Now, in the former train of reasoning,
the whole proof rests entirely upon the fact that "it is impossible to
conceive that ever bare incogitative matter should produce a thinking
intelligent being." Clearly, if this proposition is true, it must destroy
one or other of the trains of reasoning; for it is common to them both, and
in one of them it is made the sole ground for concluding that matter cannot
think, while in the other it is made compatible with the supposition that
matter may think. This extraordinary inconsistency no doubt arose from the
fact that the author was antecedently persuaded of the existence of an
_Omnipotent_ Mind, and having been long accustomed in his intellectual
symbols to regard it presumptuous in him to impose any limitations on this
almighty power, when he asked himself whether it would be possible for this
almighty power, if it so willed, to endow matter with the faculty of
thinking, he argued that it might be possible, notwithstanding his being
unable to conceive the possibility. But when he banished from his mind the
idea of this personal and almighty power, and with that idea banished all
its associations, he then felt that he had a right to argue more freely,
and forthwith made his conceptive faculty a test of abstract possibility.
Yet _the sum total of abstract possibility, in relation to him, must have
been the same in the two cases_; so that in whichever of the two trains of
reasoning his argument was sound, in the other it must certainly have been
null.
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