The heroic tempers, to fight a battle with the World is a martyrdom that is the richest meed in the World’s gift. It is apparent in the light of the findings of archaeology that during the first and primeval stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared Universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of World transport and communication, those differences are fading. Humankind’s understanding of the Universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums—particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. However, there were great changes also in the past: for example, the economics of the Pyramids, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, with their priestly observers of the Heavenly courses, and astronomers, with their concept of an Earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres. A great variety of knowledge has allowed life to flourish on this planet. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 13
Many grave histories are as dangerous as the most absurd fictions. Somewhere on this broad new Earth, there has been a Garden of Eden, with a garden gate guarded by cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. These holy tales and their images are messages to the conscious mind from quarters of the spirit unknown to normal daylight consciousness, and if read as referring to events in the field of space and time—whether of the future, present, or past—they will have been misread and their force deflected. Eden is a walled garden of delight, and in its center stands the great tree; or rather, it its center stands two trees, the one of knowledge of good and evil, the other of immortal life. Four rivers flow, furthermore, from within it as from an inexhaustible source, to refresh the World in the four directions. The Garden of Eden is the landscape of the Soul. However, our conscious minds are, for the most part, unable to enter it and enjoy there the taste of eternal life, since we have already tasted the knowledge that has thrown us out of the garden, pitched us away from our own center, now we judge things as good and evil instead of eternal life. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 13
Nevertheless, the Garden of Eden, as some believe, is enclosed within us, must already be ours, even though unknown to our conscious personalities. That would mean that the myth of the Bible when read, is not prehistory, but it is referring to human’s inward spiritual state. One of the commonest of daily experiences is that of recognizing our friends. A less common, though still fairly familiar, experience is the decision that a certain person is or is not the person they claim to be. The problem of personal identity is that of clarifying the principles behind these indispensable processes of reidentification. To reidentify someone is to say or imply that in spite of a lapse of time and the changes it may have wrought, the person before us now is the same as the person we knew before. One set of facts is needed to deal with this. One set of such facts is the private set of thoughts, feelings, and images that each of us has, and how constant and rapid are the changes in the with which our identity has to contend. The problem generated by this alleged paradox will be referred to as the problem of the unity of a person through change or, more briefly, as the problem unity. Which is flesh and which is spirit? History has been well said to be the Romance of the human mind and Romance the history of the heart. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 13
Souls may be near when bodies are distant. Has a new soul crept into this body, that even our intellectual faculties are changed? What enables us to say, in spite of the changes wrought by time, that person A, before us now, is the person B whom we formerly knew and that person C, also before us now, is not? The problem of the conditions for reidentifying persons should be distinguished from the problem of individuating person. To individuate among a class of beings is to pick out one from another; to reidentify a member of a class of beings is to recognize that individual as the same as someone known at an earlier time. In our World of time and change, there is a deeper sense of being recognized. The criterion of the identity of a person is the identity of the body which one has—that it is either a necessary or a sufficient condition of saying correctly that this person before us is Harris that the body which this person before us has is the body that Harris had. When the outer senses are at rest, and the min is all the more clam and clear for their repose, a spiritual clairvoyance often seems to lift for a while the whole stifling cloud that lies like a confusing mist over the problems of life, and the soul has sudden glimpses of things unutterable which lie beyond. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 13
Nothing can sure the soul, but the sense, just as nothing can cure the senses, but the soul. The other answer is that the criterion of the identity of a person is the set of memories which one has—that it is either necessary or a sufficient condition that this person before us is Harris that he should have memories of doing Harris’s actions or having Harris’s experiences. Also, there are certain things, which may not even be secrets, which the source would remember saying in confidence and with the preponderance of evidence, it seems reidentification is possible. For instance, there are the case of ostensible “bodily transfer.” However, this is not like that of the cobbler and the prince because one body is missing, no longer in existence. And I really do not understand how two souls could inhabit one body? The problem of personal identity has traditionally been raised in a dualist context: Those who have discussed it have been greatly influenced by the picture of a person as composed of two entities—body and mind—which are only contingently related to each other. This has restricted the problem of unity so that is has become the problem of how one can be justified in attributing unity to the mind. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 13
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Spiritual substance that within each person there is come central component which preserved one’s identity because it never changes as one’s thoughts and feelings do. There is a problem between the knowledge a person has of oneself and the knowledge that others have of the individual. There are a great many facts about a person which others can learn, it is often said, only by inference but to which the individual themselves seems to have direct and privileged access. The usual examples are facts about his present thoughts, feelings, and intentions. However, it looks as though something similar may be true about the past. Although others may have to ascertain whether I am a certain previously known person or did a certain past action by reference to external records or to my observable appearance, I seem to know this directly, in memory. This bears on the puzzle stories. It seems absurd, if we imagine ourselves as one of the participants in these tales, to suggest that someone else might know better than we who we are. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 13
Is the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the soul? The separation of spirit from matter is a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter is a mystery also. If bodily identity is not a necessary criterion of personal identity, perhaps bodily death is merely one major event in a person’s history and not the end of the individual. And if the fundamental criterion of identity is memory, it would seem to follow that a person might be known, at least to oneself, to have survived death because one continued to have memories in their disembodied state. An entity of any sort can remain the same throughout its changes provided that the changes that take place in it are characteristic of entities of that sort and are allowed for in their concept. Over the years a tree can double its size and remain the same tree since this sort of change is characteristic of trees and it is allowed for the concept of a tree. It cannot, however, sprout wings and fly or burn to ashes and still remain a tree, for changes of these kinds are not allowed for. Thus being so, no hidden substance is necessary for the retention of its identity since there is no requirement of unchanging character which this is said to provide. The same is true of persons. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 13
