IX THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY 199 



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 regarded rather as 

 grammatical than as philosophical difficulties. Identity de- 

 pends on the relations of ideas, and these relations produce 

 identity by means of that easy transition they occasion. But 

 as the relations, and the easiness 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 con- 

 cerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, 

 except 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 uncer- 

 tainty of our notion of identity, as applied to the human mind, 

 may be extended, with little or no variation, to that of sim- 

 plicity. 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 un- 

 divisible, 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 

 existence, so we employ the name of soul for the 

 sum of the phenomena which constitute our 

 mental existence ; and we have no more reason, in 

 the latter case, than in the former, to suppose that 

 there is anything beyond the phenomena which 

 answers to the name. In the case of the soul, as 

 in that of the body, the idea of substance is a 



