Bacon & Identity

[jmage at panix.com]

Carrol Cox wrote:
>It would be
>fascinating to speculate on the significance of Bacon being one of the very
>earliest users of a concept
[i.e. "identity" as  The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in
all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself
and not something else; individuality, personality]
>so intrinsic to bourgeois individualism.

And that John Dunne tried to strangle the imp in the cradle?

'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

*The First Anniversarie*, lines 213-8

Does anyone know of a good Raymond Williams type history of the emergence
of this sense of "identity"?

John Mage