because we cannot know its essence, as it is called, or have the idea of the substance of matter, as to say, there is no spirit, because we know not its essence, or have no idea of a spiritual substance." Mr. Locke also, comparing our idea of spirit with our idea of body, thinks there may seem rather less obscurity in the former than the latter. Our idea of body he takes to be an extended solid substance, capable of communicating motion by impulse; and our idea of soul is a substance that thinks, and has a power of exciting motion in body by will or thought. Now, some perhaps will say they comprehend a thinking thing, which perhaps is true; but, he says, if they consider it well, they can no more comprehend an extended thing; and if they say, they know not what it is thinks in them, they mean they know not what the substance is of that thinking thing; no more, says he, do they know what the substance is of that solid thing; and if they say they know how not how they think, he says, neither do they know how they are extended, how the solid parts are united, or where to make extension, &c. The learned Monsieur le Clerc, who generally knows how far human reason can bear, argues consonantly to what is before delivered by Mr. Locke, in his _Coronis_, added to the end of the fourth volume of his Philosophical Works, in the third edition of them, where he writes as followeth:-- "When we contemplate the corporeal nature, we can see nothing in it but extension, divisibility, solidity, mobility, and various determinations of quantity, or figures; which being so, it were a rash thing, and contrary to the laws of right reasoning, to affirm other things of bodies; and consequently from mere body nothing can be deduced by us, which is not joined in a necessary connection with the said properties; therefore those who have thought the properties of perceiving by sense, of understanding, willing, imagining, remembering, and others the like, which have no affinity with corporeal things, to have risen from the body, have greatly transgressed in the method of right reasoning and philosophising, which hath been done by Epicurus, and those who have thought as he did, having affirmed our minds to be composed of corporeal atoms: but whence shall we say they have had their rise? truly, they do not owe their rise to matter, which is wholly destitute of sense and thought, nor are they spontaneously sprung up from nothing, it being an ontological maxim of most evident truth, that nothing springs from nothing."