I do not doubt that a person who will grow out of me as I now am, but of
whom I know nothing now and in whom therefore I can take none but the
vaguest interest, will one day undergo so sudden and complete a change
that his friends must notice it and call him dead; but as I have no
definite ideas concerning this person, not knowing whether he will be a
man of 59 or 79 or any age between these two, so this person will, I am
sure, have forgotten the very existence of me as I am at this present
moment. If it is said that no matter how wide a difference of condition
may exist between myself now and myself at the moment of death, or how
complete the forgetfulness of connection on either side may be, yet the
fact of the one’s having grown out of the other by an infinite series of
gradations makes the second personally identical with the first, then I
say that the difference between the corpse and the till recently living
body is not great enough, either in respect of material change or of want
of memory concerning the earlier existence, to bar personal identity and
prevent us from seeing the corpse as alive and a continuation of the man
from whom it was developed, though having tastes and other
characteristics very different from those it had while it was a man.
From this point of view there is no such thing as death—I mean no such
thing as the death which we have commonly conceived of hitherto. A man
is much more alive when he is what we call alive than when he is what we
call dead; but no matter how much he is alive, he is still in part dead,
and no matter how much he is dead, he is still in part alive, and his
corpse-hood is connected with his living body-hood by gradations which
even at the moment of death are ordinarily subtle; and the corpse does
not forget the living body more completely than the living body has
forgotten a thousand or a hundred thousand of its own previous states; so
that we should see the corpse as a person, of greatly and abruptly
changed habits it is true, but still of habits of some sort, for hair and
nails continue to grow after death, and with an individuality which is as
much identical with that of the person from whom it has arisen as this
person was with himself as an embryo of a week old, or indeed more so.
If we have identity between the embryo and the octogenarian, we must have
it also between the octogenarian and the corpse, and do away with death
except as a rather striking change of thought and habit, greater indeed
in degree than, but still, in kind, substantially the same as any of the
changes which we have experienced from moment to moment throughout that
fragment of existence which we commonly call our life; so that in sober
seriousness there is no such thing as absolute death, just as there is no
such thing as absolute life.
Either this, or we must keep death at the expense of personal identity,
and deny identity between any two states which present considerable
differences and neither of which has any fore-knowledge of, or
recollection of the other. In this case, if there be death at all, it is
some one else who dies and not we, because while we are alive we are not
dead, and as soon as we are dead we are no longer ourselves.
So that it comes in the end to this, that either there is no such thing
as death at all, or else that, if there is, it is some one else who dies
and not we. We cannot blow hot and cold with the same breath. If we
would retain personal identity at all, we must continue it beyond what we
call death, in which case death ceases to be what we have hitherto
thought it, that is to say, the end of our being. We cannot have both
personal identity and death too.