she eventually named the absent Hume as the father of her unborn child – probably to protect the real father. This was the sessions’ firm conviction, at any rate. We will never know the truth.
With one notable exception, this is the main evidence we have of Hume’s sexual inclinations. According to Mossner, Hume ‘in later life, in Italy and France and Scotland, was to prove a man of normal sexual desires’. Since not much else is recorded about these sexual desires, one can only assume they were fulfilled by hospitality – with enthusiastic chambermaids and demanding hostesses. And since Hume is one of the few literary figures of the age who didn’t catch the pox, it’s unlikely that this hospitality was very frequent, or that he went with whores, who at the time were cheaper than hot water bottles. (This latter is intended as a purely socioeconomic observation, with no sexist undertones. These disease-ridden human hot water bottles would in most cases have arrived at their condition after suffering the same fate as Agnes, victims of the hypocrisy so necessary to any upright society of closet masochists.)
Hume went first to live in Reims but later moved to La Fleche, almost certainly because of its inspiring associations with Descartes, who had been educated there at the Jesuit college. Within three years Hume had finished A Treatise of Human Nature. He was later to disparage this work because of what he considered to be its youthful extravagances. But he did not disavow its philosophy, which contains almost all the original philosophical ideas for which he is today remembered. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, is even of the view that this work contains the best parts of Hume’s philosophy. Some achievement for a man who was not yet thirty.
In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume attempted to define the basic principles of human knowledge. How do we know anything for certain? And what exactly is it that we do know for certain? In trying to answer these questions he followed in the empiricist tradition, believing that all our knowledge is ultimately based on experience. In Hume’s view, experience consists of perceptions, of which there are two types. ‘Those perceptions which enter with most force and violence we may name impressions; and, under this name, I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning.’
He explains: ‘Every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it.’ But we can also form complex ideas. These are derived from impressions, by way of simple ideas, but need not necessarily conform to an impression. For example, we can imagine a mermaid by combining our idea of a fish and our idea of a woman.
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