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• It is in the spirit of his earlier distinction between the natural and the moral man that Locke initiated the discussion of personal identity in the chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’. A man, he argued, is as such like any other animal, a ‘living organized Body’ the principle of unity and continuity of which is its life. In common speech, ‘man’ simply means an animal of a certain form. It is easily shown, Locke thought, that the traditional definition, rational animal, falls short: an irrational animal in the ‘shape and make’ of a man would ordinarily be called a man, while we would count an animal which had the shape of a parrot, but which could ‘discourse, reason and philosophize’, as ‘a very intelligent rational Parrot’. A view to which Locke took specific objection was the doctrine (capable of either an Aristotelian or a Cartesian interpretation) that ‘the Identity of Soul alone makes the same Man’. He argued against it that we can at least make sense of the Platonic hypothesis of transmigration, according to which the same immaterial soul is successively united to the bodies of different men, or even to the bodies of men and lower animals.
• In the light of this criticism of traditional views of what a man is, Locke then proceeded to offer his own careful definition of a person. ‘a thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places’. He wished to derive the principle of individuation of a ‘thinking thing’ from the nature of thinking itself: it is ‘that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems . . . essential to it. It being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive’. Locke was appealing to the orthodox Cartesian notion of our necessary reflexive awareness of all our mental activity. This reflexive consciousness or apperception is what unifies ‘our present Sensations and Perceptions’, and ‘can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought’. Neatly, the defining attribute of a person supplies the principle of personal unity and, ipso facto, the principle of personal continuity. Even more neatly, Locke’s explanation of these interconnected logical functions of consciousness came only after he had explained the supposedly similar role of life as the defining attribute, the principle of unity and the principle of continuity of living things.
• The analogy between life and consciousness supplied the main framework for Locke’s argument that the identity of the moral agent is conceptually independent of any particular theory about the nature, number and continuity of whatever, at the substantial level, underlies. that phenomenal identity. The underlying substance may be ‘Spiritual, or Material, Simple, or Compounded, it matters not. Hence neither the unity of consciousness nor moral experience and reflection on the conditions of divine justice afford any reason for belief in simple immaterial souls. On the contrary, just as life, is an organizing principle which unites a variety of ‘fleeting’ or ever-changing parts into one continuing animal, so consciousness is a principle which unites what is at least possibly a variety of fleeting parts into one person. To fail to see that, Locke implied, is to introduce the possibility of an alarming scepticism about personal identity, since we can rationally do no more than confess our ignorance or, at best, offer speculative hypotheses as to the substance or substances underlying thought. At the same time, he was not claiming that it is absolutely or metaphysically possible that the seat of consciousness is a system of fleeting parts, material or immaterial. The possibility he was concerned with was the epistemic possibility left open by our inadequate ideas: nothing in our idea of a finite self-conscious thinking thing entails either its simplicity or its immateriality. Locke was prepared to say that the most probable ‘opinion’ or ‘hypothesis’ is that the seat of consciousness is a simple immaterial soul. But it could well be, for all that we can be certain of, that a finite thinking thing must comprise material organs and ‘a certain System of fleeting Animal Spirits’.
• Such, then, was Locke’s strategy. The precise course and details of his argument are sometimes rather less clear. Immediately after his first statement that the identity of the self is determined by consciousness, a tortuous discussion begins with an explanation of why ‘it is farther enquir’d whether [the self] be the same Identical Substance’. Was Locke thinking of inquiries actually made by his contemporaries? It is reasonable to assume that he again had in mind the controversy over ^he resurrection. If so, he was in effect raising the following question: the principle of personal continuity, recognized in our ordinary concept of a person, is consciousness, why was the dispute as to the principium individuationis of the resurrectable self or moral agent so generally framed in terms of the identity of substance,, whether soul, body or both in substantial union? An obvious answer to this question lies in the traditional principle that the identity of accidents or non-substances is dependent on the identity of substances, never the reverse. Where else is there to look for the identity of a substantial self if not in substantial identity, whether of matter or form, body or soul? Even Hobbes, in advancing a mechanistic account of animal and human identity similar to Locke’s, had thought fit to distinguish ‘form’ from ‘accident’. The defining shape of a ship is an accident, such that it (and the ship) remains numerically the same only in so far as the substance or matter is the same. But a man is defined by a ‘form’ or ‘beginning of motion’: ‘that man will be always the same, whose actions and thoughts proceed all from the same beginning of motion, namely that which was in his generation’. Hobbes, by borrowing the term ‘form’, dressed his radical departure from tradition in traditional clothes. Locke was in effect following him in claiming that life, although a mechanical process, is not a mere accident of matter but a principle of substantial unity and continuity. Yet Locke differed from Hobbes in finding another such principle in consciousness. The present passage seems to contain an admission that this latter principle commonly fails to satisfy us: we want the self to enjoy the continuity of underlying substance too.
