Yet can only account for it as a ‘fiction’ by supposing ideas which with him are impossible.
343. The method of explanation in each case is the same. He starts with two suppositions, to neither of which he is logically entitled. One is that we have a ‘distinct idea of identity or sameness,’ i.e. of an object that remains invariable and uninterrupted through a supposed variation of time’—a supposition which, as we have seen, upon his principles must mean that a feeling, which is one in a succession of feelings, is yet all the successive feelings at once. The other is that we have an idea ‘of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close’ (natural) ‘relation’—which in like manner implies that a feeling, which is one among a succession of feelings, is at the same time a consciousness of these feelings as successive and under that qualification by mutual relation which implies their equal presence to it. These two ideas, which in truth are ‘distinct and even contrary’ [1] we yet come to confuse with each other, because ‘that action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invisible object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling.’ Thus, though what we call our mind is really a ‘succession of related objects,’ we have a strong propensity to mistake it for an ‘invariable and uninterrupted object.’ To this propensity we at last so far yield as to assert our successive perceptions to be in effect the same, however interrupted and variable; and then, by way of ‘justifying to ourselves this absurdity, feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul and self, and substance, to disguise the variation’. [2]
[1] See note to § 341.
[2] Pp. 535-536. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.].
In origin this ‘fiction’ the same as that of ‘Body’.
344. It will be seen that the theory, which we have just summarised, would merely be a briefer version of that given in the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses,’ if in the sentence, which states its conclusion, for ‘the notion of a soul and self and substance’ were written ‘the notion of a double existence of perceptions and objects’. [1] To a reader who has not thoroughly entered into the fusion of being and feeling, which belongs to the ‘new way of ideas,’ it may seem strange that one and the same process of so-called confusion has to account for such apparently disparate results, as the notion of a permanently identical self and that of the distinct existence of body. If he bears in mind, however, that with Hume the universe of our experience is the same when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body’ and when it is called the ‘universe of thought or my impressions and ideas’, [2] he will see that on the score of consistency Hume is to be blamed, not for applying the same method to account for the fictions of material and spiritual identity, but for allowing himself, in his preference for physical, as against theological, pretension, to write as if the supposition of spiritual were really distinct from that of material identity, and might be more contemptuously disposed of. The original ‘mistake,’ out of which according to him the two fictitious suppositions arise, is one and the same; and though it is a ‘mistake’ without which, as we have found [3] from Hume’s own admissions, we could not speak even in singular propositions of the most ordinary ‘objects of sense’—this pen, this table, this chair—it is yet one that on his principles is logically impossible, since it consists in a confusion between ideas that we cannot have. Of this original ‘mistake’ the fictions of body and of its ‘continued and distinct existence’ are but altered expressions. They represent in truth the same logical category of substance and relation. And of the Self according to Locke’s notion of it [4] (which was the only one that Hume had in view), as a ‘thinking thing’ within each man among a multitude of other thinking things, the same would have to be said. But in order to account for the ‘mistake,’ of which the suppositions of thinking and material substance are the correlative expressions, and which it is the net result of Hume’s speculation to exhibit at once as necessary and as impossible, we have found another notion of the self forced upon us—not as a double of body, but as the source of that ‘familiar theory’ which body in truth is, and without which there would be no universe of objects, whether ‘bodies’ or ‘impressions and ideas,’ at all.
[1] Above, §§ 306-310.
[2] Above, § 340.
[3] Above, §§ 303 & 304.
[4] Above, §§ 129-132.