*

On the basis of his investigations into human consciousness Hume felt
obliged to reason thus: My consciousness, as I know it, has no contact
with the external world other than that of a mere outside onlooker.
What it wins for its own content from the outer world is in the nature
of single, mutually unrelated parts. Whatever may unite these parts
into an objective whole within the world itself can never enter my
consciousness; and any such unifying factor entertained by my thought
can be only a self-constructed, hypothetical picture. Hume summed up
his view in two axioms which he himself described as the alpha and
omega of his whole philosophy. The first runs: 'All our distinct
perceptions are distinct existences.' The other: 'The Mind never
perceives any real connexions between distinct existences.' (Treatise
of Human Nature.)

If once we agree that we can know of nothing but unrelated thought
pictures, because our consciousness is not in a position to relate
these pictures to a unifying reality, then we have no right to ascribe,
with Descartes and his school, an objective reality to the self. Even
though the self may appear to us as the unifying agent among our
thoughts, it must itself be a mental picture among mental pictures ;
and man can have no knowledge of any permanent reality outside this
fluctuating picture-realm. So, with Hume, the onlooker-consciousness
came to experience its own utter inability to achieve a knowledge of
the objective existence either of a material world be - behind all
external phenomena, or of a spiritual self behind all the details of
its own internal content.

Accordingly, human consciousness found itself hurled into the abyss of