note 1 7, about the ventricles of the brain and the inner senses.
Book XII 481 because they have no control over the formation of bodily images which cannot be distinguished from actual bodies in their dreams, and because of its good disposition. Some of its merits shine out even in dreams. Thus Solomon preferred wisdom to everything else even while he was asleep, and scorning all other things asked the Lord for her; and as scripture assures us, this found favor with the Lord, who was not slow to give him a good reward for a good desire.28
Grading the senses and kinds of vision
16, 32. All that being said, bodily visions are the concern of the body's sensi tivity, which distributes itself through five streams, as it were, capable of covering long distances, especially the one that is the finest and keenest one in the body and thus more akin to the soul than the others. This one, that is to say the light that is first poured out through the eyes, flashes out in rays from the eyes to gaze upon visible objects. Next this light isjoined in a kind of mixture, first with pure air, secondly with foggy, cloudy air, thirdly with a denser humidity, fourthly with the grossness of earth, to make up the five senses together with the sense of the eyes in which this light reigns supreme by functioning all by itself. I recall having discussed all this in the fourth book and again in the seventh.29
Now this heaven, visible to the eyes, from which shine the great lights and the stars, is of course more excellent than all the bodily elements, just as the sense of the eyes is the most excellent in the body. But because every spirit without a doubt outclasses every kind of body, it follows that the spiritual nature, even the sort that has the images of bodily things imprinted on it, outclasses that bodily heaven, the sky, not by its location in space but by its worth in nature.
33. Here a very curious fact emerges, that while spirit comes before body, and the image of a body comes after the body, still nevertheless, because that which is last in time comes to be in that which is first in nature, the image of a body in the spirit outclasses the actual body as it is in itself. And we are certainly not to assume that a body makes anything in the spirit, as though the spirit were subjected to the body making something out of it as out of some material. The one that makes, after all, outclasses in every possible way the thing out of which it makes something, while in no way whatsoever does body outclass spirit, as spirit most evidently does body.
So then, although we first see a body which we had not seen before, and from that moment its image begins to be in our spirit, by which we can remember it when it is no longer there in front of us, still it is not the body that makes its own image in the spirit, but the spirit itself which makes it in itself with a wonderful
28. Seel Kgs 3:5-15. 29. See Book 1V.34,54, and note 48 there; V11, 13,1 4.20, and notes 1 3. 1 4 and 1 5; 1 71 9,23-25, and note 1 7, about the ventricles of the brain and the inner senses.