75. But how is this continuity, or sameness of existence in plurality of times or spaces, compatible with the constitution of ‘real existence’ by mere _individua_? The difficulty is the same, according to Locke’s premisses, whether the simple ideas by themselves are taken for the real _individua_, or whether each is taken to represent a single separate thing. In his chapter on identity he expressly says that ‘things whose existence is in succession’ do not admit of identity. Such, he adds, are motion and thought; ‘because, each perishing the moment it begins, they cannot exist in different times or in different places as permanent beings can at different times exist in distant places.’ (Book I. chap, xxvii. sec. 2.) What he here calls ‘thought’ clearly includes the passive consciousness in which alone, according to his strict doctrine, reality is given. So elsewhere (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9), in accounting for the ‘simple idea of succession,’ he says generally that ‘if we look immediately into ourselves we shall find our ideas always, whilst we have any thought, passing in train, one going and another coming, without intermission.’ [1] No statement of the ‘perpetual flux’ of ideas, as each having a separate beginning and end, and ending in the very moment when it begins, can be stronger than the above. If ‘ideas’ of any sort, according to this account of them, are to constitute real existence, no sameness can be found in reality. It must indeed be a relation ‘invented by the mind.’ [1] It is true that in this place Locke distinguishes between the ‘suggestion by our senses’ of the idea of succession, and that which passes in our ‘minds,’ by which it is ‘more constantly offered us.’ But since, according to him, the idea of sensation must be ‘produced in the mind’ if there is to be any either sensation or idea at all (Book II. chap, ix. secs. 3 and 4), the distinction between the ‘suggestion by our senses’ and what passes in our minds’ cannot be maintained. Yet it is from reality that the idea of it is derived.