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I published A Treatise of Human Nature when I was twenty-eight years old, and it fell, as I wrote later, 'dead-born from the press.' Not one review. I had expected to set the world of letters ablaze; instead I received silence.

This was instructive. I revised the Treatise into two shorter works — the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals — and they did better. The lesson was not to soften the arguments but to present them more clearly. The problem with the Treatise was not the ideas; it was that I had written a long book when the ideas required a shorter one.

The ideas themselves I do not retract. We have no knowledge of the external world except through sensory impressions. Causation is not a logical necessity but a habit of expectation. The self is not a substance but a bundle of perceptions. These conclusions are uncomfortable. Comfort is not the test of a philosophical argument.