nd united to the matter thus
arranged, an immaterial substance which thinks? Now in relation to our
notions, it is not less easy for us to conceive that God can add to
our idea of matter the faculty of thinking, since we know not in what
thought consists, and to what species of substance that Almighty being
has judged proper to grant this faculty, which could exist in no
created being except by virtue of the goodness and the will of the
Creator.

This system certainly embraces great absurdities, and greater to my
mind than those it would fain avoid. We conceive clearly that matter
is divisible, and capable of motion; but we do not conceive that it is
capable of thought, nor that thought can consist of a certain
configuration or a certain motion of matter. And even could thought
depend on an arrangement, or on a certain subtility, or on a certain
motion of matter, as soon as that arrangement should be disturbed, or
the motion interrupted, or this heap of subtile matter dispersed,
thought would cease to be produced, and consequently that which
constitutes man, or the reasoning animal, would no longer subsist;
thus all the economy of our religion, all our hopes of a future life,
all our fears of eternal punishment would vanish; even the principles
of our philosophy would be overthrown.

God forbid that we should wish to set bounds to the almighty power of
God; but that all-powerful Being having given us as a rule of our
knowledge the clearness of the ideas which we form of everything, and
not being permitted to affirm that which we know but indistinctly, it
follows that we ought not to assert that thought can be attributed to
matter. If the thing were known to us through revelation, and taught
by the authority of the Scriptures, then we might impose silence on
human reason, and make captive our judgment in obedience to faith; but
it is owned that the thing is not at all revealed; neither is it
demonstrated, either by its cause, or by its effects. It must, then,
be considered as a simple system, invented to do away certain
difficulties which result from the opinion opposed to it.

If the difficulty of explaining how the soul acts upon our bodies
appears so great, how can we comprehend that the soul itself should be
material and extended? In the latter case will it act upon itself, and
give itself the impulsion to think, or will this movement or impulsion
be thought itself, or will it produce thought? Will this thinking