Identity

“ 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. ”

“ And every unity, every identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it. ”

“ It is therefore Being as Ideality.—It is important to come to a proper understanding on the true meaning of Identity: and, for that purpose, we must especially guard against taking it as abstract Identity, to the exclusion of all Difference. That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone deserves the name of philosophy. Identity in its truth, as an Ideality of what immediately is, is a high category for our religious modes of mind as well as all other forms of thought and mental activity. ”

“ Nor let any one think, that the Questions, I have here proposed, about the Identity of Man, are bare, empty Speculations; which if they were, would be enough to shew, That there was in the Understandings of Men no innate Idea of Identity. ”

“ In order that I may possess a proper personal identity so as to live, breathe, and feel along the whole line of my existence in the same intense and intimate mode, it is absolutely necessary to have some general medium or faculty by which my successive impressions are blended and amalgamated together, and to maintain and support this extraordinary interest. ”

“ IDENTITY may be esteemed a second species of relation. This relation I here consider as applied in its strictest sense to constant and unchangeable objects; without examining the nature and foundation of personal identity, which shall find its place afterwards. Of all relations the most universal is that of identity, being common to every being whose existence has any duration. ”

“ If you took two terms which had no more visibly in common than the fact that they exist or are thought, yet the comparison still has a result. You have stated the truth that existence or thought is an identity which somehow has within it these diversities, and that they somehow are connected in and qualify this unity. ”

“ The ideas of identity and distinction originate in the ideas of being and of not-being; and thus the idea of copulative being, which affirms the identity of a predicate with a subject, flows also in a manner from the idea of substantive being. ”

“ The knowledge of our mind as a substance, and the belief of our identity during successive feelings, may be considered as the [201] same notion, expressed in different words. Our identity is the unity and sameness of that which thinks and feels,—itself substantially unchanged amid the endless variety of its thoughts and feelings,—capable of existing separately in all these different states ”

“ The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. ”

“ It must be the mind itself, standing above the senses, which performs the identification. Thus the ideas of identity and difference are not yielded to me by my senses. The intellect itself introduces them into things. ”

“ The identity, which we are to consider, is, as I have already said, the identity only of the principle which feels and thinks, without regard to the changeable state of the particles of the brain, or of the body in general. This unity and permanence of the principle, which thinks, if we had still to invent a phrase, I would rather call mental identity, than personal identity, though the latter phrase may now be considered as almost fixed by the general use of philosophers. ”

“ The nature or essence of any individual would seem to imply in its very concept a transcendental relation of specific identity with all other actual and possible individual embodiments of this essence. ”

“ The identity of man. This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists ; viz. in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body. ”

“ As we have seen, besides, Identity is undoubtedly a negative,—not however an abstract empty Nought, but the negation of Being and its characteristics. Being so, Identity is at the same time self-relation, and, what is more, negative self-relation; in other words, it draws a distinction between it and itself. ”

“ This functional identity seems really the only sort of identity in the thinker which the facts require us to suppose. Successive thinkers, numerically distinct, but all aware of the same past in the same way, form an adequate vehicle for all the experience of personal unity and sameness which we actually have. ”

“ Here, identity is lost in public spirit. Here, a studious observance of the rights of others is ever manifested. Here, the principles fostered by those noble old pioneers are infused into the minds of their successors. ”

“ Our consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essential simplicity: the owner of the various constituents of the self, as we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Ego whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real entity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly aware. ”

“ In one word, to fix the human personality, to give to each human being an identity, an individuality that can be depended upon with certainty, lasting, unchangeable, always recognisable and easily adduced, this appears to be in the largest sense the aim of the new method. ”

“ The inward sense attests with irresistible certainty the identity of the me. This unity, this identity, is as certain, as evident to the child who begins to feel pleasure or pain, and is sure that he is one and the same that experiences both impressions, as they are to the [Pg 186] philosopher who has spent long years in profoundly investigating the idea of the me and the unity of consciousness. ”

“ The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion, which is of great importance in the present affair, viz. that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties. Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. ”

