An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

The following is an e-text of a 1912 reprint of the 1777 edition of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Each page was cut out of the original book with an X-acto knife and fed into an Automatic Document Feeder Scanner to make this e-text, so the original book was disbinded in order to save it. Some adaptations from the original text were made while formatting it for an e-text. Italics in the original book are capitalized in this e-text. The original spellings of words are preserved, such as "connexion" for "connection," "labour" for "labor," etc. Original footnotes are put in brackets "[]" at the points where they are cited in the text. TABLE OF CONTENTS AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT CONTENTS PAGE AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS APPENDIX 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.…