[7]
To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a
people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be
demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can
change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place
within his continuity.
It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called
changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such
are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the
basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to
the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has
now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who
suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not
equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if
he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution,
a veritable revolution.
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