1, pp. 13–14).
However, the strain eventually told on Hume's health, and he was obliged to curtail his studies and pursue a more active life. To this end, he secured employment with a Bristol merchant in 1734. Though this venture into the world of commerce was brief, his health was sufficiently restored to enable him to undertake the composition of the systematic philosophical treatise by which he hoped to make his literary mark. To stretch his meager income further than was possible in Britain, Hume relocated to France—first to Reims, then to La Flèche in Anjou—where he was able to benefit from the outstanding library of the Jesuit college.
Hume returned to England in 1737 with the intention of publishing the first two books, Of the Understanding and Of the Passions, of the work he decided to call A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. After publishing them as volume 1 in 1739, he went home to Scotland to revise the third book, Of Morals, which he published as volume 2 the following year. Never before or since has anyone so young published a philosophical work so comprehensive, ambitious, original, or accomplished.
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