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EDITOR’S NOTE

THIS NEW EDITION of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary is based on the edition of 1777. The 1777 edition is the copy-text of choice, for, while it appeared posthumously, it contains Hume’s latest corrections. It was the text used by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose for the version of the Essays that is included in their edition of The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Because of initial difficulties in obtaining a photocopy of the 1777 edition, Green and Grose’s text was used as editor’s copy for the current project. Both the editor’s copy and the compositor’s reading proofs were then corrected against a photocopy of the 1777 edition obtained from the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The present edition contains material that was not in the 1777 edition of the Essays: Hume’s My own Life, Adam Smith’s Letter to William Strahan, and the essays that were either withdrawn by Hume prior to the 1777 edition or suppressed by him during his lifetime. Unless otherwise noted, these materials are reprinted here as they appear in Green and Grose and, unlike the Essays proper, have not been corrected against the appropriate earlier editions.

Green and Grose’s edition of the Essays has generally been regarded as the most accurate one available,¹ and it has thus become a standard source for scholars. A close comparison of their edition with that of 1777 shows, however, that it falls far short of the standards of accuracy that are adopted today in critical-text editing.² There are hundreds of instances in which it departs, either intentionally or unintentionally, from the text of the 1777 edition. Comparing Green and Grose’s “New Edition,” in the 1889 printing, with the 1777 text, we find at least 100 instances of incorrect wording (words dropped, added, or changed), 175 instances of incorrect punctuation, and 75 errors in capitalization. Probably intentional are over 100 changes in Hume’s spelling, symbols, joining of words, formatting of quotation marks, and such. At least 25 typographical errors in the 1777 edition are corrected silently by Green and Grose, who also corrected some of the Greek passages. The most massive departures from the 1777 edition come in Hume’s footnotes, where his own citations are freely changed or augmented. Only near the end of their volume, in a final footnote to Hume’s essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” do Green and Grose inform the reader that such changes have been made. Hume’s essays have many long footnotes, and there are at least 7 instances where Green and Grose, without warning or explanation, print not the 1777 version of the footnote but a different version from an earlier edition, producing substantial variations in wording, punctuation, and spelling besides those tabulated above.

In preparing this new edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, fidelity to the text of the 1777 edition has been a paramount aim. Hume’s peculiarities of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been retained, because these often bear on the meaning of the text.³ The reader should know, however, that there are some minor departures in the present edition from that of 1777: (1) typographical errors in the 1777 edition have been corrected silently; (2) Greek passages are reprinted as they appear in Green and Grose, with corrections and accents; (3) footnotes are designated by arabic numerals rather than by Hume’s symbols (in cases where these designations are adjacent to the punctuation mark, they have been relocated so that they follow, rather than precede, the mark); (4) whereas Hume’s longer footnotes are lettered and collected at the end of the volume in the 1777 edition, the present edition puts them at the bottom of the appropriate page, as was the practice in editions of the Essays up to 1770 (with the change in location, it was no longer appropriate to capitalize the first word of these footnotes); (5) whereas two sizes of capitals as well as lowercase letters are used in essay titles in the 1777 edition, titles here are in level capitals; (6) the “long s” has been eliminated throughout; and (7) the running quotation marks in the left margin have been omitted, and the use of quotation marks has been made to conform to modern practice.

Textual Notations

Three types of notational symbols appear in the present text.

A. Superscript Numerals. A superscript arabic numeral indicates a footnote. The editor’s notes are enclosed in brackets to distinguish them from Hume’s own notes. Information that I have added to Hume’s footnotes is also bracketed.

A reader of the Essays cannot fail to be impressed by the breadth of Hume’s learning. In the Essays, Hume ranges far beyond the great works of philosophy into every area of scholarship. One finds abundant evidence of his reading in the Greek and Latin classics as well as of his familiarity with the literary works of the important English, French, Italian, and Spanish authors. The essays reflect Hume’s intimate knowledge not only of the history of Great Britain but also of the entire sweep of European history. He knew the important treatises on natural science, and he investigated the modern writings on political economy.

Hume intended for his essays to have a wide audience, but since he presupposed that his readers would have a broad knowledge of literature, history, and contemporary affairs, his footnotes are quite sparse and sketchy by today’s standards. He often refers to persons or events without explaining who or what they are. He frequently quotes in languages other than English, and often he fails to identify an author or the work from which he is quoting. He sometimes misquotes his sources or gives misleading citations. No doubt the informed eighteenth-century reader could have filled in many of these lacunae, but such background knowledge can no longer be presupposed.

My footnotes and supplements are meant to provide some of the information that today’s reader may need to understand Hume’s Essays. Since it is hoped that this edition will be useful to beginning students and general readers, I have tended to prefer fullness in these annotations, even though much is included that will be known to specialists in one area or another of eighteenth-century studies. First, I have identified persons, places, and events to which Hume refers. Second, I have provided translations of foreign-language passages in those instances where Hume himself fails to translate them or give a close English paraphrase. Translations of Greek and Latin authors have been drawn from the appropriate volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, which is published in the United States by Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.) and in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd. (London). Third, I have given citations for the many quotations or references that Hume leaves uncited. Moreover, I have supplemented Hume’s own sparse citations to identify authors, give dates of an author’s birth and death or else the date when a work was published, provide full titles of sources cited, and specify as closely as possible the location in a work where quotations or references can be found. For the sake of uniformity, classical citations are given to the Loeb editions. Since these often divide or arrange materials differently from the editions used by Hume, the Loeb citations will not always agree with Hume’s. Finally, I have added explanatory notes that refer to Hume’s other writings when this helps to clarify the argument of an essay.

