An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

How then, assuming we do not expect to wake up in a new world after we die, are we to think about life's end in any way that gives shape and meaning to the life we're living now? I entertain no fancies about worlds not dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy.

I worship only at the altar of the greatest of our British philosophers, David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1745.

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? no does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter-of-fact and existence no commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion Hume's test is a stern one, but Wilder's idea passes that test.

It doesn't posit any new or speculative planes of existence.

So he eventually ended up writing more of a condensed version that was much clearer for a more widespread audience.

That's his An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

It's basically an easier to understand summary of his larger treatise of human nature, specifically book one, which is about the understanding.

Some of the others are about like morals and passions and that kind of stuff.

But then you look at another section of his library, and you see this expansive, heavy Western philosophy collection.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, David Hume's An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, the works of Plato and Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self, Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person, Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces.

It is a phenomenal contrast.

Let's pause there because that sounds a bit reductive if we just say he read both.