The purpose of this paper is to challenge a widespread assumption among readers of Hume. The mentalistic assumption, as I call it, holds that Humean perceptions—both impressions and ideas—are intrinsically mental items. This assumption is reinforced by the common view that Hume adopts a variant of the Cartesian–Lockean “way of ideas.” I argue that Hume’s scepticism about substantial minds, his Copy Principle, his account of the idea of existence, and his commitment to inferences from conceivability to possibility are incompatible with the mentalistic assumption. By reconstructing the Separability Argument, which shows that perceptions may be separated from the mind, I offer compelling evidence that Hume was committed to the mind‑independence of perceptions in the strongest possible sense: impressions and ideas may exist outside the mind and need not inhere in, depend on, or be necessitated by any mind. While acknowledging that passions and sentiments are causally dependent on bodily or psychological states, I contend that such dependence is compatible with their being mind‑independent in the sense outlined here. The paper concludes that, for Hume, perceptions—including ideas, sense impressions, passions and emotions, are mind-independent entities. If correct, this conclusion carries far-reaching consequences for our understanding of Hume’s philosophy of mind and epistemology.
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