Impressions and Ideas
Like the other empiricists that preceded him, Hume believed that the contents of the mind came only from experience. Also, like his predecessors, he believed that experience (per- ception) could be stimulated by either internal or external events. Hume agreed with Berkeley that we never experience the physical directly and can have only perceptions of it:
It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other ques- tions of a like nature. But here experi- ence is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never any thing present
Hume, however, was very impressed by the achievements of Newton, and he wanted to do for “moral philosophy” what Newton had done for “natural philosophy.”
Hume believed that he could bring about a reform in moral philosophy comparable to the Newtonian revolution in physics by following the very method of inquiry that Newton had followed. He aspired to be the Newton of the moral sciences. His achievement would in fact surpass Newton’s. The science of man is not only the indispensable foundation of natural philosophy, but is also of “greater impor- tance” and “much superior in utility.”
In Hume’s day, moral philosophy referred roughly to what we now call the social sciences and natural philosophy referred to what we now call the physical sciences.
