ON CONCEPTION. 5/9 



instruments it is easy to judge of their use and application, 

 with no less certainty than we have been taught by Aristotle 1 

 to recognize the nature of animals from the structure and 

 arrangement of their bodily organs ; and as physiognomy in- 

 structs us to judge of a man's disposition and character from 

 the shape of his face and features, what should prevent us from 

 supposing that where the same structure exists there is the 

 same function implanted? 



But it is so unfairly ordered that, when customary and fami- 

 liar matters come to be debated, this very familiarity lessens 

 their importance and our wonder ; whilst things of much less 

 moment, because they are novel and rare, appear to us far 

 greater objects of marvel. Whoever has pondered with him- 

 self how the brain of the artist, or rather the artist by means 

 of his brain, pictures to the life things which are not present 

 to him, but which he has once seen; also in what manner 

 birds immured in cages recall to mind the spring, and chant 

 exactly the songs they had learned the preceding summer, 

 although meanwhile they had never practised them ; again, 

 and this is more strange, how the bird artistically builds its 

 nest, the copy of which it had never seen, and this not from 

 memory or habit, but by means of an imaginative faculty 

 (phantasia), and how the spider weaves its web, without either 

 copy or brain, solely by the help of this imaginative power; 

 whosoever, I say, ponders these things, will not, I think, regard 

 it as absurd or monstrous, that the woman should be impreg- 

 nated by the conception of a general immaterial " idea/' and 

 become the artificer of generation. 



I know well that some censorious persons will laugh at this, 

 men who believe nothing true but what they think so them- 

 selves. Yet this that I do is the practice of philosophers, who, 

 when they cannot clearly comprehend howathing really is brought 

 to pass, devise some mode for it in accordance with the other 

 works of nature, and as near as possible to what is true. And 

 indeed all those opinions which we now regard as of the greatest 

 weight, were at the beginning mere figments and imaginations, 

 until confirmed by experiments addressed to the senses, and 

 made credible by a knowledge of their positive causes, Aris- 



1 Analyt. lib. ii, cap. 35. 



