Hume’s Version of Hutcheson’s Teaching that Space and Time are Non-Sensational

THE general, comprehensive title of Part ii, Book I, is, it will be observed, Of the ideas of space and time; and when we compare its argument with the argument of the section on abstract ideas we find that, taken as a whole, it exhibits the same broad features. It opens with a recapitulation of the principles insisted upon in the introductory sections of the Treatise, and it closes with teaching out of keeping with these principles. Hume’s restatement of the principles is in these terms:

No discovery cou’d have been made more happily for deciding all controversies concerning ideas, than that above-mention’d, that impressions always take the precedency of them, and that every idea, with which the imagination is furnish’d, first makes its appearance in a correspondent impression. … Let us apply this principle, in order to discover farther the nature of our ideas of space and time.¹