5. Identity of animals. The case is not so much different in
brutes but that any one may hence see what makes an animal and
continues it the same. Something we have like this in machines, and
may serve to illustrate it. For example, what is a watch? It is
plain it is nothing but a fit organization or construction of parts to
a certain end, which, when a sufficient force is added to it, it is
capable to attain. If we would suppose this machine one continued
body, all whose organized parts were repaired, increased, or
diminished by a constant addition or separation of insensible parts,
with one common life, we should have something very much like the body
of an animal; with this difference, That, in an animal the fitness
of the organization, and the motion wherein life consists, begin
together, the motion coming from within; but in machines the force
coming sensibly from without, is often away when the organ is in
order, and well fitted to receive it.
6. The identity of man. This also shows wherein the identity of
the same man consists; viz. in nothing but a participation of the same
continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in
succession vitally united to the same organized body. He that shall
place the identity of man in anything else, but, like that of other
animals, in one fitly organized body, taken in any one instant, and
from thence continued, under one organization of life, in several
successively fleeting particles of matter united to it, will find it
hard to make an embryo, one of years, mad and sober, the same man,
by any supposition, that will not make it possible for Seth, Ismael,
Socrates, Pilate, St.
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