David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher believed that the human imagination flatters itself enormously. We speak of creative genius, of ideas that arrive from nowhere, of minds that conjure entirely new worlds from nothing. Hume thought this was almost entirely wrong. His starting point is a distinction between impressions and ideas. Impressions are the vivid, immediate deliverances of sensation and feeling: the sharp cold of water on your face, the specific grief of a particular loss, the redness of something red as you are actually looking at it. Ideas are the fainter copies of those impressions that the mind retains and works with afterward. From this, he draws a conclusion that cuts deep: all ideas are copies of impressions.
What we call imagination, what we call creativity, is merely the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing those traces. Combining them in new configurations. Rearranging their components. But the components themselves were always delivered by experience first. This is Hume’s Copy Principle, and it is a rather startling claim about the limits of the human mind.
What about a golden mountain, or a red dragon? Surely those are original ideas, produced from nothing? No, Hume says. A golden mountain is gold, which you have seen, plus mountain, which you have seen, combined. A red dragon is a lizard, which you have seen, plus wings, which you have seen, plus red, which you have seen, scaled up and breathing fire you have also seen, fused into a single creature you have not. The novelty is in the configuration, not the elements. And the history of creative genius bears this out rather mercilessly.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is lifted from a twelfth-century Scandinavian legend, filtered through a French retelling and possibly an earlier lost English play. Romeo and Juliet is a 1562 narrative poem wearing new clothes. Dante's cosmology is Aristotelian theology plus Virgil's Aeneid plus the political violence of Florence, assembled under personal exile. Dostoevsky's tormented heroes are Hegel and French utopianism run through Siberian suffering and a faith that kept collapsing and rebuilding itself. Kafka's dreamlike bureaucratic dread is the Habsburg Empire he grew up inside, recombined with Kierkegaard's existential anxiety and his father's suffocating authority. What separates these writers from the rest of us is just the fact that nobody has ever recombined inherited material with greater precision, pressure, or feeling. The Copy Principle, in this sense, is an honest account of what genius actually does.
Reference:
Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II. The Treatise of Human Nature (1739)