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
The soul, during sound sleep, thinks, say these men. Whilst it thinks
and perceives, it is capable certainly of those of delight or trouble,
as well as any other perceptions; and IT must necessarily be CONSCIOUS
of its own perceptions. But it has all this apart: the sleeping MAN, it
is plain, is conscious of nothing of all this. Let us suppose, then,
the soul of Castor, while he is sleeping, retired from his body; which
is no impossible supposition for the men I have here to do with, who so
liberally allow life, without a thinking soul, to all other animals.
These men cannot then judge it impossible, or a contradiction, that the
body should live without the soul; nor that the soul should subsist and
think, or have perception, even perception of happiness or misery,
without the body. Let us then, I say, suppose the soul of Castor
separated during his sleep from his body, to think apart. Let us
suppose, too, that it chooses for its scene of thinking the body of
another man, v. g. Pollux, who is sleeping without a soul. For, if
Castor’s soul can think, whilst Castor is asleep, what Castor is never
conscious of, it is no matter what PLACE it chooses to think in. We
have here, then, the bodies of two men with only one soul between them,
which we will suppose to sleep and wake by turns; and the soul still
thinking in the waking man, whereof the sleeping man is never
conscious, has never the least perception. I ask, then, whether Castor
and Pollux, thus with only one soul between them, which thinks and
perceives in one what the other is never conscious of, nor is concerned
for, are not two as distinct PERSONS as Castor and Hercules, or as
Socrates and Plato were? And whether one of them might not be very
happy, and the other very miserable? Just by the same reason, they make
the soul and the man two persons, who make the soul think apart what
the man is not conscious of. For, I suppose nobody will make identity
of persons to consist in the soul’s being united to the very same
numerical particles of matter. For if that be necessary to identity, it
will be impossible, in that constant flux of the particles of our
bodies, that any man should be the same person two days, or two
moments, together.
13. Impossible to convince those that sleep without dreaming, that they
think.
Thus, methinks, every drowsy nod shakes their doctrine, who teach that
the soul is always thinking. Those, at least, who do at any time SLEEP
WITHOUT DREAMING, can never be convinced that their thoughts are
sometimes for four hours busy without their knowing of it; and if they
are taken in the very act, waked in the middle of that sleeping
contemplation, can give no manner of account of it.
14. That men dream without remembering it, in vain urged.
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