There are plenty of complaints about Hume’s adopted theory of ideas (not least that as a theory of mind it’s homuncular). But his notions on association of ideas through adjacency, resemblance and cause are interesting in terms of how they function in a narrative sense. I was reminded of ‘reading by the book’ more than once. Also the distinction between impression and idea was resonant of the what I think is called the ‘vivacity’ of particular literary images in ‘reading by the book’. Hume means the difference between an experiential perception and a remembered one. The narrative transplantation of the difference doesn’t settle exactly cntiguously, but I’m thinking about how I noted the idea of ‘fractal imagination’ and Humes notion of simple or complex ideas. Narrative conjures with both, indeed revelling in the synthesis of unexpected ideas. It arranges these from several orders at once; from the descriptive to the symbolic and from all angles of voice and fictive perception. These complex or simple ideas are finally brought together in the rhetorical field, particularly into the transformative field of metaphor. I wonder what metaphor and ‘complex ideas’ n the Humean sense have in common?

Also thought about Hume’s terminology of ‘impression’ and that idea is ‘recast’ as a ‘copy’. This is clearly in the language of print (and of the Platonic mind as a wax tablet)- but more particularly  of print, as it takes the stereotype ‘impression’ to endlessly produce the inferior ‘idea’ in new combinations. McLuhan might have had something to say here about Hume’s position vis a vis… well, positions. It’s no accident that Hume works hard on free will when he reduces cognitive perception to the effects of the empirical typetray. Although this is capable of producing the Borgesian library of Babel, it produces a particular view of what cognition actually is. One I suppose I buy into a fair bit, through my interest in narrative.