iii.vi: SBN
619]). He then went on to point out that on his view, the rules of justice are as
‘stedfast and immutable’ as human nature itself.
258. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 279 [III.iii.vi: SBN 620]. The
manuscript of ‘Conclusion of this Book’ shows that Hume first wrote ‘may
interest every principle of our nature, both our selfishness and pride’: NLS MS
23159 item 15 [p. 3].
259. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 280 [III.iii.vi: SBN 620–1].
260. As we have seen, Hume says at the very beginning of Book III that the only
doctrine from Books I and II that the reader needs to keep in mind is the
distinction between impressions and ideas. And the conclusion arrived at in
Part One of Book III that moral distinctions have their basis in impressions, not
ideas, was a Hutchesonian conclusion. But it mattered whether the source of
those impressions was a special moral faculty, or a general operation of the mind,
sympathy, with no specifically moral nature.
261. See the advertisements reprinted in Norton and Norton, ‘Historical Account’,
pp. 490–1.
262. A somewhat different reading of the epigraph from Lucan is argued by Paul
Russell: see The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise, pp. 75–6. But Russell’s reading is
only as convincing as his reading of the Treatise as a whole as devoted first and
foremost to the agenda of neo-Lucretian ‘irreligion’.
264. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 283 [SBN 623].
265. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 290 [SBN 627].
266. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 300–5 [SBN 635–6].
267. See Norton and Norton, David Hume Library, p. 25. This copy is held by the
British Library, shelfmark C.175.c.8(1). See Connon, ‘Some MS Corrections
by Hume in the Third Volume of his Treatise’. There is another annotated copy
in the Hoose Library of Philosophy at the University of Southern California:
for a list of the corrections, see Nethery, ‘Hume’s Manuscript Corrections’. A

third copy of the Treatise with annotations in Hume’s hand was sent by Hume
to Pope. It is currently held in a private collection in Edinburgh. For an account
of the marginalia, see Yalden-Thomson, ‘More Hume Autograph Marginalia’.
269. One reason why there was no second edition of the Treatise may simply have
been the hasty deal he struck with John Noon, the publisher of Books I and II.
As we have seen (pp. 117–8), according to the terms of the contract, all copies of
the first edition needed to be sold, or to be bought up by Hume, before a second
could be brought out.
271. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 205–6 [III.i.i: SBN 576–7].
273. This is what is argued in Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, ch. 5; see
also pp. 64–71.
274. In his ‘Account of the Life and Writings’ of John Millar, William Craig says
that Millar was ‘a zealous admirer of Mr. Hume’s philosophical opinions, which
he had early adopted, and of the truth of which, after inquiries increased his
conviction, he was necessarily engaged in frequent debate with Dr. Reid’ (Millar,
Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, ed. Garrett, p. 39).
3 Essayist
2. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 35–6.
3. A number of magazines inspired by Addison and Steele’s success had already
appeared in Scotland, including The Echo: or, Edinburgh Weekly Journal (1729–
32), The Reveur (1737–8), and Letters of the Critical Club (1738). See Phillipson,
‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province’.
4. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. i, p. 5. Even so, there was a fundamentally Whig ori-
entation to the politics of The Spectator. Sir Roger de Coverley is more often a
figure of fun than Sir Andrew Freeport. Part of what Addison wanted to do with
The Spectator was, in the wake of the Sacheverall affair and the electoral disaster
of 1710, to wean Whigs off factional squabbling and convert them to ‘polite-
ness’. See Klein, ‘Coffeehouse Civility, 1660–1714’, pp. 47–50 (on Addison
and Steele as ‘Whig cultural ideologists’), and Phillipson, ‘Politics and Polite-
ness’.
5. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. iii.
7. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. iv.
8. There has as yet been no properly comprehensive study of Essays, Moral and
Political taken as a whole. I have learned much from Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical
Politics, chs. 5–7; Box, Suasive Art of David Hume, ch. 3; Phillipson, David
Hume, ch. 4; and Robel’s introduction to his French translation of the Essays.
Two important new editions of Hume’s Essays are at the time of writing still
forthcoming: Mark Box’s Clarendon edition, and a Penguin edition by David
Womersley.
9. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. v.
10. NLS MS 23159, item 14.
11. The date of the composition of the memoranda is a matter of some controversy.
Mossner (‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, pp. 494–5) speculated that the ‘Natural
Philosophy’ entries date from 1729–34, the ‘Philosophy’ entries from 1730–34,
and the rest from 1737–40. M. A. Stewart argues that the earliest of the memoranda
‘are coterminous with the end of Hume’s main work on the Treatise and reflect
some of his reading in anticipation of other projects’ (‘The Dating of Hume’s
Manuscripts’, p. 280). Stewart sees no reason in fact not to ascribe all of the
memoranda to ‘the earlier 1740s’ (p. 286). I agree with Stewart. I do not think
that Tatsuya Sakamoto (in ‘Hume’s “Early Memoranda” and the Dating of his
Political Economy’) has a good case for pushing the date further forward still, to
the second half of the 1740s. Sakamoto’s argument seems to me to be convincingly
refuted by Jon Charles Miller, ‘Hume’s Citation of Strabo and the Dating of the
Memoranda’.
12. For a detailed examination of what the notes tell us about Hume’s knowledge of
Bayle, see Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’. Pittion argues that several of the
notes are likely to have been taken from Hume’s reading in journals where Bayle’s
works had been reviewed.
13. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, p. 499. In what was perhaps a look back to
Hume’s own experiences during his period of ill health between 1729 and 1731,
another of the notes appears to deny that there are reasons to be confident of any of
the curative substances that doctors prescribe: some doctors recommend ‘common
food &c’ such as tea or coffee, but the weakness and uncertainty of these ‘is well
known by experience’; yet it is at the same time ‘a strong presumption against
medicines, that they are mostly disagreeable, & out of the common use of life’. In
the periodical article from which Hume probably took this note it is concluded that
such reflections must lead to ‘une violente inclination au Pirrhonisme médicinal’:
see Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, p. 381.
14. See King, Essay on the Origin of Evil, ch. 5. The Essay was originally published
in Latin in 1702.
15. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, p. 502.
16. See above, p. 68.
17. See Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’.
18. Mossner grouped them under the heading ‘General’, but there is no manuscript
authority for this.
20. In the remainder of this paragraph, I am indebted to Ross, ‘The Emergence of
David Hume as a Political Economist’, and to Emerson, ‘Scottish Contexts for
Hume’s Political-Economic Thinking’.
21. See Norton and Norton, The David Hume Library, p. 146.
22. Petty, Political Arithmetick, Preface [pages not numbered].

24. See Tomaselli, ‘Moral Philosophy and Population Questions in Eighteenth-
Century Europe’, for an account of the significance of the issue of population
growth and decline to Enlightenment thought in general.
25. Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, pp. 517–18.
26. Law, Money and Trade Considered, p. 90. I quote here from the second, 1720,
edition.
27. See Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, p. 508. For the debate about the
economic prospects of Ireland, and its larger European significance, see Hont,
‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited’.
28. Petty, Political Arithmetick, p. 1.
29. See Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces, esp. ch. IV (‘Of their People
and Dispositions’).
30. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, vol. i, p. 185 (Remark Q).
31. Paris-Duverney, Examen du Livre intitulé, Reflexions Politiques sur les Finances et
le Commerce, vol. ii, p. 132 (‘laissa la France plus épuisée qu’elle ne l’avoit été par
vingt-cinq ans de guerre, & par des pertes presque continuelles à la fin du régne
de Louis XIV’).
32. See Political Discourses (1752), p. 49 fn.
33. Melon, Political Essay upon Commerce, p. 136.
36. Dutot, Political Reflections upon the Finances and Commerce of France, p. 2.
40. Dutot, Political Reflections upon the Finances and Commerce of France, pp. iii–iv.
41. Dutot, Political Reflections upon the Finances and Commerce of France, p. ix.
42. Dutot, Political Reflections upon the Finances and Commerce of France, pp. iv, x, xi.
43. For some interesting reflections on this strategy, see Carabelli, On Hume and
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, Part 2 (‘The Middle Station of Life’).
45. On the Court Whigs, see esp. Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the
Court Whigs.
46. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), pp. 33–4.
49. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. i, p. 44 [No. 10, 12 March 1711].
50. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, transl. King, p. 435 [V.iv.10–11].
51. See Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, Part I of which is ‘an extended
gloss’ on Shaftesbury’s remark that ‘To philosophize, in a just signification, is but
to carry good-breeding a step higher’ (Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. iii, p. 99
[Miscellany III.i]). But as Klein says, there are all the same important similari-
ties between Addison’s project and Shaftesbury’s: ‘both were proposing to shift
what they called philosophy from certain locales and to resituate it in new ones’
(p. 37).
52. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. iv, p. 139 [No. 464, 22 August 1712].
53. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p 44.
63. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. 60.
66. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. 6.
67. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 6–7.
69. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p. 175. The reference to mutual consent
here may have been irony on Hume’s part. Many eighteenth-century marriages
were, as we would say now, arranged.
71. Hume’s arguments against divorce were criticized by the deist Peter Annet in his
1749 pamphlet Social Bliss Considered: see Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume,
vol. ii, pp. 13–19. Scottish divorce law grew more liberal during the course of the
eighteenth century. Roger Emerson has suggested to me that Hume’s essay may
reflect, or refract, debates going on about divorce in Edinburgh at the time.
73. ‘There is no subject in critical learning, more copious than this of the just mixture
of simplicity and refinement in writing’: Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742),
p. 196.
74. On ‘Chevy Chase’, see Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. i, p. 297 [No. 70, 21 May 1711].
Addison’s long and frequently interrupted discussion of wit true and false began
in Spectator No. 58.
76. But see below, pp. 324–5, for what ‘Of the Study of the History’ does tell us about
Hume’s historical method.
77. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. iii–iv.
78. Here I disagree with Mossner, who claims that the fact that Hume calls himself
a ‘new author’ is ‘the first outward sign that Hume was already beginning to
dissociate himself from the Treatise’ (Life of David Hume, p. 140). Similarly
ungrounded in evidence is Mossner’s claim that Hume’s ‘fondest hopes’ were for
‘philosophical essays’ such as ‘The Sceptic’, rather than for his essays on political
subjects (p. 143).
79. At the same time, it is further proof of the impact of The Spectator on Hume
the essayist. The dignity of human nature is a recurrent theme in The Spectator:
see, e.g., nos. 210 (ed. Bond, vol. ii, pp. 321–4) and 537 (ed. Bond, vol. iv,
pp. 416–20).
80. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 161–2.
83. See below, p. 264.
84. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. ii, p. 288 [No. 201, 20 Oct 1711].
85. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. ii, p. 289. In ‘A Letter concerning Enthusiasm’ in the
Characteristicks, Shaftesbury notes that it was a distinctive feature of ancient
policy regarding superstition and enthusiasm that they ‘were mildly treated; and
being let alone, they never rag’d to that degree as to occasion bloodshed’. An ele-
ment of their mild treatment was that ‘the Epicurean, the Academick, and others,
were allow’d to use all the force of wit and raillery’ against them (Characteristicks,
ed. Den Uyl, vol. i, p. 12).
89. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 123, 124.
90. See Smith, ‘Hume’s “Rejected Essays”’.
93. Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. ii, pp. 1–4; see also the previous number, dated 24 July
1711 (vol. i, pp. 509–12).
94. On Bolingbroke’s political thought, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle,
and Armitage’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Bolingbroke’s political writings.
95. Bolingbroke, Political Writings, ed. Armitage, p. 37 [Dissertation upon Parties,
Letter IV].
96. For a penetrating study of this novel state of affairs, see Skinner, ‘The Principles
and Practice of Opposition’.
97. See Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs; and
Kramnick, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography’. The arguments of
Walpole’s propagandists, and Hume’s use of the same arguments to different
ends, will be further considered below, pp. 315–21.
98. See the Introduction to Gunn (ed.), Factions No More.
99. Halifax, Political Thoughts and Reflections, as reprinted in Gunn, Factions No
More, p. 44.
100. Toland, The State-Anatomy of Great Britain, Preface, as reprinted in Gunn,
Factions No More, p. 53.
101. Rapin, Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys: or, An Historical Dissertation upon
Whig and Tory.
Letter VII].

104. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 131–2. For Bolingbroke’s account of
the various motives at work in the re-emergence of party politics after the
Revolution, see e.g. Political Writings, ed. Armitage, pp. 70–5 [Dissertation upon
Parties, Letter VIII].
112. Mandeville, Free Thoughts (1731), p. 355.
114. Mandeville was, of course, a Whig. Like Addison, however, he was critical of
much Whig political strategy, and, in the Free Thoughts and elsewhere, can be
understood as arguing for a new, forward-looking, kind of Whiggism such as
would recognise trade as a fundamental concern of the state, and that would be
less concerned with, for example, the reform of the manners of the people.
115. Pope, Essay on Man, ed. Mack, pp. 123–4 [Epistle III, ll. 303–4].
116. Hostile critics were quick to seize on the couplet as evidence of the indifference
of the poet – who was, after all, a Catholic – to the glories of the post-1688
British constitution and to the Protestant succession that guaranteed its per-
petuity. Surely, they said, the clear implication was that it need not matter if
that constitution were overturned and the Stuarts restored to the monarchy.
Pope later sought to clarify his meaning. ‘The author of these lines’, he insisted,
‘was far from meaning that no one form of government is, in itself, better than
another’. What he meant, rather, was ‘that no form of government, however
excellent or preferable in itself, can be sufficient to make a people happy, unless
it be administered with integrity. On the contrary [he continued], the best sort
of government, when the form of it is preserved, and the administration corrupt,
is most dangerous’ (Essay on Man, ed. Mack, p. 124). But, as Tony Nuttall
observes, ‘Such self-defensive interpretations, written in response to criticism,
are seldom entirely trustworthy’: ‘Pope wrote quite clearly . . . that dispute over
which form of government is best is futile, and that the really important factor
is the manner in which whatever system prevails is administered’ (Pope’s Essay
on Man, p. 126).
117. See Scott, ‘The Rapture of Motion: Harrington’s Republicanism’.
118. Harrington, Political Works, ed. Pocock, p. 269.
121. Written by 1748, but not published until 1752: see below, pp. 240–1.

125. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. iii, p. 32. The context here
is Shaftesbury’s detailed account of how ‘Egyptian and Asiatick priesthoods’
acquired power enough to ‘swallow up the state and monarchy’.
126. Fletcher, Political Works, ed. Robertson, pp. 2–9.
127. Turnbull, Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, ed. Broadie, p. 228.
128. Turnbull, Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, ed. Broadie, pp. 654–5.
129. See Turnbull’s edition of Heineccius, published in 1741, for a summary of
Harrington on the ‘natural causes’ and ‘natural variations’ of government as
determined by the balance of property. ‘[E]verything in nature, moral or cor-
poreal, must have its natural course, its natural rise, progress and variations’,
Turnbull observed. ‘And as to know the one is to be a natural philosopher, so to
know the other is to be a moral philosopher or politician’ (Heineccius, Methodical
System of Natural Law, ed. Ahnert and Schroder, p. 438).
130. Hutcheson, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, ed. Turco, pp. 248ff;
see also System of Moral Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 243 ff.
131. Hume replied with detailed comments: see discussion on pp. 201–2.
Letter XVII].
137. Temple’s place in eighteenth-century political thought needs further study.
For a preliminary account, see Macpherson, ‘Sir William Temple: Political
Scientist?’ Another possible source of Hume’s interest in the role of opinion in
politics – and maybe of Temple’s as well – is Hobbes, who in Behemoth noted
that ‘The power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief
of the people’ (ed. Seaward, p. 128), and who in The Elements of Law went so far
as to claim that ‘the world is governed by opinion’ (Elements of Law, ed. Gaskin,
p. 72).
138. Temple, ‘Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government’, p. 55.
139. Temple, ‘Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government’, p. 84.
140. Temple, ‘Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government’, pp. 92–3.
141. See Moore, ‘Hume and the Classical Republican Tradition’, pp. 815–17.
144. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 99–100.
146. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, ch. 4; and O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of
British Taxation, 1660–1815’.
151. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 115.

156. There seems to have been significant interest in Montesquieu’s Considérations
in Edinburgh in the 1730s. An edition was printed there in 1736 by ‘Guillaume
Cheyne’, dedicated by ‘Guillaume Ker’ to ‘Madame la Contesse de Wemysse’.
For indications of the book’s influence on later Scottish Enlightenment thought,
see McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment.
157. Montesquieu, Considerations, transl. Lowenthal, p. 169 [ch. xviii].
158. It is perhaps a reason to think that Hume had read Montesquieu’s Considérations
before he wrote his early political essays that in ‘That Politicks may be reduc’d
to a Science’, as an example of a ‘general truth’ of politics, Hume argued ‘that
though free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who
partake of their freedom; yet they are the most ruinous and oppressive for their
provinces’ (Essays, Moral and Political [1741], p. 34). Montesquieu attached
considerable significance to the consequences of the Roman republic’s treatment
of its provinces.
159. As McArthur shows in David Hume’s Political Theory, Hume can certainly be
represented as having had an interest in ‘concrete questions about the machinery
and functioning of government’, and especially in ‘the machinery of how legal
systems operate and how their development interacts with that of the society as
a whole’ (pp. 14, 15). I do not believe, though, that Hume was concerned with
developing these interests into anything resembling ‘what is now called political
science’. Neither in his essays nor in the History does this seem to me what
Hume was about.
162. See below, pp. 286–8.
164. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), pp. 25–6. This passage was cut from the
1770 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, presumably on account
of Hume’s contempt for the behaviour of John Wilkes and his supporters. Adam
Potkay, in The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, is informative about the
political context for invocation of ideals of eloquence in the 1720s to 1740s. He
notes that calls for the revival of eloquence were a staple of the Bolingbrokean
opposition to Walpole. They were part of the complaint about Britain’s loss
of liberty. I do not think it plausible, though, that ‘Of Eloquence’ ‘may be
read as an Opposition comment on the decline of liberty under Walpole’ (p.
42). The explanation given of Britain’s failure to produce notable examples of
eloquence is framed by Hume in terms of national character, not in terms of the
viciousness of a single individual – and the (Harringtonian) thrust of Hume’s
political thought as a whole is to detract from the historical significance of
individuals.
165. See Jurdjevic, ‘Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici’; and Brandolini,
Republics and Kingdoms Compared.
167. See Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), pp. 66–74.
168. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. 179. Hume went on to explain that ‘Men,
in this country, have been so much occupied in the grand disputes of religion,
politics and philosophy, that they had no relish for the minute observations of
grammar and criticism’ (pp. 179–80).
170. In a note Hume refers the reader to Shaftesbury’s dialogue ‘The Moralists’.
172. I owe this point to discussion with Mikko Tolonen.
174. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, p. 199.
175. For a more detailed reading of these essays, see Harris, ‘Hume’s Four Essays
on Happiness’. See also Immerwahr, ‘Hume’s Essays on Happiness’; Heydt,
‘Relations of Literary Form and Philosophical Purpose’; Jost, ‘Hume’s Four
Philosophers’; Potkay, ‘Discursive and Philosophic Prose’; Stewart, ‘The Stoic
Legacy in the Scottish Enlightenment’.
176. In his Dictionary, Johnson defined an ‘Epicure’ as ‘a man wholly given to luxury’,
and ‘Epicurism’ as ‘Luxury; sensual enjoyment; gross pleasure’. For the revival
of (moderate) Epicureanism in England in the seventeenth century, see Harris,
‘The Epicurean in Hume’, and the literature cited there.
179. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p.156.
182. See Tusculan Disputations III.6 (‘Est profecto animi medicina, philosophia . . . ’)
(ed. King, p. 230). I am grateful to Alexander Long for this reference.
183. For a thorough consideration of the question of Hume’s attitude towards ancient
philosophy, which I take to be largely in accord with the views expressed here
and elsewhere in this book, see Loptson, ‘Hume and Ancient Philosophy’. ‘For
all of his very deep enthusiasm for classical writers’, Loptson writes, ‘Hume
seems mostly not to have thought very highly of the ancients as philosophers’
(p. 744).
184. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, vol. ii, p. 150 [Part I, Chap. 11].
186. See Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, pp. 311–18. Kincaid was apprentice to
the man who had published Kames’ first book, Essays upon Several Subjects in
Law (1732), and would himself publish his next, Essays upon Several Subjects
concerning British Antiquities (1747).
187. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), pp. 63, 155.
190. The differences between this second edition and the first are very minor. Some
spellings are altered. It is only a slight change in the typesetting (beginning at
p. 105) that makes it two pages longer.
191. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p. iii.
192. Essays, Moral and Political, vol. ii (1742), p. 204. ‘Moderate in the exercise of
power, not equitable in engrossing it’, a footnote explained.
194. Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (1742), p. 82.
195. Both the remarks and Hume’s answers to them are reprinted in Elliott, ‘Hume’s
“Character of Sir Robert Walpole”’. Hume’s answers clarify his attitude towards
Walpole in interesting ways. They confirm, for example, that Hume believed
both that trade had flourished under Walpole and that liberty had declined.
Of the declension of liberty, Hume claims, ‘There are many instances, tho’
I hope none fatal; such as, the increase of the civil list, votes of credit, and
too large a standing army, etc’. Hume also reiterates his belief that, at least
‘[t]o a great degree’, learning has gone to ruin: ‘What successors have Addison,
Congreve, Prior, Newton, etc. left in Britain? Who are to succeed Pope, Swift,
and Bolingbroke?’
4 The Achievement of Independence

9. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 55. For the context of Perceval’s
pamphlet, see Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideolo-
gies’, p. 578. According to J. A. W. Gunn, it was ‘the most successful and
notorious polemical work of the period’ (Factions No More, p. 133).
10. There is much in Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts that Hume might
well have come to agree with, particularly its argument that, because the lib-
erties of the British had increased dramatically since 1688, any opportunistic
deployment of republican principles was highly dangerous because it was likely
to weaken fatally the authority of the government and destroy the balance of the
constitution. See Faction Detected, pp. 128ff, esp. p. 156.
11. See, e.g., The Detector Detected, reprinted in part in Gunn (ed.), Factions No
More, pp. 146–7 (‘I shall conclude with explaining the difference between party
and faction, which this shallow-pated politician does not seem to understand’).
12. Butler, Analogy of Religion, p. 316.
13. Hutcheson, Institutio/Short Introduction, ed. Turco, pp. 49–50.
15. Butler laid out his account of the natural authority of conscience in the first
three sermons in Fifteen Sermons Preached at The Rolls Chapel (1726). In the
second edition of 1729 he added a preface with further discussion of conscience’s
authority.
16. For a more detailed account of Hume’s criticisms of Hutcheson in this letter, and
of their significance for the understanding of the relation between Hume’s and
Hutcheson’s moral philosophies more generally, see Moore, ‘The Eclectic Stoic,
The Mitigated Sceptic’, pp. 160–3. I do not think Moore is right in seeing the
letter as ‘an extended exercise in irony and (not always controlled) exasperation’
(p. 160).
19. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, pp. 10–11.
21. Leechman, Nature, Reasonableness, and Advantages of Prayer, p. 17.
22. Leechman, Nature, Reasonableness, and Advantages of Prayer, p. 54.
24. The Dialogue on Devotion described an argument about advantages of prayer, to
both the individual and the public, between ‘Socrates’, who believes that prayer ‘is
founded on reason, and productive of happiness’, and ‘Alcibiades’, who believes
that it is ‘a tiresome, or useless service’ (pp. 8–9).
25. I quote from a report in The Scots Magazine 6 (1744): 218–23, p. 218. For a
full account, see Remarks of the Committee of the Presbytery of Glasgow upon Mr.
Leechman’s Sermon on Prayer, which makes it clear that the Presbytery did not
believe Leechman when he claimed that his sermon was directed principally at
deists who denied the value of prayer.
26. On the controversy surrounding Leechman’s appointment, see Kennedy,
‘William Leechman, Pulpit Eloquence and the Glasgow Enlightenment’.
27. In the following synopsis of the story of the professorship I rely greatly upon
Stewart, ‘The Kirk and the Infidel’. For another valuable study of the affair, see
Grote, ‘The Rejection of David Hume’.
31. For a thorough study of Cleghorn’s teaching, see Grote, ‘The Moral Philosophy
of William Cleghorn’, esp. ch. 3. Cleghorn and Hume are depicted as taking part
in a wide-ranging conversation on, inter alia, the nature of the moral faculty and
the definition of beauty, in an unpublished text by Adam Ferguson with the title
‘An Excursion in the Highlands’.
32. See especially Emerson, ‘The “Affair” at Edinburgh and the “Project” at
Glasgow’.
33. Wishart’s Specimen appears not to have been printed in very large numbers. No
copy has survived, and our knowledge of its contents depends entirely on Hume’s
reply in the Letter from a Gentleman.
34. See Stewart, Kirk and the Infidel, p. 18.

