26. "Person" a forensic term.
Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls
himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person. It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their
merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. This personality
extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,--whereby it becomes concerned
and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it
does the present. All which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness;
that which is conscious of pleasure and pain, desiring that that self that is conscious should be happy. And
therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be
no more concerned in than if they had never been done: and to receive pleasure or pain, i.e., reward or
punishment, on the account of any such action, is all one as to be made happy or miserable in its first being,
without any demerit at all. For, supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he
could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being
created miserable? And therefore, conformable to this, the apostle tells us, that, at the great day, when every one
shall "receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open." The sentence shall be justified
by the consciousness all persons shall have, that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what
substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions, and deserve that
punishment for them.
