it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound.  The Mind, Spirit, or Soul is that indivisible unextended thing which thinks, acts, and perceives.  I say indivisible, because unextended; and unextended, because extended, figured, moveable things are ideas; and that which perceives ideas, which thinks and wills, is plainly itself no idea, nor like an idea.  Ideas are things inactive, and perceived.  And Spirits a sort of beings altogether different from them.  I do not therefore say my soul is an idea, or like an idea.  However, taking the word idea in a large sense, my soul may be said to furnish me with an idea, that is, an image or likeness of God—­though indeed extremely inadequate.  For, all the notion I have of God is obtained by reflecting on my own soul, heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections.  I have, therefore, though not an inactive idea, yet in myself some sort of an active thinking image of the Deity.  And, though I perceive Him not by sense, yet I have a notion of Him, or know Him by reflexion and reasoning.  My own mind and my own ideas I have an immediate knowledge of; and, by the help of these, do mediately apprehend the possibility of the existence of other spirits and ideas.  Farther, from my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.  So much for your first question.  For the second:  I suppose by this time you can answer it yourself.  For you neither perceive Matter objectively, as you do an inactive being or idea; nor know it, as you do yourself, by a reflex act, neither do you mediately apprehend it by similitude of the one or the other; nor yet collect it by reasoning from that which you know immediately.  All which makes the case of matter widely different from that of the deity.

HYL.  You say your own soul supplies you with some sort of an idea or image of God.  But, at the same time, you acknowledge you have, properly speaking, no idea of your own soul.  You even affirm that spirits are a sort of beings altogether different from ideas.  Consequently that no idea can be like a spirit.  We have therefore no idea of any spirit.  You admit nevertheless that there is spiritual Substance, although you have no idea of it; while you deny there can be such a thing as material Substance, because you have no notion or idea of it.  Is this fair dealing?  To act consistently, you must either admit Matter or reject Spirit.  What say you to this?

Phil. I say, in the first place, that I do not deny the existence of material substance, merely because I have no notion of it’ but because the notion of it is inconsistent; or, in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.  Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.  But then those