A vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat lux

Your last exception is laid against what I affirmed concerning the Relation you fancy between the Image and its prototype, whereby you would excuse the honour and worship which you give unto it, which I said is a mere effect of your own imagination. To which you reply, that speaking of a formal representation or relation and not of the efficient cause of it, you cannot but wander at this illogical Assertion. But sir, this your formal representation or relation which you fancy, must have an efficient cause, and hath so; a real one, if it be real; an imaginary one if it be fictitious, and this I enquired after; and I think it is not illogical to affirm that the relation you pretend is fictitious because it hath no cause but your own imagination on which alone it depends. A divine institution constituting such a relation you have none, nor doth it ensue on the nature of the thing it self. For the carving of a stock into the likeness of a man, gives it no such relation to this or that individual man, as that which is done unto the one should have any respect unto the other. But you add; Is the picture made by the spectators imagination to represent this or that thing, or the imagination rather guided to it by the picture? By this Rule of yours the image of Caesar, did not my imagination help it, would no more represent a man then a mouse. But you quite mistake the matter; the relation you fancy includes two things; first that this Image represents ⟨p. 521⟩not a man in general, but this or that individual man in particular, and that exclusively to all others; for instance; Simon Peter, and not Simon Magus, who was a man no less then he or any other man whatever. Now though herein the imagination may be assisted when it hath any certain grounds of discerning a particular likeness in an image unto one man when he was living more then to another, yet you in most of your images are destitute of any such assistance. You know not at all that your images represent any thing peculiar in the persons whereof you pretend them to be the images, which sufficiently appears by the variety that is in the images whereby you represent the same Person, even Christ himself in several places. So that though every man in his right wits may conceive, that an Image is the image of a man and not of a mouse, yet that it should be the image of this or that man, of Christ himself;

Your last exception is layed against what I affirmed concerning the Relation you fancy between the Image and its prototype, whereby you would excuse the honour and worship which you give unto it, which I said is a meer effect of your own imagination. To which you reply, that speaking of a formal representation or relation and not of the efficient cause of it, you cannot but wander at this illogical Assertion. But sir, this your formal representation or relation which you fancy, must have an efficient cause, and hath so; a real one, if it be real; an imaginary one if it be fictitious, and this I enquired after; and I think it is not illogical to affirm that the relation you pretend is fictitious because it hath no cause but your own imagination on which alone it depends. A divine institution constituting such a relation you have none, nor doth it ensue on the nature of the thing it self. For the carving of a stock into the likeness of a man, gives it no such relation to this or that individual man, as that which is done unto the one should have any respect unto the other. But you add; Is the picture made by the spectators imagination to represent this or that thing, or the imagination rather guided to it by the picture? By this Rule of yours the image of Caesar, did not my imagination help it, would no more represent a man then a mouse. But you quite mistake the matter; the relation you fancy includes two things; first that this Image represents