Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IMMORTALITY (PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS) [This paper, and the two that follow it, entitled ' Pleasure' and ' Spirit,' were written two or three years before the author's death. They were composed, by way of experiment, for a friend who wished to discover how far the want of education in technical philosophy would be a hindrance to the understanding of some of the ideas which were occupying Nettleship's mind.] People talk of ' personal' immortality, and often find fault with what philosophers say on the ground that it is merely 'impersonal.' It is clear that the first thing to do is to come to some understanding as to what we are to mean by personality. It is probably the hardest of all subjects, and yet it is one upon which we are all ready to pronounce in the most easy-going way. It is worth while to bring home to oneself how extraordinarily vague, confused, or inadequate, many of the things are which we suppose ourselves to mean by personality. To begin with, we generally assume it to be a definite, self-contained, unchanging thing, round and about which all sorts of more or less separable and changing appendages confusedly float. Or it is something ' inward,' the most inward of all things, that to which we think we should come if we stripped off all the coats of circumstances, custom, education. But we soon realize, on thinking, that there is no circle to be drawn round any one, within which all is ' personal,' and without which all is ' impersonal.' We realize what may be called the continuity of things. What, for instance, is a triangle? A space bounded by three straight lines. Where does ' it' stop ? At the lines, of course. But these lines are merely its contact with surrounding space, and the ' personality' of the triangle is one thing if the surrounding ...