future sensations and present impulses, collecting, and uniting the different successive moments of my being in one general representative feeling of self-interest as the impressions made on different parts of my body are all conveyed to one common principle of thought, it is in vain to tell me that I have the same interest in my future sensations as if they were present, because I am the same individual. However nearly allied, however similar I may be to my future self, whatever other relation I may bear to that self, so long as there is not this intercommunity of thoughts and feelings, so long as there is an absolute separation, an insurmountable barrier fixed between the present, and the future, so that I neither am, nor can possibly be affected at present by what I am to feel hereafter, I am not to any moral or practical purpose the same being. Natural impossibilities cannot be made to give way to a mere courtesy of expression. "But I know that I shall become that being." Then my interest in it is founded on that knowledge, and not on an event which not only is not felt by my mind, but is itself yet to come, viz. the transition of my present into my future being. How does it signify to me what I shall hereafter feel, or how can it influence my present conduct, or how ought it to do so but because, and in as far as, I have some idea of it beforehand[1]? The injury that I may do to my future interest will not certainly by any kind of reaction return to punish me for my neglect of my own happiness. In this sense, I am always free from the consequences of my actions.—
- ↑ The distinction between the motives to action and the reasons for it cannot affect the argument here insisted on. When it is said, that though I am not really governed by such and such motives, I ought to be governed by them, this must mean (or it means nothing) that such would be the effect of a proper exertion of my faculties. The obligation to act in this or that manner must therefore be deduced from the nature of those faculties, and the possibility of their being impressed in a certain manner by certain objects.
