HYL.  As to the first point:  by occasion I mean an inactive unthinking being, at the presence whereof God excites ideas in our minds.

Phil.  And what may be the nature of that inactive unthinking being?

HYL.  I know nothing of its nature.

Phil.  Proceed then to the second point, and assign some reason why we should allow an existence to this inactive, unthinking, unknown thing.

HYL.  When we see ideas produced in our minds, after an orderly and constant manner, it is natural to think they have some fixed and regular occasions, at the presence of which they are excited.

Phil.  You acknowledge then God alone to be the cause of our ideas, and that He causes them at the presence of those occasions.

HYL.  That is my opinion.

Phil.  Those things which you say are present to God, without doubt He perceives.

HYL.  Certainly; otherwise they could not be to Him an occasion of acting.

Phil.  Not to insist now on your making sense of this hypothesis, or answering all the puzzling questions and difficulties it is liable to:  I only ask whether the order and regularity observable in the series of our ideas, or the course of nature, be not sufficiently accounted for by the wisdom and power of God; and whether it doth not derogate from those attributes, to suppose He is influenced, directed, or put in mind, when and what He is to act, by an unthinking substance?  And, lastly, whether, in case I granted all you contend for, it would make anything to your purpose; it not being easy to conceive how the external or absolute existence of an unthinking substance, distinct from its being perceived, can be inferred from my allowing that there are certain things perceived by the mind of God, which are to Him the occasion of producing ideas in us?

HYL.  I am perfectly at a loss what to think, this notion of occasion seeming now altogether as groundless as the rest.

Phil.  Do you not at length perceive that in all these different acceptations of matter, you have been only supposing you know not what, for no manner of reason, and to no kind of use?

HYL.  I freely own myself less fond of my notions since they have been so accurately examined.  But still, methinks, I have some confused perception that there is such a thing as matter.

Phil.  Either you perceive the being of Matter immediately or mediately.  If immediately, pray inform me by which of the senses you perceive it.  If mediately, let me know by what reasoning it is inferred from those things which you perceive immediately.  So much for the perception.  Then for the Matter itself, I ask whether it is object, substratum, cause, instrument, or occasion?  You have already pleaded for each of these, shifting your notions, and making Matter to appear sometimes in one shape, then in another.  And what you have offered hath been disapproved and rejected by yourself.  If you have anything new to advance I would gladly bear it.