ARGUMENT FOR THE LIFE HEREAFTER

Argument for the Life Hereafter ~ 190 ~ survives in his original form. At all stages of his life, he thinks of himself as being the same ‘man’ that he was in the past, and this, in spite of the fact that no feature of his—eyes, ears, nose, hands, legs, hair, nails, etc. — has remained the same. Now if, along with the death of the body, the man inhabiting it died too, he should be diminished or depleted in some way by this total replacement of his cells. But this is not so. He remains quite distinct from and independent of the body, and retains his identity notwithstanding the death and decay of the body. Man is like a river. And the human personality is like an island in it, unaffected by the ceaseless flow of the cells. That is why a scientist has regarded life, or the human personality, as an independent entity that remains constant in the face of continuous change. He asserts that ‘personality is changelessness in change.’ Now if death means the end of the body, we might well say that whenever there is such a total replacement of cells in the body, the man actually dies on each occasion. And that if we see him moving about alive, he has really been resurrected. That is, a fifty-year old man would have experienced death at least five times within