Of the Signification of Spirit, Angel, and Inspiration in the Books of Holy Scripture
Seeing the foundation of all true ratiocination is the constant signification of words; which in the doctrine following, dependeth not, as in natural science, on the will of the writer, nor, as in common conversation, on vulgar use, but on the sense they carry in the Scripture; it is necessary, before I proceed any further, to determine, out of the Bible, the meaning of such words, as by their ambiguity may render what I am to infer upon them, obscure or disputable. I will begin with the words “body” and “spirit,” which in the language of the schools are termed, “substances,” “corporeal,” and “incorporeal.”
The word “body,” in the most general acceptation, signifieth that which filleth or occupieth some certain room, or imagined place; and dependeth not on the imagination, but is a real part of that we call the “universe.” For the “universe” being the aggregate of all bodies, there is no real part thereof that is not also “body”; nor anything properly a “body,” that is not also part of that aggregate of all “bodies,” the “universe.” The same also, because bodies are subject to change, that is to say, to variety of apparence to the sense of living creatures, is called “substance,” that is to say, “subject” to various accidents: as sometimes to be moved; sometimes to stand still; and to seem to our senses sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes of one colour, smell, taste, or sound, sometimes of another. And this diversity of seeming, produced by the diversity of the operation of bodies on the organs of our sense, we attribute to alterations of the bodies that operate, and call them “accidents” of those bodies. And according to this acceptation of the word, “substance” and “body” signify the same thing; and therefore “substance incorporeal” are words, which when they are joined together, destroy one another, as if a man should say an “incorporeal body.”