ader's understanding to resume the explication of it in its place. I
shall only observe that if at table all who were present should see, and
smell, and taste, and drink wine, and find the effects of it, with me
there could be no doubt of its reality; so that at bottom the scruple
concerning real miracles has no place at all on ours, but only on the
received principles, and consequently makes rather for than against what
has been said.

85. CONSEQUENCES OF THE PRECEDING TENETS.--Having done with the
Objections, which I endeavoured to propose in the clearest light,
and gave them all the force and weight I could, we proceed in the
next place to take a view of our tenets in their Consequences.
Some of these appear at first sight--as that several difficult and
obscure questions, on which abundance of speculation has been
thrown away, are entirely banished from philosophy. "Whether
corporeal substance can think," "whether Matter be infinitely divisible,"
and "how it operates on spirit"--these and like inquiries have given
infinite amusement to philosophers in all ages; but depending on the
existence of Matter, they have no longer any place on our principles.
Many other advantages there are, as well with regard to religion as the
sciences, which it is easy for any one to deduce from what has been
premised; but this will appear more plainly in the sequel.

86. THE REMOVAL OF MATTER GIVES CERTAINTY TO KNOWLEDGE.--From the
principles we have laid down it follows human knowledge may naturally
be reduced to two heads--that of ideas and that of spirits. Of each
of these I shall treat in order.

And first as to ideas or unthinking things. Our knowledge of these has
been very much obscured and confounded, and we have been led into very
dangerous errors, by supposing a twofold existence of the objects of
sense--the one intelligible or in the mind, the other real and without
the mind; whereby unthinking things are thought to have a natural
subsistence of their own distinct from being perceived by spirits. This,
which, if I mistake not, has been shown to be a most groundless and
absurd notion, is the very root of Scepticism; for, so long as men
thought that real things subsisted without the mind, and that their
knowledge was only so far forth real as it was conformable to real
things, it follows they could not be certain they had any real knowledge
at all. For how can it be known that the things which are perceived are
conformable to