Human laws punish
both, with a justice suitable to their way of knowledge;- because,
in these cases, they cannot distinguish certainly what is real, what
counterfeit: and so the ignorance in drunkenness or sleep is not
admitted as a plea. For, though punishment be annexed to
personality, and personality to consciousness, and the drunkard
perhaps be not conscious of what he did, yet human judicatures
justly punish him; because the fact is proved against him, but want of
consciousness cannot be proved for him. But in the Great Day,
wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, 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 conscience
accusing or excusing him.
23. Consciousness alone unites remote existences into one person.
Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same
person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever
substance there is, however framed, without consciousness there is
no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of
substance be so, without consciousness.
Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses
acting the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night;
and, on the other side, the same consciousness, acting by intervals,
two distinct bodies: I ask, in the first case, whether the day and the
night- man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato?
And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in
two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct
clothings? Nor is it at all material to say, that this same, and
this distinct consciousness, in the cases above mentioned, is owing to
the same and distinct immaterial substances, bringing it with them
to those bodies; which, whether true or no, alters not the case: since
it is evident the personal identity would equally be determined by the
consciousness, whether that consciousness were annexed to some
individual immaterial substance or no.
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