372 PSYCHOLOGY. 



The identity wliicli the /discovers, as it surveys this long 

 procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slow 

 shifting in which there is always some common ingredient 

 retained.* The commonest element of all, the most uni- 

 form, is the possession of the same memories. However 

 different the man may be from the youth, both look back 

 on the same childhood, and call it their own. 



Thus the identity found by the / in its me is only a 

 loosely construed thing, an ideutitj' ' on the whole,' just 

 like that which any outside observer might find in the same 



follow, are seen only to be neglected; while to him the objects that are 

 afterwards to absorb his whole soul are as indifferent as the objects of his 

 present passions are destined then to appear. . . . How many opportuni- 

 ties must every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectual 

 decay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We 

 quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and after an absence of 

 many years we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure which 

 grow more tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to 

 whose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same rev- 

 erence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty, — who first led 

 us into knowledge, '>nd whose image has been constantly joined in our 

 mind with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him 

 sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us, — igno- 

 rant alike of the pasi and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of 

 animal gratification. We seek the favorite companion of our childhood, 

 whose tenderness of heart, etc. . . . We find him hardened into a man, 

 meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship — in 

 his general relations to the world careless of the misery he is not to feel. 

 . . . When we observe all this, ... do Ave use only a metaphor of little 

 meaning when we say of him that he is become a different person, and that 

 his mind and character are changed ? In what does the identity consist? 

 . . . The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these 

 cases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same man- 

 ner in the same circumstances. It therefore, if the test be a just one, is 

 not the same identical mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy of 

 the Human Mind, 'on Mental Identity. '> 



* " Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his 

 maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk 

 stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued with 

 some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have 

 been sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both be- 

 fore and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in 

 them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all, 

 there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings : but 

 they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's Mar- 

 tinus Scriblerus, quoted by Brown, ibid.) 



