_B._ ‘Plain truth,’ dear A——, ‘needs no flowers of speech.’ _D._ Let me rightly understand you. Do you mean to say that I am not C. D. and that you are not W. B. or that we shall not both of us remain so to the end of the chapter, without a possibility of ever changing places with each other? _B._ I am afraid, if you go to that, there is very little chance that ‘_I_ shall be ever mistaken for _you_.’ But with all this precise individuality and inviolable identity that you speak of, let me ask, Are you not a little changed (less so, it is true, than most people) from what you were twenty years ago? Or do you expect to appear the same that you are now twenty years hence? _D._ ‘No more of that if thou lovest me.’ We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be. _B._ A truce then; but be assured that whenever you happen to fling up your part, there will be no other person found to attempt it after you. _D._ Pray, favour us with your paradox without farther preface. _B._ I will then try to match my paradox against your prejudice, which as it is armed all in proof, to make any impression on it, I must, I suppose, take aim at the rivets; and if I can hit them, if I do not (round and smooth as it is) cut it into three pieces, and show that two parts in three are substance and the third and principal part shadow, never believe me again. Your real self ends exactly where your pretended self-interest begins; and in calculating upon this principle as a solid, permanent, absolute, self-evident truth, you are mocked with a name. _D._ How so? I hear, but do not see. _B._ You must allow that this identical, indivisible, ostensible self is at any rate distinguishable into three parts,—the past, the present, and future? _D._ I see no particular harm in that. _B._ It is nearly all I ask. Well then, I admit that you have a peculiar, emphatic, incommunicable and exclusive interest or fellow-feeling in the two first of these selves; but I deny resolutely and unequivocally that you have any such natural, absolute, unavoidable, and mechanical interest in the last self, or in your future being, the interest you take in it being necessarily the offspring of understanding and imagination (aided by habit and circumstances), like that which you take in the welfare of others, and yet this last interest is the only one that is ever the object of rational and voluntary pursuit, or that ever comes into competition with the interests of others. _D._ I am still to seek for the connecting clue.