is really no more a person, one and indivisible, than is
the coral with its million polypes, the tree with its million buds, or
even the thunderstorm with its million vesicles of attracting and
repelling vapour.

Now that a truth underlies such a theory as this, I am the last to deny.
How much of the character of each man is inherited, how much of it
depends on his actual bodily organization; how much of it, alas! on the
circumstances of his youth; how much of it changes with the mere physical
change from youth to old age--who does not know all this, who has ever
needed to fight for himself the battle of life? Only, I say, this is but
half the truth; and these philosophers cannot state their half-truth,
without employing the very words which they repudiate; without using the
very personal pronouns, the I and me, the thou and thee, the he and him,
to which they deny any real existence. Beside, I ask--Is the experience
and the conclusion of the vast majority of all mankind to go for nothing?
For if there be one point on which human beings have been, and are still,
agreed, it is this--that each of them is, to his joy or his sorrow, an I;
a separate person. And, I should have said, this conviction becomes
stronger and stronger in each of them, the more human they become,
civilized, and worthy of the respect and affection of their fellow-men.

For what rises in them, or seems to rise, more and more painfully and
fiercely? What but that protest, that battle, between the everlasting I
within them, and their own passions, and motives, and circumstances;
which St Paul of old called the battle between the spirit on one side,
and the flesh and the world on the other. The nobler, surely, and
healthier, even for a moment, the manhood of any man is, the more intense
is that inward struggle, which man alone of all the animals endures. Is
it in moments of brave endeavour, whether to improve our own character,
or to benefit our fellow-men: or is it in moments of depression,
disappointment, bodily sickness, that we are tempted to say?--I will
fight no more. I cannot mend myself, or the world. I am what nature has
made me; and what I am, I must remain. I, and all I know, and all I
love, are things, not persons; parts of nature, even as the birds upon
the bough, only more miserable, because tormented by a hope which never
will be fulfilled; an empty pageant of mere phenomena, blown onward
toward decay, like dying autumn leaves, be