Can Matter Think? The Strange Debate Between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke

Imagine you’re holding a rose. You can smell it—that sweet, rich scent. But here’s a strange question: does any single part of the rose have that smell? If you ground a petal into dust, would that dust smell like a rose? Probably not. The smell seems to come from the whole arrangement—the way the rose is organized—not from any one piece.

Now imagine something much bigger. Imagine your own mind—your thoughts, your memories, your sense of being you. Is that something that could come from a physical thing, like your brain? Or does it require something non-physical, something that can’t be made of matter at all?

This was the question at the heart of one of the most fascinating philosophical debates of the 1700s. Two brilliant thinkers—Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke—went back and forth for years, writing long letters to each other, trying to figure out whether matter (plain old physical stuff) could ever think.

The Spark: A Dangerous Idea

The debate started with a famous philosopher named John Locke. (Locke was like the cool older professor who got everyone arguing about new ideas.) In one of his books, Locke suggested something outrageous: maybe God could give matter the power to think. Maybe you didn’t need a separate, non-physical soul. Maybe your brain, organized in the right way, could do the job all by itself.

This idea horrified many people. If matter could think, then maybe the soul wasn’t special. Maybe it could die with the body. Maybe there was no afterlife. Maybe humans weren’t that different from animals. Religious authorities were not happy.

Samuel Clarke was one of Locke’s most powerful critics. Clarke was a famous philosopher and a friend of Isaac Newton. He believed that the soul was immaterial—made of something entirely different from physical stuff—and that this was obvious once you thought about it carefully.

Anthony Collins thought Clarke was wrong.

Clarke’s Argument: Why Matter Can’t Think

Clarke had a clever argument. He said: look, matter is made of parts. You can divide it. You can separate those parts. Your brain, for example, is made of billions of tiny particles. Now, if you take those particles and spread them out—put some here, some a mile away—do you have one thinking thing? No, of course not. You just have a bunch of separate particles.

But here’s Clarke’s point: if those particles aren’t one thinking thing when they’re far apart, why would bringing them together make them one thinking thing? They’re still separate particles. They’re just closer together. How does being close together turn many things into one thing that thinks?

Clarke thought this was impossible. For him, consciousness had to belong to something truly unified—something that couldn’t be divided into parts. A soul, not a brain.

Collins’ Response: The Power of Organization

Collins had a very different way of thinking about things. He pointed out that we see examples everywhere of wholes having properties that their parts don’t have. The rose is the perfect example. No individual particle of the rose smells like a rose. But put those particles together in the right arrangement, and suddenly you get that smell. The organization matters.

Your eye is another example. No single piece of your eye can see. But organize those pieces in the right way—lens, retina, optic nerve—and suddenly you have something that can detect light. The power of vision belongs to the whole, not to any part.

So why couldn’t consciousness work the same way? Maybe when billions of neurons are organized in a particular pattern, consciousness emerges. Just like smell emerges from the organization of a rose, or vision emerges from the organization of an eye.

This is what philosophers call an “emergent property”—a property that belongs to a whole system but doesn’t exist in any of its individual parts.

The Battle Over Realness

Clarke wasn’t impressed. He had a systematic way of categorizing properties, and he claimed that emergent properties weren’t real. For Clarke, a property was only real if you could find it in the parts—if the whole’s property was just the sum of its parts’ properties. The height of a wall is real because it’s just the sum of all the bricks’ heights. But the smell of a rose? According to Clarke, that’s not really a property of the rose at all. It’s just an effect the rose produces in you, the observer.

This is a bold move. Clarke is saying that many of the properties we experience in the world aren’t actually “out there.” They’re in our minds. The smell isn’t really in the rose. The color isn’t really in the object. And consciousness certainly can’t be in the brain.

Collins pushed back hard. He said Clarke was just making up categories to avoid the obvious fact that organization creates real new properties. The power of an eye to see is real. It’s not just a trick of the mind. And if that’s true, then maybe the power of a brain to think is real too.

A Deeper Disagreement: What Makes Something One Thing?

This debate kept leading to deeper and deeper questions. One of the most important was: what makes something a single thing—an individual?

Clarke had a very strict answer. Something is truly one only if it has no parts at all. A soul, being immaterial, could be like that—perfectly simple, undivided. But anything made of matter always has parts. And if it has parts, it can always be divided. So no material thing is ever truly one individual. It’s just a bunch of separate things pretending to be one.

This means that for Clarke, you aren’t really the same person you were yesterday. The particles in your body are different. You’ve lost some, gained some. So you’re literally a different collection of stuff. The only thing that makes you the same person over time is your unchanging, immaterial soul.

Collins thought this was ridiculous. He pointed out that living things stay the same even as their matter changes. A tree that loses leaves and grows new ones is still the same tree. An oak that’s been standing for a hundred years has completely different matter than it did at the start, but it’s still the same oak. What makes it the same is its organization—the pattern that persists even as the parts change.

The same goes for you. You’re not the same collection of atoms you were last year. But you’re still you. Your brain has a certain organization that persists even as individual cells come and go. Your memories, your personality, your sense of self—these are patterns, not static things.

