I see _no contradiction_ in it that the first eternal thinking Being should, if He pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter, put together as He sees fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought."[166] In these and similar passages, Locke did not mean, we think, to retract or modify the doctrine which he had taught respecting the radical distinction betwixt mind and matter; he intended merely to intimate that, in adopting that doctrine, he proceeded on grounds different from those which had been assumed by some other writers; that his belief rested mainly on the essential difference between the properties belonging to the two substances, and not on the mere metaphysical arguments by which some had attempted to prove that God himself could not impart to matter the power of thinking.

He shrunk from pronouncing a positive decision on _this_ one point; and yet his words have ever since been quoted with triumph by the advocates of Materialism as affording a virtual sanction to _the possibility_ at least of that for which they contend.

And on the same account, Locke has been severely blamed by some modern "spiritualists." Mr.Carlyle, speaking of "Hartley's and Darwin's, and all the possible forms of Materialism,--the grand Idolatry, as we may rightly call it, by which at all times the true worship, that of the invisible, has been polluted and withstood"-- adds the following characteristic remarks: "Locke, himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay religious man, had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.

Mind, by being modelled in men's imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility, and reasoned of as if it had been some composite, divisible, and reunitable substance, some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of logical joinery, began to lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine, though invisible character: it was tacitly figured as something that might, were our organs fine enough, be _seen_.

Yet who had ever seen it?
who could ever see it?
Thus, by degrees, it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some faint Possibility, and, at last, into a highly probably Nonentity.