It seems to me that if unshaken evidence means anything at all, if the authority of the ablest and acutest intellects of all ages in all countries is not to count for merest vapourings and fairy fantasies, the possibility—I do not, thank God, say the frequency—of these demoniacal connexions is not to be denied. Of course the mind already resolved that such things cannot be is inconvincible even by demonstration, and one can only fall back upon the sentence of S. Augustine: “Hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare et efficere, plures talesque asseuerant, ut hoc negare impudentiæ uideatur.”[31] In which place the holy doctor explicitly declares: “Seeing it is so general a report, and so many aver it either from their own experience or from others, that are of indubitable honesty and credit, that the sylvans and fawns, commonly called incubi, have often injured women, desiring and acting carnally with them: and that certain devils whom the Gauls call _Duses_, do continually practise this uncleanness, and tempt others to it, which is affirmed by such persons, and with such confidence that it were impudence to deny it.” The learned William of Paris, confessor of Philip le Bel, lays down: “That there exist such beings as are commonly called incubi or succubi and that they indulge their burning lusts, and that children, as it is freely acknowledged, can be born from them, is attested by the unimpeachable and unshaken witness of many men and women who have been filled with foul imaginings by them, and endured their lecherous assaults and lewdness.”[32] S. Thomas[33] and S. Bonaventura,[34] also, speak quite plainly on the subject.