36. See Stewart, ‘Principal Wishart and the Controversies of His Day’.
37. See Sher, ‘Professors of Virtue’.
39. See Pringle, Six Discourses, p. vi.
40. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 48. Hume added a tag from Horace:
‘Nil desperandum Teucro duce & auspice Teucro’ [‘There’s no need to despair
while Teucro is our leader and we are under his protection’].
41. Scots Magazine 4 (1741): 371–4, p. 373. The article relates that Pringle ‘annually
delivered several lectures on the immateriality and immortality of the soul; sub-
jects that fell properly within his province, and which were not a little discussed
at that period’.
42. The Letter from a Gentleman was advertised in both The Caledonian Mercury and
The Edinburgh Evening Courant on 21 May 1745: see Norton, ‘Historical Account’,
p. 524.
44. Letter from a Gentleman, pp. 17–18.
45. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, pp. 464–5 [I.iv.vii: SBN 267–8]:
quoted by Wishart in the Specimen as reprinted in Hume, Letter from a Gentleman,
pp. 4–5.
46. Letter from a Gentleman, p. 20. ‘These are his very words’, the reader of the Letter
was told. In fact, Hume’s words were ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium’
(Treatise (1739–40), vol. i, p. 467 [I.iv.vii: SBN 269]).
47. Letter from a Gentleman, p. 19.
50. ‘There are many different kinds of certainty’, Hume wrote in a letter of 1754;
‘and some of them are as satisfactory to the mind, tho perhaps not so regular, as
the demonstrative kind’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 187).
51. Watts, Logick (1725), p. 276.
53. The passage in question is as follows: ‘The being of a God is not mathematically
demonstrable, nor can it be expected that it should, because onely mathematical
matters admit of this kind of evidence; nor can it be proved immediately by sense,
because God being supposed to be a pure spirit, cannot be the object of any corporeal
sense. But yet we have as great assurance that there is a God as the nature of thing
is capable of, and as we could in reason expect to have, supposing he were’
(The Wisdom of being Religious, p. 32).
55. Letter from a Gentleman, pp. 20–1. On Hume and Huet, see Broadie, Agreeable
Connexions, ch. 3.

63. The Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals was originally conceived of as a
collection of essays: see below, p. 254.
64. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 337–41. (And also Further Letters
of David Hume, ed. Waldmann, p. 47.) There is no mention of the business in
any letter later than December 1760. As Mossner speculates (Life of David Hume,
p. 172), presumably it was settled out of court.
65. In a footnote to the essay ‘Of National Characters’, Hume endorsed the ancient
presumption that a soldier’s life is ‘not so well qualified’ for ‘books and study’.
‘Company and the world is their sphere’, he wrote. ‘And if there be any politeness
to be learned from company, they will certainly have the most considerable share
of it’ (Essays, Moral and Political [1748], p. 269 fn).
69. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 228–9. Voltaire’s book was
published in 1756, and issued in an English translation in the same year. Hume’s
own detailed account of the invasion of Britanny survives in manuscript: NLS
MS 23159, item 12. For further information, see Mossner, Life of David Hume,
pp. 199–202. On return, the fleet was forced to shelter in Cork harbour, which
meant that Hume was in Cork during the time that Berkeley was bishop of nearby
Cloyne. However, there is no record of their having met, on this or any other
occasion.
72. It was for a while thought that five manuscripts apparently in Hume’s hand, four
in the National Library of Scotland, and one in the Huntington Library, provide
evidence that Hume began historical work in the mid-1740s: see Mossner, ‘An
Apology for David Hume, Historian’, pp. 675–6. Mossner uses these manuscripts
to counter the charge that Hume was a mere follower of Voltaire in his History of
England. It is now established, as Mossner recognizes in the preface to the revised
edition of The Life of David Hume, that they are fakes.
73. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, p. 23. Hume continued:
‘But to what can all this serve? I am a philosopher, & so, I suppose, must continue’.
75. The crown had promised an allowance of a crown a day for commissioned officers
in St Clair’s army. For a detailed explanation of the case, see the letter from Hume
to Alexander Hume Campbell in Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Waldmann,
pp. 22–5.
79. Life of David Hume, p. 12.

81. Philosophical Essays (1748), pp. 66–7.
82. Essays, Moral and Political (1741), p. v.
83. On the style of the Philosophical Essays, see especially Box, Hume’s Suasive Art,
ch. 4. For studies intended to bring out the distinctive features of the Philosophical
Essays/Enquiry concerning Human Understanding as contrasted with the Treatise,
see, e.g., Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract; Flew, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief;
and Millican (ed.), Reading Hume on Human Understanding. See also Frasca
Spada on the Philosophical Essays/Enquiry concerning Human Understanding as a
‘creative reading’ of the Treatise, and as ‘part of its reception’: Space and Self in
Hume’s Treatise, p. 90.
85. Philosophical Essays (1748), p. 7.
86. Philosophical Essays (1748), pp. 7, 10.
87. See Stewart, ‘Two Species of Philosophy’.
88. Philosophical Essays (1748), p. 15 fn.
92. See earlier discussion on p. [2.3.1.4].
93. This part of the essay remained in place until the final, posthumous edition of
1777.
94. See Philosophical Essays (1748), p. 79.
96. For the significance of this move on Hume’s part, see especially Buckle, ‘British
Sceptical Realism’.
104. For a reading of the Essays/Enquiry which emphasizes the importance of its
criticism of rational religion, and of ‘Christian Stoicism’ more generally, see
Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract.
105. Philosophical Essays (1748), p. 149. For more on the character of Hume’s ‘rec-
onciling project’ in the Philosophical Essays, see Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity,
ch. 3.
107. Philosophical Essays (1748), p. 162. Compare Bayle: ‘[T]he manner of introducing
evil, under the empire of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely holy,
and infinitely powerful, is not only inexplicable but incomprehensible . . . We
must humbly acknowledge that philosophy is here at a stand, and that it’s [sic]
weakness ought to lead us to to the light of revelation, where we shall find a sure
and stedfast anchor’: Dictionary, vol. iv, pp. 513, 522 [‘Paulicians’, Remark E,
Remark H].
108. Here I follow Wootton, ‘Hume’s “Of Miracles”’.
109. See Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, ed. Buroker, p. 264.
110. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, p. 667 (IV.xvi.13).
111. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. i, p. 271 [I.iii.xiii: SBN 154].
113. See Perinetti, ‘Philosophical Reflections on History’, pp. 1109–10. As Perinetti
points out, Bayle did not seek to undermine the credibility of history as such.
Rather, he recommended ‘critical scrutiny of accepted historical facts through
rigorous assessment of testimony’.
116. ‘Of Miracles’ was the only one of the essays in the Philosophical Essays subject
to major revision in the second, 1750, edition. Hume added an endorsement of
the reasoning of Locke’s ‘Indian prince, who refus’d to believe the first relations
concerning the effect of frost’, on the grounds that though the facts ‘were not
contrary to his experience, they were not conformable to it’ (Philosophical Essays
[1750], pp. 179–80). He also added a long footnote about miracles supposed
performed at the Abbé de Paris, in which he drew attention to, while pretending
to disavow, the ‘ridiculous comparison betwixt the miracles of our saviour and
those of the Abbé’ – ‘as if the testimony of men could ever be put in the bal-
lance with that of God himself, who conducted the pen of the inspir’d writers’
(p. 196 fn). Even though Hume complained in ‘My Own Life’ that the Philo-
sophical Essays was ‘overlooked and neglected’ when first published because of
the controversy caused by Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous
Powers, Which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church (see Life of
David Hume [1777], pp. 12–13), it is possible that this footnote was inspired
by Middleton’s argument that that Protestants had no better reason to believe
in the miracles of the post-Apostolic early Christian era than Catholics had to
believe in miracles of later ages up to and including the present.
119. This might be why, in the second, 1750, edition, the essay is retitled ‘Of a
Particular Providence and of a Future State’.
122. Here I slightly modify the argument made in Harris, ‘Hume’s Use of the Rhetoric
of Calvinism’. However, if Thomas Ahnert is right in the main argument of his
book The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, the argument I made in that
paper needs to be revised wholesale. His claim is that it was the Moderates who
had no confidence in the powers of human reason when it came to the necessary
and sufficient conditions of salvation. By the 1750s, at least, according to Ahnert,

orthodox Calvinists were comparatively optimistic on this score. Unfortunately
Ahnert’s book was not published in time for me to take full account of it here.
124. For a modern account of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, see Devine, Scottish
Nation, ch. 2, and also the works listed on pp. 634–5. Also interesting is the
narrative by Hume’s friend John Home in his History of the Rebellion in the Year
1745, begun in 1746 but not published until 1802.
125. Naturally Hume alluded to the rebellion from time to time, for example calling it
a ‘miserable war’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 66), and lamenting
the delays it was causing in the delivery of mail.
126. For a very full account, see The Trial of Archibald Stewart, Esq; Late Lord Provost
of Edinburgh, Before the High Court Justiciary in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1747); also
Scots Magazine 9 (1747): 44, 144, 277–82, 296, 301–28, 348–9, 353–64, 405–19,
500–1.
127. True Account (1747), p. 4. For a full account of the circumstances of the writing
and publication of the True Account, to which I am much indebted, see Box,
Harvey, and Silverthorne, ‘Diplomatic Transcription of Hume’s “Volunteer
Pamphlet”’.
128. Hume, True Account (1747), p. 11.
129. True Account (1747), p. 41. ‘The present instance is, I believe’, Hume continues,
‘the only one, in near sixty years, of an innocent man, that has ever lain under
the least oppression’. It is hard to be absolutely certain, but Hume appears to be
quite serious here.
130. True Account (1747), p. 43.
131. True Account (1747), p. 8.
132. True Account (1747), p. 8.
133. By contrast, John Home attributed success of rebels to neglect of Lowland militia
since 1603: see History of the Rebellion, pp. 13–14; and also Robertson, Scottish
Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, p. 77.
134. See Hume’s letter to Lord Elibank, 8 January 1748, in Mossner, ‘New Hume
Letters to Lord Elibank’, pp. 437–8: ‘We have here got down some copies of a
pamphlet publish’d in London, in defence of our friend, Archy Stewart. The
author seems to have been engag’d by the tyes of private friendship; and as the
subject was rather too particular, as well as for other reasons, does not choose to
own it. Perhaps, your Lordship may be able to guess who it is.’
135. True Account (1747), p. 48.
136. True Account (1747), pp. 48–50.
137. See Smout, ‘Provost Drummond’.
138. True Account (1747), pp. 49–50.
140. Letters of David Hume, vol. i, p. 112.
141. Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), p. 302.
143. See Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), p. 262: ‘But philosophers, who
have embrac’d a party (if that be not a contradiction in terms) . . . ’.
147. No manuscript of ‘Of the Protestant Succession’ survives. Quotations are taken
from the first published version, in Political Discourses (1752): here, p. 273 and
note.
148. Political Discourses (1752), p. 276.
150. Mossner, ‘New Hume Letters to Lord Elibank’, p. 437.
157. For an account of Hume’s time in Turin, based on new research, see Mazza and
Piccoli, ‘“Disguised in Scarlet”: Hume and Turin in 1748’. For the retailing of
some salacious gossip about Hume’s feelings for an Italian countess, see Mossner,
Life of David Hume, pp. 214–18.
160. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 73 [II.i.xi: SBN 316–7]. In
the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding Hume attributes the
variation of manners in different ages and countries to ‘the great force of custom
and education, which mould the human mind from its infancy and form it into
a fix’d and establish’d character’ (1748, p. 137).
164. See Chamley, ‘The Conflict between Montesquieu and Hume’; and also Mazza
and Piccoli, ‘“Disguised in Scarlet”’, pp. 102–7.
165. It is worth noting that Montesquieu’s view is that many things, not physical
causes alone, determine national character: ‘Nature and climate almost alone
dominate savages; manners govern the Chinese; laws tyrannize Japan; in former
times mores set the tone in Lacedaemonia; in Rome it was set by the maxims
of government and the ancient mores’ (Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al.,
p. 310 [Bk. 19, ch. 4]).
166. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), p. 270.
167. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), p. 272 fn.
168. Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), pp. 107–8 fn. The italicized phrase
‘by the laws’ was added in the second edition of 1742.
169. In 1753 Hume would add to ‘Of National Characters’ a footnote that has become
even more notorious, concerning the apparent ‘natural inferiority’ of ‘negroes,
and in general all the other species of men’ to ‘the whites’. ‘There never was a
civiliz’d nation of any other complexion than white’, Hume claimed, ‘nor even
any individual eminent in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures
amongst them, no arts, no sciences’. And so on. See Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, p. 291 fn. Hume slightly amended the footnote
for the final, 1777, edition of the Essays and Treatises, restricting his claims to
‘negroes’ alone: see Essays and Treatises (1777), vol. i, p. 550. Hume’s racism was
sharply criticized by Beattie in the Essay on Truth, pp. 479–84. Immerwahr claims
that Hume limited the scope of the footnote in response to Beattie: see ‘Hume’s
Revised Racism’. This is not plausible, as is shown by Garrett, ‘Hume’s Revised
Racism Revisited’. For a further unsettling suggestion as to Hume’s attitude
towards ‘negroes’, see a letter to Francis Seymour Conway dated 20 March 1766
in which he appears to be acting as an intermediary for three London brokers in
the purchase of plantations in Grenada worth £60,000: Waldmann (ed.), Further
Letters of David Hume, p. 67.
170. See above, pp. 165–6.
171. Hume had begun the process of modernizing his spelling: ‘That Politicks may
be reduc’d to a Science’ was now ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’.
172. Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), pp. 37–8 fn.
173. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), pp. 71–2, 136, 170–1.
174. Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), p. 31.
175. Compare Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn. (1748), pp. 62–3 with
Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 2nd edn. (1742), p. 83.
176. See Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, pp. 275–94. Sher calls Millar ‘the greatest
bookseller and publisher of the mid-eighteenth century’ (p. 275).
177. They were published with the title Three Essays, Moral and Political.
178. Hume, ‘My Own Life’, in Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 11–12. The new
edition of the Essays, Moral and Political, he adds, ‘met not with a much better
reception’.
179. See Beauchamp, ‘Introduction’, pp. lxxiv–xciii.
180. Hume, ‘My Own Life’, in Life of David Hume (1777), p. 14.
181. Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles was published in 1762, and Price’s Four
Dissertations, including a treatment of ‘the nature of historical evidence, and
miracles’, in 1767. Hume’s relationships with Campbell and with Price are
discussed below, pp. 300–1.
182. In Fontainebleau they crossed paths with Charles Edward Stewart, under arrest
and on his way to exile in Rome: see Mossner, Life of David Hume, pp. 218–19.
183. Hume, ‘My Own Life’, in Life of David Hume (1777), p. 11.
5 Two Years at Ninewells

5. For the text, see Stewart, ‘Hume’s “Bellmen’s Petition”’. For context and inter-
pretation, see Emerson, ‘Hume and the Bellman’. The pamphlet is the only place
where Hume more or less openly attacks the Bible as being historically unreliable.
6. Baumstark, ‘David Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian’, is a close
study of this period of Hume’s career as a philosophical man of letters, and of its
role in particular in the development of ‘Hume’s idea of philosophical history’.
7. If it is right to think that the contents of the first version of Four Dissertations
were all written in 1749–51, then, apart from The History of England, the only
major texts Hume had yet to compose were ‘Of Suicide’, ‘Of the Immortality of
the Soul’, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, ‘Of Coalition of Parties’, ‘Of Jealousy of
Trade’, and ‘Of the Origin of Government’.
8. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), pp. 54–5.
9. See above, pp. 243–4, for reasons to doubt that ‘Of National Characters’ could
have been meant as a criticism of De l’Esprit des Lois.
11. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al., p. 156 [Bk. 11, ch. 5].
12. See the letters from Montesquieu to Hume reprinted in Burton, Life and Corre-
spondence of Hume, vol. i, pp. 456–8.
13. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 55 fn.
14. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 223.
15. For Montesquieu and Ferguson, see McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scot-
tish Enlightenment. For Montesquieu’s influence more generally, see Fletcher,
Montesquieu and English Politics.
17. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 175. Two years later he told the Abbé
le Blanc that the Enquiry was his ‘favourite performance’ – ‘tho’ [the Philosophical
Essays] has made more noise’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 227).
18. The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 16.
20. For a long time, the Enquiry suffered in the same way as did the Philosophical
Essays/Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, denied serious attention in its
own right because it was regarded as a poor substitute for the authentic Humean
philosophy to be found in the Treatise. For accounts of the Enquiry as a self-
contained piece of moral philosophy, see Abramson, ‘Sympathy and the Project
of Hume’s Second Enquiry’; Baier, ‘Incomparably the Best?’; and, especially,
Taylor, ‘Hume’s Later Moral Philosophy’ (and also the works listed by Taylor
on pp. 339–40). A comprehensive study and revaluation will be made in Taylor
(ed.), Reading Hume on the Principles of Morals.
22. This process of the stripping down of the argument to the absolute essentials con-
tinued after the publication of the Enquiry in 1751. In the final (and posthumous)
1777 version of the Enquiry Hume extracted his refutation of philosophical ego-
ism from Section II and his discussion of the merely verbal distinction between
virtues and talents from Section VI, and turned them into two new Appendices
(Appendices II and IV).
23. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), pp. 55 fn., 110 fn. See also
p. 55 fn (‘See Essay I’).
26. See above, p. [2.4.3.3].
27. As we saw in Chapter 2, there are reasons to think that Part One of Treatise Book
III was a later addition, written after Hume received comments from Hutcheson
in mid-1740.
28. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), pp. 26–7.
30. The importance of the honestum to Hume’s contemporaries is well explained in
Moore, ‘Utility and Humanity’. However, I do not accept Moore’s argument to
the effect that in the Enquiry Hume presents his own understanding of what the
honestum might be.
34. Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 76.
35. Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 85 fn.
36. On the question of the status of sympathy in the Enquiry, see Abramson, ‘Sym-
pathy and the Project of Hume’s Second Enquiry’; Debes, ‘Humanity, Sympathy
and the Puzzle of Hume’s Second Enquiry’ and ‘Has Anything Changed? Hume’s
Theory of Association and Sympathy after the Treatise’; and Vitz, ‘Sympathy and
Benevolence in Hume’s Moral Psychology’.
42. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 146. ‘Effeminacy’ is Hume’s
translation of molesse.
43. See Heydt, ‘Practical Ethics’, esp. p. 376.
45. See Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, for an account of
Moderatism which makes sense of such commitments.
48. See above, pp. 191–4.
50. Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), pp. 121, 129. See also p. 61,
where Hume claims, in support of his proposal that utility is the prime determinant
of merit, that ‘Tis entirely agreeable to the rules of philosophy, and even of
common reason; where any principle has been found to have a great force and
energy in one instance, to ascribe it a like energy in all similar instances’.
52. Hume misremembers, therefore, when he says in ‘My Own Life’ (The Life of
David Hume [1777], p. 16) that the Enquiry was published in the same year as
Political Discourses.
53. This is the paragraph that begins: ‘We may just observe, before we conclude
this subject . . . ’: Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), p. 222. See
Beauchamp, ‘Introduction’, p. xliii.
54. Oswald to Hume, 10 October 1750, reprinted in part (but misdated) in Rotwein,
David Hume: Writings on Economics, pp. 190–6; Hume to Oswald, 1 November
1750, in Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 142–4.
57. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, ch. 4, and O’Brien, ‘Political Economy of British
Taxation, 1660–1815’. By 1750, the national debt had increased to approximately
£80 million.
58. Bolingbroke, Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation, p. 323.
59. Faction remained a concern of Hume’s, however. As we will see in Chapter 7, he
wrote a new essay on the topic (‘Of Coalition of Parties’) in 1758.
60. For surveys of this literature, see Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth-Century England, and Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance.
61. See Sheldon, ‘Massie, Joseph (d. 1784)’.
62. Tucker, Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend
France and Germany, with Regard to Trade, p. iv.
63. Tucker, Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend
France and Germany, with Regard to Trade, p. 65.
64. Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, vol. ii, p. 793.
65. See Stern and Wennerlind, ‘Introduction’.
66. See Coleman, ‘Mercantilism Revisited’, and Viner, ‘English Theories of Foreign
Trade before Adam Smith’.
67. Cary, A Discourse on Trade, pp. iv–v.
68. E.g., Philips, The State of the Nation, in Respect of her Commerce, Debts, and Money;
Decker, An Essay on the Causes of the decline of the Foreign Trade; and Tucker,
Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France
and Germany, with Regard to Trade.
69. See Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, ch. 2; Viner, Studies in the Theory of
International Trade, p. 69; Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. 168ff.
70. Gervaise, System or Theory of the Trade of the World, pp. 17–18.
71. Vanderlint, Money Answers All Things, pp. 26, 43.
74. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), pp. 2–3.
75. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), p. 3.
76. The extent to which Hume draws upon the arguments of others in Politi-
cal Discourses has been explored in, e.g., Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith,
ch. 9; Rashid, ‘David Hume and Eighteenth-Century Monetary Thought’, and
Wennerlind, ‘An Artificial Virtue and the Oil of Commerce’.
77. Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1760), vol. ii, p. 110.
78. For useful overviews of Hume’s economic thought, see Rotwein, ‘Introduction’
to David Hume: Writings on Economics; Sakamoto, ‘Hume’s Economic Theory’;
Schabas, ‘Hume on Economic Well-Being’; and Skinner, ‘Hume’s Principles
of Political Economy’. See also the essays collected in Wennerlind and Schabas
(eds.), David Hume’s Political Economy.
79. Here I follow Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 363–71.
80. On the significance of this argument of Melon’s, see Hont, Jealousy of Trade,
‘Introduction’, pp. 30–2.
81. Melon, Political Essay upon Commerce, transl. Bindon, p. 10.
82. See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, ‘Introduction’, pp. 32–3.
83. Political Discourses (1752), p. 5 fn.
84. Force notes that this was a ‘new and paradoxical view’: Self-Interest Before Adam
Smith, pp. 208–10.
85. See Viner, ‘Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy’.
86. See esp. Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury’.
88. See Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate’, pp. 404–9; and for Montesquieu
on the beneficial effects of commerce in general, The Spirit of the Laws, transl.
Cohler et al, pp. 337–53 [Bk 20].
89. Melon, Political Essay upon Commerce, transl. Bindon, p. 177.
90. Smith, Wealth of Nations, eds. Campbell, Skinner, and Todd, vol. i, p. 412.
91. Berkeley, Querist (ed. Johnson), p. 125 [Query 5].
92. Berkeley, Querist (ed. Johnson), p. 126 [Query 23].
93. Vanderlint, Money Answers All Things (1734), p. 2.
94. See Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al., pp. 398–413 [Bk 22, chs. 1–10].
95. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), pp. 51–2.
96. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), p. 42.
97. There is a very striking similarity between Hume’s description (Political Dis-
courses [1752], pp. 47–8) of the effects of an increase in money and remarks
in Cantillon’s 1755 Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (ed. Higgs,
pp. 161ff ). Hont notes that it is just possible – though there is no evidence at all –
that the Chevalier Ramsay might have given Hume access to Cantillon’s manu-
script: see ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited’, p. 319
n. 16.
98. For a survey of the debate about interest rates, see Tucker, Progress and Profits
in British Economic Thought; see also Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. 124ff.
99. Massie, Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest, pp. 47ff.
103. The classic study is Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England.
104. Hume had hinted at a conventionalist approach to money in the Treatise: see,
e.g., Treatise (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 63–4 [II.i.x: SBN 311].
105. See Wennerlind, ‘An Artificial Virtue and the Oil of Commerce’.

