er expect to
make me a proselyte to your principles.

PHIL. Let me know this mighty difficulty.

HYL. The Scripture account of the creation is what appears to me
utterly irreconcilable with your notions. Moses tells us of a creation: a
creation of what? of ideas? No, certainly, but of things, of real things,
solid corporeal substances. Bring your principles to agree with this, and
I shall perhaps agree with you.

PHIL. Moses mentions the sun, moon, and stars, earth and sea, plants
and animals. That all these do really exist, and were in the beginning
created by God, I make no question. If by IDEAS you mean fictions
and fancies of the mind, then these are no ideas. If by IDEAS you mean
immediate objects of the understanding, or sensible things, which cannot
exist unperceived, or out of a mind, then these things are ideas. But
whether you do or do not call them IDEAS, IT matters little. The
difference is only about a name. And, whether that name be retained or
rejected, the sense, the truth, and reality of things continues the same.
In common talk, the objects of our senses are not termed IDEAS, but
THINGS. Call them so still: provided you do not attribute to them any
absolute external existence, and I shall never quarrel with you for a
word. The creation, therefore, I allow to have been a creation of things,
of RED things. Neither is this in the least inconsistent with my
principles, as is evident from what I have now said; and would have been
evident to you without this, if you had not forgotten what had been so
often said before. But as for solid corporeal substances, I desire you to
show where Moses makes any mention of them; and, if they should be
mentioned by him, or any other inspired writer, it would still be
incumbent on you to shew those words were not taken in the vulgar
acceptation, for things falling under our senses, but in the philosophic
acceptation, for Matter, or AN UNKNOWN QUIDDITY, WITH AN ABSOLUTE
EXISTENCE. When you have proved these points, then (and not till then)
may you bring the authority of Moses into our dispute.

HYL. It is in vain to dispute about a point so clear. I am content to
refer it to your own conscience. Are you not satisfied there is some
peculiar repugnancy between the Mosaic account of the creation and your
notions?

PHIL. If all possible sense which can be put on the first chapter of
Genesis may be conceived as consistently with my principles as any other,
then it has