Humphry Clinker

DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION

DAVID HUME was born in Edinburgh in 1711, the second son of Joseph Hume, an advocate, and Katherine Falconer, daughter of an eminent lawyer who became Lord President of the Court of Session. He devoted himself from an early age to philosophy and literature and in 1739–40 published his now highly regarded work A Treatise of Human Nature. In his own words it ‘fell dead-born from the Press’ and he later reworked parts of the text. He applied for a professorship at the University of Edinburgh but was unsuccessful, largely due to local opposition. In 1746 he accepted a post as secretary to General James St Clair and was involved in a military campaign and, subsequently, in military embassies to Austria and Italy. By 1751 Hume had returned to Edinburgh. He was appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, which gave him access to an extensive library. For the next twelve years he published a succession of works, which at last earned him an international reputation. During this time he wrote the first draft of the Dialogues Concerning Natural religion. A complementary work, The Natural History of Religion, appeared in 1757. His Political Discourses were published in 1752 and a six-volume History of England appeared between 1754 and 1762. In 1763 he was appointed private secretary to the British ambassador to France. On his arrival there he was greeted with adulation. He was briefly Under-Secretary of State in London before he retired to Edinburgh in 1769. Hume continued with his revision of the Dialogues, which were published posthumously in 1779. He died in 1776. Adam Smith said of Hume: ‘I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.’

J. M. BELL was born in Nairobi in 1944. He was educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, Northwood, and at King’s College, Durham, the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and Linacre College, Oxford. From 1969 to 1994 he taught philosophy at the University of York. He is now Professor of Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan University and Head of the Department of Politics and Philosophy.

DAVID HUME

DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
MARTIN BELL

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First published 1779

Published in Penguin Classics 1990

21

Introduction and notes copyright © Martin Bell, 1990

All rights reserved

Material from Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, translated by R. H. Popkin, is reprinted by kind permission of Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., Indianapolis.

Material from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum: Academica, Vol XIX, translated by H. Rackham, is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Loeb Classical Library. Copyright 1933 by Harvard University Press

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9781101494059

CONTENTS

Introduction

Notes to Introduction

Textual Note

PAMPHILUS to HERMIPPUS

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Notes

Select Bibliography

INTRODUCTION*

IN JULY 1776 James Boswell, the biographer of Dr Johnson, visited David Hume at his house in Edinburgh. Hume was suffering from the illness which led to his death seven weeks later. In his last months, he revised Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which he had written originally in the 1750s but had never published. But in many of the works published in his lifetime, he had discussed the nature of religious belief.