From these definitions emerges a conception of the properties of man's cognitional powers which agrees exactly with those on which, as we have seen, Hume built up his whole philosophy. Both allow to the reason a knowledge-material consisting only of pictures - that is, of pictures evoked in consciousness through sense-perception, and received by it from the outer world in the form of disconnected units, whilst denying it all powers, as Hume expressed it, ever 'to perceive any real connections between distinct existences'.