Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/135

Ch. 4. our idea of sameness is not so settled and clear as to deserve to be thought innate in us. For if those innate ideas are not clear and distinct, so as to be universally known, and naturally agreed on, they cannot be subjects of universal and undoubted truths; but will be the unavoidable occasion of perpetual uncertainty. For, I suppose, every one's idea of identity will not be the same that Pythagoras and others of his followers have: And which then shall be true? Which innate? Or are there two different ideas of identity, both innate?

§ 5. 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 show that there was in the understandings of men no innate idea of identity. He that shall, with a little attention, reflect on the resurrection, and consider that divine justice will bring to judgment, at the last day, the very same persons, to be happy or miserable in the other, who did well or ill in this life; will find it perhaps not easy to resolve with himself what makes the same man, or wherein identity consists: and will not be forward to think he, and every one, even children themselves, have naturally a clear idea of it.

§ 6. Let us examine that principle of mathematics, viz. "that the whole is bigger than a part." This, I take it, is reckoned amongst innate principles. I am sure it has as good a title as any to be thought so; which yet nobody can think it to be, when he considers the ideas it comprehends in it, "whole and part," are perfectly relative: but the positive ideas, to which they properly and immediately belong, are extension and number, of which alone whole and part are relations. So that if whole and part are innate ideas, extension and number must be so too; it being impossible to have an idea of a relation, without having any at all of the thing to which it belongs, and in which it is