| This proposition, therefore, can never be absurd with regard to perceptions. |
| When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions. |
| It is the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self. |
| We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. |
| Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of an oyster. |
| Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. |
| Consider it in that situation. |
| Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion. |
| The annihilation, which some people suppose to follow upon death, and which entirely destroys this self, is nothing but an extinction of all particular perceptions; love and hatred, pain and pleasure, thought and sensation. |
| These therefore must be the same with self; since the one cannot survive the other. |
| Is self the same with substance? If it be, how can that question have place, concerning the subsistence of self, under a change of substance? If they be distinct, what is the difference betwixt them? For my part, I have a notion of neither, when conceived distinct from particular perceptions. |
| Philosophers begin to be reconciled to the principle, that we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities. |
| This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions. |
| So far I seem to be attended with sufficient evidence. |
| But having thus loosened all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings coued have induced me to receive it. |
| If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. |
| But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding. |
| We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another. |
| It follows, therefore, that the thought alone finds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other. |
| However extraordinary this conclusion may seem, it need not surprize us. |
| Most philosophers seem inclined to think, that personal identity arises from consciousness; and consciousness is nothing but a reflected thought or perception. |