Easton Press "The History of England" Limited Edition 6-Volume Complete Matched Set, Leather-Bound [Sealed]

Easton Press Leather Bound Collection. The monumental work covering English history.

Easton Press 2004. David Hume, Esq. "The History of England: From the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688". Luxuriously bound in full genuine leather. A complete matched set in six volumes. Includes the author's last corrections and improvements, to which is prefixed a short account of his life, written by himself. Hubbed spine, distinctive cover design, beautiful illustrations, permanent satin ribbon page marker, gilded page edges, moire end-sheets, and thread-sewn pages for durability and strength. Very Fine, sealed without any flaws.

• Landmark works on English History
• Forest green leather with an original stylized design embossed in gold
• Frontispiece in black & white with the author's portrait
• The coat-of-arms engraved on the front board

The History of England

David Hume's The History of England, published in six volumes between 1754 and 1762, is a monumental work covering English history from Julius Caesar's invasion to the Revolution of 1688, establishing Hume's fame as a historian. The book traces England's evolution from a government of will to a government of law, emphasizing liberty as a central theme, and includes political, social, and economic developments, making it a significant text of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Key aspects of the book:

Scope: Covers nearly 1,800 years, from Roman Britain to the Glorious Revolution.

Structure: Published in six volumes, with the final edition containing Hume's corrections.

Central Theme: Views English history as a progression toward liberty, arguing that this liberty is contingent and requires understanding its supporting institutions.

Content: Goes beyond kings and battles to include literature, science, and social change, inspired by Voltaire's broad approach to history.

Legacy: Became a bestseller in its time, solidifying Hume's reputation beyond his philosophical work.

David Hume

David Hume (7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience; this places him amongst such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Locke and George Berkeley.

Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified empirically; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but experience only the "constant conjunction" of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.

An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behavior, proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.

Hume denied that people have an actual conception of the self, positing that they experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and critique of the argument from design, was especially controversial. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers".