PERSONAL IDENTITY.
“STRANGE difficulties have been raised by some,” says Bishop Butler,
“concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as
implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in any
two consecutive moments.” But in truth it is not easy to see the
strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either “personal” or
“identity” are used in any strictness.
Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that we
have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests. We regard our
personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable, individual
thing, which can be seen going about the streets or sitting indoors at
home, which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of which no
doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth this
“we,” which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable
aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among
themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to
this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due to the
jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts of our identity
change from moment to moment, our personality becomes a thing dependent
upon the present, which has no logical existence, but lives only upon the
sufferance of times past and future, slipping out of our hands into the
domain of one or other of these two claimants the moment we try to
apprehend it. And not only is our personality as fleeting as the present
moment, but the parts which compose it blend some of them so
imperceptibly into, and are so inextricably linked on to, outside things
which clearly form no part of our personality, that when we try to bring
ourselves to book, and determine wherein we consist, or to draw a line as
to where we begin or end, we find ourselves completely baffled. There is
nothing but fusion and confusion.
Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common daily
experience of mankind, our body is certainly part of our personality.
With the destruction of our bodies, our personality, as far as we can
follow it, comes to a full stop; and with every modification of them it
is correspondingly modified. But what are the limits of our bodies?
They are composed of parts, some of them so unessential as to be hardly
included in personality at all, and to be separable from ourselves
without perceptible effect, as the hair, nails, and daily waste of
tissue. Again, other parts are very important, as our hands, feet, arms,
legs, &c., but still are no essential parts of our “self” or “soul,”
which continues to exist in spite of their amputation. Other parts, as
the brain, heart, and blood, are so essential that they cannot be
dispensed with, yet it is impossible to say that personality consists in
any one of them.
Each one of these component members of our personality is continually
dying and being born again, supported in this process by the food we eat,
the water we drink, and the air we breathe; which three things link us
on, and fetter us down, to the organic and inorganic world about us. For
our meat and drink, though no part of our personality before we eat and
drink, cannot, after we have done so, be separated entirely from us
without the destruction of our personality altogether, so far as we can
follow it; and who shall say at what precise moment our food has or has
not become part of ourselves? A famished man eats food; after a short
time his whole personality is so palpably affected that we know the food
to have entered into him and taken, as it were, possession of him; but
who can say at what precise moment it did so? Thus we find that we are
rooted into outside things and melt away into them, nor can any man say
he consists absolutely in this or that, nor define himself so certainly
as to include neither more nor less than himself; many undoubted parts of
his personality being more separable from it, and changing it less when
so separated, both to his own senses and those of other people, than
other parts which are strictly speaking no parts at all.
A man’s clothes, for example, as they lie on a chair at night are no part
of him, but when he wears them they would appear to be so, as being a
kind of food which warms him and hatches him, and the loss of which may
kill him of cold. If this be denied, and a man’s clothes be considered
as no part of his self, nevertheless they, with his money, and it may
perhaps be added his religious opinions, stamp a man’s individuality as
strongly as any natural feature could stamp it. Change in style of
dress, gain or loss of money, make a man feel and appear more changed
than having his chin shaved or his nails cut. In fact, as soon as we
leave common parlance on one side, and try for a scientific definition of
personality, we find that there is none possible, any more than there can
be a demonstration of the fact that we exist at all—a demonstration for
which, as for that of a personal God, many have hunted but none have
found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth’s
crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the
damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is
no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves
drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of
things, in which alone our nature permits us to be comforted.
Common parlance, however, settles the difficulty readily enough (as
indeed it settles most others if they show signs of awkwardness) by the
simple process of ignoring it: we decline, and very properly, to go into
the question of where personality begins and ends, but assume it to be
known by every one, and throw the onus of not knowing it upon the
over-curious, who had better think as their neighbours do, right or
wrong, or there is no knowing into what villainy they may not presently
fall.
