David Hume

David Hume has been rightfully called one of the greatest of the British speculative thinkers, a merciless skeptic, and the purest of the radical empiricists (Royce, 1955; Stumpf, 1966).

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1711, "into a family of country gentlemen of ancient lineage and modest circumstances" (Jones, 1952, p. 297). At age 23, after attending but not graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he went off to France for three years: here he wrote what is arguably his most influential work, A Treatise of Human Nature which was published in 1739. Hume had hoped this book would make his fortune but, although it was mildly well-received on the Continent, it made almost no impression in England (Stumpf, 1966).

For the next ten years he acted variously as the paid companion of a mad marquis, as the private secretary to a general during an ill-fated assault on the French coast, and as a member of the suite of the same general, now-turned British Ambassador, in the courts of Vienna and Turin. During this time, Hume did not neglect his writing. He wrote and published his Essays Moral and Political (1741-1742) and two drastically revised versions of his Treatise now entitled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) (Jones, 1952).

After this, he was appointed librarian of the Advocates Library at Edinburgh, but was soon forced to resign when the lawyers saw his choice of books. After all, this is

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ar as we can tell through rigorous empiricism, is the degree of vividness. In short, we have no knowledge of anything that we have not felt or perceived through our physical sense: this sensory-based knowledge Hume calls "matters of fact" (Hume, 1896). Thus, although we have never directly seen flying horses and cannot, therefore, call them matters of fact, we can still have an idea of them because we have seen horses and wings; it is a basic function of the mind to create complex ideas (like flying horses) by combining simple ideas (like horses and wings). Furthermore, Hume says that the only ideas which can be reasoned upon to find novel truths are those of quantity and number. Therefore, the only true science is mathematics and all other sciences are necessarily confined to historical statements of past observations, as we shall see with regard to the law of causation. Berkeley, then, was entirely wrong in thinking it is possible to find God or anything else supersensual, e.g. universal laws, if it has no basis in matters of fact (Royce, 1955). Hume's most famous application of this premise has to do with the law of causation. Hume contends that, in actuality, we have no experience of causation at all - it is merely a ha

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