31. The notion of spirit involves no more difficulty in it than that of body.
Lastly, if this notion of immaterial
spirit may have, perhaps, some difficulties in it not easily to be explained, we have therefore no more reason to
deny or doubt the existence of such spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body; because the
notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties very hard, and perhaps impossible to be explained or
understood by us. For I would fain have instanced anything in our notion of spirit more perplexed, or nearer a
contradiction, than the very notion of body includes in it; the divisibility in infinitum of any finite extension
involving us, whether we grant or deny it, in consequences impossible to be explicated or made in our
apprehensions consistent; consequences that carry greater difficulty, and more apparent absurdity, than anything
can follow from the notion of an immaterial knowing substance.
