For whilst we are thinking, or
whilst we receive successively several ideas in our minds, we know
that we do exist; and so we call the existence, or the continuation of
the existence of ourselves, or anything else, commensurate to the
succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or
any such other thing co-existent with our thinking.
4. Proof that its idea is got from reflection on the train of our
ideas. That we have our notion of succession and duration from this
original, viz. from reflection on the train of ideas, which we find to
appear one after another in our own minds, seems plain to me, in
that we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of
ideas that take their turns in our understandings. When that
succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases with it;
which every one clearly experiments in himself, whilst he sleeps
soundly, whether an hour or a day, a month or a year; of which
duration of things, while he sleeps or thinks not, he has no
perception at all, but it is quite lost to him; and the moment wherein
he leaves off to think, till the moment he begins to think again,
seems to him to have no distance. And so I doubt not it would be to
a waking man, if it were possible for him to keep only one idea in his
mind, without variation and the succession of others.
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