Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction, French -- Translations into English; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction
"You ought not to be surprised at what I tell you; for though our Globe
be very vast, and yours little, though we die not before the end of
Four thousand Years, and you at the end of Fifty; yet know, that as
there are not so many Stones as clods of Earth, nor so many Animals as
Plants, nor so many Men as Beasts; just so there ought not to be so
many Spirits as Men, by reason of the difficulties that occur in the
Generation of a perfect Creature."
I asked him, if they were Bodies as we are? He made answer, That they
were Bodies, but not like us, nor any thing else which we judged such;
because we call nothing a Body commonly, but what we can touch: That,
in short, there was nothing in Nature but what was material; and that
though they themselves were so, yet they were forced, when they had a
mind to appear to us, to take Bodies proportionated to what our Senses
are able to know; and that, without doubt, that was the reason why many
have taken the Stories that are told of them for the Delusions of a
weak Fancy, because they only appeared in the night time: He told me
withal, That seeing they were necessitated to piece together the Bodies
they were to make use of, in great haste, many times they had not
leisure enough to render them the Objects of more Senses than one at a
time, sometimes of the Hearing, as the Voices of _Oracles_, sometimes
of the Sight, as the _Fires_ and _Visions_, sometimes of the Feeling,
as the _Incubusses_; and that these Bodies being but Air condensed in
such or such a manner, the Light dispersed them by its heat, in the
same manner as it scatters a Mist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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