Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/78

 each occasion with its direct memory of its past and with its anticipation of the future. That claim to enduring self-identity is our self-assertion of personal identity.

Yet, when we examine this notion of the soul, it discloses itself as even vaguer than our definition of the body. First, the continuity of the soul — so far as concerns consciousness — has to leap gaps in time. We sleep or we are stunned. And yet it is the same petson who recovers consciousness. We trust to memory, and we ground our trust on the continuity of the functionings of Nature, more especially on the continuity of our body. Thus, Nature in general and the body in particular provide the stuff for the personal endurance of the soul. Again, there is a curious variation in the vividness of the successive occasions of the soul’s existence. We are living at fall stretch with a keen observation of external occurrence; then external attention dies away and we are