becomes the ‘simplicity’ of an object ‘containing many different resemblances and relations,’ and the individuality of the subject of a proposition, instead of being regarded in its true light as a temporary isolation from other relations of those for the time under view--an individuality which is perpetually shifting its limits as thought proceeds--becomes an individuality fixed once for all by what is given in the impression. Because, as is supposed, I can only ‘see’ a globe as of a certain colour and material, I can only think of it as such. If the ‘sight’ of it had been rightly interpreted as itself a complex work of thought, successively detaching felt things from the ‘flux’ of feelings and determining these by relations similarly detached, the difficulty of thinking certain of these--_e.g._ those designated as ‘figure’--apart from the rest would have disappeared. It would have been seen that this was merely to separate in reflective analysis what had been gradually put together in the successive synthesis of perception. But such an interpretation of the supposed _datum_ of sense would have been to elevate thought from the position which Hume assigned to it, as a ‘decaying sense,’ to that of being itself the organizer of the world which it knows. [2] [1] See above, paragraphs 47, 95, &c. [2] The phrase ‘decaying sense’ belongs to Hobbes, but its meaning is adopted by Hume. Result is a theory which admits predication, but only as singular. 222. Here, then, as elsewhere, the embarrassment of Hume’s doctrine is nothing which a better statement of it could avoid. Nay, so dexterous is his statement, that only upon a close scrutiny does the embarrassment disclose itself. To be faithful at once to his reduction of the impression to simple feeling, and to his account of the idea as a mere copy of the impression, was really impossible. If he had kept his word in regard to the impression, he must have found thought filling the void left by the disappearance, under Berkeley’s criticism, of that outward system of things which Locke had commonly taken for granted. He preferred fidelity to his account of the idea, and thus virtually restores the fiction which represents the real world as consisting of so many, materially separate, bundles of qualities--a fiction which even Locke in his better moments was beginning to outgrow--with only the difference that for the separation of ‘substances’ in space he substitutes a separation of ‘impressions’ in time. That thought (the ‘idea’) can but faintly copy feeling (the ‘impression’) he consistently maintains, but he avails himself of the actual determination of feeling by reference to an object of thought--the determination expressed by such phrases as impression of a man, impression of a globe, &c.--to charge the feeling with a content which it only derives from such determination, while yet he denies it. By this means predication can be accounted