• Locke attributed such misguided concern to imperfections in the continuity of consciousness: both failures of memory and interruptions of consciousness have stimulated in us the doubt whether the same subject underlies the phenomenal train of consciousness throughout, lose ‘sight of our past selves’. In response he drew a distinction. Doubt which surfaces as the doubt ‘whether we are the same thinking thing; i.e. the same substance or no’, may be reasonable, but the ‘thinking thing’ in this sense should not be confused with the ‘thinking thing’ which is the self or person: ‘Different Substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one Person; as well as different Bodies, by the same Life are united into one Animal.’
• That the identity of substance is irrelevant to personal continuity is shown, Locke went on to suggest, by
  our very Bodies, all whose Particles, whilst vitally united to this same thinking conscious self, so that we feel when they are touch’d, and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that happens to them, are a part of our selves.
  These words were evidently chosen with care, and they both echoed and deliberately distorted the orthodox Cartesian doctrine that a person is a ‘vital union’ of soul and body. Locke agreed that we consist in such a union of that which thinks in us with the parts of the body of which we are intimately conscious, (But) denied that our continuous identity requires the continuous identity of either material or immaterial substance. On the contrary, the role of the body as a part of the self illustrates the absence of any such requirement. If we cut off a hand, then the substance of the self is changed, although the self or person remains the same.
• Here, unusually, Locke used ‘body’ as we all do, as something itself capable of surviving a change of parts. But we can perhaps better sympathize with his official, ‘strict and philosophical’ use of ‘the same body’ (despite the criticisms brought against it in chapter, above) if we see it as being partly determined by the problem of the resurrection. Indeed, the threefold distinction between the identity of substance (whether the same ‘body’ or the same ‘soul’), the identity of the man (or ‘living organized body’) and the identity of the person owed its existence, in all probability, to this problem and to the argument which surrounded it. Locke was able to distinguish clearly and consistently between several questions at issue: ^whether the resurrected be composed oi the same particles as its natural predecessor it will share the same principle of life (Le. whether there will be the same man, in Locke’s terminology); and whether it will share the same immaterial soul. His own proposal, embodied in his new (or nearly new) account of what makes ‘the same person’, was to set aside these questions (except in so far as a mechanistic understanding of life answers the second in the negative) in favour of the principle that the same self- conscious, rational being will be resurrected. Yet such a proposal could only Ke a serious rival to the existing proposals if it could be shown that rational consciousness is not a mere power or accident, as irrelevant to the identity of its possessor as musicality is irrelevant to the identity of the musician. It was precisely that theoretical aim which motivated Locke’s insistence that life is a non-substantial principle of substantial unity, and that consciousness is relevantly just like life. The philosophical critic of Locke must decide: does the trick work?
• The claim that consciousness would constitute a distinct principle of individuation whatever supposition we made about the underlying substantial basis of consciousness comes under the greatest theoretical pressure, of course, with the supposition on which the analogy with life supervening on flux is least compelling, i.e. when what is supposed for the sake of argument is the Platonic-Cartesian hypothesis of a simple immaterial soul. How, on that special hypothesis, could a distinction possibly be drawn between the self which thinks and the underlying substance which thinks? Locke, bravely enough, faced up to the question explicitly, but the section in which he did so is singularly ambiguous. In the previous section he had again called on the alleged intelligibility of transmigration in order to drive a wedge between the continuity of the soul and the continuity of the self: only if migrating souls kept their memories, would personal identity be preserved. Yet when he turned to the reverse possibility, personal continuity through a change of simple immaterial substances, his argument seems understandably to have faltered. Such a transfer of consciousness between even simple substances cannot, he claimed, be ruled out in our state of ignorance. For there is no evident theoretical reason ‘why one intellectual Substance may not have represented to it, as done by itself, what it never did, and was perhaps done by some other Agent’. Yet to put the possibility this way seems an endorsement of the view that it would be a kind of illusion, and therefore a source of injustice, if such a transfer occurred:
  that it never is so, will by us, till we have clearer views of the Nature of thinking Substances, be best resolv’d into the Goodness of God, who as far as the Happiness or Misery of any of his sensible Creatures is concerned in it, will not by a fatal Error of theirs transfer from one to another, that consciousness, which draws Reward or Punishment with it.