Assuming, then, that every one knows what is meant by the word “person”
(and such superstitious bases as this are the foundations upon which all
action, whether of man, beast, or plant, is constructed and rendered
possible; for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious
basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into
wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which
faith it were powerless; and the lichen only grows upon the granite rock
by first saying to itself, “I think I can do it;” so that it would not be
able to grow unless it thought it could grow, and would not think it
could grow unless it found itself able to grow, and thus spends its life
arguing in a most vicious circle, basing its action upon a hypothesis,
which hypothesis is in turn based upon its action)—assuming that we know
what is meant by the word “person,” we say that we are one and the same
from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, so that whatever
is done by or happens to any one between birth and death, is said to
happen to or be done by one individual. This in practice is found to be
sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life, which,
being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only tolerate
compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate phenomena. When facts
of extreme complexity have to be daily and hourly dealt with by people
whose time is money, they must be simplified, and treated much as a
painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important
features, and neglecting all that does not assert itself as too essential
to be passed over—hence the slang and cant words of every profession, and
indeed all language; for language at best is but a kind of “patter,” the
only way, it is true, in many cases, of expressing our ideas to one
another, but still a very bad way, and not for one moment comparable to
the unspoken speech which we may sometimes have recourse to. The
metaphors and _façons de parler_ to which even in the plainest speech we
are perpetually recurring (as, for example, in this last two lines,
“plain,” “perpetually,” and “recurring,” are all words based on metaphor,
and hence more or less liable to mislead) often deceive us, as though
there were nothing more than what we see and say, and as though words,
instead of being, as they are, the creatures of our convenience, had some
claim to be the actual ideas themselves concerning which we are
conversing.
This is so well expressed in a letter I have recently received from a
friend, now in New Zealand, and certainly not intended by him for
publication, that I shall venture to quote the passage, but should say
that I do so without his knowledge or permission which I should not be
able to receive before this book must be completed.
“Words, words, words,” he writes, “are the stumbling-blocks in the way of
truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that
misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the
appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide;
thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all
only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must
be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear—only the clothes.
I say this over and over again, for there is nothing of more importance.
Other men’s words will stop you at the beginning of an investigation. A
man may play with words all his life, arranging them and rearranging them
like dominoes. If I could _think_ to you without words you would
understand me better.”
If such remarks as the above hold good at all, they do so with the words
“personal identity.” The least reflection will show that personal
identity in any sort of strictness is an impossibility. The expression
is one of the many ways in which we are obliged to scamp our thoughts
through pressure of other business which pays us better. For surely all
reasonable people will feel that an infant an hour before birth, when in
the eye of the law he has no existence, and could not be called a peer
for another sixty minutes, though his father were a peer, and already
dead,—surely such an embryo is more personally identical with the baby
into which he develops within an hour’s time than the born baby is so
with itself (if the expression may be pardoned), one, twenty, or it may
be eighty years after birth. There is more sameness of matter; there are
fewer differences of any kind perceptible by a third person; there is
more sense of continuity on the part of the person himself; and far more
of all that goes to make up our sense of sameness of personality between
an embryo an hour before birth and the child on being born, than there is
between the child just born and the man of twenty. Yet there is no
hesitation about admitting sameness of personality between these two
last.
On the other hand, if that hazy contradiction in terms, “personal
identity,” be once allowed to retreat behind the threshold of the womb,
it has eluded us once for all. What is true of one hour before birth is
true of two, and so on till we get back to the impregnate ovum, which may
fairly claim to have been personally identical with the man of eighty
into which it ultimately developed, in spite of the fact that there is no
particle of same matter nor sense of continuity between them, nor
recognised community of instinct, nor indeed of anything which goes to
the making up of that which we call identity.
There is far more of all these things common to the impregnate ovum and
the ovum immediately before impregnation, or again between the impregnate
ovum, and both the ovum before impregnation and the spermatozoon which
impregnated it. Nor, if we admit personal identity between the ovum and
the octogenarian, is there any sufficient reason why we should not admit
it between the impregnate ovum and the two factors of which it is
composed, which two factors are but offshoots from two distinct
personalities, of which they are as much part as the apple is of the
apple-tree; so that an impregnate ovum cannot without a violation of
first principles be debarred from claiming personal identity with both
its parents, and hence, by an easy chain of reasoning, _with each of the
impregnate ova from which its parents were developed_.
So that each ovum when impregnate should be considered not as descended
from its ancestors, but as being a continuation of the personality of
every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum _it actually
is_ quite as truly as the octogenarian _is_ the same identity with the
ovum from which he has been developed.
This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will
probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove
each one of us to _be actually_ the primordial cell which never died nor
dies, but has differentiated itself into the life of the world, all
living beings whatever, being one with it, and members one of another.
To look at the matter for a moment in another light, it will be admitted
that if the primordial cell had been killed before leaving issue, all its
possible descendants would have been killed at one and the same time. It
is hard to see how this single fact does not establish at the point, as
it were, of a logical bayonet, an identity, between any creature and all
others that are descended from it.
