Page:Treatise of Human Nature (1888).djvu/691

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
667
A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE.

avoid it by the fiction of their continued existence, 205 f.; and further by the fiction of substance or matter, 219 (cf. 254, f.), (v. Body, § 2, Existence, § 2).

§ 4. A. Personal identity or the idea of self, 251 f.; impressions never felt as distinct from ourselves, 189; how far we ourselves are the object of our senses a very difficult question, 190; externality to our body or our limbs is not externality to ourselves, 191; no impression of Self from which the idea of a simple and identical person can be derived, 251, 189 (v. Senses) (cf. 633); we are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception; a man is 'a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement, 252, 634; the identity which we attribute to the mind analogous to that which we attribute to plants and animals: imagination causes us to mistake a succession of related objects for an identical object, 254; we hide the interruption by feigning a soul, self, or substance, or 'imagine something unknown and mysterious connecting the parts beside their relation,' 254; the identity which we attribute to the mind of man is a fictitious one; it cannot run the different perceptions into one, and it is no real bond between them, 259; it is only an idea arising from an easy transition produced by resemblance and causation, 260, 636; memory as the source of these relations not only discovers but produces the identity, 261, but still we extend the chain of causes beyond memory, 262; the same explanation to be given of the simplicity as of the identity of the mind, 263 are self and substance the same thing? 635; there is no satisfactory theory to explain the principles that unite our successive impressions in our thought or consciousness, 636; we must 'distinguish between, personal identity as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves,' 253.

B. Self—the object of pride and humility, 277, 286; the existence of ourselves durable, 293; 'self or that succession of related ideas and impressions of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness, 277; 'that connected succession of perceptions which we call self,' 277; 'self or that individual person of whose actions and sentiments each of us is intimately conscious,' 286; 'the qualities of our mind and body, that is, self,' 303; 'the idea, or rather impression, of ourselves is always intimately present with us, and our consciousness gives us so lively a conception of our own person that 'tis not possible to imagine that anything can in this particular go beyond it,' 307, 320, 339, 340, 354, 427; the relation between our self and another person the foundation of sympathy (q.v.), 318, 322, 359; easy to pass from idea of another person to idea of self, but not the reverse way, 340; self love not love in the proper sense, 329, 480.