strong reminder that scholarship requires the support of institutions as well as individuals. My research on Hume has been aided and encouraged in many ways by the University of Georgia, especially by its libraries, which are directed by David Bishop, by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, whose Dean is W. Jackson Payne, and by the Department of Political Science, which has been headed during the period of this research by Loren P. Beth and Frank J. Thompson. The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago is a second institution to which I am deeply indebted. Many years ago, while a doctoral student under the Committee, I first studied Hume’s writings in research that was guided by Friedrich A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Joseph Cropsey. The Committee on Social Thought, more than any academic program that I know of, has sought to recover the unity and comprehensiveness of human knowledge that was lost after Hume’s time, with the division of learning into departments or disciplines. Finally, I owe a great debt to Liberty Fund for its willingness to sponsor a new edition of Hume’s Essays and to entrust me with its preparation. Liberty Fund’s founder, Pierre F. Goodrich, maintained that a free society depends on free inquiry and that free inquiry depends, in turn, on the availability of reliable editions or translations of the great books, among which he included Hume’s essays.
E.F.M.
Athens, Georgia
THIS volume has been revised throughout for this new printing. First, the text of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary has been rechecked carefully, using photocopies supplied by the Huntington Library of both the 1772 edition and the 1777 edition. A fair number of corrections have been made in the text, but rarely do these affect Hume’s meaning. The 1777 edition continues to serve as the copy-text, but a comparison with the 1772 edition was helpful in detecting typographical errors in the 1777 edition that might otherwise be indistinguishable. In their compilation of variant readings, Green and Grose overlooked the 1772 edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, which appeared as the first volume of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (A New Edition; London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand: and A. Kincaid, and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh; two volumes). A comparison of the 1777 edition of Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary with that of 1772 shows that Hume reworked carefully the last edition that he prepared for the press, sometimes making substantial changes.
Second, I have corrected the other writings reprinted in this volume against the appropriate copy-texts, thus ending all dependence on the unreliable edition of Green and Grose, save for the use of their apparatus of variant readings. I am grateful to the British Library for supplying photocopies of the 1777 edition of Hume’s “Life” and Smith’s “Letter” and to the Houghton Library of Harvard University for photocopies of the essays withdrawn by Hume, in their final printings.
Third, I have redesigned and corrected the Index of the first edition. Finally, I have made a few minor changes in the editorial apparatus. I am indebted to the following persons for suggestions that were helpful in preparing this revised edition: John Danford of the University of Houston; Thomas Pangle of the University of Toronto; Samuel Shaffer of Nashville, Tennessee; and M. A. Stewart of the University of Lancaster.
E.F.M.
October 1986
THE LIFE OF DAVID HUME, ESQ.
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
IT is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity.
I was born the 26th of April 1711, old style, at Edinburgh. I was of a good family, both by father and mother: my father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s, or Hume’s; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice: the title of Lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother.
My family, however, was not rich, and being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender. My father, who passed for a man of parts, died when I was an infant, leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister, under the care of our mother, a woman of singular merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children. I passed through the ordinary course of education with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.
My very slender fortune, however, being unsuitable to this plan of life, and my health being a little broken by my ardent application, I was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life. In 1734, I went to Bristol, with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there 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.
During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country-house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of his fortune.
Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots. But being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I very soon recovered the blow, and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country. In 1742, I printed at Edinburgh the first part of my Essays: the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment. I continued with my mother and brother in the country, and in that time recovered the knowledge of the Greek language, which I had too much neglected in my early youth.
In 1745, I received a letter from the Marquis of Annandale, inviting me to come and live with him in England; I found also, that the friends and family of that young nobleman were desirous of putting him under my care and direction, for the state of his mind and health required it.—I lived with him a twelvemonth. My appointments during that time made a considerable accession to my small fortune. I then received an invitation from General St. Clair to attend him as a secretary2 to his expedition, which was at first meant against Canada, but ended in an incursion on the coast of France. Next year, to wit, 1747, I received an invitation from the General to attend him in the same station in his military embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. I then wore3 the uniform of an officer, and
