I will only mention Locke's treatment
of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to
its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so
much consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we
remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the
same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical
continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke
says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should WE
be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he
annexed the same consciousness to different souls, | should we, as
WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day
the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how
Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question
pragmatic:
Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once
was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more
than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him
once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then
finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal
identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and
punishment.
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