Is The Conception Of Identity In A Treatise Of Human Nature, By David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist best known today for his highly persuasive system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume attempted to create a total naturalistic knowledge of man that examined the psychological foundation of human nature. Against rationalism, Hume contended that passion rather than reason governs human behavior. He also argued that inductive reasoning, cannot be justified rationally; our faith in induction comes from custom, habit, and experience rather than logic. He denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, arguing that we experience only a bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causally-connected perceptions.
He claims, “The identity, which we attribute to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, the same which we ascribe to plants and animal bodies.” What he means by this is identity is no more than an effect, a quality, which we attribute to object; because of the culmination of ideas in the imagination, we reflect upon identity through resemblance and causation. Hume claims that we use resemblance of current perception and past perceptions to create a link that makes all the different perceptions seem like a single, unified object.
David Hume, true to his extreme skepticism, eventually completely rejects the notion of identity. There are no underlying objects or “persons” that continue to exist over time, there are merely impressions; this idea can be simplified into the following argument:
1. Every idea ultimately arises from