Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/62

 would run thus. You are necessarily interested in your future sensations? Yes. And why so? Because I am the same being. What do you mean by the same being? The same being is the same individual; that is, one who has the same interests, the same feelings, the same consciousness; so that whatever affects him at any one time must extend to his whole existence. He must therefore be at all times interested in it alike. Do you then feel your future sensations before they really exist? No. How then, if you do not feel them, can you be affected by them : Because as the same individual, &c. That is, by the very supposition, the pain which the child is to suffer does not exist: of course he does not exist, of course he does not feel it, nor can he be moved, affected or interested by it as if it did : and yet in the same breath, by a shrewd turn of logic it is proved that as he is the same being, he must feel, be interested in, affected by it as much as he ever will. But then it will as shrewdly follow that with this implication he is not the same being, for he cannot be affected in the same manner by an object before it is impressed on his senses as he is afterwards; and the fear or imaginary apprehension of pain is a different thing from the actual perception of it. There is just the same difference be- tween feeling a pain yourself and believing that another will feel it.

I request the reader to bear it in mind throughout the whole of this reasoning, that when I say the child does not feel; that he is not interested in his future sensations; and when I consider this as equivalent to his having no real or personal interest in them, I mean that he never feels, or can be affected by them, before-hand; that he is always necessarily cut off from every kind of communication with them; that they cannot possibly act upon his mind as motives to