Books

London: Printed for M. Smith,, 1783. His most substantial essays on religion Second edition in English overall, the first to acknowledge Hume as the author. These controversial essays assert that individuals have a moral right to commit suicide, and that life after death is highly improbable. This edition is scarce in commerce: we trace one previous auction listing in the past 60 years. Hume (1711-1776) originally included these essays in the proposed Five Dissertations volume in 1755. Hostile reactions from readers of prepublication copies led Hume and his publisher to replace the two essays with "On the Standards of Taste", and to release the book as Four Dissertations in January 1757. Despite this, several sets of the original sheets were smuggled out: pirated copies were published anonymously in French in 1770 and in an anonymous, corrupted English edition of 1777. This edition, which reprints the 1777 text, was the first to package the essays with extracts from Rousseau's…