PERSONAL IDENTITY. (CHAPTER V. OF LIFE AND HABIT.)
"Strange difficulties have been raised by some," says Bishop Butler,
"concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as
implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in any
two consecutive moments." But in truth it is not easy to see the
strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either "personal" or
"identity" are used in any strictness.
Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that we
have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests. We regard our
personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable, individual
thing, which can be seen going about the streets or sitting indoors at
home; as something which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of
which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth
this "we," which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and
indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little
among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps
due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due
to the jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts of our
identity change from moment to moment, our personality becomes a thing
dependent upon time present, which has no logical existence, but lives
only upon the sufferance of times past and future, slipping out of our
hands into the domain of one or other of these two claimants the moment
we try to apprehend it.
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