With these remarks, I conclude what appears to me to be the most accurate view of the question of our personal, or, as I have rather chosen to term it, our mental identity. We have seen, that the belief of this arises, not from any inference of reasoning, but from a principle of intuitive assent, operating universally, immediately, irresistibly, and therefore justly to be regarded, as essential to our constitution,--a principle, exactly of the same kind, as those, to which reasoning itself must ultimately be traced, and from which alone its consecutive series of propositions can derive any authority. We have seen, that this belief,--though intuitive,--is not involved in any _one_ of our separate feelings, which, considered merely as present, might succeed each other, in endless variety, without affording any notion of a sentient being, more permanent than the sensation itself; but that it arises, on the consideration of our feelings as _successive_, in the same manner, as our belief of proportion, or relation in general, arises, not from the conception of _one_ of the related objects or ideas, but only after the previous conception of _both_ the relative and the correlative; or rather, that the belief of identity does not arise as subsequent, but is involved in the very remembrance which allows us to consider our feelings as successive; since it is impossible for us to regard them as successive, without regarding them as feelings of our sentient self;--not flowing, therefore, from experience or reasoning, but essential to these, and necessarily implied in them,--since there can be no result in experience, but to the mind which remembers that it has previously observed, and no reasoning but to the mind which remembers that it has felt the truth of some proposition, from which the truth of its present conclusion is derived. In addition to this positive evidence of our identity, we have seen, that the strongest objections which we could imagine to be urged against it, are, as might have been expected, sophistical, in the false test of identity which they assume,--that the contrasts of momentary feeling, and even the more permanent alterations of general character, in the same individual, afford no valid argument against it; since, not in _mind_ only, but in _matter_ also,--(from a superficial and partial view of the phenomena of which the supposed objections are derived,)--the most complete identity of substance, without addition of any thing, or subtraction of any thing, is compatible with an infinite _diversity of states_.