Cause Principle Unity

On magic
readily to where the seed is sown’. 29 As a result, like the proper seed being
sown in the proper field, good and evil spirits and the beginnings of consciousness
are born from a proper mixture and combination of specific
hearts or brains or animal spirits, and conversely, improper mixtures produce
disturbances. These results are mutual: certain souls bring certain
bodies into existence, and certain bodies bring certain souls into existence,
in accordance with what are called the substantial and the specific
difference and subsistence.
When two spirits approach and come near to each other, either because
of an accidental combination or because of objects attached to the body,
then the dominance of a raging spirit can be removed safely and methodically.
This is done either by incantations, that is, by rhetorical and friendly
and curing persuasions which restore the besieged spirit; or by the expulsion
and evacuation of noxious material with purgative medicines; or
by foods and a happy, sunny atmosphere which are agreeable to human
life, and which introduce better matter for the spirit; or by soothing and
moderating the harmful materials which sometimes enter into the mix.
As a result, the spirit alone does not produce these living animal operations,
nor does the body do this without the spirit. Rather, for these things
to occur, whether they be good or bad, or in accord with or in opposition
to the nature of the species, what is required is both a material principle
and a formal or efficient cause of the needed type. Further, it is reasonable
to say that a simple purgation of humours and a simple diet are adequate
to cure disturbed images and to free the internal senses which are bound
in this way.
However, from this, one cannot accept the conclusion drawn by a most
stupid and dull-witted medical man in his book De occultis naturae miraculis
30 (On the Hidden Miracles of Nature), which presents more nonsense
than words and sentences can describe. He concludes that spirits are the
same thing as humours because the expulsion and evacuation of humours
also expels and evacuates these spirits with their marvellously independent
and structured powers. In this way, with equal justice, one could say that,
because the excellence of the soul forces it to leave the body and be many
souls in succession, he should think that the soul, itself, is a humour or
excrement. Or if he himself were to decide to abandon his house and country
because a shortage of food and water made him ignorant of medicine
and of the obvious colours and sounds of nature, we should conclude that
29 Virgil, Georgics, I, 54. 30 Levinus Lemnius, De miraculis occultis naturae (Anterpiae, 1559).
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