Hume’s Impression/Idea Distinction

Understanding the distinction between impressions and ideas that Hume draws in the opening paragraphs of his A Treatise on Human Nature is essential for understanding much of Hume’s philosophy. This, however, is a task that has been the cause of a good deal of controversy in the literature on Hume. I here argue that the significant philosophical and exegetical issues previous treatments of this distinction (such as the force and vivacity read­ ing and the external-world reading) encounter are extremely problematic. I propose an alternative reading of this distinction as being between original mental entities and copied mental entities. I argue that Hume takes himself to discover this distinction as that which underlies our pre-theoretical sorting of mental entities. Thus, while the Copy Principle is initially treated by Hume as a mere empirical fact, it later comes to play a more substantial explanatory role in his account of human nature. This reading makes Hume’s distinction a more philosophically robust one, and avoids many of the exegetical difficulties of previous interpretations. Hume sets out in the first Book of the Treatise1 to present a theory of the mental according to which everything mental can be accounted for in terms of mental entities and their relations and behaviors. Hume calls such mental entities “percep­ tions” and divides these into two important classes: impressions and ideas. Hume’s official position on what determines whether a mental entity is an impression or an idea has been the subject of some debate, largely because Hume’s text is subtly ambiguous on the issue. One main point dividing scholars has been how to treat David Landy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Philosophy, UNC-CH, Chapel, Hill, NC 27599. Email: [email protected].