ged ice,
a lurid sunset, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant
escape in places, and settle upon the changed continent when the waters
have subsided--a simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying
ocean beds, and with little time for introspection; yet they can read and
write and sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk; but
they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness. Also
they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able to follow
their own operations--the manner of their own apprenticeship being to
them as a buried city. May we not imagine that, after the lapse of
another ten thousand years or so, some one of them may again become
cursed with lust of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish the
world by discovering that it can read and write, and that steam-engines
do not grow, but are made? It may be safely prophesied that he will die
a martyr, and be honoured in the fourth generation.

PERSONAL IDENTITY. (CHAPTER V. OF LIFE AND HABIT.)

"Strange difficulties have been raised by some," says Bishop Butler,
"concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as
implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in any
two consecutive moments." But in truth it is not easy to see the
strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either "personal" or
"identity" are used in any strictness.

Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that we
have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests. We regard our
personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable, individual
thing, which can be seen going about the streets or sitting indoors at
home; as something which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of
which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth
this "we," which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and
indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little
among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps
due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due
to the jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts of our
identity change from moment to moment, our personality becomes a thing
dependent upon time present, which has no logical existence, but lives
only upon the sufferance of times