23. Consciousness alone unites remote existences into one person.
Nothing but consciousness can unite remote
existences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever substance there is, however
framed, without consciousness there is no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance
be so, without consciousness.
Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same body, the one constantly by day,
the other by night; and, on the other side, the same consciousness, acting by intervals, two distinct bodies: I ask, in
the first case, whether the day and the night--man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato?
And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the
same in two distinct clothings? Nor is it at all material to say, that this same, and this distinct consciousness, in the
cases above mentioned, is owing to the same and distinct immaterial substances, bringing it with them to those
bodies; which, whether true or no, alters not the case: since it is evident the personal identity would equally be
determined by the consciousness, whether that consciousness were annexed to some individual immaterial
substance or no. For, granting that the thinking substance in man must be necessarily supposed immaterial, it is
evident that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again:
as appears in the forgetfulness men often have of their past actions; and the mind many times recovers the
memory of a past consciousness, which it had lost for twenty years together. Make these intervals of memory and
forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by day and night, and you have two persons with the same immaterial
spirit, as much as in the former instance two persons with the same body. So that self is not determined by identity
or diversity of substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness.
