but are ‘relations between permanent parts,’ like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine about geometry has always been found the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one ‘from the permanent parts of space,’ the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [4] He afterwards prefers the term ‘expansion’ to space, as the opposite of duration, because it brings out more clearly the distinction of a relation between permanent parts from that between ‘fleeting successive parts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive parts’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its parts are permanent and co-exist? [1] As implying no distinction from, or reference to, a thing causing and a subject experiencing it. See above, paragraphs 195 and 208, and the passages there referred to. [2] ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.’ p. 371 [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]. ‘When I shut my eyes and _think_ of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I _felt_.’ p. 312 [Book I, part I., sec. I.]. [3] See above, paragraphs 172 & 176. [4] Essay Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1. Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his own account of perception; 237. If this crux had been fairly faced by Hume, he must have seen that the only way in which he could consistently deal with it was by radically altering, with whatever consequence to the sciences, Locke’s account of space. As it was, he did not face it, but--whether intentionally or only in effect--disguised it by availing himself of the received usages of language, which roughly represent a theory the exact opposite of his own, to cover the incompatibility between the established view of the nature of space, and his own reduction of it to feeling. A very little examination of the passage, quoted at large above, will show that while in it a profession is made of identifying extension and a certain sort of perception with each other, its effect is not really to reduce extension to such a perception as Hume elsewhere explains all perceptions to be, but to transfer the recognised properties of extension which with such reduction would disappear, to something which for the time he chooses to reckon a perception, but which he can only so reckon at the cost of contradicting his whole method of dealing with the ideas of God, the soul, and the world. The passage, in fact, is merely one sample of the continued shuffle by which Hume on the one hand ascribes to feeling that intelligible content which it only derives from relation to objects of thought, and on the other disposes of these objects because they are not feelings. ... as appears if we put ‘feeling’ for ‘perception’ in the passages in question.