Hume's Marvelous Method for Solving Philosophical Disputes!

As Hume believed that all ideas were faint 'copies' of the sense 'impressions' that they originated in, he was able to propose a method for solving certain philosophical problems by tracing the ideas these problems involved back to their original 'impressions'. If an idea could not be traced back to its original sense 'impression' then it must be empty, meaningless and not worth pursuing. 

I got you to try to apply this 'method' to the notion of  'a time when nothing happens'. This caused a lot of confusion and 'debate', but eventually we all agreed (I think) that because we could not have experienced a time when nothing happens, we cannot have a sense impression to base our idea on and therefore the idea was empty and meaningless. 

It is confusing because we 'think' we can imagine such a time, but we tend to imagine ourselves or someone 'observing' nothing happening, but of course the observation itself is something happening.

So we agreed that what we actually experience as 'time' is in fact change and 'time' as a 'substance' separate from change does not exist if Hume is correct. 

You went on to apply this method to love / hate and innate ideas and of course you could find the impressions that the ideas of love and hate come from, but not those for innate ideas. This would have made Hume happy. Well done people!