er cases by the same.

"You cannot conceive how matter can attract matter at any distance, much
less at the distance of 1,000,000 miles; ergo, God cannot give it such a
power: you cannot conceive how matter should feel or move itself, or affect
any material being, or be moved by it; ergo, God cannot give it such
powers: which is in effect to deny gravity, and the revolution of the
planets about the sun; to make brutes mere machines, without sense or
spontaneous motion; and to allow man neither sense nor voluntary motion.

"Let us apply this rule one degree farther. You cannot conceive how an
extended solid substance should think, therefore God cannot make it think:
can you conceive how your own soul or any substance thinks? You find,
indeed, that you do think, and so do I; but I want to be told how the
action of thinking is performed: this, I confess, is beyond my conception;
and I would be glad any one who conceives it would explain it to me.

"God, I find, has given me this faculty; and since I cannot but be
convinced of His power in this instance, which, though I every moment
experience in myself, yet I cannot conceive the manner of, what would it be
less than an insolent absurdity to deny His power in other like cases, only
for this reason, because I cannot conceive the manner how?...

"That Omnipotency cannot make a substance to be solid and not solid at the
same time, I think with due reverence [diffidence?[35]] we may say; but
that a solid substance may not have qualities, perfections, and powers,
which have no natural or visibly necessary connection with solidity and
extension, is too much for us (who are but of yesterday, and know nothing)
to be positive in.

"If God cannot join things together by connections inconceivable to us, we
must deny even the consistency and being of matter itself; since every
particle of it having some bulk, has its parts connected by ways
inconceivable to us. So that all the difficulties that are raised against
the thinking of matter, from our ignorance or narrow conceptions, stand not
at all in the way of the power of God, if He pleases to ordain it so; nor
prove anything against His having actually endowed some parcels of matter,
so disposed as He thinks fit, with a faculty of thinking, till it can he
shown that it contains a contradiction to suppose it.

"Though to me sensation be comprehended under thinking in general, in the
foregoing discourse I have spoke of sense in brute