107. Political Discourses (1752), p. 93. For context, see Viner, Studies in the Theory of
International Trade, pp. 45–51.
108. See Political Discourses (1752), p. 45. Compare Vanderlint, Money Answers All
Things (1734), p. 94.
109. For a study of this political-economic dynamic, and Hume’s place in its explo-
ration, see Hont, ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate in the Scottish
Enlightenment’.
115. Political Discourses (1752) p. 126 fn. I owe this point to Murphy, ‘John Law and
the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 15.
116. This is not to deny that there was a set of political-economic concerns, particular
to Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, of which Hume
must have been conscious as he composed Political Discourses. It seemed to
many, though certainly not all, Scots that full integration of the Highlands into
the modern commercial economy of Great Britain was a necessary condition
of the final destruction of the Jacobite threat; but at the same time there were
widespread and deep-rooted worries about the moral and spiritual consequences
of the ongoing process of the ‘civilization’ of Scotland. See Caffentzis, ‘Hume,
Money, and Civilisation’, for some suggestions as to the role of Political Discourses
in Scottish political-economic debates in the late 1740s and early 1750s.
117. The essay is not included in Rotwein (ed.), David Hume: Writings on Economics.
121. See especially Hont, ‘The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary
State Bankruptcy’.
123. Berkeley, by contrast, had described Britain’s public credit as ‘a mine of gold’
and as ‘the principal advantage that England hath over France’ (Querist, ed.
Johnson, p. 144 [Query 233]). Walpole had routinely presented public credit as
the means by which the liberties won in 1688 had been preserved.
124. Bolingbroke, Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation, p. 387.
125. There is a similarity between Hume’s list of the disadvantages of public indebt-
edness and the analysis given in Decker, Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the
Foreign Trade, pp. 36–7.
128. See the discussion below, pp. 423–5.
130. See Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics, pp. 218ff.

133. On the debates going on in Scotland in the late 1740s about many of the topics
discussed in Political Discourses, see Caffentzis, ‘Hume, Money, and Civilization:
or, Why Was Hume a Metalist? ’; and also Harris and Tolonen, ‘Hume In and
Out of Scottish Context’, pp. 175–80.
134. Tucker, Brief Essay, pp. iv–vi.
135. Montesquieu, Of the Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al., p. 452 [Bk. 23,
ch. 24].
136. In 1745 or 1746, Wallace gave a paper to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society
‘On the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times’. See Luehrs,
‘Population and Utopia in the Thought of Robert Wallace’.
139. The best study of ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ is Box and Sil-
verthorne, ‘The “Most Curious & Important of All Questions of Erudition”’.
Hume was not the only writer confident that the population of modern Europe
was increasing. Vanderlint, for example, accepted the arguments of Sir William
Petty that the British population was increasing steadily, despite wars and emi-
gration to colonies. For a detailed account of the population controversy more
generally, see Glass, Numbering the People.
143. For careful and insightful discussion of the significance of this essay, see
Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’,
pp. 169–77.
146. Commenting on Harrington and Oceana in The History of Great Britain, though,
Hume remarks that ‘The idea . . . of a perfect and immortal commonwealth will
always be found as chimerical as that of a perfect and immortal man’ (History of
Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), p. 127).
147. Political Discourses (1752), p. 283. There are obvious flaws in Harrington’s design,
according to Hume, in its stipulation of the fixed rotation of public offices, in its
agrarian laws, and, most notably, in the excessive power given to the senate. In
Oceana, the senate proposes legislation, and the people consent to it. This means,
as Hume puts it, that the ‘negative’ of the senate ‘goes before the votes of the
people’: ‘Were the king’s negative of the same nature in the English constitution,
and cou’d he prevent any bill from coming into parliament, he wou’d be an
absolute monarch’ (p. 284).
148. Political Discourses (1752), p. 293. It is perhaps worth noting that Hume’s ideal
state is not free of religion. This was no doubt a part of his declared intention to
present a model that did not require a wholesale reformation of human nature.
Hume was clear, though, that while church government would be presbyterian
in form, the magistracy would have the power to try and depose or suspend any
presbyter. It was essential to the stability of the state that there be ‘dependence
of the clergy on the civil magistrate’ (p. 298).
150. Political Discourses (1752), p. 302. On the role played by this claim of Hume’s
in the construction of the argument of The Federalist, see Adair, ‘“That Politics
May Be Reduced to a Science”’, and also Moore, ‘Hume and the Classical
Republican Tradition’, pp. 834–9.
152. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, p. 30. Political Discourses
was published in early 1752 in Edinburgh, not London, by Alexander Kincaid,
not Andrew Millar. I do not know why.
154. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 177. A copy of the first edition sent
by Hume to Montesquieu in Paris via a mutual friend, ‘Mr Smith, of Boulogne’,
never arrived.
155. This was not the first French translation of the Political Discourses. In 1753, one
had appeared by Elézéar Mauvillon, published in Holland. It did not sell as well.
See Charles, ‘French “New Politics” and Hume’s Political Discourses’, p. 194.
Several other British works on trade were translated into French at around this
time, including those by Cary and Decker.
156. See letter from Le Blanc to Hume, dated 25 August 1754, in Hill-Burton, Life
and Correspondence of David Hume, vol. i, p. 458.
157. See Charles, ‘French “New Politics” and Hume’s Political Discourses’, p. 188.
158. Hume, Discours Politiques (transl. Le Blanc, 1754), p. l (‘Le militaire, le magistrat,
le négociant, tous servent également l’état’).
159. Letters of David Hume (ed. Greig), vol. i, p. 168.
160. Letters of David Hume (ed. Greig), vol. i, p. 208. It is perhaps worth noting that in
the 1753 edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political Bolingbroke is referred to
as merely an ‘author’ and no longer as a ‘celebrated writer’: Essays and Treatises
on Several Subjects, vol. i, p. 99.
161. Le Blanc to Hume, 25 August 1754, in Hill-Burton, Life and Correspondence of
David Hume, vol. i, p. 458 (‘J’ai trouvé dans vos discours un politique philosophe,
et un philosophe citoyen’).
162. Le Blanc to Hume, no date, in Hill-Burton, Life and Correspondence of David
Hume, vol. i, p. 460.
164. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 223. We do not know what kind of
‘considerations’ Hume refers to here, but it may be that this was a new version
of Book I of the Treatise’s treatment of our ideas of space and time. As we will
see below, p. 359, it was never published because Hume was persuaded that
there was a fatal flaw in its argument. It is possible that some evidence as to
the nature of that argument is provided by two manuscripts, one in the hand
of Robert Wallace, one in an unknown hand, among the Hume papers now
held by the National Library of Scotland (MS 23163, items 40 and 41). Both
documents discuss arguments similar to those made by Hume in Treatise Book
I, Part Two. The one in Wallace’s hand might be a critical commentary on the
now lost dissertation, but there is no evidence sufficient to settle the matter
either way. For a careful discussion, and a transcription of both manuscripts, see
Gossman, ‘Two Unpublished Essays on Mathematics in the Hume Papers’. As
Gossman points out, Hume was in constant contact with Wallace at this time.
Merivale notes that there was a place for a discussion of geometry in a set of texts
centrally concerned with the operations and effects of the passions. In Book
II of the Treatise Hume had explored the effects of distance on the passions,
and, Merivale suggests, the lost dissertation on geometry might have included
further explorations of that topic: see ‘An Enquiry concerning the Passions’,
p. 6.
165. Four Dissertations (1757), p. 1.
166. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, vol. ii, p. 124 [Part I, Chap. 9]. Hobbes
contrasted ‘natural history’ with ‘civill history’, ‘which is the history of the
voluntary actions of men in commonwealths’. It is worth noting that in Leviathan
Hobbes called ‘feare of things invisible’ ‘the naturall seed of that, which every
one in himself calleth religion; and in them that worship, or feare that power
otherwise than they do, superstition’ (vol. ii, p. 162 [Part I, Chap. 11].)
167. For a careful examination of the implications of Hume’s choice of title, see
Malherbe, ‘Hume’s Natural History of Religion’.
168. Howard, History of Religion, pp. iv–v.
169. See Serjeantson, ‘David Hume’s Natural History of Religion and the End of
Modern Eusebianism’, and also Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment,
pp. 308–16.
173. Four Dissertations (1757), pp. 55–6.
177. Four Dissertations (1757), pp. 99–102 fn. Hume quotes from Ramsay’s posthu-
mous Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (vol. ii, pp. 403–6).
‘I thought the opinions of this ingenious author very curious’, Hume says, ‘but
I pretend not to warrant the justness of them’ (p. 102 fn.).
178. On the ‘religion of virtue’ promulgated by the ‘moderate literati’ in the mid-
eighteenth century, see Sher, Church and University, pp. 166–86.
180. See Beauchamp, ‘Introduction’, pp. li, liii–cxvi.
181. Four Dissertations (1757), pp. 126, 131.

185. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, pp. 248, 249–50 [II.iii.iii: SBN 415,
416].
186. Kemp Smith declares that it is ‘by general consent the least satisfactory of all
[Hume’s] writings’ (Philosophy of David Hume, p. 535); Selby-Bigge omitted it
from his edition of the two Enquiries on the grounds that it is ‘a very uninter-
esting and unsatisfactory work’ (‘Editor’s Introduction’, p. xxi). See, however,
Immerwahr, ‘Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions’; Beauchamp, ‘Introduction’
to the Clarendon Edition of The Natural History of Religion and the Dissertation
on the Passions; and, especially, Merivale, ‘An Enquiry concerning the Passions’,
which argues that in significant respects the ‘philosophy of the emotions’ con-
tained in ‘Hume’s Third Enquiry’ is superior to that contained in Book II of the
Treatise.
189. Like ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (discussed below, pp. 361–4), ‘Of Tragedy’
has, given the slightness of its content, generated a surprising amount of crit-
ical commentary since the mid-twentieth century. For a survey, see Costel-
loe, ‘Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Future Research’,
pp. 107–9.
190. See Wasserman, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’.
191. Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. ii, p. 164 [II.ii.vii: SBN 369].
192. Addison, Spectator, ed. Bond, vol. iii, p. 568 [No. 418, 30 June 1712].
193. Dubos, Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture, Part I, section vii (‘Que
la Tragédie nous affecte plus que la Comédie, à cause de la nature des sujets que
la Tragédie traite’).
194. Fontenelle, ‘Réflexions sur la Poétique’, §36 (‘je ne sais quelle idée de la fausseté
de ce qu’on voit’).
196. Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, ed. Moran,
pp. 11–22.
197. Kames certainly shared with Hume an early draft of the discussion of personal
identity contained in his Essays. In a letter of 1746 Hume told Home that he ‘likt
exceedingly’ his method of explaining personal identity, and that it was ‘more
satisfactory than any thing that had ever occur’d to me’ (New Letters of David
Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, p. 20). As is often the case with Hume’s
letters, it is not easy to know how serious he is being here. The account given
by Kames of personal identity in Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural
Religion does not seem likely to have been ‘satisfactory’ by Hume’s lights.
199. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 173. Hume would return to this
theme in the dedication of Four Dissertations. There he says that the liberty of
thought is ‘an instance of true liberty, of which antient times can alone afford
us an example’: ‘Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises,
sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Atticus, an epicurean’. He continues:
‘I have been seized with a strong desire of renewing these laudable practices of
antiquity . . . ’ (Four Dissertations [1757], pp. ii–iii).
200. On Hume’s friendship with Wallace, see Mossner, The Forgotten Hume, ch. 5.
Wallace was one of the few supporters among the Edinburgh clergy of Hume’s
candidacy for the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair in 1744–5. In 1756, he
would write, but not publish, a pamphlet defending Hume from the move on
the part of the ‘Popular’ party to have him prosecuted for blasphemy.
201. Wallace’s ‘Letter from a Moderate Freethinker to David Hume Esquire Con-
cerning the Profession of the Clergy’ was never published. The manuscript is
held by Edinburgh University Library, shelf mark La. II 97/1. A transcription
has been published by Miguel A. Badı́a Cabrera.
204. Wallace, Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times
(1753), p. 163.
205. ‘Le publie qui admirera les deux ouvrages, n’admirera pas moins deux amis qui
font céder d’une manière si noble les petits intérêts de l’esprit aux intérêts de
l’amitié’: Montesquieu to Hume, 13 July 1753, reprinted in Hill Burton, Life
and Correspndence of David Hume, vol. i, p. 458.
206. See, e.g., Balfour, Delineation (1753), p. 132.
208. Hume tells Balfour that if there were occasion for a new edition of the Enquiry,
‘I shall make great advantage of your remarks, and hope to obviate some of your
criticisms’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 174). There is, however,
no sign of an answer to Balfour in any of the subsequent editions of the Enquiry.
209. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 360. In May 1755 Hume had written
to Michael Ramsay that Campbell had sent him ‘a very civil obliging letter’ about
the first volume of the History of Great Britain: ‘He . . . exhorts me to persevere
wth courage, notwithstanding the violent torrent, which bigotry & prejudice,
he says, have rais’d against me’ (Kozanecki, ‘Dawida Hume’a Nieznane Listy’,
p. 135).
211. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 360. At some point, Hume became
friends with John Douglas, author of The Criterion: or, Miracles Examined (1754):
see the long 1760 letter about Charles I in Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig,
vol i, pp. 332–5.
212. Wood, ‘David Hume on Thomas Reid’s Inquiry’, p. 415.
213. Reid said in the Dedication of the Inquiry that he was ‘persuaded, that absolute
scepticism is not more destructive of the faith of a Christian, than of the science
of a philosopher, and of the prudence of a man of common understanding’
(ed. Brookes, p. 4). But he nowhere in the Inquiry, implicitly or explicitly,
impugned Hume’s personal beliefs. Perhaps the remarks that Hume objected in
the manuscript were removed before publication.
214. Wood, ‘David Hume on Thomas Reid’s Inquiry’, p. 416.
216. Correspondence of Thomas Reid, ed. Wood, p. 31.
217. Correspondence of Richard Price: Vol. I, ed. Peach and Thomas, p. 47.
218. Price, Four Dissertations, p. 383.
220. In The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ahnert explains why it might
have been that Hume chose to make Demea, the proponent of inflexible ortho-
doxy, a proponent also of rationalist, a priori argumentation for the existence of
attributes of God. By the 1750s, Ahnert argues, the Orthodox were in important
ways more sympathetic to rationalism than were the Moderates.
221. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), p. 226.
225. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), p. 126.
226. For the only comprehensive study of the Essays and Treatises, which I discovered
too late to take proper account of it in this book, see Bouchard, ‘The Philosophical
Publishing Life of David Hume’.
227. See Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, pp. 45–6.
228. Not all extant copies of the first edition of the Political Discourses are bound
with Hume’s list of Scotticisms. The list is six pages long. ‘Notice shou’d not
be us’d as a verb’, Hume writes, for example. ‘The proper phrase is take notice.
Yet I find lord Shaftesbury uses notic’d, the participle: And unnotic’d is very
common.’ Hume’s list was reprinted in The Scots Magazine in 1760 (vol. 22, pp.
686–7). Hume continued to worry about his Scotticisms (see, e.g., a 1762 letter
to David Mallet: Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 369–70). He was
of course not the only Scot of his time to be concerned to the point of obsession
with sounding as English as possible. Boswell and Smollett are other notable
examples. For discussion of the issue, see Basker, ‘Scotticisms and the Problem
of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’. In the 1760s, there was a spin-off
of the Select Society of Edinburgh called The Select Society for Promoting the
Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland: see Emerson, ‘Select
Society’.
229. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, pp. 29–30 fn.
230. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. ii, p. 18.
6 The Start of a History of Great Britain

1. The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 16. In a letter to Clephane dated 18 October
1754 Hume cites Bayle in support of the view that ‘a man of letters ought always
to live in a capital’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 205).
2. See Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, ch. 5, for a ‘conjectural history’
of Smith’s Edinburgh lectures.
3. In a letter of 1747 Hume had remarked to Kames that in his Essays upon Sev-
eral Subjects concerning British Antiquities he did Hume ‘the honour to borrow
principles from a certain book’ (New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and
Mossner, p. 27). The year 1751 saw the publication of Kames’s Essays on the
Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, which Hume described in a letter to
Michael Ramsay as ‘an unusual instance of an obliging method of answering a
book’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 162). In the 1753 edition of the
Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Hume added to his account of justice
a passage discussing the idea that the sentiment of justice might ‘arise from a
simple original instinct in the human breast’ (see Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects [1753], vol. iii, p. 61), an idea prominent in Kames’s treatment of justice
in the Essays.
4. The classic account of the rise of the Moderates is given in Sher, Church and
University, esp. ch. 2.
5. See esp. Emerson, ‘The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1737–1747’ and
‘The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1748–1768’.
6. Quoted in Emerson, ‘The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1737–1747’,
p. 164.
7. A first volume of Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary. Read before a
Society in Edinburgh, and published by them was published in 1754, with a preface
sometimes said to have been written by Hume. For helpful context, see Wood’s
‘Introduction’ to the Thoemmes Press reprint. There is no evidence that Hume
was in fact its author (Wood suggests that Hume’s role was to ‘polish the prose’ of
the other Secretary, Alexander Monro primus), and there is nothing very Humean
in the reasons it gives as to why the Society excluded theology, morals, and politics
from its discussions, viz., that ‘The great delicacy of the subject, the imperfections
of human understanding, the various attachments and inclinations of mankind,
will for ever propagate disputes with regard to these parts of erudition’ (p. vii).
Kames’s efforts in resurrecting the Society might explain why a paper by him –
‘Of the Laws of Motion’ – was the first item in the volume. It was followed by a
highly critical examination by John Stewart, Professor of Natural Philosophy at
Edinburgh University, which insinuated that, because he appeared to allow events
without causes, Kames must be an Epicurean kind of atheist, and which also made
some rather slighting allusions to Hume’s analysis of causality (e.g. pp. 116 ff.).
In a letter to Stewart Hume made it clear that he was dismayed by this lapse of
politeness: see Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 185–8. For detailed
discussion, see Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume, pp. 161ff. Hume
was still secretary of the Philosophical Society when Benjamin Franklin visited
Scotland in 1762: see New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner,
pp. 66–8 (letter to Franklin, 10 May 1762).
8. See Emerson, ‘The “Affair” at Edinburgh and the “Project” at Glasgow’,
pp. 14–16.
9. Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Mossner and Ross, p. 5.

10. Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. 9, p. 8 (letter from James Wodrow to
Samuel Kenrick, 21 January 1752).
13. In June 1758 Hume tried to persuade Smith to move to Edinburgh to take up the
University’s chair in the Law of Nature and Nations. ‘I dare swear’, he wrote,
‘that you think the difference of place is worth paying for . . . ’ (Letters of David
Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 279–80).
17. Along with much in the letter to Clephane, this was a slight exaggeration. In
1772, according to the then librarian Alexander Brown, the library possessed
‘more than twenty-five thousand volumes’: see Catalogue of the Library of the
Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh: Part the First, p. ii. It would seem from this and
later publications of the catalogue that even by 1807 the library’s collection of
Hume’s own works was far from complete.
18. Maitland, History of Edinburgh, p. 417.
19. For a general account of the English historical tradition, see Kenyon, The History
Men. For Hume’s intentions and practice as a historian, see: Black, The Art
of History, pp. 77–116; Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction, ch. 3;
Emerson, ‘Hume’s Histories’; Forbes, Introduction to his edition of The History
of Great Britain, and Hume’s Philosophical Politics, Part III; Hicks, Neoclassical
History and English Culture; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, ch. 3; Okie,
Augustan Historial Writing; Phillips, Society and Sentiment, chs. 1–2, and ‘“The
Most Illustrious Philosopher and Historian of the Age”’; Phillipson, David Hume:
The Philosopher as Historian; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. ii: Narratives
of Civil Government, Section III; Slater, ‘Authorship and Authority in Hume’s
History of England’; Van Holthoon, ‘Hume and the End of History’; Wootton,
‘Hume: “the Historian”’.
21. Hume would remark at the end of his own account of the reign of James I that ‘Tis
well known that the English have not much excelled’ in the writing of history:
History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), p. 140.
23. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, pp. 220–1.
24. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al., p. 333 [Bk. 19, ch. 27].
25. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, p. 221. Gordon had published
his translation of Tacitus between 1728 and 1731. He did not go on to write
a history of England. Voltaire later modified his opinion of Rapin. In his 1764
review of Hume’s History of England he found Hume superior to Rapin in respect
of his impartiality: ‘Rapin Thoiras, étranger, semblai seul avoir écrit une his-
toire impartiale; mais on voit encore la souillure du préjugé jusque dans les
vérités que Thoiras raconte’ (Articles Extraits de la Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe,

p. 456).
26. Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, vol. ii, p. 209.
28. See Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth-
Century England’, pp. 150–3.
29. See Kenyon, The History Men, pp. 21ff, and Butterfield, The Englishman and
His History, pp. 62ff (on the ‘resurrection’ in the 1620s, due especially to Coke,
of ‘many ancient statutes that guaranteed the liberties of Englishmen’); and for
more detailed studies especially of history writing in the post-Restoration period,
Douglas, English Scholars 1660–1730; Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the
Feudal Law; Smith, The Gothic Bequest.
30. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 187–93.
31. Petyt, Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted, Preface, p. 3.
32. Petyt, Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted, Preface, pp. 34–5.
33. See Douglas, English Scholars, ch. vi; Pocock, Ancient Constitution and the Feudal
Law, ch. viii; and also Pocock, ‘Robert Brady, 1627–1700: A Cambridge Historian
of the Reformation’.
34. Brady, Complete History of England, Preface [no pagination]. Brady published a
continuation of his Complete History in 1700, but by then his lessons from the past
had become inconvenient to many on the Tory side. The obvious implication to
be drawn from his books was that the 1688 revolution was a criminal rebellion
against a legitimate monarch. Brady argued that the succession was hereditary
and lineal, not elective. There was no way of justifying the rule of William of
Orange on Brady’s terms. Brady himself swore allegiance to William and Mary,
but his history led to an uncompromising non-juring, Jacobite conclusion. A
more moderate Tory history was needed – and duly appeared in the form of the
posthumous publication of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and the Civil Wars
in England (1702–4).
35. Temple, Introduction to the History of England, p. 621.
36. Temple, Introduction to the History of England, p. 497.
37. It was first published in 1707.
38. Echard, The History of England, vol. i, p. iii.
39. Oldmixon, Critical History of England Ecclesiastical and Civil, p. iii. Oldmixon
was not alone in reading Echard this way. Edmund Calamy noted that the zealous
applause for the Revolution in the dedications to the three volumes of Echard’s
History was at cross-purposes with the argument of the main body of the book:
‘you as zealously applaud the principles that would have effectually prevented
it [i.e., the Revolution]: and do what you can to explode those principles upon
which it was bottom’d’ (Calamy, Letter to Mr. Archdeacon Echard, p. 24).
40. Oldmixon, Critical History of England Ecclesiastical and Civil, p. 50.
41. In a second part of the Critical History, Oldmixon engaged in a point-by-point
refutation of Echard’s accounts of reigns from Henry VIII to James II. He
later published his own History of England, covering the period from James I
to George I, in which, as well as continuing his campaign against Echard, he

claimed that some of what had been published as Clarendon’s History of the
Rebellion was a forgery.
42. Grey, Defence of our Antient and Modern Historians, Preface, p. [i].
43. On Rapin, see Trevor-Roper, ‘A Huguenot Historian’. According to Trevor-
Roper, although Hume never cites Rapin’s History of England, ‘it is clear that he
had it continuously in his eye’ (p. 17). On Rapin’s importance for subsequent
historians, ‘up to and including Hume’, see Okie, Augustan Historial Writing,
p. 61ff. On Rapin and Hume, see Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume, and the Identity of
the Historian in Eighteenth-Century England’. According to Sullivan, Rapin’s
success meant that Hume was ‘oblig[ed] to define his historical project and his own
identity as writer of history, in relation to [Rapin]’ (p. 147). See also Baumstark,
‘David Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian’, pp. 146–53, pp. 154–67
(on, especially, the description of set-piece debates in Rapin and in Hume).
44. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. i, p. [i].
45. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. i, p. 181.
46. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. i, p. 178 (Tindal noted that ‘This
is more than is advanced by the antient historians’); vol. i, p. 181.
50. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. ii, pp. 347–9.
51. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. ii, p. 571.
52. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. ii, p. 429.
53. Rapin, Historical Dissertation upon Whig and Tory, transl. Ozell, pp. 51, 78.
55. See Kramnick, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography’; and also Kenyon,
The History Men, ch. 3, on Bolingbroke’s ‘dizzying switch in party ideology’, the
Walpoleans’ embrace of Brady, and the resultant ‘crying need for a new synthesis
of English history’. Smith notes that Bolingbroke’s strategy had a precedent, in
the Tory Francis Atterbury’s polemical writings of the 1690s: see The Gothic
Bequest, pp. 31–8.
56. Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, pp. 50–3.
57. Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, p. 53.
61. In this way, 1688 became, in Gerald Straka’s phrase, ‘year one of English liberty’:
see Straka, ‘1688 as Year One of English Liberty’.
62. The London Journal no. 740 (1 September 1733).
63. The London Journal no. 768 (16 March 1734).
64. The Daily Gazetteer no. 24 (26 July 1735).
66. Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty States and Compar’d, p. 6.

68. Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 23.
69. The London Journal no. 600 (30 January 1731).
70. Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 29.
71. Guthrie, General History of England, vol. iii, p. 380.
75. Despite his scepticism about some of the core principles of historical Whiggism,
Guthrie was a traditionalist in so far as he viewed the Revolution as a restoration
of the original principles of the Saxon constitution. He condemned Brady’s work
as ‘a shameful attempt to support the schemes of his patron King James II’
(vol. i, p. ii).
79. Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, pp. 94–5.
80. Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. iv, pp. 238–9
and fn.
81. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), p. 268 fn. In the edition of 1753 Rapin’s treat-
ment of James and Charles is attributed to ‘his usual malignity and partiality’, and
reference to his judiciousness is dropped (Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects
[1753], vol. iv, p. 239 fn.). Presumably initial work on the History of Great Britain
had quickly impressed on Hume the extent of the differences between his and
Rapin’s historical visions. In June 1753, Hume told James Oswald that ‘Rapin,
whom I had an esteem for, is totally despicable’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig,
vol. i, p. 179). He also called Rapin ‘despicable’ in a July 1757 letter to the Abbé
le Blanc. ‘To tell the truth’, he wrote, ‘I was carry’d away with the usual esteem
pay’d to that historian, till I came to examine him more particularly’ (Letters of
David Hume, ed. Greig, p. 258).
85. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. iv, p. 241.
86. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, vol. i, p. iii.
87. Echard, History of England, vol. i, ‘Preface’.
88. Oldmixon, History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Mary, Queen
Anne and King George I, p. iv.
90. Rapin produced a huge collection of abstracts of the texts collected by Rymer
between 1704 and 1725. It was translated into English in 1726, with the title Acta
Regia.
93. See Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment, p. 110. The
last two clauses of this sentence are a quotation from Wootton. Wootton believes
that Sarpi was an atheist, and sees him as an early exponent of Enlightenment
philosophical history.
96. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, p. 222.
98. Voltaire, An Essay on the Age of Lewis XIV, pp. 9, 10. Voltaire described Charles
I of England and Scotland as ‘too obstinate to desist from his views, and too
weak to put them in execution’: ‘this kind husband and tender father, this good
man and ill-advised monarch, engaged in a civil war, which at last brought him
to a scaffold, where, with his crown, he lost his life’ (pp. 26–7).
99. Voltaire, History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, pp. 177–8.
100. Voltaire, History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, p. 178.
101. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, pp. 59–60.
102. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), vol. i, p. 59; vol. iv, p. 177;
vol. ii, pp. 94–5.
105. Johnson gave as one of the meanings of ‘To interest’: ‘To affect; to move; to
touch with passion; to gain the affections: as, this is an interesting story’. In
‘Of Tragedy’ Hume explained the brevity of Clarendon’s description of the
execution of Charles I in terms of the fact that ‘[h]e himself, as well as the
readers of that age, were too deeply interested in the events, and felt a pain from
the subjects, which an historian and a reader of another age would regard as the
most pathetic and most interesting, and by consequence, the most agreeable’
(Four Dissertations [1757], p. 198).
106. Hume’s balance of detachment and the desire to engage the reader’s sympa-
thy is explored in Phillips, Society and Sentiment, chs. 1–2. See also Hilson,
‘Hume: The Historian as Man of Feeling’; and Burrow, History of Histories,
pp. 334–6.
108. In a reply to a request from an unnamed correspondent, dated only ‘26 July’,
Hume says he has from memory drawn up ‘a list of the writers, who treat of King
James’s reign’. ‘I have omitted such compilers as Rapin, Carte, Echard, &c.’, he
explains. ‘All those I mention are original writers, or contain extracts from such
as are no where else to be met with.’ ‘I have some of these books by me’, he adds
(see Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Waldmann, p. 33; Waldmann provides a
speculative reconstruction of Hume’s list on pp. 34–5).
109. Hume’s friend Henry Mackenzie condemned his lack of attention to manuscript
evidence, but claimed that ‘after all that has been said by republicans against him,
he weighed without prejudice, or it may be safely said without the conscious-
ness of it, the authorities which he consulted on both sides, and the probable
conclusion which the nature of man, the experience of ages, and the conduct of
political men during those ages warranted his drawing’ (Anecdotes and Egotisms,
p. 169).
110. Guthrie, General History of England, vol. i, p. iii.
112. Ralph, History of England during the Reign of K. William, Q. Anne, and King
George I, vol. i, p. iii.
113. Hume did say that Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion ‘does great honour to
his memory; and, except Whitelocke’s Memorials, is the most candid account
of those times, composed by any cotemporary author’ (History of Great Britain,
vol. ii [1757], p. 180).
117. History of England (1778), vol. viii, p. 323. In the previous edition of 1773, the
note mentioned merely ‘Rapin Thoyras, &c.’ (vol. viii, p. 321).
118. See Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. Vickers, pp. 65–7.
119. Compare Harrington, Political Works, ed. Pocock, p. 198: quoted above,
p. 176.
120. Letters of David Hume, ed Greig, vol. i, pp. 167–8.
121. So Hume argued in ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’: see Essays, Moral and
Political (1741), p. 125.
123. Harrington, Political Works, ed. Pocock, p. 660 [The Art of Lawgiving, Bk III]. As
we saw above, p. 178, in the essay on ‘Whether the British Form of Government
Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic’ Hume observed that
Oceana ‘was scarce published when the King was restored’ (Essays, Moral and
Political [1741], p. 94).
124. See the ‘Petition’ of 3 December 1621 reprinted in Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart
Constitution, pp. 43–7.
125. See the ‘Protestation’ of 18 December 1621 reprinted in Kenyon (ed.), The
Stuart Constitution, pp. 47–8.
126. I disagree, therefore, with those, including Forbes and Phillipson, who regard
the first Stuart volume as plainly the most important book of history that Hume
wrote. Forbes’s 1970 Pelican edition of ‘Hume’s History of Great Britain’ did not
include Volume II. According to Phillipson, the reigns of James I and Charles I
were ‘where the intellectual excitement lay’ (David Hume, p. 72).
127. See discussion below, pp. 406–7.
130. See Wootton, ‘Hume: “The Historian”’, pp. 471–2 (Hume ‘is always partial,
even if he is not always on the same side’); and also Forbes, in his review of
Giarizzo’s David Hume, Politico e Storico: ‘Hume is on both sides, or none’
(p. 292).
131. History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), pp. 105–6.

132. History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), pp. 160, 163.
136. Hume, History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), p. 334.
137. Hume, History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), pp. 468–9. The question of Charles
I’s ‘probity and honour’ was the occasion of one of the earliest critiques of Hume’s
History of Great Britain, an Appendix added by the Church of England Whig
Thomas Birch to the second edition of his Inquiry into the Share, Which King
Charles I had in the Transactions of the Earl of Glamorgan [etc] (1755). Birch had
argued that Charles, despite his assertions to the contrary, authorised Glamorgan
to bring over Catholic Irish troops to fight on the Royalist side in 1644–5. Hume
argued the contrary case: History of Great Britain, vol. i, pp. 413–14 fn. See
also letters to Millar about Birch’s Inquiry in Further Letters of David Hume,
ed. Waldmann, pp. 29–32. But by 1755, Hume was changing his mind, and
in successive editions of the History weakened his assertion that Glamorgan’s
commission had been a forgery. In April 1758, he wrote to Millar asking him
‘to prepare the way for an acquaintance between Dr Birch & me’. ‘I have great
esteem for his character’, he explained (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 273). Here is another example of Hume’s desire to cultivate friendly relations
with his intellectual adversaries.
141. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), pp. 60, 70.
147. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), pp. 440–1.
151. There were places in Rapin’s narrative where there seemed to be anticipations
of Hume’s ‘philosophical’ analyses of the politics of the seventeenth century.
A notable instance was the set of remarks, occasioned by the controversies of
1621, on the difficulties of determining the extent of both parliamentary privi-
lege and royal prerogative: see Rapin, History of England (1732), vol. ii, p. 213.
Rapin’s distinction between ‘true Presbyterians’ and ‘State-Puritans’ (vol. ii, pp.
287, 379) is evocative, at the least, of the distinction Hume draws in his apol-
ogy for Archibald Stewart between ‘religious’ and ‘political’ Whigs (see above,
pp. 235–6).

155. History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), pp. 245–6.
162. The complaints were those of the Edinburgh minister Daniel MacQueen in
Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain. See below, p. 361.
164. See the transcription of the manuscript of the draft preface (held by King’s
College, Cambridge) in Mossner, Life of David Hume, pp. 306–7.
165. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), pp. 449–50 fn.
168. J. B. Black fixed, not altogether unfairly, on Hume’s ‘singularly blatant inabil-
ity . . . to understand the workings of the religious mind in history, or to give
Christianity its place among the forces shaping civilization’ (The Art of History,
p. 104). See also Herdt, ‘Artificial Lives’; and O’Brien, Narratives of Enlighten-
ment, p. 81 (‘the peculiar abstraction of Hume’s account of fanaticism in British
history tends to disrupt the causally integrated fabric of the narrative’).
174. See Carte, General History of England, vol. iv, pp. 603–10. Carte’s fourth and
final volume was published in 1755, so Hume cannot be accused of copying from
it in his account of the first two Stuart kings. What Hume surely did use in the
first volume of the History of Great Britain, however, was Carte’s An History of
the Life of James Duke of Ormonde, published in 1735–6. Thomas Birch accuses
Hume of a ‘repetition of Mr. Carte’s assertions and reasonings’ in his discussion
of the Glamorgan controversy (see fn 137 to this chapter): Inquiry into the Share,
Which Charles I had in the Transactions of the Earl of Glamorgan (1756), p. 349.
For an account of Carte as historian, see Monod, ‘Thomas Carte, the Druids,
and British National Identity’.
175. Hume’s concealed, or at least unacknowledged, debts to Royalist sources in
his account of the death of Charles I are listed in vindictive detail by Frances
Palgrave in ‘Hume and his Influence upon History’. John Stuart Mill claimed
that ‘nearly all’ of the History of England is ‘copied from’ Royalist writers,
notably Carte, ‘whom he seems almost to have taken as his text book, but
whom he rarely ventures to quote’ (‘Brodie’s History of the British Empire’,

p. 7).
180. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), pp. 151–2.
181. History of Great Britain, vol. ii (1757), pp. 386, 387.
182. History of Great Britain, vol. i (1754), pp. 297, 298.
183. Mossner and Ransom, ‘Hume and the “Conspiracy of the Booksellers”’,
pp. 178–9.
184. Hamilton, as a member of Edinburgh’s Town Council, had been one of those
who opposed Hume’s candidacy for the University chair in moral philosophy
in 1745. In a letter to William Strahan dated 29 January 1754 he calls Hume’s
book ‘the prittyest thing ever was attempted in the English history’ (quoted in
Mossner and Ransom, ‘Hume and the “Conspiracy of the Booksellers”’, p. 166).
185. See Mossner and Ransom, ‘Hume and the “Conspiracy of the Booksellers”’,
pp. 170–8.
188. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 226. This reference to the indulgence
of good judges is hard to square with what Hume said in ‘My Own Life’ about
the first volume of his History having been ‘assailed by one cry of reproach,
disapprobation, and even detestation’ (Life of David Hume [1777], p. 18).
189. Or perhaps to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. That is the projected conclusion of
the History as described by Hamilton in his January 1754 letter to Strahan (see
Mossner and Ransom, ‘Hume and the “Conspiracy of Booksellers”’, p. 166).
7 The Completion of a History of England

1. Quoted in McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement, pp. 48–9. On the Select
Society, see Emerson, ‘The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland’; and
also Phillipson, ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province’.
2. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 219. It was at this time that Ramsay
painted the first of his two well-known portraits of Hume. Since 2008 it has been
in the possession of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Acc. No. PG 3521).
3. Though he probably was not much concerned himself with the militia issue.
For what can be said about Hume’s attitude towards military organization, see
Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, pp. 60–74.
4. Reid, Correspondence, ed. Wood, p. 31.
5. ‘Order of the Curators of Advocates Library for removing certain Books 27 June
1754’: NLS MS 23159, item 16.

7. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 211. Hume alludes to Hamlet III.i,
ll. 69–78.
8. For reasons that are not altogether clear, Hume was an enthusiastic supporter
and patron of Blacklock, whom he first met in around 1742. See esp. the letter to
Joseph Spence dated 15 October 1754 (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
pp. 200–4), and several other letters promoting Blacklock and encouraging friends
to buy his Poems on Several Occasions.
10. This, at any rate, is the conjecture offered by Mossner to explain Hume’s resig-
nation of the Keepership of the Library: see Life of David Hume, pp. 255–6.
12. See above, pp. 289–97.
13. See McIntosh, Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland. As McIntosh
makes clear, from the 1740s on the main controversies within the Church of
Scotland were not so much doctrinal as ecclesiastical.
14. For accounts of this and the other episodes discussed in this section of the present
chapter, see Sher, Church and University, ch. 2, and Ross, Lord Kames and the
Scotland of his Day, ch. 8.
15. Bonar, Analysis, p. 42.
16. Bonar, Analysis, p. 49.
17. Ritchie (see Life and Writings of David Hume, p. 53) speculates, plausibly enough,
that the Orthodox were inspired in making this move against Hume and Kames by
the presentation in October 1754 of Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works, and David
Mallet, its publisher, to the Grand Jury of Westminster, as ‘tending . . . to the
subversion of religion, government and morality, and being against his Majesty’s
peace’ (Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury, p. 44).
18. See Morren, Annals of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1739–1766,
vol. ii, pp. 54–61.
19. That the ‘Natural History’ was the most important of the dissertations from their
author’s point of view is suggested also by the fact that in ‘My Own Life’ he
wrote that in the interval between the two volumes of The History of Great Britain
‘I published at London, my Natural History of Religion along with some other
small pieces’ (Life of David Hume (1777), p. 21).
21. ‘I am preparing for the Day of Wrath’, he told Ramsay in April or June 1755, ‘and
have already bespoken a number of discreet families, who have promised to admit
me after I shall be excommunicated’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 224).
23. [Blair], Observations upon a Pamphlet, pp. 1–2. Blair’s principal concern in
the Observations is with exposing the ‘misrepresentations and false quotations’
contained in Bonar’s Analysis.
24. Anderson, Infidelity a Proper Object of Censure, pp. 12, 13–14.
25. Anderson, Infidelity a Proper Object of Censure, p. 36.

26. The Edinburgh Review 1 (1755), pp. i, iii.
27. The Edinburgh Review 2 (1755–6), p. 63.
28. For an illuminating study, see Lomonaco, ‘Adam Smith’s “Letter to the Authors
of the Edinburgh Review”’; and also Rasmussen, Problems and Promise of Commer-
cial Society, pp. 59–71.
29. A copy of the second number of the Edinburgh Review with annotations, mostly
stylistic, in Hume’s hand is held in Chuo University Library, Japan. For a dis-
cussion, see Stewart, ‘Introduction’ to Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish
Enlightenment, pp. 5–8. Why Hume marked up his copy of the Review so carefully
is not known.
30. The Edinburgh Review 2 (1755–6), p. 31.
31. Johnston, A View of the Edinburgh Review, pp. 22, 6.
32. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 253. Stanhope, Hume told Stra-
han, ‘convinced me, that either there was some defect in the argument or in its
perspicuity; I forget which’.
33. NLS MS.509. In Hume’s handwriting it is written in this copy that ‘This book
is to be considerd as a manuscript and to be deliverd to Mr Strahan according to
my will’.
34. Grober, in ‘“A Steady Contempt of Life”’, connects Hume’s essay on suicide with
a suicide he witnessed during his time with the British army in the employment
of James St Clair, described in his account of the attack on Lorient.
35. Four Dissertations (NLS MS.509), p. 204.
36. On the argument of ‘Of Suicide’, see Holden, ‘Religion and Moral Prohibition in
Hume’s “Of Suicide”’, and Heydt, ‘Practical Ethics’, pp. 378–81.
37. See below, p. 366, for an early example of Hume’s having been read in precisely
this way.
38. Four Dissertations (NLS MS.509), p. 237. There is a correction in Hume’s hand:
‘from the slightest causes’ was to be inserted between ‘and’ and ‘subject to the
greatest disorders’.
39. Four Dissertations (NLS MS.509), pp. 239–40.
40. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 253. ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the
Immortality of the Soul’ were published in French translation in 1770 in Recueil
Philosophique, vol. ii, pp. 34–69. Hume’s name was not mentioned – the essays
were, simply, ‘Traduite de l’Anglois’. In his will Hume gave William Strahan
permission to publish the two essays, but there is no evidence that he did. They
were first published in English in 1777 in a volume entitled simply Two Essays,
with no author or publisher given. Hume’s name was first attached to them in
a 1783 volume with the title Essays on Suicide, and the Immortality of the Soul,
ascribed to the late David Hume, Esq. . . . With Remarks, Intended as an Antidote to
the Poison Contained in these Performances. For reviews of the 1783 volume, see
Fieser, Early Responses to Hume, vol. 6, pp. 289–341.
41. The story appears to have been fairly well known in the later eighteenth century,
and is repeated in several of the reviews of the 1783 edition of the essays on suicide
and the immortality of the soul cited in the previous note.
42. Macqueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain, p. 306.

43. This was not the only instance of Hume toning down his treatment of religion
in the second edition of The History of Great Britain. In 1754, to give another
example, the principles of Puritanism were described as an ‘engine of rebellion’
(History of Great Britain, p. 160). In 1759, this was changed to ‘engine of religion’
(History of Great Britain, vol. i, p. 150).
44. See Morren, Annals of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1739–1766,
vol. ii, pp. 86–98.
45. The amount of commentary on Hume’s essay is astonishing given the hurried
circumstances of its composition. As Timothy Costelloe puts it, the intensity of
interest in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ ‘reflects . . . the dearth of Hume’s writ-
ings on aesthetics and the place he occupies in the pantheon of great philoso-
phers’ (The British Aesthetic Tradition, p. 52). For a useful survey, see Costelloe,
‘Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Future Research’, as well
as more recent literature in the bibliography to Costelloe, The British Aesthetic
Tradition.
46. Four Dissertations (1757), p. 140. Two pages earlier Hume restated his view that
the difference between virtue and vice lies in the way we are made to feel pleasure
by some kinds of character and uneasiness by others.
48. Hume was fond of port, but not of claret. In the final codicil to his will, Hume
left John Home ‘ten dozen of my old claret at his choice; and one single bottle
of that other liquor called port. I also leave to him six dozen of port, provided
that he attests . . . that he has himself finished that bottle at two sittings: By this
concession, he will at once terminate the only differences, that ever arose between
us, concerning temporal matters’: see ‘Codicil to my Will 7 of August 1776’
(NLS MS 23159 item 24).
50. ‘This work was corrected through the press by the celebrated David Hume;
who at that time had a temporary residence in Lisle-street, Leicester Fields,
where I [i.e., the printer William Bowyer, who printed Gerard’s Essay] fre-
quently visited him’: Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii,
p. 326 fn.
51. Gerard, Essay on Taste, p. 90.
52. Gerard, Essay on Taste, p. 134.
57. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 204 (letter to Joseph Spence).
58. For a recent account of the Douglas affair, see McLean, ‘Introduction’ to John
Home’s Douglas, and also the literature cited in note 14 to this chapter. See also
Mossner, The Forgotten Hume, ch. 3, for Hume’s relationship with John Home.
59. See the Appendix to Anderson, The Use and Abuse of Diversions.
60. [Anon.], Admonition and Exhortation, p. 2.
61. Four Dissertations (1757), p. iii.

62. Four Dissertations (1757), pp. v–vi.
65. A Letter to the Reverend the Moderator, and Members of the Presbytery of Haddington,
p. 4.
66. ‘The General Assembly did indeed judicially disapprove of that liberty taken
by ministers’, Witherspoon would write in 1763; ‘but the censure inflicted on
the offenders was so gentle, that it was then the opinion of many, it would
have a greater tendency to encourage, than to prevent repetition of the offence’
(A Serious Apology, p. 35).
71. Quoted in Sher, Church and University, p. 88.
72. Quoted in Mossner, The Forgotten Hume, p. 201.
73. See below, pp. 440–2, for Hume’s response to Ossian.
75. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 245. In a letter of February 1757
to (probably) the Prussian courtier Christian Ludwig de Brand, Hume writes:
‘Some of these dissertations are attempts to throw light upon the most profound
philosophy: Others contain a greater mixture of polite literature, & are wrote
in a more easy style & manner’ (Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Waldmann,
pp. 40–1).
76. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1758), p. 529.
83. Contrast History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. i, pp. 58–61, with History of Great
Britain (1759), vol. i, pp. 52–3. The omitted paragraphs also featured a contrast
of Lowland and Highland Scotland reminiscent of Hume’s 1748 True Account of
the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart.
84. Contast History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. i, pp. 243–5, with History of Great
Britain (1759), vol. i, pp. 234–5 fn.
85. Contrast History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. i, p. 330, with History of Great
Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 319 fn.
86. This would be Hume’s practice also in the first volume of the History of England,
from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII, which contained
two appendices, one on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners’, the other
on ‘The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government and Manners’.
87. See above, pp. 322–3.

