Kant imagines that he can explain this sentiment of identity with great simplicity. I will try to express his strange opinion in an intelligible manner. Let A, B, C, D, E, ... be instants of time, and let _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_, ... be thoughts or any other internal phenomena, corresponding to them. At the instant A, the thought _a_ exists. At the instant B, the thought _b_ succeeds. At the instant B, the soul which existed at the instant A, no longer exists. The soul at the instant B, is something entirely new; it is not _a_ but _b_. The same is true of all the rest. But how, you will say, is it possible for the soul at all these instants to believe itself the same? It is very simple: the subject _a_ transmits the thought to the subject _b_; _b_ transmits its own and _a_'s to _c_. Nothing remains identical; but the consciousness of the identity always lasts. Does not such an hypothesis seem truly wonderful and philosophical? What could be imagined clearer and more satisfactory? The reader may perhaps think that I am jesting, and that I present Kant's opinion under a ridiculous aspect for the sake of combating it more easily; but it is just the reverse; the exposition which I have just made of Kant's philosophy is more serious than his own. These are his words: "One elastic ball striking another in a right line, communicates to the latter its whole motion, and consequently its whole state (considering only their positions in space). Admit now, by analogy with these bodies, certain substances, of which one transmits representations to another, with the consciousness which accompanies them; we may then conceive a whole series of such representations, in which the first communicates its state, and the consciousness of its state to the second; the second communicates its state, together with that of the preceding substance, to the third; the third, in like manner, communicates the states of both of the preceding substances together with its own, and the consciousness which accompanies them to the fourth. The last of the series will then have the consciousness of all the states of the substances which preceded it, as of its own; because these states, and the consciousness of these states have been transmitted to it. Still it will not have been the same person in all these states." Kant, in trying to refute the psychological argument founded on consciousness, overthrows and destroys the character of consciousness: a transmitted consciousness is not a true consciousness; it is only the cognition of a previous thought.