“ By this means we make a difference betwixt the idea meant by the word object and that meant by itself without going the length of number, and at the same time without restraining ourselves to a strict and absolute unity.’ In other words, identity means the unity of a thing through a multiplicity of times ”

“ The many vexed questions that arise concerning individual identity are metaphysical rather than psychological. But it Individual Identity. will serve to bring out the difference between the two forms of identity to note that an identification cannot be established solely by qualitative comparison; an alibi or a breach of temporal continuity will turn the flank of the strongest argument from resemblance. ”

“ But, as, notwithstanding this distinction and separability, we suppose the whole train of perceptions to be united by identity, a question naturally arises concerning this relation of identity; whether it be something that really binds our several perceptions together, or only associates their ideas in the imagination. That is, in other words, whether in pronouncing concerning the identity of a person, we observe some real bond among his perceptions, or only feel one among the ideas we form of them. ”

“ Such a body, to the continuance and identity whereof we attach the continuance and identity of our personality, and which we posit as a complete articulated whole, and in which we posit ourselves as having causality immediately through our will, is what we call our body. ”

“ It is this greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my future feelings, that in a manner identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen it’s habitual propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth which they can never have. ”

“ But because not all identity is between qualities in one sense of that term, it does not follow that any identity can fail to be qualitative in a broader sense, and thus the whole alternative disappears. ”

“ And essential to any method of analysis is the recognition of the individuality of the individual. Constitutional differences of a radical nature may be concealed beneath apparent identity of external form. ”

“ In their stead we have craftily devised conventions, such as that becoming shall mean being, and that for our purposes relative identity may, under the proper precautions, serve as well as absolute. But we stand unalterably committed to the postulate that identity there shall be, though everywhere we have to make it and by force to fit it on the facts. ”

“ We now proceed to explain the nature of personal identity, which has become so great a question in philosophy, especially of late years in England where all the abstruser sciences are study'd with a peculiar ardour and application. ”

“ Against these assertions I shall put some others, viz. that identity and diversity, sameness and difference, imply one another, and depend for their meaning on one another; that mere diversity is nonsense, just as mere identity is also nonsense; that resemblance or likeness, strictly speaking, falls not in the objects, but in the person contemplating (likening, ver-gleichend) ; that ‘is A really like B?’ does not mean ‘does it seem like?’ It may mean ‘would it seem like to everybody?’ but it generally means ‘is there an “objective identity”? ”

“ But as the interruption of the appearance seems contrary to the identity, and naturally leads us to regard these resembling perceptions as different from each other, we here find ourselves at a loss how to reconcile such opposite opinions. The smooth passage of the imagination along the ideas of the resembling perceptions makes us ascribe to them a perfect identity. ”

“ An individual sound, I, has relation, therefore, to Centre and to Point generally. As such it stands representatively for the Soul or Identity or Central Individuality of Being—for that which gives to anything its distinctive character, as existing in the Point or the Unit, or the Atom, or in any Individual Object or Thing from the Atom up to a World and to the Universe as a whole. Identity is, perhaps, the best single term furnished by our Language to signify this basic idea. Individuality approximates the meaning. ”

“ We should, therefore, regard as a form of heredity and organic identity through ages, everything that maintains among a people continuity of character, spirit, habits, and aptitudes; in short, a national consciousness and a national will. ”

“ Wherefore, the man, or that thing which is to be the knower, must have had individuality or personality, from other principles, antecedently to this knowledge, called consciousness: and, consequently, he will retain his identity, or continue the same man, or (which is equivalent) the same person, as long as he has those individuating principles.... ”

“ Upon your death, your records, identity specifications, and the morontia entity of the human soul—conjointly evolved by the ministry of mortal mind and the divine Adjuster—are faithfully conserved by the destiny guardian together with all other values related to your future existence, everything that constitutes you, the real you, except the identity of continuing existence represented by the departing Adjuster and the actuality of personality. ”

“ The idea of the identity of the individual among the more complex and perfect forms of existence in the two kingdoms of life may be dismissed, because the methods of propagation in the two are far from the same. ”