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LOCKE, John.
An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. In Four Books.
Publisher: London: for Thomas Basset, and sold by Edw. Mory, 1690
Stock code: 50177
Price: £25,000 Currency Conversion
First edition, Basset issue (traditionally considered the second) with the "ss" of Essay reversed, and with the typographical ornament unaligned. John Stuart Mill described Locke as "the unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind". Though it startled contemporaries by its denial of innatism, the Essay was founded on earlier philosophers, notably Hobbes, though Locke's account was far more thoroughly worked out, and such features as the distinction in book 3 between real and nominal essences were entirely new. "Perhaps the most original aspect of the Essay is, however, the conception of philosophy which it embodies. Locke abandoned the whole enterprise of first philosophy as practised from Aristotle to Descartes: he did not see himself as laying a metaphysical foundation on which natural philosophers could then build, but rather (as he put it in the 'Epistle to the Reader') 'as an Under-Labourer … clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge' (Drafts for the Essay, 10) … Locke's philosophy was immensely influential in the eighteenth century, not least in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where it soon replaced the scholastic doctrines in which Locke had been educated … Locke was seen as having given a plain unmetaphysical account of the workings of the human mind that could serve as a complement to Newton's account of the physical universe" (ODNB). This issue has the Thomas Basset imprint; the other has the Elizabeth Holt imprint, and the "ss" of Essay correctly printed. Both issues have been championed as having priority, but recent scholarship indicates that priority of issue cannot be established: in his introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of the Essay, Peter Nidditch reverses his former opinion that the Holt imprint is the sign of a first issue, and John Attig's bibliography records it as a variant.
Folio (320 × 194 mm). Contemporary mottled calf, red sprinkled edges, red morocco label added to style. Housed in a dark brown cloth slipcase. Armorial bookplate of Viscount Hood. Extremities and joints skilfully restored, single wormhole in lower margin throughout (occasionally closed) below the text, a few trivial marks, but a very good copy, clean and fresh.
