Education Quote by David Hume

Hume levels a characteristically Enlightenment charge: when learning is organized around scholastic logic and combative theology, the mind turns from the world to words and from inquiry to authority. Scholastic learning, the medieval university tradition rooted in Aristotle and subtle disputation, trained students to win syllogistic battles, reconcile authorities, and multiply distinctions. Its energy went into refining terms rather than testing nature. Polemical divinity, the habit of treating religion as a field for controversy, sharpened tongues and hardened dogmas. Both absorbed intellectual ambition into contests where victory meant defending a creed, not discovering a fact.

True knowledge, for Hume, grows from experience, observation, and the cautious extension of causal inference. It advances when hypotheses are answerable to the stubbornness of the world, not when they are fenced by canonical texts. He admired the turn to experimental philosophy that produced Bacon, Boyle, and Newton, a turn that required the loosening of ecclesiastical control and the decline of scholastic prestige. Once scholars asked what experiments show rather than what authorities say, Europe began to leave behind centuries of clever but sterile debates.

There is historical nuance: medieval institutions preserved manuscripts and cultivated disciplined reasoning. Hume’s point is not that rigor is bad, but that rigor yoked to dogma misdirects human genius. Theological polemics especially divert talent toward zero-sum disputes where positions must not yield, and where social rewards flow to partisanship. Under such incentives, curiosity is suspect and concession is vice.

The line is also a political lesson. Knowledge flourishes with toleration, secure commerce, and modesty about first principles. It withers where institutions prize orthodoxy over evidence. Hume’s admonition reaches beyond the Middle Ages: whenever ideology sets the questions and polices the answers, learning ossifies. The cure is a cultivated habit of looking, measuring, and being willing to be wrong.