Page:An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding - Locke (1690).djvu/58

RV 42 (Chap IV.) condemn for allowing it to be nothing but the subtilest parts of Matter. Characters drawn on Dust, that the first breath of wind effaces; or Impressions made on a heap of Atoms, or animal Spirits, are altogether as useful, and render the Subject as noble, as the Thoughts of a Soul that perish in thinking; that once out of sight, are gone for ever, and leave no memory of themselves behind them. Nature never makes excellent things, for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be conceived, that our infinitely wise Creator, should make so admirable a Faculty, as the power of Thinking, that Faculty which comes nearest the Excellency of his own incomprehensible Being, to be so idlely and uselesly employ'd, at least part of its time here, as to think constantly, without remembring any of those Thoughts, without doing any good to its self or others, or being any way useful to any other part of the Creation. If we will examine it, we shall not find, I suppose, the motion of dull and sensless matter, any where in the Universe, made so little use of, and so wholly thrown away.

§. 16. 'Tis true, we have sometimes instances of Perception, whilst we are asleep, and retain the memory of those Thoughts: but how extravagant and incoherent for the most part they are; how little conformable to the Perfection and Order of a rational Being, those who are acquainted with Dreams, need not be told. This I would willingly be satisfied in, Whether the Soul, when it thinks thus apart, and as it were separate from the Body, acts less rationally then, when conjointly with it, or no: If its separate Thoughts be less rational, then these Men must say, That the Soul owes the perfection of rational thinking to the Body: If it does not, 'tis a wonder that our Dreams should be, for the most part, so frivolous and irrational; and that the Soul should retain none of its more rational Soliloquies and Meditations.

§. 17. Those who so confidently tell us, That the Soul always actually thinks, I would they would also tell us, what those Ideas are, that are in the Soul of a Child, before, or just at the union with the Body, before it hath received any by Sensation. The Dreams of sleeping Men, are, as I take it, all made up of the waking Man's Ideas, though, for the most part, oddly put together. 'Tis strange, if the Soul has Ideas of its own, that it derived not from Sensation or Reflection, (as it must have, if it thought before it received any impressions from the Body) that it should never, in its private thinking, (so private, that the Man himself perceives it not) retain any of them, the very moment it wakes out of them, and then make the Man glad with new discoveries. Who can find it reason, that the Soul should, in its retirement, during sleep, have so many hours thoughts, and yet never light on any of those Ideas it borrowed not from Sensation or Reflection, or at least preserve the memory of none, but such, which being occasioned from the Body, must needs be less natural to a Spirit? 'Tis strange, the Soul should never once in a Man's whole life, recal over any of its pure, native Thoughts, and those Ideas it had before it borrowed any thing from the Body; never bring into the waking Man's view, any other Ideas, but what have a tangue of the Cask, manifestly derive their Original from that union. If it always thinks, and so had Ideas before it was united, or before it received any from the Body, 'tis not to be supposed, but that during sleep, it recollects its native Ideas, and during that retirement from communicating with the Body, whilst it thinks by it self, the Ideas it is busied about, should be sometimes, at least those more natural and congenial ones had in it self, underived from the Body, or its own operations about them, which since the waking Man never remembers, we must from this Hypothesis conclude, that Memory belongs