THE impression made on the organs of sight by lucid bodies,either in one direct line or in many lines,reflected from opaque,or refracted in the passage through diaphanous bodies,produceth in living creatures,in whom God hath placed such organs,an imagination of the object from whence the impression proceedeth;which imagination is called sight,and seemeth not to be a mere imagination,but the body itself without us;in the same manner as when a man violently presseth his eye,there appears to him a light without,and before him,which no man perceiveth but himself,because there is indeed no such thing without him,but only a motion in the interior organs,pressing by resistance outward,that makes him think so.And the motion made by this pressure,continuing after the object which caused it is removed,is that we call imagination,and memory,and,in sleep,and sometimes in great distemper of the organs by sickness or violence,a dream,of which things I have already spoken briefly in the second and third Chapters.
This nature of sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to natural knowledge,much less by those that consider not things so remote (as that knowledge is)from their present use,it was hard for men to conceive of those images in the fancy and in the sense otherwise than of things really without us:which some,because they vanish away,they know not whither nor how,will have to be absolutely incorporeal,that is to say,immaterial,or forms without matter (colour and figure,without any coloured or figured body),and that they can put on airy bodies,as a garment,to make them visible when they will to our bodily eyes;and others say,are bodies and living and living creatures,but made of air,or other more subtle and ethereal matter,which is,then,when they will be seen,condensed.But both of them agree on one general appellation of them,demons.As if the dead of whom they dreamed were not inhabitants of their own brain,but of the air,or of heaven,or hell;not phantasms,but ghosts;with just as much reason as if one should say he saw his own ghost in a looking-glass,or the ghosts of the stars in a river;or call the ordinary apparition of the sun,of the quantity of about a foot,the demon or ghost of that great sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world:and by that means have feared them,as things of an unknown,that is,of an unlimited power to do them good or harm;and consequently,given occasion to the governors of the heathen Commonwealths to regulate this their fear by establishing that demonology (in which the poets,as principal priests of the heathen religion,were specially employed or reverenced)to the public peace,and to the obedience of subjects necessary thereunto;and to make some of them good demons,and others evil;the one as a spur to the observance,the other as reins to withhold them from violation of the laws.
What kind of things they were to whom they attributed the name of demons appeareth partly in the genealogy of their gods,written by Hesiod,one of the most ancient poets of the Grecians,and partly in other histories,of which I have observed some few before,in the twelfth Chapter of this discourse.
The Grecians,by their colonies and conquests communicated their language and writings into Asia,Egypt,and Italy;and therein,by necessary consequence,their demonology,or,as St.Paul calls it,their doctrines of devils:and by that means the contagion was derived also to the Jews,both of Judaea and Alexandria,and other parts,whereinto they were dispersed.But the name of demon they did not,as the Grecians,attribute to spirits both good and evil;but to the evil only:and to the good demons they gave the name of the Spirit of God,and esteemed those into whose bodies they entered to be prophets.In sum,all singularity,if good,they attributed to the Spirit of God;and if evil,to some demon,but a kakodaimen,an evil demon,that is,a devil.And therefore,they called demoniacs,that is,possessed by the devil,such as we call madmen or lunatics,or such as had the falling-sickness;or that spoke anything which they,for want of understanding,thought absurd.As also of an unclean person in a notorious degree,they used to say he had an unclean spirit;of a dumb man,that he had a dumb devil;and of John the Baptist,for the singularity of his fasting,that he had a devil;and of our Saviour,because he said,he that keepeth his sayings should not see death in aeternum,"Now we know thou hast a devil;Abraham is dead,and the prophets are dead."And again,because he said they went about to kill him,the people answered,"Thou hast a devil:who goeth about to kill thee?"Whereby it is manifest that the Jews had the same opinions concerning phantasms;namely,that they were not phantasms,that is,idols of the brain,but things real,and independent on the fancy.