The Personal Identity Problem

This led to a fascinating argument about memory and personal identity. Collins, following Locke, believed that you are the same person as a past version of yourself if you can remember what that past version did. Consciousness and memory are what unite different moments of your life into one continuous person.

Clarke objected strenuously. He said this couldn’t work if the brain was constantly changing its particles. If the substance of your brain is different now than it was yesterday, how can you genuinely remember yesterday’s experiences? Memory, for Clarke, required the same substance carrying the same properties.

Collins had a clever answer. He described how memories are maintained: by thinking about them again, by “re-imprinting” them. It’s not that a single particle carries a memory from childhood to adulthood. Rather, the pattern of organization that carries the memory gets refreshed and maintained, even as the individual particles change. The pattern persists, even as the parts are replaced.

This is exactly how a living thing maintains its identity over time. You’re not the same matter you were as a child, but you’re the same person because the pattern—the organization—has continued.

Who Won?

Philosophers still argue about who came out ahead in this debate. It’s not the kind of thing that gets settled like a sports match. In the 1700s, dualists (people who believed in a separate soul) tended to think Clarke won. Materialists (people who thought matter could think) thought Collins won.

One historian of philosophy argued that Collins actually gave up a crucial point during the debate—that he conceded that all “generic” properties (like motion in general) had to be present in the parts, and that this made it impossible for consciousness to emerge from matter.

But other scholars disagree. They point out that Collins distinguished between two kinds of properties: specific ones (like particular motions or shapes) and general categories (like motion itself). He argued that specific properties could be emergent even if general categories weren’t. And he insisted that God, being all-powerful, could make matter think even if it violated normal rules.

The debate ended in a standoff. Clarke got the last word because he had more social power and could threaten Collins with legal trouble. But the arguments kept going, and they’re still being discussed today.

Why This Matters Now

This isn’t just a historical curiosity. Philosophers and scientists are still trying to figure out how consciousness works. We know that brain activity is correlated with thinking—when your brain changes, your thoughts change. But we still don’t understand how physical processes in the brain produce the subjective experience of being you.

Some people today are dualists like Clarke, believing consciousness is something non-physical. Others are materialists like Collins, believing consciousness emerges from the organization of matter in the brain. And some take middle positions that neither Clarke nor Collins would have recognized.

The idea of emergent properties—which Collins was one of the first to defend clearly—is now common in science. Wetness emerges from the arrangement of water molecules, even though no single molecule is wet. Life emerges from the organization of molecules, even though no individual molecule is alive. So why not consciousness?

Collins was fighting for a view that seemed radical in his time but has become much more plausible today. He was trying to show that you don’t need magic or mysterious substances to explain thinking. You just need matter, organized in the right way.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it means in this debate
Emergent property	A property that belongs to a whole system but not to any of its individual parts (like the smell of a rose)
Dualism	The view that mind and matter are two completely different kinds of stuff
Materialism	The view that everything, including the mind, is made of matter
Personal identity	What makes you the same person over time, even as your body changes
Organization	The way parts are arranged to form a whole; what Collins thought was crucial for creating new properties
Homogeneity Principle	The idea that whatever you find in an effect must have been present in its cause; Collins rejected this
Compatibilism	The view that determinism and free will can both be true

Key People

Anthony Collins (1676–1729): A wealthy English writer and freethinker who argued that matter could think and that human actions are determined. He loved books and kept a huge library open to anyone who wanted to use it, even his opponents.
Samuel Clarke (1675–1729): A famous philosopher and friend of Isaac Newton who argued that the soul is immaterial and that humans have genuine free will. He debated Collins for years in a series of published letters.
John Locke (1632–1704): The philosopher who first suggested—controversially—that God might be able to make matter think. Collins admired him and continued his arguments.

Things to Think About

Suppose you could take every individual neuron in your brain and understand exactly what it does. Would you then understand how consciousness works? Or is there something about the whole system that can’t be seen by looking at the parts?
Clarke thought that being made of parts made it impossible for something to be a real individual. But think about yourself: you’re made of parts (organs, cells, atoms). Does that mean you’re not really one person? What would it even mean to be “truly one”?
Collins used the example of a rose’s smell to argue that wholes can have properties parts don’t have. But Clarke said the smell isn’t really in the rose—it’s in the person smelling it. Does this feel like cheating to you? How would you decide who’s right?
If you change every single atom in your body over the course of a few years, are you still the same person? If yes, what makes you the same? If no, why do you feel like the same person?

Where This Shows Up

Neuroscience today: Scientists still debate whether consciousness can be fully explained by brain activity or whether something non-physical is required. Collins’ side has gotten much stronger, but the puzzle isn’t solved.
Artificial intelligence: If we build a computer complex enough, could it become conscious? The question of whether organization alone can produce mind is directly relevant to debates about AI.
Your own experience: Every time you remember something from years ago, you’re experiencing the problem of personal identity. The matter in your brain has changed, but the memory is still yours. How?
Arguments about free will: Collins was a determinist who thought all our choices are caused by prior events. This debate still happens today in philosophy and psychology—are we really free, or just following causes we can’t see?