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 173940. 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.