As great a Paradox as this may at first blush appear, yet it will need little more to make it out than the application of some things already delivered on occasion of the two foregoing Advices, of which this is indeed little more than a Corollary. For it being evident, that as a great part of the Dictates of Reason are Negative, so Negative Propositions do usually spring from the repugnancy we judge that some things have to some positive Dictate of Reason; if those positive Dictates contain but gradual and limited Truths (to borrow Sophronius his Terms;) and come to be unduly extended to privileg’d Subjectss it may very possibly happen, that a thing may be really true, that yet must appear false, if it be judg’d of by its congruity to one of those limited, and but respective Dictates of Reason. ‘Tis also clear, that not only in Philosophy, but natural (as well as reveal’d) Theology the usual ground on which we reject many things is, that we judge them unintelligible. And I censure not the practice in general, but I think it may easily mislead us, when it is extended to things that we may discern to transcend our Reason, as for ought yet appears, some of the Modus’s even of things Corporeal are found to do. And we think we have made complete Enumerations of the several ways of inexistence of an Attribute in a Subject, or of the operation of one thing upon another, when indeed we have overlook’d one or other, and perhaps that which we have thus pretermitted may be the true one; tho it may be also that no attention and diligence of ours could in some Cases have served our turn, the Modus inquired after being not conceivable to us, tho it may be too a higher than a human Intellect.
Pyrocles.
The School-Philosophers for many Ages in the Catalogues they made of the ways of a Bodies working upon another at a distance; did not think of the true ways by which Odors and Sounds are communicated to us, and therefore had recourse to certain unintelligible things, which they were pleas’d to call Species Intentionales. Whereas those modern Naturalists that philosophize freely, acknowledge, that Odors are communicated by Effluviums, exhaling from the odorous Body, and fitted to affect our Nostrils, and Sounds are transmitted to the Ear by the undulating motion which the Air is put into by the impulse of the vibrating, or otherwise agitated parts of the sonorous Body.
Timoth.
Methinks we need not go out of our selves to find Instances of both the parts of what Arnobius was last saying, if we admit, as I question not but we rationally may, this Tenet of the generality of Philosophers, both ancient and modern, That the Reasonable Soul is an immaterial Substance: For then; whereas men think they have sufficiently enumerated the ways of determining the motion of a Body, by saying, that the determination must be made either in the Line wherein the Impellent that put it into motion made it move, or in the Line wherein it was determined to move by the situation of the resisting Body that it met with in its way; the motions of the animal Spirits, if not also some other internal parts of the Body, may, the Body being duly disposed, be determined by the human Will; which is a way quite differing from the other. And how this Attribute, I mean the power of determining the motion of a Body, without any power to impart motion to that Body, should belong to an immaterial Creature, which has no Corporeal Parts to resist the free passage of a Body, and thereby change the Line of its Motion, is not yet, nor perhaps ever will be in this life, clearly conceived by us men, tho there is no doubt, but that he, who indowed the Soul with this Attribute or Power, perfectly understands, both how it exists in the Soul, and how the Soul by exerting it, operates on the Body.
Pyrocles.
But can any thing seem more unreasonable than to embrace opinions that contradict the Rules of Reason; which practice, if it be once allowed, why should we trouble our selves to investigate what is congruous or incongruous to Reason, since the making a discovery, that an opinion is repugnant to it, will not assure us of that opinions being false.
Arnob.
A person less knowing and equitable than Pyrocles would have spared this double Objection, if he had remembred, what hath been formerly said, applicable to our present purpose, and what kind of things they are that we are discoursing of: But to remind him a little of them, I shall desire him to consider with me, that I no way disallow the rejecting of Opinions that are found contrary to those Rules of Reason, at the framing of which the things opin’d about were duly taken into consideration: But in Cases not thought on when such Rules were devised, we are not always bound to submit to be judged by them; and to maintain an opinion unconformable to such a Rule, may be not to oppose a genuine and absolute dictate of Reason, but to rectifie one that is erroneously thought so, by shewing, that the Rule is expressed in more Catholick and Indefinite Terms than it ought to have been. And of two opinions you will not deny that that is the most rational that is most agreeable to those Rules of Reason, that are framed upon the fullest Information.