ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that John Locke would find emergentism to be a reasonable possibility. It shows that Locke’s nominal dualism, combined with his emergentism, explains why the power of thought may appear to be entirely distinct from and over, because that system can be viewed from the nominally dualistic perspective of our ‘Notions’ of ‘Matter’ and ‘Thinking’. The ideas of mind and body that we derive from these two sources are both ‘primary’ ideas in that each is considered to be conceptually basic, neither being explainable in terms of the other. Locke even accuses substance dualism of limiting God’s omnipotency ‘to a narrow compass and ‘bringing down God’s infinite power to the size of our capacities’. Many commentators think that Locke treats the notion of a system of matter endowed with thought as merely an epistemic possibility or hypothesis. God creates each particle and assembles them into such organic forms as he thinks suitable to assign specific higher-level features to.
