Excerpt from A Treatise on Human Nature, Vol. 1 of 2 David Hume was born in Edinburgh on the 26th April, 1711. His family, he tells us, wished to make him a lawyer, but he "found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning." His fortune not being considered sufficient to allow him to devote himself to such unremunerative pursuits, he tried going into business. Three months of that experiment were enough for him, and in 1734 he went over to France, and, as he says, "laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully followed. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpared my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in literature." The Treatise was written in the three years that Hume spent in France, and completed before he was twenty-six. It was published in London in 1738, but, in the words of its author, "fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." Undiscouraged by this failure, in 1742 he published the first part of his Essays which met with much greater success. In 1748 he recast the first part of the Treatise, convinced that its unfavourable reception was due rather to its manner than its matter, and published it under the title of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The second part was similarly recast and published in 1752 as An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume says of this that it was in his opinion incomparably the best of his works. But "it came unnoticed and unobserved into the world." Meanwhile, however, his Essays were increasing in popularity, and the second part of them, called Political Discourses, were successful at once. In 1752 he was appointed librarian of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, where he spent most of his remaining years. He now turned his attention to history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.