It may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to
answer for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his
consciousness accusing or excusing. 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?
Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in
pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these
verifiable facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a
merely curious speculation. Locke, compromiser that he was,
passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our
consciousness. But his successor Hume, and most empirical
psychologists after him, have denied the soul, save as the name for
verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the
stream of experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change
value in the way of 'ideas' and their peculiar connexions with each
other. As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is good or 'true'
for just SO MUCH, but no more.
The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of
'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit
up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle.
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