PERSONAL IDENTITY—(_continued_).
HOW arbitrary current notions concerning identity really are, may perhaps
be perceived by reflecting upon some of the many different phases of
reproduction.
Direct reproduction in which a creation reproduces another, the
_facsimile_, or nearly so, of itself may perhaps occur among the lowest
forms of animal life; but it is certainly not the rule among beings of a
higher order.
A hen lays an egg, which egg becomes a chicken, which chicken, in the
course of time, becomes a hen.
A moth lays an egg, which egg becomes a caterpillar, which caterpillar,
after going through several stages, becomes a chrysalis, which chrysalis
becomes a moth.
A medusa begets a ciliated larva, the larva begets a polyp, the polyp
begets a strobila, and the strobila begets a medusa again; the cycle of
reproduction being completed in the fourth generation.
A frog lays an egg, which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after more
or fewer intermediate stages, becomes a frog.
The mammals lay eggs, which they hatch inside their own bodies, instead
of outside them; but the difference is one of degree and not of kind. In
all these cases how difficult is it to say where identity begins or ends,
or again where death begins or ends, or where reproduction begins or
ends.
How small and unimportant is the difference between the changes which a
caterpillar undergoes before becoming a moth, and those of a strobila
before becoming a medusa. Yet in the one case we say the caterpillar
does not die, but is changed (though, if the various changes in its
existence be produced metagenetically, as is the case with many insects,
it would appear to make a clean sweep of every organ of its existence,
and start _de novo_, growing a head where its feet were, and so on—at
least twice between its lives as caterpillar and butterfly); in this
case, however, we say the caterpillar does not die, but is changed;
being, nevertheless, one personality with the moth, into which it is
developed. But in the case of the strobila we say that it is not
changed, but dies, and is no part of the personality of the medusa.
We say the egg becomes the caterpillar, not by the death of the egg and
birth of the caterpillar, but by the ordinary process of nutrition and
waste—waste and repair—waste and repair continually. In like manner we
say the caterpillar becomes the chrysalis, and the chrysalis the moth,
not through the death of either one or the other, but by the development
of the same creature, and the ordinary processes of waste and repair.
But the medusa after three or four cycles becomes the medusa again, not,
we say, by these same processes of nutrition and waste, but by a series
of generations, each one involving an actual birth and an actual death.
Why this difference? Surely only because the changes in the offspring of
the medusa are marked by the leaving a little more husk behind them, and
that husk less shrivelled, than is left on the occasion of each change
between the caterpillar and the butterfly. A little more residuum, which
residuum, it may be, can move about; and though shrivelling from hour to
hour, may yet leave a little more offspring before it is reduced to
powder; or again, perhaps, because in the one case, though the actors are
changed, they are changed behind the scenes, and come on in parts and
dresses, more nearly resembling those of the original actors, than in the
other.
When the caterpillar emerges from the egg, almost all that was inside the
egg has become caterpillar; the shell is nearly empty, and cannot move;
therefore we do not count it, and call the caterpillar a continuation of
the egg’s existence, and personally identical with the egg. So with the
chrysalis and the moth; but after the moth has laid her eggs she can
still move her wings about, and she looks nearly as large as she did
before she laid them; besides, she may yet lay a few more, therefore we
do not consider the moth’s life as continued in the life of her eggs, but
rather in their husk, which we still call the moth, and which we say dies
in a day or two, and there is an end of it. Moreover, if we hold the
moth’s life to be continued in that of her eggs, we shall be forced to
admit her to be personally identical with each single egg, and, hence,
each egg to be identical with every other egg, as far as the past, and
community of memories, are concerned; and it is not easy at first to
break the spell which words have cast around us, and to feel that one
person may become many persons, and that many different persons may be
practically one and the same person, as far as their past experience is
concerned; and again, that two or more persons may unite and become one
person, with the memories and experiences of both, though this has been
actually the case with every one of us.
Our present way of looking at these matters is perfectly right and
reasonable, so long as we bear in mind that it is a _façon de parler_, a
sort of hieroglyphic which shall stand for the course of nature, but
nothing more. Repair (as is now universally admitted by physiologists)
is only a phase of reproduction, or rather reproduction and repair are
only phases of the same power; and again, death and the ordinary daily
waste of tissue, are phases of the same thing. As for identity it is
determined in any true sense of the word, not by death alone, but by a
combination of death and failure of issue, whether of mind or body.
