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Classics

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Hilarius Bogbinder reviews David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.

“Next to ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of making much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident than beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as man” (Treatise, p.176). When David Hume (1711-76) wrote these words, a mere hundred years had passed since René Descartes described animals as mere machines. Yet in this and in many other ways, the twenty-something college dropout who published this magnum opus was exceptionally modern.

A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, to give the book its full title, was published in instalments in 1739-40.

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