Whenever, therefore, we find ourselves benighted in an unknown place, where upon account of the darkness no judgment is to be formed of distance, or figures of the objects that may present themselves, we are every moment in danger of being misled with respect to our ideas of such objects. Hence proceeds that internal fear and dread which most men experience from the obscurity of night, and of those strange and hideous spectres and gigantic figures which so many persons tell us they have seen. Though such figures, it is commonly asserted, exist solely in the imagination, yet they may appear literally to the eye, and be in every respect seen as described to us; for when we reflect that whenever we cannot judge of an unknown object but by the angle which it forms in the eye, this object is magnified in proportion to its propinquity; and that if it appears at the distance of twenty or thirty paces to be only a few feet high, when advanced within a short space of it, it will seem to be of considerable magnitude. At this the spectator must naturally be astonished and terrified, till he approaches and knows it by feeling; for in the very instant that he has an actual perception of what it is, the tremendous form it assumed to the eye will diminish, and it will appear in no other than its real and absolute form. If, on the other hand, he is afraid to approach it, and flies from the spot with precipitation, the only idea he can have of it will be that of the image which had been formed in his eye; the image of a figure he had seen, gigantic in its size, and horrible in its form. The prejudice with respect to spectres, therefore, originates from Nature, and depend not, as some philosophers have supposed, solely upon the imagination.