 Clarke’s claim that the unity of consciousness is incompatible with divisible matter is complicated by his apparent belief that souls are extended. At least, he refused to rule out the possibility that souls are extended because “as the parts of space or expansion itself can demonstrably be proved to be absolutely indiscerptible [indivisible], so it ought not to be reckoned an insuperable difficulty to imagine that all immaterial thinking substances (upon supposition that expansion is not excluded out of their idea) may be so likewise” (CC 62, W 3.763). The issue, as Clarke tries to frame it, is not that consciousness is incompatible with extension but that it is incompatible with anything divisible into parts. Because, following Newton, Clarke denies that space is actually divisible into parts, it cannot be ruled out that the soul is extended. His acceptance of the principle that there is no action at a distance and of the claim that immaterial beings (both finite and God) act in space perhaps push him to accept that the soul is extended. If so, he does not provide details, for instance, whether the soul occupies the same space as the whole body, the brain, or some part of the brain, or how souls move from place to place if not affected by bodies. Richard Price, defending Clarke, and Joseph Priestley both read Clarke as accepting extended souls. Priestley objects that souls must therefore have shape (which he takes to be implausible) and must interpenetrate God’s spiritual substance (which he takes to be impossible, as in the case of physical substances) (Price and Priestley 1777, 58–62).