machines. Hence it is that the ancients themselves, who knew no
real substance but the body, pretended, however, that the soul of a
man was a fifth element, or a sort of quintessence without name,
unknown here below, indivisible, immutable, and altogether celestial
and divine, because they could not conceive that the terrestrial
matter of the four elements could think, and know itself:
Aristoteles quintam quandam naturam censet esse, e qua sit mens.
Cogitare enim, et providere, et discere, et docere. . . . in horum
quatuor generum nullo inesse putat; quintum genus adhibet vacans
nomine.


SECT. XLIV. Matter Cannot Think.


But let us suppose whatever you please, for I will not enter the
lists with any sect of philosophers: here is an alternative which
no philosopher can avoid. Either matter can become a thinking
substance, without adding anything to it, or matter cannot think at
all, and so what thinks in us is a substance distinct from matter,
and which is united to it. If matter can acquire the faculty of
thinking without adding anything to it, it must, at least, be owned
that all matter does not think, and that even some matter that now
thinks did not think fifty years ago; as, for instance, the matter
of which the body of a young man is made up did not think ten years
before he was born. It must then be concluded that matter can
acquire the faculty of thinking by a certain configuration, ranging,
and motion of its parts. Let us, for instance, suppose the matter
of a stone, or of a heap of sand. It is agreed this part of matter
has no manner of thought; and therefore to make it begin to think,