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It is not contestable that Hume‟s works are great in contributing to the progress of philosophy (Empiricism in particular). However, the society and the environment Hume found himself contributed in a considerable extent to the line of his thought. In the day of Hume, philosophy was treating the epistemic problem of true source of human knowledge.

77 The rationalistic metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Malebranche who accorded acquisition of knowledge to reason: it is a given among this group that out senses are deceptive and so, they distrusted the senses as sources of knowledge; only reason can do just that. To them, it is only through reason that we truly understand the fundamental truth about reality. This school also believed that the fundamental truth about the world can be known a priori; that they are either innate or self evident to the minds. These philosophers made use of deductive reasoning to prove the truth of propositions concerning the nature of the universe; God and human soul. Hume was dissatisfied with the approaches of his predecessors on the certainty of human knowledge. Therefore, “Hume wishes to base his philosophy on the experimental method and to study human nature by applying the empirical method of the experimental sciences”.⁹

Secondly, it is however still common to find him and the individuality of his philosophy considered merely the third major representatives, and logical outcome of British empiricism, John Locke, and George Berkeley, being therefore, his two predecessors.

Undoubtedly, Hume‟s writings owed so much to the influence of Locke and Berkeley. The major principle which Hume formulated in his Enquiry concerning Human understanding

-“all our ideas … are copies of our impressions”¹⁰ considered a re-echo of Locke‟s fundamental views in his Essays concerning Human understanding. Most of Hume‟s arguments concerning the name of object and ideas were taken almost directly from Berkeley. This is very evident because, during Hume‟s youth, when he was a student of Edinburgh, he belonged to a society of young men who were engaged in discussing Berkeley‟s conception of the material world and who were also correspondents with him (Berkeley). Berkeley‟s influence on Hume was even confirmed by Hume himself when he

78 said that the writings of that very ingenious author-referring to Berkeley-form the best of lesson of skepticism which are to be found either among the ancient or modern philosophers.

He however, opined that the skepticism of Berkeley‟s argument stemmed from the fact that they admit of no answer and produced no convictions. This kind of skepticism that admits of no answer and produces no conviction was not therefore satisfactory to Hume as he battled to correct the short comings of skepticism in his own philosophy. However, though Hume was influenced by Locke and Berkeley, it was not to the extent of drawing the same conclusions with them as the resulting philosophy constructed with the aid of their views by Hume differed sharply from theirs. Unlike both Locke and Berkeley, Hume broke away from the orthodox philosophical assumptions then in dominance - the dogmatic rationalism of the seventeenth century most notably, its appeal to God. Hume himself recognized and confirmed this fact when he wrote to Henry in Rome in 1739 saying that, “my principles … would produce almost a total alteration in philosophy and you know, revolutions of this kind are not easily brought about”.¹¹

From this therefore, it became clear that though Locke and Berkeley influenced Hume a lot, Hume never however allowed himself to be carried away by their philosophical views as of course, he did not agree with them in many areas. One thus discovers that Hume only used the epistemological procedures of Locke and Berkeley as ladder to aid him climb to his own epistemological procedure, and after this, he discarded the ladder. He mostly used Locke‟s and Berkeley‟s views to bring out the absurdities inherent in the epistemological traditions he was attacking – dogmatic rationalism.

79 Another notable influence on Hume was the skepticism of the French thinkers. It is pertinent to note Hume‟s contact with the works of Francis Hutcheson as related by Lavine:

Hume had discovered the works of Francis Hutcheson … who had argued that moral principles are not based upon the bible as Christianity says nor are they based upon reason, as Plato said and Socrates had said, our moral beliefs, said Hutcheson, rests only on our feelings, or sentiment of approval or disapproval.¹²

This led him to assert that moral beliefs are neither divine nor rational but only express our feelings to all our beliefs. He attributed the achievements of science - physics, chemistry, astronomy and physiology to sentiments and feelings that we perceive over and over again in an orderly fashion which leads to our believing them to be true. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume stated that his purpose is to “study the science of man and to explain the principles of human nature”.¹³

Hume was also tremendously impressed by the achievement of Newton in the field of natural science. Newton‟s success which depended on his employment of experimental method was so much acknowledged by Hume. For this reason, Hume felt that the time had come to employ this same method to philosophy believing it to bring about a comparable success. Hume acknowledged that thinkers before him had attempted this method as he commented, “earlier thinkers have made a start in this direction, and he mentioned, and has obviously been influenced by the works of Locke, Shaftsbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson and Butter”.¹⁴ But for Hume, “none had made a systematic attempt to work out an empirical science of man, and none had found any general principles by which the subject could be unified as mechanics as had been unified by Newton‟s law on motion”.¹⁵ Hume was determined to harmonize Newton‟s experimental method in order to produce a true science by which the hypothesis of rationalistic metaphysics could be scrutinized.

80 The particular conception Hume has of philosophy as an empirical „science of man‟ is to him the true emergence of modern philosophy. Hume‟s philosophy can be said to be shaped by the following dispositions:

a. That all our ideas are acquired from impressions of sensation,

b. That we cannot conceive of anything different from what our experiences gives us, c. That a matter of fact can never be proved a priori. It must be discovered by or

inferred from experience. In order to achieve this task, Hume “proposes to do this by consulting experience.”¹⁶

It is based on this frame of mind that Hume‟s extreme empiricism was developed.