Personal Identity, and its Morbid Modifications

Abstract

The answer to Shakespeare's question, “What's in a name?” as conveyed in Juliet's subsequent remarks, is, at least in some points of view, unsatisfactory; for placing aside all regard to beauty or euphony of sound, there is yet much either of good or evil connected with every name that rises to our lips or is silently repeated in our minds. There is, to a sensitive being, a pleasure or a pain connected with it, in which memory, experience, and association have wrapped it round. True, the pleasure or the pain may be of infinite and almost imperceptible minuteness, but it is nevertheless an atom in our emotional existence, and is added to the sum of our mental experiences. This is the case with the words used to designate the objects which surround us, but is more obvious with those applied to places which we have visited or known, and to persons whom we have encountered, or with whom we have been familiar. But the importance and significance of a name are most clearly appreciated and understood, when viewed with reference to the articulate sound by which we ourselves are called by our fellow men. This we will find, upon reflection, to be a very important part of ourselves, to be intimately united to our “dear perfection,” and to adhere to us with wonderful tenacity, so that it is difficult to throw it aside. At the same time it is well known that a man may be legally stripped of his name, that on a sufficient payment, he may be permitted to denude himself of a beggarly appellation and to clothe himself in one of aristrocratic splendour. Yet even after this has been formally accomplished, the savour of his rags will still, we opine, hang about him. The memory of his discarded title will still, ever and anon, come back upon him like vestiges of a state of former existence, and will probably produce a mental confusion bordering upon double consciousness. Nor does it seem wonderful that a man's name should stick very closely to him and be difficult of divorce, when it is remembered how intimately it has been connected with all his conscious states from his very baptism, and how he has come to associate it almost indissolubly with the first person singular, the Ego, simple and concrete. Firmly grafted, as a man's name is upon his belief in his own personal identity, and being almost the sole expression of personal identity, as it certainly is, to many of the uneducated masses of mankind; it is not wonderful that it should be a permanent and persistent fact, difficult to be got rid of. For amongst the most fundamental principles of mind, is the conviction, out of which all names have arisen, that a man continues to be always himself; that he is at any given moment the same person that he was the moment before, and that he has always been, since he came into existence. This belief is, in fact, the very essence of mind, and arises necessarily out of the succession of momentary conscious states; just as corporeal identity springs out of a succession of material atoms endowed with certain vital functions.