According to David Hume, what are the laws of association, the meaning of the ideas of God, and explain the basis for morality and the happy life.

Please answer and explain all parts of the question in grave detail, elaboration, and length

 

All the contents of the consciousness come from the sensitive experience ("perception"). Hume's empiricist ontology is really very simple, since it admits only one type of entity, namely perceptions, which it divides into two classes: impressions and ideas. He calls the immediate data of external or internal experience (sensations, feelings, sentiments) impressions and characterizes them by their vividness and sense of reality. Impressions, in the sense that he gives to this word, are the irreducible and fundamental perceptions that we call "sensations, passions and emotions". Hume calls ideas the mediated contents, reproduced or derived from them, and for that reason they are weaker, less vivid. The ideas, according to him, are "the blurred images of the sensations in the thought and the reasoning". Therefore, he believes that thought and reasoning are born from the faculty of forming images and that imagination is a kind of blurred copy of sensations and feelings. There we have an interpretation prior to that of Tracy's Destutt, who said: "To think is to feel".

Hume, unlike many other previous philosophers from the difference and his problem is how from here you can go up to the unity and the universal. Hume starts from an empiricist and atomistic ontology: perceptions are simple, distict, differentiated units, because only this way they are distinguishable. Hume's way of distinguishing the two unique types of perceptions, the fundamental ones, is the following: "everyone would readily admit that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind when a man feels pain [...] and when later he evokes this sensation or anticipates it in his imagination [and] a similar distinction affects all the perceptions of the mind. Hume, Research on Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 2.

At first glance, man's thinking is unlimited. It can unite incongruous forms and appearances, lead us even beyond the universe, and conceive of what has never been seen or heard of. Nothing but that which implies absolute contradiction, seems to be beyond the power of thought. But a closer examination shows that all that creative power of the mind is reduced to the faculty of mixing, transposing, increasing or decreasing the materials supplied by the senses.

"To express myself in philosophical language, all our 'ideas', or weaker perceptions, are copies of our 'impressions' or more intense perceptions" (Ibidem).

All ideas come from previous impressions. The truth of our thoughts is determined by the impressions on which they are based. Whoever claims something else says defiantly Hume, has a unique and simple method of refutation: to show that idea which, in his opinion, does not derive from that source. He concludes: "if we harbor the suspicion that a philosophical term is used without any meaning or idea (as is so often the case), we will only have to ask from what impression the supposed idea is derived; and if it is impossible to assign one, our suspicion will have been confirmed". (Ibidem).

There is no truth nor possibly even meaning, when no impression can be identified. This provides Hume with the philosophical method that imposes to test every concept or category that is presented, looking for the impression that is its origin and rejecting it (or rejecting it) if its origin is not an impression.

From that single original material, the content of the mind increases and is enriched by the association of ideas. Locke had already pointed this out, but Hume attends to it more extensively and also with a greater simplicity, which he achieves by renouncing the realistic scruples of the English language.

Step-by-step explanation

The movements of ideas must be able to be reduced to a "law of mechanics": "there is a kind of attraction that has in the world of the mind effects as extraordinary as in the physical one".

What law governs the succession of ideas, the representation? What makes the succession, the flow, to be representation and not simple delirium, vertigo, arbitrariness, freedom? Hume thinks that we only know the effects of the law. Association imposes itself on imagination, affects it, determines it, orders it, makes it appear as memory, dream, understanding or fantasy, makes it a system, nature, regularity, object of science. Ideas are united and combined by virtue of the forms of association called contiguity, similarity and causality. Under these forms the spirit is naturalized. The cause of the association is unknown to us: we only know its effects.

"According to me, it will hardly be doubted that these principles serve to connect ideas. Ibid. section 3.

Moreover, the law can even be reduced to two conditions; namely, similarity and space-time contiguity, since the cause-effect relationship is reduced, as we shall see, to the regular connection of two events in space and time.

The similarity will be decisive for the comparison between ideas (as to their formal relations), as is the case of mathematics; the space-time contiguity will be decisive in the field of the matters of fact.

Therefore, constancy and uniformity appear, are given, in the way ideas are associated in the imagination. Those principles that organize what is given in a system also organize belief, because that constancy, that regularity and order in succession, push to believe, help fiction.