eeling, desire, volition, and self-consciousness,
by ascribing them, as Materialists do, either to the _substance of_
"matter," or to its _form_; that is, either to the _atomic particles_
of which it consists, or to the _peculiar organization_ in which these
particles are arranged.

It is too manifest to admit either of doubt or denial, that the power of
thinking, feeling, and willing, does not belong to every form of matter.
It is not, therefore, one of its essential properties; and if it belong
to it at all, it must be either a _quality superadded_ to the ordinary
powers of matter, or a _product resulting_ from its configuration in an
organized form.

If it be a quality superadded merely to the ordinary powers of matter,
then it must exist equally in every part of the mass to which it is
attached; every particle of the matter in which it inheres must be
sentient, intelligent, voluntary, and active; and, on this supposition,
it will remain a difficult, if not desperate problem, to account for the
_unity_ of consciousness by such a diversity of parts, and especially
for the _continuity_ of consciousness, when the material elements are
confessedly in a state of constant flux and mutation. It would seem,
too, that if thought be thus connected with an extended, divisible, and
mutable substance, it must be itself extended, and, of course,
divisible; and, accordingly, Dr. Priestley does not hesitate to affirm
that our _ideas_, as well as our _minds_, possess these characters.
"Whatever ideas," he says, "are in themselves, they are evidently
produced by external objects, and must therefore correspond to them; and
since many of the objects or archetypes of ideas are _divisible_, it
necessarily follows that _the ideas themselves are divisible also_." ...
"If the archetypes of ideas have _extension_, the ideas which are
expressive of them, and are actually produced by them according to
certain mechanical laws, must have extension likewise; and, therefore,
the mind in which they exist, whether it be material or immaterial, must
have extension also.... I am, therefore, obliged to conclude that the
sentient principle in man, containing ideas which certainly have parts,
and are divisible, and consequently must have extension, cannot be that
simple, indivisible, and immaterial substance that some have imagined it
to be, but something that has real extension, and therefore may have the
other properties of matter."[169] He argues that