David Hume

A Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, and the most influential of the British empiricists, who argued that all the materials of human thought ultimately derive from sense impressions. Hume held that causation is not something we perceive directly in the world but a habit of the mind formed by observing one kind of event constantly followed by another, a claim that raises what came to be called the problem of induction: past regularities give us no strictly rational guarantee that the future will resemble the past. He applied the same empiricist scepticism to the self, arguing that introspection reveals only a bundle of fleeting perceptions and never a single unified soul behind them, and to religion, where his essays and posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion subjected the argument from design to sustained criticism. His moral philosophy grounded ethics in sentiment rather than reason, holding that reason alone can never motivate action and is, in his own phrase, the slave of the passions.