particle A and that of a mouse upon particle B, they can never know either jointly or separately which is the larger creature; nor can a judgment be formed until the ideas of both coincide in one and the same individual. 9. And what has been said of perception may be applied equally to volition for as a body could neither impel nor resist another unless all the particles of the whole mass, be they finite or infinite, had a quality of impelling or resistance; for it is unintelligible to talk of an impulse arising solely from the composition: so neither can any system have a power of beginning motion where there was none in the parts. A hundred men may certainly lift a weight that would crush any one of them, but a thousand would never be able to stir it unless each man had some strength of his own independent on the rest. Whence we may justly conclude perceptivity and activity to be primary qualities, essential to the substances possessing them, inseparable therefrom, belonging to individuals, and not producible by any combination whatsoever of imperceptive and inactive ingredients. 10. If Self be not a substance but a system of substances ranged in some particular order, there appears no such necessary connection between any one Self and any precise collection of substances or percipient form (for we now proceed upon a supposition of forms being percipient) but that they might have contained any other Self: so that these substances and this form, which now constitute Myself, might as well have constituted the Self of John or Thomas, or any other person, without implying a contradiction or absurdity; and we must look for some cause yet undiscovered to assign each system its personality. This cause then, before I was existent, might have assigned my personality to any other similar substances disposed in the like order in some distant part of the globe: now why may not this cause do the same at this present instaut? for how should my existing in the spot where I now stand hinder the operations of nature elsewhere, or incapacitate her from doing what she could have done a hundred years ago? therefore there might have been two Myselves some thousand of miles apart. But if such a supposition would shock the ears and understanding of every man, it will necessarily follow that every Self must be a substance numerically distinct from all others, of whose identity no other substance nor system of substances can participate. And if a substance, it must be one uncompounded of parts: for I am nothing else besides Myself, nor can contain anything that is not Me, nor yet can I have parts which are neither me nor anything else. As a piece of matter divided makes several pieces, and a compound form dissolved becomes many lesser forms, so a perceptive substance divided would yield many percipients, and perception always implying personality, each percipient must have a Self distinguishing it from its neighbor: so that upon supposition of a divisibility in the substance of Mind, I should contain as many Selves as there are parts in my composition. 11. Thus have I endeavored to place this matter in as many different lights as I could, and to turn it about in all manner of ways; but it happens sometimes in these abstruse disquisitions that the very pains we take for illustration renders the subject more perplexing, for being forced to spin our thoughts very fine they become liable to entangle in the reader's hands, and the multiplicity of ideas, into which we divide them by such refinements, distracts his attention and causes them to throw a cloud over one another. Therefore, since I apprehend this a matter of importance, I wish every one would consider it afresh in his own way, and satisfy himself, in a manner most suitable to his own liking, whether he has not a real existence distinct from every other being whatever, and whether Self be not an indelible character which cannot be taken from him nor exchanged with any other person. We often talk of what we would do, if we were Such an one, that is, if we were in his place, with his strength of limbs, endowments of mind, fortune, or circumstances of situation: but no man can even in imagination suppose himself to feel for another or act for another, to perceive his sensations or perform his actions, or that that other should be his very self. We have heard of metamorphoses and transmigrations from one form of being into another, I do not desire anybody to believe the truth of those relations, but the pleasure we receive in hearing them shows they are not unfamiliar to our imagination, nor do we apprehend a contradiction in supposing the same person to take various forms. But in all those changes the same Self continues throughout: Calisto when a bear, and Ino when a cow, are the same persons, though different sorts of creatures, that they were while women, nor does Euphorbus lose his identity by becoming 'Pythagoras: and though they should lose their remembrance or consciousness, still we rejoice or grieve with them according as we think they have deserved in their former state. When the poet tells us that Aristotle's soul of old that was, may now be doomed to animate an ass, or in this very house for aught we know, be doing painful penance in some beau; though he goes too far in calling it a painful penance, for the beau perhaps is well satisfied with his present condition and would think it a terrible misfortune to be restored to the dry notions and musty metaphysics of Aristotle, yet we still apprehend the same percipient substance existing in both. We may imagine ourselves having new members added to our bodies, four legs, or twenty arms, or a pair of wings sprouting from our shoulders, yet still we should remain the same selves: or we may imagine ourselves losing our limbs, deprived of our faculties, and becoming senseless as the stone before us, yet even in that case we should not apprehend ourselves the same substance with the stone we see whence it appears that we are possessed of an existence and identity of which we cannot even in imagination divest ourselves. 