ons removed by death, and I could neither
think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution
of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive
what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any
one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a
different notion of _himself_, I must confess I can reason no
longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the
right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this
particular. He may perhaps perceive something simple and continued
which he calls _himself_, though I am certain there is no such
principle in me.

"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture
to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a
bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one
another with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux
and movement.... The mind is a kind of theatre, where several
perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide
away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
There is properly no _simplicity_ in it at one time, nor _identity_
in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine
that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must
not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only that
constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the
place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of
which it is composed.

"What then gives so great a propension to ascribe an identity to
these successive perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possessed of
an invariable and uninterrupted existence through the whole course
of our lives? In order to answer this question, we must distinguish
between personal identity as it regards our thought and
imagination, and as it regards our passions, or the concern we take
in ourselves. The first is our present subject; and to explain it
perfectly we must take the matter pretty deep, and account for that
identity which we attribute to plants and animals; there being a
great analogy betwixt it and the identity of a self or
person."--(I. pp. 321, 322.)

Perfect identity is exhibited by an object which remains unchanged
throughout a certain time; pe