Essays
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~37,900 words · 180 passages
Cite this work
- APADavid Hume. (n.d.). Essays. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-hume/essays
- MLADavid Hume. "Essays." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-hume/essays.
- ChicagoDavid Hume. Essays. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-hume/essays.
What it is about
The essays: politics, commerce, taste, superstition, suicide.
Context and history
These, not the Treatise, are what made Hume known in his lifetime. He writes short and for ordinary readers, and it is here that ideas later taken up elsewhere first appear: the balance of power, the conventional origin of government, and what Adam Smith would carry into economics.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
WHETHER THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT INCLINES MORETO ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OR TO A REPUBLIC OF PARTIES IN GENERAL OF THE PARTIES OF GREAT BRITAIN OF SUPERSTITION AND ENTHUSIASM OF THE DIGNITY OR MEANNESS OF HUMAN NATURE OF CIVIL LIBERTY OF ELOQUENCE Biographical Introduction The material facts in Hume's life are to be found in the autobiography which he prefixed to his _History of England_. _My Own Life_, as he calls it, is but a brief exposition, but it is sufficient for its purpose, and the longer biographies of him do little more than amplify the information which he gives us himself. The Humes, it appears, were a remote branch of the family of Lord Hume of Douglas. Hume's father was Joseph Hume, of Ninewells, a minor Scotch laird, who died when his son was an infant. David Hume was born at Edinburgh on April 26th, 1711, during a visit of his parents to the Scotch capital. Hume tells us that his father passed for a man of parts, and that his mother, who herself came of good Scottish family, "was a woman of singular merit; though young and handsome, she devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children." At school Hume won no special distinction. He matriculated in the class of Greek at the Edinburgh University when he was twelve years old, and, he says "passed through the ordinary course of education with success"; but "our college education in Scotland," he remarks in one of his works, "extending little further than the languages, ends commonly when we are about fourteen or fifteen years of age." During his youth, Mrs. Hume does not appear to have maintained any too flattering← Back to David Hume