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facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.

The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to
appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong,
which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same
innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to
the idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of
preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such
pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as
threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of
a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the
psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We
cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment.
Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that
something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting
death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for
another's, still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man,
as he grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable
from himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not necessarily
negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere.
Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate. But to
part with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewell
of the soul. The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such a
thought.

The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever
it may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from our
ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our
descendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passes
the possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it
necessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coeval
with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the
oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of
a very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their
family tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing
there beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree of
knowledge. Of what c