is implied when the impressions are counted and pronounced so many. Thus when Hume tells us that a single object, by being ‘multiplied in order to be conceived at once as existent in different points of time,’ gives us the idea of number, we are forced to ask him what precisely it is which thus, being one, can become manifold. Is it a ‘unite that can exist alone’? That, having no parts, cannot become manifold by resolution. ‘But it may by repetition?’ No, for it is a separate impression, and the repetition of an impression cannot co-exist, so as to form one sum, with its former occurrence. ‘But it may be _thought of_ as doing so?’ No, for that, according to Hume, could only mean that feelings might concur in a fainter stage though they could not in a livelier. Is the single object then a unite which already consists of parts? But that is a ‘fictitious denomination,’ and presupposes the very idea of number that has to be accounted for. [1] P. 338. [Book I, part II., sec. II.] Idea of time even more unaccountable on Hume’s principles. 259. The impossibility of getting number, as a many-in-one, out of the succession of feelings, so long as the self is treated as only another name for that succession, is less easy to disguise when the supposed units are not merely given in succession, but are actually the moments of the succession; in other words, when time is the many-in-one to be accounted for. How can a multitude of feelings of which no two are present together, undetermined by relation to anything other than the feelings, be at the same time a consciousness of the relation between the moments in which the feelings are given, or of a sum which these moments form? How can there be a relation between ‘objects’ of which one has ceased before the other has begun to exist? ‘For the same reason,’ says Hume, ‘that the year 1737 cannot concur with the present year 1738, every moment must be distinct from, and posterior or antecedent to, another’. [1] How then can the present moment form one sum with all past moments, the present year with all past years; the sum which we indicate by the number 1738? The answer of common sense of course will be that, though the feeling of one moment is really past before that of another begins, yet thought retains the former, and combining it with the latter, gets the idea of time both as a relation and as a sum. Such an answer, however, implies that the retaining and combining thought is other than the succession of the feelings, and while it takes this succession to be the reality, imports into it that determination by the relations of past and present which it can only derive from the retaining and combining thought opposed to it. It is thus both inconsistent with Hume’s doctrine, which allows no such distinction between thought, _i.e._ the succession of ideas, and the succession of impressions, and inconsistent with itself. Yet Hume by disguising both inconsistencies contrives to avail himself of it.