Where there is No Impression, the Idea is Meaningless

This is Hume’s Empiricist Rule. To begin with, David Hume is an empiricist, therefore, a
philosopher whose theory of knowledge lies on the sense perception of things. There are no two
kinds of knowledge for Him. For David Hume, the notion that there is a superior kind of
knowledge that philosophers can reach by reason, knowledge of the nature of reality,
metaphysical knowledge, is completely false, a total illusion (Lavine, 1985), thereby, rejecting
everything that was taught by the previous philosophers which were known as the rationalists.
David Hume, from this stand point, sets out to define our knowledge, he says that there is only
one kind of knowledge, that of sense perception, for it is only in perceiving things that we are
able to attain true knowledge, everything else that are not experienced are false. For him, the
foundation of all knowledge is sense perception.
Our knowledge by sense perception is divided by David Hume into two, impressions and
ideas. Impressions are our immediate sensations, passions, and emotions, the immediate data of
seeing, touching, hearing, desiring, loving, hating. Ideas are copies of faint images of
impressions, such as we have in thinking about or recalling any of our immediate impressions.
(Lavine, 1985) David Hume then, decides to take it a step further by saying that these two can be
distinguished as simple impressions or ideas and complex impressions or ideas. Simple
impressions are that of looking at a table and seeing that it is brown. Brown is a simple
impression, and recalling that color of the table that is brown, is the simple idea. Complex
impressions or ideas are those that have different obstacles to them, or other qualities that make
it harder to distinguish the object or that which makes the object more beautiful, Hume’s
example to this was the view of the Capitol Hills in the distance, there is an impression
consisting of many sensations of darkness and light, blackness and yellow (from the street
lamps), white marble and grayish shadows, the great dome, and lots more perceptions.
Since ideas are stemmed from impressions by the fact that ideas are merely recollections
of the impressions, Hume goes on to say that Ideas are meaningless if there are no impressions.
If this is how he defines ideas and impressions, then I would have to agree with him. Let us take
the ideas of fictitious creatures in order to prove this point. Take a mermaid or a Minotaur for
example; we very well know that these creatures do not exist and that they are fictitious ideas
(according to Descartes), however, how did these ideas come into being? These ideas come from
the jumbling up of ideas, a mermaid is a combination of a woman and a fish; a Minotaur is a
combination of a man and a bull; a centaur is a combination of a man and a horse. These ideas
are jumbled up ideas of impressions. Since we have the impression of fishes, women, bulls, men,
and horses, we combine all of these to create different ideas that are out of this world. Another
example, the idea of a square-circle; it comes from the idea of a square and a circle, but it is a
logical impossibility because these two are negating principles.
David Hume is then correct in saying that where there is no impression, the idea is
meaningless, for what good is it to be able to create fictitious things when it doesn’t necessarily
exist in our world. It would be just for entertainment, it does not even cause mental stimulation,
or even rational challenge. These ideas that do not exist or ideas that are meaningless really are
meaningless if they are not applicable in our everyday life. These ideas do not have any practical
use to us, therefore, really are meaningless.