“How then do I arrive at the idea of identity? I say by _intuitive_ knowledge, so totally independent of the circumstances with which it is combined in the body, that these may undergo every variety of change without impairing its force. Suppose that you were taken at your birth, like Hunter, and brought up amongst the North American Indians; that you believed a tatooed chief of a particular village to be your father, and a certain squaw to be your mother. At one-and-twenty, you are brought to Europe, and discover, by a remarkable chain of circumstances, that you are _not_ a North American Indian, but a child of British parents. You are _not_ what you believed yourself to be; yet _this_ has nothing to do with your identity--you are still _yourself_. “Suppose again, that by successive cannon shots, you have been deprived of your limbs; your arms and legs have been shot away, and, as nearly as is compatible with continued existence, you are reduced to a mere trunk. No diminution takes place in the consciousness of your personal identity, any more than results from the gradual substitution of new particles which, it is calculated, replace those which composed the whole of the former body, once in every seven years. _Memory of the past_ is not necessary to our belief that _we are ourselves_. Whole years may be blotted from our recollection, and still we have some invisible, intuitive assurance that we have continuity of being, and have not gone through any metempsychosis, which destroys it; but this knowledge is limited by certain boundaries, beyond which we have absolutely nothing to guide us, except the evidence of _other people_. Ask yourself solemnly, and searchingly, what is your ground for believing that, ere you saw the light, you lived during nine months in another state as different from your present condition of existence, as the present union of body and spirit can possibly be from a future mode of being in which the soul, freed from human restraint, shall expatiate with as much more liberty than it can now exert, as it enjoys at present, when compared with the former period of its imprisonment. “Is there one human creature who could be so certain that you are absolutely the person for whom we take you, as not by _possibility_ to be deceived? Even your _mother_, after her heart had yearned to the first faint cry of her own baby, may have been deceived. Suppose that her own had died, and that you were presented to her. _How_ do you know _what_ or _where_ you were before sensible objects began to make impression on your faculties? You have no more actual _connection_ with your former being, even during the first six or eight months,--I might go on to say the first year of childhood--when you slept in your nurse’s arms, than you have with that oak that overshadows your window, if you estimate that connection by your power of tracing its links without any hiatus in the chain.