And this makes clear the answer to his statement, “The body is continually breaking down.” The body’s breakdown is no more remarkable than the transformation of a drop of fluid into a clinging clot, and of a clinging clot into a lump of flesh, each differing in nature from the other. In the body undergoing breakdown, however, the replacement parts resemble and match the earlier ones. If restoring the body does not require its transformation from one nature into another, still less does it require the changes caused by its breakdown.

It is well known that someone who sees a person in his youth and then sees him in old age knows that this is the same person, despite this transformation. The same applies to all other animals and plants. Someone who has been away from a tree for some time and then returns and finds it knows that it is the same tree, even though breakdown and transformation occur in all other animals and plants just as they do in the human body.

No rational person, in believing that this tree is the same tree, that this horse is the one he had years ago, or that this person is the one he saw twenty years ago, needs to suppose that some original parts have remained without breaking down. Such a thought does not even occur to anyone. Nor, when rational people say, “This is the same one,” do they mean only those parts that are neither known nor distinguishable from others. Rather, they refer to the whole tree, horse, or person, even though each may once have been small and then grown.

Nor can it be said that it is the same solely because the rational soul remains one and the same, as alleged by those who claim that the second body is not that first body, but that the purpose is instead to recompense the soul with bliss or torment