18. How knows any one that the soul always thinks? For if it be not a self-evident proposition, it needs proof.
I would be glad also to learn from these men who so confidently pronounce that the human soul, or, which is all
one, that a man always thinks, how they come to know it; nay, how they come to know that they themselves think
when they themselves do not perceive it. This, I am afraid, is to be sure without proofs, and to know without
perceiving. It is, I suspect, a confused notion, taken up to serve an hypothesis; and none of those clear truths, that
either their own evidence forces us to admit, or common experience makes it impudence to deny. For the most
that can be said of it is, that it is possible the soul may always think, but not always retain it in memory. And I
say, it is as possible that the soul may not always think; and much more probable that it should sometimes not
think, than that it should often think, and that a long while together, and not be conscious to itself, the next
moment after, that it had thought.
