Lytton Strachey wrote: “Had Hume died at the age of 26, his real work in the world would have been done.” When readers of James Harris’ biography reach the year 1737, Hume’s twenty seventh, they are still only at page 142 of some 600, and they have many chapters of informed and informative reading ahead of them.True, Hume’s most profound contribution to philosophy was his early Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. The aim of the work was “to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into Moral Subjects”. Hume saw himself as doing for the mind what Newton had done for physics. He was disappointed by the work’s reception.  “It fell dead-born from the Press,” he wrote. After his death, however, it was to achieve en