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Lewis Carroll published his most famous work, Alice in Wonderland, in 1865. At that time David Hume’s Treatise on human nature (1738) had been in circulation for more than one hundred years. The analogies between the fairy tale – provided that Carroll’s masterpiece could be defined as such – and the philosophical inquiry by the Scottish thinker are remarkable.

Alice is a continuously changing character. She is never the same. She grows up abruptly, shutting up like a telescope, and shortens in a blink of an eye, becoming only ten inches high. Then she asks herself: “Was I the same when I got up this morning?”.

Hume said that we are merely the sum of our perceptions, which follow one another on the stage of our mind so fast that they give us the illusion of continuity of the self. There are no proofs of the existence of such a solid, substantial subject as we pretend to be. The white rabbit with a waist-coat and a pocket-watch, the speaking Dodo, the vanishing Cheshire cat are definitely much more real than that.

When the wise hookah-smoking caterpillar asks Alice a question as embarrassing as it is simple: “Who are you?” her reply is pure philosophy: “I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”.

In the end, Alice got up. All her adventures were only a fabulous dream. However, how can I assure that I am awake rather than asleep? Is there an ‘I’? Who said an I? Chop off his head!

Igor Tavilla, Teacher of Philophy – Liceo Artistico “P. Petrocchi”, Pistoia.

[Original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel][:]