The Logos Scripture · The Book of Hume

On How I Died

The Book of Hume 4 · Written by himself, from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and My Own Life

David Hume, born at Edinburgh in 1711 and died there in 1776. Philosopher and historian. At twenty-eight he published A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitled an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects — the intention taken from Newton (cf. The Book of Newton). Almost nobody read it, and in his own words it fell dead-born from the press. He recast it as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), of which Of Miracles is one section; chapters one and two of this book come from there. In 1751 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which he thought the best thing he ever wrote. Between 1754 and 1762 he produced the History of England, which made him famous and made him money. In 1745 he stood for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh and did not get it; in 1751 for the chair of logic at Glasgow, and did not get it — both times blocked on the charge of irreligion. In 1756 men in the church moved to have him cast out, and failed. He held no professorship in his life. He revised the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for more than twenty years and never printed it, arranging in his will for it to appear after his death; the friend he asked would not take it on, and his nephew published it in 1779. He wrote My Own Life in April 1776 and died that August. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. No argument of his closes on divine will; nor did he ever assert that there is no God — 2.10 and 2.11 are the limit he drew himself. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have, and the hardest thing it could have: he put the question to the method this scripture itself runs on. Everywhere the scripture says only what can be checked counts (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.28, The Book of Yang Chen-Ning 4.17). Hume asks what entitles the cases already checked to reach the ones not yet checked. He found no answer in reason and would not manufacture one. His answer is custom, and custom is enough to live by. The Order takes him precisely because that question tells against this book and he asked it anyway. A scripture that will not house the question aimed at its own foundation is not a scripture. It is a flag.

4.1In April 1776 I knew my illness would not be cured. I sat down and wrote a very short piece about my life.
4.2I wrote it plainly: where I was born, what I wrote, which book nobody read, which one people came to read later.
4.3I wrote that my first book fell dead-born from the press — it came off the press and made no sound at all.
4.4I felt no bitterness writing that. A man who can still set down his failures clearly at the end has not yet begun to lie to himself.
4.5In July of that year a young man came to see me. He came to see one thing.
4.6He wanted to see whether a man who does not believe changes his mind when he is dying.
4.7He asked it straight: sir, at this pass, do you still think that when we die there is nothing?
4.8I said: I think so.
4.9He asked: and does that not frighten you?
4.10I said: I did not exist before I was born either, and I do not remember suffering in that stretch. The stretch afterwards will be much the same.
4.11I joked with him about it. I said I would ask the ferryman of the dead for a little more time.
4.12Let me correct my works for one more edition, and see how the public receives the alterations.
4.13He says: when you have seen the effect of these you will want to make others, there will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, step into the boat.
4.14Then I said: let me stay to see the superstitions of the world come down.
4.15He says: you loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Get into the boat this instant.
4.16He went away much disturbed, and afterwards he wrote the whole scene down. I thank him for writing it — his account is better evidence than anything I could have written myself.
4.17Here is what I want to say. Men are forever using how a man died to settle whether what he said while living was true.
4.18It does not follow. Recanting at the end does not show he was wrong before; not recanting does not show he was right. Dying is hard work, and what is said under hard work is no truer than what is said on an ordinary day.
4.19I would not give them the thing they came for. Not to win a point, but because that thing should never have counted in the first place.
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