This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained. For example, Hume's views on personal identity do not appear. The Enquiry dispensed with much of the material from the Treatise, in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. The end product of his labours was the Enquiry. 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. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 1739–40. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748.
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