SOURCE: “The Treatise” and “The Essays, Moral and Political,” in The Suasive Art of David Hume, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 53-162.

In the following two chapters from The Suasive Art of David Hume, Box describes Hume's stylistic development from the Treatise to the Essays. According to Box, the “journalistic character” of the latter work represents a marked improvement over the tendency of the former toward “formal treatise.”

Chapter Two: the Treatise

I borrowed today out of the Advocates' Library, David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, but found it so abstruse, so contrary to sound sense and reason, and so dreary in its effects on the mind, if it had any, that I resolved to return it without reading it.

—Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck

Il est quelquefois malheureux d’avoir trop d’esprit & de pénétration.

—Anon. rev. of the Treatise, art. 8, Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages...