1. There is a late way of arguing taken up by Dr. _Moore_ and others, that they will undertake to prove a thing to be so or so, or else to make Man to deny his own faculties. And so the said Doctor doth undertake to prove the existence of immaterial and incorporeal beings, or else he thinketh he bringeth Men to deny their own faculties: And these faculties he maketh to be, common notions, external sense, and evident and undeniable deductions of reason. And concludeth that, what is not consonant to all or some of these is meer fancy, and is of no moment for the evincing of truth or falshood, by either its vigour or perplexiveness. But this will not accomplish the business he intends, for these reasons. 1. Because there is not the common notion of a spiritual and immaterial being in all or any Man, neither is it (to use his own words) true at first sight to all men in their wits upon a clear perception of the terms, without any further discourse or reasoning, but is only a bare supposition without any proof or evidence at all. 2. The being of an immaterial and spiritual substance can no way incurr into the senses nor affect them, because it is manifest (as _Des Cartes_ hath sufficiently proved) that all sensation is procured by corporeal contact, and not otherwise. And though we deny not that there have been, are and may be apparitions, that cannot be rationally supposed to be the ordinary _Phænomena_ of corporeal matter, yet affecting the senses, there must be something in them that performeth that effect, that is corporeal, or else the senses could not be wrought upon, for _immateriale non agit in materiale, nisi eminenter ut Deus_. 3. No right deductions can possibly be drawn from the highest power of ratiocination, where the understanding hath no cognoscibility of the things that reason would draw its conclusions from, for as the same Doctor frameth his Axiome which is this: Whatsoever things are in themselves, they are nothing to us, but so far forth as they become known to our faculties or cognitive powers. But we assert (which we shall make good anon) that our faculties or cognitive powers (how far soever some would vainly magnifie and extol them) have not the power of understanding beings that are simply and absolutely immaterial and incorporeal. 4. There is nothing that is more undoubtedly true than what the Lord _Verulam_ hath told us in these words: _Causa vero & radix ferè omnium malorum in scientiis ea una est: quod dum mentis humanæ vires falso miramur & extollimus, vera ejus auxilia non quæramus_. And again: _Subtilitas naturæ subtilitatem sensûs & intellectûs multis partibus superat_, the which may be proved from many undeniable instances, which need not here be mentioned, only we shall add what the aforesaid learned Lord speaks to the same purpose which is this: “The fault of sense is twofold: For it either forsaketh or deceiveth us. For first there are many things that escape the sense, though rightly disposed, and no way