1748 · Skopia

Showing 14 works across all media from 1748

The American Instructor: or Young Man's Best Companion · 1748

★ 8.5

Spirit of the Laws

1748 · 757 pages

Montesquieu sorts governments into republics that run on virtue, monarchies on honor, and despotisms on fear, then argues that liberty survives only where power is divided. The American framers read him closely.

★ 7.5

Fiction · Epistolary novel

Clarissa

Samuel Richardson

1748 · 1533 pages

Clarissa refuses the suitor her family has chosen, and a charming predator named Lovelace offers to rescue her. Told entirely in letters, it puts you inside both minds while the dread builds.

★ 7.1

Nonfiction · Philosophy

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

David Hume

1748 · 304 pages

Hume's clearest book, and his most dangerous: no testimony establishes a miracle, he argues, unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the event reported. Every later defense of miracles answers him.

★ 6.7

Any port in a storm.

John Cleland

1748

★ 4.5

Philosophical literature

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding · 1748

★ 3.9

Philosophical literature

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.