ESSAY I1I. 365 If after all, we find difficulties in adjusting these speculations with a perfect accuracy, let us remember, that our understandings are very imperfect powers ; that forms of learning as well as unlearned prejudices sometimes lead us into mistakes ; and that all things will not easily be collected and bound up under our grammatical and logical ways of speaking, and confined to them only. ESSAY III. Of the Original of our Perceptions and Ideas. FATHER Malebranche, who was an admirable writer in the last age, and has many excellent chapters in his treatise of The Search after Truth, yet has vented :a strange opinion, that we see all our ideas in God. It is the known and distinguishing character of this rational author, that be falls into a sort of enthu- siasm in his doctrine concerning our ideasof things, and their original. Ile supposes God to contain in himself all material beings in a spiritual manner ; which he.calls the:intelligible sun, moon, trees, and stars, the intelligible world, and intelligible extension : And that created mindsreceive all their ideas of ex- ternal objects, by contemplating this intelligible world which ex- ists in God ; which he explains and attempts to prove at large in the sixth chapter of the third book, part II. and to prepare the way, he labours to refute allother opinions in the five chapters preceding. But among all these opinions of the original ideas he lias neither exactly proposed nor refuted the true Cartesian doctrine, which, with a little alteration, seems the most evi- dent and most defensible of all: And this I shall endea- vour to describe in several theses in a distinct manner, where- in we shall see how far God concurs in tite ideas formed by the mind. I. The soul of man is a thinking being, created and pre- served with all its capacities by God the Almighty Spirit. The Cartesian writers make self- subsistent and perpetual cogitation to be the intimate essence and nature of it : But I bad rather say, It is a power of thing, i. e. of perceiving and willing in con- tinual act ; and consequently, it is created capable of forming or receiving ideas in the tniud, as well as of exerting volitions, or acts of the will. And as it is brought into-being by the creative power of God, so it is the almightyconservingpowet of God that
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=