The last days of David Hume

David Hume died 250 years ago, on 25 August 1776. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, Hume was the foremost thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment and is today known as one of the greatest philosophers in the Western canon. A quintessential 18th-century man of letters, Hume became rich and famous as a bestselling but controversial essayist and historian. As a thinker, he is known for applying the scientific method to philosophical, political and historical problems, challenging some of his time’s most entrenched positions in epistemology, constitutional theory and historiography. In philosophy, his influence has been colossal, as philosophers still grapple with his scepticism, naturalism, challenges to religion and theory of the mind, while political theorists mine his essays and historical works.

In April 1776, when he was already sick and dying from bowel cancer, Hume penned a concise autobiography, which he called a ‘funeral oration of myself’. The text of My Own Life  is only six pages long in its modern edition. ‘It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity’, Hume explained, ‘therefore, I shall be short.’ He further stated that ‘my narrative shall contain little more than the history of writings – as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations’. He described ‘love of literary fame’ as his life’s ‘ruling passion’.

Hume’s autobiographical sketch covers primarily, though not exclusively, his books and their reception. We read about how his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature  (1739-40), now considered a philosophical masterpiece, ‘fell dead-born from the press’. We learn that his Political Discourses (1752) was his only work that was an immediate success, and that he considers his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals  (1752)  ‘incomparably the best’ of all his writings. We also learn about the controversial reception of his best-selling History of England  (six volumes, 1754-61), which outraged Whigs because of its alleged Tory bias.

Hume’s memoir briefly mentions his early love for literature, his failure as a young merchant in Bristol, his short tenure as tutor to the mad Marquess of Annandale, and his various appointments: as secretary to General St Clair on several military expeditions during the War of the Austrian Succession, as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh in 1752, and as secretary to the British Embassy in Paris in 1763. Unlike Immanuel Kant, who notoriously never left Königsberg, Hume was a ‘citizen of the world’ both in word and deed, residing at various times in his family home in Ninewells in Berwickshire, Bristol, La Flèche, Vienna, Turin, Paris, London and Edinburgh.

My Own Life leaves out many details, including Hume’s failed applications to become professor of ethics at the University of Edinburgh in 1744 and professor of pneumatical philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752, the attempt of the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk to excommunicate him for infidelity in the late 1750s, and his well-publicised quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1760s. It also excludes more positive events, such as the fact that he obtained a royal pension from George III.

James Harris has argued in the standard modern biography that Hume may have misrepresented his rather comfortable life and tended to exaggerate some of his early failures in order to tell a more dramatic ‘rags to riches’ story as well as to amplify his independent credentials. Be that as it may, Hume emphasised that he remained of ‘cheerful and sanguine temper’ in the face of disappointment, and stayed away from ‘all literary squabbles’. He was also proud to point out that the royalties he received from his History ‘exceeded anything formerly known in England’, meaning that he ‘bec[a]me not only independent, but opulent’ from his writing.

My Own Life concludes with Hume’s discovery of his final illness, which he appears to have taken in his stride. His description of the final part of his life is worth quoting at length:

In spring 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were I to name the period of my life, which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could have but few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.

My Own Life was published posthumously in 1777 along with his close friend Adam Smith’s Letter to Strahan, which, with Hume’s blessing, completed the account of Hume’s final period of illness, in a public letter addressed to Hume’s publisher, William Strahan. Hume and Smith had been in close contact for over 25 years and, because they lived in different cities, many of their letters have been preserved. In January 1776, the famously rotund Hume informed Smith that he had lost five stone, or 70 pounds. Hume’s doctor, Joseph Black, told Smith that his patient suffered from night fevers, internal bleeding and severe stomach problems. The evidence indicates, however, that despite his failing health, Hume continued to host dinners and visit friends. The Scottish playwright John Home commented that ‘[Hume] talks of his illness, of his death, as matters of no moment… I never saw him more cheerful, or in more perfect possession of all his faculties, his memory, his understanding, his wit.’

Hume also kept revising his own writings, while keeping up with new literature, including Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in the spring of 1776. ‘Euge! Belle! Dear Mr Smith: I am much pleas’d with your Performance, and the Perusal of it has taken me from a State of great Anxiety,’ he wrote to the author from his sickbed. Though the work was inspired by Hume’s essays on political economy in the Political Discourses, Hume added that ‘If you were here at my Fireside, I should dispute some of your Principles.’ Anticipating David Ricardo, Hume argued that ‘I cannot think, that the Rent of Farms makes any part of the Price of the Produce, but that the Price is determined altogether by the Quantity and the Demand.’

Smith spent over a month with Hume in Edinburgh in July and August 1776, with Smith reporting that Hume was ‘by no means in the state in which I could have wished to have seen him. His spirits, however, continue perfectly good’. Smith’s Letter to Strahan retells the last period of Hume’s life and also offers a eulogy of his older friend, describing the notorious sceptic as ‘approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’. Smith was careful to point out that ‘though Mr. Hume always talked of his approaching dissolution with great cheerfulness, he never affected to make any parade of his magnanimity. He never mentioned the subject but when the conversation naturally led to it, and never dwelt longer upon it than the course of the conversation happened to require’.

