A statue of David Hume with a comment he made on race in the 18th century HE is generally reckoned to be Scotland’s greatest philosopher and one of the world’s leading thinkers. But before the rise of Black Lives Matter and the toppling of statues, it is likely that few Scots suspected David Hume was guilty of making racist statements. The author of a A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was one of the greatest figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, but once wrote a footnote to an essay stating “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites.”