would disappear; but so, likewise, would the objection to speaking of thought as constitutive of reality. To appreciate his view we must take feeling not as we really know it--for we cannot know it except under those conditions of self-consciousness, the logical categories, which in his attempt to get at feeling, pure and simple, Hume is consistent enough to exclude--but as it becomes upon exclusion of all determination by objects which Hume reckons fictitious. What it would thus become _positively_ we of course cannot say, for of the unknowable nothing can be said; but we can decide _negatively_ what it cannot be. Can that in any case be said of it, which must be said of it if a feeling may be extended, and if extension is a feeling? Can it be such a quality of an object, so consisting of parts, and such a relation, as we have found that Hume takes it to be in his account of the perception of this table? ... which it can only mean as the result of certain ‘fictions’. 240. After having taken leave throughout the earlier part of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ to speak in the ordinary way of objects and their qualities--and otherwise of course he could not have spoken at all--in the fourth book he seems for the first time to become aware that his doctrine did not authorise such language. To perceive qualities of an object is to be conscious of relation between a subject and object, of which neither perishes with the moment of perception. Such consciousness is self-consciousness, and cannot be reduced to any natural observable event, since it is consciousness of that of which we cannot say ‘Lo, here,’ or ‘Lo, there,’ ‘it is now but was not then,’ or ‘it was then but is not now.’ It is therefore something which the spirit of the Lockeian philosophy cannot assimilate, and which Hume, as the most consistent exponent of that spirit, most consistently tried to get rid of. The subject as self, the object as body, he professes to reduce to figures of speech, to be accounted for as the result of certain ‘propensities to feign:’ nor will he allow that any impression or idea (and impressions and ideas with him, be it remembered, exhaust our consciousness) carries with it a reference to an object other than itself, any more than do pleasure or pain to which ‘in their nature’ all perceptions correspond. [1] He cannot, indeed, avoid speaking of the consciousness thus reduced to the level of simple pain and pleasure, as being that which in fact it can only be when determined by relation to a self-conscious subject, _i.e._ as itself an object; but he is so far faithful in his attempt to avoid such determination, that he does not reckon the object more permanent than the impression. It, too, is a ‘perishing existence.’ As the impression disappears with a ‘turn of the eye in its socket,’ so does the object, which really is the impression, and cannot appear other than it is any more than a feeling can be felt to be what it is not. [2]