Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/65

 torily for the origin of the idea of self, and the influence which that idea has on our actions, without loosening the foundation of the foregoing reasonings, I should give them up without a question, as there is no reasoning which can be safely opposed against a common feeling of human nature left unexplained, and without shewing in the clearest manner the grounds from which it may have arisen. I shall proceed to state (as far as is necessary to the present argument) in what the true notion of personal identity appears to me to consist; and this I believe it will be easy to shew depends entirely on the continued connection which subsists between a man's past and present feelings, and not, vice versâ, on any previous connection between his future and his present feelings, which is absurd and impossible.

Every human being is distinguished from every other human being, both numerically, and characteristically. He must be numerically distinct by the supposition: otherwise he would not be another individual, but the same. There is however no contradiction in supposing two individuals to possess the same absolute properties: but then these original properties must be differently modified afterwards from the necessary difference of their situations, or we must suppose them both to occupy the same relative situation in two distinct systems corresponding exactly with each other. In fact every one is found to differ essentially from every one else, if not in original properties, in the cirstances [sic] and events of their lives and consequent ideas. In thinking of a number of individuals, I conceive of them all as differing in various ways from one another, as well as from myself. They differ in size, in complexion, in features, in the expression of their countenances, in age, in the events and actions of their lives, in situation, in knowledge,