The immaterial or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial; which [1062] Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from a "hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which, without matter, alter the brain and functions of it."

Nor is this my faith fairly liable to any inconvenience, if only it be remembered that it is a spiritual working, of which I speak, and a spiritual knowledge,not through the 'medium' of image, the seeking after which is superstition; nor yet by any sensation, the watching for which is enthusiasm, and the conceit of its presence fanatical distemperature.

Hercules de Saxonia differs here from the common current of writers, putting peculiar signs of head-melancholy, from the sole distemperature of spirits in the brain, as they are hot, cold, dry, moist, "all without matter from the motion alone, and tenebrosity of spirits;" of melancholy which proceeds from humours by adustion, he treats apart, with their several symptoms and cures.