Hume, DAVID

1711-1776. Scottish historian and philosopher. His History of England, a partisan defense of Tory principles, was pub. in three instalments, reversing the order of time, the Stuarts 1754-57, the Tudors 1759, the earlier part 1762. Treatise on Human Nature, 1739-40; E ays, 1741; Human Understanding, 1748; Principles of Morals, 1751; Political Dis courses, 1752: Di ertations, 1757. His argument against miracles has often been quoted and contested. His system of skepticism, founded upon a reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, resolved causality into a ociation, and denied the evidence for the existence of matter, of the soul, and of God, on the basis of pure sensationalism. In ethics he was an adherent of the "moral sense" school and of utilitarianism.