ink, according to the various wrangling
and configurations it may receive, I will not tell you in this place
that matter cannot think; and that one cannot conceive that the
parts of a stone, without adding anything to it, may ever know
themselves, whatever degree of motion, whatever figure, you may give
them. I will only ask you now wherein that precise ranging and
configuration of parts, which you speak of, consists? According to
your opinion there must be a degree of motion wherein matter does
not yet reason, and then another much like it wherein, on a sudden,
it begins to reason and know itself. Now, who is it that knew how
to pitch upon that precise degree of motion? Who is it that has
discovered the line in which the parts ought to move? Who is it
that has measured the dimensions so nicely as to find out and state
the bigness and figure every part must have to keep all manner of
proportions between themselves in the whole? Who is it that has
regulated the outward form by which all those bodies are to be
stinted? In a word, who is it that has found all the combinations
wherein matter thinks, and without the least of which matter must
immediately cease to think? If you say it is chance, I answer that
you make chance rational to such a degree as to be the source of
reason itself. Strange prejudice and intoxication of some men, not
to acknowledge a most intelligent cause, from which we derive all
intelligence; and rather choose to affirm that the purest reason is
but the effect of the blindest of all causes in such a subject as
matter, which of itself is altogether incapable of knowledge!
Certainly there is nothing a man of sense would not admit rather
than so extravagant and absurd an opinion.

SECT. XXIX. Sentiments of some of the Ancients concerning the Soul
and Knowledge of Beasts.

The philosophy of the ancients, though very lame and imperfect, had
nevertheless a glimpse of this difficulty; and, therefore, in order
to remove it, some of them pretended that the Divine Spirit
interspersed and scattered throughout the universe is a superior
Wisdom that continually operates in all nature, especially in
animals, just as souls act in bodies; and that this continual
impression or impulse of the Divine Spirit, which the vulgar call
instinct, without knowing the true signification of that word, was
the life of all living creatures. They added, "That those sparks of
the Divine Spirit were the principle of