it is obvious that the supposed detachment is the very opposite of such distinction. A perception distinguished from all others is determined by that distinction in the fullest possible measure. A perception _detached_ from all others, left out of the ‘heap which we call a mind,’ being out of all relation, has no qualities--is simply nothing. We can no more ‘consider’ it than we can see vacancy. Yet it is by the consideration of such nonentity, by supposing a world of unperceived perceptions, of ‘existences’ without relation or quality, that the mind, according to Hume--itself only ‘a heap of perceptions’--arrives at that fiction of a continued being which, as involved in the supposition of identity, is the condition of our believing in a world of real things at all. [1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] [2] Pp. 494, 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] [3] P. 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] [4] Ibid. Existence of objects, distinct from perceptions, a further fiction still. 307. It is implied, then, in the process by which, according to Hume, the fiction of a continued being is arrived at, that this being is supposed to be not only continued but ‘distinct from the mind’ and ‘independent’ of it. With Hume, however, the supposition of a distinct and ‘independent’ existence of the _perception_ is quite different from that of a distinct and independent object other than the perception. The former is the ‘vulgar hypothesis,’ and though a fiction, it is also a universal belief: the latter is the ‘philosophical hypothesis,’ which, if it has a tendency to obtain belief at all, at any rate derives that tendency, in other words ‘acquires all its influence over the imagination,’ from the vulgar one. [1] Just as the belief in the independent and continued existence of perceptions results from an instinctive effort to escape the uneasiness, caused by the contradiction between the interruption of resembling perceptions and their imagined identity, so the contradiction between this belief and the evident dependence of all perceptions ‘on our organs and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits’ leads to the doctrine of representative ideas or ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects.’ ‘This philosophical system, therefore, is the monstrous offspring of two principles which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embraced by the mind and which are unable mutually to destroy each other. The imagination tells us that our resembling perceptions have a continued and uninterrupted existence, and are not annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us that even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence and different from each other. The contradiction betwixt these opinions we elude by a new fiction which is conformable to the hypotheses both of reflection and fancy, by ascribing these contrary qualities to different existences; the interruption to _perceptions_, and the continuance to _objects_’. [2]