The fact that the same man is before us does not mean that the same person is, since the man may not be conscious of having the same experiences in question and if the man is not conscious of having these experiences, then the person did not do it. A person has to be physically present to have these experiences that some are suggesting, and that is a condition of responsibility for these situations. When a person remembers his deeds and experiences clearly, but does not have the body that performed those deeds or witnessed those experiences, the deeds can nevertheless still be his because he may have done them in a previous body and have inherited another one since. The same person will no longer be the same man. To say that someone remembers something is merely to say that he sincerely claims to remember it (in the strong sense). In a weak sense, memories can be mistaken. Now, it is clear that even though we do pay special attention to what people claim to remember when settling questions of identity, the fact that someone claims to remember doing or witnessing something does not show that he did it or witnessed it. Even though sincere, he might be mistaken. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 13
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Even psychoanalysts (a medical doctor who interprets resistance and transference used to explore repressed or unconscious energy) fail to reidentify individuals. However, the soul has an interpreter—often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter—in the eyes. In the case of persons the doctrine is one of spiritual rather than material substances (whatever the difference between two unknowns may be). However, it is clear that nothing whose character is totally unknown can be detectable by the senses or by introspection. No one could be said to be applying a concept on the basis of facts to which he has no access. People are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions in a constant state of change. Suppose ourselves possessed of invariable and uninterrupted existence through the whole course of our lives. The soul of the human seems to have been constructed for another sphere of existence. We confuse these two ideas because of the metal laziness which makes us content with their superficial similarity. Strictly (“to an accurate view”), change destroys identity, but we are easily beguiled into overlooking that change has occurred. Our souls should be stars on Earth, not as meteors and tortured comets. #RyanPhillippe 9 of 13
The soul really grand is only tested in its errors. Once launched upon this convenient path of error, the mind is led further and further along it by certain recurring facts—it is easier for us to overlook than notice gradual changes that occur according to certain smooth and regular patterns, and so we choose to overlook them. A man can change in more ways before he is destroyed than a chair can. Some alterations are allowed and some are not allowed and it all depends on the class of the entities grouped under the concept in question. These matters may not always be easy to settle precisely. We may not be in a position to say whether we have the same things on a certain occasion. When the roof is removed, does the house still exist, or are we left with something else? If the walls are torn down and rebuilt, do we have the same house or another? Sometimes the only answer at such a point is a decision on the scope of the concept. These are the things that beguile us most regularly into the habit of ignoring the changes which are taking place in objects right under our noses. However, these factors (which do not at all conceal the changing character of our World from us) are the same ones which appear without this disguise in a correct account of the situation. #RyanPhillippe 10 of 13
The mind apparent circularity of the view that the memory is the sole criterion for the identity of human beings. In order to apply it some covert reference to the identity of the body has to be made. However, there are some occasions in which we find human bodies that are not persons—that is, dead bodies or bodies that are biologically alive but incapable of exhibiting personality. Nonetheless, bodily identity can be sufficient criterion for reidentifying person, even if the case where there has been a bodily transfer. We have to know that there was actually a person in the past about whose life these memory claims seem to be accurate reports and that all the claims fit the life history of the same person in past, who was the person the claimant now says he is. This can be known only if in the past we were able to reidentify that person over the period of his life. This requires the past availability of the bodily criterion. However, when these admission are made, the advocate of bodily transfer need go no further; he could hold his ground here and say that bodily transfer is still possible. These claims could systematically be checked up on in detail. And they would be found, ex hypothesi, to fit a past human body. #RyanPhillippe 11 of 13
Transfer cases, even if allowed, could only be exceptional. The logical possibility of bodily transfer has to be admitted, the implications are small and the wisdom of the particular change in our connections is not self-evident. The reason that we all feel some degree of compulsion toward accepting the bodily-transfer solution is that the dualist preconceptions intrude themselves when we investigate stories. It is taken for granted that we have an independently clear concept, with recognized criteria of identity, of a soul, spirit, or mind, which can be thought of as having a purely contingent relationship to the body, which it may abandon in favor of another body. “Person” come from the Latin word persona, meaning the mask and/or actor. It came to mean an individual’s dignity in affiliations and affinities to others. This usage is reinforced by theological language for which persona is the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypostasis (standing under) and for which both persona and hypostasis are closely related to ousia (substance). These associations foreshadow the ultimacy that personalism attaches to personality, both in value (a person is identified with one’s dignity) and in being (person is substance). I am a Persoalist, the first of the clan in any thorough-going sense. #RyanPhillippe 12 of 13
There is a secret self that hath its own life rounded by a dream, unpenetrated, unguessed. A person is a complex unity of consciousness, which identifies itself with its past self in memory, determine itself by its freedom, is purposive and value-seeking, private yet communicating, and potentially rational. The ultimacy of spirit has had a decided influence on others forms of personalism. This ultimate reality is a spiritual, supernatural being created by God. Reality is a hierarchy of psychic beings (monads) determined by the degree of consciousness possessed by any monad. The supreme monad (God) has created all other monads in pre-established harmony. There are more grades of self or mind than the human and the divine. All reality is person. It is pluralistic: reality is a society of persons. It is theistic: God is the ultimate person and, as such, is the ground of all being and the creator. The natural World is understood as an order within or as a function of the mind of God. Hence, God is the source is conserver of values. The soul asleep in the arms of love. (www.thedeedle.com) #RyanPhillippe 13 of 13
