Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1319

Let me then ( and in public ) glance into the mirror.

I have known some men and women who said that the selves they are told about or even remember seem utter strangers to them now ; ;

that their remote past is as discontinuous with their present selves, as lacking in any conscious likeness to their mature personality, as the self of a butterfly may be imagined discontinuous with that of the caterpillar it once was.

For my part I find it difficult to conceive such a state of affairs.

I have changed and I have reversed opinions ; ;

but I am so aware of an uninterrupted continuity of the persona or ego that I see only as absurd the tendency of some psychologists from Heraclitus to Pirandello and Proust to regard consciousness as no more than a flux amid which nothing remains unchanged.

So far as I am concerned, the child is unmistakably father to the man, despite the obvious fact that child and father differ greatly -- sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.