These, and the like, though they have a constant and regular connexion
in the ordinary course of things; yet that connexion being not
discoverable in the ideas themselves, which appearing to have no
necessary dependence one on another, we can attribute their
connexion to nothing else but the arbitrary determination of that
All-wise Agent who has made them to be, and to operate as they do,
in a way wholly above our weak understandings to conceive.
29. Instances. In some of our ideas there are certain relations,
habitudes, and connexions, so visibly included in the nature of the
ideas themselves, that we cannot conceive them separable from them
by any power whatsoever. And in these only we are capable of certain
and universal knowledge. Thus the idea of a right-lined triangle
necessarily carries with it an equality of its angles to two right
ones. Nor can we conceive this relation, this connexion of these two
ideas, to be possibly mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power,
which of choice made it thus, or could make it otherwise. But the
coherence and continuity of the parts of matter; the production of
sensation in us of colours and sounds, &c., by impulse and motion;
nay, the original rules and communication of motion being such,
wherein we can discover no natural connexion with any ideas we have,
we cannot but ascribe them to the arbitrary will and good pleasure
of the Wise Architect.
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