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This paper aims at solving a minor puzzle in the interpretation of David Hume's Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding (1748).* Its object is no more than an anecdote, but it involves a more general and ambitious suggestion about a possible way of handling meaning in past philosophical texts. I present it as an exercise in a (so far) embryonic discipline: the cultural history of philosophy. For a start, I must introduce a little philosophy. All human knowledge, we find in Hume's Enquiry, is based either on a priori 'relations of ideas', as in mathematics, which consists of abstract reasonings concerning objects independent of experience such as quantity and number; or on a posteriori 'matters of fact', as, for example, induction and all our reasonings concerning causation, which are based on experience. The main object of the book is, as is well known, the treatment of this latter kind of 'probable' knowledge. The textual side of my puzzle is to be found in the conclusion of the Enquiry, and refers back to this original distinction between 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'. If all knowledge must consist of either relations of ideas, or matters of fact, books containing neither are totally pointless so when we get into a library 'what havoc must we make?', Hume wonders with some scorn. And he goes on, in a passage which is among the most quoted, discussed and famous in western philosophy:
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