Note 72 — ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER II.
Reading edition
These Dialogues were posthumously published in obedience to their author's will. Hume had kept the MS. by him for twenty-seven years, and had corrected it from time to time, yet had delayed publication from deference to the judgment of his friends. He directed his literary executor, Adam Smith, to publish the Dialogues within two years of his death; but, in consequence of Smith's distaste for the task, this duty devolved upon Hume's nephew. They were printed in 1779 translated into German in 1781, and commented on by Jacobi in 1787.
Lowndes states that these Dialogues were not republished with the "Essays," but is mistaken in saying so. They appear at the end of Vol. II. in the 8vo. Edition of 1788. As this is not an uncommon or expensive book, I quote its paging. The quantity of matter extends only through 113 8vo. pages, and reference will not be difficult in any other Edition.
It seems true that the Dialogues were withdrawn from later reprints of the Essays. They appear to have been considered particularly objectionable; but there is no doubt that they express Hume's most deliberate and matured convictions, and thus become to fair inquirers particularly valuable. It must, however, be added that Hume valued himself on a conservatism of opinion. Comparing, when forty years old, his recent Essays with his Treatise "planned before I was twenty-one and composed before twenty-five," he says, "The philosophical principles are the same in both; but I was carried away by the heat of youth and invention to publish too precipitately." Burton, I. 337.