The Ego, or Personality. 933 



broken and damaged brain is fragmentary, discontinuous, and neces- 

 sarily false, as to its conception of facts, in some respects at least. 

 Even when the brain is complete we are liable to get wrong sensations 

 of things, and of their memories, and much more so when it is dis- 

 rupted. So that our consciousness may be wrong in respect to our 

 identity and continuity, just as it may be in anything else. Thus we 

 see there may be a great difference between our real identity, and our 

 consciousness of it. Identity and continuity of existence do not then 

 at all depend upon the continuity of the consciousness, or upon con- 

 sciousness in any way, but upon continued bodily existence, which con- 

 tinuity may be proved by witnesses when the subject himself is incom- 

 petent through forgetfulness, disease, or insanity, to trace his identity 

 by means of his memory. More than that, consciousness or at least a 

 persuasion of identit}" is not conclusive of such identity, since in many 

 instances of insanity the subject believes himself to be another person, 

 and in his speech, manners, and actions he imitates the party he im- 

 agines himself to be. Yet a disinterested person who has known this 

 subject, will testify to his identity as being very different from what he 

 fancies it to be. No amount of change which takes place in us cuts 

 any figure in disturbing our identity. We change from day to day, and 

 in maturity and old age we are no more like our youthful selves than 

 we are like another person. In short, if identity depended upon a con- 

 tinuance of form, thought, feeling, &c. , all identity would soon be lost, 

 and we should be somebody else every daj r . But it depends upon con- 

 tiguous succession, and requires only that each state, experience, and 

 molecular arrangement, be founded upon one that went before, and it is 

 due to its reaction against some new phase of energy from the environ- 

 ment. Identity, therefore, in reality, relates to the body alone, and con- 

 sciousness depends upon cerebral conditions. 



The feeling of personality is a union of sensations from the divers 

 parts, associated together so as to form a consolidated, single sensation, 

 the ego or I. It is a true case of e pluribus unum. This feeling grows 

 up in the same way in which knowledge of external objects does. The 

 infant, at first, 'sees all things, including his own parts, as objective. In 

 the course of time, as the perceptions of relationships and correspond- 

 ences come to be developed, this one of the ego appears among the rest. 

 He begins to connect the different parts of his body together into a sin- 

 gle thing or person, in consequence of che habitual association of sen- 

 sations derived from those parts. But even after this he is some time 

 in learning himself as a first person. He still regards himself as a 

 third person. He says, " Tommy wants a drink." Doubtless he is as- 

 sisted in the formation of his notion of himself by the manner in which 

 - he is addressed by others, and regards himself as a third person, partly 



