311. From this long excursion into Hume’s doctrine of relation in the way of identity--having found him admitting explicitly that it is only by a ‘fiction of the imagination’ that we identify this table as now seen with this table as seen an hour ago, and implicitly that the same fiction is involved in the perception of this table as an identical object even when hand or eye is kept upon it, while yet he says not a word to vindicate the possibility of such a fiction for a faculty which can merely reproduce and combine ‘perishing impressions’--we return to consider its bearing upon his doctrine of relation in the way of cause and effect. According to him, as we saw, [1] that relation, ‘considered as a philosophical’ one, is founded on a comparison of present experience with past, in the sense that we regard an object, precedent and contiguous to another, as its cause when all like objects have been found similarly related. The question then arises whether the experiences compared--the present and the past alike--do not involve the fiction of identity along with the whole family of other fictions which Hume affiliates to it? Does the relation of precedence and sequence, which, if constant, amounts to that of cause and effect, merely mean precedence and sequence of two feelings, indefinitely like an indefinite number of other feelings that have thus the one preceded and the other followed; or is it a relation between one qualified thing or definite fact always the same with itself, and another such thing or fact always the same with itself? The question carries its own answer. If in the definition quoted Hume used the phrase ‘all like objects’ instead of the ‘same object,’ in order to avoid the appearance of introducing the ‘fiction’ of identity into the definition of cause, the device does not avail him much. The effect of the ‘like’ is neutralized by the ‘all.’ A _uniform_ relation is impossible except between objects of which each has a definite identity. [1] Above, pars. 298 and 299. ... without which there could be no recognition of an object as one observed before.