Note 184 — Chapter III · THE PLACE OF THE “SELF” IN REALITY

“Bodily identity” itself, of course, might give rise to difficult problems if we had space to go into them. Here I can merely suggest certain points for the reader’s reflection. (1) All identity appears in the end to be teleological and therefore psychical. I believe this to be the same human body which I have seen before, because I believe that the interests expressed in its actions will be continuous, experience having taught me that a certain amount of physical resemblance is a rough-and-ready criterion of psychical continuity. (2) As to the ethical problem of responsibility referred to in the text, it is obviously entirely one of less and more. Our moral verdicts upon our own acts and those of others are in practice habitually influenced by the conviction that there are degrees of moral responsibility within what the immediate necessities of administration compel us to treat as absolute. We do not, e.g., think a man free from all moral blame for what he does when drunk, or undeserving of all credit for what he performs when “taken out of himself,” i.e. out of the rut of his habitual interests by excitement, but we certainly do, when not under the influence of a theory, regard him as deserving of less blame or credit, as the case may be, for his behaviour than if he had performed the acts when he was “more himself.” On all these topics see Mr. Bradley’s article in Mind for July 1902.