Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [52]
There are subtler and better replies to Berkeley than Johnson’s, but none simpler or saner than Hume’s: Berkeley’s arguments, he said, “admit of no answer and produce no conviction.”
Hume
But David Hume (1711–1776) himself created a difficult problem for both philosophers and psychologists in his psychological writing. First, let us meet this brightest star of the Scottish Enlightenment.
In Scotland, as elsewhere in the Western world, the Enlightenment was the prevalent eighteenth-century philosophic movement, characterized by reliance on science and reason, the questioning of traditional religion, and the belief in universal human progress. In childhood, Hume was, on two counts, an unlikely prospect to become a luminary of that movement. He was born in Edinburgh of a well-to-do Presbyterian family and indoctrinated in childhood with Calvinist theology. As a boy he seemed dull (his own mother said he was “a fine, good-natured crater but uncommon weak-minded”), but the dullness was probably a misimpression created by his stolidity and tendency toward overweight; he was bright enough to enter the University of Edinburgh at twelve. As for his Calvinism, at fifteen he was avidly reading the philosophy of his time and by eighteen had become a convert to it, later commenting that “he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke.”*
Hume, the second son in his family, inherited only a trifling portion. He therefore studied law, but so loathed it that he had a breakdown. He found a stint in a merchant’s office equally intolerable. At twenty-three he decided to eke out an existence as a philosopher and moved to France to live cheaply. He settled at La Flèche (where Descartes had studied), and, though not enrolled at the college, talked the Jesuits into letting him use its library. In only two years he wrote his two-volume Treatise of Human Nature: An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental (Newtonian) Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1738), the work in which he first set forth his psychology.
He expected it to make him famous but was bitterly disappointed when it attracted almost no notice. (Rewritten, later, in simpler form, it did better.) Forced to earn a living, he briefly tutored a young nobleman, then became secretary to General James St. Clair, in which post he earned a good salary, wore a scarlet uniform, ate well, and grew stout. A visitor described him as having a broad fat face “without any expression other than that of imbecility” and a body better suited to an alderman than a refined philosopher. Again appearances were deceptive; fairly soon Hume had saved enough to devote himself to writing, and the works of his mature years in politics, economics, philosophy, history, and religion brought him the fame he sought. In France he was, though vast in girth, the darling of the salonières and much admired by Voltaire and Diderot; in London his home became a salon where Adam Smith and other liberal thinkers regularly met for stimulating conversation.
Friends and acquaintances considered him wise, amiable, moderate in controversy, and tolerant; he said the same of himself, adding that he was “a man of great moderation in all my passions.” (At twenty-three he had made a young woman pregnant, and at thirty-seven wooed a married countess on his knees, without success. These episodes aside, he seems to have been remarkably moderate in at least one passion.) Though he denounced Spinoza as an atheist, he was himself a doubter to the end.