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By default, every text opens in edited form, with any departures from the copytext made silently. If you wish to see these departures, press the “mark changes” button on the right, which will highlight each of them in yellow. Moving the mouse over these changes will reveal a box on the top right describing and justifying the change. Clicking on the “original version” button, meanwhile, will revert to an almost completely unedited reproduction of the copytext (for an explanation of the minor ways in which these “original” versions differ from the copytexts, see the Editorial Notes, section 1.4).
The editions from which we have taken the page numbers sometimes hyphenate a word across the page break. In order to show exactly where the page break comes in these editions, we have likewise hyphenated the words. Since one of the main advantages of an electronic text, however, is that it can be searched for words (Ctrl+F in most web browsers will bring up a search box), and since any hyphenated word would not show up in a search, a button has been included to “force no hyphens”. This will move any hyphenated word fully onto the next page, removing the hyphen.
Links and boxes below the options buttons enable you to jump to a particular part of the text, either by clicking on the link, or entering a page or paragraph number and pressing Enter. For the essays, the paragraph number must be preceded by the two or three letter code of the desired essay (you can find the code for each essay by looking at the paragraph numbers in the margin of the essay, or in the Editorial Notes, section 1.2). For works with more complicated structure, such as the Treatise or the Enquiries, paragraph numbers must be preceded by section, part, and book numbers (just section numbers for the Enquiries), in the now standard format (e.g. 1.2.1.1 for Book 1, part 2, section 1, paragraph 1 of the Treatise, or 5.6 for section 5, paragraph 6 of the first Enquiry).
Thanks to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, we are able to offer on this site, for the first time, high-quality digital images of Hume’s manuscript of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. This opens up by default with the text of the first (1779) edition on the left, but the text can be hidden by clicking on the “hide text” button on the bar at the top. This bar also allows you to jump to a particular page, and adjust the zoom for the images. Please note that images can take a while to download, depending on the speed of your internet connection.