Page:The Prince of Abissinia - Johnson (1759) - 02.djvu/167

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ABISSINIA.
157

be solid or fluid, to be great or little, to be moved slowly or swiftly one way or another, are modes of material existence, all equally alien from the nature of cogitation. If matter be once without thought, it can only be made to think by some new modification, but all the modifications which it can admit are equally unconnected with cogitative powers."

”But the materialists, said the astronomer, urge that matter may have qualities with which we are unacquainted.”

"He who will determine, returned Imlac, against that which he knows, because there may be something which he knows not; he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty, is not

to