17. If I think when I know it not, nobody else can know it.
Those who so confidently tell us that the soul always
actually thinks, I would they would also tell us, what those ideas are that are in the soul of a child, before or just at
the union with the body, before it hath received any by sensation. The dreams of sleeping men are, as I take it, all
made up of the waking man's ideas; though for the most part oddly put together. It is strange, if the soul has ideas
of its own that it derived not from sensation or reflection, (as it must have, if it thought before it received any
impressions from the body,) that it should never, in its private thinking, (so private, that the man himself perceives
it not,) retain any of them the very moment it wakes out of them, and then make the man glad with new
discoveries. Who can find it reason that the soul should, in its retirement during sleep, have so many hours'
thoughts, and yet never light on any of those ideas it borrowed not from sensation or reflection; or at least
preserve the memory of none but such, which, being occasioned from the body, must needs be less natural to a
spirit? It is strange the soul should never once in a man's whole life recall over any of its pure native thoughts, and
those ideas it had before it borrowed anything from the body; never bring into the waking man's view any other
ideas but what have a tang of the cask, and manifestly derive their original from that union. If it always thinks,
and so had ideas before it was united, or before it received any from the body, it is not to be supposed but that
during sleep it recollects its native ideas; and during that retirement from communicating with the body, whilst it
thinks by itself, the ideas it is busied about should be, sometimes at least, those more natural and congenial ones
which it had in itself, underived from the body, or its own operations about them: which, since the waking man
never remembers, we must from this hypothesis conclude either that the soul remembers something that the man
does not; or else that memory belongs only to such ideas as are derived from the body, or the mind's operations
about them.
