Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/60

 moment be exposed to the most excessive pain. This is still more true of that inward conscious principle which alone connects the successive moments of his being together, and of which all his outward organs are but instruments, subject to perpetual changes both of action and suffering. To make the difference of time the foundation of an essential distinction and complete separation between his present and future being, as if this were the only thing to be attended to, is to oppose an unmeaning sophism to plain matter of fact, since mere distance of time does not destroy individuality of consciousness. He is the same conscious being now that he will be the next moment, or the next hour, or a month or a year hence. His interests as an individual as well as his being must therefore be the same. At least this must be the case so long as he retains the consciousness of his past impressions, connecting them together in one uniform or regular train of feeling: for the interruption of this sense of continued identity by sleep, inattention, or otherwise, seems from its being afterwards renewed, to prove the point more clearly, as shews that there is some deep inward principle which remains the same in spite of all particular, accidental changes.

The child does no doubt consider himself as the same being, or as directly and absolutely interested in his own welfare, as far as he can distinctly foresee the consequences of things to himself. But this very circumstance of his identifying himself with his future being, of feeling for this imaginary self as if it were incorporated with his actual substance, and weighed upon the pulses of his blood, is itself the strongest instance that can be given of the force of the imagination, which the advocates of the selfish hypothesis would represent as a faculty entirely powerless.