  In addition to the defense of real distinction, Norris questions Locke's suggestion that we might be thinking matter. Norris, along with many of his contemporaries, questions the mechanisms by which matter could be endowed with thought. Mary Astell, with whom Norris corresponded, is as confounded when she wonders whether God “may according to the good Pleasure of His Omnipotency, give it [a triangle] a good speaking, a walking, or a dancing Faculty, and make it able to Eat and Drink” (Christian Religion 254–255, brackets added). Astell's assumption here is shared by Norris; things are what they are according to their essences, which are determined by God's ideas. Extended bodies cannot reveal mental states through walking and dancing, only minds are capable of initiating such acts. Norris utilizes this assumption in one of his arguments against the thinking matter hypothesis: