247. If this question had been brought home to Hume, he could scarcely have avoided the admission that to answer it affirmatively involved just as much of a contradiction as that which he recognises between the ‘interrupted’ and ‘continuous’ existence of objects; [1] and just as in the latter case he gets over the contradiction by taking the interrupted existence, because the datum of sense, to be the reality, and the continued existence to be a belief resulting from ‘propensities to feign,’ so in the case before us he must have taken the multiplicity of successive impressions to be the reality, and their co-existence as related parts to be a figure of speech, which he must account for as best he could. As it is, he so plays fast and loose with the meaning of ‘impression’ as to hide the contradiction which is involved in the notion of a ‘compound impression’ if impression is interpreted as feeling--the contradiction, namely, that a single feeling should he felt to be manifold--and in consequence loses the chance of being brought to that truer interpretation of the compound impression, as the thought of an object under relations, which a more honest trial of its reduction to feeling might have shown to be necessary. To convict so skilful a writer of a contradiction in terms can never be an easy task. He does not in so many words tell us that all impressions of sight must be successive, but he does tell us that ‘the impressions of touch,’ which, indifferently with those of sight, he holds to constitute the compound impression of extension, ‘change every moment upon us.’ [2] And in the immediate sequel of the passage where he has made out extension to be a compound of co-existent impressions, he derives the idea of time ‘from the succession of our perceptions _of every kind_, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation.’ The parts of time, he goes on to say, cannot be co-existent; and, since ‘time itself is nothing but different ideas and impressions succeeding each other,’ these parts, we must conclude, are those ‘perceptions of every kind’ from which the idea of time is derived. [3] It is only, in fact, by availing himself of the distinction, which he yet expressly rejects, between the impression and its object, that he disguises the contradiction in terms of first pronouncing certain impressions, as parts of space, co-existent, and then pronouncing all impressions, as parts of time, successive. A statement that ‘as from the coexistence of visual, and also of tactual, perceptions we receive the idea of extension, so from the succession of perceptions of every kind we form the idea of time,’ would arouse the suspicion of the most casual reader; while Hume’s version of the same,--‘as ’tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time’ [4]--has the full ring of empirical plausibility.