312. When Hume has to describe the experience which gives the idea of cause and effect, he virtually admits this. ‘The nature of experience,’ he tells us, ‘is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects, and also remember that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember to have seen that species of object we call _flame_, and to have felt that species of sensation we call _heat_. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony we call the one cause, and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from the other’. [1] It appears, then, that upon experiencing certain sensations of sight and touch, we recognize each as ‘one of a species of objects’ which we remember to have observed in certain constant relations before. In virtue of the recognition the sensations become severally this _flame_ and this _heat_; and in virtue of the remembrance the objects thus recognized are held to be related in the way of cause and effect. Now it is clear that though the recognition takes place upon occasion of a feeling, the object recognized--this flame or this heat--is by no means the feeling as a ‘perishing existence.’ Unless the feeling were taken to represent a thing, conceived as permanently existing under certain relations and attributes--in other words, unless it were _identified_ by thought--it would be no definite object, not this _flame_ or this _heat_, at all. The moment it is named, it has ceased to be a feeling and become a felt thing, or, in Hume’s language, an ‘individual of _a species of objects_.’ And just as the present ‘perception’ is the recognition of such an individual, so the remembrance which determines the recognition is one wholly different from the return with lessened liveliness of a feeling more strongly felt before. According to Hume’s own statement, it consists in recalling ‘frequent instances of the existence of _a species of objects_.’ It is remembrance of an experience in which every feeling, that has been attended to, has been interpreted as a fresh appearance of some qualified object that ‘exists’ throughout its appearances--an experience which for that reason forms a connected whole. If it were not so, there could be no such comparison of the relations in which two objects are now presented with those in which they have always been presented, as that which according to Hume determines us to regard them as cause and effect. The condition of our so regarding them is that we suppose the objects now presented to be _the same_ with those of which we have had previous experience. It is only on supposition that a certain sensation of sight is not merely like a multitude of others, but represents the same object as that which I have previously known as flame, that I infer the sequence of heat