“Allow me to ask if it is not possible that your strange thought as to your imagined doubleness is caused by your believing that memory is necessary to identity?”

“And that is error?” I asked.

“You say truly, sir; it is error.  Your own experience disproves it.  If memory is necessary, you have lost your personality; but you have a personality,—­permit me to say a strong one,—­and whose have you taken?”

“I do remember some things,” said I.

“Then do you not agree with me that your very memory is proof that you are not double?  But, if you please, take the case of any one.  Every one has been an infant, yet he cannot remember what happened when he was in swaddling clothes, though he is the same person now that he was then, which proves that although a person loses his memory, he does not on that account, sir, lose his identity.”

“Then what is the test of identity, Captain?”

“It needs none, sir; consciousness of self is involuntary.”

“I have consciousness of self; yet I do not know who I am, except that I am I.”

“Every man might say the same words, sir,” said he, smiling.

“And I am distinct? independent?”

“Jones, my dear fellow, there are many intelligent people in the world who, I dare say, would think us demented if they should know that we are seriously considering such a question.”

This did not seem very much of an answer to my mind, which in some inscrutable way seemed to be at this moment groping among fragments of thoughts that had come unbidden from the forgotten past.  I felt helpless in the presence of the Captain; I could not presume to press his good-nature.  Perhaps he saw my thought, for he added:  “A man is distinct from other men, but not from himself.  He constantly changes, and constantly remains the same.”

“That is hard to understand, Captain.”

“Everything, sir, is hard to understand, because everything means every other thing.  If we could fully comprehend one thing, even the least,—­if there be a least,—­we should necessarily comprehend all things,” said the Captain.

Then he talked at large of the relations that bind everything—­and of matter, force, spirit, which he called a trinity.

“Then matter is of the same nature with God?” I asked; “and God has the properties of matter?”

“By no means, sir.  God has none of the properties of matter.  Even our minds, sir, which are more nearly like unto God than is anything else we conceive, have no properties like matter.  Yet are we bound to matter, and our thoughts are limited.”

“How can the mind contemplate God at all?”

“By pure reason only, sir.  The imagination betrays.  We try to image force, because we think that we succeed in imaging matter.  We try to image spirit.  I suppose that most people have a notion as to how God looks.  Anything that has not extension is as nothing to our imagination.  Yet we know that our minds are real, though we cannot attribute extension to mind.  Divisibility is of matter; if the infinite mind has parts, then infinity is divisible—­which is a contradiction.”