t go forward and the other backward, nor, when we
look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the
other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some
purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a
certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his
action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one
single purpose, be it what it may.

Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a
discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he
who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he
who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of
consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is
the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by
memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our
memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past
to transform itself into our future.

All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the
world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own
personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
know what that is."

On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
nothing appeared to me quite so