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different terms for the same reality. One cannot separate thought from
matter that thinks. It is the substratum of all changes. The word
infinite is meaningless unless it signifies the capacity of our minds
to perform an endless process of addition. As only material things are
perceptible and knowable, nothing can be known about the existence of
God.

My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical
movement which has a beginning or an end. The objects of impulse are
what are called good. Man is subject to the same laws of Nature. Power
and freedom are identical.

Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, providing any firmer
basis for the latter's fundamental principle, the origin of all
knowledge and ideas from the world of the senses.

It was Locke who established the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in his
Essay on the Human Understanding.

Just as Hobbes shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian
materialism, so Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, etc.
broke down the last theological bars which still obstructed Locke's
sensationalism. At least for materialists, theism became nothing more
than a convenient and easy-going way of getting rid of religion.

We have already noticed at what an opportune time Locke's work came to
the French. Locke had established the philosophy of _bon sens_, of
healthy common sense, that is, to express it in a roundabout way, that
there are no philosophers other than those of the understanding which
is based upon the healthy human senses.

Condillac, who was Locke's immediate pupil and French interpreter,
lost no time in turning the Lockeian sensationalism upon the
metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He contended that the French
had rightly spurned the latter as a clumsy product of the imagination
and theological prejudice.

He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his work: _L'essai sur l'origine des
connaissances humaines_, he developed Locke's ideas and contended that
not only the soul, but also the senses, not only the art of fashioning
ideas, but also the apparatus of sensual receptivity, are subjects of
experience and usage. Consequently, the entire development of man
depends upon education and external circumstances. Condillac was only
supplanted in the French schools by the eclectic philosophy.

The difference between French and English materialism is the
difference betwee