Philosopher and historian, born in Edinburgh. He studied at Edinburgh, took up law, and in 1734 went to La Flèche in Anjou, where he wrote his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), consolidating and extending the empiricist legacy of Locke and Berkeley. His views became widely known only when he wrote two volumes of Essays Moral and Political (1741-2). He wrote the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion in the 1750s. His atheism thwarted his applications for professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he became a tutor, secretary, and keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, where he published his popular Political Discourses (1752), and his six-volume History of England (1754-62). His views inspired Kant to argue for the inadequacy of empiricism.