What makes the same man? Nor let any one think that the questions
I have here proposed about the identity of man are bare empty
speculations; which, if they were, would be enough to show, that there
was in the understandings of men no innate idea of identity. He that
shall with a little attention reflect on the resurrection, and
consider that divine justice will bring to judgment, at the last
day, the very same persons, to be happy or miserable in the other, who
did well or ill in this life, will find it perhaps not easy to resolve
with himself, what makes the same man, or wherein identity consists;
and will not be forward to think he, and every one, even children
themselves, have naturally a clear idea of it.
6. Whole and part, not innate ideas. Let us examine that principle
of mathematics, viz. that the whole is bigger than a part. This, I
take it, is reckoned amongst innate principles. I am sure it has as
good a title as any to be thought so; which yet nobody can think it to
be, when he considers [that] the ideas it comprehends in it, whole and
part, are perfectly relative; but the positive ideas to which they
properly and immediately belong are extension and number, of which
alone whole and part are relations. So that if whole and part are
innate ideas, extension and number must be so too; it being impossible
to have an idea of a relation, without having any at all of the
thing to which it belongs, and in which it is founded.
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