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The best key for the aforesaid analogy or natural Science will be easily acknowledged to be a certain celebrated Treatise of Mechanics. Whoever therefore supposes them to exist (allowing the supposition possible) when they are not perceived does it manifestly to no purpose; since the only use that is assigned to them, as they exist unperceived, is that they produce those perceivable effects which in truth cannot be ascribed to anything but Spirit. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. Using NetDetective you can find everything about The Smith. But I believe nobody will say that what he means by the terms soul and substance is only some particular sort of idea or sensation. You may say, for example, that twice two is equal to seven, so long as you declare you do not take the words of that proposition in their usual acceptation but for marks of you know not what. Which sufficiently shows that the right angle might have been oblique, and the sides unequal, and for all that the demonstration have held good. But what truth is there which shineth so strongly on the mind that by an aversion of thought, a wilful shutting of the eyes, we may not escape seeing it? And accordingly we see the attempts of that kind are not at all satisfactory. Not that I imagine we see God (as some will have it) by a direct and immediate view; or see corporeal things, not by themselves, but by seeing that which represents them in the essence of God, which doctrine is, I must confess, to me incomprehensible. The Smith you can find here. But, perhaps, we may be too partial to ourselves in placing the fault originally in our faculties, and not rather in the wrong use we make of them. But then it must be observed that it supports nothing at all, and how nearly this comes to the description of a nonentity I desire may be considered. Were it necessary to add any farther proof against the existence of Matter after what has been said, I could instance several of those errors and difficulties (not to mention impieties) which have sprung from that tenet. It is true the diagram I have in view includes all these particulars, but then there is not the least mention made of them in the proof of the proposition. For example, a triangle is defined to be "a plain surface comprehended by three right lines," by which that name is limited to denote one certain idea and no other. But then if this be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animals, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number. The Smith information. First, in true or absolute motion all parts which preserve the same position with respect of the whole, partake of the motions of the whole. But for a fuller information in this point I refer to the Essay itself. But, secondly, if we had a new sense it could only furnish us with new ideas or sensations; and then we should have the same reason against their existing in an unperceiving substance that has been already offered with relation to figure, motion, colour and the like. Unity I know some will have to be a simple or uncompounded idea, accompanying all other ideas into the mind. A clear view of which great truths cannot choose but fill our hearts with an awful circumspection and holy fear, which is the strongest incentive to Virtue, and the best guard against Vice. Innumerable examples of this kind may be given, but why should I insist on those things which every one's experience will, I doubt not, plentifully suggest unto him? We comprehend our own existence by inward feeling or reflexion, and that of other spirits by reason. But, philosophers having plainly seen that the immediate objects of perception do not exist without the mind, they in some degree corrected the mistake of the vulgar; but at the same time run into another which seems no less absurd, to wit, that there are certain objects really existing without the mind, or having a subsistence distinct from being perceived, of which our ideas are only images or resemblances, imprinted by those objects on the mind.
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