Hume Studies

My purpose in Hume: An Intellectual Biography was to write the first comprehensive account of Hume's career as an author, beginning with what we know about his education at Edinburgh, and ending with "My Own Life," the brief autobiography that Hume wrote shortly before he died. Where Ernest Mossner, in his classic The Life of David Hume, was explicitly concerned with the man rather than with the ideas, I was concerned with the ideas, and the arguments, rather than with the man. Hume's biography was of interest to me insofar as, but no further than, it shed light on Hume's intellectual development. In many respects, Mossner's achievement as a biographer remains deeply impressive, and anyone wanting to gain a full impression of Hume as an individual certainly needs to read his book, as well as mine. But in one crucial respect, I believe, Mossner was deeply mistaken. Mossner was determined to present Hume as an outsider, continually subject to snubs and humiliations, and almost universally misread and misunderstood. I was concerned, by contrast, to present Hume's authorial career as a triumphant success. As I explain in my response to my critics below, I fixed on the persona of the man of letters as the key to understanding Hume's writings taken as a whole, and I gave an account of Hume's life as man of letters that was intended to bring out his central place in the literary worlds of mid eighteenth-century Scotland, England, and Europe. Thus, I emphasised his friendly intellectual engagements with his contemporaries, and I argued that, in the case of Hume, "Enlightenment" was the creation of a kind of discursive space in which fundamental disagreement about speculative and practical matters could be both polite and constructive.

Closely related to this way of presenting Hume's relationship with the intellectual world in which he lived and worked was a particular approach to the question of Hume and religion. Hume's religious skepticism was, I fully accepted, both unique and a supremely important part of his legacy, but it did not set Hume dramatically against the spirit of his age in the way [End Page 3] that Mossner and many others have claimed. It was no barrier, for instance, to close friendships with several ministers of the Church of Scotland, nor to productive argument with men outwith Scotland such as Richard Price and Josiah Tucker. I attempted to set Hume's religious thought, in the first instance, in a complicated Scottish context in which traditionalist Calvinist orthodoxy was being challenged by a self-consciously "moderate" faction in the Church. This conflict had consequences for many aspects of Scottish cultural and intellectual life, and it impacted sharply on Hume on more than one occasion, for instance when he applied for academic positions in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and when he was trying to establish himself in Edinburgh in the 1750s. Hume was, in an important sense, an ally of the moderates, but it was also true that he shared the skepticism of the orthodox about the possibility of the kind of compromises the moderates wanted to make between religion and modern philosophy. I suggested that one way to read the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion—begun, of course, thirty years before its publication in 1779—was as a response to this intellectual predicament. I was doubtful, then, that it makes sense to think of Hume as hostile to something called, simply, "religion." Religion was not, for him, a monolith. It was a complex and variegated phenomenon, that had played and continued to play many different roles in the emotional, moral, and political lives of human beings. It was also—as Hume revealed in the Natural History of Religion—a phenomenon with deep roots in human nature, and so was something that a skeptic about human rationality was bound to accept as almost certainly a permanent feature of any conceivable human society.

Part of the point of understanding Hume's career as that of a man of letters, and of seeing that career as having been a success, was to move beyond the idea...