🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi, thought that some of you would enjoy this letter.  The document is to
John Adams and was sent from Monticello, on August 15, 1820.

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... But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the
12th, on matter, spirt, motion, etc.  Its crowd of scepticisms kept me from
sleep.  I read it, and laid it down; read it, and laid it down, again and
again; and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my
habitual anodyne, "I feel, therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not
myself: there are other existences then.  I call them matter.  I feel them
changing place.  This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter,
I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space.  On the basis of sensation,
of matter, and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can
have or need.  I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular
organization of matter, formed for that purpose by its Creator, as well as
that attraction is an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone.  When he
who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of
action called thinking, shall show how He could endow the sun with the mod
of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their
orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put
matter into motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain
the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking.  When once we
quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind.  To talk of immaterial
existences, is to talk of nothings.  To say that the human soul, angels,
God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God,
no angels, no soul.  I cannot reason otherwise:  but I believe I am
supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys and the
Stewarts.  At what age of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism,
or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know.  But a heresy it
certainly is.  Jesus taught nothing of it.  He told us indeed, that "God is
Spirt," but He has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not
matter.  And the ancient fathers generally, of the three first centuries,
held it to be matter, light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still
matter....

   Rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my senses, I rid
myself of the pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations
hyperphysical and antiphysical, so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.
A single sence may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely; and never all
our senses to-gather, with their faculty of reasoning.  They evidence
realities, and their are enough of these for all purposes of life, without
plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms.  I am satisfied,
and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or
troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no
evidence.  I am sure that I really know many, many things, and none more
surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance
of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.

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