Saducismus Triumphatus: Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions

...cried out immediately, "If this be true, I have been completely mistaken original: "in a wrong Box" all this time, and must start my calculations all over again."

And I remember an old gentleman I knew in the countryside, who was an excellent Justice of the Peace and something of a mathematician. However, you may understand what kind of a philosopher he was from a rhyme of his own making, which he shared with me as I was mounting my horse in his yard. The rhyme is this:

This rhyme of his filled him with such rapture that, upon reciting the second verse, the old man spun around on his toe as nimbly as one might see a dry leaf whisked around in the corner of an orchard path by a small whirlwind. I had many discussions with this philosopher concerning the immortality of the soul and its distinct nature. When I completely defeated him with reason, he would only laugh at me and say, "This is logic, Henry," calling me by my first name. To this I replied, "This is reason, Father L." (for I and some others used to call him that), "but it seems you are in favor of the 'new lights' and immediate inspiration" A reference to radical religious groups who claimed direct revelation from God, bypassing reason and scripture. I confess he favored those ideas as little as he favored the other; I said it only as a joke to him in those days.

The truth is, nothing but tangible experience would move him. Being a bold man who feared nothing, he told me he had used every magical ceremony of conjuration he could to summon the Devil or a spirit, having an earnest desire to meet one, but he could never succeed. But he told me that once, when he wasn't even thinking about it, while his servant was pulling off his boots in the hall, some invisible hand gave him such a slap on the back that it made the whole place ring. "So," he thought, "now I am invited to speak with my spirit." Therefore, as soon as his boots were off and his shoes were on, he went out into the yard and the neighboring field to find the spirit that had given him this friendly original: "Familiar" slap on the back, but he found no one in either the yard or the field next to it.

Although he later thought this blow was a mere delusion—since nothing came of it—shortly before his death, it had more influence on him than all the philosophical arguments I could provide. Even though I could confuse original: "wind him" and baffle original: "non-plus him" him as I pleased, all my arguments, no matter how solid, made no impression on him; where—