88. History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. i, p. 473 fn; History of Great Britain (1759),
vol. i, p. 463fn.
89. ‘My Own Life’, in Life of David Hume (1777), p. 23.
91. History of Great Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 13 fn.
92. History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. i, p. 159.
93. History of Great Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 149.
Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 150.
Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 153.
96. ‘My Own Life’, in Life of David Hume (1777), p. 22. For studies of Hume’s
revisions of the early volumes of the History, see Mossner, ‘Was Hume a Tory
Historian?’, and Slater, ‘Hume’s Revisions of The History of England ’.
97. There have been few close studies of the Tudor volumes of Hume’s History
of England. But see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 82–7; Phillipson,
David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian, pp. 100–17; Pocock, Barbarism and
Religion, Vol II: Narratives of Civil Government, ch. 14; Slater, ‘Authorship and
Authority in Hume’s History of England ’, ch. 4.
103. Rapin, History of England, vol. ii, p. 155.
105. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 716.
107. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 707. This was not the
only place he would compare Tudor England with Turkey. He also remarked
that in England then, as in Turkey now, ‘[t]he sovereign possessed every power,
except that of imposing taxes’ – a limitation which prompted Elizabeth to look
for an income in the granting of monopolies and patents, a practice which, had
it been continued, would have made England as poor ‘as Morocco, or the coast
of Barbary’ (p. 721).
111. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 55. As Phillipson puts it,
‘so far from marking a return to constitutional government, Henry [VII]’s reign
saw the final destruction of an ancient constitution that had existed on some
form or other since Saxon times’ (David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian,
p. 103).
112. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 737. ‘[T]he history of
England under the Tudors’, Pocock says, ‘would be the history of the interval
between cause and effect’ (Barbarism and Religion, Vol. ii: Narratives of Civil
Government, p. 223).
113. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 611 fn.
116. Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 287.
117. The Monthly Review 20 (1759), pp. 344–64, 400–17, reprinted in Fieser (ed.),
Early Responses to Hume, vol. vii, pp. 195–228: p. 220. Ruffhead’s review was
generally positive. ‘It is but just to acknowledge’, he wrote, ‘that the historian, in
recounting the revolutions of this period, has, upon the whole, proceeded with
great freedom of inquiry, and impartiality of judgment. He has occasionally done
justice to all sects, and all parties: he does not appear to be in the least tinctured
with that bigotry, which disposes men to adopt particular received tenets and
opinions in religion and politics’ (p. 196). Hume’s great failing, according to
Ruffhead, was ‘a passion for singularity’.
118. See the reviews and critiques in Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. viii,
items 34, 36, and 45; and also Francis Jeffrey’s review of Brodie in The Edinburgh
Review 40 (1824): 92–146.
119. Carte, General History of England, vol. iii, pp. 699–700.
120. Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared, pp. 24–5.
122. Carte, General History of England, vol. iii, p. 703.
123. Smollett, Plan of a Complete History of England, p. 2.
124. Hume insinuated in a letter to Elliot of May 1758 that Smollett’s History was
lacking in ‘accuracy of composition’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 278). In several other letters he made it obvious that he was unable to take
Smollett seriously as a historian. On the other hand, the reviews that Smollett
wrote of vol. ii of The History of Great Britain and The History of England,
Under the House of Tudor were generous and perceptive: see Fieser (ed.), Early
Responses to Hume, vol. vi, pp. 145–59 and 182–93. Hume and Smollett later
became friends: see, e.g., Hume to Smollett 21 September 1768, in Letters of
David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, pp. 185–6, in reply to a letter in which Smollett
called Hume ‘one of the best men, & undoubtedly, the best writer of the age’
(quoted by Greig, p. 186, fn.).
125. Smollett, Plan of a Complete History of England, pp. 1–2.
130. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 500 fn.
131. Rapin, History of England, transl. Tindal, vol. ii, pp. 76–7.
132. Oldmixon, History of England, During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI,
Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, p. 338.
136. In ‘Hume and Robertson’s History of Scotland’, Raynor argues that Hume wrote
the (very positive) review of Robertson’s History printed in the February 1759
number of the Critical Review.
137. Robertson, History of Scotland, vol. i, p. 270.
138. See Kidd, ‘The Ideological Significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland ’,
pp. 137–8, 144.
139. New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, p. 46. Hume’s atti-
tude toward Robertson may be contrasted with his response to William Tytler’s
Historical and Critical Enquiry into the Evidence . . . against Mary Queen of Scots
(1760), a work praised by Samuel Johnson in The Gentleman’s Magazine pre-
cisely, one imagines, because it was so abusive of Hume, and of Robertson too.
Perhaps not altogether in earnest, Hume told Lord Elibank in December 1759
that Tytler’s treatment of him was so outrageous that he deserved ‘a sound
beating or even a rope’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 321). See
also letters to Sir Alexander Dick, one dated 26 August 1760, in New Letters
of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, pp. 58–64, and another dated 1
November 1760, in Bongie, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Marian Controversy and
an Unpublished Letter by David Hume’, pp. 247–52. ‘The Marian Contro-
versy . . . ’, Henry Mackenzie observed, ‘has stirred more zeal and bile than any
question of however much importance that I know’ (Anecdotes and Egotisms,
p. 171).
140. Echard, History of England, vol. i, p. 745.
141. Rapin, History of England, vol ii, p. 3.
144. Burnet, History of the Reformation, vol. ii, p. 315. Burnet also discerned provi-
dence in the fact that Mary followed the counsels of Gardiner and not Pole (who
might well have succeeded in returning England to Popery) (p. 343).
145. Echard, History of England, vol. i, p. 787.
150. For the execution of Lady Jane Grey, see History of England, Under the House
of Tudor (1759), p. 365 (ending with a description of how she ‘with a steddy
countenance submitted herself to the executioner’); for the execution of Cran-
mer, see pp. 389–90 (after having held in the flames the hand that had signed his
recantation, ‘he then discovered a serenity in his countenance; and when the fire
attacked his body, he seemed to be wholly insensible of his outward sufferings,

and by the force of hope and resolution to have collected his mind altogether
within itself, and to repel the fury of the flames’, etc.).
152. It was, in fact, very much in the spirit of ‘The Natural History of Religion’, and
may be read as a making explicit of what the ‘Natural History’ left implicit about
the sources and character of Protestant religion.
154. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), p. 117. This line of argument
was what was to be expected from Hume, given what he had said about the role
of an established (Presbyterian) religion in the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’
essay: see above, p. [5.3.4.5].
155. History of England, Under the House of Tudor (1759), pp. 180–1.
158. Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. Vickers, p. 203.
162. In his review of the Tudor History, Ruffhead asserted that here Hume ‘seems in
some degree, to mistake an effect for a cause. We are so far from thinking that the
encrease of the arts had the influence he supposes, that we rather conclude the
foregoing law, with others which followed, to have contributed to the encrease
of the arts, by abolishing that pernicious practice of retaining, and changing
the course of property’ (Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. vi, p. 199).
This is perhaps evidence of how well entrenched the Bacon-Harrington thesis
was.
163. The European dimension of the Tudor volumes of The History of England
is emphasized in O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 82–7. ‘It is in the
Tudor volumes’, O’Brien says, ‘that Hume consciously searches for continuities
between British and European history’ (p. 83).
165. Voltaire, General History and State of Europe, vol. iii, p. 72. On the differences
between Hume’s History and Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs, see Meyer, ‘Voltaire
and Hume as Historians’.
167. ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ was ready to be printed in the summer of 1759:
see Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 317. It was added to remaining
copies of the 1759 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, without
being included in the table of contents.
168. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1760), vol. ii, p. 324. Presumably Hume
was referring to the Newcastle-Pitt ministry of 1757–62. Hume was clear in this
essay that he did not imagine that parties were about to disappear. A coalition
did not imply the complete dissolution of party differences. There was thus no
contradiction between this essay and the argument made in Essays, Moral and
Political that party difference was an essential and inevitable part of post-1688
British politics.
170. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1760), vol. ii, pp. 333–4.
173. See above, pp. 317–8.
175. Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, pp. 191–2.
176. Rapin, History of England, vol. i, p. v.
177. History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry
VII (1762), vol. ii, pp. 445–6. Detailed commentary on the medieval volumes of
Hume’s History is rare, but see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 296–
307; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 88–92; Phillipson, David Hume,
pp. 117–25; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. II, ch. 15; and Smith, The
Gothic Bequest, pp. 75–83. There is much careful attention to the medieval
volumes, albeit from the point of view of a modern political scientist looking for
lessons for modern political science, in Sabl, Hume’s Politics.
178. See Tyrrell, General History, vol. ii, pp. lxvii–civ.
179. Guthrie, General History of England, vol. i, p. 366; and see more particularly the
dissertation ‘Concerning the Norman Engraftments on the English Laws and
Government’, vol. iv, pp. 1383–7.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 76 fn. In the same footnote, Hume also called Carte ‘[a]
late author of great industry and learning, but full of prejudices, and of no
penetration’.
182. Carte, Collection of Several Papers, pp. 1–2.
183. Carte, Collection of Several Papers, p. 3.
184. Carte, General History of England, vol. i, p. 376.
186. Compare History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession
of Henry VII (1762), vol. i, pp. 222–3, with Carte, General History of England,
vol. i, pp. 480–1.
187. Hallam, review of John Lingard’s History of England, Edinburgh Review 53 (1831),
p. 15.
188. Whitaker, History of Manchester, vol. ii, p. 312. Whitaker was offended, though,
by the brevity of Hume’s account of Britain prior to the Roman invasion.
189. Dalrymple, Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain,
pp. ix–x.
190. Kames, Historical Law-Tracts, vol. i, p. vii.
191. On Darymple in relation to Montesquieu’s history of feudalism, see Fletcher,
Montesquieu and English Politics, pp. 84–5.
192. Hume begins his appendix on ‘The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government
and Manners’ by acknowledging how much he will take from Montesquieu,
Robertson, and Dalrymple (History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar
to the Accession of Henry VII [1762], vol. i, p. 397).
193. Robertson, History of Scotland, vol. i, pp. 12, 14.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 163.
195. According to Voltaire, it was ‘certain’ that ‘William [I] abolished all the laws
of the country, in order to introduce those of Normandy’ (General History and
State of Europe, vol. i, p. 142).
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 297.
VII (1762), vol. ii, pp. 277, 276.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 347.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 10.
VII (1762), vol. i, pp. 82, 85.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 63.
202. Carte, General History of England, vol. ii, p. 246; see also vol. i, pp. 361–2.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 148.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 163.
205. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, transl. Cohler et al., pp. 165–6 [Bk. 11,
ch. 6].
206. Hale, History of the Common Law, pp. 88–9.
207. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, pp. 158–65 [III.ii.ix: SBN 549–
53].
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 60.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 225.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 319.
VII (1762), vol. i, pp. 387–8.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 388.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 422.
214. Rapin, History of England, vol. i, p. 275.

215. Guthrie, General History of England, vol. i, p. 677.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 423.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 424.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 404.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 407.
VII (1762), vol. i, p. 410.
223. Brady, Historical Treatise of Cities, p. 17.
224. Rapin, History of England, vol i, pp. 333, 346.
VII (1762), vol. ii, pp. 46–7.
227. Carte, General History of England, vol. ii, p. 151.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 89.
230. Brady, Introduction to the Old English History, p. 25.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 91.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 154.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 240.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 293.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 91 fn.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 72.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 121.
238. Robertson, History of Scotland, vol. i, pp. 6ff.
239. History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII
(1762), vol. ii, p. 108. Robertson struck a similarly sceptical note about Wallace:
see History of Scotland, vol. i, p. 10.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 169.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 351.
VII (1762), vol. ii, pp. 280–1.
VII (1762), vol. ii, pp. 377, 382.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 398.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 431.
248. Hume was criticized for unthinkingly accepting historical orthodoxy, concerning
Perkin Warbeck’s claim to be one of the princes supposedly murdered by Richard
III, by Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard
the Third, pp. 93–102. A reply by Hume to Walpole, in defence of the view that
Warbeck was an impostor, was printed – in French – at the end of a review
of the Historic Doubts in vol. ii of Mémoires Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne
(1769), pp. 26–35; it was added – in English – as an endnote to Chapter 26 in
the 1770 edition of The History of England (vol. iii, pp. 479–83). ‘Nothing can be
a stronger proof how ingenious and agreeable that gentleman’s [i.e., Walpole’s]
pen is’, Hume observed, ‘than his being able to make an enquiry concerning a
remote poin of English antiquities, an object of general conversation’ (p. 383).
249. Bolingbroke, Remarks on English History, p. 102.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 440.
VII (1762), vol. ii, p. 441.
252. See Todd, ‘David Hume: A Preliminary Bibliography’, p. 198. In his Life and
Writings of David Hume, Ritchie noted ‘that booksellers generally set down the
ensuing year in the title-pages of all books ready for sale in or after the month of
November’ (pp. 8–9 fn).
253. Carte, Collection of Several Papers, p. 2.
255. History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688
(1762), vol. iii, p. 223 fn.
(1762), vol. iv, p. 94 fn (footnote added); vol. iv, p. 96 fn (one of the considerations
in favour of the authenticity of the Casket Letters is dropped).
(1762), vol. iv, p. 220; contrast with History of England, Under the House of Tudor
(1759), p. 622.
(1762), vol. iv, pp. 314–15 fn.
259. Here, as often in this chapter and in Chapter 6, I follow Forbes: ‘In Hume, there
is no single ancient constitution, but several, constituting a progressive series’
(Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 267).
260. As J. B. Stewart puts it, by demonstrating the invalidity of party political
appeals to history, ‘Hume annihilates much of the old justification for studying
the past’. Stewart goes on to remark that ‘It is notable that when he had fin-
ished his essentially negative task, he did not undertake another historical work’
(The Moral and Political Thought of David Hume, p. 299).
(1762), vol. v, p. 33; contrast with History of Great Britain (1759), vol. i, p. 31.
(1762), vol. v, p. 114.
(1762), vol. v, p. 181.
(1762), vol. vi, p. 395; contrast with History of Great Britain (1759), vol. ii,
p. 395.
267. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 377. Hume came to dislike the 1763
octavo edition intensely. Eight years later Millar’s company still had copies of
this edition, and it got in the way of a wholly new edition of the History in the
early 1770s: see below, pp. 456–8.
8 Paris, London, Edinburgh

1. See Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, pp. 240–1. £4,000 in the mid-
eighteenth century was equivalent in purchasing power to around £500,000
today.
2. This is the only one of Hume’s homes in Edinburgh still to survive. He let it to
Hugh Blair while he was away in Paris. When he moved to the New Town in
1771, he let it to James Boswell. He gave his sister Katherine the life rent of the
flat in his will.
4. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 352. The project of an ecclesiastical
history was, he told David Mallet in November 1762, ‘rather founded on an idea
I was fond of, than on any serious, at least present purpose of executing it’ (Letters
of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p 369). As will be seen below, p. 414, the rumour
that Hume would one day undertake such a project followed him to Paris. For a
speculative account of what an ecclesiastical history by Hume might have looked
like, see Emerson, ‘Hume and Ecclesiastical History’.
5. See Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 380; and below, pp. 444–5.
6. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p 223.
7. Voltaire, Universal History . . . With a Supplement Carrying the History to the Peace
of Versailles, vol. iv, p. 317.
8. Quoted in Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, pp. 501–2.
9. Jones, The Great Nation, pp. 244–5.
10. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, ed. Rusell Barker, vol. i,
p. 209 (quoted in Mossner, Life of David Hume, p. 435). Mossner speculates
(pp. 436–7), without any evidence, that the Comtesse de Boufflers played a part
in the issuing of the invitation to Hume.
12. See New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, pp. 89–130, and
pp. xx–xxv.
13. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 447. Hume was exaggerating. He surely
read more seriously than this suggests. For instance, he told William Robertson
in December 1763 that he had found time to ‘look into’ the Memoirs of James II,
kept in the Scots College in Paris, and had made ‘great discoveries’: see Letters
of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 417; see also letters to Andrew Millar (vol. i,
pp. 418, 426, 433, 444), and to the Earl of Hardwicke (pp. 453–5). What the
Memoirs revealed about the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 changed Hume’s view
of Charles II: ‘I thought his careless negligent temper had renderd him incapable
of bigotry; and that he had floated all his life between deism and popery’, he
told Hardwicke; ‘But I find, that Lord Halifax knew better his sentiments, when
he says, that the King only affected irreligion in order to cover his zeal for
the Catholic religion’ (p. 454). In ‘Hume and the 1763 Edition of his History
of England’, Van Holthoon calls this Hume’s only important archival discovery
(p. 146) – and notes that Hume failed to make substantive alterations to the
History in the light of it. According to Van Holthoon, this is evidence that ‘his
mind was not set on making historical discoveries, but on polishing the message
as he originally had conceived it’ (p. 147).
14. Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, pp. 6–9.
15. Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, p. 23 [‘pour les
ages, pour l’universalité des temps et des lieux’].
16. Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, p. 252.
18. In a letter to Walpole dated 20 November 1766, Hume wrote that his opinion
was that d’Alembert ‘was a man of superior parts, not a superior genius’ (Letters of
David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 110). His ‘superior parts’ were probably most
obvious in ‘the works which I suppose neither you nor I have read, his Geometry
and Algebra’. ‘I agree with you’, he continued, ‘that in some respects Rousseau
may more properly be called a superior genius; yet he is so full of extravagances,
that I am inclined to deny him even that appellation’.
19. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 423. Voltaire’s reply to Hume came to
light in a sale of manuscripts in 2006. ‘I have been your admirer since I read your
works’, he told Hume, ‘and I was your friend in my heart. These sentiments are
due to one who in the investigation of truth had sagacity enough to find it, and
enough of bold assurance to tell it. I congratulate and envy my countrymen who
may improve in your conversation’: see Cronk, ‘Une Lettre de Voltaire à David
Hume’, p. 369.
20. For an account that turns the relationship between Hume and the Comtesse into
the stuff of a sentimental novel, see Mossner, Life of David Hume, ch. 32.
21. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 497–9. A year earlier, in April 1764,
he had told Blair he was ‘fix’d at Paris for some time, and to judge by probabilities,
for life’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 437).
22. For the letters from Helvétius and d’Alembert, see Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent
Persons Addressed to David Hume, pp. 13, 183; for the letter from Grimm, see
Bongie, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution, p. 25.
24. Gibbon, Autobiographies, ed. Murray, p. 204. Bongie describes well how the
philosophes saw, or wanted to be able to see, Hume as ‘yet another soldier in the
Voltairian war of propaganda against “l’infame”’ (David Hume, Prophet of the
Counter-Revolution, p. 25) – and how in fact he was read more closely by religious
traditionalists.
26. Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, p. 130 [’un sujet
dont nous avons quelques fois disputé].
30. Burton (ed.), Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, p. 155 [‘[d]ans
une nation où le commerce et l’industrie sont libres et animés’].
31. See Meek, ‘Introduction’ to Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, p. 18.
32. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 180. Turgot had given vivid expression
to his confidence in the human capacity for endless progress and self-improvement
in his 1750 address to the Sorbonne, A Philosophical Review of the Successive
Advances of the Human Mind. The discovery of printing plays a significant role
in Turgot’s argument: ‘At once the treasures of antiquity, rescued from the dust,
pass into all hands, penetrate into every part of the world, bear light to the talents
which were being wasted in ignorance, and summon genius from the depths of
its retreats’ (Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, p. 57).
36. Political Discourses (1752), p. 24. It is just possible – though there is no evidence
at all – that ‘Of Luxury’ was in some sense a reply to the Rousseau’s 1750 Discours
sur les Sciences et les Arts.
37. Rousseau, Social Contract, transl. Gourevitch, p. 91 [III.iv].
39. History of Great Britain (1754–7), vol. ii, p. 443; History of England, From the
Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1762), vol. vi, p. 441.
40. Rousseau, Social Contract, transl. Gourevitch, p. 114 [III.xv].

45. Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, vol. xxx, p. 30
[§5274] [‘[J]e me faisois une sorte de gloire, montrer un bel example aux gens
de lettres dans l’union sincére de deux hommes dont les principes étoient si
différens’].
47. Scottish National Portrait Gallery: Acc. Nos. 820 (Rousseau) and PG 1057
(Hume). Rousseau claimed in his long 10 July 1766 letter to Hume that the
portrait was Hume’s idea (which Hume denies in the Exposé Succinct), and that
‘Cette fantasie me parut trop affichée, et j’y trouvai je ne sais quel air d’ostentation
qui ne me plut pas’ (Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh,
vol. xxx, p. 31 [§5274]). Later, in Rousseau, Juge de Jean Jacques, Rousseau claimed
that Ramsay’s portrait was subsequently altered by his enemies so that ‘in place
of the terrifying and vigorous man painted initially, little by little they made a
petty impostor, a petty liar, a petty swindler, a denizen of taverns and low places’
(Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, transl. Kelly and Bush, p. 94). For commentary
on the two portraits, see Coltman, ‘The “Peculiar Colouring of the Mind”’,
and Mankin, ‘Authority, Success and the Philosopher: Hume vs Rousseau’,
pp. 188–94.
49. Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, vol. xii, p. 217
[§2093] [‘M. Hume a dit; voila ce que fait l’intolérance et ce que fait le despotisme;
il a vû par toutes ses faces l’objet que la passion ne m’a laissé voir que par un
côté’].
50. For some suggestive observations on the way in which his relationship with Hume
provided an example of how ‘Rousseau’s anxious attempts to assure himself that
he is loved produce the contrary result’, see Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Transparency and Obstruction, pp. 134–7, 159.
51. Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, vol. xix, pp. 99–102
[§5151].
52. Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, vol. xix, p. 275
[§5242].
53. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, pp. 55–7.
54. Correspondance Complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, vol. xxx, pp. 29–46
[§5274]. In The Philosophers’ Quarrel Zaretsky and Scott suggest that Rousseau’s
certainty about having been betrayed by Hume was rooted not in any kind of
publicly available evidence, but rather in pure feeling (pp. 167ff.). They portray
the quarrel between Hume and Rousseau as a kind of representation in minia-
ture of the struggle between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.
For an account of the rhetorical dynamics involved in the controversy, see
Goodman, ‘The Hume-Rousseau Affair: From Private Querelle to Public Procès’;

for a contrasting account, see Lilti, Le monde des salons, pp. 342–55.
57. Letter from Guichard de Meinieres, 7 July 1766: NLS MS 23153, item 47. The
letter expressed incredulity at this characterization of Rousseau.
59. In fact, the Confessions ended with Rousseau’s departure from Switzerland in
late 1765. According to Mossner, it is ‘an inscrutable mystery’ that Rousseau’s
autobiography ‘significantly stops short with 1765, the very moment before he
put himself under the protection of Hume’ (The Forgotten Hume, p. 13; see ch. 6
of The Forgotten Hume for Mossner’s fullest account of the Hume-Rousseau
relationship).
60. Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau
(1766), p. viii; cp. Exposé Succinct de la Contestation qui s’est Élevée entre M. Hume
et M. Rousseau (1766), p. xii.
74. Like ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ was first published
in 1759, but was first included in the table of contents of Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects in the 1760 edition: see Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 317.
75. Hume’s disagreement with Tucker is discussed in Hont, ‘The “Rich Country-
Poor Country” Debate’, pp. 283–9.
76. Tucker, The Case of Going to War for the Sake of Procuring, Enlarging, or Securing
of Trade, Considered in a New Light.
78. For a comprehensive discussion of this issue, see Hont, ‘Jealousy of Trade: An
Introduction’, esp. pp. 6–8.
81. For the context necessary to understanding the significance of Hume’s argument,
see Robertson, ‘Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe’, esp. 368–73.
82. Tucker, The Case of Going to War for the Sake . . . of Trade, pp. 40–1 (‘I ask
farther, What will be the conduct of foreign nations when your goods are
brought to their markets? They will never enquire, whether you were victorious
or not; but only, Whether you will sell cheaper, or at least as cheap as others?).
83. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 115.
84. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1764), vol. i, pp. 391–4. On the signifi-
cance of the revisions to ‘Of Public Credit’, see Hont, ‘The Rhapsody of Public
Debt’, pp. 340–6.
88. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, p. 58.
89. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 161; cp. Burke.
90. For a full account, see Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty.
91. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, p. 383. It might have been Wilkes
who made possible the unauthorized publications of the essays ‘Of Sucide’ and
‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’. While in Paris as a fugitive from British justice,
he told Hume that Andrew Millar had given him a copy of the Dissertations
with those two essays still included. ‘It was imprudent in you to intrust him
with that copy’, Hume wrote to Millar (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 444). Millar got hold of the book when Wilkes’s library was put up for sale
and destroyed ‘the two obnoxious dissertations’, as Hume had called them in the
same letter. But Wilkes might have made his own copies of them beforehand.
99. See esp. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George
III, ch. 12; and also ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’.
100. See, e.g., Catherine Macaulay’s critique of Burke in Observations on a Pamphlet,
entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
101. Contrast Essays and Treatise on Several Subjects (1768), vol. i, p. 558, with Essays
and Treatises on Several Subjects (1770), vol. ii, p. 326.
102. Contrast Essays and Treatise on Several Subjects (1768), vol. i, pp. 560–1, with
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1770), vol. ii, p. 328.
103. Contrast Essays and Treatise on Several Subjects (1768), vol. i, p. 12, with Essays
and Treatises on Several Subjects (1770), vol. i, p. 13.
108. See Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), vol. iii, p. 135 [III.ii.vii: SBN 535–6];
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, vol ii, pp. 270–1.
109. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1777), vol. i, pp. 38–9. J. B. Stewart
notes that ‘Hume increasingly in his later writings . . . emphasizes . . . the extent
to which the actualization of the principles of government comes about, not by
human insight and design, but rather, accidentally, as an unanticipated conse-
quence of less worthy human strivings’ (Moral and Political Thought of David
Hume, p. 158).
112. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 306. The claim in this letter that
republicanism was only viable in a small state is puzzling in light of the argument
to the contrary in ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’: see p. 287 above.
115. Quoted in Harris, ‘Introduction’ to Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, p. 205.
116. This was the speech published with the title Conciliation with the Colonies. ‘As
long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as
the sanctuary of liberty . . . ’, Burke told his fellow MPs, ‘wherever the chosen
race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards
you’ (p. 60).
118. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 288. Franklin had been Hume’s guest
in Edinburgh for several weeks in the autumn of 1771.
121. For some searching reflections on Hume’s position on the American ques-
tion, and what it tells us about Hume’s political thought taken as a whole, see
Pocock, ‘Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North
Briton’.
123. Price, Political Writings ed. Thomas, pp. 47–8.
124. Price, Political Writings ed. Thomas, pp. 23–4.
125. See Tucker’s The True Interest of Great-Britain set forth in regard to the Colonies,
and also his earlier Letter from a Merchant in London, to his Nephew in America,
both in Four Tracts (1774).
126. Smith, Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell, Skinner, and Todd, p. 947.
127. As it turned out, the national debt jumped from £131 million in 1775 to £245
million in 1783: see Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 115.
128. See Popkin, ‘Hume and de Pinto’ and ‘Hume and Isaac de Pinto: Five Unpub-
lished Letters’.
129. De Pinto, Essay on Circulation and Credit, p. 42.
130. History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688
(1778), vol. v, pp. 475–6.
131. Price, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the
War with America, printed with Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, p. xiii. Pocock calls
Hume’s conviction that the national debt would in the end subvert the entire
fabric of British society ‘a blockage in his economic thinking’: ‘Hume and the
American Revolution’, p. 139.
134. See the letter to Andrew Stuart of Torrance, dated 1 August 1775, printed
in Baumstark, ‘The End of Empire and the Death of Religion’, pp. 256–
7.
135. See Bossenga, ‘Financial Origins of the French Revolution’. In Before the Deluge,
Michael Sonenscher shows that there was plenty of anxiety in ancien régime
France very similar to Hume’s worry about the future of Britain – and argues
that the revolution of 1789 may be seen as a solution to the problem of how a
bankrupt state might meet its obligations both to its creditors and to its citizens.
Sonenscher quotes George Chalmers’ rather Humean reply to Hume’s worries:
Britain’s future stability was guaranteed by ‘our having a greater number of
people who are better instructed and more industrious, who employ greater
capital to more profitable purposes, who derive an energy from the constitution
and place a confidence in their rulers’ (p. 56). ‘Hume’, according to Chalmers,
‘saw every body busy about him, yet did not perceive that they moved’ (p. 55).
As Sonenscher goes on to show, the fullest reply to Hume’s pessimism about the
political consequences of the national debt was Sir James Steuart’s 1767 Inquiry
into the Principles of Political Oeconomy.
136. On 6 September 1769, The Caledonian Mercury printed a poem by ‘Philocalos’
entitled ‘To D- H-, Esq; on his return to Edinburgh’. ‘O thou to Albion’s
deathless honour born,/ Whom worth, wit, wisdom, eloquence, adorn’, it begins.
Livingston speculates that the author was John Home: see ‘A Poem by Philocalos
Celebrating Hume’s Return to Edinburgh’.
138. ‘My Own Life’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 30.
141. Boswell recounts the conversation in ‘An Account of My Last Interview with
David Hume, Esq’: see Boswell in Extremes, pp. 11–15. Somehow he manages
to convince himself that Hume ‘perhaps was not without some hope of a future
state, and that his [i.e., Hume’s] spirits were supported by a consciousness (or
at least a notion) that his conduct had been virtuous’ (p. 15).
142. Quoted in Burton, Life and Correspondence of David Hume, vol. ii, p. 439. Macken-
zie relates that Hume never introduced ‘the theoretical principles of moral or
religious truth’ into conversation: ‘On the contrary, when at any time the conver-
sation tended that way, he was desirous rather of avoiding any serious discussion
on matters which he wished to confine to the graver and less dangerous consid-
eration of cool philosophy. He had, it might be said, . . . two minds: one which
indulged in the metaphysical scepticism which his genius could invent . . . ;

