"God, I find, has given me this faculty; and since I cannot but be convinced of His power in this instance, which, though I every moment experience in myself, yet I cannot conceive the manner of, what would it be less than an insolent absurdity to deny His power in other like cases, only for this reason, because I cannot conceive the manner how?... "That Omnipotency cannot make a substance to be solid and not solid at the same time, I think with due reverence [diffidence?[35]] we may say; but that a solid substance may not have qualities, perfections, and powers, which have no natural or visibly necessary connection with solidity and extension, is too much for us (who are but of yesterday, and know nothing) to be positive in. "If God cannot join things together by connections inconceivable to us, we must deny even the consistency and being of matter itself; since every particle of it having some bulk, has its parts connected by ways inconceivable to us. So that all the difficulties that are raised against the thinking of matter, from our ignorance or narrow conceptions, stand not at all in the way of the power of God, if He pleases to ordain it so; nor prove anything against His having actually endowed some parcels of matter, so disposed as He thinks fit, with a faculty of thinking, till it can he shown that it contains a contradiction to suppose it. "Though to me sensation be comprehended under thinking in general, in the foregoing discourse I have spoke of sense in brutes as distinct from thinking; because your lordship, as I remember, speaks of sense in brutes. But here I take liberty to observe, that if your lordship allows brutes to have sensation, it will follow, either that God can and doth give to some parcels of matter a power of perception and thinking, or that all animals have immaterial, and consequently, according to your lordship, immortal souls, as well as men; and to say that fleas and mites, &c., have immortal souls as well as men, will possibly be looked on as going a great way to serve an hypothesis.... "It is true, I say, 'That bodies operate by impulse, and nothing else,' and so I thought when I writ it, and can yet conceive no other way of their operation. But I am since convinced, by the judicious Mr. Newton's incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God's power in this point by my narrow conceptions. The gravitation of matter towards matter, by way unconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God can, if He pleases, put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter, but also an unquestionable and everywhere visible instance that He has done so. And therefore, in the next edition of my book, I will take care to have that passage rectified....