To Hate To Love To Think

From A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Book I — the same work in which Hume advances his famous "bundle theory" of the self. He uses "perception" as a technical umbrella term covering every mental state, both the vivid impressions of sensation and the fainter ideas of thought and memory. By declaring that even hating, loving, and seeing are "nothing but to perceive," Hume collapses the traditional distinction between inner life and outward experience, laying the groundwork for his radical conclusion that there is no persistent self behind the flow of perceptions — only the perceptions themselves, succeeding one another "with inconceivable rapidity."