I

In the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume remarks that it does not take ‘such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences … The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision’ (Hume 2007: 3). This state of things, he thinks, warrants a new and different approach.

The study of philosophy had been a marked feature of education in the Scottish universities for over 300 years before Hume wrote this. Nevertheless, with a striking military image, he set philosophy in Scotland in a new direction. His intellectual project, variously called the science of man, the science of human nature or the science of mind, soon became the remit for philosophers in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with St Andrews following at a rather greater distance in time.

Hume’s Treatise, after a slow start, effectively shaped Scottish philosophy for almost 150 years. One enduring issue across this long period was the question of whether, as Hume hoped, this new approach to the topics that had been the mainstay of philosophy since ancient times could result in genuine intellectual advances. Did the science of human nature as it was pursued by the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries secure real progress, and if so, in what did that progress consist?

In seeking answers to these two questions, it is worth noting at the outset that for Hume and his contemporaries the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ were interchangeable. One important feature of the development of Hume’s project over the century that followed his death was the gradual differentiation of these terms.