Volume 1

William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter.

Isaac Todhunter

Date:: 1876

Credit: William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$3-47 from ye blow ’’—tlicn we seem to awake from a sleep m which we had been plunged during the intermission of these feelings to resume an existence which we had laid down when we suffered our youthful visions to slide away from us. Of all the visits of old friends the most agreeable and the most affecting is the visit from a man’s former self. Agreeable because there is nobody of whom we know so much and with whom we have so many subjects of common interest—and affecting because in truth it is rather more like a visit from the ghost of an old acquaintance than from himself—we know that he is gone foi ever, we see something supernatural about his return we know it is only momentary (like angels’ visits)—we know that all our efforts cannot detain him long, that as soon as the broad glare of daylight breaks in upon us he will vanish and be lost. W e strive in vain to remain what we once were, and though we may feel ourselves for a small space the same person whom we recollect running about after butterflies our feelings roll away from us like smoke—the busy realities of life reappear round us, and we are left like Mirza when the vision vanished and the bare hills of Bagdad spread drearily around him. Thus we have as many identities as we have suits of clothes and verify Locke s idea of a man with a sleeping and a waking set of consciousnesses, and if Keliama had sent all the different seifs of which we are conscious up the streets of [there is a blank in the manuscript, but the word must be Padalon, see Curse of Keliama, xxiv] not only would lie have had as many as the service required but no one would ha\e recognized them for the same person. As a further illustration of this we may observe the complete change of identity which seems to have taken place if we throw our reflections back at random upon the extent of our past years the chance is great that among the bundle of personages which we have brought forward to the present time we do not at hist pitch upon the one which at present we are, and therefore that we stumble upon a person who is to us at the present moment as great a stranger as if we had never been in habits of intimacy with him. There is something rather melancholy in this un- ceasing flux of mental as well as corporeal individuality—this$