Called the "Great Infidel" by some and "le bon David" by others, David Hume was and has remained one of the most important British philosophers, essayists, and historians of the eighteenth century. Though Hume is known today in most circles for his contributions to philosophy, during his own lifetime he was renowned for his moral, political, and critical essays and for his The history of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1762), the vehicle that principally carried his name into the nineteenth century. Hume himself believed his thinking to be important and revolutionary, writing about his first philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739), that its principles are "so remote from the vulgar Sentiments on this Subject, that were they to take place, they wou'd produce almost a total Alteration in...