ABSTRACT
The question of the form of Locke's own mechanism is more than a little complicated. A good place to start unravelling the issue is perhaps a set of passages concerned with the extent and causes of our ignorance of the natural world, passages which have been taken to constitute a direct assertion that at least some fundamental laws or connections in nature do not possess geometrical necessity and intelligibility, but are the brute effects of God's will. The bulk of these passages occurs in the context of the long argument of Essay IV.iii, 'Of the Extent of Human Knowledge'. First, in IV.iii.6, there is the famous claim that thinking matter is for us an open possibility: more precisely, that it is
impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial Substance.
