ABSTRACT
George Berkeley’s successor in the tradition of mental mechanism was David Hume. Hume’s great contribution to this tradition was twofold, in its general structure Hume’s psychology went very little beyond those of John Locke and Berkeley. In addition, Hume rightly recognized that the whole effort of mental mechanism stood or fell upon the question of the association of ideas. The doctrine of psychological empiricism insists that “ideas” must in some fashion derive from “impressions”. But Hume for the first time spelled out the assumption that mental mechanism made concerning the precise nature of this derivation— namely, that “ideas” differ from their generative “impressions” only in “force and liveliness”. Hume’s clarity of expression brought out another of mental mechanism’s fundamental assumptions. The assumption of mental mechanism, which Hume readily accepted, was that such complex impressions can be analyzed into psychologically discrete sensory qualities.
