In Hume the term ‘perception’ replaces Locke’s ‘Ideas’, as the object of understanding: “It has been observ’d, that nothing is ever present to the mind but its perceptions; and that all the actions of seeing, hearing, judging, loving, hating, and thinking, fall under this denomination. The mind can never exert itself in any action, which we may not comprehend under the term of perception; and consequently that term is no less applicable to those judgments, by which we distinguish moral good and evil, than to every other operation of the mind. To approve of one character, to condemn another, are only so many different perceptions.” (All page citations are from D.F. Norton’s edition of Treatise on Human Nature: 293). Perception is whatever is present to the mind (THN: 408), they are objects intimately present to the mind (137), they are our only objects (141,293), they are interrupted and perishing and different at every return (140), like the Heracletean flux. Further ‘Per
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