Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/59

 distinctions between truth and falsehood, or the common methods of judging what these are: all the old boundaries and land-marks remain just where they were. It does not surely by any means follow because the reality of future objects can only be judged of by the mind, that therefore it has no power of distinguishing between the probable consequences of things, and what can never happen, that it is to take every impulse of will or fancy for truth: or because future objects cannot act upon the mind from without, that therefore our ideas cannot have any reference to, or properly represent those objects, or any thing external to the mind, but must consist entirely in the conscious contemplation of themselves.

There is another feeling in a great measure the same with the former, but distinguishable from it in being still more strongly connected with a sense of self-interest, namely, that of continued personal identity. This has been already a treated of but I shall here resume the question as on it the chief stress of the argument lies. The child seeing himself in danger of the fire does not think of his present and future self as two distinct beings, but as one and the same: he as it were projects himself forward into the future, and identifies himself with it. He knows that he shall feel his own future pleasures and pains, and believes that he must therefore be as much interested in them as if they were present. In thinking of the future, he does not conceive of any change as really about to take place in himself, or of any thing intermediate between his present and future being, but considers his future sensations as affecting that very same conscious being in which he now feels such an anxious and unavoidable interest. The hand which the child snatches back from the fire is the same hand which but for his doing so would the next