In the Enquiry, David Hume challenges us to imagine an object that can not be traced back to something we have seen in the past. This challenge is meant to serve as evidence for the theory that all our ideas are just copies of the things we’ve observed in the past (impressions). If this is true, is there a problem for someone like Descartes and others who believe that reason alone can give us knowledge of the world? What do you think this does for our beliefs about things we have never seen before, such as God, numbers, the “mind”, time, and other ideas that we use to make sense of the world? Is Hume right?
