And again:-


"It appeared to me that since this memory is connected with the body,
it must depend upon some change which must happen to the primitive
state of the sensible fibres by the action of objects. I have,
therefore, admitted as probable that the state of the fibres on which
an object has acted is not precisely the same after this action as it
was before I have conjectured that the sensible fibres experience
more or less durable modifications, which constitute the physics of
memory and recollection." {54b}


Professor Hering comes near to endorsing this view, and uses it for
the purpose of explaining personal identity. This, at least, is what
he does in fact, though perhaps hardly in words. I did not say more
upon the essence of personality than that it was inseparable from the
idea that the various phases of our existence should have flowed one
out of the other, "in what we see as a continuous, though it may be
at times a very troubled, stream" {55} but I maintained that the
identity between two successive generations was of essentially the
same kind as that existing between an infant and an octogenarian. I
thus left personal identity unexplained, though insisting that it was
the key to two apparently distinct sets of phenomena, the one of
which had been hitherto considered incompatible with our ideas
concerning it. Professor Hering insists on this too, but he gives us
farther insight into what personal identity is, and explains how it
is that the phenomena of heredity are phenomena also of personal
identity.