The
serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape.
It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting
of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally
withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.
Continued Identity
I do not doubt that a person who will grow out of me as I now am, but
of whom I know nothing now and in whom therefore I can take none but
the vaguest interest, will one day undergo so sudden and complete a
change that his friends must notice it and call him dead; but as I
have no definite ideas concerning this person, not knowing whether he
will be a man of 59 or 79 or any age between these two, so this
person will, I am sure, have forgotten the very existence of me as I
am at this present moment. If it is said that no matter how wide a
difference of condition may exist between myself now and myself at
the moment of death, or how complete the forgetfulness of connection
on either side may be, yet the fact of the one's having grown out of
the other by an infinite series of gradations makes the second
personally identical with the first, then I say that the difference
between the corpse and the till recently living body is not great
enough, either in respect of material change or of want of memory
concerning the earlier existence, to bar personal identity and
prevent us from seeing the corpse as alive and a continuation of the
man from whom it was developed, though having tastes and other
characteristics very different from those it had while it was a man.
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