  The apparent incoherence in Locke’s argument is only made more apparent by what immediately follows: if the same consciousness can ‘be transferr’d from one thinking Substance to another’, in that case ‘it will be possible, that two thinking Substances may make but one Person. For the same consciousness being preserved . . . the personal Identity is preserv’d’. The obvious problem of interpretation lies in the question how Locke could have advanced this conclusion in the same breath as he seems to have accepted that the transfer of consciousness (i.e. of memories of what that person did and suffered) would involve mistake and illusion. And if the person is the morally significant agent, what is unjust in punishing the person for the act represented in the transferred memory? Perhaps Locke couldn’t help feeling that such punishment would be bad luck on the last-coming immaterial substance, which, as a subject of thought, presumably has its feelings too. A rather odd, unless ironical suggestion that there might here be a consideration counting against ‘those who would place Thinking in a System of fleeting animal Spirits’ is reminiscent of those advocates of the resurrection of the same body who solemnly appealed to the moral fitness of the same particles’ composing the object of punishment as composed the sinner while sinning. Perhaps, then, as one commentator has proposed, the whole argument here is ironically concessive: the transference of memory would involve illusion i£~ as some hold dogmatically, souls and selves are identical; yet it still could not be ruled out in principle by any knowledge such philosophers can pretend to have. On the other hand, the supposition of the wholesale transference of consciousness from one distinct simple substance to another takes us so far from the analogy with organic life supervening on flux that it would be unsurprising if Locke had had some sceptical qualms about the rigid application of his doctrine in such a case. There seems nothing particularly ironical about his reassurance that God would not be a party to injustice.
• It would perhaps be helpful at this point to review Locke’s account, indeterminate and shifting as it is, of the uniting function of consciousness. At its introduction into the argument, consciousness was said to unite such items as sensations, perceptions, thoughts and actions: in general, modes or operations of the mind which are necessarily self- conscious. Yet in the following discussion Locke invited his reader to see consciousness as uniting substantial parts, and that in two ways. First, the unknown, material or immaterial, simple or complex substance which underlies and sustains a single consciousness is ‘united into one Person’ by that consciousness. Second, the intimate consciousness we have of the outlying parts of the Body incorporates them too into ‘our thinking conscious self’. There seems to be an uneasy slide here from the substance which constitutes the subject of consciousness to the substance which is a peculiar intentional object of consciousness.
• Locke’s example of a part of the body united to the self by consciousness is a little finger. A little finger, unlike the brain, is normally an object of feeling and may be the object of a pain, but it is not a part of the physical basis of consciousness as the brain is, or as immaterial substance was supposed to be. There are accordingly, on Locke’s account, two quite different ways in which consciousness unites over time. Our past thoughts and (presumably) our past bodies are commonly the intentional objects of present consciousness, whereas the past substance which thought in us (the substantial basis of consciousness) is linked to the present such substance on quite other grounds. In each case there may seem to be room for some analogy with life, but simply in there being two such very different grounds of unity and continuity the general analogy with life breaks down. (That is unsurprising enough, since life has no intentional objects.) Unlike life, for instance, consciousness is for ever being interrupted, and it is through the intentionality of its successive states that it is supposed to span the gaps. Indeed there are on Locke’s account two fundamentally different ways in which ‘one consciousness’ may be either continuous or gappy: first, like one life, simply as a natural process; and, second, in virtue of intentional relationships between its elements. In the first respect, it is interrupted by deep sleep, in the second respect, by forgetting. A significant part of the difficulty in interpreting the theory is the difficulty of knowing how these two sorts of continuity are supposed to be related, in general and in particular cases.
• Some see in Locke’s argument quite another conception of the uniting relation involved in consciousness. The series of supposed conceptual possibilities or imaginary cases by which he seeks to break the link in his readers’ minds between the self and the man, or between the self and the immaterial soul, is throughout imbued and directed by certain moral intuitions. Chief among these is the thought that reward and punishment simply do not make sense unless the recipient acknowledges the action in question as his own; and, on the other hand, that Fam ‘justly accountable for any Action . . . appropriated to me now by this self-consciousness’ Here, as others have pointed out, Locke was to some extent leaning on the connection, stronger then than now, between the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’ Another connection on which he put some pressure is between two senses of ‘own’, both of which appear in his assertion that
  That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join it self, makes the same Person . . . and so attributes to it self, and owns all the Actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no farther?
