 So, when reading English philosophical texts it is a tricky matter assigning a meaning or analysis to the term. But, of course, this is true to the nature of the problem. Philosophers of the seventeenth century were sketching out a concept that remains problematic to this day. In today’s discussions of consciousness, it is fairly common to mark out even further distinctions to identify which aspect of the problem one is addressing (creature consciousness, state consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, etc.). While some have used these later terms to make sense of what seventeenth-century philosophers are attempting to articulate in their theories, these finer-grained concepts will be for the most part left to today’s philosophers. This entry will instead see what sense can be made from the seventeenth-century philosophers' own attempts at providing a coherent analysis of consciousness.