secretaries on this phenomenon.
Book XII 493 halfway house between the intellectual and bodily kinds. I think in fact that it is not incongruous to call what is not body but still like body the halfway house between what is really body and what is neither body nor like body.
How the soul can be deceived in these visions through its own mistaken judgments, not by the objects seen
25, 52. The likenesses of things, however, can cause illusions in the soul, not through any fault of theirs but through the soul's own mistaken assumptions, when it accepts the likenesses for the things they resemble, failing to use its intel ligence. So then it is deceived in bodily vision when it thinks something is happening in the bodies themselves which is in fact happening in the senses of the body. Thus things on land which are stationary seem to people sailing by to be moving, and to those gazing at the sky the stars which are moving seem to be stationary, and when you stretch the rays from the eyes apart you see the lamp double,42 and an oar in the water looks as if it is broken—and many other instances of this sort.
Or it may mistake one thing for another because it has a similar color or sound, or smells or tastes or feels very like it. ln this way, you see, some wax plaster being sterilized in a cooking pot may be thought to be a vegetable, and the sound of a passing cart be mistaken for thunder; and if it is left to the nose alone and not explored by any of the other senses, a citron will be mistaken for the plant called bee balm,43 and food treated with some sweetish juice or other will be assumed to have been flavored with honey, and an unfamiliar ring handled in the dark will be assumed to be of gold while in fact it is brass or silver.
Or when the soul is amazed by sudden and totally unexpected bodily sights it may think it is seeing them in a dream or being affected by some spiritual vision of that sort. Thus it is that in all bodily visions both the evidence of the other
42. See The Trinity X1,2,4 for a little picture of Augustine experimenting together with his secretaries on this phenomenon. 43. A citron, citrium, can be taken for herba quae vocatur apiaria. Through a leading bee-keeper of the Cambridge area, Mrs. Eleanor Witter, 1 was put in touch with the top authority on bees in England, Dr. Eva Crane. She told me there is a kind of balm known as bee balm, whose Latin name is melissa officinalis. 1ts interest to the beekeeper, according to F.N.Howes, another authority whom Dr. Crane quotes, "is in the aromatic lemon-scented leaves." Dr. Crane also very kindly sent me references to a learned book published in 1958, The Roman Cookery Book, a critical translation of The Art ofCooking by Apicius, made by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum, which enabled me to improve on what Lewis & Short have to say about citrium, which is simply that it is "a kind of gourd." But Flower and Rosenbaum, in note 1 on page 53 of their book, say: Citrium, citreum, citrum, citrus, means here the fruit of the citron tree (Citrus medica, Linn.); this appears to be the only variety of citrus fruit known in ancient 1taly. They agree elsewhere (note 3, page 113) that in another place of Apicius'cookery book citrium must have the meaning of citrullus, pumpkin. But the citron fruit is almost certainly what Augustine had in mind here.