another, simple, natural, and playful [etc]’ (pp. 438–9).
143. For exactly what Hume was reading by Lucian, see Baier, ‘Hume’s Deathbed
Reading’. With Emilio Mazza’s help, Baier establishes that it was not The Dia-
logues of the Dead but Kataplous, ‘the downward journey’.
144. One Scottish book that did not please Hume was his friend Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society. In 1759, Hume told Smith he was sure that
it would make ‘an admirable book’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i,
p. 304) and told Robertson that it had ‘a great deal of genius and fine writing’
(p. 308). But he was disappointed when he read the manuscript of the Essay
in 1766. He told Hugh Blair that it was ‘not . . . fit to be given to the public;
neither on account of the style nor the reasoning; the form nor the matter’
(vol. ii, p. 12). The reason why Hume judged it so harshly might be explained
by Elizabeth Montagu’s judgment, recounted by Hume in a letter to Robertson
in March 1767, that ‘it seems almost impossible that anyone could write such
a style except a Scotchman’ (vol. ii, p. 132). For discussion, see Raynor, ‘Why
Did David Hume Dislike Adam Ferguson’s Essay?’.
147. Henry, History of Great Britain . . . Written on a New Plan, vol. i, p. iv. Henry
recycled his prospectus as a ‘General Preface’ to his History.
149. The review is transcribed in Mossner, ‘Hume as Literary Patron’, pp. 374–82.
As Mossner recounts, in the event, Hume’s review was rejected by journal’s
editor, Gilbert Stuart, who, for unknown reasons, detested Henry and wanted a
much more negative review than Hume was prepared to write.
150. Mossner, ‘Hume as Literary Patron’, p. 374.
151. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, pp. 309–11. ‘[A]s it seems to me that
your countrymen, for almost a whole generation, have given themselves up to
barbarous and absurd faction’, Hume told Gibbon, ‘I no longer expected any
valuable production ever to come from them’. In a letter to Smith of 1 April 1776
congratulating him on The Wealth of Nations, Hume returned to this theme. ‘It
is lamentable’, he writes, ‘to consider how much that nation [i.e., England] has
declined in literature during our time’ (p. 312).
152. For a general account of the Ossian affair, see Stafford, ‘Introduction’ to Gaskill
(ed.), The Poems of Ossian. On Hume’s shifting attitudes to Macpherson and his
poems, see Raynor, ‘Ossian and Hume’.
155. See especially the letters to Hugh Blair dated 19 September 1763 and 6 October
1763: Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. i, pp. 398–401, and 403–4. Blair’s
Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal had been published
earlier in 1763. It is likely that Hume’s change of mind was caused by time spent
in London en route to Paris. In London, he told Blair, ‘I often hear [the poems]
totally rejected with disdain and indignation, as a palpable and most impudent
forgery’ (p. 399).
156. NLS MS 23159, item 17. Hume referred to Macpherson’s translation of the
Iliad, published in 1773, and ‘received with that universal derision, which it
merited’ (p. 15).
157. NLS MS 23159, item 17, p. 5.
158. NLS MS 23159, item 17, p. 18.
159. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, pp. 310, 311.
162. For a sympathetic explanation of why Beattie was so upset by Hume, see Phillip-
son, ‘James Beattie and the Defence of Common Sense’.
163. Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, pp. 496–7.
164. Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, p. 502.
165. In the Advertisement Hume claims that the Treatise was ‘a work which the
Author had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published
not long after’. This was an exaggeration. There is no more reason to believe
that Hume planned the Treatise while still at college than there is to believe that
he wrote and published it ‘not long after’ he stopped being a student.
166. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1777), vol. ii, p. [i]. He told Strahan that
the advertisement ‘is a compleat answer to Dr Reid and to that bigotted silly
fellow, Beattie’ (Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, p. 301). In line with
his maxim of not responding to criticism, Hume never replied to Beattie. He
probably thought that the mockery of the Essay to be found in the anonymous
Specimen of the Scots Review (1774) was the best kind of answer. There it is
alleged that Beattie only wrote the Essay on Truth because Hume had expressed
an unfavourable opinion of his poetry. There follows much ridicule of Beat-
tie’s efforts: ‘In this precious morsel of controversy, the author advances many
uncommon truths; for instance, he admits that Mr. Hume is a good historian;
but, in the same breath, assures us, he is lamentably ignorant of human nature’
(pp. 4–5); and so on.
167. Forbes, Beattie and his Friends, p. 66.
168. Carlyle, The Tendency of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland, p. 37.
169. Mossner, ‘Hume as Literary Patron’, p. 382.
171. ‘[F]or Gods sake let that [i.e., ‘certain Dialogues’] be a posthumous work, if ever
it shall see the light: tho’ I really think it had better not’: Blair to Hume, 29
September [1763]. NLS MS 23153, item 51.
174. For some suggestions as to the nature of Smith’s scruples, see Campbell
and Ross, ‘The Theory and Practice of a Wise and Virtuous Man’, pp. 68–
72.
176. See his letter to Smith, 10 June 1776: Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Mossner
and Ross, p. 199.
177. ‘Codicil to my Will 7 of August 1776.’ (NLS MS 23159 item 24). Hume’s
request that his nephew publish the Dialogues if no one else had subjoins Hume’s
signature to the main part of the codicil.
178. Strahan to John Hume, 3 March 1777: NLS MS 23158, item 44. Strahan added
that if the book were published by him, ‘I might be suspected of doing it from
interested motives, which, on this occasion, have no place with me’.
179. Blair to Strahan 3 Aug 1779: EUL MS. Dc. 2. 7610 [transcription]. ‘They are
exceedingly elegant’, Blair continued. ‘They bring together some of his most
exceptionable reasonings; but the principles themselves were all in his former
works.’
180. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, ed. Den Uyl, vol. ii, p. 107.
184. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), pp. 39–40.
189. Philo is thus not any of the ‘three kinds of atheists’ listed by Hume in one of
the ‘Early Memoranda’: ‘1. Who deny the existence of a God. Such as Diagoras,
Theodorus. 2. Who deny a providence, such as the Epicureans & the Ionic Sect.
3. Who deny the freewill of the deity, such as Aristotle, the Stoics, &c.’ (Mossner,
‘Hume’s Early Memoranda, p. 501). Nor does he argue for Strato’s atheism, said
by Hume in the Memoranda to be ‘the most dangerous of the antient [forms of
atheism], holding the origin of the world from nature, or a matter endu’d with
activity’ (p. 501). Philo’s concerns are always epistemological: his point is always
that there is no evidence for this or that theory concerning the fundamental
metaphysical structure of the universe.
192. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), pp. 75, 89.
193. I agree with Kemp Smith when he says that, when seen in an eighteenth-century
context, atheism involved ‘a much more positive view of reality than Hume
himself claimed to possess’ (‘Introduction’ to his edition of the Dialogues, p. 37).
I am less comfortable than Kemp Smith is with talk of ‘Hume’s theism’, but,
all the same, he seems to me to be essentially correct when he says that Hume’s
position involves ‘a recognition of the mysterious character of all the ultimate
modes of existence, and a refusal to allow as either possible or needful any
asseverations of a more positive nature’ (p. 38). Alexander Carlyle’s remark that
Hume ‘was professedly a sceptic, though by no means an atheist’ (Autobiography,
p. 286) also sounds right to me. I do not think, though, that this is to say, as Gaskin
does, that Hume was a kind of deist, a believer in ‘a god whose sole attribute is
an intelligence which may bear some remote analogy to the intelligence of man’
(Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, p. 223).
194. Maclaurin, Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, p. 381. For a
reading of the argument of the Dialogues as ‘aimed primarily at the Newtonian
attempt to bring about a rapprochement between science and religion’, see
Hurlbutt, Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument.
p. 207.
196. See Stewart, ‘Arguments for the Existence of God: The British Debate’,
pp. 719–20.
202. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), pp. 128, 129.
p. 207.
208. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), pp. 135–8 (‘All men of sound reason
are disgusted with verbal disputes . . . ’) and pp. 151–2 (‘If the whole of Natural
Theology . . . ’).
212. In another late addition, printed as a footnote in the 1779 edition but probably
intended for the main body of the text (here I agree with Price: see p. 250, n. 5, of
his edition of the Dialogues), Hume portrayed the disagreement between atheists
and theists as an instance of the ‘merely verbal’ difference between ‘sceptics’ and
‘dogmatists’ more generally. Both sceptics and dogmatists allow that there are
many difficulties ‘both with regard to the senses and to all sciences’; both also
allow that ‘we lie under an absolute necessity, notwithstanding these difficulties,
of believing, and reasoning with regard to these subjects, and even of frequently
assenting with confidence and security’ (pp. 138–9 fn). The difference is that,
while the sceptic places the emphasis upon the difficulties, the dogmatist places
it upon the necessity. This can perhaps be regarded as Hume’s final attempt to
clarify the character and import of his scepticism.

228. History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688
(1773), vol. iii, p. 400. The note is at pp. 460–4: in it, Hume remarked that
‘If we consider the magnificent and elegant manner in which the Venetian and
other Italian noblemen then lived, we shall not wonder that they considered the
ultramountaine nations as barbarous’ (p. 464).
231. Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. ii, pp. 243, 304. See Rousseau, Oeuvres,
‘Préface’: ‘un ecrivain un peu soigneux de sa gloire n’a jamais trop de la moitié
pour faire un livre, et de l’autre moitié pour le corriger’ (p. ii).
Afterword: Death and Character

2. National Archives of Scotland [NAS], CC8/8/125, p. 863.
3. NAS CC8/8/125, pp. 866–7.
4. NAS CC8/8/125, p. 867. Perhaps Katherine Home had decided that a hundred
books was all she wanted.
5. ‘Codicil to my Will 7 of August 1776’: NLS MS 23159, item 24.
11. Brown says that ‘My Own Life’ ‘was the result of a spontaneous outpouring of
memory and the product of a single day’s work’ (‘Introduction’ to David Hume:
My Own Life, p. 15). But as the manuscript text (reproduced in Brown’s edition
of My Own Life) makes clear, Hume did not let all of the spontaneous outpourings
of his memory stand uncorrected.
15. It is very strange also that there is no mention at all in ‘My Own Life’ of Essays
and Treatises on Several Subjects. For discussion, see Sher, Enlightenment and the
Book, pp. 54–5.
16. The manuscript of ‘My Own Life’ indicates that ‘patriot and courtier’ was added
at some point after the writing of the first draft, as if Hume later remembered
further sections of society who had detested his first volume of history.
17. ‘My Own Life’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 18–19.
18. ‘My Own Life’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 32–3.
19. Price notes that in the eighteenth century ‘autobiographies published in their
author’s lifetime or shortly after their deaths are surprisingly uncommon. Let-
ters, diaries, biographies, and memorabilia abound, but not autobiographies’
(‘Introduction’ to Horne, Letter to Adam Smith, pp. x–xi).
20. Quoted in Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 439.
21. See Gibbon, Autobiographies, ed. Murray, pp. 150–2.
22. For a comparison of ‘My Own Life’ with Franklin’s Autobiography, see Hanley,
‘Hume’s Last Lesson’.
23. That tomb, it is worth noting, was, when it was built, the only significant mon-
umental structure on Calton Hill. It would have been a prominent part of the
view to the north-east of the city. Smith is reported as having said that it was ‘the
greatest piece of vanity I ever saw in my friend Hume’ (quoted in Greig, David
Hume, p. 410).
25. Quoted in Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. ix, pp. 264–5, in an announce-
ment of the publication of ‘My Own Life’. On the eighteenth-century ‘cult of the
deathbed scene’, see Miller, Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought, ch. 1.
26. There was nothing obviously fallacious or unfair, in other words, about arguments
ad hominem: see Haakonssen, ‘The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy’,
p. 17.
27. See Mankin, ‘My Own Life de David Hume’, esp. pp. 258–9; and also Guimares,
‘Skeptical Tranquility and Hume’s Manner of Death’, esp. p. 129.
28. Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, p. 363.
29. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Womersley, pp. 314–15. This was in October 1769.
It is not impossible that Boswell told Hume what Johnson had said.
33. ‘Letter from Smith to Strahan’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 41.
36. ‘Letter from Smith to Strahan’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 50–1.
38. ‘Letter from Smith to Strahan’, in The Life of David Hume (1777), p. 62. On
Smith’s letter to Strahan, see Ainslie, ‘Hume’s “Life” and the Virtues of the
Dying’, pp. 134–8, and Schliesser, ‘The Obituary of a Vain Philosopher’. For
another account of Hume’s imaginary conversation with Charon, see the letter
from William Cullen to John Hunter in Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume,
vol. ix, pp. 291–3.
39. Hume’s brother John, on the other hand, was sure that the separate publication of
‘My Own Life’ was contrary to the terms of Hume’s will. He worried that it was
bound to look like ‘the work of any other person than [Hume] himself ’ (quoted
by Brown, ‘Introduction’ to David Hume: My Own Life, p. 24).
43. The very first publication of ‘My Own Life’, along with the ostensible letter from
Smith to Strahan, was in the January 1777 number of The Scots Magazine. It is
not known how this came about. For suggestions, see Todd, ‘The First Printing
Hume’s Life (1777)’, pp. 124–5 and Brown, ‘Introduction’ to David Hume: My
Own Life, pp. 23–4.
45. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Womersley, p. 585.
46. Horne, Letter to Adam Smith, p. ii.
47. Horne Letter to Adam Smith, pp. 10–11.
48. Agutter, On the Difference between the Deaths of the Righteous and the Wicked,
p. 11.
49. Wesley, ‘On the Deceitfulness of the Human Heart’, p. 342.
50. Pratt was perceptive, though, about Hume’s disposition ‘to feel, with exquisite
sensibility, every thing which affected his literary fame’: ‘notwithstanding his
boasted equanimity, philosophy did not shield him from the excessive chagrin
which he felt from those arrows, which envy and prejudice darted at his reputation’
(Supplement, p. 8).
51. Pratt, Apology for the Life and Writings of David Hume, p. v.
52. Pratt, Apology for the Life and Writings of David Hume, pp. 97–9.
53. Mackenzie, The Mirror, vol. ii, pp. 42, 43, 46, 56, 59.
54. Mackenzie claimed that Smith thought the sentiments put into Hume’s mouth
in ‘The Story of La Roche’ ‘so natural that in his usual absence of mind he told
me he wondered he had never heard the anecdote before’ (Anecdotes and Egotisms,
p. 171).
55. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Raphael and Macfie, p. 235 [VI.ii.3].
56. Warburton, Selections from Unpublished Works, p. 310. ‘You have often told me
of this man’s [i.e., Hume’s] moral virtues’, Warburton wrote to Millar, in a letter
trying to dissuade him from publishing Four Dissertations. ‘He may have many,
for aught I know; but let me observe to you, there are vices of the mind as well
as of the body: and I think a wickeder mind, and more obstinately bent on public
mischief, I never knew’.
57. Beattie, Essay on Truth, p. 500.
58. Smith had told Hume in the letter of 22 August that in the ‘few lines’ he wanted to
add to ‘My Own Life’ he might mention Hume’s joke about his ‘want of an excuse
to offer Charon’. It would, Smith said, ‘make no disagreeable part of the history’
(Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Mossner and Ross, p. 206). And maybe the
point was, simply, that it was a joke. ‘My Own Life’ is after all a rather solemn
affair, and Smith might have wanted merely to give an example of the ‘constant
pleasantry’ that he claimed in the final paragraph of the ‘Letter to Strahan’ was
‘the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy
and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently
the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men’ (‘Letter from Smith
to Strahan’, in The Life of David Hume [1777], pp. 60–1). Perhaps it was a joke
that Hume made often. In a letter to Andrew Stuart of Torrance, dated 1 August
1775, Hume declared that there were four events which would, in his opinion,
establish Britain’s prosperity: ‘First, that we do not possess a single foot of land,
that we can call our own, in America: Secondly, that, by a common edict of all the
Asiatic powers, no Englishman under pain of death, shall ever dare to pass the
Cape of Good-Hope: Thirdly, that, if King, Lords, and Commons were to offer
their united bond at twenty per cent for 1000 pounds they shall not be able to
procure it: Fourthly, that all the churches shall be converted into riding schools,
manufactories, tennis courts, or playhouses. Old as I am, I expect to see the three
first objects compleated, and the fourth much advanced’ (see Baumstark, ‘The
End of Empire and the Death of Religion’, p. 257).
61. The Life of David Hume (1777), pp. 31–2.
62. John Crawford to Hume, 20 January 1767: NLS 23154, item 44. Crawford intro-
duced this topic by telling Hume that it was just not possible that he had ‘seriously
resolved to settle in Edinburgh’.
63. Denina, Essay on the Revolutions of Literature, p. 279.
64. The London Chronicle 40 (1776), p. 248 (no. 3083, 7–10 September); reprinted in
Fieser (ed.), Early Responses to Hume, vol. ix, p. 338. The letter was printed in the
September issue of The Scots Magazine. It was soon answered by another, rather
more hostile letter to The London Chronicle (p. 509; no. 3116, 23–25 November;
reprinted in Fieser [ed.], Early Responses to Hume, vol. ix, pp. 339–40). This also
was later printed in The Scots Magazine.
Bibliography
(I) Published Works by Hume

An Abstract of a Book lately Published; Entituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c.
Wherein the Chief Argument of that Book is farther Illustrated and Explained.
London. Printed for C. Borbet, at Addison’s Head, over-against St. Dunstan’s
Church, in Fleet-street. 1740.
A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau:
With the Letters that passed between them during their Controversy. As also, the
letters of the Hon. Mr Walpole and Mr. DʼAlembert, relative to this extraordinary
Affair. Translated from the French. London. Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De
Hondt, near Surry-street, in the Strand. 1766.
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Printed in 1779.
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. London. Printed for A. Millar, over-
against Catherine-street in the Strand. 1751.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. 4 vols. London. Printed for A. Millar, in the
Strand; and A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, in Edinburgh. 1753.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. London. Printed for A. Millar,
in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh. 1758.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. 4 vols. London. Printed
for A. Millar, in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh.
1760.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. 2 vols. London. Printed for
A. Millar, in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh. 1764.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. 2 vols. London. Printed for
A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and A. Donaldson, in Edinburgh. And sold by T. Cadell,
in the Strand. 1768.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. 4 vols. London. Printed
for T. Cadell (Successor to Mr. Millar) in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and A.
Donaldson, at Edinburgh. 1770.
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition. 2 vols. London. Printed for T.
Cadell, in the Strand; and A. Donaldson and W. Creecch, at Edinburgh. 1777.
Essays, Moral and Political. Edinburgh. Printed by R. Fleming and A. Alison, for A.
Kincaid Bookseller, and Sold at his Shop above the Cross. 1741.
Essays, Moral and Political. The Second Edition, Corrected. Edinburgh. Printed for
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Essays, Moral and Political. The Third Edition, Corrected, with Additions. London.
Printed for A. Millar, over against Catharine Street in the Strand; and A. Kincaid
in Edinburgh. 1748.
Exposé Succinct de la Contestation qui s’est Élevée entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau, Avec
les Piéces Justificatives. London, 1766.
Four Dissertations. London. Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand. 1757.
The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry
VII. 2 vols. London. Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand. 1762.
The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. A
New Edition, Corrected. 6 vols. London. Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand.
1762.
New Edition, Corrected. 8 vols. London. Printed for T. Cadell, (Successor to A.
Millar) in the Strand. 1770.
New Edition, Corrected. 8 vols. London. Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand.
1773.
The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688.
A New Edition, With the Author’s Last Corrections and Improvements. 8 vols.
London. Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand. 1778.
The History of England, Under the House of Tudor. 2 vols [with continuous pagination].
London. Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand. 1759.
The History of Great Britain. Vol. I. Containing the Reigns of James I and Charles I.
Edinburgh. Printed by Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill. 1754.
The History of Great Britain. Vol. II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the Reigns
of Charles II and James II. London. Printed for A. Millar, opposite Catharine-
Street, in the Strand. 1757.
The History of Great Britain under the House of Stuart. The Second Edition Corrected.
2 vols. London. Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand. 1759.
A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh: Containing Some Observations on
A Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintainʼd
in a Book lately publishʼd, intituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Edinburgh.
1745.
The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself. London. Printed for W. Strahan;
and T. Cadell, in the Strand. 1777.
Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. London. Printed for A. Millar,
opposite Katharine-Street, in the Strand. 1748.
Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. The Second Edition. With
Additions and Corrections. London. Printed for A. Millar, opposite to Katharine-
Street, in the Strand. 1750.
Political Discourses. Edinburgh. Printed by R. Fleming, for A. Kincaid and A. Don-
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Three Essays, Moral and Political: Never before published. Which compleats the former
Edition, in two Volumes. London. Printed for A. Millar, over against Catharine
Street in the Strand; and A. Kincaid in Edinburgh. 1748.
A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of
Reasoning into Moral Subjects. 3 vols. London. Vols. i–ii: Printed for John Noon,
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A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch.
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Provost of Edinburgh. In a Letter to a Friend. London. Printed for M. Cooper, in
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(II) Unauthorized Publications, Manuscript Material, Letters

and Other Unpublished Works by Hume
Unauthorized Publications
Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, Ascribed to the Late David Hume,
Esq. Never Before Published. With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison
contained in these Performances, By the Editor. To which is added, Two Letters on
Suicide, from Rousseau’s Eloisa. London, 1783.
Two Essays. London. 1777.
Manuscript Material
‘Articles of Agreement . . . between David Hume . . . and John Noone’. NLS 23159,
item 5.
‘Codicil to my Will 7 of August 1776.’ NLS MS 23159, item 24.
‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry on Modern Honour’. NLS MS 23159, item 4.
Transcribed in Wright, ‘Hume on the Origin of “Modern Honour”’, pp. 204–9.
‘My Own Life’. NLS 23159, item 23. Facsimile copy reproduced in Ian Gordon Brown
(ed.), David Hume: My Own Life. Edinburgh: The Royal Society of Edinburgh,
2014. Pp. 59–72.
‘Of the Poems of Ossian’. NLS MS 23159, item 17.
‘Order of the Curators of Advocates Library for removing certain Books 27 June 1754’.
NLS MS 23159, item 16.
‘Sect. 6. Conclusion of this Book’. NLS MS 23159, item 15. Facsimile copy reproduced
in Norton and Norton (eds.), A Treatise of Human Nature, ‘Editing the Texts’,
pp. 664–7.
‘Sect. 7. Fourth Objection.’ NLS Accession 10805. Transcribed (with facsimile copy)
in Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’, pp. 165–8.
‘A Treatise of Fluxions by Mr. George Campbell: Professor of Mathematicks in
Edinburgh. Written by David Home, 1726’. Photocopy held by NLS, Accession
11333. Original held by the library of Tokyo International University.
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Untitled notes on several subjects. NLS 23159, item 14. Transcribed in Mossner,
‘Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729–40’, pp. 499–518.
‘Last Will and Settlement’, dated 4 January 1776, with later emendations. National
Archives of Scotland, CC8/8/125, pp. 858–68.
Edited Collections of Letters

