rine of
retention does not pervert the sense, nor by absurd passions and motions
work in it an alteration disturbing the imaginative faculty; but it
only takes away opinions, and for the rest, makes use of other things
according to their nature.

But it is impossible, you will say, not to consent to things that are
evident; for to deny such things as are believed is more absurd than
neither to deny nor affirm. Who then are they that call in question
things believed, and contend against things that are evident? They
who overthrow and take away divination, who say that there is not any
government of Divine Providence, who deny the sun and the moon--to whom
all men offer sacrifices and whom they honor and adore--to be animated.
And do not you take away that which is apparent to all the world, that
the young are contained in the nature of their parents? Do you not,
contrary to the sense of all men, affirm that there is no medium
between pleasure and pain, saying that not to be in pain is to be in
the fruition of pleasure, that not to do is to suffer, and that not to
rejoice is to be grieved?

But to let pass all the rest, what is more evident and more generally
believed by all men, than that those who are seized with melancholy
distempers, and whose brain is troubled and whose wits are distracted,
do, when the fit is on them and their understanding altered and
transported, imagine that they see and hear things which they neither
see nor hear? Whence they frequently cry out:--

Women in black arrayed bear in their hands,
To burn mine eyes, torches and fiery brands.

And again:--

See, in her arms she holds my mother dear.
(Euripides, "Iphigenia in Tauris," 289.)

These, and many other illusions more strange and tragical than
these,--resembling those mormos and bugbears which they themselves laugh
at and deride, as they are described by Empedocles to be, "with sinuous
feet and undeveloped hands, bodied like ox and faced like man,"--with
certain other prodigious and unnatural phantoms, these men have gathered
together out of dreams and the alienations of distracted minds, and
affirm that none of them is a deception of the sight, a falsity, or
inconsistence; but that all these imaginations are true, being bodies
and figures that come from the ambient air. What thing then is there so
impossible in Nature as to be doubted of, if it is possible to believe
such reveries as these? For these men, supposi