) and the power of abstracting (p. 409) can be given to matter, not as matter but as enriched by divine power. Finally he repeats (p. 434) the remark - made by no less eminent and judicious a traveller than M. de La Loubere - that the pagans of the East know the immortality of the soul even though they cannot understand its immateriality.
  I shall comment on all of this before expounding my own views. Certainly, as our author agrees, matter cannot mechanically produce sense, any more than it can reason. I acknowledge that we must not deny what we do not understand, but I add that we are entitled to deny (within the natural order at least) whatever is absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable. I also maintain that substances (material or immaterial) cannot be conceived in their bare essence devoid of activity; that activity is of the essence of substance in general; and, finally, that although what creatures conceive is not the measure of GodÕs powers, their ¥conceptivityÕ or power of conceiving is the measure of natureÕs powers: everything which is in accord with the natural order can be conceived or understood by some creature.
Those who come to understand my system will realize that I cannot  entirely agree with either of these excellent authors, although their dispute is very instructive. But to explain myself distinctly: it must be borne in mind above all that the modifications which can occur to a single subject naturally and without miracles must arise from limitations and variations of a real genus, i.e. of a constant and absolute inherent nature. For that is how philosophers distinguish the modes of an absolute being from that being itself; just as we know that size, shape and motion are obviously limitations and variations of corporeal nature (for it is plain how a limited extension yields shapes, and that changes occurring in it are nothing but motion). Whenever we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality we would conceive how the quality could arise from it. So within the order of nature (miracles apart) it is not at GodÕs arbitrary discretion to attach this or that quality haphazardly to substances. He will never give them any which are not natural to them, that is, which cannot arise from their nature as explicable modifications. So we may take it that matter will not naturally possess the attractive power referred to above, and that it will not of itself move in a curved path, because it is impossible to conceive how this could happen - that is, to explain it