rceiving beings, such as we find
ourselves to be. Which, if you please, we will hereafter call COGITATIVE
and INCOGITATIVE beings; which to our present purpose, if for nothing
else, are perhaps better terms than material and immaterial.

10. Incogitative Being cannot produce a Cogitative Being.

If, then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of being
it must be. And to that it is very obvious to reason, that it must
necessarily be a cogitative being. For it is as impossible to conceive
that ever bare incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent
being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter. Let us suppose
any parcel of matter eternal, great or small, we shall find it, in
itself, able to produce nothing. For example: let us suppose the matter
of the next pebble we meet with eternal, closely united, and the parts
firmly at rest together; if there were no other being in the world, must
it not eternally remain so, a dead inactive lump? Is it possible to
conceive it can add motion to itself, being purely matter, or produce
anything? Matter, then, by its own strength, cannot produce in itself so
much as motion: the motion it has must also be from eternity, or else
be produced, and added to matter by some other being more powerful than
matter; matter, as is evident, having not power to produce motion in
itself. But let us suppose motion eternal too: yet matter, INCOGITATIVE
matter and motion, whatever changes it might produce of figure and bulk,
could never produce thought: knowledge will still be as far beyond the
power of motion and matter to produce, as matter is beyond the power
of nothing or nonentity to produce. And I appeal to every one's own
thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive matter produced by
NOTHING, as thought to be produced by pure matter, when, before, there
was no such thing as thought or an intelligent being existing? Divide
matter into as many parts as you will, (which we are apt to imagine a
sort of spiritualizing, or making a thinking thing of it,) vary the
figure and motion of it as much as you please--a globe, cube, cone,
prism, cylinder, &c., whose diameters are but 100,000th part of a GRY,
will operate no otherwise upon other bodies of proportionable bulk, than
those of an inch or foot diameter; and you may as rationally expect to
produce sense, thought, and knowledge, by putting together, in a certain
figure and motion, gross particles of matter, as b