Hume wrote the Treatise at 23 and called it 'deadborn from the press'

In 1734, David Hume moved to La Flèche in France and, at twenty-three, began writing A Treatise of Human Nature. His verdict on how it landed became one of the more quotable lines in the history of philosophy: the book, he declared, fell 'deadborn from the press.' The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats that as an exaggeration — but only partly. The Treatise, it reports, certainly did far less spectacularly than Hume was hoping. There is something bracing in the mismatch: the work is now filed among the most consequential in its field, and its author spent his early twenties in another country writing it while convinced, briefly, that nobody had noticed.