Even if his empiricism had something to be lacking his attention to rationality as a service to the passions still keeps him one of the most relevant philosophers to this day in light of modern psychology. We are rational beings only insofar as it serves our interests to be happy beings, loving truth for the sake of truth is silly. (taken from Philosophy Now! available for free on the internet) “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” David Hume was regarded by his eighteenth century contemporaries as a really nice guy. Celebrated in Scotland, fêted in France, Hume had a wide circle of adoring friends. He was the great thinker you’d most like to go to the pub with. He loved to entertain at home in Edinburgh, and boasted of his “great Talent for Cookery.” He had a weakness for sugar lumps and would sneak them from the bowl on the table until his sister would whisk it away and keep it on her lap. An habitual generator of disturbing ideas with even more alarming consequences, he retained a sanity-preserving ability to disengage from them and go for a beer or three to chill out. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” Hume’s original philosophical publication ceased around age forty, and most of his other writings were completed by his early fifties, more than a decade before his death in 1776. To his publisher, who earnestly solicited him to complete his History of England, Hume replied, “I must decline not only this offer, but all others of a literary nature, for four reasons: Because I’m too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.” Hume approached his own death with a cheerful calm that bordered on disinterest. A few months before his death, he composed a brief autobiography in which he described his situation: “In spring 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were I to name a period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. … It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.” David Hume, My Own Life, penultimate paragraph. When he lay dying, his friend Boswell was convinced that Hume must be in a terrible mental turmoil, as a result of facing imminent extinction without religious belief or the prospect of a future state to consol him. But on visiting Hume he found him cheerful and joking as usual, an experience which apparently left the pious Boswell deeply shaken.