An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2Locke, John
Philosophy
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1: MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2
Locke, John
Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800
This also shows wherein the identity of the same MAN consists; viz. in
nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly
fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same
organized body. He that shall place the identity of man in anything
else, but, like that of other animals, in one fitly organized body,
taken in any one instant, and from thence continued, under one
organization of life, in several successively fleeting particles of
matter united to it, will find it hard to make an embryo, one of years,
mad and sober, the SAME man, by any supposition, that will not make it
possible for Seth, Ismael, Socrates, Pilate, St. Austin, and Caesar
Borgia, to be the same man. For if the identity of SOUL ALONE makes the
same MAN; and there be nothing in the nature of matter why the same
individual spirit may not be united to different bodies, it will be
possible that those men, living in distant ages, and of different
tempers, may have been the same man: which way of speaking must be from
a very strange use of the word man, applied to an idea out of which
body and shape are excluded. And that way of speaking would agree yet
worse with the notions of those philosophers who allow of
transmigration, and are of opinion that the souls of men may, for their
miscarriages, be detruded into the bodies of beasts, as fit
habitations, with organs suited to the satisfaction of their brutal
inclinations. But yet I think nobody, could he be sure that the SOUL of
Heliogabalus were in one of his hogs, would yet say that hog were a MAN
or Heliogabalus.
8. Idea of Identity suited to the Idea it is applied to.
It is not therefore unity of substance that comprehends all sorts of
identity, or will determine it in every case; but to conceive and judge
of it aright, we must consider what idea the word it is applied to
stands for: it being one thing to be the same SUBSTANCE, another the
same MAN, and a third the same PERSON, if PERSON, MAN, and SUBSTANCE,
are three names standing for three different ideas;—for such as is the
idea belonging to that name, such must be the identity; which, if it
had been a little more carefully attended to, would possibly have
prevented a great deal of that confusion which often occurs about this
matter, with no small seeming difficulties, especially concerning
PERSONAL identity, which therefore we shall in the next place a little
consider.
9. Same man.
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