Note 6 — Chapter II

Doubtless many will fall back upon the position already indicated, "It is as repugnant to the idea of senseless matter, that it should put into itself sense, perception, and knowledge, as it is repugnant to the idea of a triangle, that it should put into itself greater angles than two right ones." But, granting this, and also that conscious matter is the sole alternative, and what follows? Not surely that matter cannot perceive, and feel, and know, merely because it is repugnant to our idea of it that it should. Granting that there is no other alternative in the whole possibility of things, than that matter must be conscious, or that self-conscious Mind must somewhere be self-existing; and granting that it is quite "impossible for us to conceive" of consciousness as an attribute of matter; still surely it would be a prodigious leap to conclude that for this reason matter cannot possess this attribute. Indeed, Locke himself elsewhere strangely enough insists that thought may be a property of matter, if only the Deity chose to unite that attribute with that substance. Why it should be deemed abstractedly impossible for matter to think if there is no God, and yet abstractedly possible that it should think if there is a God, I confess myself quite unable to determine; but I conceive that it is very important clearly to point out this peculiarity in Locke's views, for he is a favourite authority with theists, and this peculiarity amounts to nothing less than a suicide of his entire argument. The mere circumstance that he assumed the Deity capable of endowing matter with the faculty of thinking, could not have enabled him to conceive of matter as thinking, any more than he could conceive of this in the absence of his assumption. Yet in the one case he recognises the possibility of matter thinking, and in the other case denies such possibility, and this on the sole ground of its being inconceivable! However, I am not here concerned with Locke's eccentricities:[6] I am merely engaged with the general principle, that a subjective inability to establish certain relations in thought is no sufficient warrant for concluding that corresponding objective relations may not obtain.