B. Superscript Circles. A small superscript circle by a word indicates that the meaning of that word is specified in the Glossary. This symbol is used at the word’s first occurrence in the Essays and usually is not repeated unless the word is used later with a different meaning. One encounters quite a large number of words in Hume’s Essays that either have become obscure in their meaning or have come to have quite different meanings from the one that Hume intends. I have found Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, which was first published in 1755 and revised frequently thereafter, to be immensely helpful in locating eighteenth-century meanings. Specifically, I used the eleventh, corrected and revised, edition (London: 1816; 2 vols.) in preparing the Glossary. Words are glossed sequentially rather than alphabetically, because their meanings are often related closely to the contexts in which they appear. In those cases where Johnson’s Dictionary proved inadequate, I have consulted The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; 12 vols.).

C. Superscript Lowercase Letters. A superscript lowercase letter indicates a variant reading in some earlier edition or editions of Hume’s Essays. These variants are collected at the end of this volume. As has been noted, Hume’s Essays went through numerous editions in his lifetime, and Hume worked painstakingly to prepare them for the press. Besides adding many new essays and deleting some old ones, Hume often made changes in the essays that he carried over from previous editions. Some of these changes are only stylistic, but others reflect substantive alterations in Hume’s views.

A critical edition of a text is understood today as one that collates the copy-text with all other editions and gives an exhaustive record of variations—formal and material—in the texts. Two excellent examples are Peter H. Nidditch’s critical edition of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)⁴ and the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), whose general editors are R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner and whose textual editor is W. B. Todd. Both editions contain exhaustive lists of variant readings.

The preparation of a critical apparatus for Hume’s Essays would require that the 1777 edition be collated with each of the previous editions and that each variation in wording, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and such be recorded. This task falls beyond the scope of the present edition of the Essays. Yet inasmuch as variants are important for understanding the development of Hume’s thought, I have reprinted the variant readings that Green and Grose record in their edition of the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, using for this purpose the “New Edition” in the printing of 1889. Nidditch is certainly correct in pointing out that Green and Grose’s “apparatus of variant readings is very deficient.”⁵ They do not, for example, record formal variations, and it is clear that they do not show all of the significant material variations. Their list of variant readings is nonetheless quite extensive, and it must suffice for the present. In Green and Grose’s edition, the variant readings appear as footnotes. I have collected them at the end of the volume in order to avoid confusion with Hume’s and my own footnotes.

While I have tried to provide a text and notations that are free of error, I am painfully aware of Hume’s warning that perfection is unlikely in things undertaken by man. I shall welcome suggestions for the improvement of this edition of Hume’s Essays, addressed to me at the Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga., 30602, U.S.A.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many for assistance in the preparation of this edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Facsimiles of the title and half-title pages of the 1777 edition of the Essays are reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Huntington Library also provided the photocopy of the 1777 edition that was used in correcting the Green and Grose text. Mr. Thomas V. Lange, Assistant Curator of the Huntington Library, was especially helpful in answering several queries. Passages from various editions in the Loeb Classical Library are reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. Colleagues at the University of Georgia who provided assistance include Richard A. LaFleur, James C. Anderson, Edward E. Best, Robert I. Curtis, Timothy N. Gantz, and Nancy F. Rubin of the Department of Classics; Francis Assaf, Vanni Bartolozzi, and Maria Cocco of the Department of Romance Languages; Lee B. Kennett, Linda J. Piper, and Kirk Willis of the Department of History; and Rodney Baine of the Department of English. Professors LaFleur, Rubin, and Piper were willing, on numerous occasions, to help me with points of translation or historical detail. My research assistant, Myrna Nichols, shared in some of the editorial tasks. When I found it necessary to consult scholars at other universities, the following responded generously: Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago; J. W. Johnson of the University of Rochester; David M. Levy of George Mason University; Arthur F. Stocker of the University of Virginia; William B. Todd of the University of Texas; Frank W. Walbank of Cambridge University; and Thomas G. West of the University of Dallas. My wife, Eva Miller, has been helpful in more ways than I can possibly enumerate. The responsibility for such errors as might have entered in the editorial process is, of course, mine alone and not that of anyone whose help I have acknowledged.

At a late stage in the editorial process, it became apparent that the appropriate copy-text for Hume’s suppressed essays, “Of Suicide” and “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” would be the proof-copy of these essays, with marginal corrections in Hume’s own hand, that is in the possession of the National Library of Scotland. I am grateful to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to reprint the text of this proof-copy, with Hume’s corrections, and to Thomas I. Rae, Keeper of Manuscripts, for his timely assistance in obtaining the necessary photocopy.

My work on this edition of Hume’s Essays has served as a strong reminder that scholarship requires the support of institutions as well as individuals. My research on Hume has been aided and encouraged in many ways by the University of Georgia, especially by its libraries, which are directed by David Bishop, by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, whose Dean is W. Jackson Payne, and by the Department of Political Science, which has been headed during the period of this research by Loren P. Beth and Frank J. Thompson. The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago is a second institution to which I am deeply indebted. Many years ago, while a doctoral student under the Committee, I first studied Hume’s writings in research that was guided by Friedrich A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Joseph Cropsey. The Committee on Social Thought, more than any academic program that I know of, has sought to recover the unity and comprehensiveness of human knowledge that was lost after Hume’s time, with the division of learning into departments or disciplines. Finally, I owe a great debt to Liberty Fund for its willingness to sponsor a new edition of Hume’s Essays and to entrust me with its preparation. Liberty Fund’s founder, Pierre F. Goodrich, maintained that a free society depends on free inquiry and that free inquiry depends, in turn, on the availability of reliable editions or translations of the great books, among which he included Hume’s essays.

E.F.M.

Athens, Georgia