possess this attribute. Indeed, Locke himself
elsewhere strangely enough insists that thought may be a property of
matter, if only the Deity chose to unite that attribute with that
substance. Why it should be deemed abstractedly impossible for matter to
think if there is no God, and yet abstractedly possible that it should
think if there is a God, I confess myself quite unable to determine; but I
conceive that it is very important clearly to point out this peculiarity in
Locke's views, for he is a favourite authority with theists, and this
peculiarity amounts to nothing less than a suicide of his entire argument.
The mere circumstance that he assumed the Deity capable of endowing matter
with the faculty of thinking, could not have enabled him to _conceive_ of
matter as thinking, any more than he could _conceive_ of this in the
absence of his assumption. Yet in the one case he recognises the
possibility of matter thinking, and in the other case denies such
possibility, _and this on the sole ground of its being inconceivable_!
However, I am not here concerned with Locke's eccentricities:[6] I am
merely engaged with the general principle, that a subjective inability to
establish certain relations in thought is no sufficient warrant for
concluding that corresponding objective relations may not obtain.

Sec. 13. Hence, an objector to the above syllogism need not be a materialist;
it is not even necessary that he should hold any theory of things at all.
Nevertheless, for the sake of definition, I shall assume that he is a
materialist. As a materialist, then, he would appear to be as much entitled
to his hypothesis as a theist is to his--in respect, I mean, of this
particular argument. For although I think, as before shown, that in strict
reasoning a theist might have taken exception to the last-quoted passage
from Mill in its connection with the law of causation, that passage, if
considered in the present connection, is certainly unanswerable. What is
the state of the present argument as between a materialist and a theist?
The mystery of existence and the inconceivability of matter thinking are
their common data. Upon these data the materialist, justly arguing that he
has no right to make his own conceptive faculty the unconditional test of
objective possibility, is content to merge the mystery of his own mind's
existence into that of Existence in general; while the theist, compelled to
accept without explanation the mystery o