Humean skepticism should be well distinguished from Greek skepticism. Hume's assumes as basic the truth of the empirical, of feeling, of intuition, and from that base contests general determinations and laws—because they lack justification from sense perception. Ancient skepticism was so far from making feeling and intuition the principle of truth that, on the contrary, it turned first of all against the senses.

The great sceptic, with his profound conviction of the imperfection of all human reason and knowledge, did not expect much positive good from political organisation. He knew that the greatest political goods, peace, liberty, and justice, were in their essence negative, a protection against injury rather than positive gifts. No man strove more ardently for peace, liberty and justice. But Hume clearly saw that the further ambitions which wanted to establish some other positive justice on earth were a threat to those values... It was not from the goodness of men but from institutions which "made it the interest even of bad men, to act for the public good" that he expected peace, liberty, and justice. He knew that "every man must be supposed a knave"; though, as he adds, "it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics which is false in fact."

It is...in his analysis of the circumstances which determined the evolution of the chief legal institutions, in which he shows why a complex civilisation could grow up only where certain types of legal institutions developed, that he makes some of his most important contributions to jurisprudence. In the discussion of these problems his economic and his legal and political theory are intimately connected. Hume is indeed one of the few social theorists who are clearly aware of the connection between the rules men obey and the order which is formed as a result... What he undertakes is to show that certain characteristics of modern society which we prize are dependent on conditions which were not created in order to bring about these results, yet are nevertheless their indispensable presuppositions. They are institutions "advantageous to the public though...not intended for that purpose by the inventors". Hume shows, in effect, that an orderly society can develop only if men learn to obey certain rules of conduct.

Prescription, then, is for Burke the most solid rock on which mundane rights can be based; it gives a title having for its sanction the eternal order of things; it is the master and not the creature of positive law, it is the decree of nature, it is the law of God. Hume had stated the theory rather differently, but though Burke introduces a theological connotation, it is difficult not to suspect him of some debt to the earlier thinker. "Time and custom", wrote Hume, "give authority to all forms of government, and all successions of princes; and that power, which at first was founded only on injustice and violence, becomes in time legal and obligatory." Burke, too, holds that prescription is the most solid title to property and to government and so the principal base on which States are founded.

David Hume, sceptic, suspected atheist and Tory, was not a man with whom Burke was likely to claim affiliations; but Hume it is, nevertheless, who in the first half of the eighteenth century introduces clearly those principles which were to emerge more definitely later in the theories of Burke and the Romantic movement. Locke had substituted empiricism for rationalism in philosophy, but he still treated ethics and politics as deductive sciences of the same nature as mathematics. Hume carries the attack on rationalism into these fields and enounces a naturalism which anticipates in many respects the subsequent return to nature of the Romantics.

Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James, Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.

Well, it does not really explain things; in fact the founding fathers of quantum mechanics rather prided themselves on giving up the idea of explanation. They were very proud that they dealt only with phenomena: they refused to look behind the phenomena, regarding that as the price one had to pay for coming to terms with nature. And it is a fact of history that the people who took that agnostic attitude towards the real world on the microphysical level were very successful. At the time it was a good thing to do. But I don't believe it will be so indefinitely. Of course, I cannot produce theorems to that effect. If you go back to, say, David Hume, who made a careful analysis of our reasons for believing things, you find that there is no good reason for believing that the sun will come up tomorrow, or that this programme will ever be broadcast. It's a habit we have, of believing that things will continue very much as they did before. However, it is a fact that this seems to be a good habit! I cannot make that a theorem, because I think Hume's analysis is sound, but nevertheless I do believe it's a good habit, to look for explanations.

Standards of morality and of justice are what Hume calls "artifacts"; they are neither divinely ordained, nor an integral part of original human nature, nor revealed by pure reason. They are an outcome of the practical experience of mankind, and the sole consideration in the slow test of time is the utility each moral rule can demonstrate toward promoting human welfare. Hume may be called a precursor to Darwin in the sphere of ethics. In effect, he proclaimed a doctrine of the survival of the fittest among human conventions—fittest not in terms of good teeth but in terms of maximum social utility.

I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism, and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill, to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.

The difference between a man who is led by opinion or emotion and one who is led by reason. The former, whether he will or not, performs things of which he is entirely ignorant; the latter is subordinate to no one, and only does those things which he knows to be of primary importance in his life, and which on that account he desires the most; and therefore I call the former a slave, but the latter free.