lent anatomist explains the springs of the human body. He
everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide. He sometimes
presumes to speak affirmatively, but then he presumes also to doubt.
Instead of concluding at once what we know not, he examines gradually
what we would know. He takes an infant at the instant of his birth; he
traces, step by step, the progress of his understanding; examines what
things he has in common with beasts, and what he possesses above them.
Above all, he consults himself: the being conscious that he himself
thinks.

"I shall leave," says he, "to those who know more of this matter than
myself, the examining whether the soul exists before or after the
organisation of our bodies. But I confess that it is my lot to be
animated with one of those heavy souls which do not think always; and I
am even so unhappy as not to conceive that it is more necessary the soul
should think perpetually than that bodies should be for ever in motion."

With regard to myself, I shall boast that I have the honour to be as
stupid in this particular as Mr. Locke. No one shall ever make me
believe that I think always: and I am as little inclined as he could be
to fancy that some weeks after I was conceived I was a very learned soul;
knowing at that time a thousand things which I forgot at my birth; and
possessing when in the womb (though to no manner of purpose) knowledge
which I lost the instant I had occasion for it; and which I have never
since been able to recover perfectly.

Mr. Locke, after having destroyed innate ideas; after having fully
renounced the vanity of believing that we think always; after having laid
down, from the most solid principles, that ideas enter the mind through
the senses; having examined our simple and complex ideas; having traced
the human mind through its several operations; having shown that all the
languages in the world are imperfect, and the great abuse that is made of
words every moment, he at last comes to consider the extent or rather the
narrow limits of human knowledge. It was in this chapter he presumed to
advance, but very modestly, the following words: "We shall, perhaps,
never be capable of knowing whether a being, purely material, thinks or
not." This sage assertion was, by more divines than one, looked upon as
a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal. Some
Englishmen, devout after their way, sounded an alarm. The superstitious
are the same i