David Hume

David Hume stands among the towering minds of the Scottish Enlightenment, the philosopher, historian and economist whose radical empiricism argued that all we truly know comes from experience, and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, he built his system the way a Taurus builds anything: patiently, from the ground up, laying a foundation of unshakeable conclusions. The Bull holds solid opinions, and God or the universe could beg a Taurus to change his mind and get nowhere. That earthy stubbornness let him question causality itself and refuse the argument from design when religious orthodoxy pressed hard against him. Fittingly Venusian too, this was a man famous for his fondness for good port and cheese, his five senses well satisfied.

Beneath that grounded pillar lay a Capricorn Moon, the child who grew up fast. His father died before Hume turned two, and his mother raised him alone on slender means, that dutiful, stoic emotional weather woven early into his temperament. Saturn's Moon breeds sober self-reliance and quiet endurance, and Hume spent ten disciplined years reading and writing toward his Treatise. Patient earth below, patient earth above.