Why did David Hume doubt that people can know an enduring self?

David Hume’s skepticism regarding an enduring self stems from his strict empiricism, which posits that all knowledge must be derived from sense experience, or "impressions".123

In his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued that when he looked inward, he could never observe a stable, unified "self" or "mind." Instead, he encountered only a fleeting succession of individual perceptions—such as heat, cold, light, shade, or pain—that are constantly changing. Because he could find no single, permanent impression that serves as the foundation for the idea of a self, he concluded that the mind is merely a "bundle of perceptions" without any deeper unity or cohesion.1243

Hume maintained that the belief in a persistent self is a fiction created by the imagination, which mistakenly attributes identity to a collection of disparate perceptions united by relations like resemblance and causation. Consequently, he argued that there is no underlying "substance" or subject that remains the same over time.13