[1] It will be noticed that in the last sentence of the passage quoted, Hume assumes the convenient privilege of ‘speaking with the vulgar,’ and treats the ‘minimum visibile’ presented by telescope or microscope as representing something other than itself, which previously existed, though it was imperceptible. [2] See above, §§ 241 & 246. In Hume’s instances it is not really a feeling, but a conceived thing, that appears as finitely divisible. 267. It is thus the confusion between feeling and conception that is at the bottom of the difficulty about divisibility. For a consciousness formed merely by the succession of feelings, as there would be no _thing_ at all, so there would be no parts of a thing--no addibility or divisibility. But Hume is forced by the exigencies of his theory to hold together, as best he may, the reduction of all consciousness to feeling and the existence for it of divisible objects. The consequence is his supposition of ‘compound impressions’ or feelings having parts, divisible into separate impressions but divisible no further when these separate impressions have been reached. We find, however, that in all the instances he gives it is not really a feeling that is divided into feelings, but a thing into other things. It is the heap of sand, for instance, that is divided into grains, not the feeling which, by intellectual interpretation, represents to me a heap of sand that is divided into lesser feelings. I may feel the heap and feel the grain, but it is not a feeling that is the heap nor a feeling that is the grain. Hume would not offend common sense by saying that it was so, but his theory really required that he should, for the supposition that the grain is no further divisible when there are no separate impressions into which it may be divided, implies that in that case it is itself a separate impression, even as the heap is a compound one. But what difference, it may be asked, does it make to say that the heap and the grain are not feelings, but things conceived of, if it is admitted, as since Berkeley it must be, that the thing is nothing outside or independent of consciousness? Do we not by such a statement merely change names and invite the question how a thought can have parts, in place of the question how a feeling can have them? Upon true notion of quantity infinite divisibility follows of course.