ABSTRACT
David Hume gained many contradictory epithets in his lifetime and later. To his religious and conservative-minded critics he was ‘David Hume the atheist’ (a term which carried with it strong implications of immorality) or the extreme ‘sceptic’, a negative thinker and a seeker after notoriety (the vulgar notion of ‘fame’). To his literary rival, Johnson, he was a ‘Blasphemer’ (Sharbo, 1974, 32; Box, 1990 , 5). Hume evoked, in his own time and since, ‘antipathy or admiration’ (Jessop, 1966 , 35). In his own ironic mind he was Hume ‘the great infidel’, a disturber of ‘zealots’ (the Presbyterian spirit of Scotland in his youth was a significant context for the development of his secular morality and anti-religious convictions). Near the end of his life he held himself to be, with considerable justification, ‘a man of great moderation’ with respect to all of his ‘passions’, a judgment supported by Philip Vincent, relative of the ‘lunatic’ Marquis of Annandale, whom Hume worked with for ‘a twelvemonth’ (Murray, 1841 , 14). He was certainly a naturalist and materialist. He may well have been an atheist (the question is in doubt) but if he were then he would probably be an example of a nondogmatic one – someone who argues that there can be no convincing evidence for or against the existence of God but whom nevertheless believes that God does not exist. Yet, he toys with the notion of a divine mover, the ‘Author’ of nature. His normal everyday practices are not clear and, in defending his stand on religious abuses depicted in his History of England , he disliked the implication that being of no sect meant being of no religion (Calderwood, [ 1898 ] 1989, 74). He protected himself carefully. He had several friends among the moderate clergy, including his ‘friendly adversary’, George Campbell (Merrill, 2008 , 66), and they gave him, in the end, a Christian burial. He could not reasonably be taken as an example of Shaftesbury’s ‘entheusiastical atheists’.
