Essays

Contents
The material facts in Hume's life are to be found in the autobiography which he prefixed to his History of England . My Own Life , as he calls it, is but a brief exposition, but it is sufficient for its purpose, and the longer biographies of him do little more than amplify the information which he gives us himself. The Humes, it appears, were a remote branch of the family of Lord Hume of Douglas. Hume's father was Joseph Hume, of Ninewells, a minor Scotch laird, who died when his son was an infant. David Hume was born at Edinburgh on April 26th, 1711, during a visit of his parents to the Scotch capital. Hume tells us that his father passed for a man of parts, and that his mother, who herself came of good Scottish family, was a woman of singular merit; though young and handsome, she devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children. At school Hume won no special distinction. He matriculated in the class of Greek at the Edinburgh University when he was twelve years old, and, he says passed through the ordinary course of education with success ; but our college education in Scotland, he remarks in one of his works, extending little further than the languages, ends commonly when we are about fourteen or fifteen years of age. During his youth, Mrs. Hume does not appear to have maintained any too flattering opinion of her son's abilities; she considered him a good-natured but uncommon weak-minded creature. Possibly her judgment underwent a change in course of time, since she lived to see the beginnings of his literary fame; but his worldly success was long in the making, and he was a middle-aged man before his meagre fortune was converted into anything like a decent maintenance.
It may have been Hume's apparent vacillation in choosing a career that made this shrewd Scots wife hold her son in such small esteem. At first the family tried to launch him into the profession of the law, but while they fancied I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly devouring. For six years Hume remained at Ninewells and then made a feeble trial for entering on a more active scene of life. Commerce, this time, was the chosen instrument, but the result was not more successful. In 1734 I went to Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable for me. At length—in the middle of 1736 when Hume was twenty-three years of age and without any profession or means of earning a livelihood—he went over to France. He settled first at Rheims, and afterwards at La Flêche in Anjou, and there I laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature. At La Flêche Hume lived in frequent intercourse with the Jesuits at the famous college in which Descartes was educated, and he composed his first book, the Treatise of Human Nature . According to himself it fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots. But this work which was planned before the author was twenty-one and written before he was twenty-five, in the opinion of Professor Huxley, is probably the most remarkable philosophical work, both intrinsically and in its effects upon the course of thought, that has ever been written. Three years later Hume published anonymously, at Edinburgh, the first volume of Essays, Moral and Political , which was followed in 1742 by the second volume. The Essays , he says, were favourably received and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointments.