LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I'J'J 



in great part owing to Hume's own request, in the 

 preface to the posthumous edition of the short 

 " Pieces," that the public would thenceforth look 

 in these for the proper form of his philosophy. But 

 in the Treatise he had written down and published 

 what his genuine public, the keenest philosophic 

 minds, have credited with a permanent significance 

 of its own, quite lapart from its author's afterthought 

 about it. This critical material, philosophic thought 

 can never abandon. 



In Part IV of the First Book of the Treatise, too 

 often overlooked, Hume has supplied a key for the 

 destruction of the empirical position and the agnos- 

 ticism logically involved in it. There his diligent 

 and penetrating reader will see he cannot longer 

 stop with Hume's doctrine, that experience gives 

 only, but gives surely, the sensation of the present 

 moment. He cannot but go on to discover, as Hume 

 himself seems clearly to forebode, that without pre- 

 supposing the abiding unity of personal identity, 

 even the fleeting impression of the instant is impos- 

 sible.^ This permanence of personal identity, how- 

 ever, Hume has by simply carrying out the rigorous 

 logic of empiricism already done away with : it is 

 nothing but a "deposit" from the "artificial idea" 



^ Treatise, p. 187 foil., edition of Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon 

 Press, 1896. Compare, especially, the passage in the Appendix, 

 pp. 635, 636. 



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