in their succession by degrees of intensity,—sensations when in their highest intensity, memories when in an abated degree, and mere fancies when the intensity is at a minimum. His maxim forbade recognition of more reality in the universe than a momentary reality of isolated perceptions, in their different degrees of intensity, but without any reasonable retrospective memory, or any reasonable expectation with its hopes or fears. What we call 'existence' was resolved into an unintelligible chaos of felt impressions—a purposeless procession, in which the percipient loses his very selfhood and all besides. The Past, the Distant, the Future, are all illusions. 'Things' and 'persons' are only unconnected transitory feelings, without any permanent person to feel them. The word 'identity' is meaningless. A person cannot be more than a momentary idea. 'I never catch self except in the form of a passing feeling.' Present feeling alone exists.
It is impossible without contradiction to express a philosophy which destroys intelligible expression; virtually dismissing as absurdities all personal pronouns, all substantive nouns, and all verbs; leaving abstract adjectives as the only parts of speech;—and, as such adjectives are really unintelligible, leaving us the speechless and motionless victims of philosophical suicide. When I start with the preliminary maxim of Hume, I literally lose 'myself' at last in a radically untrustworthy universe, or I find myself suspended over a bottomless abyss. Here are the last words of this intellectual suicide at the end of his destructive analysis:—
'I am affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy. When we trace up the human understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead
