Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/112

 existing are not two distinct processes. Things acquire no new attribute by our thinking of them as existent.

b. We nevertheless employ all these concepts—substance or thing, cause, being! Hume undertakes to explain how this happens, by means of three distinct psychological factors.—Consciousness naturally tends to continue the processes which have been produced by an intense impression even after the impression ceases. The faculty of imagination continues to be active even though experience is unable to follow. This gives rise to ideal representations, e. g. representations of perfect similarity and perfectly accurate figures, whilst experience only furnishes suggestions and degrees of approach towards the perfect. This is likewise the way in which the representations of absolute substances and absolute being are formed. The faculty of imagination expands the relative constancy which we perceive, into absolute constancy.

Another peculiarity of consciousness is the tendency to combine representations which have frequently been experienced together. When anything happens we are accustomed to find that something else either precedes or follows it; hence, when anything occurs, we expect to find a "cause" and an "effect." But this is nothing more than a habit which has become instinctive. It is impossible to establish the validity" of the causal concept on this basis. This principle of association, which gives rise to this habit, is likewise an example of causality and just for this very reason Hume says, it, too, is inexplicable. Observation never discovers more than the separate elements of the content of consciousness, never any "uniting principle, principle of connection." The problem of explaining the permanent connection of these elements,