IX THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY 195 



ent from the substance, which, on like grounds, 

 must be supposed to underlie the qualities of 

 matter ? 



Again, if it be said that our personal identity 

 requires the assumption of a substance which 

 remains the same while the accidents of perception 

 shift and change, the question arises what is 

 meant by personal identity ? 



"For my part," says Hume, "when I enter most intimately 

 into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular 

 perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or 

 hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any 

 time without a perception, and never can observe anything 

 but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for 

 any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, 

 and may be truly said not to exist. And were all my percep- 

 tions removed by death, and I could neither think, nor feel, 

 nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, 

 I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is 

 further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any one, 

 upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a 

 different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no 

 longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in 

 the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in 

 this particular. He may perhaps perceive something simple 

 and continued which he calls himself, though I am certain there 

 is no such principle in me. 



" But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may 

 venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing 

 but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which suc- 

 ceed one another with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in 

 a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The mind is a kind of 

 theatre, where several perceptions successively make their 

 appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite 

 variety of postures and situations. There is properly no 



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