Note 2 — Chapter II · CONCERNING MATTER.

“How can we define a being whose nature is absolutely unknown to us?” La Mettrie uses this as an argument against the belief in a soul, and yet he later admits that the “nature of motion is as unknown to us as the nature of matter.” It is difficult then to see why there is more reason to doubt the existence of spirit, than to doubt the existence of matter. Locke makes this point very well. “It is for want of reflection that we are apt to think that our senses show us nothing but material things. Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporeal and spiritual.”3... “If this notion of immaterial spirit may have, perhaps, some difficulties in it not easy to be explained, we have therefore no more reason to deny or doubt the existence of such spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body because the notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties, very hard and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us.”4