The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I,
all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for that
sense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the root
of my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, in
the sense in which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be defined
except by reference to my own sameness with myself. It is a simple idea
incapable of analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my last
Lecture, the root of the character of permanence which we assign to
things external. To say that this conception has been evolved from the
characteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumerated is like saying that a
cat has been evolved without any intermediate stages from a fish, or a
smell from a colour.
But, if we now go a step further, and ask in what form this personal
identity presents itself in the world of phenomena, the answer is clear:
our personality while bound up with all our other faculties, so that we
can speak of our understanding, our affections, our powers of perception
and sensation, as parts of ourselves, yet is centred in one faculty
which we call the will. 'If there be aught spiritual in man,' says
Coleridge, 'the will must be such.
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