The definition of person in this passage as “a thinking, intelligent being,” etc., is not far removed from our own definition; but surely conscious thought is not “that which _makes_ every one to be what he calls self,” seeing that conscious thought is only an _activity_ or _function_ of the “rational being”. It is conscious thought, of course, including memory, that _reveals_ the “rational being” to himself as a self, and as the same or identical self throughout time; but unless the “rational being,” or the “thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection,” etc.—which is Locke’s own definition of “person”—were there all the time identical with itself, exercising those distinct and successive acts of consciousness and memory, and unifying them, how could these acts _even reveal_ the “person” or his “personal identity” to himself, not to speak of their _constituting_ personality or personal identity? It is perfectly plain that these acts _presuppose_ the “person,” the “thinking, intelligent being,” or, as we have expressed it, the “subsisting, rational, individual nature” _already constituted_; and it is equally plain that the “personal identity” which they _reveal_ is _constituted by_, and _consists simply in_, the duration or continued existence of this same subsisting individual rational nature; nor could these acts reveal any identity, personal or otherwise, unless they were the acts of one and the same actually subsisting, existing and persisting substance. Yet Locke thinks he can divorce personal identity from identity of substance, and account for the former independently of the latter. In face of the obvious difficulty that actual consciousness is not continuous but intermittent, he tries to maintain that the consciousness which links together present states with remembered states is sufficient to constitute personal identity even although there may have intervened between the present and the past states a complete change of substance, so that it is really a different substance which experiences the present states from that which experienced the past states. The question Whether we are the same thinking thing, _i.e._ the same substance or no ... concerns not personal identity at all: the question being, what makes the same person, and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person: different substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it), being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved, in that change of substances, by the unity of one continued life ... [for] animal identity is preserved in identity of life, and not of substance.(316)