It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such are studied by alienists.  In these changes of personality, memory, the basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism.  For the subject who suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death—­it is not equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if he possesses one!  And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution, a veritable revolution.

A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other elements co-ordinated with it seek.  Its end, considered in itself—­that is to say, in the abstract—­may be more elevated, more noble, more anything you like; but it is different.  To fly and breathe in the air may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish, would perish.  And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity.  I do not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a bird.

Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself.  Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people.  What if some other people is better than our own?  Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is meant by better or worse.  Richer?  Granted.  More cultured?  Granted likewise.  Happier?  Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass!  A conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered?  Well and good.  All this is good—­but it is something different.  And that is enough.  Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am—­that is to say, it is simply to cease to be.  And that—­no!  Anything rather than that!

Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better?  Another might fulfil my function in society?  Yes, but it would not be I.

“I, I, I, always I!” some reader will exclaim; “and who are you?” I might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann:  “For the universe, nothing—­for myself, everything”; but no, I would rather remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant—­to wit, that we ought to think of our fellow-men not as means but as ends.  For the question does not touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each and all.  Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the logicians say.  The singular is not particular, it is universal.