23. A reflection on the knowledge of corporeal things possessed by spirits separate from bodies.
Hence we may
take notice, how much the foundation of all our knowledge of corporeal things lies in our senses. For how spirits,
separate from bodies, (whose knowledge and ideas of these things are certainly much more perfect than ours),
know them, we have no notion, no idea at all. The whole extent of our knowledge or imagination reaches not
beyond our own ideas limited to our ways of perception. Though yet it be not to be doubted that spirits of a higher
rank than those immersed in flesh may have as clear ideas of the radical constitution of substances as we have of a
triangle, and so perceive how all their properties and operations flow from thence: but the manner how they come
by that knowledge exceeds our conceptions.
