9.  Two Sorts of Beings, cogitative and incogitative.

There are but two sorts of beings in the world that man knows or conceives.

First, such as are purely material, without sense, perception, or thought, as the clippings of our beards, and parings of our nails.

Secondly, sensible, thinking, perceiving beings, such as we find ourselves to be.  Which, if you please, we will hereafter call cogitative and incogitative beings; which to our present purpose, if for nothing else, are perhaps better terms than material and immaterial.

10.  Incogitative Being cannot produce a Cogitative Being.

If, then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of being it must be.  And to that it is very obvious to reason, that it must necessarily be a cogitative being.  For it is as impossible to conceive that ever bare incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter.  Let us suppose any parcel of matter eternal, great or small, we shall find it, in itself, able to produce nothing.  For example:  let us suppose the matter of the next pebble we meet with eternal, closely united, and the parts firmly at rest together; if there were no other being in the world, must it not eternally remain so, a dead inactive lump?  Is it possible to conceive it can add motion to itself, being purely matter, or produce anything?  Matter, then, by its own strength, cannot produce in itself so much as motion:  the motion it has must also be from eternity, or else be produced, and added to matter by some other being more powerful than matter; matter, as is evident, having not power to produce motion in itself.  But let us suppose motion eternal too:  yet matter, incogitative matter and motion, whatever changes it might produce of figure and bulk, could never produce thought:  knowledge will still be as far beyond the power of motion and matter to produce, as matter is beyond the power of nothing or nonentity to produce.  And I appeal to every one’s own thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive matter produced by nothing, as thought to be produced by pure matter, when, before, there was no such thing as thought or an intelligent being existing?  Divide matter into as many parts as you will, (which we are apt to imagine a sort of spiritualizing, or making a thinking thing of it,) vary the figure and motion of it as much as you please—­a globe, cube, cone, prism, cylinder, &c., whose diameters are but 100,000th part of a GRY, will operate no otherwise upon other bodies of proportionable bulk, than those of an inch or foot diameter; and you may as rationally expect to produce sense, thought, and knowledge, by putting together, in a certain figure and motion, gross particles of matter, as by those that are the very minutest that do anywhere exist.  They knock, impel, and resist one another, just as the greater do; and that is all they can do.  So that, if