Larger context for LACK in Corpus USbrown_UKbncw/US_brown.txt
One may be exasperatingly aware that if the answer is favorable it will be judged such only by those of one's own age.
But at least the question has been raised.
Many readers of this department no doubt discount certain of my opinions for the simple reason that they can guess pretty accurately, even if they have never actually been told, what my age is.
At least I should like them to know that I know these discounts are being made.
Let me then (and in public) glance into the mirror.
lack > 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 lack ing 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.