Born May 7, 1711, in Edinburgh, Scotland; died there Aug. 25, 1776. British philosopher, historian, economist, and publicist. A precursor of positivism, Hume formulated the basic principles of the new European agnosticism.
Hume’s father was a member of the Scottish gentry; the family was of moderate means, and Hume read for the law at Edinburgh University. In 1739 he published his major work, A Treatise of Human Nature. From 1753 to 1762, Hume worked on his eight-volume History of England, in which he set forth the claims of the “new” Tories to leadership of the English bourgeoisie’s two-party bloc. From 1763 to 1766, Hume was in the diplomatic service in Paris. For a number of years he was active in the Select Society of Edinburgh. He became known in his native land for his Essays, Moral and Political (1741), which dealt with social, political, moral, aesthetic, and economic issues.
Hume’s theory of knowledge was based on his elaboration of G. Berkeley’s subjective idealism in the spirit of agnosticism and phenomenalism. The impressions of external experience, or sensations, were regarded by Hume as primary perceptions, and the impressions of internal experience, such as affects, desires, and passions, as secondary perceptions. He considered the problem of the relationship between mind and matter to be insoluble in theory, and he substituted for it the problem of the dependence of simple ideas (that is, sensory images) on external impressions. Rejecting the notion that the objective laws of existence are reflected in the conscious mind, Hume regarded complex ideas as developing from the psychological association of a number of simple ideas.
Hume’s doctrine of causality, which is the central point of his epistemology, is linked to his conviction about the causal nature of association. Having posed the problem of the objective existence of causal relationships, Hume proposed an agnostic solution; he maintained that the problem was not subject to proof, inasmuch as that which is considered the effect is not contained in and does not resemble that which is considered the cause. According to Hume, the psychological mechanism that causes people to believe in the objective existence of causality is based on the perception of event B following event A in time, as well as on the regularity with which which B follows A. These facts are accepted as proof that the cause necessarily gives rise to the effect—an error that grows into a fixed association of expected events, into a habit, and finally into “belief that A will inevitably be followed by B.
In the natural sciences, Hume maintained, belief in causality is based on nontheoretical faith; in the sciences of the mind, on the other hand, causality is indisputable, since it acts as the mechanism of association. It was Hume’s contention that causality must be transformed into a branch of psychology—a goal that he sought to achieve.
Rejecting freedom of the will from his position of psychic determinism, Hume utilized this conclusion to criticize the concept of spiritual substance. The individual, according to Hume, is “an assemblage or bundle ... of different impressions that follow one another” (Soch., vol. 1, Moscow, 1965, p. 367). Hume’s criticism of spiritual substance grew into criticism of religious belief, to which he opposed the habits of ordinary consciousness and a diffuse “natural religion.”
Hume’s ethics were founded on the conception of man’s unchanging nature. Man, in Hume’s judgment, is a weak creature, subject to the error and whim of his associations; through education he acquires habits rather than knowledge. Following A. Shaftesbury and F. Hutcheson, Hume considered moral judgments to be derived from feelings of satisfaction. From this hedonistic principle he made the transition to utilitarianism; but in his search for motives that would force people to meet the demands of the “public good,” Hume turned to the altruistic feeling of common human “sympathy,” which he contrasted to individualism.
Hume’s aesthetics can be defined as the psychology of artistic perception; for him, the beautiful was that which was most suitable for the attainment of practical goals.
In sociology, Hume opposed both the feudal-aristocratic and the bourgeois contractual conceptions of the origin of the state. Society, according to Hume, developed as a result of the branching out of families, while political power grew out of the institution of military chieftains and the people’s “habit” of submission to the latter. The legitimacy of power, according to Hume, depends on the length of time of rule and on observance of the principle of private property. In political economy, Hume rejected mercantilism and came close to the theory of labor of A. Smith. Together with Montesquieu, Hume subscribed to the “quantity theory” of metal money.
Hume’s ideas influenced the development of most of the positivist doctrines of the 19th and 20th centuries, including empiriocriticism, neopositivism, and linguistic philosophy.