Hume drove the empiricist epistemological critique to its final extreme by using Berkeley's insight only turning it in a direction more characteristic of the modern mind. Being an empiricist who grounded all human knowledge in sense experience, Hume agreed with Lockes general idea, and too with Berkeley's criticism of Lockes theory of representation, but disagreed with Berkeley's idealist solution. Behind Hume's analysis is this thought: Human experience was indeed of the phenomenal only, of sense impressions, but there was no way to ascertain what was beyond the sense impressions, spiritual or otherwise. To start his analysis, Hume distinguished between sensory impressions and ideas. Sensory impressions being the basis of any knowledge coming with a force of liveliness and ideas being faint copies of those impressions. The question is then asked, What causes the sensory impression? Hume answered None. If the mind analyzes it's experience without preconception, it must recognize that in fact all its supposed knowledge is based on a continuous chaotic volley of discrete sensations, and that on these sensations the mind imposes an order of its own. The mind can't really know what causes the sensations because it never experiences cause as a sensation. What the mind does experience is simple impressions, through an association of ideas the mind assumes a causal relation that really has no basis in a sensory …show more content…
A more disturbing consequence of Hume's analysis was its undermining of empirical science itself. The mind's logical progress from many particulars to a universal certainty could never be absolutely legitimated. Just because event B has always been seen to follow event A in the past, that does not mean it will always do so in the future. Any acceptance of that law is only an ingrained psychological persuasion, not a logical certainty. The causal necessity that is apparent in phenomena is the necessity only of conviction subjectively, of human imagination controlled by its regular association of ideas. It has no objective basis. The regularity of events can be perceived, however, there necessity can not. The result is nothing more than a subjective feeling brought on by the experience of apparent regularity. Science is possible, but of the phenomenal only, determined by human psychology. With Hume, the festering empiricist stress on sense perception was brought to its ultimate extreme, in which only the volley and chaos of those perceptions exist, and any order imposed on those perceptions was arbitrary, human, and without objective foundation. For Hume all human knowledge had to be regarded as opinion and he held that ideas were faint copies of sensory impressions instead of vice - versa. Not only was the human mind less than perfect, it could never claim access to the world's