nly
second cause I am acquainted with? Here all the school philosophers
interrupt me with their arguments, and declare that there is only
extension and solidity in bodies, and that there they can have nothing
but motion and figure. Now motion, figure, extension and solidity cannot
form a thought, and consequently the soul cannot be matter. All this so
often repeated mighty series of reasoning, amounts to no more than this:
I am absolutely ignorant what matter is; I guess, but imperfectly, some
properties of it; now I absolutely cannot tell whether these properties
may be joined to thought. As I therefore know nothing, I maintain
positively that matter cannot think. In this manner do the schools
reason.

Mr. Locke addressed these gentlemen in the candid, sincere manner
following: At least confess yourselves to be as ignorant as I. Neither
your imaginations nor mine are able to comprehend in what manner a body
is susceptible of ideas; and do you conceive better in what manner a
substance, of what kind soever, is susceptible of them? As you cannot
comprehend either matter or spirit, why will you presume to assert
anything?

The superstitious man comes afterwards and declares, that all those must
be burnt for the good of their souls, who so much as suspect that it is
possible for the body to think without any foreign assistance. But what
would these people say should they themselves be proved irreligious? And
indeed, what man can presume to assert, without being guilty at the same
time of the greatest impiety, that it is impossible for the Creator to
form matter with thought and sensation? Consider only, I beg you, what a
dilemma you bring yourselves into, you who confine in this manner the
power of the Creator. Beasts have the same organs, the same sensations,
the same perceptions as we; they have memory, and combine certain ideas.
In case it was not in the power of God to animate matter, and inform it
with sensation, the consequence would be, either that beasts are mere
machines, or that they have a spiritual soul.

Methinks it is clearly evident that beasts cannot be mere machines, which
I prove thus. God has given to them the very same organs of sensation as
to us: if therefore they have no sensation, God has created a useless
thing; now according to your own confession God does nothing in vain; He
therefore did not create so many organs of sensation, merely for them to
be uninformed with this faculty; co