David Hume's First Impression Essay

Hume divides “perception” into two things, “impressions” and “ideas”. To him impressions transmit to “sensing” or “feeling”, while ideas relate to “thinking”. “Sensing” should be assumed to be comprehensive, as Hume divides feelings into those of “sensation” and “reflection”. The main difference between the two is that reflections come from what we experience in our mind such as emotions, however; sensations come from our senses such as the sensation of touch. According to Hume, ideas are just “faint copies” of impressions that are “less forcible and lively”. An example of this is that we can love someone which is an impression and we can think about the concept of love which would be an idea. The concept will always feel fainter and weaker yet he directly …show more content…
The opinion that all ideas derive from sensory impressions is very appealing because there are ideas that don’t agree at all with our sense experience. An example of this is unicorns. Hume claims that basic ideas are replicas of impressions. Complex ideas cannot be copies of impressions however; they are composed of simple ideas. Take a unicorn for example; we have experiences of horses, horns and white color. Putting all that together gives us a unicorn. Hume believes all ideas originate from sensory impressions. He gives two arguments for his position. First, all ideas can be broken down into very simple ideas each of which can resemble an impression. Hume gives an example as the “idea of god” comes from the sensory impressions of “infinitely intelligent, wise and good being”. His second argument is that without a specific type of experience a person is lacking the ability to formulate an idea of that experience. He gives an example of how a blind man does not know color and how a mild mannered man cannot understand the motive of