A way of reconstructing his point is this. Either ‘same person’ just goes along with ‘same human being’ or it does not. If it does, we all agree that we have the one human being from infancy to death, regardless of mental capacities. And none of the thoughts on list 2 make any sense. The reason for saying that ‘same person does not go with ‘same human being’, for Locke, is that we allow that if one man has ‘distinct incommunicable consciousness’ then we have different persons, successively inhabiting the one body (we might also think of multiple personality disorders).
