elephants do not think, when
they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling
us that they do so. This some may suspect to be a step beyond the
Rosicrucians; it seeming easier to make one's self invisible to others,
than to make another's thoughts visible to me, which are not visible to
himself. But it is but defining the soul to be "a substance that
always thinks," and the business is done. If such definition be of any
authority, I know not what it can serve for but to make many men suspect
that they have no souls at all; since they find a good part of their
lives pass away without thinking. For no definitions that I know, no
suppositions of any sect, are of force enough to destroy constant
experience; and perhaps it is the affectation of knowing beyond what we
perceive, that makes so much useless dispute and noise in the world.

20. No ideas but from Sensation and Reflection, evident, if we observe
Children.

I see no reason, therefore, to believe that the soul thinks before
the senses have furnished it with ideas to think on; and as those are
increased and retained, so it comes, by exercise, to improve its faculty
of thinking in the several parts of it; as well as, afterwards, by
compounding those ideas, and reflecting on its own operations, it
increases its stock, as well as facility in remembering, imagining,
reasoning, and other modes of thinking.

21. State of a child on the mother's womb.

He that will suffer himself to be informed by observation and
experience, and not make his own hypothesis the rule of nature, will
find few signs of a soul accustomed to much thinking in a new-born
child, and much fewer of any reasoning at all. And yet it is hard to
imagine that the rational soul should think so much, and not reason at
all, And he that will consider that infants newly come into the world
spend the greatest part of their time in sleep, and are seldom awake
but when either hunger calls for the teat, or some pain (the most
importunate of all sensations), or some other violent impression on the
body, forces the mind to perceive and attend to it;--he, I say, who
considers this, will perhaps find reason to imagine that a FOETUS in the
mother's womb differs not much from the state of a vegetable, but passes
the greatest part of its time without perception or thought; doing very
little but sleep in a place where it needs not seek for food, and is
surrounded with liquor, always equally soft