Antonius Lodovicus, in his book On Shame, holds that this fine blood rises in the face not so much from reverence in the presence of our superiors, but from joy and pleasure, or if something escapes us unawares, or at a sudden accident, encounter or meeting—as Disarius in Macrobius confirms—or at anything heard or seen. For blind people never blush, as Dandinus observes; night and darkness make people shameless. Or if we are detained before our superiors, or in company we dislike, or something troubles and offends us, “the act of blushing turns to redness”: blushing becomes a lasting flush.

Sometimes the tips of the ears tingle and redden, sometimes the whole face, “even if you have done nothing wrong,” as Lodovicus holds; although Aristotle’s opinion is that “all shame comes from a fault committed”: all shame from some offence. But we find otherwise. It may come as readily from fear, force and inexperience, as Dandinus holds, as from wrongdoing; from a hot liver, says Duretus in his notes on Hollerius; from a hot brain, wind, heated lungs, or after drinking wine or strong drink, from emotional disturbances, and so on.

What laughter is, says Cicero, how and where it is caused, and how it bursts out so suddenly that we cannot stop it though we wish to; how it comes to seize and stir our face, veins, eyes, countenance, mouth and sides—let Democritus determine. Gomesius, On Festive Wit, book 3, chapter 18, explains why it often affects melancholy people so strongly: an abundance of pleasant vapours, especially in sanguine melancholy, breaks out from the heart and tickles the diaphragm because it lies across the body and is full of nerves. This tickling moves the sense and stretches or pulls the arteries; the spirits then move into and take possession of the sides, veins, face and eyes. See further Jossius, On Laughter and Weeping, and Vives, On the Soul, book 3. Tears, as Scaliger defines them, proceed from grief and pity, or from the heating of a moist brain, for a dry one cannot weep.

As Fienus discusses at length in his book on imagination, and Lavater in On Spectres, part 1, chapters 2, 3 and 4, their disordered imagination makes them see and hear so many phantasms, chimeras, noises, visions and the like: things that in reality are neither heard nor seen. “Those who fast much or pass sleepless nights”—those who fast a great deal or lack sleep, as melancholy or sick people commonly do—see visions; so do people with weak eyesight, those very timid by nature, mad, distracted, or searching eagerly. “The Sabines dream what they wish”: as the saying goes, they dream of what they desire.

Like Sarmiento the Spaniard, who was sent by the viceroy of Peru to explore the Straits of Magellan and neighbouring places. Standing on a hilltop, “he thought he looked down upon a most delightful plain, magnificent buildings, very many villages, lofty towers and splendid temples,” and fine cities built like ours in Europe. Not, says my author, that any such things existed, but that he was “utterly fanciful and excessively credulous” and very much wanted it to be so.

Or, as Lodovicus Mercatus argues, internal vapours and humours arising from blood, choler and so on, mixed in different ways, cause them to perceive and seemingly see outside themselves various images that do not in fact exist. As wine drinkers think everything is spinning when the disturbance is in their own brain, so it is with these people: the fault and cause are internal. As Galen affirms, mad people and those near death “have within their eyes the images they think they see outside themselves.” What seems to be before them is in their brain; the brain reflects solid bodies like a concave mirror. “Even decrepit old people have a hollow and dry brain, so that they imagine they see,” says Boissardus, “things that do not exist.” Old people too are often mistaken and mentally confused in this way.

Or, just as someone looking through red glass judges everything red, corrupt vapours rise from the body to the head and distil from there back into the eyes. Once mixed with the watery crystal that receives the images of visible things, they make everything appear the colour of the humour that spreads over our sight: to melancholy people everything is black, to phlegmatic people white, and so on. Or else, as before, organs corrupted by a corrupted imagination—as Lemnius aptly observes in book 1, chapter 16—cause a great agitation of spirits and humours, which wander to and fro through every recess of the brain and produce such apparitions before their eyes.

One thinks he reads something written in the moon, as Pythagoras is said to have done long ago; another smells sulphur or hears Cerberus bark. Orestes, now mad, imagined he saw the Furies tormenting him and his mother always ready to rush at him.

Mother, I beg you, do not pursue me with these Furies, snake-like in appearance, terrible. Look, look, they attack me; now they rush upon me.

But Electra told him, as he raved in his fit of madness, that he saw no such sights at all; it was only his disordered imagination.

Rest, poor sufferer, rest in your bedclothes; you do not see what you think you see.

So Pentheus, in Euripides’ Bacchae, saw two suns and two cities of Thebes: his brain alone was disturbed. Sickness is a common cause of such sights. Cardan, On Subtlety, book 8: “A sick mind, broken by labour and fasting, makes them see and hear,” and so on. Both Andreas Osiander and Alexander ab Alexandro saw strange visions during illness, which he relates in On the Variety of Things, book 8, chapter 44. Albategnius, that distinguished Arabian, saw a ship rising and falling on his deathbed; Fracastorius records the same of his friend Baptista Tirrianus.

Weak eyesight, together with a groundless conviction, may have the same effect when secondary causes combine, as an oar in water is refracted and seems larger, bent in two, and so on. Thick air may cause such effects; or fear and imagination will suspect any object imperfectly seen in the dark to be a ghost or devil. “What the wretched greatly fear, they readily believe”: we are prone to belief and error in such cases. Marcellus Donatus, book 2, chapter 1, introduces a story from Aristotle about a certain Antepheron who apparently saw his own image in the air, as in a mirror, wherever he was.