) “spirits”; as when they call that aerial substance, which in the body of any living creature gives it life and motion, “vital” and “animal spirits.” But for those idols of the brain, which represent bodies to us where they are not, as in a looking-glass, in a dream, or to a distempered brain waking, they are, as the apostle saith generally of all idols, nothing; nothing at all, I say, there where they seem to be; and in the brain itself, nothing but tumult, proceeding either from the action of the objects, or from the disorderly agitation of the organs of our sense. And men that are otherwise employed than to search into their causes, know not of themselves what to call them; and may therefore easily be persuaded, by those whose knowledge they much reverence, some to call them “bodies,” and think them made of air compacted by a power supernatural, because the sight judges them corporeal; and some to call them “spirits,” because the sense of touch discerneth nothing in the place where they appear, to resist their fingers: so that the proper signification of “spirit” in common speech, is either a subtle, fluid, and invisible body, or a ghost, or other idol or phantasm of the imagination.