an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True,
substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but
who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully
refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in
still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual
substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something
living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all
his thoughts and actions. It was _he_ that had them and did them; and this
self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal
subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I
think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered
very little what the _substance_ of a thinking being might be: God might
even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating
ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that:
and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest
Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner
man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it
was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from
moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in
retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles
and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits
of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included
everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word,
_he was his idea of himself_: and this insight opens a new chapter not
only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.