in great part owing to Hume’s own request, in the preface to the posthumous edition of the short “Pieces,” that the public would thenceforth look in these for the proper form of his philosophy. But in the Treatise he had written down and published what his genuine public, the keenest philosophic minds, have credited with a permanent significance of its own, quite apart from its author’s afterthought about it. This critical material, philosophic thought can never abandon.
In Part IV of the First Book of the Treatise, too often overlooked, Hume has supplied a key for the destruction of the empirical position and the agnosticism logically involved in it. There his diligent and penetrating reader will see he cannot longer stop with Hume’s doctrine, that experience gives only, but gives surely, the sensation of the present moment. He cannot but go on to discover, as Hume himself seems clearly to forebode, that without presupposing the abiding unity of personal identity, even the fleeting impression of the instant is impossible.[1] This permanence of personal identity, however, Hume has by simply carrying out the rigorous logic of empiricism already done away with: it is nothing but a "deposit" from the “artificial idea”
- ↑ Treatise, p. 187 foll., edition of Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896. Compare, especially, the passage in the Appendix, pp. 635, 636.
