[Next Project] Hume, Treatise of Human Nature

[Bennett Helm]

For my next project, I'd like to do Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.

Here are original page scans for the Selby-Bigge edition (1896), which is pretty much the standard edition for the Treatise.

Here is the Project Gutenberg page.

Assuming I get the go-ahead to do this, I have one question to start with concerning how to break this into files.

Hume divides his text into "Books", "Parts", and "Sections". There really is no text to any "book" or "part" except what is contained in the "sections" (though each book, part, and section has a name). Part numbering restarts with each book, and section numbering restarts with each part. 

So far what I've done is to split the text into these files (ordering them as they appear in the text):

• advertisement.xhtml
• introduction.xhtml
• book-1.xhtml
• part-1-1.xhtml
• part-1-2.xhtml
• part-1-3.xhtml
• part-1-4.xhtml
• book-2.xhtml
• part-2-1.xhtml
• part-2-2.xhtml
• part-2-3.xhtml
• book-3.xhtml
• part-3-1.xhtml
• part-3-2.xhtml
• part-3-3.xhtml

These "Parts" average about 55 pages (11 parts in total over 620 pages); the longest is over 100 pages, and the shortest is about 20. By contrast, there are 90 sections in total.

So is this an appropriate way to divide up the work? Or should I divide it further into sections, resulting in files like "section-2-4-1.xhtml" for Book II, Part IV, Section 1? The reason I didn't split any further is that, whereas each Book and Part has a title, none of them has any text except for what is contained in the Sections. So "book-*.xhtml" is essentially a stub, containing just the title. It seemed silly to have a bunch of "part-*-*.xhtml" files that also contain just titles. ... And having a part with about 100 pages didn't seem outlandish.

Bennett

[Vince]

What you’re describing (each section in a file) is the standard way we structure three-level books. It’s no sillier for a part to be just the part # and title than it is for the book file to be just the book # and title; that’s just the way the book is structured. See, e.g. War and Peace (whose top-level has only a #, no title), Les Misérables, etc.