delight of those serene and undisturbed relations which one sometimes
establishes with a congenial person, which no lapse of time or lack of
communication seems to interrupt--the best kind of friendship. There
is here no blaming of conditions that may keep the two lives apart; no
feverish attempt to keep up the relation, no resentment if mutual
intercourse dies away. And then, perhaps, in the shifting of
conditions, one's life is again brought near to the life of one's
friend, and the old easy intercourse is quietly resumed. My companion
said that such a relation seemed to him to lie as near to the solution
of the question of the preservation of identity after death as any
other phenomenon of life. "Supposing," he said, "that such a
friendship as that of which we have spoken is resumed after a break of
twenty years. One is in no respect the same person; one looks
different, one's views of life have altered, and physiologists tell us
that one's body has changed perhaps three times over, in the time, so
that there is not a particle of our frame that is the same; and yet the
emotion, the feeling of the friendship remains, and remains unaltered.
If the stuff of our thoughts were to alter as the materials of our body
alter, the continuity of such an emotion would be impossible. Of
course it is difficult to see how, divested of the body, our
perceptions can continue; but almost the only thing we are really
conscious of is our own identity, our sharp separation from the mass of
phenomena that are not ourselves. And, if an emotion can survive the
transmutation of the entire frame, may it not also survive the
dissolution of that frame?"

"Could it be thus?" I said. "A ray of light falls through a chink in a
shutter; through the ray, as we watch it, floats an infinite array of
tiny motes, and it is through the striking of the light upon them that
we are aware of the light; but they are never the same. Yet the ray
has a seeming identity, though even the very ripples of light that
cause it are themselves ever changing, ever renewed. Could not the
soul be such a ray, illuminating the atoms that pass through it, and
itself a perpetual motion, a constant renewal?"

But the day warned us to descend. The shadows grew longer, and a great
pale light of sunset began to gather in the West. We came slowly down
through the pastures, till we joined the familiar road again. And at
last we parted, in that wistful silence that falls