681David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1711. His father, a lawyer, died
before David was 2 years old. He was raised by his mother, a deeply religious
woman, on a pleasant, but modest, family estate at Ninewells, near Berwick in
southern Scotland. Young David was very religious as a boy, often making lists of
his sins so that he could seek forgiveness. But shortly after beginning his studies at
the University of Edinburgh, at age 12, he seems to have lost his faith.
Although the family was not poor, there was not enough wealth to provide a
comfortable life of study for David, the youngest child. His family decided, there-
fore, that Hume should follow his father into law. This was not to be, however, for
as Hume later wrote, “I found an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the
pursuit of philosophy and general learning.”
In 1729, when he was only 18, Hume had a breakthrough, discovering what he
called “a new Science of Thought.” He gave up all pretense of becoming a lawyer
and applied his energies to his new insight. To conserve his limited finances, he
moved to a small town in France, La Flèche, where Descartes had studied. There he
completed his first work,A Treatise of Human Nature, Being an Attempt to
Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, published in
1739 and 1740. Hume hoped this work would give him his “love of literary
fame”—while putting him in a more comfortable financial situation. But, as he later
said, the work “fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as
even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”
For the next thirteen years, Hume held a variety of positions, including tutor to a
mad marquess and secretary to a general. During this time, he wrote and published
his Essays, Moral and Political(1741–1742). The success of this work led him to
rewrite Book I of his earlier Treatise, this time titled as An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding(1748). He added chapters on miracles, free will, and theDAVID HUME
1711–1776