An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) Book

Though Locke himself cautions (late in Book IV, the final volume of the Essay) against the Argumentum ad Vericundeum (from "authority")'against giving undue credence to an argument merely because of the reputation* of the person making it (e.g. "the Aristotelian unities must be respected by any playwright, because Aristotle"), still there exist certain books in the history of letters which loom large over other scribblings, and whose adamantine reputations must remain occasionally impermeable to erosion by the vaprous rantings of the hoi polloi, viz, the subjective rating systems of GR-reviewers such as this one.

But where else to begin in describing my near-monthlong relationship with this monument (pub 1789~90) of English philosophy? Except to say that it is at once a towering, unprecedented intellectual achievement; a fine example of that loftily perspicacious, poised and mellifluous style (soon to be found in the pages of the Tatler and Spectator) of the dawning eighteenth century; a breath of fresh Anglo-Saxon air to disturb the cobwebs of scholasticism and the obscurantist dust of continental rationalism; and a sometimes tediously long-winded, fastidious/punctilious, even repetitive journey through (more meanders than forthrights) the catacombs of the mind (via the portals of the senses, towards the seat of judgement).

Thus if the non-self-heeding Polonious is more than occasionally summoned to this reader's lips (viz., "Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,/And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,/I will be brief:"), the Essayis still the product of a fascinating, first-rate mind, and, with Hamlet, take it for all in all'I shall not look on its like again (though perchance I shall append some highlights in addition to those in previous below, betimes)
FINIS

*This must surely presage the windy dispute between the "Ancients and Moderns" that obsesses European salons in the coming decades, as lampooned in Swift's Battle of the Books(1704)