AUTHOR’S ADVERTISEMENT.

Most of the principles, and reasonings, contained in this volume,

[Footnote:  Volume ii. of the posthumous edition of Hume’s works published in 1777 and containing, besides the present enquiry, A dissertation on the passions, and an enquiry concerning human understanding.  A reprint of this latter treatise has already appeared in The Religion of Science Library (no. 45)]

were published in a work in three volumes, called A treatise of human nature:  A work which the Author had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published not long after.  But not finding it successful, he was sensible of his error in going to the press too early, and he cast the whole anew in the following pieces, where some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected.  Yet several writers who have honoured the Author’s Philosophy with answers, have taken care to direct all their batteries against that juvenile work, which the author never acknowledged, and have affected to triumph in any advantages, which, they imagined, they had obtained over it:  A practice very contrary to all rules of candour and fair-dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices which a bigotted zeal thinks itself authorized to employ.  Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.

CONTENTS PAGE

      I. Of the General Principles of Morals
      ii.  Of Benevolence
      iii.  Of Justice
      iv.  Of Political Society
      V. Why Utility Pleases
      vi.  Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves
      VII.  Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Ourselves
      viii.  Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Others
      ix.  Conclusion

APPENDIX.

      I. Concerning Moral Sentiment
      ii.  Of Self-love
      iii.  Some Farther Considerations with Regard to Justice
      iv.  Of Some Verbal Disputes

AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS

SECTION I.

OF THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF MORALS.

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind.  The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood.  And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.