Hume's Skepticism about the Self and Personal Identity

In the section "Of Personal Identity" within Book I, Part IV of the Treatise (1739), Hume applies his copy principle to the notion, defended by philosophers such as Descartes and, in a qualified form, by Locke, that introspection reveals a single, simple, continuously existing self or soul that persists identically through time as the subject of all one's successive experiences. Hume reports, on the basis of careful introspective examination, that whenever he turns his attention most intimately upon what he calls "myself," he never can catch himself without some particular perception — a sensation of heat or cold, a feeling of love or hatred, a thought or a pain — and never can observe anything at all besides this or that particular perception, still less any additional, further impression corresponding to a bare, perceiving "self" distinct from the perceptions themselves. From this Hume concludes his famous "bundle theory": what we call the mind or self is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity, and united only by certain relations, without there being any simple, constant, further thing in which these perceptions inhere.