Friday, April 18, 2008

Hume: Of the Origin in Ideas

Paragraph 5: "But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience."

Here Hume is kind of contradicting himself. First he says that people have no boundaries or limits to their thoughts, but here he is saying that we are limited to what we know because of our experiences and our senses. This, to my understanding, still gives us a lot of space for cognitive growth, but Hume seems to change his mind on the matter. We may be 'thought-limited' by our experiences and our senses, but there are always more experiences to be experienced and, of course, more sensations to be sensed.

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