tive thinking image of the Deity. And, though
I perceive Him not by sense, yet I have a notion of Him, or know Him by
reflexion and reasoning. My own mind and my own ideas I have an immediate
knowledge of; and, by the help of these, do mediately apprehend the
possibility of the existence of other spirits and ideas. Farther, from my
own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do,
by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all
created things in the mind of God. So much for your first question. For
the second: I suppose by this time you can answer it yourself. For you
neither perceive Matter objectively, as you do an inactive being or idea;
nor know it, as you do yourself, by a reflex act, neither do you
mediately apprehend it by similitude of the one or the other; nor yet
collect it by reasoning from that which you know immediately. All which
makes the case of MATTER widely different from that of the DEITY.

HYL. You say your own soul supplies you with some sort of an idea or
image of God. But, at the same time, you acknowledge you have, properly
speaking, no IDEA of your own soul. You even affirm that spirits are a
sort of beings altogether different from ideas. Consequently that no idea
can be like a spirit. We have therefore no idea of any spirit. You admit
nevertheless that there is spiritual Substance, although you have no idea
of it; while you deny there can be such a thing as material Substance,
because you have no notion or idea of it. Is this fair dealing? To act
consistently, you must either admit Matter or reject Spirit. What say you
to this?

PHIL. _I_ say, in the first place, that I do not deny the existence of
material substance, merely because I have no notion of it' but because
the notion of it is inconsistent; or, in other words, because it is
repugnant that there should be a notion of it. Many things, for aught I
know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any
idea or notion whatsoever. But then those things must be possible, that
is, nothing inconsistent must be included in their definition. I
say, secondly, that, although we believe things to exist which we do not
perceive, yet we may not believe that any particular thing exists,
without some reason for such belief: but I have no reason for believing
the existence of Matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither
can I immediately from my sensations, ideas, notions,