84 LIFE AND HABIT. 



differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing 

 they must be got rid of: they are the clothes that 

 thoughts wear — only the clothes. I say this over and 

 over again, for there is nothing of more importance. 

 Other men's words will stop you at the beginning of an 

 investigation. A man may play with words all his 

 life, arranging them and rearranging them like 

 dominoes. If I could think to you without words you 

 would understand me better." 



If such remarks as the above hold good at all, they 

 do so with the words " personal identity." The least 

 reflection will show that personal identity in any sort 

 of strictness is an impossibility. The expression is one 

 of the many ways in which we are obliged to scamp 

 our thoughts through pressure of other business which 

 pays us better. For surely all reasonable people will 

 feel that an infant an hour before birth, when in the 

 eye of the law he has no existence, and could not be 

 called a peer for another sixty minutes, though his 

 father were a peer, and already dead, — surely such an 

 embryo is more personally identical with the baby into 

 which he develops within an hour's time than the born 

 baby is so with itself (if the expression may be 

 pardoned), one, twenty, or it may be eighty years after 

 birth. There is more sameness of matter ; there are 

 fewer differences, of any kind perceptible by a third 

 person; there is more sense of continuity on the 

 part of the person himself, and far more of all that 

 goes to make up our sense of sameness of personality 

 between an embryo an hour before birth and the child 

 on being born, than there is between the child just 



