Like Berkeley, David Hume produced his major philosophical work while still in his twenties. But unlike Berkeley, who wrote several short books, Hume wrote one quite long one, A Treatise of Human Nature. His later work, apart from a multi-volume history of England, consisted largely of relatively short essays. However, he also wrote three works, each of which each of which was devoted mainly to presenting the ideas of one of the three books of the Treatise in a shorter and somewhat more popular form.
We will discuss most of the first of these, limiting ourselves to the chapters that correspond to material in the earlier Treatise. If you'd like to see the corresponding parts of the Treatise, there is web page on the Moodle site that provides links to the text of both works as well as the correspondence between them.
• The Enquiry was first titled as a series of essays, and its first chapter reworks ideas from the introduction to the Treatise as an independent essay. You should notice some similarities to the aims expressed by Locke and Berkeley, but notice also Hume’s description of his project as the beginnings of an experimental science of human nature.
• The ideas in ch. II should also sound familiar, but here notice Hume’s way of presenting them—in particular, his distinction between impressions and ideas and the relation between the two that he discusses in the later paragraphs of the chapter.
• Ch. III is quite short but very important. In the corresponding part of the Treatise, Hume compared the role of these forms of association of ideas in his science to the role of gravity in Newton’s.