Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/140

64 all kind of religious devotion. Nature has so richly provided for their convenience in this life, that they have drowned all sense of the God of it, and are grown quite careless of the next."

But to provide against the clearest evidence of atheism in these people, you say, "that the account given of them makes them not fit to be a standard for the sense of mankind." This, I think, may pass for nothing, till somebody be found, that makes them to be a standard for the sense of mankind. All the use I made of them was to show, that there were men in the world that had no innate idea of a God. But to keep something like an argument going (for what will not that do?) you go near denying those Cafers to be men. What else do these words signify? "a people so strangely bereft of common sense, that they can hardly be reckoned among mankind, as appears by the best accounts of the Cafers of Soldania, &c" I hope, if any of them were called Peter, James, or John, it would be past scruple that they were men: however Courwee, Weweua, and Cowsheda, and those others who had names, that had no places in your nomenclator, would hardly pass muster with your lordship.

My lord, I should not mention this, but that what you yourself say here may be a motive to you to consider, that what you have laid such a stress on concerning the general nature of man, as a real being, and the subject of properties, amounts to nothing for the distinguishing of species; since you yourself own that there maybe individuals, wherein there is a common nature with a particular subsistence proper to each of them; whereby you are so little able to know of which of the ranks or sorts they are, into which you say God has ordered beings, and which he hath distinguished by essential properties, that you are in doubt whether they ought to be reckoned among mankind or no. of such a notion out of men's minds, any argument against the being of a God; any more than it would be a proof that there was no loadstone in the world, because a great part of mankind had neither a notion of any such thing, nor a name for it ; or be any show of argument to prove, that there are no distinct and various species of angels or intelligent beings above us, because we have no ideas of such distinct species, or names for them: for men being furnished with words, by the common language of their own countries, can scarce avoid having some kind of ideas of those things, whose names those they converse with have occasion frequently to mention to them. And if they carry with it the notion of excellency, greatness, or something extraordinary; if apprehension and