all his speculations, takes himself for the model, he no sooner imagined
a spirit within himself, than giving it extent, he made it universal;
then ascribed to it all those causes with which his ignorance prevents
him from becoming acquainted, thus he identified himself with the Author
of Nature--then availed himself of the supposition to explain the
connection of the soul with the body: his self-complacency prevented his
perceiving that he was only enlarging the circle of his errors, by
pretending to understand that which it is more than possible he will
never be permitted to know; his self-love prevented him from feeling,
that whenever he punished another for not thinking as he did, that he
committed the greatest injustice, unless he was satisfactorily able to
prove that other wrong, and himself right: that if he himself was
obliged to have recourse to hypothesis--to gratuitous suppositions,
whereon to found his doctrine, that from the very fallibility of his
nature, these might be erroneous: thus GALLILEO was persecuted, because
the metaphysicians, the theologians of his day, chose to make others
believe what it was evident they did not themselves understand.

As soon as I feel an impulse, or experience motion, I am under the
necessity to acknowledge extent, solidity, density, impenetrability in
the substance I see move, or from which I receive impulse: thus, when
action is attributed to any cause whatever, I am obliged to consider it
MATERIAL. I may be ignorant of its individual nature, of its mode of
action, or of its generic properties; but I cannot deceive myself in
general properties, which are common to all matter: this ignorance will
only be increased, when I shall take that for granted of a being, of
which from that moment I am precluded by what I admit from forming any
idea, which moreover deprives it completely either of the faculty of
moving itself, giving an impulse, or acting. Thus, according to the
received idea of the term, a spiritual substance that moves itself, that