136. The remark will at once occur that the question concerning the relation between our consciousness, as in succession, and the idea of God, is essentially different from that concerning the relation between this consciousness and the self identical throughout it, inasmuch as the relation in the one case is between a fact and an idea, in the other between conflicting facts. The identity of the self, which Locke asserts, is one of ‘real being,’ and this is found to lie in consciousness, in apparent conflict with the fact that consciousness is a succession, of which ‘no two parts exist together.’ There is no such conflict, it will be said, between the _idea_ of a conscious being, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever--the correspondence to which of any reality is a farther question--and the _fact_ of our consciousness being in succession. Allowing for the moment the validity of this distinction, we will consider first the difficulties that attach to Locke’s account of the idea of God, as an idea. Locke’s account of this idea. 137. This idea, with him, is a ‘complex idea of substance.’ It is the idea each man has of the ‘thinking thing within him, enlarged to infinity.’ It is beset then in the first place with all the difficulties which we have found to belong to his doctrine of substance generally and of the thinking substance in particular. [1] These need not be recalled in detail. When God is the thinking substance they become more obvious. It is the antithesis to ‘material substance,’ as the source of ideas of sensation, that alone with Locke gives a meaning to ‘thinking substance,’ as the source of ideas of reflection: and if, as we have seen, the antithesis is untenable when it is merely the source of human ideas that is in question, much more must it be so in regard to God, to whom any opposition of material substance must be a limitation of his perfect nature. Of the generic element in the above definition, then, no more need here be said. It is the qualification of ‘enlargement to infinity,’ by which the idea of man as a thinking substance is represented as becoming the idea of God, that is the special difficulty now before us. Of this Locke writes as follows:--‘The complex idea we have of God is made up of the simple ones we receive from reflection. If I find that I know some few things, and some of them, or all perhaps, imperfectly, I can frame an idea of knowing twice as many: which I can double again as often as I can add to number, and thus enlarge my ideas of knowledge by extending its comprehension to all things existing or possible. The same I can do of knowing them more perfectly, _i.e._ all their qualities, powers, causes, consequences, and relations; and thus frame the idea of infinite or boundless knowledge. The same also may be done of power till we come to that we call infinite; and also of the duration of existence without beginning or end; and so frame the idea of an eternal being. ...