"Personal identity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the abstract and the mystical—a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of God, he "found no ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... knowledge endows the man who knows with a force and efficiency which he would lack without it. Few words are more elastic and adaptable than the verb substantive. "Is" can denote a wide variety of ideas, from that of personal identity, as when I see that yonder distant figure is my brother; to that of equivalence, as when a stamped and signed piece of thin paper called a bank-note is five pounds of gold; or to that of mere representation, as when another piece of paper, ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would be a great blessing in ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... in a noisome universe this is the most purulent. In order to keep up our rudimentary self-respect we have done our best to veil our personal identity as images of the Almighty from the higher promenades of the vulgar. Our sole associates have been the blatant frequenters of evil smelling bars. We've not exchanged a word with a creature approaching ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... all, some of them he could have taught, many of them would have welcomed him as their peer. As he mixed with high and low in his lifetime, so would it have been in the past; and so will it be in the future, if he has gone into a world where personal identity continues, and the spiritual standards and ideals of this world persist. But yesterday, he seemed one who embodied Life to the utmost. With the assured step of one whom nothing can frighten or surprise, he walked our earth, as on granite. Suddenly, the granite grew more unsubstantial ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... faith, for which we have already an historical guarantee. Stupendous mysteries still veil the nature of the resurrection process, though these are exaggerated into inconceivabilities by false notions of what constitutes personal identity; but if the choice lies between accepting the Christian doctrine of a resurrection and the conception of a finite spirit disembodied and yet active, there can be no doubt as to which of these two is the more reasonable and thinkable. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... impressions registered on the brain these could no more survive the dissolution of the brain than impressions on wax could survive the melting of the wax. Surely my memory, my irresistible conviction of personal identity with my past makes it abundantly clear that "I" am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind this ever ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... again into life, and into a new, a higher, a different sort of life. The personal identity was unchanged. His disciples recognized His voice and face and form, as they talked and ate with Him. But the limitations were gone. The control of spirit over ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... enlightened racial existence. Thirdly: The educated Negro woman must take her stand among the best and most enlightened women of all races; and in so doing she must seek to be herself. Imitate no one when the imitation destroys the personal identity. Not only in dress are we imitative to the extreme, but in manners and customs. When our boys and girls become redeemed from these evils a great deal will have been accomplished in the elevation of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... necessitated because of its identity: an impregnable fortress containing a highly organized and self-sufficient governmental society, each citizen having a particular duty for the common good, and each kept from an unfarcical personal identity by the means of a ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... A. A. Royce." The latter was used by him in the Democratic Review, so late as March, 1840.] they traced his contributions assiduously, cut them out of magazines, and preserved them. But they could not discover his personal identity. One of them who lived in Salem used constantly to wonder, in driving about town, whether the author of her favorite tales could be living in this or in that house; for it was known that he was a Salem resident. Miss Peabody, who had in girlhood known ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... right in maintaining reason and instinct to be but different degrees of perfection of the same mental processes. Had he substituted "memory" for "imitation," and asked the lady to define "sameness" or "personal identity," he would have ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic treatment of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The problem of materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic treatment. 'God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more. Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of the sense of personal identity is illustrated by the ease and completeness with which actors can put themselves in the place of the characters they assume, so that even their instinctive demeanor corresponds to the ideal, and their acting becomes nature. Such was the experience of the members ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... gross, though unfortunately not very uncommon, nonsense. And as for the former, which may be called 'Logica Praepostera', I have read in metaphysical essays of no small fame, arguments drawn 'ab extra' in proof and disproof of personal identity, which, ingenious as they may be, were clearly anticipated by the little old woman's appeal to her little dog, for the solution of the very same doubts, occasioned by her petticoats having been ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... The consciousness of personal identity is said to be bound up with memory. That is to say, I am conscious of a continuous permanent self under all the varying surface-play of the stream of consciousness, just because I can, by an act of recollection, bring together any two portions of this stream of experience, and so recognize the unbroken ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully |
