Farther, from my own
being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I
do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a
God, and of all created things in the mind of God. So much for
your first question. For the second: I suppose by this time you
can answer it yourself. For you neither perceive Matter
objectively, as you do an inactive being or idea; nor know it, as
you do yourself, by a reflex act, neither do you mediately
apprehend it by similitude of the one or the other; nor yet
collect it by reasoning from that which you know immediately. All
which makes the case of
widely different from that of
the .
[. You say your own soul supplies you with some sort of
an idea or image of God. But, at the same time, you acknowledge
you have, properly speaking, no of your own soul. You even
affirm that spirits are a sort of beings altogether different
from ideas. Consequently that no idea can be like a spirit. We
have therefore no idea of any spirit. You admit nevertheless that
there is spiritual Substance, although you have no idea of it;
while you deny there can be such a thing as material Substance,
because you have no notion or idea of it.
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