dwelling oppresses the mind thinking many things."
482 The Literal Meaning of Genesis swiftness that is infinitely removed from the sluggishness of the body; so no sooner is the body seen by the eyes than its image is formed without the slightest interval of time in the spirit of the person seeing. Again with hearing; unless the spirit immediately formed in itself the image of a voice heard by the ears, and stored it in the memory, you would not know whether the second syllable was the second, since the first would now no longer exist, having vanished after striking the ear.
And thus all the value of speech, all the sweetness of singing, finally every single movement of the body in all our activity, would collapse and fall away and achieve no progress at all, if the spirit did not retain in the memory the body's movements as they were performed, to join the following ones onto them in any activity; and of course it only retains them by constructing their images in itself. Again, the images of future movements precede the conclusions of our actions. Is there anything, after all, that we do with the body, which the spirit has not anticipated by thinking about it, and by looking in itself at the likenesses of all the visible operations involved, and after a fashion arranging them in due order?
Some instances ofparanormal or demonic communication
17, 34. lt is difficult to find out and explain how these spiritual likenesses of bodily realities in our spirits30 become known even to unclean spirits, or what kind of obstacle our souls experience from these earthly bodies,31 so that we are unable in our turn to see them in our own spirits. There have, all the same, been the most definite and certain indications to establish that what people have been thinking has been made public by demons; and yet if these could observe in people the inner beauty of their virtues, they would not even try to tempt them. Thus if the devil had been able to observe in Job that wonderful, noble patience of his, he would undoubtedly have been most unwilling to be defeated in his effort to tempt him.32
For the rest it should cause no surprise that they make public things already done somewhere a long way away, which are confirmed as being true a few days later. They are enabled to bring this off, you see, both by the acuteness of their perception even of bodies, which incomparably outclasses ours, and also by the remarkable swiftness of their bodies, which are of course of a far and away finer material than ours.33
30. Again, in animo nostro. 31. An allusion to Wis:9:15: "For the perishable body weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling oppresses the mind thinking many things." 32. See Job 1:20-22; 2:9-10. 33. As has been noted several times before, demons (and angels) were commonly thought to have airy bodies. This and the other paranormal phenomena he is talking about here are also discussed in Answer to the Academics, I,6,16—7,21.