305. Thus without professedly admitting into consciousness anything but the succession of feelings he gets such individual objects as Locke would have called objects of ‘actual present sensation.’ When ‘I survey the furniture of my chamber,’ according to him, I see sundry ‘identical objects’--this chair, this table, this inkstand, &c. [1] So far there is no fiction to be accounted for. It is only when, having left my chamber for an interval and returned to it, I suppose the objects which I see to be identical with those I saw before, that the ‘propensity to feign’ comes into play, which has to be explained as above. But in fact the original ‘survey’ during which, seeing the objects, I suppose them to continue the same with themselves, involves precisely the same fiction. In that case, says Hume, I ‘suppose the change’ (which is necessary to constitute the idea of identity) ‘to lie only in the time.’ But without ‘succession of perceptions,’ different however resembling, there could according to him be no change of time. The continuous survey of this table, or this chair, then, involves the notion of its remaining the same with itself throughout a succession of different perceptions--_i.e._ the full-grown fiction of identity--just as much as does the supposition that the table I see now is identical with the one I saw before. The ‘reality,’ confusion with which of ‘a smooth passage along resembling ideas’ is supposed to constitute the ‘fiction,’ is already itself the fiction--the fiction of an object which must be other than our feelings, since it is permanent while they are successive, yet so related to them that in virtue of reference to it, instead of being merely different from each other, they become changes of a thing. [1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] With Hume continued existence of perceptions a fiction different from their identity. Can perceptions exist when not perceived?