Identity not Lost by Unconsciousness.
DR. BEATTIE, sometime of Aberdeen, where he died in the sixty-seventh year of his age, writes of identity thus: “It has been asked whether a continued consciousness of our being always the same does not constitute our sameness, or identity? No more, I should answer, than our perception of truth, light, or cold, is the efficient cause of truth, light or cold. Our identity is perceived by consciousness; but consciousness is as different from identity as the understanding is different from truth, as past events are different from memory, as colors from the power of seeing. Consciousness of identity is so far from constituting identity, that it presupposes it. An animal might continue the same being, and yet not be conscious of identity which is probably the case with many of the brute creation; nay, which is often the case with man himself. When we sleep without dreaming, or fall into a fainting fit, or rave in a fever, and often, too, in our ordinary dreams, we lose all sense of our identity, and yet never conceive that our identity has suffered any interruption or change; the moment we awake, or recover, we are conscious that we are the same individuals that we were before. “The following case, which M. CROZAZ gave in to the Academy of Sciences, is the most extraordinary instance of interrupted consciousness I have ever heard of. A nobleman of Lausanne, as he was giving orders to a servant, suddenly lost his speech and all his senses. Different remedies were tried without effect for six months, during which time he appeared to be in a deep sleep or deliquium, with various symptoms at different periods, which are particularly specified in the narrative. At last, after some chirurgical operations, at the end of six months, his speech and senses were suddenly restored. When he recovered, the servant to whom he had been giving orders when he was first seized with the distemper happening to be in the room, he asked whether he had executed his commission; not being sensible it seems, that any interval of time, except a very short one, had elapsed during his illness. He lived ten years after, and died of another disease. I mention this chiefly with a view to the reader’s amusement; he may consider the evidence, and believe or disbelieve, as he pleases. But that consciousness may be interrupted by a total deliquium, without any change in our notions of our own identity, I know by my own experience. I am therefore fully persuaded that the identity of this substance which I call my soul may continue even when I am unconscious of it; and if for a shorter space, why not for a longer?”—Sel.