ABSTRACT
In the first of those few entries in his journals clearly on the subjectmatter of the chapter 'Of Identity and Diversity' (although the word 'identity' does not occur) Locke launched an attack on the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul. The note begins with a statement of the 'usual physicall proofe' of natural immortality: since matter cannot think, the soul is immaterial; since an immaterial thing is by nature indestructible (because indivisible), the soul is naturally immortal. Materialists, Locke continued, complain that animals have sensation, 'i.e., thinke', so that the same argument would prove that animals too have immortal souls. To this objection immaterialists have three possible responses: to deny (with Descartes) that animals are anything more than 'perfect machins5, to allow that they do have immortal souls, or to hold that God arbitrarily annihilates their souls with their bodily deaths. Locke did not say so, but Cudworth, whose book he had just been reading, also identified these three possibilities, preferring the second as being less implausible than the first, and more economical than the third. Cudworth argued that the hypothesis of animal souls is no more disturbing theologically than the accepted principle that any substance, even matter, is naturally indestructible as such, since division is not annihilation. Locke in effect took up this point, but with a different purpose. The disputants 'perfectly mistake immortality whereby is not meant a state of bare substantiall existence and duration but a state of sensibility'. Even the 'manifestly false5 doctrine that the soul thinks essentially, and 'dureing a sound quiet sleep perceives and thinkes but remembers it not5, could not save the argument for natural immortality. An eternally existing soul 'with all that sense about it whereof it hath noe consciousness noe memory5 simply fails to fulfil the conditions of a morally significant afterlife. To all moral effects and purposes it is dead. Since the consciousness and memory of its states are contingent activities or modifications of the soul, their occurrence
at any time 'wholy depends upon the will and good pleasure of the first author': immortality is a state of grace, not the natural state of the soul.45
