The author of the article SOUL in the " Encyclopedia " (the Abbe Yvon)followed Jaquelot scrupulously; but Jaquelot teaches us nothing.He sets himself also against Locke, because the modest Locke said (liv.iv, ch.
iii, para.vi.)--" We possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas without revelat ion, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power which cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator, for I see no contradiction in it, that the first eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception and thought."Those are the words of a profound, religious and modest man.
We know what quarrels he had to undergo on account of this opinion which appeared bold, but which was in fact in him only a consequence of his conviction of the omnipotence of God and the weakness of man.He did not say that matter thought; but he said that we have not enough knowledge to demonstrate that it is impossible for God to add the gift of thought to the unknown being called '' matter '', after according it the gift of gravitation and the gift of movement, both of which are equally incomprehensible.
Locke was not assuredly the only one who had advanced this opinion;it was the opinion of all antiquity, who, regarding the soul as very unrestricted matter, affirmed consequently that matter could feel and think.
It was Gassendi's opinion, as may be seen in his objections to Descartes." It is true," says Gassendi, " that you know what you think; but you are ignorant of what species of substance you are, you who think.Thus although the operation of thought is known to you, the principle of your essence is hidden from you; and you do not know what is the nature of this substance, one of the operations of which is to think.You are like a blind man who, feeling the heat of the sun and being informed that it is caused by the heat of the sun, thinks he has a clear and distinct idea of this luminary;because if he were asked what the sun was, he could reply that it is a thing which heats, etc."The same Gassendi, in his " Epicurean Philosophy," repeats several times that there is no mathematical evidence of the pure spirituality of the soul.
Descartes, in one of his letters to the Palatine Princess Elisabeth, says to her--" I confess that by the natural reason alone we can make many conjectures on the soul, and have gratifying hopes, but no certainty."And in that sentence Descartes combats in his letters what he puts forward in his works; a too ordinary contradiction.
In fine we have seen that all the Fathers of the first centuries of the Church, while believing the soul immortal, believed it at the same time material; they thought that it is as easy for God to conserve as to create.They said--" God made the soul thinking, He will preserve it thinking.''
Malebranche has proved very well that we have no idea by ourselves, and that objects are incapable of giving us ideas: from that he concludes that we see everything in God.That is at the bottom the same thing as making God the author of all our ideas; for with what should we see in Him, if we had not instruments for seeing? and these instruments, it is He alone who holds them and guides them.This system is a labyrinth, one lane of which would lead you to Spinozism, another to Stoicism, another to chaos.
When one has had a good argument about spirit and matter, one always finishes by not understanding each other.No philosopher has been able with his own strength to lift this veil stretched by nature over all the first principles of things.Men argue, nature acts.
