Of Demonology, and Other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles
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.