The Psychological Continuity Theory versus the Bundle Theory

David Hume's bundle theory, presented in Book I, Part IV, Section VI, "Of Personal Identity," of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), denies that introspection ever discloses a single, simple, continuing self. Hume reports that whenever he "enters most intimately into what I call myself," he always stumbles only on some particular perception — of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure — and never catches "myself" without a perception, and never observes anything but the perception itself. He concludes that the mind is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement," comparing the mind to a theatre in which perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, and glide away, while cautioning that even the theatre metaphor is misleading, since there is no single stage or place in which these perceptions occur, only the perceptions themselves.