12. And for individuality if we cannot find that in ourselves we can find it nowhere, for all the bodies we behold are undoubtedly compounds, and we have seen in the last chapter how difficult it is to ascertain whether there be atoms or no, and if there should be, we cannot come at the apprehension of them either by experience or reasoning. But we cannot comprehend ourselves composed of parts so as that something might be taken away and the remainder make an imperfect self, or that such imperfect self should become perfect upon the accession of something else. A house may be half built and then is something of a house but not an entire one; a fœtus may be half formed and then is an imperfect man: but in personality there is no medium between completion and nonentity, we cannot half be, but must either be completely ourselves or not be at all. By such considerations as these I apprehend a man may convince himself of his being neither a form, nor a harmony, nor a system, nor yet a quality or consciousness annexed thereto; but a real existent substance numerically distinct from all others, uncompounded, and consequently indivisible. CHAP. V. SPIRIT, HAVING settled with ourselves that Mind has a being of its own distinct from that of all other things, and is a pure, unmingled, individual substance, nevertheless, for anything that has yet appeared it may be a single atom of matter, since we have supposed existence and individuality to reside in atoms: now, in order to discover whether it be so or not, let us examine wherein our idea of matter consists. The essence of things arises from the qualities we find them have; for to ask what a thing is, implies a presupposal of some substance, and a want of information concerning what qualities it possesses, or what appearances it ex ; hibits. Mr. Locke pronounces our idea of substance very confused, and so indeed it is if we go to consider it singly, for you cannot form a clear idea of naked substance divested of all its qualities or manners of making itself known to us: but there are some things we apprehend well enough in the concrete, though we cannot in the abstract, as has been made appear with respect to surfaces, which we conceive easily while lying upon the main body, yet cannot by any effort of our imagination detach them therefrom without pulling up a lining besides so if we cannot form an idea of substance apart from all other ideas, yet when we see qualities affecting our senses, we may have an unconfused idea of something exerting them having a real and actual existence independent of everything else. For forms and qualities are not beings, but modes of existence in other beings, and the appearances they exhibit must come accompanied with another idea of actual existence in the subject containing them. Therefore, if I were to make our idea of substance the same with that of actual independent existence, which we cannot conceive apart from every manner of existing, though we can easily with it, I should not deserve much blame from Mr. Locke, who doubts whether space may not be ranked among the class of substances, because it has a reality independent on any other substances lying within it. 2. But I believe nobody ever suspected the substantiality of space before Mr. Locke, and he goes no further than to declare his ignorance whether it be substance or accident; yet few have denied the reality of space, or that we may conceive a vacuum without any substance whatever to occupy it: this is one of the most familiar ideas to our imagination, for any common person entertains it every time he thinks of an empty bottle. Whence we may conclude that substance, in our ordinary notion of it, is that species of existencies which has perception and action, or which affects our senses, or causes discernible alterations in other substances: wherefore space is not usually ranked among substances, because it does nothing, produces no effect, but is the most passive of things, permitting all else to remain in it, remove from it, or pass through it; we neither see nor feel it, nor does it touch any of our senses, but is rather an idea of reflection, for upon discerning objects in different quarters, and observing their distances, we gather by inference that there must lie a space between them. 3. I shall not pretend to be wiser than Mr. Locke, nor to ascertain whether space be properly substance, but our comfort is that it matters not for our present purpose whether we can decide the point or no, since nobody ever dreamt of Mind being mere empty space so the question lies between its being a corporeal atom, or distinct species of substance of a kind peculiar to itself. We get our first idea of substance I conceive from ourselves, our perceptions convincing us of our existence, not as is commonly supposed by logical inference, I see, I feel, therefore I am, for we know our own Being long before we learn to make such abstractions, nor can one imagine a child to form syllogisms, or draw consequences of this kind: but the idea of being is contained in that of perceiving, for you cannot understand a proposition without apprehending the several terms composing it, and in the proposition, I feel, the term I expresses something real and substantial, or else it would not be different from the proposition Nothing feels, which rather implies a denial of feeling than carries an evidence of it, nor can there be an idea of actual feeling without something that feels. 4. On the other hand, to complete our idea of feeling there must likewise be something felt, and this gives us our knowledge of substances without us: for when we grasp a stone in our hand we find it press against our fingers, so that we cannot close them into a fist as we might have done before, whence we apprehend it to be a solid substance: and if we cast it behind our back, where we can neither see nor feel it, still we conceive it retaining its solidity. But we discover its solidity by other ways, for if we see the stone squeezed hard by a pair of pincers, or struck by another stone hitting against it, though there be no feeling concerned in the case, yet we perceive the stone makes a resistance against whatever presses or strikes upon it: but this resistance between bodies never happens until they touch, wherefore I look upon solidity, resistance, and tangibility, as the same thing, or at least to depend upon one another, and to be inseparable from our idea of body. Lucretius asserts roundly that nothing besides body can touch or be touched, whether he knew thus for certain is more than I can tell, but thus much we must allow him, that if there be anything which cannot be touched, it is not body, and where resistance necessarily ensues upon contact there must be body: but when astronomers, in describing an eclipse, talk of the shadow of the earth touching the outer limb of the moon, I suppose Lucretius would not allow this to be touching. And indeed our touch gives us the first evidence of external substances, which do not discover themselves to our other senses, until we have been convinced of their reality by that: wherefore the vulgar apprehend savors, odors, sounds, and light, to contain nothing substantial, and the learned will hardly deny that the effluvia causing smells and |