s as distinct from
thinking; because your lordship, as I remember, speaks of sense in brutes.
But here I take liberty to observe, that if your lordship allows brutes to
have sensation, it will follow, either that God can and doth give to some
parcels of matter a power of perception and thinking, or that all animals
have immaterial, and consequently, according to your lordship, immortal
souls, as well as men; and to say that fleas and mites, &c., have immortal
souls as well as men, will possibly be looked on as going a great way to
serve an hypothesis....

"It is true, I say, 'That bodies operate by impulse, and nothing else,' and
so I thought when I writ it, and can yet conceive no other way of their
operation. But I am since convinced, by the judicious Mr. Newton's
incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God's power
in this point by my narrow conceptions. The gravitation of matter towards
matter, by way unconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God
can, if He pleases, put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what
can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know
of matter, but also an unquestionable and everywhere visible instance that
He has done so. And therefore, in the next edition of my book, I will take
care to have that passage rectified....

"As to self-consciousness, your lordship asks, 'What is there like
self-consciousness in matter?' Nothing at all in matter as matter. But that
God cannot bestow on some parcels of matter a power of thinking, and with
it self-consciousness, will never be proved by asking how is it possible to
apprehend that mere body should perceive that it doth perceive? The
weakness of our apprehension I grant in the case: I confess as much as you
please, that we cannot conceive how an unsolid created substance thinks;
but this weakness of our apprehension reaches not the power of God, whose
weakness is stronger than anything in man."

Lastly, Locke turns upon his opponent the power of the _odium theologicum_.

"Let it be as hard a matter as it will to give an account what it is that
should keep the parts of a material soul together after it is separated
from the body, yet it will be always as easy to give an account of it as to
give an account what it is that shall keep together a material and
immaterial substance. And yet the difficulty that there is to give an
account of that, I hope, does not, with your lordship, wea