ideas only, or, rather, to use Hume's own terminology, there are 

 impressions and ideas. Impressions denote the data received 

 through sense, including, however, pains and pleasures, and the 

 ideas are the faint images of impressions which arise in thinking 

 and reasoning. All knowledge is originally derived through sense. 1 

 The soul is not an immaterial substance but a bundle of percep- 

 tions. Hume fearlessly and consistently applied his argument not 

 only to substance but also to certain other principles, chief of which 

 was causality, and, in holding that causality is a relation among 

 ideas and that the necessity usually attributed to it is due only to 

 constant conjunction and habitual or customary association of 

 ideas, he came into direct opposition with the rationalistic philos- 

 ophy which had been developing on the continent, and was con- 

 temporaneous also with him in England, and which held to a univer- 

 sality and necessity in experience other than that which Hume con- 

 ceded. In his unambiguous statement that "the independent 

 existence of our sensible perceptions is contrary to the plainest 

 experience", 2 Hume is quite at one with Berkeley. But since, 

 unlike Berkeley, Hume did not hold to the necessity of a perceiving 

 spirit, one might be led to suppose that he would deny existence to 

 unperceived objects or things; but this is just what Hume does not. 

 He holds firmly to a belief in, though no knowledge of, a continued 

 existence. Referring to the popular but false view that perceptions 

 continue to exist, he says, "The imagination naturally runs on in 

 this train of thinking. Our perceptions are our only objects; 

 resembling perceptions are the same, however broken or uninter- 

 rupted in their appearance: this appearing interruption is con- 

 trary to the identity: the interruption consequently extends not 

 beyond the appearance, and the perception or object really con- 

 tinues to exist, even when absent from us ; our sensible perceptions 

 have, therefore, a continued and uninterrupted existence. But as a 

 little reflection destroys this conclusion, that our perceptions have 

 a continued existe a nce, by showing that they have a dependent one, 

 it would naturally be expected that we must altogether reject the 

 opinion that there is such a thing in nature as a continued existence, 

 which is preserved even when it no longer appears to the senses. 

 The case, however, is otherwise." And then Hume goes on to say, 



1 Cf. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part 2, Sec. 1. 



2 A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part 4, Sec. 2. (P. 210 Selby-Bigge's 

 Edn.). 



85 



