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e our knowledge is intuition comprehended under conception, we cannot have any knowledge of that which is not received into the imaginary recipients of time and space, and consequently God is not an entity. 'But here comes the jugglery--reason forms the idea of the soul or a substance out of nature, by connecting substance and accident into infinite and absolute substance. What is that verbiage, but that the reason gives the name of soul to something that does not exist at all?' 'Reason forms the idea of God or of Supreme Intelligence out of Nature, by connecting action and reaction into infinite and absolute concurrence. What is God out of Nature? Where is out? Where is God? What is God?--an absolute nothing.' 'For an imagination to exist there must be two properties or qualities coming in contact with each other to produce that imagination. For these two properties or qualities to exist there must be matter for them to exist in; and for matter to exist there must be space for it to exist in, and so on. Matter might exist without two different properties to produce an imagination; but neither two properties nor one property can exist without matter for it to exist in. Man may exist for a time as he does when he is dead without an imagination; but the imagination cannot exist without the material man. Matter cannot become non-existent, but the imagination can and does become so. Matter therefore is the reality and the imagination a nonentity, an unsubstantial idea; or an imagination only.' [52:1] The anonymous writer of the passages here given within inverted commas clearly draws the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal. His remarks on imagination are specially important. Theologians do not seem to be aware that imagination is a modification of mind, and mind itself a modification of sensibility--no sensations--no thought--no life. Though awkwardly expressed, there is truth in the dogma of Gassendi--_ideas are only transformed sensations._ All attempts to conceive sensibility without organs of sense are vain. As profitably might we labour to think of motion where nothing exists to be moved, as sensibility where there is no organ of sense. We often see organs void of sensibility, but who ever saw, or who can imagine sensibility independent of organs? Pantheists and other Divinitarians write about mind as if it were an existence; nay, they claim, for it the first place among existences, according to
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