How to be Philosophical About Your Book Falling Dead-Born from the Press

If you are a writer, cause and effect is a major source of conflict and interest.  However, one philosopher denied we could ever be sure about cause and effect.  Did you once believe there could only be white swans:

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

More than that, he also said we were just a bunch of perceptions and there was no such thing as "self."

What's more he was amazingly stoical about no one liking his book:

"As a child prodigy, David Hume entered University at the tender age of eleven years; and after graduation, began to follow the theories of John Locke.
His good-natured humour reaches out to us from beyond the grave. According to Jeremy Harwood in Philosophy, 100 Great Thinkers, Hume wrote his first and chief philosophical work A Treatise on Human Nature in France in the mid-1730s and published it when he was 28 years old, noting that “…it fell dead-born from the press.”  Read more

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