for being at that instant what it is and nothing else, it is the same, and so must continue as long as its existence is continued; for so long it will be the same, and no other.’ (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 1-3). Relation of identity not to be distinguished from idea of it. 72. It is essential to bear in mind with regard to identity, as with regard to cause and effect, that no distinction according to Locke can legitimately be made between the relation and the idea of the relation. As to substance, it is true, he was driven in his controversy with Stillingfleet to distinguish between ‘the being and the idea thereof,’ but in dealing with relation he does not attempt any such violence to his proper system. Between the ‘idea’ as such and ‘being’ as such, his ‘new way of ideas,’ as Stillingfleet plaintively called it, left no fair room for distinction. In this indeed lay its permanent value for speculative thought. The distinction by which alone it could consistently seek to replace the old one, so as to meet the exigencies of language and knowledge, was that between simple ideas, as given and necessarily real, and the reproductions or combinations in which the mind may alter them. But since every relation implies a putting together of ideas, and is thus always, as Locke avows, a complex idea or the work of the mind, a distinction between its being and the idea thereof, in that sense of the distinction in which alone it can ever be consistently admitted by Locke, was clearly inadmissible. Thus in the passages before us the relation of identity is not explicitly treated as an original ‘being’ or ‘existence,’ It is an idea formed by the mind upon a certain ‘consideration of things’ being or existent. But on looking closely at Locke’s account, we find that it is only so far as it already belongs to, nay constitutes, the things, that it is formed upon consideration of them. This ‘invented’ relation forms the ‘very being of things’.