ible
qualities or ideas, and then their most unanswerable objections
come to nothing.

96. SUMMARY OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXPELLING MATTER.--Matter being once
expelled out of nature drags with it so many sceptical and impious
notions, such an incredible number of disputes and puzzling questions,
which have been thorns in the sides of divines as well as philosophers,
and made so much fruitless work for mankind, that if the arguments
we have produced against it are not found equal to demonstration
(as to me they evidently seem), yet I am sure all friends to knowledge,
peace, and religion have reason to wish they were.

97. Beside the external existence of the objects of perception, another
great source of errors and difficulties with regard to ideal knowledge is
the doctrine of abstract ideas, such as it has been set forth in the
Introduction. The plainest things in the world, those we are most
intimately acquainted with and perfectly know, when they are considered
in an abstract way, appear strangely difficult and incomprehensible.
Time, place, and motion, taken in particular or concrete, are what
everybody knows, but, having passed through the hands of a metaphysician,
they become too abstract and fine to be apprehended by men of ordinary
sense. Bid your servant meet you at such a time in such a place, and he
shall never stay to deliberate on the meaning of those words; in
conceiving that particular time and place, or the motion by which he is
to get thither, he finds not the least difficulty. But if time be taken
exclusive of all those particular actions and ideas that diversify the
day, merely for the continuation of existence or duration in abstract,
then it will perhaps gravel even a philosopher to comprehend it.

98. DILEMMA.--For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea
of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows
uniformly and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in
inextricable difficulties. I have no notion of it at all, only I hear
others say it is infinitely divisible, and speak of it in such a manner
as leads me to entertain odd thoughts of my existence; since that
doctrine lays one under an absolute necessity of thinking, either that he
passes away innumerable ages without a thought, or else that he is
annihilated every moment of his life, both which seem equally absurd.
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the sucession of ideas in
ou