Boswell knew the popular reputation Hume had as an unbeliever, and he was interested to see how he was facing death. In his journal1 Boswell records that Hume told him that the morality of every religion was bad and that ‘when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious’. Boswell was convinced both from what Hume said, and from his manner, which was calm and cheerful, that he ‘persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes’. Boswell found the interview disturbing:

I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith. I told him that I believed the Christian religion as I believed history. Said he: ‘You do not believe it as you believe the Revolution.’

The views about religion glimpsed in Hume’s conversation with Boswell accord with his philosophical theories. In all his writings Hume argued that there is no reason to believe such doctrines as that of the immortality of the soul; that religion is morally corrupting; that commonly ordinary men and women do not really believe what they profess to believe. Of course such views made enemies, and Hume’s finest work on religion, the Dialogues, remained unpublished when he died largely because his friends had persuaded him not to publish it in his lifetime. Hume asked his close friend Adam Smith to supervise its posthumous publication, but he was unwilling, as was Hume’s London printer, William Strahan. It appeared eventually in 1779, without a publisher’s name, being brought to press by Hume’s nephew who was following instructions in his uncle’s will.

David Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in Edinburgh, 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. David did not know his father, who died in 1713. He was brought up by Katherine at the family estate, Ninewells, near the village of Chirnside a few miles from Berwick upon Tweed. He matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1723, it being common practice to go to college at a young age. After the usual course of study in Latin and Greek, ethics, mathematics, logic and natural philosophy (natural science) Hume returned to his family home. Not so commonly for the time, his study of natural philosophy had included some introduction to the theories of Sir Isaac Newton.

Katherine, to whom David was devoted, intended her younger son to follow family tradition and become a lawyer. But he preferred philosophy and literature, especially classical authors such as Cicero and Virgil. From the age of eighteen, he studied and thought with such intensity as to undermine his health. In eight years he developed the essentials of his thought, and wrote a philosophical masterpiece, the three-volume work called A Treatise of Human Nature.

In 1734 he left Ninewells and went to England, where for a few months he worked for a sugar merchant in Bristol. Abandoning this, he went to France, where he lived in La Flèche, in Anjou. Here there was a Jesuit college, at which René Descartes (1596–1650) had been a student. In his correspondence, Hume says that in a discussion with a Jesuit in La Flèche he first constructed an argument against the credibility of stories of miracles, which he included in the Treatise. He completed the work in France, and in 1737, now aged twenty-six, went to London in search of a publisher. This was not altogether easy. While engaged in negotiations, Hume also planned to seek opinions of his work from leading thinkers. One of these was the theologian Dr Joseph Butler (1692–1752). Butler had recently published the Analogy of Religion (1736), but he was already familiar to Hume from his Fifteen Sermons (1726). Hume refers to Butler in the Treatise as someone whose thought influenced his own, and there are reasons to think that some of the theological views examined in the Dialogues were derived from Butler’s writings. It was partly to avoid antagonizing Butler that Hume deleted from the Treatise. the discussion of miracles.

The first two books of the Treatise, ‘Of the Understanding’ and ‘Of the Passions’, appeared in 1739, while the third book, ‘Of Morals’, was revised and published in 1740.