Later in the paragraph Hume is slightly less careful: "we may prosecute this enquiry to what length we please; where we shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression." [text] First of all, this is the conclusion of the induction, not a restatement of the premise (Hume is clear on this, I think), although Hume seems to state it dogmatically instead of indicating this as a conclusion of an inductive argument. Second, he suggests here that "every idea" is "copied from a similar impression" but this is not his considered view. Every simple idea, Hume holds, is copied from a similar impression, but some ideas are compounded from other ideas and these ideas are not directly copied from impressions. See his examples of the ideas of God [text] and the gold mountain [text].