254. We now know what becomes of ‘extended matter’ when the doctrine, which has only to be stated to find acceptance, that we cannot ‘look for anything anywhere but in our ideas’--in other words that for us there is no world but consciousness--is fairly carried out. Its position must become more and more equivocal, as the assumption, that consciousness reveals to us an alien matter, has in one after another of its details to be rejected, until a principle of synthesis within consciousness is found to explain it. In default of this, the feeling consciousness has to be made to take its place as best it may; which means that what is said of it as feeling has to be unsaid of it as extended, and _vice versâ_. As _feeling_, it carries no reference to anything other than itself, to an object of which it is a quality; as _extended_, it is a qualified object. As _extended_ again, its qualities are relations of coexistent parts; as _feeling_, it is an unlimited succession, and therefore, not being a possible whole, can have no parts at all. Finally as _feeling_, it must in each moment of existence either be ‘on the same footing’ with pain and pleasure or else--a distinction between impressions of sensation and reflection being unwarrantably admitted--be a colour, a taste, a sound, a smell, or ‘tangibility;’ as _extended_, it is an ‘order of appearance’ or ‘disposition of corpuscles,’ which, being predicable indifferently at any rate of two of these sensations, can no more be the same with either than either can be the same with the other. It is not the fault of Hume but his merit that, in undertaking to maintain more strictly than others the identification of extension with feeling, he brought its impossibility more clearly into view. The pity is that having carried his speculative enterprise so far before he was thirty, he allowed literary vanity to interfere with its consistent pursuit, caring only to think out the philosophy which he inherited so far as it enabled him to pose with advantage against Mystics and Dogmatists, but not to that further issue which is the entrance to the philosophy of Kant. He gives no account of quantity as such.