22.  Our complex idea of an immaterial Spirit and our complex idea of Body compared.

Let us compare, then, our complex idea of an immaterial spirit with our complex idea of body, and see whether there be any more obscurity in one than in the other, and in which most.  Our idea of body, as I think, is an extended solid substance, capable of communicating motion by impulse:  and our idea of soul, as an immaterial spirit, is of A substance that thinks, and has A power of exciting motion in body, by willing, or thought.  These, I think, are our complex ideas of soul and body, as contradistinguished; and now let us examine which has most obscurity in it, and difficulty to be apprehended.  I know that people whose thoughts are immersed in matter, and have so subjected their minds to their senses that they seldom reflect on anything beyond them, are apt to say, they cannot comprehend a thinking thing which perhaps is true:  but I affirm, when they consider it well, they can no more comprehend an extended thing.

23.  Cohesion of solid Parts in Body as hard to be conceived as thinking in a Soul.

If any one says he knows not what it is thinks in him, he means he knows not what the substance is of that thinking thing:  No more, say I, knows he what the substance is of that solid thing.  Further, if he says he knows not how he thinks, I answer, Neither knows he how he is extended, how the solid parts of body are united or cohere together to make extension.  For though the pressure of the particles of air may account for the cohesion of several parts of matter that are grosser than the particles of air, and have pores less than the corpuscles of air, yet the weight or pressure of the air will not explain, nor can be a cause of the coherence of the particles of air themselves.  And if the pressure of the aether, or any subtiler matter than the air, may unite, and hold fast together, the parts of a particle of air, as well as other bodies, yet it cannot make bonds for itself, and hold together the parts that make up every the least corpuscle of that MATERIA subtilis.  So that that hypothesis, how ingeniously soever explained, by showing that the parts of sensible bodies are held together by the pressure of other external insensible bodies, reaches not the parts of the aether itself; and by how much the more evident it proves, that the parts of other bodies are held together by the external pressure of the aether, and can have no other conceivable cause of their cohesion and union, by so much the more it leaves us in the dark concerning the cohesion of the parts of the corpuscles of the aether itself:  which we can neither conceive without parts, they being bodies, and divisible, nor yet how their parts cohere, they wanting that cause of cohesion which is given of the cohesion of the parts of all other bodies.