An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish
empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's
A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in
London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the
Treatise, which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.