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ADDITIONAL NOTE TO PAGE 96

After this passage was ready for the press my friend, Mr. Robert P.
Casey, sent me the following criticism: "It can hardly be said that
'we' gain through the loss of our personalities, since 'we' (a personal
pronoun) _are_ our personalities. On the other hand, it is quite
conceivable that that Immaterial Purpose, which works in and through
our personal life, or at least some parts of it, gains by rejecting us
after our usefulness is past, seeking its further completion in those
who come after us, and thus maintaining a unified and eternal Life
through a multiplicity and diversity of lives. That this process is a
gain from the point of view of history is apparent, yet it can hardly
be said to be 'our' gain if 'we' are destroyed in the process.

"Furthermore, is the archipelago a fair analogy? In the sentence 'If
those islands could have thought and spoken...' the fact that they
cannot destroys the analogy at its most important point. The allegory
fits admirably the relation of the individual life and Immaterial
Reality as a whole, but the crux of the problem of immortality from the
point of the individual is the relation between (1) the unity
established between the intellectual and moral elements (but not many
other elements, e.g. evil) of his personal life and the sum total of
Immaterial Reality, and (2) the equally real and more obvious unity
presented by his own personality, including all his conscious
experiences regardless of their value.

"The first unity is, if not everlasting, at least as permanent as
history itself, and is by its nature eternal and immaterial. The
second unity is apparently transitory, being dependent physically on
the brain and nervous system, psychically on the persistence of memory.
Thus, to say a man has eternal life is simply to mean that certain of
his activities or experiences have the attribute of eternal or
immaterial. It, however, leaves untouched the question whether the
'ego' which is conscious of these activities continues after death."

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The point seems to me to be well taken, and to express a widely spread
and possibly correct opinion; yet I cannot but feel that Mr. Casey is a
little too much influenced by the exigencies of language. Of course in
all the ordinary dealings of life that which makes me "me" is a number
of factors, which, taken together, may be called personality, but the
real point at issue is whether in