First edition of Hume’s first great work, complete with the supplementary third volume, rarely found together.
Hume composed the first two books before he was 25 during his three years in France. He returned to London with the finished manuscript by mid-September 1737, but he did not sign articles of agreement with a publisher, John Noon, for another twelve months, and the two volumes finally appeared, anonymously, at the end of January 1739.
Already fearing that they would not be well received, Hume had meanwhile begun a third volume, Of Morals, in part a restatement of the arguments of these first two books, which was not published until 5 November 1740, by a different publisher, Thomas Longman. Hume treated the third volume as a discrete work in its own right in so far as he later “cast anew” its contents alone as An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).
As a result of this broken-backed publication history, the three volumes of the Treatise are rarely found together. “The book comes up for sale so seldom that one may doubt whether more than one or two hundred can be extant” (Keynes and Sraffa, in their introduction to Hume’s Abstract).
Though this item is now sold, all our catalogued works by David Hume can be viewed online here.