Many were impressed with Smith’s Letter to Strahan. Hugh Blair, a moderate minister in the Scottish Kirk, wrote after Hume’s death: ‘Taking him all in all, we shall never see the like. Indeed I cannot but agree with what Adam Smith says of him.’ But since Hume had many detractors, particularly among the devout in Presbyterian Scotland and Anglican England, Smith was heavily criticised for his Letter to Strahan. Indeed, he said notoriously that it ‘brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain’. The latter was a reference to Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which, like so many of the highlights of the Scottish Enlightenment, was inconceivable without the prior achievements of Hume. One of the central claims of the work, summarised by Smith in Book Three, was that:

Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.

According to the Letter to Strahan, Smith said to Hume that ‘you have at least the satisfaction of leaving all your friends, your brother’s family in particular, in great prosperity’. Hume agreed; referring to one of Lucian’s dialogues in which the dying are pleading with Charon, the boatman who carries the dead across the river Styx into Hades, Hume could not come up with any reasonable excuse for not getting into Charon’s boat. As Smith depicts their dialogue in the Letter to Strahan:

‘I could not well imagine’, said he [Hume], ‘what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done everything of consequence which I ever meant to do, and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am now likely to leave them; I, therefore, have all reason to die contented.’

Hume went on to invent ‘several jocular excuses’:

‘Upon further consideration’, said he, ‘I thought I might say to him, Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the Public receives the alterations.’ But Charon would answer, ‘When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.’ But I might still urge, ‘Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfal of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.’ But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. ‘You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue.’

The final conversation between Hume and Smith took place on 8 August 1776, after which Smith returned to his mother in Kirkcaldy. We know from their subsequent letters that it was not a fictional account. On 22 August, three days before Hume’s death, physician Black reported to Smith that ‘[Hume] is quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’. The day after his passing, Black said that Hume until his final moments ‘never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness’.

As Dennis Rasmussen has chronicled in glorious detail in The Infidel and the Professor  (2017), Hume’s alleged infidelity meant that his death was a highly anticipated event. Many wanted to know if Hume would stay true to his scepticism to the very end, or he would repent. And if he did not, would he experience anguish and despair as a result? In short, was it possible for a non-Christian to die a philosophical death in a Christian age?

On 7 July 1776, Hume had been visited by James Boswell, who asked Hume for his final thoughts about the afterlife. ‘[I]t was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever’, Hume responded. When Boswell asked if this worldview did not make him anxious, Hume replied that ceasing to exist after death was not scarier than not having existed before birth. Hume’s religious brother corroborated that ‘as far as I can judge, his sentiments with regard to futurity’ during his final days ‘were the same, as when he was in perfect health’.

Many were outraged. Samuel Johnson told Boswell that he simply could not believe it: ‘It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy.’ When Boswell’s friend William Johnson Temple, who admired Hume as a historian, learned that Hume remained stubborn in his sceptical views, his reaction was remarkably hostile: ‘His persisting in his impiety & irreligion makes no impression upon me… If he continue obstinate [he] will die the death of a Dog… Let him die then & be thrown into the ditch.’

Hume had argued in The Natural History of Religion (1757) that religious belief arises partly from fear as people face life’s uncertainties and difficulties. Rasmussen has plausibly suggested that Hume (and Smith) wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to live a happy and virtuous life, and die without fear and regrets, without recourse to religion.

There is an alternative narrative of Hume’s final days, recently explored in Aaron Alexander Zubia’s The Political Thought of David Hume  (2024), in which Hume’s death was less tranquil. According to Alexander Haldane’s Memoirs of Robert Haldane (1852), a woman, possibly Hume’s housekeeper, contended that ‘Mr. Hume was cheerful even to frivolity, but that when alone he was often overwhelmed with unutterable gloom, and had, in his hours of depression, declared that he had been in search of light all his life, but was now in greater darkness than ever.’ The Christian Observer (1831) reported that Hume’s housekeeper had said that he was afraid of being alone for a single minute during the time before his death. According to this alternative narrative, Zubia writes: ‘Hume’s ignoble, fearful demise proved that there is no substitute for religion, which is indispensable to a noble life and a noble death.’

As Zubia recognises, we cannot tell with absolute certainty which account is true. Both accounts are, to an extent, mythical, even if there is much more, and a greater variety of, evidence on the side of Hume’s and Smith’s official account. But whatever one makes of Hume’s lack of religion, it is indisputable that Smith’s description of his deceased friend painted a vivid and timeless picture of a virtuous and philosophical man. Smith wrote of Hume:

His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known. Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity. It was a frugality founded, not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency. The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind, or the steadiness of his resolutions. His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight, even those who were the objects of it. To his friends, who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities, which contributed more to endear his conversation. And that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive.

Though clearly not objective, Smith’s depiction of Hume is one of the great character sketches in the history of philosophy. May it long be remembered.