de up of the waking man's ideas; though for the most part oddly
put together. It is strange, if the soul has ideas of its own that
it derived not from sensation or reflection, (as it must have, if it
thought before it received any impressions from the body,) that it
should never, in its private thinking, (so private, that the man himself
perceives it not,) retain any of them the very moment it wakes out of
them, and then make the man glad with new discoveries. Who can find it
reason that the soul should, in its retirement during sleep, have so
many hours' thoughts, and yet never light on any of those ideas it
borrowed not from sensation or reflection; or at least preserve the
memory of none but such, which, being occasioned from the body, must
needs be less natural to a spirit? It is strange the soul should never
once in a man's whole life recall over any of its pure native thoughts,
and those ideas it had before it borrowed anything from the body; never
bring into the waking man's view any other ideas but what have a tang of
the cask, and manifestly derive their original from that union. If it
always thinks, and so had ideas before it was united, or before it
received any from the body, it is not to be supposed but that during
sleep it recollects its native ideas; and during that retirement from
communicating with the body, whilst it thinks by itself, the ideas it
is busied about should be, sometimes at least, those more natural and
congenial ones which it had in itself, underived from the body, or its
own operations about them: which, since the waking man never remembers,
we must from this hypothesis conclude either that the soul remembers
something that the man does not; or else that memory belongs only to
such ideas as are derived from the body, or the mind's operations about
them.

18. How knows any one that the Soul always thinks? For if it be not a
self-evident Proposition, it needs Proof.

I would be glad also to learn from these men who so confidently
pronounce that the human soul, or, which is all one, that a man always
thinks, how they come to know it; nay, how they come to know that they
themselves think, when they themselves do not perceive it. This, I am
afraid, is to be sure without proofs, and to know without perceiving. It
is, I suspect, a confused notion, taken up to serve an hypothesis; and
none of those clear truths, that either their own evidence forces us to
admit, or common experience makes it