[76:1] "If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives: since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations, succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea. . . . . For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call _myself_, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."--Treatise, B. i. p. iv. sect. 6. [81:1] One cannot escape a feeling of astonishment on finding so great a philosopher as Reid saying, (Active Powers, ch. ix.) that on this theory day and night might be called mutually the cause and effect of each other, on account of their mutual sequence: as if the observation of those who have gone so far in civilisation as just to have seen ignited bodies, had not data for concluding that that phenomenon which most uniformly preceded the ramification of rays of light, was the appearance of a luminous body. [82:1] This refers to the notion, which may now be termed obsolete, at least in philosophy, of an inherent power in the cause to produce the effect--not to Kant's theory, which does not appear to be inconsistent with the scientific application of Hume's. [84:1] "Scepsis Scientifica; or, Confest Ignorance the Way to Science, in an essay of the vanity of dogmatizing and confident opinion." By Joseph Glanvill, M.A. 1665, 4to, p. 142. See this coincidence commented on in the _Penny Cyclopædia_, art. Scepticism. The style of Glanvill's work, in its rich variety of logical imagery and its powerful use of antithesis, is formed on that of Sir Thomas Browne, whose "Vulgar Errors" had been first published fifteen years earlier. That one who wrote a book so full of wisdom--so bold, original, and firm in its attacks on received fallacies, should also have been the champion of belief in witchcraft, in which his prototype, Sir Thomas Browne, was also a believer, is one of those inconsistencies in poor human nature, which elicit much wonder, but no explanation. The following passages from this curious and rare book are offered for the reader's amusement:-- "We conclude many things impossibilities, which yet are easie _feasables_. For by an unadvised transiliency, leaping from the effect to its remotest cause, we observe not the connexion through the interposal of more immediate causalities, which yet at last bring the extremes together without a miracle. And hereupon we hastily conclude that _impossible_ which we see not in the proximate capacity of its _efficient_."--pp. 83-84.