Treatise of Human Nature

The theories Hume develops in the Treatise have their foundations in the writings of John Locke and George Berkeley, and Hume is associated with these two men as the third in the series of great British empiricists. Like Hume, Locke denied the existence of innate ideas, dividing the sources of our i [...]
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The theories Hume develops in the Treatise have their foundations in the writings of John Locke and George Berkeley, and Hume is associated with these two men as the third in the series of great British empiricists. Like Hume, Locke denied the existence of innate ideas, dividing the sources of our ideas into two categories: those derived from sensation through the use of our sense organs and those derived from reflection through our own mental processes. For Hume, sensations and reflections both fall under the term impressions, while he reserves the term ideas for the results of mental processes such as imagination and memory. Hume's discussion of abstract ideas rests on his acceptance of Berkeley's claim that the idea we have of a general term always springs from a specific experience, though used in a general way. Hume praised this explanation but further clarified how a general term could stand for several similar, but specific, experiences.