[4] But meanwhile, behind this unknown substance, whether of spirit or of body, the self-consciousness, which has been treated as its occasional unessential operation, re-asserts itself as the self which claims both body and spirit, the immaterial no less than the material substance, as its own, and throughout whatever diversity in these maintains its own identity. [1] See above, paragraph 94 and the following. [2] See above, paragraph 125. [3] Locke, Essay ii. chap. i. sec. 10, etc. [4] See above, paragraph 106, near the end. We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self. 134. Just, then, as Locke’s conception of outward reality grows under his hands into a conception of nature as a system of relations which breaks through the limitations of reality as constituted by mere _individua_, so it is with the self, as he conceived it. It is not a simple idea. It is not one of the train that is for ever passing, ‘one going and another coming,’ for it looks on this succession as that which it experiences, being itself the same throughout the successive differences (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9, and chap. xxvii. sec. 9). As little can it be adjusted to any of the conditions of real ‘things,’ thinking or unthinking, which he ordinarily recognises. It has no ‘particularity in space and time.’ That which is past in ‘reality’ is to it present. It is ‘in its nature indifferent to any parcel of matter.’ It is the same with itself yesterday and to-day, here and there. That ‘with which its consciousness can join itself is one self with it,’ and it can so join itself with substances apart in space and remote in time (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 9, 13, 14, 17). For speaking of it as eternal, indeed, we could find no warrant in Locke. He does not so clearly distinguish it from the ‘thinking thing’ supposed to be within each man, that has ‘had its determinate time and place of beginning to exist, relation to which determines its identity so long as it exists’ (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 2). Hence he supposed an actual limit to the past which it could make present--a limit seemingly fixed for each man at the farthest by the date of his birth--though he talks vaguely of the possibility of its range being extended (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 16). In the discussion of personal identity, however, the distinction gradually forces itself upon him, and he at last expressly says (sec. 16), that if the same Socrates, sleeping and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness (as according to Book II. chap. i. sec. 11 he certainly does not), ‘Socrates sleeping and waking is not the same person;’ whereas the ‘thinking thing’--the substance of which consciousness is a power sometimes exercised, sometimes not--is the same in the sleeping as in the waking Socrates. This is a pregnant admission, but it brings nothing to the birth in Locke himself. The inference which it suggests to his reader, that a self which does not slumber or sleep is not one which is born or