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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
  
Epistle to the Reader

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Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
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Book II Of Ideas
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Book III Of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability
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Chapter I Of Knowledge in General
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Chapter II Of the Degrees of our Knowledge
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Chapter III Of the Extent of Human Knowledge
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Chapter IV Of the Reality of Knowledge
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Chapter V Of Truth in General
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Chapter VI Of Universal Propositions: their Truth and Certainty
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Chapter VII Of Maxims
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Chapter VIII Of Trifling Propositions
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Chapter IX Of our Threefold Knowledge of Existence
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Chapter X Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God
  
1. We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God.
  
2. For man knows that he himself exists.
  
3. He knows also that nothing cannot produce a being; therefore something must have existed from eternity.
  
4. And that eternal Being must be most powerful.
  
5. And most knowing.
  
6. And therefore God.
  
7. Our idea of a most perfect Being, not the sole proof of a God.
  
8. Recapitulation--something from eternity.
  
9. Two sorts of beings, cogitative and incogitative.
  
10. Incogitative being cannot produce a cogitative being.
  
11. Therefore, there has been an eternal cogitative Being.
  
12. The attributes of the eternal cogitative Being.
  
13. Whether the eternal Mind may he also material or no.
  
14. Not material: first, because each particle of matter is not cogitative.
  
15. Secondly, because one particle alone of matter cannot be cogitative.
  
16. Thirdly, because a system of incogitative matter cannot be cogitative.
  
17. And that whether this corporeal system is in motion or at rest.
  
18. Matter not co-eternal with an eternal Mind.
  
19. Objection: Creation out of nothing.
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Chapter XI Of our Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things
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Chapter XII Of the Improvement of our Knowledge
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Chapter XIII Some Further Considerations Concerning our Knowledge
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Chapter XIV Of Judgment
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Chapter XV Of Probability
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Chapter XVI Of the Degrees of Assent
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Chapter XVII Of Reason
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Chapter XVIII Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces
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Chapter XIX Of Enthusiasm
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Chapter XX Of Wrong Assent, or Error
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Chapter XXI Of the Division of the Sciences

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14. Not material: first, because each particle of matter is not cogitative.

But now let us see how they can satisfy themselves, or others, that this eternal thinking Being is material.

I. I would ask them, whether they imagine that all matter, every particle of matter, thinks? This, I suppose, they will scarce say; since then there would be as many eternal thinking beings as there are particles of matter, and so an infinity of gods. And yet, if they will not allow matter as matter, that is, every particle of matter, to be as well cogitative as extended, they will have as hard a task to make out to their own reasons a cogitative being out of incogitative particles, as an extended being out of unextended parts, if I may so speak.

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