g to have no necessary dependence
one on another, we can attribute their connexion to nothing else but the
arbitrary determination of that All-wise Agent who has made them to be,
and to operate as they do, in a way wholly above our weak understandings
to conceive.

29. Instances

In some of our ideas there are certain relations, habitudes, and
connexions, so visibly included in the nature of the ideas themselves,
that we cannot conceive them separable from them by any power
whatsoever. And in these only we are capable of certain and universal
knowledge. Thus the idea of a right-lined triangle necessarily carries
with it an equality of its angles to two right ones. Nor can we conceive
this relation, this connexion of these two ideas, to be possibly
mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power, which of choice made it
thus, or could make it otherwise. But the coherence and continuity of
the parts of matter; the production of sensation in us of colours
and sounds, &c., by impulse and motion; nay, the original rules and
communication of motion being such, wherein we can discover no natural
connexion with any ideas we have, we cannot but ascribe them to the
arbitrary will and good pleasure of the Wise Architect. I need not, I
think, here mention the resurrection of the dead, the future state of
this globe of earth, and such other things, which are by every one
acknowledged to depend wholly on the determination of a free agent. The
things that, as far as our observation reaches, we constantly find to
proceed regularly, we may conclude do act by a law set them; but yet
by a law that we know not: whereby, though causes work steadily, and
effects constantly flow from them, yet their connexions and dependencies
being not discoverable in our ideas, we can have but an experimental
knowledge of them. From all which it is easy to perceive what a darkness
we are involved in, how little it is of Being, and the things that are,
that we are capable to know. And therefore we shall do no injury to our
knowledge, when we modestly think with ourselves, that we are so far
from being able to comprehend the whole nature of the universe, and all
the things contained in it, that we are not capable of a philosophical
knowledge of the bodies that are about us, and make a part of us:
concerning their secondary qualities, powers, and operations, we can
have no universal certainty. Several effects come every day within the
notice of our senses, of