David Hume was born in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh on May 7, 1711. He was the son of the lawyer Joseph Home and his wife Catherine. Later in life, Hume would change the spelling of his surname from “Home” to “Hume.” Hume became a student at the University of Edinburgh to study law, possibly becoming a student as young as 10 when the average age of first-year university students was 14. However, Hume never finished his education and tried to get an academic career, but he was hindered by his reputation as an atheist. Throughout his life, he worked a variety of jobs, including as a merchant’s assistant, a nobleman’s tutor, a librarian, and as an assistant to a British ambassador.

It took David Hume four years to write A Treatise of Human Nature, which he finished in 1740 at the age of 28. He later wrote several philosophical works, including Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1741) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), many of which expounded upon the ideas he first expressed in A Treatise of Human Nature. However, the one book that made him famous was not a work of philosophy, but history: his History of England (1754-1762), which spanned the centuries from the Roman conquest of Britain to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.