306. Having thus in effect imported all three ‘fictions of imagination’--identity, continued existence, and existence distinct from perception--into the original ‘perception,’ Hume, we may think, might have saved himself the trouble of treating them as separate and successive formations. Unless he had so treated them, however, his ‘natural history’ of consciousness would have been far less imposing than it is. The device, by which he represents the ‘vulgar’ belief in the reality of the felt thing as a belief that the mere feeling is the real object, enables him also to represent the identity, which a smooth transition along closely resembling sensations leads us to suppose, as still merely identity of a _perception_. ‘The very image which is present to the senses is with us the real body; and ’tis to these interrupted images we ascribe a perfect identity’. [1] The identity lying thus in the images or appearances, not in anything to which they are referred, a further fiction seems to be required by which we may overcome the contradiction between the interruption of the appearances and their identity--the fiction of ‘a continued being which may fill the intervals’ between the appearances. [2] That a ‘propension’ towards such a fiction would naturally arise from the uneasiness caused by such a contradiction, we may readily admit. The question is how the propension can be satisfied by a supposition which is merely another expression for one of the contradictory beliefs. What difference is there between the appearance of a perception and its existence, that interruption of the perception, though incompatible with uninterruptedness in its appearance, should not be so with uninterruptedness in its existence? It may be answered that there is just the difference between relation to a feeling subject and relation to a thinking one--between relation to a consciousness which is in time, or successive, and relation to a thinking subject which, not being itself in time, is the source of that determination by permanent conditions, which is what is meant by the real existence of a perceived thing. But to Hume, who expressly excludes such a subject--with whom ‘it exists’ = ‘it is felt’--such an answer is inadmissible. He can, in fact, only meet the difficulty by supposing the existence of unfelt feelings, of unperceived perceptions. The appearance of a perception is its presence to ‘what we call a mind,’ which ‘is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity’. [3] To consider a perception, then, as existing though not appearing is merely to consider it as detached from this ‘heap’ of other perceptions, which, on Hume’s principle that whatever is distinguishable is separable, is no more impossible than to distinguish one perception from all others. [4] In fact, however,