_Let us see, however, whether it may not be questioned._ We remember; that is true; but we also forget. The fact that certain past events are remembered tells more heavily, in common-sense thinking, than the fact that very many past events are forgotten, simply because it is human nature, as Bacon said, to give more weight to positive than to negative instances; but science does not emphasize; science takes all the facts at the same level. The organism, again, is physically continuous, and ‘the child is father of the man’; but who makes these observations? Not I, who am the continuous organism, but—in the first instance, at any rate—my fellow-men, those who are about me; and my fellow-men clinch their observations by the bestowal upon me of a personal name. In primitive thought, the superstitions that connect the name with the personality are legion; and even to-day our own name is warmly intimate, a very factor of our self. This name, which forms part of us and holds us together all through life, comes nevertheless from the outside; we do not name ourselves! Consider, further, the influence of language in general. It is clear that language, as it developed forms of speech in accordance with the common-sense notion of self, would powerfully reinforce that notion; the words and phrases which at first expressed ideas would come, in time, to shape or suggest ideas. The common-sense view is thus accepted as natural; but there is no proof that it is correct. Suppose, then, that we openly challenge that view; _what can we urge against it?_ We find, first of all, that _language_ bears witness against itself. We say that a man is at times ‘out of himself,’ ‘not himself,’ ‘beside himself’; we say that he forgets, surpasses, loses, disregards, neglects, discredits, contradicts himself; we say that he does himself injustice, that he cannot contain himself, and so forth. Our _daily life_ bears witness to the same effect. A man may be suave and affable in business and a veritable bear at home; and the man who sits as judge upon the bench, and plays a beginner’s game upon the golf-course, and carries his little son pick-a-back to bed, is he the same self in all three situations? There are changes of selfhood so abrupt that they remind us of the ‘mutations’ of the biologists: religious conversion, loss of fortune, sudden elevation to a position of responsibility, disappointment in love, may make ‘another man’ of the man we knew. The seven ages, we might almost say, correspond with as many different selves; it is a common remark that so-and-so has not fulfilled the promise of his youth, and that so-and-so is no longer the man he was. _Pathology_ brings corroboration of the most striking kind; there are cases of =dual or multiple personality=, in which the same ‘individual’ shows at different times very marked differences of intelligence, emotivity and conduct, differences so marked that the same organism appears as two or more distinct ‘selves’; and these