How did David Hume’s empiricism explain the origin of human knowledge?

David Hume’s empiricism posits that all human knowledge originates in experience, rejecting the existence of innate ideas. He categorized all mental perceptions into two types:1

• Impressions: Vivid, forceful perceptions experienced through sensation or internal consciousness (e.g., feeling heat or pain).23
• Ideas: The "faint images" or copies of these impressions, formed by the mind through compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing original impressions.23

Hume argued that every simple idea is derived from a corresponding simple impression. Because the mind cannot create ideas without these sensory foundations, he concluded that knowledge is limited to what can be traced back to experience.2143

Furthermore, Hume distinguished between two types of knowledge:
* Relations of ideas: Necessary truths, such as those in mathematics, which are discoverable by pure reason but do not provide information about the external world.13
* Matters of fact: Contingent truths derived from experience. Because these rely on causality—which Hume identified as a habitual mental association rather than an observable necessity—he maintained that we cannot possess demonstrative knowledge of anything beyond our immediate perceptions.13