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 impudence to deny. For the most that can be
said of it is, that it is possible the soul may always think, but
not always retain it in memory. And I say, it is as possible that
the soul may not always think; and much more probable that it should
sometimes not think, than that it should often think, and that a
long while together, and not be conscious to itself, the next moment
after, that it had thought.
19. "That a man should be busy in thinking, and yet not retain it
the next moment," very improbable. To suppose the soul to think, and
the man not to perceive it, is, as has been said, to make two
persons in one man. And if one considers well these men's way of
speaking, one should be led into a suspicion that they do so.
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