In The Moralists, Shaftesbury contends that there is no physical or mental element that persists through a person’s entire life, yet it seems that one can remain the same self even amid all those changes. A person is a single thing, retaining an identity throughout the years. But that identity cannot consist of physical matter, as every particle of a person changes over time. The ‘Stuff … of which we are compos’d’, says Theocles, ‘wears out in seven, or, at the longest, in twice seven Years, [as