  In its first occurrence here ‘own’ means acknowledge, while in its second it simply imports ownership in the barely logical sense. The verb ‘appropriate’ is another ambiguous term employed several times in the course of the chapter. Thus ‘person’
  is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit. . . . This personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present. . . . And therefore whatever past Actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in, than if they had never been done?
  These passages have led some commentators to argue that personal continuity is not for Locke a natural relation at all: what links past to present is not cognitive consciousness of the past in the sense of memory, but an act of moral concern or acknowledgement which sets up a kind of non-natural, proprietary relationship. On this view Locke’s notion of a person is so thoroughly ‘forensic’ (and so like the notion of legal property itself) that the identification of persons and questions of their continuity fall right outside the scope of ontology, being somehow concepts of pure ethics. His first edition distinction between the natural man and the moral man, discussed above, has been brought in further evidence?
• Such an interpretation, even in so far as it is at all clear, can hardly be sustained in the face of several features of Locke’s argument/first,'' his explicit identification of consciousness of the past with memory or recollection; second, his quasi-Cartesian explanation of ‘consciousness’ in terms of the necessary self-consciousness of mental operations; third, the crucial analog)' between consciousness and life as natural unifying principles overlaying a flux of substance. It is memory in a straightforward sense which for Locke both ties past actions to the present and excites such moral concern as the acknowledgement of guilt. Consciousness is distinct from conscience, and prior to it. The point in associating them was to find reason for identifying the individual ‘thinking thing'’ (i.e. that which is distinguished and united, at the experiential level, by consciousness) with the ‘legal’ individual, the moral agent subject to law', responsible for a past and concerned for a future. If Locke saw the class of persons as important for ethics rather than for biology, that does not mean that self-conscious rationality, which defines that class and unifies each of its members, is anything but a natural attribute.
• The idea that one’s body and actions are ‘property' in a legal sense was not novel in Locke’s time. According to earlier Natural Law theory, each man has a sphere of what is ‘his own’ or ‘suum’ over which he has rights. The primitive or original or natural ‘suum’ includes, according to Grotius, life, body, limbs, reputation, honour and actiones propriae, our own actions. Thus all wrong-doing or iniuria (including, for example, murder) is treated as an infringement of property rights. Property in the normal sense is in turn treated as a conventional extension of the sphere of that which is one’s own by nature. Such a model is not absurd. That actions are legal property is a natural thought, since we can sell them. To take the fruits of another’s actions is to invade his property rights over his actions, to invade his personal sphere. The effect of the theory, however, is to blur the distinction between violence to the person and violence to property, not to speak of the distinction between the person and his property.
• The same rhetorical assimilation of what is legally or morally ‘ours’ to what is physically or naturally ‘ours’ found expression in the Second Treatise of Government: not only in the famous notion that, by ‘mixing his labour’ with objects and land, a man extends his ownership of his own actions to material things; but also in the possibly less serious assertion that the
  Fruit or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian . . . must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life.
  Legal incorporation is, as it were, founded on the paradigm of the physical incorporation necessary for the benefit of food to the hunter-gatherer. Yet, despite the connection that Locke’s rhetoric drew between them, his view allows for quite different relations of ‘ownership’. His account of the boundary-conditions of a person is an account of the most fundamental core of natural ‘property’ which is ‘ours’, in the sense that it, either literally and physically composes us, or is as inseparable from us as act from agent. It is true that external property is united to us by a merely legal or moral relation, and in the most primitive cases by an act of appropriation. Our actions themselves, on the other hand, not to speak of our experiences and the parts of our bodies, are ‘appropriated’ to us by an entirely natural and given principle of unity, namely consciousness, rather than by some acquisitive act of acknowledgement or ‘owning’ on our part.
• It is more than probable that there was yet another connection with previous Natural Law theory reflected in the rhetoric of II.xxvii, a connection which has to do, not with property, but with authority. Hobbes, had distinguished a ‘natural person’, a man whose words and actions are ‘considered as his own’, from an ‘artificial person’, whose words and actions represent those of another man or institution by whose authority he acts: so to speak, whose mask or persona he wears. The ‘author’ owns, i.e. authorizes and takes responsibility for, the words and actions of the ‘actor’. In II.xxvii Locke was not, of course, concerned with such an external and artificial relationship as Hobbes had been, yet he employed the same term as had appeared in Hobbes’ explanation of that relationship to express and characterize the internal, natural relationship between moral agents and their own actions: a relation constituted not by an act of ‘owning’, but by the natural unity of consciousness.