A Treatise of Human Nature (review)

David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton’s new edition of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), volumes 1 and 2 of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume, establishes a new standard for scholars engaged with that work, in two ways. In the first place, it presents the cleanest critical text to date of the Treatise itself, together with the most robust scholarly apparatus available. Secondly, and in some ways more extraordinarily, the new Clarendon edition realizes for the first time an approximation of the second edition of the Treatise that Hume himself had planned but never executed.

The Clarendon Edition was initiated thirty-two years ago in 1975, the year preceding the bicentennial of Hume’s death. General editors of the series include Tom L. Beauchamp, David Fate Norton, and M. A. Stewart. In Beauchamp’s words, “Hume scholars had increasingly begun to appreciate that available editions of Hume’s work were often textually and historically inaccurate, biased in favor of certain textual interpretations, and lacking in basic information essential for scholarly work on the text.”

In 1988 Beauchamp published volume 4 of The Clarendon Edition, Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). This edition of the second Enquiry, of course, succeeds the 1975 Clarendon edition of Selby-Bigge and Nidditch (SBN). In 2000, Clarendon released Beauchamp’s critical edition of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s first Enquiry (1748), as volume 3 of the series, completing the replacement of the 1975 combined edition. Oxford currently plans to issue Beauchamp’s Clarendon edition of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, volume 5 in the series, in late 2007 or early 2008. Volumes 6 and 7 will comprise Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, probably replacing Eugene Miller’s Liberty Classics 1985 edition as the standard. Volume 8 will contain the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion together with other posthumous materials, and will likely supplant Norman Kemp Smith’s 1935 Clarendon edition. No Clarendon critical edition of Hume’s History of England is currently planned.

The Nortons’ critical edition of Hume’s Treatise comes seven years after their Oxford Philosophical Text edition of the Treatise and eleven years after their David Hume Library. The new volumes supersede the 1978 SBN edition with Clarendon and succeed the 1888 Selby-Bigge edition with Clarendon, as well as earlier editions by Green and Grose (1874–75), Little, Brown (1854), Archibald Constable (1825), and Thomas and Joseph Allman (1817).

Editions published as Oxford Philosophical Texts (OPT) differ from the Clarendon critical editions insofar as the former are designed primarily to serve students, whereas the latter are aimed at more advanced scholars. In addition to differences in the introductions, annotations, indices, and bibliographies, the Clarendon editions contain elements proper to critical but not to student editions—namely, histories of each text, complete records of the emendations made by the editors, as well as accounts of variant readings and the selection of copy texts used in the production of the new editions.

The new Clarendon critical edition is divided into two volumes. Volume 1 contains the critical text of the Treatise itself, as well as the 1740 Abstract of a Book lately Published, which Hume issued in 1740 as a pamphlet to promote his work, together with the “Appendix” he attached to book 3. The Clarendon critical edition, however, unlike its OPT counterpart, also contains the 1745 A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh, which Hume wrote in defense of his work as opponents solidified their case against his candidacy for a professorship in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

That Hume did hope to produce a revised edition of the Treatise may be inferred from epistolary comments, from alterations prescribed in the “Appendix” he attached to book 3, from three sets of errata included in the first-edition housed by the David...