The Letters of David Hume. Ed. J. Y. T. Greig. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.
New Letters of David Hume. Ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1954.
Further Letters of David Hume. Ed. Felix Waldmann. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Biblio-
graphical Society, 2014.
Miscellaneous Letters
To James Birch, 18 May 1735: transcribed in Mossner, ‘Hume at La Flèche’,
pp. 31–3.
To Patrick Murray, fifth Lord Elibank, 8 January 1748: transcribed in Mossner, ‘New
Hume Letters to Lord Elibank’, pp. 437–8.
To Michael Ramsay, 26 and 31 August 1737: transcribed in Kozanecki, ‘Dawida
Hume’a nieznane listy’, pp. 133–4.
To Hugh Blair, 4 July 1762: transcribed in Wood, ‘David Hume on Reid’s Inquiry’,
pp. 415–16.
To Andrew Stuart of Torrance, 1 August 1775: transcribed in Baumstark, ‘The End
of Empire and the Death of Religion’, pp. 256–7.
To David Hume the younger, 21 January 1776: transcribed in Kozanecki, ‘Dawida
Hume’a nieznane listy’, p. 137.
To David Hume the younger, 20 May 1776: transcribed in Kozanecki, ‘Dawida
Hume’a nieznane listy’, pp. 138–9.
Other Unpublished Works

Four Dissertations. NLS MS.509. Bound with typeset texts of ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the
Immortality of the Soul’.
(III) Works Written before 1800

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Index
Numbers in bold indicate the principal discussion(s) of a work or subject.
Addison, Joseph 29, 73, 74, 118, 296 Ashley, John 148
The Spectator 50, 73–4, 74, 144, 156–66, association of ideas 6, 75, 83, 85, 97, 99,
195–6, 296, 508 n. 4, 512 n. 79 119, 128, 224, 258, 496 n. 80
Advocates’ Library 30–1, 307–8, 326, 350, Austrian Succession, War of 167–8, 181,
353, 354, 538 n. 17 198, 218, 242, 266
aesthetics: see criticism, taste
Agutter, William 468 Bacon, Francis 85, 244, 329, 341, 383,
Aikenhead, Thomas 479 n. 93 446
d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 413, 419, 461, Baier, Annette 11, 12
560 n. 18 Balfour, James 299, 302, 479 n. 96,
Allen, John 5 535 n. 208
America 33, 152–3, 172, 217, 273, 274, Balguy, John 121
384, 410, 422, 433–8, 440, Barbeyrac, Jean 126, 146
464 Baxter, Andrew 66, 489–90 n. 2
Amory, Thomas 205 Bayle, Pierre 4, 146–7, 263, 446, 449,
ancient philosophy 26, 28, 36, 43–4, 44, 45, 486 n. 114, 486 n. 120, 492 n. 36,
49, 52–4, 69–70, 81, 91, 121, 493 n. 41, 495 n. 75, 499 n. 150,
125–6, 136, 139, 155, 157, 190–5, 509 n. 12, 521–2 n. 107, 537 n. 1
228, 258, 262, 290, 446, 464, 465, influence on Treatise 82, 83, 87, 92, 93,
516 n. 183: see also Aristotle; 99, 102, 114, 116
Cicero; Epicureanism; Plato; influence on first Enquiry 227, 228,
Stoicism 229–30
ancient world (contrasted with modern) role in H’s early intellectual development
58, 59, 60, 74, 145, 149–50, 152, 26, 27, 36, 38, 53, 61–4
187, 189–90, 248, 249, 250, 252, Dictionnaire 53, 62, 83, 493 n. 49
260, 265, 279, 280, 283, 284–6, Oeuvres Diverses 62, 63–4
297–8, 303–4, 322, 512 n. 85, Beattie, James 3, 33, 442–3, 447, 465, 470,
534–5 n. 199 472, 525 n. 169, 568 n. 166
Annandale, Marquess of 29, 198, 209, belief 92–8, 119, 139–40, 223–5
216–17 Berkeley, George 27, 66, 244, 272, 275,
Anderson, George 356–7, 364 278, 487 nn. 132–3, 492 n. 32,
Annet, Peter 511 n. 71 492 nn. 37–8, 493 n. 40,
Arbuthnot, John 76, 244 493–4 n. 50, 520 n. 69, 530 n. 123
Areskine (Erskine), Charles 41 influence on the Treatise 83–4, 87–91
Aristotle 39, 232, 263, 459, 569 n. 189 Black, Joseph 19
Arnauld, Antoine 80–1, 228–9, 446 Blacklock, William 353, 547 n. 8
611
612 Index
Blair, Hugh 17, 293, 300, 305, 356–7, Charles I (of England and Scotland) 31,
441–2, 444, 445, 480 n. 2, 175, 176, 312–13, 317–18, 319,
567 n. 155 325, 330, 332–5, 335–6, 345,
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Earl of 144, 347, 348, 370, 371, 373, 386, 407,
167–74, 174–5, 178, 266, 280, 423
288, 314–15, 316, 318, 319, 320, Charles II (of England and Scotland) 330,
349, 371, 403, 387–8, 532 n. 160 335–6, 345
The Craftsman 144, 145, 167, 168–9 Cheyne, George 76–7, 489 n. 170
Bonar, John 355, 356–7 Church of Scotland 22, 32, 48, 68–9, 206,
Boswell, James 37, 48–9, 50–1, 51, 439, 231–2, 305, 353–4, 355–67,
465, 467–8, 478 n. 75, 566 n. 141 379–80, 444, 462, 487–8 n. 136
Boufflers, Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Cicero, Marcus Tullius 15, 41, 43, 103–4,
Campet de Saujeon, Comtesse de 125, 136, 156–7, 187, 190, 194,
413, 416, 421–2, 461, 561 n. 20 200, 214, 263, 265, 290, 298, 446,
Boulainvilliers, Henri de 149 465, 506 n. 242, 535 n. 199,
Boyle, Robert 40, 50 547 n. 13
Brady, Robert 32, 310, 311, 312, 315, 389, Civil War (English) 31, 176, 309, 312–13,
390–1, 394, 395, 398, 399, 400, 318, 325, 333–5, 370, 386
404–5, 539 n. 34 civilized monarchy 184, 188–9, 396
Brodie, George 5, 373 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 321,
Brougham, Henry 5 322, 327, 349, 369, 539 n. 34,
Burke, Edmund 19, 426, 429, 434, 472 542 n. 105, 543 n. 113
Burnet, Gilbert (writer on religious and Clarke, John 121
moral subjects) 121 Clarke, Samuel 50–1, 65–6, 213, 226, 450,
Burnet, Gilbert (bishop and historian) 327, 484 n. 69, 487 n. 129
380–1 Cleghorn, William 206, 480 n. 2, 518 n. 31
Butler, Joseph 71, 82, 84, 116–17, 118, 194, commerce 20, 147–54, 179–81, 266–84,
196, 202, 502 n. 200, 518 n. 16 317, 336–7, 342, 384, 423–4
constitution (ancient) 31, 32, 309, 310, 311,
Calas, Jean 21, 22 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 329,
Campbell, Archibald, 3rd Duke of Argyll 387–99, 406
16, 207, 306, 535 n. 209 constitution (English, and British) 20, 31,
Campbell, George (Aberdeen professor of 33, 167–70, 172–3, 173–4, 178,
divinity) 17, 30, 117, 247, 300–1, 181–3, 186, 236, 251, 286, 309,
302, 439, 472, 525 n. 181 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 318, 319,
Campbell, George (Edinburgh extramural 329–30, 331, 333, 337–8, 340,
lecturer in mathematics) 41 345, 369, 372, 374, 383, 384, 387,
Cantillon, Richard 30, 282, 529 n. 97 388, 389, 390, 393, 396, 397, 398,
Carlyle, Alexander 305, 444 400, 403, 405–6, 407, 409, 428,
Carlyle, Thomas 6 433, 504–5 n. 227, 513 n. 116,
Carmichael, Gershom 41–2 517 n. 10, 531 n. 147
Carte, Thomas 32, 322, 327, 347, 349, 374, Conway, Francis Seymour, Earl of
375–6, 377, 390–1, 395, 400, Hertford 18, 33, 409, 411–12,
402–3, 404–5, 545 nn. 174–5, 422, 433, 463
555 n. 181 criticism 27, 52, 55, 73–5, 76, 141, 161–2,
Cary, John 268 362–4
causality/cause and effect 94–100, 117, Cromwell, Oliver 176, 182, 335
119–20, 212–14, 227–8, Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de 80
493 n. 47, 494 n. 64, 496 n. 70 Cullen, William 306, 307
Index 613
Dalrymple, John 391–2 evil (problem of) 67–8, 146–7, 228, 451–2,
Davenant, Sir Charles 149 494 n. 61, 521–2 n. 107
Decker, Matthew 268, 530 n. 125
debt, national 154, 183, 184, 201, 240, 245, Fénelon, François 78, 263
251, 266, 267, 276, 279, 280–2, Ferguson, Adam 17, 27, 142, 252, 293,
283, 425, 430, 436–7, 528 n. 57, 354, 444, 461, 567 n. 144
565 n. 127 feudalism 309, 310, 317, 329, 351, 372,
deism 67–8, 206, 212, 247, 290–1, 292, 388–405
484 n. 69, 518 n. 25, 560 n. 13, Fielding, Henry 17
569–70 n. 193 Fletcher, Andrew 177
Demosthenes 150, 187 Fontenelle, Bernard 141, 263, 296
Denina, Carlo 472 Forbes, Duncan 13
de Vries, Gerhard 39, 481 n. 17 France 79–80, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153,
Derham, William 50 154, 171, 179–80, 183, 184, 187,
Descartes, René 39, 40, 79, 83, 85, 90, 91, 188, 217–18, 263, 266, 267, 268,
95, 214 269, 270, 275, 279–80, 287,
Desmaizeaux, Pierre 116–17, 143 288–9, 341–2, 367, 385, 398–9,
Diderot, Denis 413, 419, 420–1, 472 410–21, 422–3, 424, 438
Dobbs, Arthur 151 Franklin, Benjamin 40, 464, 472
Drummond, Colin 39, 42, 481 n. 16
Dubos, Abbé Jean-Baptiste 74, 141, 244, Gerard, Alexander 363
296, 297, 489 n. 163 Gervaise, Isaac 268
Dudgeon, William 67–9, Gibbon, Edward 6, 17, 414, 422, 440,
487–8 nn. 135–6 463–4, 472, 478 n. 75, 567 n. 151
Dutot, Charles de Ferrère 152–4, 180, Glasgow 201, 203, 205, 208, 241, 306–7,
270 352, 518 n. 25
University 17, 26, 30, 38, 42, 68–9, 203,
Echard, Laurence 311, 321, 322, 327, 389, 205, 208, 209, 306–7, 433,
539 n. 39, 539 n. 41 481 n. 15
Edinburgh 33, 35, 305–8, 252–4, 408, Glorious Revolution 20, 31, 168, 169, 170,
438–44, 443–4, 538 n. 13, 171, 236, 240, 310, 311, 315, 316,
559 n. 2, 574 n. 62 320, 328–9, 337–8, 344–5, 386,
Philosophical Society 305–6, 537 n. 7 504–5 n. 227
University 25, 38–42, 70, 205–7, 305 Goldsmith, Oliver 477 n. 69
The Edinburgh Review 357–8, 416 government (forms of) 130–1, 141–2,
Elizabeth I (of England) 1, 32, 176, 316, 174–5, 184, 243, 250, 286, 423,
317, 329, 330–1, 341, 371–5, 458, 504 n. 222
377–8, 380, 381, 385, 387–8, 406, Green, T. H. 7–8
437, 480–1 n. 2, 551 n. 107 Grey, Zachary 311
Elliot, Gilbert 50, 223, 247, 253, 263, 297, Grose, T. H. 7–8
306, 367–8, 369, 370, 376, 385, Grotius, Hugo 41, 42, 69, 70, 126, 127–8,
406–7, 408, 426, 428, 438, 444, 257, 482 n. 33, 503 n. 213
447, 453, 462 Guicciardini, Francesco 323
Enlightenment 24, 352, 357, 409 Guthrie, William 317–18, 322, 327, 328,
Epicurus/Epicureanism 63, 127, 191, 375–6, 388, 389–90, 397, 399,
230–1, 516 n. 176 405, 541 n. 75
Esprit, Jacques 80, 498–9 n. 150
essay (as literary form) 27, 29, 143–5, Hale, Matthew 395
158–9, 197, 221–2, 254, 263–5 Hamilton, Sir William 4
614 Index
Harrington, James 28, 175–9, 286, 316, 427, 438, 439, 443–4, 461, 462,
317, 319, 328, 329, 330, 341, 345, 469, 544 n. 137, 552 n. 124,
384, 514 n. 129, 531 nn. 146–7 558 n. 248
Harris, James 18 government employment (expedition to
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 412, 413, 414 Lorient) 217; (embassy to Austria
Henry, Robert 440 and Turin) 241–2; (Paris) 409,
Herodotus 149 410–14; (London) 422
Hervey, James 316–17, 328, 374, 397 illnesses
history: see Hume’s WORKS: History of 1729–31 35–6, 47, 61, 77, 81–2, 193–4,
England/History of Great Britain; 483 n. 54, 509 n. 13
‘Natural History of Religion’; final 461–2
‘Study of History’; and Hume, law student 41, 482 n. 25
‘ecclesiastical history’ librarian to Faculty of Advocates 307–8
Hoadly, Benjamin 328 literary success 23, 34, 246–7, 288–9,
Hobbes, Thomas 40, 53, 63, 66, 70, 83, 471–2
104, 110, 113, 127, 128, 129, 130, man of letters 2, 14–24, 29, 35, 302
139, 194–5, 254, 265, 290, money 15–17, 29, 33, 34, 247, 307, 355,
484 n. 74, 503 n. 217, 533 n. 166 368, 408, 410, 438, 462–3
d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron 412, patronage 16
413, 414 university education 25, 35, 38–42
Holland 41, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 165, university positions (denied) 18, 28–9,
171, 180, 189, 218, 241, 283–4 30, 462
Home, Henry: see Kames Edinburgh 205–10, 216, 220, 222, 230
Home, John (minister and playwright) Glasgow 306–7
16–17, 17, 32, 294, 305, 354, WORKS
365–6, 523 n. 124, 566 n. 136 Abstract of the Treatise 29, 80, 93,
Douglas 354, 364–6 118–20, 139, 224, 227,
Homer 200, 201, 367, 441, 442 500 n. 172
honour 57, 58–60, 106, 148, 180, 190, 193, ‘Bellman’s Petition’ 248–9, 526 n. 5
396 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
Horace 127 29, 30, 33–4, 50, 68, 117, 215,
Horne, George 468 230, 249, 289–90, 297–8, 301–2,
Howard, Robert 290 409, 410, 443–4, 444–56, 461, 467
Huet, Pierre-Daniel 80, 87, 214 Dissertation ‘Of the Passions’ 30, 289,
Hume, David 294–6, 534 n. 186
19th-century interpretations 2–9, 34 Dissertation on geometry
20th-century interpretations 9–13 (unpublished) 289, 355, 359,
corrector of his own works 22–3, 245–6, 532–3 n. 164, 548 n. 32
302–4, 368–70, 405–7, 456–9, ‘Early Memoranda’ 27, 145–54, 451,
471 486 n. 120, 488 n. 142, 509 n. 11,
education 35 569 n. 189
France (time spent in) 26, 33, 36, 77, ‘ecclesiastical history’ (unwritten) 408,
78–81, 217–19 414, 559 n. 4
friendships 24, 30, 32, 33, 36, 65–6, 78, Enquiry concerning Human
116–17, 199, 200, 201–2, 203, Understanding /Philosophical
205–6, 240, 241, 245, 248, 251, Essays concerning Human
265, 297–301, 306–7, 352, 353, Understanding 3, 8, 19, 29, 68, 71,
355, 356, 360, 361, 365–6, 379, 72, 117, 120, 140, 210, 215–16,
409, 443–4, 413, 416–20, 422, 216, 220–32, 241, 246–7, 291,
Index 615
294, 323, 443, 449, 462–3, ‘Love and Marriage’ 159, 161, 166,
476 n. 60, 488 n. 154, 494 n. 64 196
Enquiry concerning the Principles of ‘Luxury’ 271, 417, 561 n. 36
Morals 3, 29, 30, 42, 164, 216, ‘Middle Station of Life’ 157–8, 166,
249, 250–65, 283, 294, 323, 457, 245
459, 463, 526 n. 17, 526 n. 20, ‘Money’ 152, 273, 276, 282
526 n. 22, 527 n. 36 ‘Moral Prejudices’ 155–7, 160, 166,
Essays, Moral and Political 27–8, 191, 192, 245
143–5, 154–97, 240–1, 245–7, ‘National Characters’ 242–5, 298,
251, 463, 508–9 n. 8 520 n. 65, 525 n. 169
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects ‘Origin of Government’ 430–2
3, 20, 23, 30, 34, 302–4, 368, ‘Original Contract’ 29, 237, 237–9,
429–30, 443, 456–8 318, 320, 431, 432
ESSAYS ‘Parties in General’ 169–70, 186
‘Avarice’ 161, 166 ‘Parties of Great Britain’ 170–1,
‘Balance of Power’ 278–9 196, 246, 318, 319
‘Balance of Trade’ 265, 275, 277–8, ‘Passive Obedience’ 29, 237, 239,
282, 424 319–20
‘Character of Sir Robert Walpole’ ‘Platonist’ 19, 28, 192
185, 196–7, 201, 245, 429 ‘Poems of Ossian’ [unpubl.] 441–2
‘Coalition of Parties’ 386–7, ‘Politics may be Reduced to a
554 nn. 167–8 Science’ 172–3, 174–5, 183–4,
‘Commerce’ 20, 270–2 186, 188, 245, 246, 318, 429,
‘Delicacy of Taste and Passion’ 515 n. 158
159–60 ‘Polygamy and Divorces’ 161
‘Dignity of Human Nature’ 163–5, ‘Populousness of Ancient Nations’
174 150, 265, 283, 284–6
‘Eloquence’ 28, 186–7, 515 n. 164 ‘Protestant Succession’ 29, 176–7,
‘Epicurean’ 19, 28, 191, 191–2, 237, 239–40, 286, 319, 320,
483 n. 56 325–6, 430
‘Essay-Writing’ 158–9, 166, 245 ‘Public Credit’ 280–2, 288, 425
‘First Principles of Government’ ‘Rise and Progress of the Arts and
177 Sciences’ 28, 59, 177, 186–90,
‘Idea of Perfect Commonwealth’ 22, 191, 243, 245
186, 286–8 ‘Sceptic’ 19, 28, 193–4
‘Immateriality of the Soul’ 360–1, ‘Simplicity and Refinement’ 141,
548 n. 40, 564 n. 91 161–2, 246
‘Impudence and Modesty’ 160–1, ‘Some Remarkable Customs’ 282
166 ‘Standard of Taste’ 362–4, 549 n. 45
‘Independency of Parliament’ 173, ‘Stoic’ 19, 28, 191–2
181–2, 246 ‘Study of History’ 159, 162, 166,
‘Interest’ 274 324–5
‘Jealousy of Trade’ 270, 423–5, ‘Suicide’ 359–60, 361, 366,
563 n. 74 548 n. 40, 561 n. 91
‘Liberty and Despotism’ (‘Civil ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm’
Liberty’) 179–80, 181, 183, 184, 164–5, 245
188, 189, 245, 415 ‘Taxes’ 279–80, 415
‘Liberty of the Press’ 196, 430, ‘Tragedy’ 29, 296–7, 534 n. 189,
499–500 n. 168 542 n. 105
616 Index
Hume, David (cont.) Treatise of Human Nature 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8,

