Key figures: David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, James Boswell
Summary
David Hume, one of the most influential philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, died on August 25, 1776, at age 65 in Edinburgh. After battling intestinal cancer throughout 1775 and early 1776, Hume passed away at his home at the southwest corner of St Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh’s New Town. He requested a simple Roman tomb inscribed only with his name and birth/death years, famously remarking that he would “leave it to Posterity to add the Rest.” Hume’s death marked the end of an intellectual life that had transformed Western philosophy, economics, and historical scholarship over nearly five decades of prolific writing and thought.
Final Months: Illness, Equanimity, and Posthumous Arrangements
Hume’s final year became as philosophically significant as his written works. Diagnosed with what contemporaries called “a disorder of the bowels” — almost certainly intestinal cancer — he nonetheless remained in good spirits, reportedly telling friends that he had never been calmer in his life. His equanimity in the face of death attracted enormous attention in an era when Christian piety was considered essential to a peaceful end, and Hume’s cheerful atheism — or at minimum agnosticism — was both celebrated by admirers and condemned by religious critics.
In early April 1776, the Scottish lawyer and biographer James Boswell visited Hume, reportedly hoping to find the philosopher frightened of death and thus disposed to recant his skepticism. Instead, Boswell found Hume “just a-dying” but “in no pain,” joking about his own approaching end. Hume told Boswell he had never entertained any serious religious belief and saw no reason to begin. Boswell, deeply unsettled by the encounter, recorded it in his diary. Hume told him he thought it possible that “a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn” — citing his own theory that causation is a habit of mind, not a necessary logical connection — and that the best he could say for an afterlife was that he simply did not know.
In March 1776, Hume completed his brief autobiography, My Own Life, a document of only five pages that covered his entire career with characteristic detachment and dry wit. He described himself as a man of “mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper, of an open, social, and cheerful Humour” and narrated his career setbacks — the reception of the Treatise as having “fallen dead-born from the Press” in 1739 — without bitterness.
Key Philosophical Works and Their Impact
Hume’s intellectual output spanned philosophy, history, and economics:
| Work | Year | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| A Treatise of Human Nature | 1739–40 | Foundational statement of empiricism; initially ignored |
| Essays, Moral and Political | 1741–42 | Brought Hume popular recognition; widely read |
| An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding | 1748 | Accessible reformulation of the Treatise; widely influential |
| An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals | 1751 | Moral sentimentalism; Hume called it his best work |
| History of England (6 vols.) | 1754–62 | Made him wealthy and famous; definitive history of its era |
| The Natural History of Religion | 1757 | Empirical examination of religion’s psychological origins |
| Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion | 1779* | Decisive critique of arguments for God’s existence; published posthumously |
Hume completed the *Dialogues before his death but arranged for posthumous publication to avoid controversy. Adam Smith declined to publish them on Hume’s behalf, fearing damage to his own reputation; Hume’s nephew David Hume the Younger arranged publication in 1779.
Hume’s Fork
The most consequential analytical tool Hume introduced was the distinction between two types of meaningful propositions:
- Relations of ideas (mathematics, logic): necessarily true, knowable by reason alone
- Matters of fact (empirical claims): known only through experience; their denial is always possible
Any statement that fits neither category — including most metaphysical claims about God, substance, and causation — Hume famously suggested should be “committed to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” This Hume’s Fork became the template for later positivism and analytic philosophy.
Causation and Skepticism
Hume’s analysis of causation was his most disruptive philosophical contribution. He argued that we never perceive a necessary connection between cause and effect — we observe a sequence of events (billiard ball A strikes B; B moves) and form a habit of expectation through repeated experience. Causation, on this view, is psychological rather than metaphysical. This challenged not only Aristotelian philosophy but also Newtonian physics as commonly interpreted, since Newton’s laws seemed to imply that the universe was governed by necessary causal laws.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously wrote in his Prolegomena (1783) that reading Hume had “interrupted my dogmatic slumber” and compelled him to develop an entirely new philosophical framework — the critical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant’s response to Hume reshaped European philosophy for the next century.
The Is-Ought Problem
In the Treatise (Book III, Part I, Section I), Hume observed that moral philosophers frequently move from describing what is to prescribing what ought to be without explaining how this logical leap is justified. This is-ought problem (sometimes called “Hume’s Guillotine”) remains one of the most debated questions in metaethics and philosophy of law, and is cited in contemporary discussions of natural law theory, evolutionary ethics, and moral realism.
Relationship with Adam Smith
Hume and Adam Smith were intimate friends for over 25 years, their friendship cemented through shared membership in Edinburgh intellectual circles — including the Select Society — and mutual influence across their works. Smith later credited Hume as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.” Their correspondence throughout 1776 is among the most poignant intellectual exchanges of the era.
In May 1776, Smith wrote to Hume praising the Wealth of Nations (published in March 1776 — see The Wealth of Nations) and acknowledging Hume’s prior influence on his economic thinking, particularly regarding money, prices, and the balance of trade. Hume, though seriously ill, responded with typical wry enthusiasm, praising the book while offering a gentle skepticism about whether Smith’s arguments for free trade would actually change mercantilist policy.
After Hume’s death, Smith wrote a celebrated letter to their mutual publisher William Strahan describing Hume’s final months and character. The letter, later published as “A Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strahan, Esq.,” concluded with Smith’s judgment that Hume had approached as nearly as possible “the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man.” The letter scandalized many religious contemporaries who saw it as endorsing irreligion; Smith received significant hostile correspondence as a result.
Hume’s Historical Significance in 1776
The convergence of events in 1776 gives Hume’s death particular symbolic weight:
- The Declaration of Independence was adopted in July 1776, invoking Enlightenment principles of natural rights — principles that Hume had simultaneously influenced (through his empiricism) and challenged (through his skepticism about natural law’s rational foundations).
- Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in March 1776 — a work Hume had in many ways made possible through his own economic essays.
- James Watt’s commercial steam engine launched the same year, representing the technological materialisation of the empirical, practical-reason worldview that Hume had championed philosophically.
Hume’s grave in Calton Hill, Edinburgh — the simple Roman tomb he requested — became a minor landmark by the early nineteenth century, visited by philosophers and writers seeking to pay respects to the man who had more than any other thinker defined what it meant to think empirically about the human condition.