Hume Quotes

“Pope showed that a writer, if he were sufficiently good, and had sufficient business acumen, did not need a patron or employer. This new model of authorship made some uncomfortable. Writing for money sounded mercenary and generally unrespectable. The old culture of aristocratic patronage might, in a way, have been a surer guarantee of literary integrity and independence.69 If Hume had any worries on this score, he never confessed them. The tone of ‘My Own Life’ was one of unabashed pride in his own financial success. Hume positively trumpeted the fact that the money he received from his booksellers ‘much exceeded any thing formerly known in England’, and that it made him not just independent but also opulent.70 Another role model may have been Voltaire, who, while not averse to the patronage of the great, was a very capable marketer of his own works. The young Hume would have”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“The first really significant event in Hume's intellectual life may have been an encounter with Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Hume bought, or was given, a copy in”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Hume declared that ‘Our connection with each other, as men of letters, is greater than our differences as adhering to different sects or systems’. ‘Let us’, he continued, ‘revive the happy times, when Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter to discourse and conversation’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“He sought, and found, a very large readership among the educated men and women of his day, in Britain, and in Europe more widely. What he wanted from his readers, but did not always get, was a willingness to join him in a certain kind of discursive space, in a kind of conversation”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“This suggests that there would be little plausibility to a suggestion to the effect that the remit of the philosophical man of letters, as understood by Hume, was to work towards the demise of the Christian religion.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Many of Hume's early readers, including Smollett, believed that Hume wrote his History in imitation of Voltaire. Johnson claimed that ‘Hume would never have written History, had not Voltaire written it before him’.91 Hume, though, had none of Voltaire's reforming zeal, neither in religion nor in politics. Hume did not write, as Voltaire said he did, pour agir. It is impossible to imagine Hume taking up a case like that of Jean Calas, or writing a book like Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance.92 Hume seems to have been made uncomfortable by the utopian optimism and dogmatic self-assurance of the philosophes – which may have been part of the reason why he attempted to give assistance to their bitter critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was even more sceptical than Rousseau himself was as to the possibility of a writer's doing anything to change and improve the world in which he lived. His account of human nature, with its subversion of the authority of reason, and its case for belief in general as being a function of feeling not rationality, cast doubt on the very possibility of enlightened reform and improvement. Politics as Hume describes it is”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“The 1742 essays ‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’, taken together, demanded to be read as, in effect, Hume's explanation of why he did not think of himself as able to continue with moral philosophy's traditional project of emotional therapy and improvement of character, and why, as moral philosopher, he concerned himself with the purely explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judgement. Hume liked to portray himself an anatomist of the moral life – and as an anatomist also of politics. He made a much more serious attempt than was common at the time to rise above factionalism and to discuss politics with genuine impartiality, in the interests of understanding the deeper forces threatening the much-vaunted constitutional settlement of 1688. And in his writings on commerce, there were none of the usual pleas of books on trade for this or that piece of legislative reform, in the interests of this or that part of the mercantile or manufacturing community. The ‘chief business’ of both philosophers and politicians, Hume wrote in ‘Of Commerce’, was ‘to regard the”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“The philosopher did not have a practical agenda. That was implicit in his concern for the general, not the particular. This made philosophical politics look attractively different from the self-seeking squabbling of party political debate. On the other hand, it made philosophical religion look, to some at least, reprehensibly theoretical and ‘cold’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Similarly, in A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke depicted the investigation of the springs and the tracing of the courses of the passions as part of a larger search into ‘the general scheme of things’, in so far as the goal was to reduce the complex to ‘utmost simplicity’, and thus ‘communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“doctrine or a subject matter, but rather as a habit of mind, a style of thinking, and of writing, such as could in principle be applied to any subject whatsoever.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“It may have been that early on Hume took his conception of the life of letters from the writings of Shaftesbury, and, perhaps, especially from Shaftesbury's ‘Advice to an Author’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“By twenty-six Hume had completed the first two volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, ‘the masterpiece which contains all that is most important in his thought’. The Treatise, though, was ‘a complete failure’, and there followed years of poverty and insignificance. Hume”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography