7. The identity of man.
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.
