regard to it as these do in regard to extension, ‘giving the idea’ of it without actually being it. He fails to assign any impression or compound of impressions from which idea of time is copied. 262. Hence, as the passage last quoted shows, in the case of time the alternative between ascribing it to a sixth sense, and confessing that it is not an impression at all, is very hard to avoid. It would seem that there is an impression of ‘the manner in which impressions appear to the mind,’ which yet is no ‘distinct impression.’ What, then, is it? It cannot be any one of the impressions of sense, for then it would be a distinct impression. It cannot be a ‘compound impression,’ for such composition is incompatible with that successiveness of all feelings to each other which is the object of the supposed impression. It cannot be any ‘new original impression’ arising from the contemplation of other impressions, for then, according to Hume, it would be ‘an affection or emotion.’ But after the exclusion of impressions of sense, compound impressions, and impressions of reflection, Hume’s inventory of the possible sources of ideas is exhausted. To have been consistent, he ought to have dealt with the relation of time as he afterwards does with that of cause and effect, and, in default of an impression from which it could be derived, have reduced it to a figure of speech. But since the possibility of accounting for the propensities to feign, which our language about cause and effect according to him represents, required the consciousness of relation in time, this course could not be taken. Accordingly after the possibility of time being an impression has been excluded as plainly as it can be by anything short of a direct negation, by a device singularly _naïf_ it is made to appear as an impression after all. On being told that the consciousness of time is not a ‘new original impression of reflection,’ since in that case it would be an emotion or affection, but ‘_only_ the notice which the mind takes of the manner in which impressions appear to it,’ the reader must be supposed to forget the previous admission that it is no distinct impression at all, and to interpret this ‘notice which the mind takes,’ because it is not an impression of reflection, as an impression of sense. To make such interpretation easier, the account given of time earlier in the paragraph quoted is judiciously altered at its close, so that instead of having to ascribe to feeling a consciousness of ‘the manner in which impressions appear to the mind,’ we have only to ascribe to it the impressions so appearing. But this alteration admitted, what becomes of the ‘abstractness’ of the idea of time, _i.e._ of the possibility of its being ‘conjoined with any objects’ indifferently? It is the essential condition of such indifferent conjunction, as Hume puts it, that time should be only the manner of appearance as distinct from the impressions themselves. If time _is_