194 HUME ix 



tended material body was to affect a thiiking 

 thing which had no dimension, was as great as 

 that involved in solving the problem of how to 

 hit a nominative case with a stick. Hence, the 

 successors of Descartes either found themselves 

 obliged, with the Occasionalists, to call in the aid 

 of the Deity, who was supposed to be a sort of 

 go-between betwixt matter and spirit; or they had 

 recourse, with Leibnitz, to the doctrine of pre- 

 established harmony, which denied any influence 

 of the body on the soul, or vice versa, and com- 

 pared matter and spirit to two clocks so accurately 

 regulated to keep time with one another, that 

 the one struck whenever the other pointed 

 to the hour; or, with Berkeley, they abolished 

 the " substance " of matter altogether, ' as a 

 superfluity, though they failed to see that the same 

 arguments equally justified the abolition of soul 

 as another superfluity, and the reduction of the 

 universe* to a series of events or phenomena; or, 

 finally, with Spinoza, to whom Berkeley makes 

 a perilously close approach, they asserted the 

 existence of only one substance, with two chief 

 attributes, the one, thought, and the other, exten- 

 sion. 



There remained only one possible position, 

 which, had it been taken up earlier, might have 

 saved an immensity of trouble; and that was to 

 affirm that we do not, and cannot, know anything 

 about the "substance" either of the thinking 



