The apparent permanency of the ego consists pre-eminently in the fact of its _continuity_, and in its slow change. The many thoughts and plans of yesterday that are continued to-day, and of which our environment in waking hours continually reminds us (and therefore in dreams the ego can be very indistinct, doubled, or entirely wanting), and the little habits that are unconsciously and involuntarily kept up for longer periods of time, constitute the fundamental root of the ego. There can hardly be greater differences in the ego of different people, than occur in the course of years in _one_ person. When I recall to-day my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few single features, for a different person, did not the chain of memories that make up my personality now lie before me. Many a treatise that I myself wrote twenty years ago, now makes upon me a very strange impression. The very gradual character of the changes of the body also contributes to the permanency of the ego, but in a much less degree than people imagine. Such things are much less analysed and noticed than the intellectual and the moral ego. Individually, personally, people have a very poor knowledge of themselves. Once, when a young man, I espied in the street a face in profile that was very displeasing and repulsive to me. I was not a little taken aback when a moment afterwards I found that it was my own, which, in passing by a place where mirrors were sold, I had perceived reflected from two mirrors that stood at the proper inclination to each other. Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, being much fatigued, I got into an omnibus just as another gentleman appeared at the other end. "What degenerated pedagogue is that, who has just entered," thought I. It was myself: opposite me hung a large mirror. My ordinary dress, accordingly, was more familiar to me than my travelling attire. The ego is as little absolutely permanent as bodies. That which we so greatly fear in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, as a rule preserves itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as liberation from individuality, can even become a pleasant thought. * * * * *