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tion. Each of these objections has met with responses by Swinburne (1996b, 1996c, 1998). But<br />
I fail to see how it even gets off the ground – one simply cannot make an inference from<br />
logical possibility allowed by a particular description to a natural possibility supposedly<br />
upheld by a particular entity fitting that description. Reames (1999) makes a similar point,<br />
claiming that Swinburne’s notion of logical possibility is better described as an instance of<br />
natural or metaphysical possibility and so is not amenable to a priori arguments from con-<br />
ceivability.<br />
An even more fundamental way to counter the argument is to deny that persons are<br />
substances in the first place. Hume raises the point elegantly (1739, 1.4.6):<br />
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular per-<br />
ception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch<br />
myself at any time with a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.<br />
But Swinburne rejects this on the following grounds (157–8):<br />
One wonders what he supposes that the common subject would look like, and what he consid-<br />
ered would count as its discovery… The self which he ought to have found in all his mental<br />
events is supposed to be the subject, not the object of perception. And finding it consists in<br />
being aware of different mental events as had by the same subject. Further… that certain si-<br />
multaneous mental events are states of a common subject… It is among the data of your expe-<br />
rience that these are all your mental events.<br />
However, Hume’s point is precisely that this is not the case. He is not aware of “different<br />
mental events as had by the same subject” – he is aware only of a succession of mental<br />
events. James puts the point as follows (1892, 82–3):<br />
The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as “I” can remem-<br />
ber those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain<br />
ones among them… The I which knows them… need [not]… be an unchanging metaphysical<br />
entity like the Soul or a principle like the transcendental Ego… It is a thought, at each moment<br />
different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together will all that the<br />
latter called its own… The thoughts themselves are the thinkers.<br />
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