_Locke's Doubts concerning the Soul._
The author of the article on "Soul," in the "Encyclopædia," who has
scrupulously followed Jacquelot, teaches us nothing. He also rises up
against Locke, because the modest Locke has said:
"Perhaps we shall never be capable of knowing whether a material being
thinks or not; for this reason--that it is impossible for us to
discover, by the contemplation of our own ideas, 'without revelation,'
whether God has not given to some portion of matter, disposed as He
thinks fit, the power of perceiving and thinking; or whether He has
joined and united to matter so disposed, an immaterial and thinking
substance. For with regard to our notions, it is no less easy for us to
conceive that God can, if He pleases, add to an idea of matter the
faculty of thinking, than to comprehend that He joins to it another
substance with the faculty of thinking; since we know not in what
thought consists, nor to what kind of substance this all-powerful Being
has thought fit to grant this power, which could be created only by
virtue of the good-will and pleasure of the Creator. I do not see that
there is any contradiction in God--that thinking, eternal, and
all-powerful Being--giving, if He wills it, certain degrees of feeling,
perception, and thought, to certain portions of matter, created and
insensible, which He joins together as he thinks fit."
This was speaking like a profound, religious, and modest man. It is
known what contests he had to maintain concerning this opinion, which he
appeared to have hazarded, but which was really no other than a
consequence of the conviction he felt of the omnipotence of God, and the
weakness of man. He did not say that matter thought; but he said that we
do not know enough to demonstrate that it is impossible for God to add
the gift of thought to the unknown being called "matter," after granting
to it those of gravitation and of motion, which are equally
incomprehensible.
Assuredly, Locke was not the only one who advanced this opinion; it was
that of all the ancients--regarding the soul only as very subtile
matter, they consequently affirmed that matter could feel and think.
Such was the opinion of Gassendi, as we find in his objections to
Descartes. "It is true," says Gassendi, "that you know that you think;
but you, who think, know not of what kind of substance you are. Thus,
though 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
that substance, one of the operations of which is to think. You resemble
a blind man who, feeling the heat of the sun, and being informed that it
is caused by the sun, should believe himself to have a clear and
distinct idea of that luminary, because, if he were asked what the sun
is, he could answer, that it is a thing which warms...."
The same Gassendi, in his "Philosophy of Epicurus," repeats several
times that there is no mathematical evidence of the pure spirituality of
the soul.
Descartes, in one of his letters to Elizabeth, princess palatine, says
to her: "I confess, that by natural reason alone, we can form many
conjectures about the soul, and conceive flattering hopes; but we can
have no assurance." And here Descartes combats in his letters what he
advances in his books--a too ordinary contradiction.
We have seen, too, that all the fathers in the first ages of the Church,
while they believed the soul immortal, believed it to be material. They
thought it as easy for God to preserve as to create. They said, God made
it thinking, He will preserve it thinking.
Malebranche has clearly proved, that by ourselves we have no idea, and
that objects are incapable of giving us any; whence he concludes that we
see all things in God. This, in substance, is the same as making God
the author of all our ideas; for wherewith should we see ourselves in
Him, if we had not instruments for seeing? and these instruments are
held and directed by him alone. This system is a labyrinth, of which one
path would lead you to Spinozism, another to Stoicism, another to chaos.
When men have disputed well and long on matter and spirit, they always
end in understanding neither one another nor themselves. No philosopher
has ever been able to lift by his own strength the veil which nature has
spread over the first principle of things. They dispute, while nature is
acting.