15.  Our Ideas of spiritual Substances, as clear as of bodily Substances.

Besides the complex ideas we have of material sensible substances, of which I have last spoken,—­by the simple ideas we have taken from those operations of our own minds, which we experiment daily in ourselves, as thinking, understanding, willing, knowing, and power of beginning motion, &c., co-existing in some substance, we are able to frame the complex idea of an immaterial spirit.  And thus, by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving, liberty, and power of moving themselves and other things, we have as clear a perception and notion of immaterial substances as we have of material.  For putting together the ideas of thinking and willing, or the power of moving or quieting corporeal motion, joined to substance, of which we have no distinct idea, we have the idea of an immaterial spirit; and by putting together the ideas of coherent solid parts, and a power of being moved joined with substance, of which likewise we have no positive idea, we have the idea of matter.  The one is as clear and distinct an idea as the other:  the idea of thinking, and moving a body, being as clear and distinct ideas as the ideas of extension, solidity, and being moved.  For our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both:  it is but a supposed I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents.  It is for want of reflection that we are apt to think that our senses show us nothing but material things.  Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporeal and spiritual.  For whilst I know, by seeing or hearing, &c., that there is some corporeal being without me, the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears.  This, I must be convinced, cannot be the action of bare insensible matter; nor ever could be, without an immaterial thinking being.

16.  No Idea of abstract Substance either in Body or Spirit.

By the complex idea of extended, figured, coloured, and all other sensible qualities, which is all that we know of it, we are as far from the idea of the substance of body, as if we knew nothing at all:  nor after all the acquaintance and familiarity which we imagine we have with matter, and the many qualities men assure themselves they perceive and know in bodies, will it perhaps upon examination be found, that they have any more or clearer primary ideas belonging to body, than they have belonging to immaterial spirit.

17.  Cohesion of solid parts and Impulse, the primary ideas peculiar to Body.

The primary ideas we have peculiar to body, as contradistinguished to spirit, are the cohesion of solid, and consequently separable, parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse.  These, I think, are the original ideas proper and peculiar to body; for figure is but the consequence of finite extension.