THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN SOUL 211 



that obstructs dissolution is incompatible with its dispersal 

 into quantitative parts; for such a principle, far from being 

 able to bind, would require binding itself, and could not, 

 therefore, be the primary source of unification in the or- 

 ganism. Finally, the soul must be incorporeal; since, if it 

 were a corporeal mass, it could not be "a formative power 

 pervading the growing mass as a whole" (Wilson) ; for this 

 would involve the penetration of one body by another. Con- 

 sequently, the soul is a simple, inextended, incorporeal reality 

 undispersed into quantitative parts. 



Introspective psychology bears witness to the same truth; 

 for consciousness reinforced by memory attests the substan- 

 tial permanence of our personal identity. We both think and 

 regulate our practical conduct in accordance with this sense 

 of unchanging personal identity. All recognition of the past 

 means simply this, that we perceive the substantial identity 

 of our present, with our past, selves throughout all the ex- 

 periences and vicissitudes of life. There is an inmost core 

 of our being which is unchanging and which remains always 

 identical with itself, in spite of the flow of thought and the 

 metabolic changes of the life-cycle. It is this that gives us 

 the sense of being always identically the same person, from 

 infancy to maturity, and from maturity to old age. It is 

 this that constitutes the thread of continuity which links our 

 yesterdays with to-day, and makes us morally responsible 

 for all the deliberate deeds of a lifetime. Courts of law do 

 not acquit a criminal because he is in a different frame of 

 mind from that which induced him. to commit murder, nor do 

 they excuse him on the score that metabolism has made him 

 a different mass of flesh from that which perpetrated the 

 crime. Such philosophies as phenomenalism and materialism 

 are purely academic. Even their advocates dare not reduce 

 them to consistent practice in everyday life. 



Nor can the cases of alternating personalities be adduced 

 as counterevidence. In the first place, these cases are psycho- 

 pathic and not normal. In the second, they are due, not to a 



