98. For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of _time_, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties. I have no notion of it at all: only I hear others say it is infinitely divisible, and speak of it in such a manner as leads me to harbour odd thoughts of my existence: since that doctrine lays one under an absolute necessity of thinking, either that he passes away innumerable ages without a thought, or else that he is annihilated every moment of his life: both which seem equally absurd(688). Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks. And in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts or abstract the _existence_ of a spirit from its _cogitation_, will, I believe, find it no easy task(689). 99. So likewise when we attempt to abstract _extension_ and _motion_ from all other qualities, and consider them by themselves, we presently lose sight of them, and run into great extravagances. [(690) Hence spring those odd paradoxes, that the fire is not hot, nor the wall white; or that heat and colour are in the objects nothing but figure and motion.] All which depend on a twofold abstraction: first, it is supposed that extension, for example, may be abstracted from all other sensible qualities; and, secondly, that the entity of extension may be abstracted from its being perceived. But, whoever shall reflect, and take care to understand what he says, will, if I mistake not, acknowledge that all sensible qualities are alike _sensations_, and alike _real_; that where the extension is, there is the colour too, to wit, in his mind(691), and that their archetypes can exist only in some other _mind_: and that the objects of sense(692) are nothing but those sensations, combined, blended, or (if one may so speak) concreted together; none of all which can be supposed to exist unperceived. [(693) And that consequently the wall is as truly white as it is extended, and in the same sense.]