31. The notion of spirit involves no more difficulty in it than that
of body. Lastly, if this notion of immaterial spirit may have,
perhaps, some difficulties in it not easily to be explained, we have
therefore no more reason to deny or doubt the existence of such
spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body;
because the notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties very
hard, and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us.
For I would fain have instanced anything in our notion of spirit
more perplexed, or nearer a contradiction, than the very notion of
body includes in it; the divisibility in infinitum of any finite
extension involving us, whether we grant or deny it, in consequences
impossible to be explicated or made in our apprehensions consistent;
consequences that carry greater difficulty, and more apparent
absurdity, than anything can follow from the notion of an immaterial
knowing substance.
32. We know nothing of things beyond our simple ideas of them. Which
we are not at all to wonder at, since we having but some few
superficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the senses
from without, or by the mind, reflecting on what it experiments in
itself within, have no knowledge beyond that, much less of the
internal constitution, and true nature of things, being destitute of
faculties to attain it.
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