ABSTRACT
In order to explain why we believe objects to remain the same despite apparent alterations in them, David Hume points out, in connection with his theory of personal identity, the ways in which such alterations may occur without affecting belief in substantial identity. Hume accordingly goes on to observe that the idea of an identity through time may be derived neither from any self-identical quality nor from any sort of multiplicity. Since Hume’s view of causal inference is a theory of inference as transitive, it is difficult to explain why he has emphasized the transitive propensity of imagination before this only in his discussion of geometry. In order further to analyse the explanation of belief in continued and independent existence must, it would seem, first ask about the nature of what has, or, this belief. Within a belief in the continued and independent existence of a perception, all is the association of constant and coherent content by resemblance.
