ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Hume’s account of impressions and its consequences. Impressions of reflection are passions. Impressions of sensation are “sensible qualities”: phenomenally experienced colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile feelings that are inconceivable to those who lack the associated sense organ. Impressions are in the mind in the sense of being locally conjoined with the mind, not in the sense of being its intentional objects or its states or modifications. Visual and tactile impressions are also disposed in space. Reid accused Hume of taking minds to be either extended and divisible substances or no substance (nothing to speak of). Hume never took exception to this interpretation. This chapter defends it against objections that were raised at the time and considers what it implies for the nature of consciousness and temporal experience. Hume had no theory of consciousness, but the direction of his thought committed him to taking it to be extended without determent to its unity and to extend into the very recent past, again without determent to its unity. The latter view is inconsistent with presentist commitments Hume will have shared with everyone else. That tension was never noticed or resolved.
