they will have these forms to be real, they are obliged to assign them “some place.” But because they hold them incorporeal, without all dimension of quantity, and all men know that place is dimension, and not to be filled but by that which is corporeal, they are driven to uphold their credit with a distinction, that they are not indeed anywhere “circumscriptive,” but “definitive,” which terms being mere words, and in this occasion insignificant, pass only in Latin, that the vanity of them may be concealed. For the circumscription of a thing is nothing else but the determination or defining of its place; and so both the terms of the distinction are the same. And in particular, of the essence of a man, which, they say, is his soul, they affirm it to be all of it in his little finger, and all of it in every other part, how small soever, of his body, and yet no more soul in the whole body than in any one of those parts. Can any man think that God is served with such absurdities? And yet all this is necessary to believe to those that will believe the existence of an incorporeal soul separated from the body.
And when they come to give account how an incorporeal substance can be capable of pain, and be tormented in the fire of hell or purgatory, they have nothing at all to answer, but that it cannot be known how fire can burn souls.
Again, whereas motion is change of place, and incorporeal substances are not capable of place, they are troubled to make it seem possible how a soul can go hence, without the body, to heaven, hell, or purgatory; and how the ghosts of men, and I may add of their clothes which they appear in, can walk by night in churches, churchyards, and other places of sepulture. To which I know not what they can answer, unless they will say they walk “definitive,” not “circumscriptive,” or “spiritually,” not “temporally,” for such egregious distinctions are equally applicable to any difficulty whatsoever.
For the meaning of “eternity,” they will not have it to be an endless succession of time, for then they should not be able to render a reason