To forego it does not necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere.
Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate.

But to part with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewell of the soul.

The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such a thought.
The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever it may originally have been.

It is a something we inherited from our ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our descendants.

How far back this consciousness has been felt passes the possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it necessarily followed the fact.