AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 59 



ence advanced which was based on the profound aphorism of Bacon 

 ■ — as nature was observed and facts recorded — the speculations of 

 the Platonists melted, like the composition of their spirits, into thin 

 air, and a knowledge that was real, tangible, and useful, began to 

 shed her pale but steady light, and gradually to disperse the mists 

 and vanities of philosophy and physic. As I have said, incubus 

 was supposed to be produced by the visits of fiends of various grades 

 and orders, angels good, bad, and indifferent ; and according to the 

 mild or aggravated form of the attack was the rank or malignancy 

 of the ghostly visitant. Much curious information on this subject 

 may be found in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Pliny, and Paracel- 

 sus, with a host of other names who, in their day, supported, illus- 

 trated, and defended, the speculations to which I have alluded. 



Popular superstition, although based in ignorance of the laws 

 which regulate and produce the phenomena of natural events, is 

 nevertheless directed, floating as it is upon a sea of error, by the 

 tenets of some philosophic school, and it is not till every link in 

 the chain of arguments supporting the doctrines of such schools has 

 been repeatedly examined and proved unsound, that the system is 

 at length abandoned for some new sect, whose opinions, perhaps, 

 merely gain novelty and renown from their being totally opposed 

 to those of the declining system, on whose ruin they are built. 

 The illustration of this point would furnish much useful informa- 

 tion, and form a subject of extreme novelty and interest, both in 

 astronomy, medicine, and metaphysics. The doctrines promulgated 

 by Plato are, even at this distant period of time^ after a lapse of 

 twenty-one centuries, not altogether exploded ; and two centuries 

 ago, they swayed certain sects with a full confidence of their immu- 

 table truth. It is strange, at that advanced period of philosophical 

 inquiry — ^for such in some respects it certainly was — that we should 

 find the Platonists accusing those men of atheism, who imputed the 

 phenomena of dreams, spectres, and incubi to mere melancholy and 

 the workings of a disturbed fancy. These Platonists were a party 

 in science, who, like the physicians of the days of Charles II., 

 dreaded all change — who were willing to clothe truth in a robe of 

 mist and darkness, merely because she should not shed the lustre of 

 her effulgent brightness upon the deformity of \he ridiculous and 

 distorted being in whom they were attempting to preserve a sickly 

 existence by the crude and unnatural food with which they nou- 

 rished her. The ideas of the Platonists were revived, with slight 

 modifications, by the writers upon witchcraft, in the 15 th and 16th 

 centuries — by Wierus, Remigius, and others. A class of dreams. 



