to say that matter knows itself. It is
impossible to imagine how it should know itself.

So, if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are
composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are
simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all
philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things in
spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they say
boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after their
centre, that they fly from destruction, that they fear the void, that they
have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of which attributes pertain
only to mind. And in speaking of minds, they consider them as in a place,
and attribute to them movement from one place to another; and these are
qualities which belong only to bodies.

Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we colour
them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the
simple things which we contemplate.

Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that
this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we
least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for
he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least
of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of
his difficult