Same man.
I have taken care that the reader should have the story at large in the author's own words, because he seems to me
not to have thought it incredible; for it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough
to warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in a place where it had nothing to
do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he mentions as his friend, but on a Prince in whom he acknowledges
very great honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could not but also think
ridiculous. The Prince, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our author, who relates it from him, both of them
call this talker a parrot: and I ask any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this parrot, and all
of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for it this one did,--whether, I say, they would not have
passed for a race of rational animals; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed to be men, and
not parrots? For I presume it is not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that makes the idea of a man in
most people's sense: but of a body, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a man, the same
successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as the same immaterial spirit, go to the making of the same
man.
