The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth Webster, John
Religion
The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth
Webster, John
Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- Early works to 1800
Confusion, Commixion, or discerpsion, and may comparatively be accounted
spirital and incorporeal, though really they be not so. But what shall
we say to that wonderful body, Image or _Idolum_ of our selves, and
other things that we behold in a mirrour or looking-glass? must this be
a meer nothing, or an absolute incorporeal thing? surely not. For it is
as really a body as any in the Universe, though of the greatest purity
and fineness of any that we know; and how near it approaches to the
nature of spirit, is very difficult (if not impossible) to determine;
for if it did exist when the body or subject from whence it floweth were
removed, it might rationally be taken for a Spirit, and with far more
probable ground than many things else that have been vainly supposed to
be Spirits. And that these visible shapes of things, and this Image in
the glass, are not meerly imaginary nothings, but Corporeal Figures and
steams, is most manifest, because they vanish when the body or subject
is removed, because that _nullius entis nulla est operatio, &
Incorporeum non incurrit in sensus_, and because they would pass through
the glass, but only for the foil or _Bractea_ laid on the otherside, by
which the Image is reflected. So that if we have bodies of so great
purity, and near approach unto the nature of spirit, we cannot tell
where spirit must begin, because we know not where the purest bodies
end.
[Sidenote: _Argum. 3._]
[Sidenote: The Immortal. of the Soul. _Axiom._ 2. _p._ 6.]
[Sidenote: _De natura substant. Energetic._ _c._ 27. _p._ 379.]
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