Criticism of Locke
That Personality is not a permanent, but a transient thing: That it lives and dies, begins and ends, continually: That no one can any more remain one and the same person two Moments together, than two successive Moments can be one and the same Moment: that our Substance is indeed continually changing; but whether this be so or not, is, it seems, nothing to the purpose; since it is not Substance, but Consciousness alone, which constitutes Personality; which Consciousness, being successive, cannot be the same in any two Moments, nor consequently the personality constituted by it." And from hence it must follow, that it is a Fallacy upon Ourselves, to charge our present Selves with any thing we did, or to imagine our present Selves interested in any thing which befell us, yesterday, or that our present Self will be interested in what will befall us to morrow; since our present Self is not, in Reality, the same with the Self of Yesterday, but another like Self or Person coming in its Room, and mistaken for it; to which another Self will succeed to morrow.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Butler
Famous quotes containing the words criticism and/or locke:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (18991961)
“What greater light can be hoped for in the moral sciences? The subject part of mankind in most places might, instead thereof, with Egyptian bondage expect Egyptian darkness, were not the candle of the Lord set up by himself in mens minds, which it is impossible for the breath or power of man wholly to extinguish.”
—John Locke (16321704)