sometime some way Objects of Sensation, so to be the genuine Objects of Imagination, and the perception of these to be rightly termed the Operation of Fancy, and that all these things that are thus represented, necessarily are to be looked upon as Corporeal, and consequently as actually divisible.
But that all perception of Extension is such Imagination, that I confidently deny, forasmuch as there is an Idea of infinite Extension drawn or taken in from no external Sense, but is natural and essential to the very Faculty of perceiving; which the Mind can by no means pluck out of her self, nor cast it away from her; but if she will rouse her self up, and by earnest and attentive thinking, fix her animadversion thereon, she will be constrained, whether she will or no, to acknowledge, that altho' the whole matter of the World were exterminated out of the Universe, there would notwithstanding remain a certain subtile and immaterial extension which has no agreement with that other Material one, in any thing, saving that it is extended, as being such that it neither falls under sense, nor is impenetrable, nor can be moved, nor discerped into parts; and that this Idea is not only possible, but necessary, and such as we do not at our pleasure feign and invent, but do find it to be so innate and ingrafted in our Mind, that we cannot by any force or Artifice remove it thence, which is a most certain demonstration that all Perception of Extension is not Imagination properly so called.
Which in my Opinion ought to be esteemed one of the chiefest and most fundamental Errors of the Nullibists, and to which especially this Difficulty is to be referred touching an Indiscerpible Extension. For we see they confess their own Guilt, namely that their Mind is so corrupted by their Imagination, and so immersed into it, that they can use no other Faculty in the Contemplation of any extended thing, and therefore when they make use of their Imagination instead of their Intellect in Contemplating of it, they necessarily look upon it as an Object of Imagination; that is, as a corporeal thing, and discerpible into parts, for, as I noted above, the sight of their Mind by reason of this Morbus ὑλοειδής, this materious Disease, if I may so speak, is made so heavy and dull, that it cannot distinguish any Extension from that of Matter, as allowing it to appertain to another kind, nor by Logical or Metaphysical Abstraction prescind it from either.
SECT.
