David Hume was a skeptic. He only trusted those things that he could experience with his senses and emotions, and even those he only trusted to an extent. The third British empiricist after Locke and Bernards, his work helped usher in the scientific process. He was unique in questioning even reason. It seemed to him that reason had little effect on the moral actions of Man, so why base morality on it? To Hume, humans were collections of transitory sensory impressions, without so much as a stable sense of self. He doubted that out of such chaos as exists in the human mind that even cause and effect could be trusted.
Hume would have felt very much at home if he lived today, but his ideas and particularly his disbelief in a deity made him unpopular in his time. He had to censor his book about the history of England, and much of his work was not even published during his lifetime because it was considered too scandalous to print.
Hume was a significant thinker because he took nothing for granted. It was common before the empiricists to assume a point, like the existence of God, and base an entire philosophy on that assumption. Hume questioned everything, leaving nothing to chance. He was shown little gratitude in his time for this hard stance, but the world has benefited greatly from his writing and that of so many others who took similar stands.
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