HUME. 221 favor that, during his second sojourn in France, as secretary to Lord Hertford, in 1763-66, he was already honored as a philosopher of world-wide renown. Then, after serving for some time as Under-Secretary of State, he retired to private life at home (1769). The three books of the Treatise on Human Nature^ which appeared in 1739-40, are entitled Of the Understanding, Of the Passions, Of Morals. Of the five volumes of the Essays, the first contains the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 1741-42 ; the second, the Enquiry concerning Human Under- standing, 1748; the third, the Enquiry concerning the Prin- ciples of Morals, 1751; the fourth, the Political Discourses, 1752; the fifth, 1757, the Four Dissertations, including that On the Passions and the Natural History of Religion. After Hume's death appeared the Autobiography, 1777; the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, i77g', and the two small essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, 1783.'^ The Philosophical Works were published in 1827, and frequently aftervvard.f Hume's object, like that of Berkeley, is the improvement of Locke's doctrine of knowledge. In several respects he does not go so far as Berkeley, in others very much farther. In agreement with Berkeley's ultra-nominalism, which com- bats g ven the possibility of abstract ideas, he yet does not fol- low him to the extent of denying external reality. On the other hand, he carries out more consistently Berkeley's hint that immediate sensation includes less than is ascribed to it {e. g., that by vision we perceive colors only, and not dis- tance, etc.), as well as his principle — destructive to the cer- tainty of our knowledge of nature — that there is nocausality amongjih^npmena ; and brings the question of substance to the negative conclusion, that there is no need whatever for a support for groups of qualties, and, therefore, that sub-
- 0r 1777, cf. Green and Grose's edition, vol. iii. p. 67 seq. — Tr.
f Among the works on Hume we may mention Jodl's prize treatise, 1872, and Huxley's Hume (English Men of Letters), 1879. [The reader may be referred also to Knight's Hume (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), 1886 ; to T. H. Green's " Introductions " in Green and Grose's edition of the collected works in four volumes, 1874 (new ed. 1889-90), which is now standard ; and to Selby-Bigge's reprint of the original edition of the Treatise, i vol., 1888, with a valuable Analytical Index.
