For, granting that the thinking
substance in man must be necessarily supposed immaterial, it is
evident that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its
past consciousness, and be restored to it again: as appears in the
forgetfulness men often have of their past actions; and the mind
many times recovers the memory of a past consciousness, which it had
lost for twenty years together. Make these intervals of memory and
forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by day and night, and
you have two persons with the same immaterial spirit, as much as in
the former instance two persons with the same body. So that self is
not determined by identity or diversity of substance, which it
cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness.
24. Not the substance with which the consciousness may be united.
Indeed it may conceive the substance whereof it is now made up to have
existed formerly, united in the same conscious being: but,
consciousness removed, that substance is no more itself, or makes no
more a part of it, than any other substance; as is evident in the
instance we have already given of a limb cut off, of whose heat, or
cold, or other affections, having no longer any consciousness, it is
no more of a man's self than any other matter of the universe. In like
manner it will be in reference to any immaterial substance, which is
void of that consciousness whereby I am myself to myself: if there
be any part of its existence which I cannot upon recollection join
with that present consciousness whereby I am now myself, it is, in
that part of its existence, no more myself than any other immaterial
being.
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