80 LIFE AND HABIT. 



blood, are so essential that they caiinot be dispensed 

 with, yet it is impossible to say that personality consists 

 in any one of them. 



Each one of these component members of our per- 

 sonality is continually dying and being born again, 

 supported in this process by the food we eat, the water 

 we drink, and the air we breathe ; which three things 

 link us on, and fetter us down, to the organic and 

 inorganic world about us. For our meat and drink, 

 though no part of our personality before we eat and 

 drink, cannot, after we have done so, be separated 

 entirely from us without the destruction of our person- 

 ality altogether, so far as we can follow it ; and who 

 shall say at what precise moment our food has or has 

 not become part of ourselves ? A famished man eats 

 food ; after a short time his whole personality is so 

 palpably affected that we know the food to have entered 

 into him and taken, as it were, possession of him ; but 

 who can say at what precise moment it did so ? Thus 

 we find that we are rooted into outside things and melt 

 away into them, nor can any man say he consists 

 absolutely in this or that, nor define himself so certainly 

 as to include neither more nor less than himself; many 

 undoubted parts of his personality being more separable 

 from it, and changing it less when so separated, both 

 to his own senses and those of other people, than other 

 parts which are strictly speaking no parts at all. 



A man's clothes, for example, as they lie on a chair 

 at night are no. part of him, but when he wears them 

 they would appear to be so, as being a kind of food 

 which warms him and hatches him, and the loss of 



