The author of the article SOUL in the "Encyclopedia" (the Abbé 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 revelation, 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.