Search -
The Life of David Hume, Written by Himself
The Life of David Hume Written by Himself Author:David Hume General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1826 Original Publisher: Hunt and Clarke Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can... more » select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: MY OWN LIFE. It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity, therefore I shall be short. It may be thought . an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life ; but this narrative shall contain little more than the history of my writing's, as indeed almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity. I was born the twenty-sixth of April 1711, old style, at Edinburgh. I was of a good family, both by father and mother. My father's family is a branch of the earl of Home's or Hume's ; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate which my brother possesses for several generations. My mother was daughter of sir David Falconer, president of the college of justice: the title of lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother. My family, however, was not rich; and, being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender. My father, who passed for a man of parts, died when I was an infant, leaving me with an elder brother and sister, under the care of our mother, a woman of singular merit: who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educatmg of her children. I passed through the ordinary course of education with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which had been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments. My studious disposition, my sobriety, andmy industry, gave my family a notion that the law ...« less