Abstract
With the general concepts of impressions, ideas, cause and effect, belief and reality in mind, we may now turn to Hume's notion of an object. In this chapter, we focus on a traditionally overlooked sense in which he uses the word "object'—"objects" that are either impressions or are ideas that "exactly represent" impressions. I show that such objects could not be what Hume has in mind by ideas of objects that admit of a "perfect identity." This is the case because impressions and ideas that exactly represent impressions (simple or complex) do not represent both of the properties of uninterruptedness and invariability, while ideas of objects that we imagine to admit of perfect identity do. In fact, as we will see in the following chapters, impressions, and ideas that exactly represent impressions (simple or complex) must be understood as the necessary psychological building blocks for ideas of objects with a perfect identity. Accordingly, we may think of, and hereafter refer to, those impressions, and ideas that exactly represent impressions as "proto-objects."