An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING v INTRODUCTION Impressions, according to Hume, are the root of all ideas, but ideas might be either the result of sensation alone or the result of the imagination functioning in harmony with experience. The creative faculty, according to Hume, employs four mental operations to generate imaginings from sense-impressions. Imagine a man who has seen every hue of blue save one, as Hume suggests. Despite the fact that he has never seen it, he predicts that this individual will be able to discern the hue of this specific shade. This appears to pose a significant difficulty for the empirical account, but Hume dismisses it as an outlier, arguing that one can have a unique thought that is devoid of meaning. David Hume describes how thoughts tend to occur in sequences, or trains of thought, in this chapter. He emphasizes that there are at least three types of concepts associations: similarity, space-time contiguity, and cau...