" Pure spirit is an expression which gives us no idea; and we
know matter only by a few phenomena. We know it so little that we call
it "substance"; well, the word substance means "that which is under";
but what is under will be eternally hidden from us. What is _under_ is
the Creator's secret; and this secret of the Creator is everywhere. We
do not know either how we receive life, or how we give it, or how we
grow, or how we digest, or how we sleep, or how we think, or how we
feel.
The great difficulty is to understand how a being, whoever he be, has
thoughts.
SECTION II
The author of the article SOUL in the "Encyclopedia" (the Abbe Yvon)
followed Jaquelot scrupulously; but Jaquelot teaches us nothing. He sets
himself also against Locke, because the modest Locke said (liv. iv, ch.
iii, para. vi.)--"We 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, for I see no contradiction in it, that the first
eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of
created senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of
sense, perception and thought.
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