John Haldane: Death of a thinking man

Some say the great atheist philosopher David Hume faced his end with good cheer, others that he was depressed and fearful; but their views may reflect their own beliefs,

this year marks the tri-centenary of the birth of David Hume (1711-76), and throughout 2011 there have been many events in Scotland and around the world celebrating his life and work. These are just tributes to a thinker who is certainly among the greatest of British philosophers.

Edinburgh University has been the principal location of the academic celebrations. The present Old College on South Bridge is on the site of the original buildings where Hume studied and where he hoped to be appointed professor of moral philosophy. In the event, however, Edinburgh rejected his application in 1745, as did Glasgow in 1751, and Hume was left to make a life as an independent scholar. Thereafter he served as tutor to an aristocratic family, secretary to a soldier-politician, diplomat in Paris, and as librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates, and, of course, he came to fame as a public intellectual, arguably Scotland’s greatest.

Rightly, celebrations have focused on Hume’s life, but as the year draws to a close it may be apt to consider the circumstances of his death, for they connect with business which we all have reason to attend to, even if we rarely discuss it, namely the right attitude to dying.

From the description of his symptoms it seems likely that Hume contracted stomach cancer. In a short essay entitled My Own Life, dated April 18, 1776, he writes: “In spring 1775 I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution.” That dissolution came four months later, on 25 August, 1776. Hume’s state of mind in the period leading up to his death was the subject of some speculation at the time, and it retains an aspect of mystery.

In his Life of Samuel Johnson (1787), James Boswell records telling Dr Johnson that Hume’s “persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much”. Boswell writes: “On Sunday forenoon the 7 of July 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just adying.” He put to Hume the question whether, although he had become famous as a non-believer, he might yet have some fear of death and of the judgment that might lie beyond it. He then describes Hume as rejecting the idea of an afterlife and as being at ease with the prospect of annihilation.

In reply to Boswell’s report, Dr Johnson said that Hume “had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very probable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going into an unknown state”. Johnson was a sincere Christian and could not accept Hume’s rejection of the reality of God, the soul and eternal judgment, but his refusal to accept Hume’s deathbed persistence in unbelief may say more about Johnson’s lack of a philosophical temperament than about the authenticity of Hume’s state of mind.

Others were keen to record their own estimate of Hume’s attitude to his approaching end. Some weeks after Hume’s death, his executor Adam Smith wrote a letter to Hume’s publisher William Strachan in which he describes the final days of the philosopher. “His cheerfulness was so great, and his conversation and amusements run so much in their usual strain, that, notwithstanding all bad symptoms, many people could not believe he was dying”. Smith adds that Hume told his doctor: “You had better tell Colonel Edmondstone, that I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”

Edmonstone was a close friend of Hume, and Smith’s mention of him was intended to convey the impression to others that Hume was being entirely open and honest with his closest associates when he said he had no fear of death, and more to the point that he did not reach out in his last days for the comforts of religion.

So far so admirable, but there is a little-known and troubling twist. In 1816, Robert Haldane of Airthrey (now the campus of Stirling University) began a work on the evidence for Christian belief. In this he wrote: “When Mr Hume’s philosophical friends visited him on his deathbed, he appeared to them to be cheerful, and was even unbecomingly jocular, as is narrated in that discreditable letter which after his death was addressed by Dr Adam Smith to Mr Strachan … But when these friends were not present, it is said to have been far otherwise with him, indeed the very reverse; and that, in the gloom of his mind, he observed on one occasion to the person who attended him, that he had been in search of light all his life, but now that he was in greater darkness than ever”.

What was the source of this contrasting report? and who was the unnamed attendant? Writing in 1860, Haldane’s nephew Alexander reported that the source of the story was Mr Abercromby of Tullibody. He writes: “The details are curious and worth preserving. It happened in the autumn of 1776, very shortly after Mr Hume’s death, that Mr Abercromby was travelling by stage coach to Haddington with two other friends. The conversation turned on the deathbed of the great philosopher, and as Mr Abercromby’s son-in-law, Colonel Edmonstone of Newton, was one of Hume’s intimate friends, he had heard from him much of the buoyant cheerfulness which had enlivened the sick room of the dying man. Whilst the conversation was running on in this strain, a respectable-looking female dressed in black, begged permission to offer a remark. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘I attended Mr Hume on his deathbed, but I can assure you I hope never again to attend the deathbed of a philosopher’.”

In response to their questions she told them that when his friends were present, “Mr Hume was cheerful even to frivolity, but that when alone he was often overwhelmed with unutterable gloom, and had, in his hours of depression, declared that he had been in search of light all his life, but was now in greater darkness than ever”.

Alexander Haldane then goes on to relate a further curious episode, which he says was “fully believed” by those who knew Smith. Wondering about “the great darkness” presented by death, Hume, promised Smith that, if it were in his power, “he would meet his friend in the shady avenue of the Meadows [behind George Square], “to tell the secrets of the world unknown”. Haldane continues: “Probably the promise was made and received during the last days of David Hume, with the same levity as the conversation which Adam Smith has actually recorded … But such was its effect on [Smith] the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, that no persuasion would induce him to walk in the Meadows after sunset”.

As regards the identity of Hume’s attendant, it might have been his housekeeper Peggy Irvine, to whom he left three years’ wages in his will. I suspect we shall never know whether the Haldane story is accurate. Certainly Hume’s agnostic or atheist associates wished to represent him as resolved in his unbelief and prepared for annihilation; while his religious critics found such indifference to God and eternity literally unbelievable and so sought, or invented, a narrative of deathbed uncertainty and terror.

Two and a half centuries on from Hume’s death, the options remain essentially the same. If there is a difference it is only that thanks to the services of medicine and the distractions of television and the internet we are able to keep thoughts of death at bay, at least for some while. But as the inescapable looms up, we should reflect on whether we face non-existence or future life, and whether, if the latter is what awaits us, we are prepared for it.

• John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy in the University of St Andrews and chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.