‘Whether the British Government 9–11, 11, 26–7, 28, 34, 38, 39, 40,
inclines . . . ’ 180 42, 44, 53, 60, 64, 66, 72, 80–142,
Exposé Succinct/Concise and Genuine 144–5, 155, 162–4, 175, 194–5,
Account 420–1 202, 208, 210–16, 220, 221,
Four Dissertations 249, 354, 354–368, 227–8, 236, 237, 242, 252–9,
550 n. 75 295–6, 396, 431, 450, 462
‘Fragment on Evil’ 68, 147, abandonment of 13, 23, 28, 140–2,
451 144, 162, 215–16, 221, 223, 232,
‘Historical Essay on Chivalry and 443, 568 n. 165
Modern Honour’ 37, 38, 48, publication of 117–18, 139
58–60, 74–5, 121, 190, 485 n. 95, reviews of 118, 140, 500 n. 171,
486 n. 105 502–3 n. 209
History of England/History of Great True Account of the Behaviour of
Britain 1, 2, 3, 5–6, 7, 20–3, Archibald Stewart 234–6,
31–3, 34, 53, 165, 175, 307–8, 523 n. 134
318, 405–7, 408–9, 421, 455, Hume, David (nephew) 433, 445,
456–8, 463, 560 n. 13 483 n. 54
History of Great Britain/History of Hurd, Richard 373, 388, 389–90
England, vols. v and vi 325–51, Hutcheson, Francis 26, 27, 38, 42, 52–3,
543 n. 126 81, 82, 84, 120–1, 141, 143, 178,
History of England under the House of 194, 201–2, 205, 206, 209,
Tudor/History of England, vols. 214–15, 222, 256, 258, 293,
iii and iv 370–87 357, 490 n. 17, 502 n. 202,
History of England, from the Invasion of 506 n. 242
Julius Caesar to the Accession of H’s correspondence with 52–3, 121–4,
Henry VII/History of England, 125, 136, 140, 201–2, 209,
vols. i and ii 387–405 507 n. 256, 518 n. 16
Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in influence on the Treatise 103, 104–5,
Edinburgh 210–16, 220, 224, 225, 108–9, 110, 120–1, 121–6, 132,
262, 499 n. 166 137, 137–9
‘Letter to a Physician’ 36–7, 46–8, 61, role in H’s early intellectual development
76–7 69–76
‘My Own Life’ 2, 14–15, 15–16, 18, 34, Hutton, James 19
37, 118, 221, 246, 247, 370, 421, Huxley, T. H. 8
445, 462–5, 483 n. 54, 528 n. 52,
546 n. 188, 571 n. 11, improvement (in Scotland) 17–18, 21–2,
572 nn. 15–16, 572 n. 43, 352, 369, 404, 478 n. 77
573 n. 39 innateness 75, 86, 112, 121, 255
‘Natural History of Religion’ 22, 29, 30,
32, 249, 289–94, 354, 356, 358–9, Jacobitism/Jacobite rebellions 29, 232–7,
361, 453, 455, 547 n. 19, 246, 376–7
554 n. 152 James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Philosophical Essays concerning Human 31, 176, 315, 316, 317, 319, 329,
Understanding: see Enquiry 330–2, 335, 336, 345, 351, 368,
concerning Human Understanding 371, 373, 386, 387, 407, 423
Political Discourses 29, 30, 34, 150, 152, James II (of England) and VII (of Scotland)
175, 186, 241, 249, 265–289, 423, 239, 319–20, 336–8, 345, 407
463 Jeffrey, Francis 5, 373
Index 617
Johnson, Samuel 3, 15, 17, 21, 33, 442, 283–4, 285, 314, 384, 416–17,
465, 467, 468, 477 n. 72, 428, 561 n. 36
478 n. 75, 478 n. 91
Dictionary 15, 18, 357, 478 n. 78 Macaulay, Catherine 423, 429
Johnston, Edward 358 Macaulay, Thomas 6
Jurieu, Pierre 495 n. 67 Machiavelli, Nicolá 63, 147, 287, 322, 325
justice 125–31, 141, 255, 257–8, 262 Mackenzie, Henry 469, 542 n. 109
Mackie, Charles 41, 43
Kames, Henry Home, Lord 17, 65–6, 76, Maclaurin, Colin 305, 449–50, 453
82, 116–17, 140, 142, 143, 144, Macpherson, James 33, 367, 440, 440–2
200, 207, 210, 247, 252, 297, 305, Macqueen, Daniel 361, 369, 379–80
355–7, 392, 450, 453, 472, Magna Carta 309, 312, 314, 396–8
487 nn. 127–30, 534 n. 197, Malebranche, Nicolas 27, 40, 75, 214, 446,
537 n. 3 490–1 n. 20, 491 n. 24,
Kant, Immanuel 4, 6 491–2 n. 32, 494 n. 58, 494 n. 64,
King, William 146 495 n. 71, 496 n. 79, 496 n. 80
Kemp Smith, Norman 9–11 influence on the Treatise 80, 83, 84, 93,
Kincaid, Alexander 196, 246, 532 n. 152 94, 99, 104, 105, 110, 111, 114,
116
Laird, John 9, 10–11, 474 n. 47 Recherche de la Vérité 40, 83, 92–3,
La Flèche 80–1, 117, 489 n. 171 490 n. 20, 498 n. 150
Law, John 151, 152, 153, 270, 276, 278 Mandeville, Bernard 151–2, 153, 163, 190,
Law, William 40–1 194, 254–5, 256, 257–8, 262, 265,
Le Blanc, Abbé Jean Bernard 20, 288–9, 271–2, 416, 513 n. 114
308, 350 influence on the Treatise 79, 82, 84, 104,
Le Clerc, Jean 39, 481 n. 15 105–11, 121, 122–3, 127, 132,
Leechman, William 200, 203–6, 261, 293, 132–3, 133, 135, 137, 139
518 n. 25 role in Hume’s early intellectual
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 67, 93, 146 development 26, 38, 53–61, 62–3,
Livingston, Donald 12 71, 72, 75
Livy 149, 150, 246, 263 Enquiry into the Origin of Honour 58, 59,
Locke, John 27, 229, 238, 239, 273, 309, 80, 106, 126, 498 n. 150
310, 328, 446, 450, 484 n. 69, Fable of the Bees 27, 53–7, 60, 61, 63, 72,
495–6 n. 78, 496 n. 80, 522 n. 116 80, 106, 116, 123, 126, 147–8,
influence on the Treatise 84, 86–9, 91–2, 271–2, 357, 505 nn. 228–9
95, 98, 99, 126, 127, 128, 130 Free Thoughts 62, 62–3, 173–4, 185,
role in H’s early intellectual development 513 n. 114
39, 40, 51, 73, 74, 75 Part Two 57–8, 106, 132
Essay concerning Human Understanding Treatise of the Hypochondriack Passions 61
40, 84, 86–9, 93 manners 20–1, 45, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 79,
logic 39, 42, 99–100, 112, 119, 120, 124, 150, 185, 187–90, 200,
213 242–3, 250, 252, 257, 260–1, 272,
logical positivism 8–9 274, 283–4, 286, 324, 342, 344,
‘Longinus’ 46 369, 384, 385, 390, 391, 392, 398,
Lucan 139 402, 406, 415, 428, 440, 441
Lucian 439, 466, 567 n. 143 Mary, Queen of Scots 376–80, 406,
Lucretius 66, 109–10, 126 553 n. 139
luxury 54–5, 150, 153, 154, 177, 181, 184, Massie, Joseph 266, 274
268, 271–2, 274, 275–6, 279, McCosh, James 7, 474 n. 25
618 Index
Melon, Jean-François 152–4, 180, 270–1, Newton, Isaacnewtonianism 40, 50, 85,
271, 280–1, 281, 288 88–9, 98, 264, 449–50, 491 n. 27,
mercantilism 267–8, 275 496 n. 82, 498 n. 143
Middleton, Conyers 522 n. 116 Nicole, Pierre 80, 81, 107, 127, 228–9,
Mill, John Stuart 5, 6, 8, 9, 474 n. 25 446
Millar, Andrew 166, 246, 265, 350, 354–5, Noon, John 117–18, 500 nn. 171–2,
532 n. 152 508 n. 269
Millar, John 27, 142, 252, 373, 433, Norton, David Fate 12
508 n. 274
Milton, John 42, 302, 342, 362, 417, 446 Oldmixon, John 311, 321, 326–7, 377–8,
Mirabeau, Victor Riquet, Marquis de 539 n. 41
412–13 Ossian: see Macpherson, James
miracles 228–30, 300–1, 522 n. 116 Oswald, James 218, 219, 220, 240, 241,
‘Moderate Party’ (of Church of Scotland) 265, 277–8, 297, 308, 332, 407,
22, 231, 261, 305, 353–4, 354–66, 408, 462, 541 n. 81
444, 479 n. 94, 523–4 n. 122,
536 n. 220 Paris 1, 33, 77, 78, 156, 409, 411–14, 418,
Montaigne, Michel de 80, 156, 465 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 436–7,
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 438, 439, 462
Baron de 19, 142, 175, 182, 184, Paris-Duverney, Joseph 152, 270
243, 250–2, 257–8, 263, 264, 270, party politics 19, 28, 144, 154, 166–74,
271, 272, 284, 287, 288, 297, 299, 195–6, 201, 207, 234–6, 238–41,
384, 385, 392, 395, 416, 472 304, 308, 336, 340–1, 386–7,
Considérations 185, 243, 515 n. 156, 408–9, 421, 426: see also
515 n. 158 Whiggism
Esprit des Lois 182, 185, 243, 250, 252, Pascal, Blaise 92, 107, 111, 261, 263, 446,
284, 287, 289, 308, 392, 395 494 n. 56
Lettres Persanes 243, 251, 284 passions (theories of) 22, 26, 27, 44, 45,
moral sense 72–3, 124, 132–3, 133, 133–8, 54–5, 55–6, 59–60, 61, 64, 83,
501 n. 183 102–116, 120, 128, 136, 137,
morality: see justice; manners; moral sense; 159–60, 163–4, 192–3, 202,
natural law; promises; 204, 225, 231, 264, 293, 294–6,
rationalism (in moral 450
philosophy); selfish hypothesis; Perceval, John 201, 517 nn. 9–11
sympathy; virtues (artificial and personal identity 91, 140, 224, 534 n. 197
natural) Petty, Sir William 148–9, 151
Mossner, Ernest Campbell ix, 474–5 n. 48, Petyt, William 309, 310, 321, 399
480 n. 102, 485 n. 95, 489 n. 167, philosophes 21, 33, 412–13, 414–15, 416,
509 n. 18, 511 n. 78, 520 n. 72, 439
524 n. 157, 560 n. 10, 561 n. 20 philosophy (definitions of) 18–19, 19–20,
Mure, William 200–1, 203–4, 205, 325, 20–1, 23–4, 24–5, 97–8, 269–70,
349, 350, 365, 412, 428 282, 304, 324–5, 339–47
physiology 84, 92–3, 491 n. 24
natural law 25, 41–2, 83, 126, 127–30 Pinto, Isaac de 436–7, 472
natural philosophy 18, 25, 37, 39, 40, 50, Pitt, William 375, 411, 426, 428, 433–4,
52, 72, 84–5, 103, 119, 135, 146, 554 n. 168
225, 226, 263–4, 289, 294, 295, Plato/Platonism 9, 161, 191, 192, 193, 203,
446, 482 n. 19, 491 n. 27, 263, 286, 295
492 n. 36, 537 n. 7 Pluche, Abbé Noel-Antoine 78, 490 n. 3
Index 619
Plutarch 37, 43, 149, 263, 291, 292 Reformation 32, 38, 293, 337, 351, 355,
political economy 150–4, 250–1, 265–89, 361, 370, 378–83, 385
414–15: see also commerce; debt; Reid, Thomas 3, 4, 6, 17, 25, 30,
luxury; mercantilism; taxation 300–1, 302, 472, 508 n. 274,
politics: see also civilized monarchy; 535–6 n. 213
constitution; Glorious religion 21, 22, 30, 32, 39, 45, 48–51, 63–4,
Revolution; government; party 65–69, 77, 89, 93, 102, 117, 118,
politics; political economy; 122, 139, 147, 164–5, 168, 170,
republicanism; Whiggism 180, 198, 203, 204–5, 212–13,
Polybius 149, 150, 263 214, 215–16, 226–32, 235–6,
Pope, Alexander 16, 23, 82–3, 143, 244–5, 260, 261, 289–94, 300,
174–5, 500 n. 170, 508 n. 267, 301–2, 313–14, 334–5, 343–6,
513 n. 116 354–68, 379–83, 393–4, 412, 414,
‘Port Royal Logic’ 80, 228 417–18, 439, 445–56, 464–70,
Postlethwayt, Malachy 267 471, 476 n. 61, 479 n. 94,
Pouilly, Louis-Jean Lévesque de 78 493 n. 47, 493 n. 50, 531–2 n. 148,
Pratt, Samuel 468–9, 573 n. 50 549 n. 43, 566 n. 142, 569 n. 193:
prayer 203–4 see also Church of Scotland; evil
Price, Richard 30, 247, 301, 302, 435–6, (problem of); miracles;
437, 472, 525 n. 181 ‘Moderate Party’; prayer;
Priestley, Joseph 40 Reformation; religious
Pringle-Pattison, Andrew Seth 6 controversy; scepticism
Pringle, John 206, 209, 519 n. 41 and human nature 22, 103, 290–3
probabilistic reasoning 93–100, 119, 223, and morality 63–4, 139, 293–4, 381
494 n. 63 and philosophy 21, 22, 29, 89, 93,
promises 128–30 117, 147, 199, 205, 215–16,
Pufendorf, Samuel 41–2, 58, 69, 70, 104, 226–32, 289–94, 301–2, 414,
126, 127–8, 209 445–56, 493 n. 47, 493 n. 50,
Pyrrhonism 64, 89, 92, 100, 120, 211–12, 569 n. 193
214, 224–5, 228, 492 n. 36: and politics 22, 63–4, 165, 168, 170,
see also scepticism 235–6, 250, 313–14, 317, 332,
334–5, 336, 337, 343–6, 382–3,
Ralph, James 327, 477 n. 69 393–4, 531–2 n. 148
Ramsay, Allan 418, 546 n. 2, 562 n. 47 religious controversy 22, 32, 34, 65–9, 118,
Ramsay, Andrew Michael, ‘the Chevalier’ 122, 203, 205, 207–9, 241,
77, 78–9, 293, 489 n. 170, 298–301, 353–4, 354–68, 442–4,
489 n. 2, 533 n. 177 467–70, 471, 566 n. 142
Ramsay, Michael 36, 42–3, 44, 61, 76, 83, republics/republicanism 142, 147, 168,
481 n. 7 169, 175–6, 179, 180, 182, 184,
Rankenian Club 487 n. 133, 492 n. 37 185, 187–9, 243, 246, 286–7, 310,
Rapin de Thoyras, Paul 31, 43, 168–9, 313, 316, 319, 320, 330, 334,
308–9, 311–14, 314, 315, 319, 335–6, 417, 430, 433, 435, 437,
321, 322, 327, 328, 371, 375–6, 565 n. 112
377–8, 389, 397, 399, 405, Ritchie, Thomas Edward 2–4, 41, 473 n. 3
540 n. 43, 541 n. 81, 541 n. 90, Robertson, William 6, 17, 305, 367, 379,
544 n. 151 392, 396, 401, 439, 444, 472
rationalism (in moral philosophy) 120, 123, Rochefoucauld, François de la 80, 107,
124, 138–9, 251, 255, 501 n. 183, 111, 163, 263
507 n. 257 Rollin, Charles 323
620 Index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 21, 33, 357, 409, Simson, John 68–9, 208
413, 416–21, 446–7, 462, 463, Skelton, Philip 247
495 n. 69, 560 n. 18, 561 n. 36, slavery 243, 285, 398
562 n. 54, 563 n. 59 Smith, Adam 17, 19, 22, 25, 27, 30, 142,
Ruffhead, Owen 373, 552 n. 117, 554 n. 162 175, 252, 267, 272, 282, 305, 306,
Rutherforth, Thomas 247 357–8, 416, 436, 444–5, 461, 465,
467, 469–70, 472, 500 n. 172,
Saint-Évremond, Charles de 261, 263 505–6 n. 238
Sarpi, Paolo 322, 323 ‘Letter to Strahan’ 465–7, 470–1,
scepticism 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 21, 26, 26–7, 29, 573–4 n. 58
36, 62, 64, 66, 80, 82, 83, 87–102, Smith, William 500 n. 172
119, 121, 140, 146, 190–1, 199, Smollett, Tobias 21, 349, 368, 375,
201, 206, 208, 210–16, 220, 478 n. 88, 552 n. 124
224–5, 416, 441, 442–3, sociability (theories of) 69–70, 115–16
570 n. 212: see also Pyrrhonism Spinoza, Baruch 40, 53, 63, 66, 91, 113,
scepticism about rational religion 48–51, 118, 484 n. 73, 493 n. 49
68, 117, 227–31, 291, 299, 302, St. Clair, General James 18, 29, 198,
344, 360–1, 414, 445–55 217–19, 241–2
scepticism in moral philosophy 135, 155, Stephen, Leslie 6–7
193–5, 258, 264–5 Steuart, Sir James 3, 282
scepticism in politics 131, 184, 236, 239, Steuart, Robert 40, 50, 85, 482 n. 19
246, 251, 271, 276, 277–8, 321, Physiological Library 40, 85,
329, 409, 425, 431 482 nn. 20–1
Schmidt, Claudia 12 Stewart, Archibald 234, 235, 307
science of man 9, 11–14, 83–4, 100, 103, Stewart, Dugald 4, 17, 42
119, 474–5 n. 48, 476–7 n. 62, Stewart, John 493 n. 47
490–1 n. 20 Stirling, James Hutchison 6
Scot, William 42 Stoicism 26, 37–8, 43–8, 53–4, 81–2,
Scotland 26, 148, 196, 278, 293, 301–2, 103–4, 105, 107–8, 114, 121,
303, 346, 366–7, 378–9, 401, 125–6, 135, 136, 139, 155, 156,
530 n. 116, 536 n. 228, 550 n. 83 190–4, 228, 255, 465
Scotticisms 503, 536 n. 228 Strachey, Lytton 1, 8, 10, 12
Selby-Bigge, L. A. 8 Strahan, William 20, 23, 303, 368–9, 370,
Select Society 352 441, 442, 445, 455, 456, 458,
selfish hypothesis 56, 70–3, 82, 104–5, 106, 466–7, 548 n. 40, 569 n. 178
256, 488 n. 154 Stroud, Barry 11, 12
Seven Years War 282, 410–11, 423, 425 Stuart, House of 31, 32, 171, 234, 240, 311,
Seymour-Conway, Henry, General 18, 312–13, 316–18, 319–20, 325–49,
33 369–71, 376, 386, 405, 423
Shaftesbury, Antony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Swift, Jonathan 189
Earl of 75, 121, 125, 139, 155, sympathy 109–10, 134–5, 138–9, 141, 258,
157, 163, 163–4, 177, 190, 194, 346–9, 499 n. 156, 505–6 n. 238,
195, 446–7, 502 n. 203, 512 n. 85, 507 n. 257, 526 n. 36
514 n. 125
role in Hume’s early intellectual Tacitus 118, 325, 413, 499 n. 167
development 15, 26, 37, 44–6, 47, taste 19, 26, 44, 46, 72, 97, 137, 159–60,
49, 51, 52–3, 55–6, 57, 60, 71 162, 187, 188, 189, 193, 215,
Characteristicks 15, 26, 37, 44–6, 49–50, 222–3, 260, 263, 284, 302, 352,
55–6, 71, 81–2, 84, 107, 156 358, 362–4, 365, 472, 502 n. 198
Index 621
taxation 180–1, 183, 242, 267, 268, 275, Siècle de Louis XIV 21, 324, 342,
276, 277, 279–80, 281, 414–15, 542 n. 98
425, 433–4 Traité sur la Tolérance 21
Temple, Sir William 149, 151, 179, 244, Vossius, Isaac 284
310, 504 n. 225, 514 n. 137
Tillotson, John 213, 519 n. 53 Wallace, George 492 n. 37
Toland, John 168, 484 n. 69 Wallace, Robert 30, 259, 265–6, 297,
trade: see commerce 298–9, 472, 533–4 n. 164,
Trenchard, John 290 535 nn. 200–1
Tristram Shandy 495 n. 69 Walpole, Horace 17, 322, 367, 411, 419,
Tucker, Josiah 267, 268, 278, 282, 283, 472, 478 n. 75, 558 n. 248
423–4, 436, 472 Walpole, Robert 31, 154, 166–74, 185, 196,
Tudor, House of 31–2, 316–17, 318, 200–1, 245, 284–5, 288, 314–17,
350–1, 368–87, 387–8, 392, 403, 429–30, 468, 517 n. 195,
405–6, 437, 458 531 n. 136
Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques 413, Warburton, William 3, 301, 442, 470, 471,
414–15, 472, 561 n. 32 573 n. 56
Turnbull, George 177–8, 491 n. 27, Watts, Isaac 213
500 n. 171, 514 n. 129 Wesley, John 468
Tyrrell, James 310–11, 321, 389, Wertz, Spencer 12
399 Westminster Confession of Faith 48, 205
Whiggism 31, 43, 130–1, 144, 166–74,
understanding (faculty of) 26–7, 85–102, 235–6, 236–41, 309, 312–13,
211–14, 223–32 327–8, 313, 369, 371, 373, 385–6,
426, 429, 504 nn. 226–7, 508 n. 4
Vanderlint, Jacob 268, 272, 275, Court Whigs 155, 167, 315–17, 318, 319,
531 n. 139 320, 321, 328–9, 374, 389,
Vayer, François La Mothe du 80 504 n. 226
Vinnius, Arnoldus 41, 42, 482 n. 27 Whitaker, John 391
Virgil 15, 43, 166 Whole Duty of Man 49, 136, 484 n. 61
virtues (artificial and natural) 27, 53–4, Wilkes, John/Wilkites 33, 415, 422–3,
55–6, 57, 59–60, 69–70, 75, 426–9, 432–3, 457–8, 564 n. 91
120–1, 121–139, 202, 214–15, Wilkie, William 366
255–62, 293–4 will (faculty of/freedom of) 112–13, 120,
Voet, Johannes 41, 42, 482 n. 87 146, 227–8
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 16, 21, William III (William of Orange) 32, 239,
22, 85, 218, 350, 413, 419, 470, 266, 328–9, 337–8, 344
472, 474 n. 47, 477 n. 66, Wishart, William 206–10, 210–16, 293,
478 n. 89, 478 n. 91, 479 n. 92, 499 n. 166, 503 n. 209, 503 n. 217,
520 n. 69, 560–1 n. 19 518 n. 33
Essai sur les Moeurs 324, 385, 392, 411 Witherspoon, John 356, 480–1 n. 2
Histoire de Charles XII 324 Witt, John de 149
Letters concerning the English Nation 16,
85, 308, 323–4 Xenophon 149, 200

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HUME

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire

James A. Harris is Reader in the History of Philosophy at the University of

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

Preface page vii

Introduction: The Love of Literary Fame 1

4 The Achievement of Independence 198

Afterword: Death and

This is, so far as I know, the first intellectual biography of Hume. It

Hume’s intentions were in writing in the particular ways that he did

with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, will be disappointed. So also will the reader

Because the development of Hume’s ideas through time is a principal

Approaches to Hume’s Intellectual Biography

observations and criticisms suggest that he himself was a disciple of

contained in Hume’s ‘metaphysical’ writings were errors still, but they

fact, precisely because of his calm philosophy and dispassionate balancing

positivists who identified Hume as the progenitor of their programme

constructive philosophical project direct from Hutcheson and the theory

Stroud claimed that on ‘the general interpretation’ that he offered of

had an intellectual biography worth writing. There is a system to describe,

Hume as Man of Letters

friend, the minister-turned-playwright John Home. Nor did he ever have

languages as such.80 Similarly, in A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of

explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judge-

manners, finances, arms, trade, learning’. For ‘[w]here a just notion is

by Hume’s philosophical history as shaped, not by argument, but by

Essential to the kind of conversation that Hume wanted his writings to

Summary of the Narrative

which all of his writings are to be seen as continuations and developments

encounter with Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,

are generated, and regulated, by experience. Hume’s scepticism, as I

true that there is no way of giving a unified and systematic account of

Pursuits of Philosophy and

avid hume was born in Edinburgh on 26 April 1711.1 He grew

Shaftesbury as an Antidote to University

It is more surprising that, when he looked back at his college educa-

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. Ramsay

kind of perfection that Hume thought he detected in Longinus. ‘I think he

was – whereby incontestable truths might finally be established in philos-

to ‘warmth and enthusiasm’. In the earliest piece of writing by Hume that

Mandeville and Bayle as an Antidote to Shaftesbury

the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity, labor’d under the inconve-

There seems here to be a certain amount of continuity with the project

involved the education and redirection by others of one’s selfish passions,

themselves as better, and in order to be praised by their superiors, and

to every florid conceit or fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of nature’.

In a letter to Hutcheson of September 1739, to which we will return

an interest in Mandeville that led Hume to Bayle. One of Mandeville’s

Hutcheson and the Scottish Scene of Thought

Another writer on philosophical topics living in close proximity to

need, Hutcheson argued, to disbelieve the farmer, or to take it that he

ambitions of a modern science of human nature. Here Mandeville and

Cheyne, doctor to Robert Walpole and Samuel Richardson, and author

Anatomist of Human Nature

ume spent around a month in Paris in the late summer of 1734.

A Compleat Chain of Reasoning:

Treatise of Human Nature. But it must be doubtful whether Hume would

Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge.21 In the Introduction to the

of the Introduction is full of allusions to Bacon. Hume would limit him-

physiological underpinnings, and reconstructed it in purely psychological

a host of possible others is bound to happen in the future, or must have

An idea of existence as such was plainly ruled out on Berkeleyan approach