200 HUME ix 



entirely our personal identity, to give a reason why we can 

 thus extend our identity beyond our memory. 



" The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion 

 which is of great importance in the present affair, viz., 

 that all the nice and subtle questions concerning personal 

 identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be re- 

 garded rather as grammatical than as philosophical diffi- 

 culties. Identity depends on the relations of ideas, and 

 these relations produce identity by means of that easy 

 transition they occasion. But as the relations and the easi- 

 ness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, 

 we have no just standard by which we can decide any 

 dispute concerning the time when they acquire or lose a 

 title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning 

 the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, ex- 

 cept so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some 

 fiction or imaginary principle of union, as we have already 

 observed. 



" What I have said concerning the first origin and un- 

 certainty of our notion of identity, as applied to the human 

 mind, may be extended, with little or no variation, to that 

 of simplicity. An object, whose different co-existent parts 

 are bound together by a close relation, operates upon the 

 imagination after much the same manner as one perfectly 

 simple and undivisible, and requires not a much greater 

 stretch of thought in order to its conception. From this 

 similarity of operation we attribute a simplicity to it, and 

 feign a principle of union as the support of this simplicity, 

 and the centre of all the different parts and qualities of the 

 object." (I. pp. 331-3.) 



The final result of Hume's reasoning comes to 

 this: As we use the name of body for the sum of 

 the phenomena which make up our corporeal ex- 

 istence, so we employ the name of soul for the 

 sum of the phenomena which constitute our 



