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 baffled. There is nothing
but fusion and confusion.

Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common sense 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 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, though in a modified condition, 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 melt
away into outside things and are rooted into them as plants into the soil
in which