Page:A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More.djvu/215

Rh the two former are wanting, Extension implyes not the Third.

But when I speak of Indivisibility, that Imagination create not new troubles to her self, I mean not such an Indivisibility as is fancied in a Mathematical point; but as we conceive in a Sphere of light made from one lucid point or radiant Center. For that Sphere or Orbe of light though it be in some sense extended, yet it is truly indivisible, supposing the Center such: For there is no means imaginable to discerp or separate any one ray of this Orbe, and keep it apart by it self disjoyned from the Center.

10. Now a little to invert the property of this luminous Orbe when we would apply it to a Soul or Spirit, As there can be no alteration in the radiant Center, but therewith it is necessarily in every part of the Orbe, as suppose it were redder, all would be redder, if dimmer, all dimmer, and the like: so there is also that unity and indivisibility of the exteriour parts, if I may so call them, of a Spirit or Soul with their inmost Center, that if any of them be affected, the Center of life is also thereby necessarily affected, and these exteriour parts of the Soul being affected by the parts of the Object with such circumstances as they are in, the inward Center receives all so circumstantiated, that it has necessarily the intire and unconfused images of things without, though they be contrived into so small a compasse, and are in the very center of this Spiritual Substance,

This Symbolical representation I used before, and I cannot excogitate any thing that will better set off the nature of a Spirit, wherein is implied a power of receiving multitudes of particular figurations into one indivisible Principle of Sense, where all are exactly united into one Subject, and yet distincty represented; which cannot be performed by the Conarion it self, as I have demonstrated, and therefore it remains that it must refer to a Soul, whose chief seat may haply be there as to the act of perception.

11. But if any shall abuse our Courtesie of endeavouring to help his Imagination (or at least to gratifie it) in this Symbolical representation we have made, by conceiving of this Center of the Soul but as some dull dirisible point in Matter, and of no greater efficacy, and of the vital or arbitrarious extension of it, as grossely as if it would necessarily argue as real a divisibility and seperability of the parts as in a Body, to prevent all such cavils, we shall omit those spinosities of the extension or indivisibility of a Soul or Spirit, and conclude briefly thus:

That the manifold contradictions and repugnancies we finde in the nature of Matter to be able to either think or spontaneously to move it self, do well assure us that these operations belong not to it, but to some other Substance: wherefore we finding those operations in us, it is manifest that we have in us an Immaterial Being really distinct from the Body, which we ordinarily call a Soul. The speculation of whose bare Essence though it may well puzzle us, yet those Properties that we find incompetible to a Body, do sufficiently inform us of the different nature of her; for it is plain she is a Substance indued with the power of cogitation (that is, of perceiving and thinking of Objects) as also of penetrating and Spontaneously moving of a Body: which Properties are as immediate to Rh