To repeat. Wherever there is a separate centre of thought and action, we
see that it is connected with its successive stages of being, by a series
of infinitely small changes from moment to moment, with, perhaps, at
times more startling and rapid changes, but, nevertheless, with no such
sudden, complete, and unrepaired break up of the preceding condition, as
we shall agree in calling death. The branching out from it at different
times of new centres of thought and action, has commonly as little
appreciable effect upon the parent-stock as the fall of an apple full of
ripe seeds has upon an apple-tree; and though the life of the parent,
from the date of the branching off of such personalities, is more truly
continued in these than in the residuum of its own life, we should find
ourselves involved in a good deal of trouble if we were commonly to take
this view of the matter. The residuum has generally the upper hand. He
has more money, and can eat up his new life more easily than his new
life, him. A moral residuum will therefore prefer to see the remainder
of his life in his own person, than in that of his descendants, and will
act accordingly. Hence we, in common with most other living beings,
ignore the offspring as forming part of the personality of the parent,
except in so far as that we make the father liable for its support and
for its extravagances (than which no greater proof need be wished that
the law is at heart a philosopher, and perceives the completeness of the
personal identity between father and son) for twenty-one years from
birth. In other respects we are accustomed, probably rather from
considerations of practical convenience than as the result of pure
reason, to ignore the identity between parent and offspring as completely
as we ignore personality before birth. With these exceptions, however,
the common opinion concerning personal identity is reasonable enough, and
is found to consist neither in consciousness of such identity, nor yet in
the power of recollecting its various phases (for it is plain that
identity survives the distinction or suspension of both these), but in
the fact that the various stages appear to the majority of people to have
been in some way or other linked together.
For a very little reflection will show that identity, as commonly
predicated of living agents, does not consist in identity of matter, of
which there is no same particle in the infant, we will say, and the
octogenarian into whom he has developed. Nor, again, does it depend upon
sameness of form or fashion; for personality is felt to survive frequent
and radical modification of structure, as in the case of caterpillars and
other insects. Mr. Darwin, quoting from Professor Owen, tells us (Plants
and Animals under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 362, ed. 1875), that in the
case of what is called metagenetic development, “the new parts are not
moulded upon the inner surfaces of the old ones. The plastic force has
changed its mode of operation. _The outer case_, _and all that gave form
and character to the precedent individual_, _perish_, _and are cast off_;
_they are not changed_ into the corresponding parts of the same
individual. These are due to a new and distinct developmental process.”
Assuredly, there is more birth and death in the world than is dreamt of
by the greater part of us; but it is so masked, and on the whole, so
little to our purpose, that we fail to see it. Yet radical and sweeping
as the changes of organism above described must be, we do not feel them
to be more a bar to personal identity than the considerable changes which
take place in the structure of our own bodies between youth and old age.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of this is to be found in the case
of some Echinoderms, concerning which Mr. Darwin tells us, that “the
animal in the second stage of development is formed almost like a bud
within the animal of the first stage, the latter being then cast off like
an old vestment, yet sometimes maintaining for a short period an
independent vitality” (“Plants and Animals under Domestication,” vol. ii.
p. 362, ed. 1875).
Nor yet does personality depend upon any consciousness or sense of such
personality on the part of the creature itself—it is not likely that the
moth remembers having been a caterpillar, more than we ourselves remember
having been children of a day old. It depends simply upon the fact that
the various phases of existence have been linked together, by links which
we agree in considering sufficient to cause identity, and that they have
flowed the one out of the other in what we see as a continuous, though it
may be at times, a troubled stream. This is the very essence of
personality, but it involves the probable unity of all animal and
vegetable life, as being, in reality, nothing but one single creature, of
which the component members are but, as it were, blood corpuscles or
individual cells; life being a sort of leaven, which, if once introduced
into the world, will leaven it altogether; or of fire, which will consume
all it can burn; or of air or water, which will turn most things into
themselves. Indeed, no difficulty would probably be felt about admitting
the continued existence of personal identity between parents and their
offspring through all time (there being no _sudden_ break at any time
between the existence of any maternal parent and that of its offspring),
were it not that after a certain time the changes in outward appearance
between descendants and ancestors become very great, the two seeming to
stand so far apart, that it seems absurd in any way to say that they are
one and the same being; much in the same way as after a time—though
exactly when no one can say—the Thames becomes the sea. Moreover, the
separation of the identity is practically of far greater importance to it
than its continuance. We want to be ourselves; we do not want any one
else to claim part and parcel of our identity. This community of
identities is not found to answer in everyday life. When then our love
of independence is backed up by the fact that continuity of life between
parents and offspring is a matter which depends on things which are a
good deal hidden, and that thus birth gives us an opportunity of
pretending that there has been a sudden leap into a separate life; when
also we have regard to the utter ignorance of embryology, which prevailed
till quite recently, it is not surprising that our ordinary language
should be found to have regard to what is important and obvious, rather
than to what is not quite obvious, and is quite unimportant.
Personality is the creature of time and space, changing, as time changes,
imperceptibly; we are therefore driven to deal with it as with all
continuous and blending things; as with time, for example, itself, which
we divide into days, and seasons, and times, and years, into divisions
that are often arbitrary, but coincide, on the whole, as nearly as we can
make them do so, with the more marked changes which we can observe. We
lay hold, in fact, of anything we can catch; the most important feature
in any existence as regards ourselves being that which we can best lay
hold of rather than that which is most essential to the existence itself.
We can lay hold of the continued personality of the egg and the moth into
which the egg develops, but it is less easy to catch sight of the
continued personality between the moth and the eggs which she lays; yet
the one continuation of personality is just as true and free from quibble
as the other. A moth becomes each egg that she lays, and that she does
so, she will in good time show by doing, now that she has got a fresh
start, as near as may be what she did when first she was an egg, and then
a moth, before; and this I take it, so far as I can gather from looking
at life and things generally, she would not be able to do if she had not
travelled the same road often enough already, to be able to know it in
her sleep and blindfold, that is to say, to remember it without any
conscious act of memory.
