334 PSYCIIOLOQY. 



owner picks o\it and sorts together when the time for the? 

 round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he 

 finds his own particular brand. 



The various members of the collection thus set apart 

 are felt to belong with each other whenever they are 

 thought at all. The animal Avarmth, etc., is their herd-mark, 

 the brand from which they can never more escape. It 

 runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and 

 makes them into a whole, which we treat as a unit, no 

 matter how much in other ways the parts may dift'er inter 

 se. Add to this character the farther one that the distant 

 selves appear to our thought as having for hours of time 

 been continuous with each other, and the most recent ones 

 of them continuous with the Self of the present moment, 

 melting into it by slow degrees ; and we get a still stronger 

 bond of union. As we think we see an identical bodily 

 thing when, in spite of changes of structure, it exists con- 

 tinuously before our eyes, or Avlien, hoAvever intermitted its 

 presence, its quality returns unchanged ; so here we think 

 we experience an identical Self when' it appears to us in an 

 analogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimi- 

 larity might otherwise separate ; similarity makes us unite 

 what discontinuity might hold apart. And thus it is, 

 finally, that Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, 

 and recalling what both had in mind before they went to 

 sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, 

 and is never temjDted to confuse them with those cold and 

 pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul. As well 

 might he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, with 

 his own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of us 

 when he awakens says. Here's the same old self again, just 

 as he says. Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the 

 same old world. 



The sense of our oum personal identity, then, is exactly like 

 any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. 

 If is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance ina funda- 

 mental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phe- 

 nomena compared. 



And it must not be taken to mean more than these 

 grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or 