In Bishop Butler’s first dissertation on personality, we find expressed
very much the same opinions as would follow from the above
considerations, though they are mentioned by the Bishop only to be
condemned, namely, “that personality is not a permanent but a transient
thing; that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually; that no man
can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than
two successive moments can be one and the same moment;” in which case, he
continues, our present self would not be “in reality the same with the
self of yesterday, but another like self or person coming up in its room
and mistaken for it, to which another self will succeed to-morrow.” This
view the Bishop proceeds to reduce to absurdity by saying, “It must be a
fallacy upon ourselves to charge our present selves with anything we did,
or to imagine our present selves interested in anything which befell us
yesterday; or that our present self will be interested in what will
befall us to-morrow. This, I say, must follow, for if the self or person
of to-day and that of to-morrow are not the same, but only like persons,
the person of to-day is really no more interested in what will befall the
person of to-morrow than in what will befall any other person. It may be
thought, perhaps, that this is not a just representation of the opinion
we are speaking of, because those who maintain it allow that a person is
the same as far back as his remembrance reaches. And indeed they do use
the words _identity_ and _same person_. Nor will language permit these
words to be laid aside, since, if they were, there must be I know not
what ridiculous periphrasis substituted in the room of them. But they
cannot consistently with themselves mean that the person is really the
same. For it is self-evident that the personality cannot be really the
same, if, as they expressly assert, that in which it consists is not the
same. And as consistently with themselves they cannot, so I think it
appears they do not mean that the person is really the same, but only
that he is so in a fictitious sense; in such a sense only as they
assert—for this they do assert—that any number of persons whatever may be
the same person. The bare unfolding of this notion, and laying it thus
naked and open, seems the best confutation of it.”
This fencing, for it does not deserve the name of serious disputation, is
rendered possible by the laxness with which the words “identical” and
“identity” are commonly used. Bishop Butler would not seriously deny
that personality undergoes great changes between infancy and old age, and
hence that it must undergo some change from moment to moment. So
universally is this recognised, that it is common to hear it said of such
and such a man that he is not at all the person he was, or of such and
such another that he is twice the man he used to be—expressions than
which none nearer the truth can well be found. On the other hand, those
whom Bishop Butler is intending to confute would be the first to admit
that, though there are many changes between infancy and old age, yet they
come about in any one individual under such circumstances as we are all
agreed in considering as the factors of personal identity rather than as
hindrances thereto—that is to say, there has been no death on the part of
the individual between any two phases of his existence, and any one phase
has had a permanent though perhaps imperceptible effect upon all
succeeding ones. So that no one ever seriously argued in the manner
supposed by Bishop Butler, unless with modifications and saving clauses,
to which it does not suit his purpose to call attention.
Identical strictly means “one and the same;” and if it were tied down to
its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we have
said already, that no such thing as personal identity is possible, but
that the case actually is as Bishop Butler has supposed his opponents
without qualification to maintain it. In common use, however, the word
“identical” is taken to mean anything so like another that no vital or
essential differences can be perceived between them; as in the case of
two specimens of the same kind of plant, when we say they are identical
in spite of considerable individual differences. So with two impressions
of a print from the same plate; so with the plate itself, which is
somewhat modified with every impression taken from it. In like manner
“identity” is not held to its strict meaning—absolute sameness—but is
predicated rightly of a past and present which are now very widely
asunder, provided they have been continuously connected by links so small
as not to give too sudden a sense of change at any one point; as, for
instance, in the case of the Thames at Oxford and Windsor or again at
Greenwich, we say the same river flows by all three places, by which we
mean that much of the water at Greenwich has come down from Oxford and
Windsor in a continuous stream. How sudden a change at any one point, or
how great a difference between the two extremes is sufficient to bar
identity, is one of the most uncertain things imaginable, and seems to be
decided on different grounds in different cases, sometimes very
intelligibly, and again at others arbitrarily and capriciously.
Personal identity is barred at one end, in the common opinion, by birth,
and at the other by death. Before birth, a child cannot complain either
by himself or another, in such way as to set the law in motion; after
death he is in like manner powerless to make himself felt by society,
except in so far as he can do so by acts done before the breath has left
his body. At any point between birth and death he is liable, either by
himself or another, to affect his fellow-creatures; hence, no two other
epochs can be found of equal convenience for social purposes, and
therefore they have been seized by society as settling the whole question
of when personal identity begins and ends—society being rightly concerned
with its own practical convenience, rather than with the abstract truth
concerning its individual members. No one who is capable of reflection
will deny that the limitation of personality is certainly arbitrary to a
degree as regards birth, nor yet that it is very possibly arbitrary as
regards death; and as for intermediate points, no doubt it would be more
strictly accurate to say, “you are the now phase of the person I met last
night,” or “you are the being which has been evolved from the being I met
last night,” than “you are the person I met last night.” But life is too
short for the pen-phrases which would crowd upon us from every quarter,
if we did not set our face against all that is under the surface of
things, unless, that is to say, the going beneath the surface is, for
some special chance of profit, excusable or capable of extenuation.