circumstances which influence them from without, ay, and of all the forces and circumstances which have influenced his ancestors ever since man appeared on the earth.  But because he remembers many states of consciousness, many moments in which he was aware of sensations within him, and of circumstances without him, therefore he strings all these together, and talks of them as one thing which he calls I; and speaks of them as his remembrances of himself, when really the many things are but links of a chain which is perpetually growing at one end and dropping off at the other.  To say, therefore, that he is the same person as he was when a child, or as he would be when an old man,—­is, when we know that every atom of his physical frame has changed again and again during the course of years, a popular delusion, or at least a misnomer used for convenience’ sake; as when we say that the sun rises and sets, when we know that the earth moves, and not the sun.  A man, therefore, according to this school, is really no more a person, one and indivisible, than is the coral with its million polypes, the tree with its million buds, or even the thunderstorm with its million vesicles of attracting and repelling vapour.

Now that a truth underlies such a theory as this, I am the last to deny.  How much of the character of each man is inherited, how much of it depends on his actual bodily organization; how much of it, alas! on the circumstances of his youth; how much of it changes with the mere physical change from youth to old age—­who does not know all this, who has ever needed to fight for himself the battle of life?  Only, I say, this is but half the truth; and these philosophers cannot state their half-truth, without employing the very words which they repudiate; without using the very personal pronouns, the I and me, the thou and thee, the he and him, to which they deny any real existence.  Beside, I ask—­Is the experience and the conclusion of the vast majority of all mankind to go for nothing?  For if there be one point on which human beings have been, and are still, agreed, it is this—­that each of them is, to his joy or his sorrow, an I; a separate person.  And, I should have said, this conviction becomes stronger and stronger in each of them, the more human they become, civilized, and worthy of the respect and affection of their fellow-men.

For what rises in them, or seems to rise, more and more painfully and fiercely?  What but that protest, that battle, between the everlasting I within them, and their own passions, and motives, and circumstances; which St Paul of old called the battle between the spirit on one side, and the flesh and the world on the other.  The nobler, surely, and healthier, even for a moment, the manhood of any man is, the more intense is that inward struggle, which man alone of all the animals endures.  Is it in moments of brave endeavour, whether to improve our own character, or to benefit our fellow-men:  or is it in moments