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 horrible as nothingness itself.  It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics has put it.[7]

To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be himself.  Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at the same time knit itself with his memories.  Neither of a man nor of a people—­which is, in a certain sense, also a man—­can a change be demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person.  A man can change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place within his continuity.