But yet after
all, I think I may, without injury to human perfection, be
confident, that our knowledge would never reach to all we might desire
to know concerning those ideas we have; nor be able to surmount all
the difficulties, and resolve all the questions that might arise
concerning any of them. We have the ideas of a square, a circle, and
equality; and yet, perhaps, shall never be able to find a circle equal
to a square, and certainly know that it is so. We have the ideas of
matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know
whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible
for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation,
to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of
matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else
joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial
substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote
from our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases,
superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd
to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know
not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the
Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any
created being, but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the
Creator.
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