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Updated: May 13, 2025
If, therefore, it be evident, that something necessarily must exist from eternity, it is also as evident, that that something must necessarily be a cogitative being: for it is as impossible that incogitative matter should produce a cogitative being, as that nothing, or the negation of all being, should produce a positive being or matter. The Attributes of the Eternal Cogitative Being.
To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the greatest philosophers of antiquity it seemed impossible to doubt that the sun moved over a stationary earth. Much more, therefore, may our broad distinction between "cogitative and incogitative being" not be a distinction which is "legitimated by the conditions of external reality."
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."
This being of all absurdities the greatest, to imagine that pure nothing, the perfect negation and absence of all beings, should ever produce any real existence. It being, then, unavoidable for all rational creatures to conclude, that SOMETHING has existed from eternity; let us next see WHAT KIND OF THING that must be. Two Sorts of Beings, cogitative and incogitative.
But this imagination, however more natural, is no less absurd than the other; for to suppose the eternal thinking Being to be nothing else but a composition of particles of matter, each whereof is incogitative, is to ascribe all the wisdom and knowledge of that eternal Being only to the juxta-position of parts; than which nothing can be more absurd.
And yet, if they will not allow matter as matter, that is, every particle of matter, to be as well cogitative as extended, they will have as hard a task to make out to their own reasons a cogitative being out of incogitative particles, as an extended being out of unextended parts, if I may so speak. II. Secondly, Because one Particle alone of Matter cannot be cogitative.
But let us suppose motion eternal too: yet matter, INCOGITATIVE matter and motion, whatever changes it might produce of figure and bulk, could never produce thought: knowledge will still be as far beyond the power of motion and matter to produce, as matter is beyond the power of nothing or nonentity to produce.
This latter fallacy is further insisted upon thus: "If they will not allow matter as matter, that is, every particle of matter, to be as well cogitative as extended, they will have as hard a task to make out to their own reasons a cogitative being out of incogitative particles, as an extended being out of unextended parts, if I may so speak.... Every particle of matter, as matter, is capable of all the same figures and motions of any other, and I challenge any one in his thoughts to add anything else to one above another."
Instead of the customary names, material and immaterial substances, Locke recommends cogitative and incogitative substances, since it is not inconceivable that the Creator may have endowed some material beings with the capacity of thought. They are not copies of real things, but represent themselves alone, are their own archetypes.
Which, if you please, we will hereafter call COGITATIVE and INCOGITATIVE beings; which to our present purpose, if for nothing else, are perhaps better terms than material and immaterial. Incogitative Being cannot produce a Cogitative Being. If, then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of being it must be.
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