"Why, sir, it is no theory of mine, but the testimony of universal
consciousness, if you interrogate it aright, that the difference between
the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make
them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were
just speaking of--the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one
who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had
been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind--proves the entire
proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that
the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the
blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between
the two. He only hates the present man, and seeks vengeance on him in so
far as he thinks that he exults in remembering the injury his past self
did, or, if he does not exult, that he insults and humiliates him by the
bare fact of remembering it. That is the continuing offence which alone
keeps alive the avenger's wrath against him. His fault is not that he did
the injury, for _he_ did not do it, but that he remembers it.

"It is the first principle of justice, isn't it, that nobody ought to be
punished for what he can't help? Can the man of to-day prevent or affect
what he did yesterday, let me say, rather, what the man did out of whom
he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could
not check save by suicide. As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he
might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for
it. You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents.
Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as
the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday. Think you,
that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable,
that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing
on, to that old stem? For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man