So also a grain of wheat is linked with an ear, containing, we will say,
a dozen grains, by a series of changes so subtle that we cannot say at
what moment the original grain became the blade, nor when each ear of the
head became possessed of an individual centre of action. To say that
each grain of the head is personally identical with the original grain
would perhaps be an abuse of terms; but it can be no abuse to say that
each grain is a continuation of the personality of the original grain,
and if so, of every grain in the chain of its own ancestry; and that, as
being such a continuation, it must be stored with the memories and
experiences of its past existences, to be recollected under the
circumstances most favourable to recollection, _i.e._, when under similar
conditions to those when the impression was last made and last
remembered. Truly, then, in each case the new egg and the new grain _is_
the egg, and the grain from which its parent sprang, as completely as the
full-grown ox is the calf from which it has grown.
Again, in the case of some weeping trees, whose boughs spring up into
fresh trees when they have reached the ground, who shall say at what time
they cease to be members of the parent tree? In the case of cuttings
from plants it is easy to elude the difficulty by making a parade of the
sharp and sudden act of separation from the parent stock, but this is
only a piece of mental sleight of hand; the cutting remains as much part
of its parent plant as though it had never been severed from it; it goes
on profiting by the experience which it had before it was cut off, as
much as though it had never been cut off at all. This will be more
readily seen in the case of worms which have been cut in half. Let a
worm be cut in half, and the two halves will become fresh worms; which of
them is the original worm? Surely both. Perhaps no simpler case than
this could readily be found of the manner in which personality eludes us,
the moment we try to investigate its real nature. There are few ideas
which on first consideration appear so simple, and none which becomes
more utterly incapable of limitation or definition as soon as it is
examined closely.
Finally, Mr. Darwin (“Plants and Animals under Domestication,” vol. ii.
p. 38, ed. 1875), writes—
“Even with plants multiplied by bulbs, layers, &c., which may _in one
sense_ be said to form part of the same individual,” &c., &c.; and again,
p. 58, “The same rule holds good with plants when propagated by bulbs,
offsets, &c., which _in one sense_ still form parts of the same
individual,” &c. In each of these passages it is plain that the
difficulty of separating the personality of the offspring from that of
the parent plant is present to his mind. Yet, p. 351 of the same volume
as above, he tells us that asexual generation “is effected in many
ways—by the formation of buds of various kinds, and by fissiparous
generation, that is, by spontaneous or artificial division.” The
multiplication of plants by bulbs and layers clearly comes under this
head, nor will any essential difference be felt between one kind of
asexual generation and another; if, then, the offspring formed by bulbs
and layers is in one sense part of the original plant, so also, it would
appear, is all offspring developed by asexual generation in its manifold
phrases.
If we now turn to p. 357, we find the conclusion arrived at, as it would
appear, on the most satisfactory evidence, that “sexual and asexual
reproduction are not seen to differ essentially; and . . . that asexual
reproduction, the power of regrowth, and development are all parts of one
and the same great law.” Does it not then follow, quite reasonably and
necessarily, that all offspring, however generated, is _in one sense_
part of the individuality of its parent or parents. The question,
therefore, turns upon “in what sense” this may be said to be the case?
To which I would venture to reply, “In the same sense as the parent plant
(which is but the representative of the outside matter which it has
assimilated during growth, and of its own powers of development) is the
same individual that it was when it was itself an offset, or a cow the
same individual that it was when it was a calf—but no otherwise.”
Not much difficulty will be felt about supposing the offset of a plant,
to be imbued with the memory of the past history of the plant of which it
is an offset. It is part of the plant itself; and will know whatever the
plant knows. Why, then, should there be more difficulty in supposing the
offspring of the highest mammals, to remember in a profound but
unselfconscious way, the anterior history of the creatures of which they
too have been part and parcel?
Personal identity, then, is much like species itself. It is now, thanks
to Mr. Darwin, generally held that species blend or have blended into one
another; so that any possibility of arrangement and apparent subdivision
into definite groups, is due to the suppression by death both of
individuals and whole genera, which, had they been now existing, would
have linked all living beings by a series of gradations so subtle that
little classification could have been attempted. How it is that the one
great personality of life as a whole, should have split itself up into so
many centres of thought and action, each one of which is wholly, or at
any rate nearly, unconscious of its connection with the other members,
instead of having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or
compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but of
its own one single existence; how it is that the daily waste of this
creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its individual
members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue which goes on in
the bodies of each individual (if indeed the tissue which we waste daily
in our own bodies is so unconscious of its birth and death as we
suppose); how, again, that the daily repair of this huge creature life
should have become decentralised, and be carried on by conscious
reproduction on the part of its component items, instead of by the
unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single centre, as the nutrition
of our own bodies would appear (though perhaps falsely) to be carried on;
these are matters upon which I dare not speculate here, but on which some
reflections may follow in subsequent chapters.