we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies". Hume's account starts with our tendency to confound resembling but contrary ideas, viz. the idea of "a perfect identity" and the idea of "a succession of related objects", an absurdity we justify by means of "a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and inexplicable, or at least... a propensity to such fictions". Next, he argues that the everyday objects we ascribe identity to (e.g., trees, humans, churches, rivers) are indeed "such as consist of a succession of related objects, connected together by resemblance, contiguity, or causation": thus we overlook relatively minor changes, especially when slow and gradual, and especially when connected by "some common end or purpose" or "a sympathy of parts to their common end". Applying all this to personal identity, he argues that since all our perceptions are distinct from each other, and since we "never observ[e] any real connexion among objects", our perceptions are merely associated together by the natural relations of resemblance (in part produced by the memory) and causation (only discovered by the memory). And consequently, leaving aside the fictions we invent, questions of personal identity are far too hazy to be answered with precision. Section 7 Hume finishes Book 1 with a deeply sceptical interlude. Before continuing his "accurate anatomy of human nature" in Books 2 and 3, he anxiously ruminates: the "danger" of trusting his feeble faculties, along with the "solitude" of leaving behind established opinion, make his "bold enterprises" look foolhardy. All his thinking is based on the "seemingly... trivial" principles of the imagination ("[t]he memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas"), which leave us so tangled up in irresolvable contradictions, and so dismayingly ignorant of causal connections. And how much should we trust our imagination? Here a dilemma looms: if we follow the imagination wherever it leads, we end up with ridiculous absurdities; if we follow only its "general and more establish'd properties", we sink into total scepticism. As Hume writes: "[w]e have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all." Faced with this dilemma, we tend to just forget about it and move on, though Hume finds himself verging on an