This maketh sufferance of torments, and (as some saie) foresight of things to come, and preserveth health, as being cold and drie: it maketh men subject to leanenesse, and to the quartane ague. They that are vexed therewith, are destroiers of themselves, stout to suffer injuries, fearefull to offer violence; except the humor be hot. They learne strange toongs with small industrie (as _Aristotle_ and others affirme.) ♦_Aristotle de somnio._♦ ♦_H. Card. lib. 8 de var. rer._♦ If our witches phantasies were not corrupted, nor their wils confounded with this humor, they would not so voluntarilie and readilie confesse that which calleth their life in question; whereof they could never otherwise be convicted. _J. Bodin_ with his lawyers physicke reasoneth contrarilie; as though melancholie were furthest of all from those old women, whom we call witches: deriding the most famous and noble physician _John Wier_ for his opinion in that behalfe. But bicause I am no physician, I will set a physician to him; namelie _Erastus_, who hath these words, to wit, that These witches, through their corrupt phantasie abounding with melancholike humors, by reason of their old age, doo dreame and imagine they hurt those things which they neither could nor doo hurt; and so thinke they knowe an art, which they neither have learned nor yet understand. ♦_Jo. Bod. contra Jo. Wierum._♦ But whie should there be more credit given to witches, when they saie they have made a reall bargaine with the divell, killed a cow, bewitched butter, infeebled a child, forespoken hir neighbour, &c: than when she confesseth that she transubstantiateth hir selfe, maketh it raine or haile, flieth in the aire, goeth invisible, transferreth corne in the grasse from one field to another? &c. If you thinke that in the one their confessions be sound, whie should you saie that they are corrupt in the other; the confession of all these things being made at one instant, and affirmed with like constancie, or rather audacitie? But you see the one to be impossible, and therefore you thinke thereby, that their confessions are vaine and false. The other you thinke may be doone, and see them confesse it, and therefore you conclude, _A posse ad esse_; as being persuaded it is so, bicause you thinke it may be so. But I saie, both with the divines, and philosophers, that that which is imagined of witchcraft, hath no truth of action; or being besides their imagination, the which (for the most part) is occupied in false causes. For whosoever desireth to bring to passe an impossible thing, hath a vaine, an idle, and a childish persuasion, bred by an unsound mind: for _Sanæ mentis voluntas, voluntas rei possibilis est_; The will of a sound mind, is the desire of a possible thing. ♦_August. lib. de Trinit. 3._ _Idem. de civit. Dei._ _Clemens. recogn. 3_ _Iamblichus._ _Jo. Wierus._ _Cardanus._ _Pampia &c._♦ The twelfe Chapter.