ESSAY I. 339 (2.) Because created spirits neither acquire their knowledge or their motivity of bodies by this supposed penetration, as I have shown in Essay VI. The power of God to know and move bo- dies arises therefore from some such superior and unknown pro- perty of his nature as belongs to Deity alone, Who can create them. Again : Does every act of God, every thought, and every volition about an atom or a fly, employ the whole immense exten- sion of space ? Doth a thought of the purest, themost spiritual and abstractedobjects, imply or require any use of length and breadth in it ? Does the whole infinite extension work in every thought? Or indeed what has immense length and breadth to do at all toward thinking or willing ? Let us first find what the supposed finite length and breadth of a common spirit can do to- wards its ideas and volitions, and then I shall be more easily per- suaded that infinite length and breadth have a proportionable in- fluence upon infinite or divine thinking.* To sum up the whole matter; we have endeavoured by rea- soning to trace out what is space, and we s 'uem to have found it cannot be a mere nothing, because it appears tohave real proper- ties ; it cannot be a mode of being, because it seems to carry in it un idea that subsists of itself, though we should nullify all other beings in our thoughts ; and therefore it must be a substance, and yet if it be a substance it cannot be a created substance; because we cannot conceive it creable or annihilable; and therefore it car- ries with it an idea of necessary existence.; and besides this idea of necessary existence, it seems to have several other properties ofgodhead, viz. Immensity or omnipresence, eternity, &c. And yet so great is the absurdity of making the blessed God a being of infinite length, breadth and depth, and of ascribing to him parts of this nature, measurable by inches, yards and miles, and commensurate to all particular bodies in the universe with other unhappy consequences, that I cannot suffer myself to assent to this notion, that space is God: And yet the strongest arguments seem to evince this, that it must be God, or it must be nothing. * It would be endless to run over the arguments which have been brought by many writers, against the power of extension as well as against thepower ofmutter to think. I would only mention here what seems to be the result of Dr. Clarke's long contest with Mr. Collins, to prove that matter cannot think, and apply it more effectually to extension. If extension has the property of thinking, every part of extension must either have that property in itself, or must do something towards it in the whole : As for instance, Ifbody has motion, every part of that body has Motion in itself; or if a surface be round, every part of that surface Both contribute something toward that roundness: But every part of extension or space doth not think this would make innumerable spirits ; nor doth every part do any thing toward it; for thought is simple, and not made up of parts; and therefore a spirit must be quite another thing, es-on a being which bas no parts, ne extension. r2
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