This is the book that woke Immanuel Kant from his self-described "dogmatic slumber". It was a simplification of an earlier effort, Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise (it "fell dead-born from the press", as he put it) and so tried again to get his ideas before the public in this Enquiry.
In one of the many famous passages of the Enquiry, Hume wrote:
"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of skepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life. These principles may flourish and triumph in the schools; where it is, indeed, difficult, if not impossible, to refute them. But as soon as they leave the shade, and by the presence of the real objects, which actuate our passions and sentiments, are put in opposition to the more powerful principles of our nature, they vanish like smoke, and leave the most determined skeptic in the same condition as other mortals."
External link
ebook text (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/h/h92e/)
Free eBook of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9662) at Project Gutenberg
AnEnquiryConcerningHumanUnderstanding appeared in 1751, an acknowledgement by Mr Hume that the simpler, shorter version is the better for actually getting humans to understand things, an idea with which we heartily concur.
Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities to discover any of its causes or effects.
Sight or feeling conveys an idea of the motion of bodies, but as to the wonderful force which carries a moving body forever in a continued change of place and which bodies never loose but by communicating it to others, we cannot form even the most distant conception.
Feeds |
Contact